The statistics of illegitimacy, of infant mortality, of ignorance and irreligion, and of destitution in Kingston, are shocking. Churches are numerous, and congregations flourishing, but the vast mass of the negroes are scarcely affected by them. This is very different from the state of things in the country, and nothing could be more preposterous than to judge of the rural population by Kingston. The Kingstonians themselves are laughably ignorant of the country parts. One of them assured a clergyman of my acquaintance, with all the gravity imaginable, that the country negroes lived principally upon fruits! No doubt he has had the chance of telling some American touching at the port the same story, who has been able to attest it at home on the authority of a 'Jamaica gentleman of great intelligence.' The Kingston people may be intelligent, but a good many of them know little more about the interior of their own island than they do about the interior of Africa. But ignorant and depraved as the negroes of Kingston are, besides being three times as numerous as the trade of the place requires, I do not see that they particularly deserve the reproach of laziness. Mr. Sewell remarks that he was puzzled to know how they had incurred it when he saw them crowding around him, all wild for a job. The negro women certainly, who coal the vessels, appear anything but indolent as they go to and fro erect under their heavy burdens: if the men let them do more than their share of the heavy work, it is precisely as in Germany,[C] and for just the same reason, namely, that the common people of neither country are sufficiently civilized to treat women as much more than a superior sort of beasts of burden. That even the Kingston populace have felt the quickening benefit of freedom, is shown by a little fact related by a shipmaster who has traded to the port for many years. He says that now he can always get his ship loaded and unloaded in quicker time than he could then.