This is not extraordinary when we consider that the African, torn from his own home and family ties and transported to a strange country, among a strange people, took the name of his master and became a part of the big household, identified not only with the working life but also with the social life of the little community represented by the plantation. Fierce as he may have been in his native surroundings, he was naturally affectionate and clung eagerly to the one who, holding the slave's whole destiny in his hand, yet was kind to him. The women slaves, especially those of mixed blood, were bound to their masters often by ties of consanguinity. They attended the master's wife when her children were born, nursed the babies at their own breasts, and served and waited upon the second generation as foster mothers. They were like grown up children. The places where they lived, the food that they ate and the clothing that they wore were all under the control of the one whom they served. When he fell ill, they were devoted nurses, and when he died, they buried him, and manifested their grief in their own primitive fashion. The slave owner who treated his slaves well, until other factors began to enter the situation, had little to fear from them. But masters were not always kindly. There were as many different varieties of human disposition in those days as in these. The negro can hate as fiercely as he can love, and gradually, as he acquired more knowledge and understanding, on the estates where kindness was not the law, there grew up mutterings of discontent and hatred, and hints of possible uprisings. It was the excessive mortality among the black population which first, perhaps, influenced their owners to favor better laws and more natural and healthful conditions for them. Curiously enough, up to the opening of the nineteenth century there were "religious scruples" against the introduction of female slaves on the plantations, although the colored women were much less expensive to purchase than the men. The colored men were condemned to celibacy, as Baron Humboldt told us, "under the pretext that vicious habits were thus avoided." They were worked in the day time, and locked in at night to avoid their having any chance for female companionship. And yet, in spite of the fact that these "scruples" were "religious," we find the paradoxical situation that the Jesuit and Bethlehemite friars were the only planters who encouraged the importation of women slaves.