When slaves were first introduced the master seems to have had absolute power of life and death, and indeed long after, when it was beginning to dawn on the ruling race that the black man had some rights, it was still difficult to punish a cruel master, because no black man's evidence could be received against a white man. This rule, too, sometimes worked both ways. There was once an overseer who was cruelly unjust to the book-keeper under him. As we have seen, the underlings subsisted very largely on salt food. This overseer, disliking his book-keeper, decreed that his salt fish should be exposed to the hot sun until it was rotten and then cooked and offered to him in the usual way. The young man protested, and the overseer declared he had fish out of the same barrel and found nothing wrong with it. Finally the exasperated book-keeper came up to the house and in desperation shot his tormentor. But he was never brought to justice, because there were only slaves present and no white man could be convicted on the testimony of a slave. When we read the slave code we do well to remember not how men are punished nowadays, but how they were all punished, black and white, in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and the first part of the nineteenth centuries. Laws were made for the rich, and the poor man without influence must go under. And having said all this, it perhaps seems curious to add that we ought always to remember that the average planter treated his slaves as well as he knew how. Even now we are always advancing. The housemistress of 1921 has to give her maids of right what the housemistress of 1900 would have thought ridiculous, even as a privilege. It was to the planter's interest that his slaves should be in good health and contented, but what none of them understood was that no man should be subject to the whim of another. The wrong was in enslaving a man. How should they understand it? Slavery had been a custom from time immemorial. Even in this twentieth century I have heard one of the best and kindest women I know mourning, “But if the poor are all so well off what shall we do for servants?” She found it difficult to believe that Providence would not arrange for someone to serve her. So the planters, I am sure, believed that Providence had placed the black man in Africa specially for their use. Why he was not contented with his lot, and a “good” slave, they could never understand. And yet the black people didn't even mind dying, to such sore straits were the poor things reduced. “They look upon death,” declares Lesley, “as a blessing.... 'Tis indeed surprising to see with what courage and intrepidity some of them will meet their fate and be merry in their last moments.”