There were tales enough, of course, of this description and the case against the planters--some of them--was pretty bad. A youth of nineteen was found wandering about the streets of Bridgetown, Barbadoes, by General Tottenham in the year 1780. “He was entirely naked, with an iron collar about his neck having five long projecting spikes. His body both before and behind was covered with wounds. His belly and thighs were almost cut to pieces with running ulcers all over them; and a finger might have been laid in some of the weals. He could not sit down, because his hinder part was mortified and he could not lie down on account of the prongs of his collar. He supplicated the General for relief, for his master had said as he could not work neither should he eat.” And the people of Bridgetown did not rise up and slay that inhuman monster! It took a long while for the West Indian planter to understand that a slave had any rights. Clarkson tells a tale of a master who wantonly cut the mouth of a child of six months old almost from ear to ear. Times were changing, and he was brought to task for it. But the idea of calling masters to account was entirely novel. “Guilty,” said the jury, “subject to the opinion of the Court if immoderate correction of a slave by his master be a crime indictable.” The Court decided it was indictable and fined him £1, 5s.! And yet that judgment is a great advance upon the times when the negro, as Mr Francis said in Parliament, was without Government protection and subject to the mere caprice of men who were at once the parties, the judges, and the executioners. He instanced an overseer who, having thrown a negro into a copper of boiling cane-juice for a trifling offence, was punished merely by the loss of his place, and by being obliged to pay the value of the slave thus done to death. He told of another instance, a girl of fourteen who was dreadfully whipped for coming late to her work. She fell down motionless, and was then dragged along the ground by the legs to the hospital, where she died. The murderer, though tried, was acquitted by a jury of his peers, because it was impossible that a master could destroy his own property! Here is a story told by Mr Pitt at the same time. A passer-by heard the piercing shrieks of a woman coming from an outhouse and determined to see what was going on. On looking in he saw a girl tied up to a beam by her wrists, she was entirely naked, and was swinging backwards and forwards while her owner was standing below her with a lighted torch in his hand, which he applied to all parts of her body!