Slavery was abolished for good and all in 1838. The intention, when Madden came to the island, was to abolish it in 1840, but the apprenticeship which was substituted seems to have been very unsatisfactory, and I have read books by Quaker and Baptist missionaries which are full of the suffering of the freed slaves under these conditions. Up till 1734 the owners had the right to punish their slaves by mutilation, which, of course, often meant death, but though it was abolished, there are many ways, as we have seen, of making the life of a slave unbearable. If the apprentice did not please his master he sent him to the nearest workhouse, and many are the ghastly tales of the tired men and women worked in the tread-mill. It takes a long, long while for mercy and pity and kindly friendliness to make its way. Madden shows us too a side of slavery which I confess had not struck me. “The law, as it now stands,” he writes, “does permit the father to hold his own son in bondage, and the son to demand the wages of slavery from his own mother, and to claim the services of his own sister as his bondswoman. These horrors are not merely possible contingencies that may be heard of occasionally; they are actual occurrences, two of which came before me within the last three months. “A Jew of this town had a young mulatto man taken up for refusing to pay wages. It turned out that these wages were demanded from his own son, his child by one of his negro slaves.... I most reluctantly fixed for that obdurate father the wages of a son's slavery, but in amount the lowest sum I had ever ordered.” And it was not always the whites who were the unkind and grasping masters. A free 'black' came before him on one occasion, claiming the services of a runaway slave and her four children. She had been absent for many months, and in support of his claim the plaintiff adduced the fact that she was his sister, the daughter of his own mother, and that both mother and daughter had been bequeathed to him, and the mother had died in slavery. The astonished magistrate puts it on record that he could hardly believe his own ears. Only, unfortunately, there was no manner of doubt as to the legality of his claim.