Peace did not come with the apprenticeship. The planters seem to have resented it immensely, and feeling ran high. Their first act was to take from the negroes all those allowances and customary gratuities which were not literally specified in the new law. They were free--well, they should see what freedom was like. Then after the 1st of August, according to Madden, there were various outrages committed not by the negroes but by the whites upon the blacks, and it was exceedingly hard to get a conviction. “A planter,” he writes, “has been indicted for shooting at an old woman, and after wounding her severely, discharging the second barrel at her, but fortunately without effect. The grand jury ignored the bill. “Another gentleman was indicted for an outrage on a sick negro woman. The grand jury ignored the bill. “Another planter was indicted for the murder of his negro by shooting him, and was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment. “Another gentleman, an overseer, was committed to jail a few weeks ago for the murder of a boy, by shooting at a number of negroes assembled in a hut in the act of singing hymns. He has not yet been tried, but from the exertions making for him I have no expectation he will be convicted. “Another gentleman was tried... for causing one of his negroes to be severely torn by dogs, for going without permission to bury his wife, who had been dead three days, and who had been refused sufficient time to prepare her coffin. “The strenuous exertions of the Chief Justice obtained a conviction. He was fined £100. “But in the majority of cases convictions are not to be expected.” How strangely it reads in these days. Before he closes his book he goes on to analyse the price of slaves, and arrives at the conclusion that the average price of all the slaves that have been imported into the West Indies may be estimated at about £40 sterling. All the sorrow, all the woe, all the long drawn-out suffering, and yet each individual for his life might be counted as worth £40 sterling! I have found no chronicler who describes the actual freeing in the same graphic way as Madden told us of the apprenticeship. I think we may be sorry for both sides. We must pity the helpless black man who had been accustomed to guidance all his days, adrift in a land where he owned nothing, and had not the faintest idea either of the value of his services or the cost of his own upkeep. We may pity the planters who had to work their estates with labour in such an uncomfortable state of unrest. For five and twenty years a sort of ominous peace reigned. Neither the planters nor their whilom slaves were content. There seems to have been a sort of feeling among the whites which is best represented as--“Well, you've got your freedom! Now are you as well off as when as slaves we took care of you!” And very often I am afraid they took care their black helots should not be as well off.