An intelligent English traveller, writing on "Antigua and the Antiguans"
in 1844, says in regard to the question, whether the freed negro will
work, that he has often observed, when a piece of land was to be
_holed_ for sugar-cane by task-work, the negroes rising by one or
two o'clock in the morning during moonlight, going to the field and
accomplishing a usual day's work (300 cane-holes) by five or six o'clock
in the forenoon; then, after resting a short time, they were prepared
for another task, which they completed; and still had some hours left
for their own provision-grounds. When the heat is considered, and the
labor of digging one cane-hole, (a trench three or four feet square and
one foot deep,) we may imagine what the work of opening 600 in a day
must be. The same author states that plantations which could not find a
purchaser before emancipation are now worth £10,000. Another writer,
quoted by Cochin, says in 1845, with reference to the efficiency of
labor of the Antiguan negroes, and their employment of machinery, "The
colony has made this year, with a field-force of less than 10,000, a
harvest almost equal to that which has employed 30,000 laborers in
Barbadoes."

Of the other Leeward Islands, Sewell says, (p. 164,) "The condition of
the free peasant rises infinitely above that of the slave. In all, the
people are more happy and contented; in all, they are more civilized; in
all, there are more provisions grown for home-consumption than ever were
raised in the most flourishing days of slavery; in all, the imports have
largely increased; in all, a very important trade has sprung up with the
United States; from all, there is an exportation of minor articles which
were not cultivated twenty years ago, and which, in estimating the
industry of a people under a free system, are often most unjustly
overlooked. These are considerations from which the planter turns with