Page:On the motion of Sir George Strickland; for the abolition of the negro apprenticeship.djvu/39

31 in opposition, there is certainly every encouragement held out to the friends of education, at home and in the island, and far more reason to wonder that so much has been already achieved, than that so much remains to be done."

I now come to the most painful portion of the case; the abuses connected with the management of certain prisons in Jamaica. Even here I must observe it is satisfactory to find that, as in the first place, the learned gentleman has dealt only with the case of Jamaica, containing a minority of the entire apprentice population, so, with reference to the cases of cruelty, we have only to deal with a small and diminishing minority of that minority, for they refer only to those, I believe, who have been convicted under the Abolition Act. Now, Sir, let me say, that I have no apology to offer for the monstrous offences which have been detected in the workhouse of St. Anns, and, in various degrees, in a few of the other workhouses of Jamaica: but I ask again, do they affect the mass? Do they establish a rule? I might say, you cannot prove this: I deprecate the method of the learned gentleman, who refers to some paper from the parish of Trelawney, signed by seventy-three persons, on the subject, I believe, of labour, and on that evidence he proposes to convict the whole white population of Jamaica; but they—no, I beg pardon, the white and coloured population of Jamaica, amount to between forty and fifty thousand. I shall, however, give you positive evidence