Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/151

Rh but the sugar-mill is still grinding, and the whip-lash sounds commanding labour. The slaves will continue to work the whole day as if it were a week-day. Next Sunday, they say, is the one on which the slaves will rest for some hours, and dance if they are inclined; but—they look so worn out!

There are in Cuba plantations where the slaves work twenty-one out of the four-and-twenty hours; plantations where there are only men who are driven like oxen to work, but with less mercy than oxen. The planter calculates that he is a gainer by so driving his slaves, that they may die within seven years, within which time he again supplies his plantation with fresh slaves, which are brought hither from Africa, and which he can purchase for two hundred dollars a-head. The continuance of the slave-trade in Cuba keeps down the price of slaves. I have heard of “gangs” of male slaves, six hundred in each gang, who are treated as prisoners, and at night locked up in a jail; but this is on the plantations in the southern part of the island.

It is amid circumstances such as these that one may become enamoured of the ideal communities of socialism, and when men such as Alcott seem like the saviours and high-priests of the earth. How beautiful appear to me associated brotherhoods on the earth, with all their extravagance of love, when compared with a social state in which human powers are so awfully abused and human rights trampled under foot! Here I feel myself more ardent than ever for those social doctrines which are labouring to advance themselves in the Free States of America; and when I return thither, I shall endeavour to become better acquainted with them and their leaders, and to do more justice to both.

Yet even here I have derived some little comfort with regard to the condition of the slaves on this plantation, at least, from the visit which I have paid to their bohea.