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 does not average half a day a week per slave; and many planters will not allow their slaves to cultivate patches, because it tempts them to reserve for and to expend in the night-work the strength they want employed in their service during the day, and also because the produce thus obtained is made to cover much plundering of their master's crops, and of his live stock. The free labourer also, in addition to his board, nearly always spends something for luxuries—tobacco, fruit, and confections, to say nothing of dress and luxuries and recreations.

The fact is, that ninety-nine in a hundred of our free labourers, from choice and not from necessity—for the same provisions cost more in Louisiana than they do anywhere in the Northern States—live, in respect to food, at least four times as well as the average of the hardest-worked slaves on the Louisiana sugar-plantations. And for two or three months in the year I have elsewhere shown that these are worked with much greater severity than free labourers at the North ever are. For on no farm, and in no factory, or mine, even when double wages are paid for night-work, did I ever hear of men or women working regularly eighteen hours a day. If ever done, it is only when some accident makes it especially desirable for a few days.

I have not compared the comfort of the light hands, in which, besides the aged and children, are evidently included