classes,--the schools being mostly church-schools, and somewhat
expensive. These schools, however, have increased from 27 in 1834, with
1,574 children, to 70 with 6,180 in 1857, and an infant school with
1,140; the children in Sunday-schools have increased in the same time
from 1,679 to 2,071.[D]

[Footnote D: _Letter from the Bishop of Barbadoes_,
February 23, 1858. It appears in the same letter that the
church-attendants have increased from 5,000 in 1825 to 28,000 in
1853.]

ST. VINCENT is generally considered by the passing traveller as another
example of the axiom that "the freed negro will not work," and of "the
melancholy fruits of emancipation."

The decline of the wealthier classes began before emancipation, and
continued after it. The planters were deeply in debt, and their estates
heavily mortgaged. Slavery there, as everywhere, wasted the means of the
masters, and exhausted the soil. When the day of freedom came, these
gentlemen, instead of prudently endeavoring to retain the laborers on
their estates, offered them lower wages than were paid on the
neighboring islands. The consequence was, that the negroes preferred to
buy their own little properties or to hire farms in the interior, and
let the great estates find labor as they could. Mr. Sewell states that
he inquired much in regard to the abandoned sugar-estates, and never
found one which was deserted because labor could not be procured at fair
cost; the more general reason of their abandonment was want of capital,
or debt incurred previously to emancipation. That the condition of the
island is not caused by the idleness of the negro is shown by the facts,
that since emancipation houses have been built by freed slaves for