front dams to keep off the water; their side-lines are disregarded,
and consequently the drainage is gone; while in many instances the
public road is so completely flooded that canoes have to be used as a
means of transit. The Africans are unhappily following the example of
the Creoles in this district, and buying land, on which they settle
in contented idleness; and your Commissioners cannot view instances
like these without the deepest alarm, for if this pernicious habit of
squatting is allowed to extend to the immigrants also, there is no
hope for the colony.'"

Under these circumstances it is that the London _Times_ furnishes its
readers with the following paragraph,--and as that journal cannot be
regarded as the opponent of the classes which have lately controlled
the legislation of England, we may feel assured that its information
is to be relied upon:--

"Our legislation has been dictated by the presumed necessities of the
African slave. After the Emancipation Act, a large charge was
assessed upon the colony in aid of civil and religious institutions
for the benefit of the enfranchised negro, and it was hoped that
those coloured subjects of the British Crown would soon be
assimilated to their fellow-citizens. From all the information which
has reached us, no less than from the visible probabilities of the
case, _we are constrained to believe that these hopes have been
falsified. The negro has not obtained with his freedom any habits of
industry or morality. His independence is little better than that of
an uncaptured brute_. Having accepted none of the restraints of
civilization, he is amenable to few of its necessities, and the wants
of his nature are so easily satisfied, that at the present rate of
wages he is called upon for nothing but fitful or desultory exertion.