obligation of furnishing the slaves ground for their support, "in order to prevent, by the grace of God (Art. 12, § 3), any need of food in the future, a need which has made itself greatly felt through the forgetfulness of salutary precautions during this year."

A new ordinance, January 1, 1826, prescribing the registration of the slaves, was followed by a law, March 23, 1832, on emancipation, and by numerous local ordinances.*

In 1842 the Dutch government framed a regulation, declaring a slave a person, eligible to hold property, to marry, to ransom himself, and to receive instruction.

On May 6, 1851, a new regulation was published, followed by another in 1856.†

In 1860 matters were still at the same point.

How indeed were all these laws to be executed? Where was the surveillance? where the sanction, where, above all, the pity? in what hearts did it still live? Why, here is an honest Governor, the author of the ordinances of 1759 and 1784, full of experience, since he had been in office twentyfive years, full of intelligence and equity, since he heads the second ordinance with the words: "Duty commands us to bring the state of slavery into harmony with the principles of humanity, and to render this state as endurable as possible, and we have a right to expect such sentiments from the masters of slaves, the more, inasmuch as their own interest enjoins it on them." Yet, animated with such good intentions, this M. Beeldsnyder Matraas permits twenty-five lashes, even eighty, even more, and suffers a slave to be fired at with large shot for stealing a banana! Does he concern himself with the garden and cabin of the slave? No. With his ransom? No. With his marriage? No.. With his religion? No.

* Rapport sur la colonie de Surinam, by Count de Castelnau, Naval Captain, 1847. Revue coloniale, XII. pp. 389-391.

† La colonie de Surinam, by M. Favart, Revue coloniale, Nov. 1859, p. 154.

Yet you hope that the voice of humanity will speak more loudly to the conscience of these managers, these overseers, whom the ordinance of 1817 represents to us (Art. 10) as being often discharged for notorious incapacity, or for the indecency, negligence, or immorality of their conduct?

Do you expect more from the pity or the interest of the masters? You are right, and the fact which we have quoted, the diminution of mortality in the districts of Nickerie, arises from the cause that the land-owners more commonly live on their plantations than in the districts of Commewyne, Mattapica, Para, and Cottica, or in the forests of Thorarica and Saramaca. The proverb, "Nothing's so good as the master's eye," exists in Dutch as in all other tongues : Het oog van den meester maakt het paard vet.*

But where are the greater part of the masters? At London or at Amsterdam.

Read the admirable study of M. Vitet on the Dutch school of painting,ta study which is itself one of the finest specimens of the school of French literature, — read in this criticism, in such just, such fine, and such pure taste, the description, or rather the written engraving, of two of the greatest pictures in the Amsterdam Museum. In one, the Banquet, by Van der Helst (1648), "Behold the bold merchants who are destined to cope with Louis XIV.; you see these sea-wolves, you speak to them; they are there in their gala suits, as rough and simple as at their counters, as on their ships. What good sense, what energy, what gravity, and, at the bottom, what pride is under this rubicund gayety!" In the other, the syndics of Rembrandt (1661), five Amsterdam merchants in session around a table covered with red cloth, with broad-brimmed felt hats on their heads, dressed in full suits of black cloth, with broad,

* At the end of the note of MM. Zéni, etc. is found the account of two plantations. The one brought in 400 florins per slave, the other 300; the first was managed by the planter, the second by his agents.

↑ Revue des Deux-Mondes, April 15, 1861, p. 790.

shining, turned-down shirt-collars. These sea-wolves, these merchants, who drink or discuss in the corner of a Holland public-house, of the hall of the Staalkof, these are the founders of Guiana, these are the masters of the slaves who were hoisted from the ground to be whipped, of the women who were stripped and made to run the gantlet during a whole century (1667-1784), since an ordinance was necessary explicitly to suppress these abuses.

Leap over seventy years. At the Hague, what progress. what prodigies accomplished by these still energetic, sen sible, rude, and simple citizens, the able managers of their cities and their fortunes! At Surinam, on the contrary, the same slave system in 1854 as in 1784, as in 1759, as in 1686, and a frightful engraving in an extremely curious book, a sort of Uncle Tom's Cabin of Dutch America, shows us a woman stripped quite naked, and suspended by the arms from two stakes, her feet fastened by a cord from the earth, her extended body lashed by a cat-o'-nine-tails in the hands of a muscular negro, before the face of an elegant and smiling Creole lady.*

I believe, and hasten to say, that acts of excessive violence are rare, but situation is more powerful than legislation. Men would be glad to keep children with their mothers, but embarrassment forces them to separate them.† They would be glad to feed and clothe the slaves well, but avarice, negligence, or poverty leads them to let them suffer, as the ordinance of 1817 attests. They would be glad not to imitate the brutal conduct of the Americans; but when the slaves take flight, they are forced to hunt them, and to employ patrols of other negroes, to track and apprehend the fugitives.§ They would be glad to evangelize

*Slaven in Vrijen onder de Nederlandsche Wet, nitgeven door Dr. W. R. Van Hoëvell, 1854, Vol. I. p. 97.

† Ibid., Chap. II., Moeder en Kind.

Ibid., Chap. VI., IX.

§ Ibid., Vol. II. Chap. VII., Wegloopers en Boschpatrouilles.

these slaves, and the Moravian missionaries occupy themselves with the task. But these Moravians themselves have slaves; their words without religious worship do little, and their example does more, as well as that of the masters, far from devout in general, in this life which is a continual temptation to harshness and to indolence. Observers, little suspected of sensibility or exaggeration, express themselves likewise.* At Surinam, the negroes are left entirely free on the subject of religion; may even practise the religion of their country.† They would be glad, in fine, not to beat their slaves, and law, pity, interest, forbid it; but, write the same witnesses, "there are laws established for the infliction of punishments according to faults, but little attention is paid to executing them; each one does nearly as he likes."

This continued until the government, wishing at length to act in an effective manner, intervened, fixed the hours of labor, or interdicted transportation and consequently sale from one plantation to another. In this case, the tutelage of the government ends by appearing intolerable; so that the régime of a slave colony always results either in the arbitrariness of the masters over the slaves, or of the ruling power over the masters.

Under this régime, is the material prosperity of the colony declining?

The founders of Surinam have been worthy of their countrymen; they have conquered this land, by prodigious labors, from the tide and rain, they have rescued from the waters a vast extent of territory, which, stretching from the Maroni to the Demerara, and forming a blue vase,

*Notes of M. Zéni (1824), Soleau, Lagrange (1884), p. 43.

† Van Hoëvell, Vol. II. Chap. II. p. 96; De Godsdienst.

M. de Castelnau cites the opposition to this rule, imposed in 1846 by Gov. Van Raders, loc. cit., p. 375. As in all slave countries, the laws are as numerous as fruitless. The Report of the Commission of 1853, Part I. p. 15, quotes eleven laws or regulations from 1818 to 1853.

covered over with a thick coating of vegetable compost, produces in abundance sugar-cane and cotton, coffee and cocoa, with almost all the products which the hand of man intrusts to it. It is claimed that, at the close of the last century, 80,000 slaves, distributed over 600 establishments, produced annually $8,000,000 worth of commodities.* In 1845 there were but 102 sugar plantations, 116 coffee plantations, 41 cotton plantations, 2 cocoa plantations, 1 indigo plantation, and 49 forests under cultivation, producing a total value of $ 1,000,000.† Since French Guiana and English Guiana have passed through the crisis of emancipation, Dutch Guiana has profited little by it. The exportation of sugar, which in 1845 was 29,787,966 lbs., and in 1849, 31,121,202 lbs., was in 1857 but 31,896,993 lbs., nearly the same. In 1824, as in 1834, as in 1845, as in 1849, all observers declared that agriculture was backward, processes imperfect, new machinery almost unknown, and the accounts presented by many of them prove that the net revenue progressed but little. Finally, now as then, the colonists complain, and their dolorous cries may be summed up in this sentence of a writing already quoted: "Suriname's toedstand is doodetyk krank."§

The history of all slaveholding peoples is therefore always fatally the same; in fact, moral and material wretchedness; in law, arbitrariness; in result, routine or decay,the same causes, the same effects, the same conduct, we may add, the same arguments.

M. Van Hoëvell has taken pains to notice all the arguments alleged by the partisans of slavery in Holland. They are still reduced to these:

The negroes are an inferior race. This is no reason for

*M. Favart, p. 158.

† M. Vidal de Lingendes.

Report of M. Dieudonné, Revue coloniale, 1850, p. 296. M. Favart, Ibid., 1859, p. 166.

Opmerkingen, p. 82.