two dollars per week, to find work for themselves and retain the surplus.

Allowing for the different effects of a system of this kind and a system of free labour, and fully aware how slowly, though certainly, the price of labour follows the price of provisions, I was surprised to find that while the latter has fallen two-thirds, the former has declined less than a fourth. This is owing partly to the circumstance of the owners of the coloured labourers being able to hold out on any particular occasion against an attempt to reduce their wages; an attempt which can seldom be effectually resisted by persons whose daily labour must obtain their daily bread; partly to conscientious scruples, which deter many holders of hereditary or domestic slaves from trafficking in humun flesh, and others from buying their fellow-creatures to hire them out like cattle; but principally to such an irregularity of demand as renders it impossible to adjust the supply to its casual fluctuations, and induces a necessity of including in the remuneration for the hours employed, some compensation for those lost in waiting for employment.

Slaves, who in Norfolk are now worth on an average 300 to 400 dollars each, receive from the merchant who engages their services, seventy-five cents per day, and their food. These are enormous wages, where turkeys, weighing five or six pounds, will sell for Is. 9d. sterling, and wild ducks at 2s per couple; and where flour is four dollars per barrel, Indian corn, their favourite food, forty cents per bushel, and beef and mutton five to

eight cents per pound. As sailors, the master can obtain for their slaves ten dollars per month: and there are many families in Norfolk, especially many widows and orphans, whose property consists entirely of hereditary slaves, whom they hire out as the only means of obtaining an income.

LETTER V.

New-York, Dec. 24, 1820.

I WROTE to you two long letters from Norfolk,which have not yet found a conveyance; and on the 22d I addressed to your care a long letter to, with an account of our visit to Norfolk and return to Baltimore. We left that city on the 18th, at three o'clock in the morning, in an open stage waggon, having decided to return to Philadelphia through York and Lancaster, instead of the old steamboat route, as it would occupy no more time. morning was bitterly cold; and as the roads were a sheet of ice, and our horses unprepared, we advanced only three miles an hour, for several hours, when we arrived at a German's, where we procured breakfast and fresh horses.

The

The face of the country, the thirty miles we continued in Maryland, presents, like almost every other part of that State which I have seen, a beautiful specimen of hill and dale, of which from one-third to one-half is woodland, young vigorous trees of second growth, so nearly of the same size, and so regularly disposed, that they perpetually suggest the idea that they have been planted by

the hand of man. I know no part of England which would give you a precise idea of Maryland hill and dale. Sometimes the scenery reminded me of the forest lands near Loughborough; but the undulations are bolder, and succeed each other in interesting variety, as far as the horizon; sometimes of Derbyshire-Ashbourne for instance -but the hills are less frequently broken by abrupt and precipitous cliffs, or the dales contracted into deep romantic valleys. About thirty miles from Baltimore, we entered York county, in the State of Pennsylvania. For the first few miles the houses were of hewn log and plaster, like those of Maryland; afterwards of stone and brick. As we advanced, the face of the country, still beautiful, principally hill and dale, began to exhibit a much higher state of cultivation, and the houses assumed a more comfortable and prosperous appearance. We now obtained a sight of the fine barns for which the Germans are celebrated, and of which we had heard much. The land was worth from 10 to 50 dollars per acre, in farms of from fifty to two hundred acres, occupied almost exclusively by German proprietors. The instances of land being rented were rare; and in those cases the landlord usually received half the gross produce for rent. I was told, (and although I do not vouch for the entire accuracy of all the “on dits" I send you on subjects like this, I seldom give them unless I have had an opportunity of cross examination,) that the less opulent farmers in this neighbourhood expend scarcely any money in articles of consumption, either vesting their

property in land, or hoarding it in a safe place. They are stated to make their own cotton and woollen clothes, their stockings, shirts, and sheetings,-exchanging wool with the hatter for hats, leather with the tanner for shoes, substituting rye for coffee, (now partially employed even in some of the cities, where it is sold in the shops,) using no tea, and very little sugar, which little they procure in exchange for the produce of their fine orchards. The best informed of them teach their children in the evenings; and sometimes they agree to board a schoolmaster at their houses gratuitously, and in succession, thus enabling him to reduce his terms to a mere trifle. They are said to be sociable, and very sensible of the comfort and independence of their condition.

Our driver on this part of the road had emigrated from Macclesfield, in Cheshire, where he drove a chaise, and knew many of our friends there. For some time he drove the Lancaster mail from Preston. He came out, he said, in his "uniformal dress of an English coachman," with a broad hat, long great coat, woollen cord breeches, and jockey boots; all which he has discarded for uncharacteristic, shabby, yet pretending, blue coat, black waistcoat, and blue pantaloons. He procured employment in two days; and his gains have averaged for the last two years 26 dollars per month, with part of his board. I told him that I hoped, when he made his bargain, he did not count upon any money from the passengers: he said, "Oh no! • Please to remember the coachman' would not do here it would be degrading to ask; although

genteel people sometimes press me to take some thing, which I do not refuse." After this hint, I did not hesitate to follow the natural impulse I felt to give an old Lancaster driver some refreshment. As he seemed a very decent, sensible man, I asked him various questions, in such a way as to give no particular direction to his answers, and found his ideas of the country and people were very similar to my own. To a question whether he found the Americans more or less civil than the English, he replied, "I think they are more accommodating and friendly, and more ready to oblige either a stranger or one another;-but, to be sure, they have always been in the habit of helping a neighbour, and have never known the depravity like of a condition which made them obliged to look to themselves. I was surprised to see them so friendly to every body."

He quite agreed with me that labourers, generally speaking, have no reasonable prospect of improving their condition, however uncomfortable, by coming hither, I mean to the Atlantic States: in the Western country, industry and self-denial will force their way. Very superior merit, or singular good fortune, may still raise some to independence; but five out of ten may wander about for weeks, or months, in the agricultural districts of Pennsylvania, without finding regular employment, or the means of supporting themselves by their labour. One of our passengers, a respectable looking man, said, that a friend of his had been applied to by a good labourer of character, whom he had long known, offering to work till the spring