We may safely challenge contradiction to the assertion, that at the expiration of the jubilee there were not a set of free laborers on earth from whom the West India planters could have got more work for the same money.

It may be proper in these days, when the maxims of slavery have so fearfully overshadowed the rights of man, to say that a man has a _right_ to forbear laboring when he can live honestly without it--or, at all events, he has a right to choose whether he will employ himself or be employed by another.

Hence it _may_ turn out that the refusal to labor, so far as there has been any, only serves to prove the more clearly the fitness of the laborers of freedom.
WAGES It must have been obvious to every man of reflection that in a change so vast, involving so many laborers, and in circumstances so various, there would arise almost infinite disputes about the rate of wages.

The colonies differ widely as to the real value of labor.

Some have a rich, unexhausted, and, perhaps, inexhaustible soil, and a scanty supply of laborers.