But they had no precedent to guide them, no advisers free from the yoke of the proprietary, no valuations given by their own masters, and there was every facility for successful combination on the part of the masters.
They must work for such wages as the masters pleased to offer, or starve.
Say Messrs.

Thome and Kimball--"_By a general understanding among the planters_, the rate is at present fixed at a _shilling_ per day, or a little more than fifty cents per week, counting five working days." This Antigua scale, and not the one they themselves had sold labor by during the apprenticeship, became at once the favorite with a great part of the Jamaica and Barbados planters.

If they in any cases offered higher wages, they made it up by charging higher rent for the houses and grounds, which the negroes had built and brought under culture on their properties.

It was before the first of August that this procedure was resolved upon by the planters, as we gather from numerous communications in the papers recommending a variety of modes of getting labor for less than its natural market value.

We select a single one of these as a specimen, by the application to which of a little arithmetic, it will be perceived that the employer would _bring the laborer in debt_ to him at the end of the year, though not a moment should be lost by sickness or other casualty.