The testimony on this subject is ample.

We rarely met a planter, who was disposed to maintain that the apprenticeship was preparing the negroes for freedom.

They generally admitted that the people were no better prepared for freedom now, than they were in 1834; and some of them did not hesitate to say that the sole use to which they and their brother planters turned the system, was to get _as much work out of the apprentices while it lasted, as possible_.

Clergymen and missionaries, declared that the apprenticeship was no preparation for freedom.

If it were a preparation at all, it would most probably be so in a religious and educational point of view.