We should expect to find the masters, if laboring at all to prepare their apprentices for freedom, doing so chiefly by encouraging missionaries and teachers to come to their estates, and by aiding in the erection of chapels and school-houses.

But the missionaries declare that they meet with little more direct encouragement now, than they did during slavery.
The special magistrates also testify that the apprenticeship is no preparation for freedom.

On this subject they are very explicit.
The colored people bear the same testimony.

Not a few, too, affirm, that the tendency of the apprenticeship is to unfit the negroes for freedom, and avow it as their firm persuasion, that the people will be less prepared for liberty at the end of the apprenticeship, than they were at its commencement.

And it is not without reason that they thus speak.
They say, first, that the bickerings and disputes to which the system gives rise between the master and the apprentice, and the arraigning of each other before the special magistrate, are directly calculated to alienate the parties.