Hitherto this vice has swept over the colored community, gathering its repeated conscriptions of beauty and innocence from the highest as well as the lowest families.

Colored ladies have been taught to believe that it was more honorable, and quite as virtuous, to be the kept mistresses of _white gentlemen_, than the lawfully wedded wives of _colored men_.

We repeat the remark, that the actual progress which the colored people of Barbadoes have made, while laboring under so many depressing influences, should excite our astonishment, and, we add, our admiration too.

Our acquaintance with this people was at a very interesting period--just when they were beginning to be relieved from these discouragements, and to feel the regenerating spirit of a new era.
It was to us like walking through a garden in the early spring.

We could see the young buds of hope, the first bursts of ambition, the early up-shoots of confident aspiration, and occasionally the opening bloom of assurance.