The French colonist deliberately expatriates himself; the Englishman never."[11] Absenteeism was throughout a serious detriment.

Many and perhaps most of the Jamaica proprietors were living luxuriously in England instead of industriously on their estates.

One of them, the talented author "Monk" Lewis, when he visited his own plantation in 1815-1817, near the end of his life, found as much novelty in the doings of his slaves as if he had been drawing his income from shares in the Banc of England; but even he, while noting their clamorous good nature was chiefly impressed by their indolence and perversity.[12] It was left for an invalid traveling for his health to remark most vividly the human equation: "The negroes cannot be silent; they talk in spite of themselves.

Every passion acts upon them with strange intensity, their anger is sudden and furious, their mirth clamorous and excessive, their curiosity audacious, and their love the sheer demand for gratification of an ardent animal desire.

Yet by their nature they are good-humored in the highest degree, and I know nothing more delightful than to be met by a group of negro girls and to be saluted with their kind 'How d'ye massa?
how d'ye massa ?'"[13] [Footnote 10: Lord Chesterfield, _Letters to his Son_ (London, 1774), II, 525.] [Footnote 11: H.N.Coleridge, _Six Months in the West Indies_, 4th ed.
(London, 1832), pp.