131, 132.] [Footnote 12: Matthew G.Lewis, _Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica_ (London, 1834).] [Footnote 13: H.N.Coleridge, p.

76.] On the generality of the plantations the tone of the management was too much like that in most modern factories.

The laborers were considered more as work-units than as men, women and children.

Kindliness and comfort, cruelty and hardship, were rated at balance-sheet value; births and deaths were reckoned in profit and loss, and the expense of rearing children was balanced against the cost of new Africans.

These things were true in some degree in the North American slaveholding communities, but in the West Indies they excelled.
In buying new negroes a practical planter having a preference for those of some particular tribal stock might make sure of getting them only by taking with him to the slave ships or the "Guinea yards" in the island ports a slave of the stock wanted and having him interrogate those for sale in his native language to learn whether they were in fact what the dealers declared them to be.