To show the lack of progress in Jamaica since the abolition of slavery by the gradual process inaugurated in 1833 and its final extermination in 1838, nothing will better serve the purpose than the review of the system of apprenticeship established as a substitute for that institution. According to the portraiture given by Sturge and Harvey in their work entitled The West Indies in 1837 and the conditions now obtaining in the island, very little progress in the condition of the laboring man has been made since that time.
For scarcely any remuneration the Negroes were required by a compulsory arrangement between their overseers and the Special Magistrates to give during the crop the time granted them under the law for their own use and they were on many estates obliged to work a greater number of hours than was required by law. The apprentices were compelled to work by spells of eight hours in the field on one day, and for sixteen hours in and about the boiling house on the next day, giving up their half Friday, for which amount of extra labor they received two shillings and one penny or 50 cents a week. On one estate the wages paid for extra labor during crop was two pence or 4 cents an hour. The working hours were generally from four to eleven and from one to five, and it is interesting to note that while it was expected that on each half Friday given to the apprentices, sufficient food should be provided by them to last for the succeeding week, yet when that half day was taken from them five or six herrings were the only compensation.
The following case is taken from an agreement made in 1836 by certain cane hole diggers. Every laborer agreed to dig 405 cane holes in four and one half days due his master, and to receive ten pounds of salt fish and a daily allowance of sugar and rum, the salt fish to be diminished in the ratio of one pound for every forty holes short of 405. In the one day and a half of his own time he was paid three shillings and four pence or 80 cents for every ninety cane holes. Under this agreement the maximum work performed was that of an apprentice who in three weeks of thirteen and one half days dug in his own time 1,017 holes, for which he received 28 pounds of fish, and in cash one pound and fifteen shillings or $8.40. By this means it was possible for the master to have 58 acres of land worked at a total cost of £147 10s 0d or $708. The cost to him, if the work had been given out to jobbers, would have been £8 an acre or £464, $2,227.20. His apprentices were therefore the means of saving for him the sum of £316 l0d or $1,519.20.
The following was the scale of wages for transient labor:
| Prime headman | 3 pence or 6 cents. |
| Inferior headman | 2 pence or 4 cents. |
| First gang—able-bodied | 1½ pence or 3 cents. |
| First gang—weakly | 1¼ pence or 2½ cents. |
| Second gang—able-bodied | 1¼ pence or 2½ cents. |
| Second gang—weakly | 1 penny or 2 cents. |
| Third gang—active | ¾ penny or 1½ cents. |
| Third gang—lazy | ½ penny or 1 cent. |
The apprentices were permitted under the law to make application to be valued, and on the basis of the valuation were entitled to purchase their freedom. Here again was the system grossly abused. The slaves or apprentices, as they were at that time called, became at the hour of valuation very desirable assets; and, in many instances, so valuable did they suddenly become that it was quite out of their power to carry out their intention. The system became for this reason a premium on all the bad qualities of the Negroes and a tax upon all the good. In spite of this, however, so great was the desire for freedom that within a period of twenty-eight months, from 1st August, 1834, to 30th November, 1836, 1,580 apprentices purchased their freedom by valuation at a cost of £52,215 or $250,632, an average of £33 or $158.40 a head.
Although seventy-eight years have passed since the total abolition of slavery, however, the condition of the laborers of Jamaica remains practically the same as it was then. There has been beyond doubt much improvement in the island, but the unfortunate fact is this, that the laborer living in a country much improved in many respects, is himself no better or very little better off than his forefathers in slavery. In truth, he is still an economic slave. The conditions under which he lives and works are such as destroy whatever ambition he may possess, and reduce his life to a mere drudgery, to a mere animal existence.
Some progress has been made and there are signs of improvement, but the majority of laborers, the men and women and children who till the banana fields and work on the sugar plantations, are no better off than previously. These are still beasts of burden, still the victims of an economic system under which they labor not as human beings with bodies to be fed or clothed, with minds to be cultivated and aspiring souls to be ministered unto, but as living machines designed only to plant so many banana suckers in an hour, or to carry so many loads of canes in a day. After seventy-eight years in this fair island, side by side, with the progress and improvements above referred to, there are still hundreds and hundreds of men and women who live like savages in unfloored huts, huddled together like beasts of the field, without regard to health or comfort. And they live thus, not because they are worthless or because they are wholly without ambition or desire to live otherwise, but because they must thus continue as economic slaves receiving still the miserable pittance of a wage of eighteen pence or 36 cents a day that was paid to their forefathers at the dawn of emancipation. The system is now so well established that the employers apparently regard it as their sacred right and privilege to exploit the laborers, and the laborers themselves have been led by long submission and faulty teaching to believe that the system is a part of the natural order, a result of divine ordainment.
This attitude of the poor down-trodden laborers is one of the most effective blocks in the way of his improvement. But the despair of every one who dares to tackle this problem of improving the economic and therefore the social and moral condition of the laborers of this island is based on the inertness which almost amounts to callous indifference of the local Government.
The following letters addressed to me by the Colonial Secretary of Jamaica deserves to be put on record as evidence of the mind of the government, in 1913,—of its inability or unwillingness to take the first step. Letter A was written at the direction of Sir Sydney Olivier, K.C.M.G., then Governor of Jamaica, who recently expressed the opinion that the laborers in this island should receive one dollar a day. That letter is valuable in that it is an official statement of the maximum wages paid by the government of Jamaica to its own laborers. Letter B was written at the direction of the then Colonial Secretary, Mr. P. Cork, and is even more valuable as an official pronouncement on the important question of a living wage.