The Council and Assembly of St. Christopher, in their answers to the enquiries of the Privy Council in 1788, stated as follows: “The owner possesses a right of corporeal punishment and confinement. Immoderate punishment has been determined by the Court of King's Bench and Common Pleas to be illegal, and so has punishment not adapted to the object.” They referred to the St. Christopher Appendix A. Now this Appendix A. contains four cases, all arising within three years of the time of the Privy Council enquiry, and one of them coeval with it; and the author has stronger grounds than the absence of any other precedents, though that would be satisfactory enough, for remarking that the Council and Assembly of St. Christopher could find no other cases at all for their purpose upon their records. Let us enquire, therefore, how far these cases support the strong assertion above cited; and the reiteration of it in answer to another query, in which the Council and Assembly again affirm that “wanton correction by the master would be taken cognizance of, and punished by the courts of law.”

The last of these cases was an arraignment upon the coroner's inquest for manslaughter, on which I abstain from any remarks; because it can show at most only that killing a slave by a person who was not the master, was held by the court at that period to be felony, which I admit, though a new rule in point of practice had not at St. Christopher, as in other islands, been opposed by any positive law.