The various methods which have been formerly devised for furnishing colonies raising exportable produce with that supply of dependent labourers which they so greatly need, without introducing a servile or quasiservile population, need not long arrest our attention. They have been evidently inadequate to their purpose; and their history is of no great importance, except as showing indirectly how much the want has been felt, by the nature of the shifts resorted to for relieving it.

In the infancy of our West India colonies, and of our tobacco and rice-growing settlements in North America, it was common for the colonists to procure indented labourers from England. These were invited by the promise of high wages; and as the captains of vessels obtained considerable emolument by this valuable part of their cargo, they were induced to use, in addition, the most disgraceful methods of raising the required contingent. Not only crimping, but actual kidnapping, seems to have been of common occurrence; and persons brought over, in extreme poverty, by the ship-owners, frequently had to pay for their passage by submitting to a species of slavery, and being disposed of by the skipper to the best advantage in the colonial market.