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+Project Gutenberg's The English in the West Indies, by James Anthony Froude
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The English in the West Indies
+       or, The Bow of Ulysses
+
+Author: James Anthony Froude
+
+Release Date: June 7, 2010 [EBook #32728]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENGLISH IN THE WEST INDIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Jane Hyland and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: MOUNTAIN CRATER, DOMINICA.]
+
+
+
+
+THE ENGLISH
+
+IN
+
+THE WEST INDIES
+
+OR
+
+THE BOW OF ULYSSES
+
+BY
+
+JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS ENGRAVED ON WOOD BY G. PEARSON
+AFTER DRAWINGS BY THE AUTHOR
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+NEW EDITION
+
+
+LONDON
+
+LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
+
+1888
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+    Fürsten prägen so oft auf kaum versilbertes Kupfer
+    Ihr bedeutendes Bild: lange betrügt sich das Volk
+    Schwärmer prägen den Stempel des Geist's auf Lügen und Unsinn:
+    Wem der Probirstein fehlt, hält sie für redliches Gold.
+
+    GOETHE.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION.
+
+My purpose in writing this book is so fully explained in the book itself
+that a Preface is unnecessary. I visited the West India Islands in order
+to increase my acquaintance with the condition of the British Colonies.
+I have related what I saw and what I heard, with the general impressions
+which I was led to form.
+
+In a few instances, when opinions were conveyed to me which were
+important in themselves, but which it might be undesirable to assign to
+the persons from whom I heard them, I have altered initials and
+disguised localities and circumstances.
+
+The illustrations are from sketches of my own, which, except so far as
+they are tolerably like the scenes which they represent, are without
+value. They have been made producible by the skill and care of the
+engraver, Mr. Pearson, to whom my warmest thanks are due.
+
+    J.A.F.
+
+    ONSLOW GARDENS: _November 15, 1887_.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+    CHAPTER I.
+
+                                                                  PAGE
+
+    Colonial policy--Union or separation--Self-government--Varieties of
+    condition--The Pacific colonies--The West Indies--Proposals
+    for a West Indian federation--Nature of the population--American
+    union and British plantations--Original conquest of
+    the West Indies                                                  1
+
+
+    CHAPTER II.
+
+    In the train for Southampton--Morning papers--The new 'Locksley
+    Hall'--Past and present--The 'Moselle'--Heavy weather--The
+    Petrel--The Azores                                              10
+
+
+    CHAPTER III.
+
+    The tropics--Passengers on board--Account of the Darien
+    canal--Planters' complaints--West Indian history--The Spanish
+    conquest--Drake and Hawkins--The buccaneers--The pirates--French
+    and English--Rodney--Battle of April 12--Peace with honour--Doers
+    and talkers                                                     20
+
+
+    CHAPTER IV.
+
+    First sight of Barbadoes--Origin of the name--Père Labat--Bridgetown
+    two hundred years ago--Slavery and Christianity--Economic
+    crisis--Sugar bounties--Aspect of the streets--Government
+    House and its occupants--Duties of a governor of Barbadoes      32
+
+
+    CHAPTER V.
+
+    West Indian politeness--Negro morals and felicity--Island of St.
+    Vincent--Grenada--The harbour--Disappearance of the whites--An
+    island of black freeholders--Tobago--Dramatic art--A
+    promising incident                                              41
+
+
+    CHAPTER VI.
+
+    Charles Kingsley at Trinidad--'Lay of the Last Buccaneer'--A
+    French _forban_--Adventure at Aves--Mass on board a pirate ship--Port
+    of Spain--A house in the tropics--A political meeting--Government
+    House--The Botanical Gardens--Kingsley's rooms--Sugar
+    estates and coolies                                             51
+
+
+    CHAPTER VII.
+
+    A coolie village--Negro freeholds--Waterworks--Snakes--Slavery--
+    Evidence of Lord Rodney--Future of the negroes--Necessity of
+    English rule--The Blue Basin--Black boy and crayfish            66
+
+
+    CHAPTER VIII.
+
+    Home Rule in Trinidad--Political aspirations--Nature of the
+    problem--Crown administration--Colonial governors--A Russian
+    apologue--Dinner at Government House--'The Three Fishers'--Charles
+    Warner--Alternative futures of the colony                       75
+
+
+    CHAPTER IX.
+
+    Barbadoes again--Social condition of the island--Political
+    constitution--Effects of the sugar bounties--Dangers of general
+    bankruptcy--The Hall of Assembly--Sir Charles Pearson--Society
+    in Bridgetown--A morning drive--Church of St. John's--Sir
+    Graham Briggs--An old planter's palace--The Chief Justice of
+    Barbadoes                                                       88
+
+
+    CHAPTER X.
+
+    Leeward and Windward Islands--The Caribs of Dominica--Visit of
+    Père Labat--St. Lucia--The Pitons--The harbour at Castries--Intended
+    coaling station--Visit to the administrator--The old
+    fort and barracks--Conversation with an American--Constitution
+    of Dominica--Land at Roseau                                    113
+
+
+    CHAPTER XI.
+
+    Curiosities in Dominica--Nights in the tropics--English and Catholic
+    churches--The market place at Roseau--Fishing extraordinary--A
+    storm--Dominican boatmen--Morning walks--Effects of the
+    Leeward Islands Confederation--An estate cultivated as it ought
+    to be--A mountain ride--Leave the island--Reflections          132
+
+
+    CHAPTER XII.
+
+    The Darien canal--Jamaican mail packet--Captain W.--Retrospect
+    of Jamaican history--Waterspout at sea--Hayti--Jacmel--A
+    walk through the town--A Jamaican planter--First sight of the
+    Blue Mountains--Port Royal--Kingston--The Colonial Secretary--Gordon
+    riots--Changes in the Jamaican constitution                    155
+
+
+    CHAPTER XIII.
+
+    The English mails--Irish agitation--Two kinds of colonies--Indian
+    administration--How far applicable in the West Indies--Land at
+    Kingston--Government House--Dinner party--Interesting
+    officer--Majuba Hill--Mountain station--Kingston
+    curiosities--Tobacco--Valley in the Blue Mountains             180
+
+
+    CHAPTER XIV.
+
+    Visit to Port Royal--Dockyard--Town--Church--Fort Augusta--The
+    eyrie in the mountains--Ride to Newcastle--Society in
+    Jamaica--Religious bodies--Liberty and authority               195
+
+
+    CHAPTER XV.
+
+    The Church of England in Jamaica--Drive to Castleton--Botanical
+    Gardens--Picnic by the river--Black women--Ball at Government
+    House--Mandeville--Miss Roy--Country society--Manners--American
+    visitors--A Moravian missionary--The modern
+    Radical creed                                                  208
+
+
+    CHAPTER XVI.
+
+    Jamaican hospitality--Cherry Garden--George William Gordon--The
+    Gordon riots--Governor Eyre--A dispute and its consequences--Jamaican
+    country-house society--Modern speculation--A
+    Spanish fable--Port Royal--The commodore--Naval theatricals--The
+    modern sailor                                                  224
+
+
+    CHAPTER XVII.
+
+    Present state of Jamaica--Test of progress--Resources of the
+    island--Political alternatives--Black supremacy and probable
+    consequences--The West Indian problem                          243
+
+
+    CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+    Passage to Cuba--A Canadian commissioner--Havana--The Moro--The
+    city and harbour--Cuban money--American visitors--The
+    cathedral--Tomb of Columbus--New friends--The late rebellion--Slave
+    emancipation--Spain and progress--A bull fight                 253
+
+
+    CHAPTER XIX.
+
+    Hotels in Havana--Sights in the city--Cigar manufactories--West
+    Indian industries--The Captain-General--The Jesuit college--Father
+    Viñez--Clubs in Havana--Spanish aristocracy--Sea
+    lodging house                                                  272
+
+
+    CHAPTER XX.
+
+    Return to Havana--The Spaniards in Cuba--Prospects--American
+    influence--Future of the West Indies--English rumours--Leave
+    Cuba--The harbour at night--The Bahama Channel--Hayti--Port
+    au Prince--The black republic--West Indian history             291
+
+
+    CHAPTER XXI.
+
+    Return to Jamaica--Cherry Garden again--Black servants--Social
+    conditions--Sir Henry Norman--King's House once more--Negro
+    suffrage--The will of the people--The Irish python--Conditions
+    of colonial union--Oratory and statesmanship                   308
+
+    CHAPTER XXII.
+
+    Going home--Retrospect--Alternative courses--Future of the
+    Empire--Sovereignty of the sea--The Greeks--The rights of
+    man--Plato--The voice of the people--Imperial federation--Hereditary
+    colonial policy--New Irelands--Effects of party government     318
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+    Mountain Crater, Dominica                        _Frontispiece_
+    Silk Cotton Tree, Jamaica                         _Title page_
+    Blue Basin, Trinidad                             _To face page_ 72
+    Morning Walk, Dominica                                         136
+    Port Royal, Jamaica                                            171
+    Valley in the Blue Mountains, Jamaica                          194
+    Kingston and Harbour, from Cherry Gardens                      234
+    Havana, from the Quarries                                      258
+    Port au Prince, Hayti                                          288
+
+
+
+
+THE ENGLISH IN THE WEST INDIES.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+    Colonial policy--Union or separation--Self-government--Varieties of
+    condition--The Pacific colonies--The West Indies--Proposals for a
+    West Indian federation--Nature of the population--American union and
+    British plantations--Original conquest of the West Indies.
+
+
+The Colonial Exhibition has come and gone. Delegates from our great
+self-governed dependencies have met and consulted together, and have
+determined upon a common course of action for Imperial defence. The
+British race dispersed over the world have celebrated the Jubilee of the
+Queen with an enthusiasm evidently intended to bear a special and
+peculiar meaning. The people of these islands and their sons and
+brothers and friends and kinsfolk in Canada, in Australia, and in New
+Zealand have declared with a general voice, scarcely disturbed by a
+discord, that they are fellow-subjects of a single sovereign, that they
+are united in feeling, united in loyalty, united in interest, and that
+they wish and mean to preserve unbroken the integrity of the British
+Empire. This is the answer which the democracy has given to the
+advocates of the doctrine of separation. The desire for union while it
+lasts is its own realisation. As long as we have no wish to part we
+shall not part, and the wish can never rise if when there is occasion we
+can meet and deliberate together with the same regard for each other's
+welfare which has been shown in the late conference in London.
+
+Events mock at human foresight, and nothing is certain but the
+unforeseen. Constitutional government and an independent executive were
+conferred upon our larger colonies, with the express and scarcely veiled
+intention that at the earliest moment they were to relieve the mother
+country of responsibility for them. They were regarded as fledgelings
+who are fed only by the parent birds till their feathers are grown, and
+are then expected to shift for themselves. They were provided with the
+full plumage of parliamentary institutions on the home pattern and
+model, and the expectation of experienced politicians was that they
+would each at the earliest moment go off on their separate accounts, and
+would bid us a friendly farewell. The irony of fate has turned to folly
+the wisdom of the wise. The wise themselves, the same political party
+which were most anxious twenty years ago to see the colonies
+independent, and contrived constitutions for them which they conceived
+must inevitably lead to separation, appeal now to the effect of those
+very constitutions in drawing the Empire closer together, as a reason
+why a similar method should be immediately adopted to heal the
+differences between Great Britain and Ireland. New converts to any
+belief, political or theological, are proverbially zealous, and perhaps
+in this instance they are over-hasty. It does not follow that because
+people of the same race and character are drawn together by equality and
+liberty, people of different races and different characters, who have
+quarrelled for centuries, will be similarly attracted to one another.
+Yet so far as our own colonies are concerned it is clear that the
+abandonment by the mother country of all pretence to interfere in their
+internal management has removed the only cause which could possibly have
+created a desire for independence. We cannot, even if we wish it
+ourselves, shake off connections who cost us nothing and themselves
+refuse to be divided. Politicians may quarrel; the democracies have
+refused to quarrel; and the result of the wide extension of the suffrage
+throughout the Empire has been to show that being one the British people
+everywhere intend to remain one. With the same blood, the same
+language, the same habits, the same traditions, they do not mean to be
+shattered into dishonoured fragments. All of us, wherever we are, can
+best manage our own affairs within our own limits; yet local spheres of
+self-management can revolve round a common centre while there is a
+centripetal power sufficient to hold them; and so long as England 'to
+herself is true' and continues worthy of her ancient reputation, there
+are no causes working visibly above the political horizon which are
+likely to induce our self-governed colonies to take wing and leave us.
+The strain will come with the next great war. During peace these
+colonies have only experienced the advantage of union with us. They will
+then have to share our dangers, and may ask why they are to be involved
+in quarrels which are not of their own making. How they will act then
+only experience can tell; and that there is any doubt about it is a
+sufficient answer to those rapid statesmen who would rush at once into
+the application of the same principle to countries whose continuance
+with us is vital to our own safety, whom we cannot part with though they
+were to demand it at the cannon's mouth.
+
+But the result of the experiment is an encouragement as far as it has
+gone to those who would extend self-government through the whole of our
+colonial system. It seems to lead as a direct road into the 'Imperial
+Federation' which has fascinated the general imagination. It removes
+friction. We relieve ourselves of responsibilities. If federation is to
+come about at all as a definite and effective organisation, the
+spontaneous action of the different members of the Empire in a position
+in which they are free to stay with us or to leave us as they please,
+appears the readiest and perhaps the only means by which it can be
+brought to pass. So plausible is the theory, so obviously right would it
+be were the problem as simple and the population of all our colonies as
+homogeneous as in Australia, that one cannot wonder at the ambition of
+politicians to win themselves a name and achieve a great result by the
+immediate adoption of it. Great results generally imply effort and
+sacrifice. Here effort is unnecessary and sacrifice is not demanded.
+Everybody is to have what he wishes, and the effect is to come about of
+itself. When we think of India, when we think of Ireland, prudence tells
+us to hesitate. Steps once taken in this direction cannot be undone,
+even if found to lead to the wrong place. But undoubtedly, wherever it
+is possible, the principle of self-government ought to be applied in our
+colonies and will be applied, and the danger now is that it will be
+tried in haste in countries either as yet unripe for it or from the
+nature of things unfit for it. The liberties which we grant freely to
+those whom we trust and who do not require to be restrained, we bring
+into disrepute if we concede them as readily to perversity or
+disaffection or to those who, like most Asiatics, do not desire liberty,
+and prosper best when they are led and guided.
+
+In this complex empire of ours the problem presents itself in many
+shapes, and each must be studied and dealt with according to its
+character. There is the broad distinction between colonies and conquered
+countries. Colonists are part of ourselves. Foreigners attached by force
+to our dominions may submit to be ruled by us, but will not always
+consent to rule themselves in accordance with our views or interests, or
+remain attached to us if we enable them to leave us when they please.
+The Crown, therefore, as in India, rules directly by the police and the
+army. And there are colonies which are neither one nor the other, where
+our own people have been settled and have been granted the land in
+possession with the control of an insubordinate population, themselves
+claiming political privileges which had to be refused to the rest. This
+was the position of Ireland, and the result of meddling theoretically
+with it ought to have taught us caution. Again, there are colonies like
+the West Indies, either occupied originally by ourselves, as Barbadoes,
+or taken by force from France or Spain, where the mass of the population
+were slaves who have been since made free, but where the extent to which
+the coloured people can be admitted to share in the administration is
+still an unsettled question. To throw countries so variously
+circumstanced under an identical system would be a wild experiment.
+Whether we ought to try such an experiment at all, or even wish to try
+it and prepare the way for it, depends perhaps on whether we have
+determined that under all circumstances the retention of them under our
+own flag is indispensable to our safety.
+
+I had visited our great Pacific colonies. Circumstances led me
+afterwards to attend more particularly to the West ladies. They were the
+earliest, and once the most prized, of all our distant possessions. They
+had been won by the most desperate struggles, and had been the scene of
+our greatest naval glories. In the recent discussion on the possibility
+of an organised colonial federation, various schemes came under my
+notice, in every one of which the union of the West Indian Islands under
+a free parliamentary constitution was regarded as a necessary
+preliminary. I was reminded of a conversation which I had held seventeen
+years ago with a high colonial official specially connected with the
+West Indian department, in which the federation of the islands under
+such a constitution was spoken of as a measure already determined on,
+though with a view to an end exactly the opposite of that which was now
+desired. The colonies universally were then regarded in such quarters as
+a burden upon our resources, of which we were to relieve ourselves at
+the earliest moment. They were no longer of special value to us; the
+whole world had become our market; and whether they were nominally
+attached to the Empire, or were independent, or joined themselves to
+some other power, was of no commercial moment to us. It was felt,
+however, that as long as any tie remained, we should be obliged to
+defend them in time of war; while they, in consequence of their
+connection, would be liable to attack. The sooner, therefore, the
+connection was ended, the better for them and for us.
+
+By the constitutions which had been conferred upon them, Australia and
+Canada, New Zealand and the Cape, were assumed to be practically gone.
+The same measures were to be taken with the West Indies. They were not
+prosperous. They formed no outlet for British emigration; the white
+population was diminishing; they were dissatisfied; they lay close to
+the great American republic, to which geographically they more properly
+belonged. Representative assemblies under the Crown had failed to
+produce the content expected from them or to give an impulse to
+industry. The free negroes could not long be excluded from the
+franchise. The black and white races had not amalgamated and were not
+inclining to amalgamate. The then recent Gordon riots had been followed
+by the suicide of the old Jamaican constitution. The government of
+Jamaica had been flung back upon the Crown, and the Crown was impatient
+of the addition to its obligations. The official of whom I speak
+informed me that a decision had been irrevocably taken. The troops were
+to be withdrawn from the islands, and Jamaica, Trinidad, and the English
+Antilles were to be masters of their own destiny, either to form into
+free communities like the Spanish American republics, or to join the
+United States, or to do what they pleased, with the sole understanding
+that we were to have no more responsibilities.
+
+I do not know how far the scheme was matured. To an outside spectator it
+seemed too hazardous to have been seriously meditated. Yet I was told
+that it had not been meditated only but positively determined upon, and
+that further discussion of a settled question would be fruitless and
+needlessly irritating.
+
+Politicians with a favourite scheme are naturally sanguine. It seemed to
+me that in a West Indian Federation the black race would necessarily be
+admitted to their full rights as citizens. Their numbers enormously
+preponderated, and the late scenes in Jamaica were signs that the two
+colours would not blend into one, that there might be, and even
+inevitably would be, collisions between them which would lead to actions
+which we could not tolerate. The white residents and the negroes had not
+been drawn together by the abolition of slavery, but were further apart
+than ever. The whites, if by superior intelligence they could gain the
+upper hand, would not be allowed to keep it. As little would they submit
+to be ruled by a race whom they despised; and I thought it quite certain
+that something would happen which would compel the British Government to
+interfere again, whether we liked it or not. Liberty in Hayti had been
+followed by a massacre of the French inhabitants, and the French
+settlers had done no worse than we had done to deserve the ill will of
+their slaves. Fortunately opinion changed in England before the
+experiment could be tried. The colonial policy of the doctrinaire
+statesmen was no sooner understood than it was universally condemned,
+and they could not press proposals on the West Indies which the West
+Indians showed so little readiness to meet.
+
+So things drifted on, remaining to appearance as they were. The troops
+were not recalled. A minor confederation was formed in the Leeward
+Antilles. The Windward group was placed under Barbadoes, and islands
+which before had governors of their own passed under subordinate
+administrators. Local councils continued under various conditions, the
+popular element being cautiously and silently introduced. The blacks
+settled into a condition of easy-going peasant proprietors. But so far
+as the white or English interest was concerned, two causes which
+undermined West Indian prosperity continued to operate. So long as sugar
+maintained its price the planters with the help of coolie labour were
+able to struggle on; but the beetroot bounties came to cut from under
+them the industry in which they had placed their main dependence; the
+reports were continually darker of distress and rapidly approaching
+ruin; petitions for protection were not or could not be granted. They
+were losing heart--the worst loss of all; while the Home Government, no
+longer with a view to separation, but with the hope that it might
+produce the same effect which it produced elsewhere, were still looking
+to their old remedy of the extension of the principle of
+self-government. One serious step was taken very recently towards the
+re-establishment of a constitution in Jamaica. It was assumed that it
+had failed before because the blacks were not properly represented. The
+council was again made partially elective, and the black vote was
+admitted on the widest basis. A power was retained by the Crown of
+increasing in case of necessity the nominated official members to a
+number which would counterbalance the elected members; but the power had
+not been acted on and was not perhaps designed to continue, and a
+restless hope was said to have revived among the negroes that the day
+was not far off when Jamaica would be as Hayti and they would have the
+island to themselves.
+
+To a person like myself, to whom the preservation of the British Empire
+appeared to be the only public cause in which just now it was possible
+to feel concern, the problem was extremely interesting. I had no
+prejudice against self-government. I had seen the Australian colonies
+growing under it in health and strength with a rapidity which rivalled
+the progress of the American Union itself. I had observed in South
+Africa that the confusions and perplexities there diminished exactly in
+proportion as the Home Government ceased to interfere. I could not hope
+that as an outsider I could see my way through difficulties where
+practised eyes were at a loss. But it was clear that the West Indies
+were suffering, be the cause what it might. I learnt that a party had
+risen there at last which was actually in favour of a union with
+America, and I wished to find an answer to a question which I had long
+asked myself to no purpose. My old friend Mr. Motley was once speaking
+to me of the probable accession of Canada to the American republic. I
+asked him if he was sure that Canada would like it. 'Like it?' he
+replied. 'Would I like the house of Baring to take me into partnership?'
+To be a partner in the British Empire appeared to me to be at least as
+great a thing as to be a State under the stars and stripes. What was it
+that Canada, what was it that any other colony, would gain by exchanging
+British citizenship for American citizenship? What did America offer to
+those who joined her which we refused to give or neglected to give? Was
+it that Great Britain did not take her colonies into partnership at all?
+was it that while in the United States the blood circulated freely from
+the heart to the extremities, so that 'if one member suffered all the
+body suffered with it,' our colonies were simply (as they used to be
+called) 'plantations,' offshoots from the old stock set down as
+circumstances had dictated in various parts of the globe, but vitally
+detached and left to grow or to wither according to their own inherent
+strength?
+
+At one time the West Indian colonies had been more to us than such
+casual seedlings. They had been precious regarded as jewels, which
+hundreds of thousands of English lives had been sacrificed to tear from
+France and Spain. The Caribbean Sea was the cradle of the Naval Empire
+of Great Britain. There Drake and Hawkins intercepted the golden stream
+which flowed from Panama into the exchequer at Madrid, and furnished
+Philip with the means to carry on his war with the Reformation. The Pope
+had claimed to be lord of the new world as well as of the old, and had
+declared that Spaniards, and only Spaniards, should own territory or
+carry on trade there within the tropics. The seamen of England took up
+the challenge and replied with cannon shot. It was not the Crown, it was
+not the Government, which fought that battle: it was the people of
+England who fought it with their own hands and their own resources.
+Adventurers, buccaneers, corsairs, privateers, call them by what name we
+will, stand as extraordinary, but characteristic figures on the stage of
+history, disowned or acknowledged by their sovereign as suited
+diplomatic convenience. The outlawed pirate of one year was promoted the
+next to be a governor and his country's representative. In those waters,
+the men were formed and trained who drove the Armada through the Channel
+into wreck and ruin. In those waters, in the centuries which followed,
+France and England fought for the ocean empire, and England won it--won
+it on the day when her own politicians' hearts had failed them, and all
+the powers of the world had combined to humiliate her, and Rodney
+shattered the French fleet, saved Gibraltar, and avenged York Town. If
+ever the naval exploits of this country are done into an epic poem--and
+since the Iliad there has been no subject better fitted for such
+treatment or better deserving it--the West Indies will be the scene of
+the most brilliant cantos. For England to allow them to drift away from
+her because they have no immediate marketable value would be a sign that
+she had lost the feelings with which great nations always treasure the
+heroic traditions of their fathers. When those traditions come to be
+regarded as something which concerns them no longer, their greatness is
+already on the wane.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+    In the train for Southampton--Morning papers--The new 'Locksley
+    Hall'--Past and present--The 'Moselle'--Heavy weather--The
+    petrel--The Azores.
+
+
+The last week in December, when the year 1886 was waning to its close, I
+left Waterloo station to join a West Indian mail steamer at Southampton.
+The air was frosty; the fog lay thick over city and river; the Houses of
+Parliament themselves were scarcely visible as I drove across
+Westminster Bridge in the heavy London vapour--a symbol of the cloud
+which was hanging over the immediate political future. The morning
+papers were occupied with Lord Tennyson's new 'Locksley Hall' and Mr.
+Gladstone's remarks upon it. I had read neither; but from the criticisms
+it appeared that Lord Tennyson fancied himself to have seen a change
+pass over England since his boyhood, and a change which was not to his
+mind. The fruit of the new ideas which were then rising from the ground
+had ripened, and the taste was disagreeable to him. The day which had
+followed that 'august sunrise' had not been 'august' at all; and 'the
+beautiful bold brow of Freedom' had proved to have something of brass
+upon it. The 'use and wont' England, the England out of which had risen
+the men who had won her great position for her, was losing its old
+characteristics. Things which in his eager youth Lord Tennyson had
+despised he saw now that he had been mistaken in despising; and the new
+notions which were to remake the world were not remaking it in a shape
+that pleased him. Like Goethe, perhaps he felt that he was stumbling
+over the roots of the tree which he had helped to plant.
+
+The contrast in Mr. Gladstone's article was certainly remarkable. Lord
+Tennyson saw in institutions which were passing away the decay of what
+in its time had been great and noble, and he saw little rising in the
+place of them which humanly could be called improvement. To Mr.
+Gladstone these revolutionary years had been years of the sweeping off
+of long intolerable abuses, and of awaking to higher and truer
+perceptions of duty. Never, according to him, in any period of her
+history had England made more glorious progress, never had stood higher
+than at the present moment in material power and moral excellence. How
+could it be otherwise when they were the years of his own ascendency?
+
+Metaphysicians tell us that we do not know anything as it really is.
+What we call outward objects are but impressions generated upon our
+sense by forces of the actual nature of which we are totally ignorant.
+We imagine that we hear a sound, and that the sound is something real
+which is outside us; but the sound is in the ear and is made by the ear,
+and the thing outside is but a vibration of air. If no animal existed
+with organs of hearing, the vibrations might be as before, but there
+would be no such thing as sound; and all our opinions on all subjects
+whatsoever are equally subjective. Lord Tennyson's opinions and Mr.
+Gladstone's opinions reveal to us only the nature and texture of their
+own minds, which have been affected in this way or that way. The scale
+has not been made in which we can weigh the periods in a nation's life,
+or measure them one against the other. The past is gone, and nothing but
+the bones of it can be recalled. We but half understand the present, for
+each age is a chrysalis, and we are ignorant into what it may develop.
+We do not even try to understand it honestly, for we shut our eyes
+against what we do not wish to see. I will not despond with Lord
+Tennyson. To take a gloomy view of things will not mend them, and modern
+enlightenment may have excellent gifts in store for us which will come
+by-and-by. But I will not say that they have come as yet. I will not say
+that public life is improved when party spirit has degenerated into an
+organised civil war, and a civil war which can never end, for it renews
+its life like the giant of fable at every fresh election. I will not say
+that men are more honest and more law-abiding when debts are repudiated
+and law is defied in half the country, and Mr. Gladstone himself
+applauds or refuses to condemn acts of open dishonesty. We are to
+congratulate ourselves that duelling has ceased, but I do not know that
+men act more honourably because they can be called less sharply to
+account. 'Smuggling,' we are told, has disappeared also, but the wrecker
+scuttles his ship or runs it ashore to cheat the insurance office. The
+Church may perhaps be improved in the arrangement of the services and in
+the professional demonstrativeness of the clergy, but I am not sure that
+the clergy have more influence over the minds of men than they had fifty
+years ago, or that the doctrines which the Church teaches are more
+powerful over public opinion. One would not gather that our morality was
+so superior from the reports which we see in the newspapers, and girls
+now talk over novels which the ladies' maids of their grandmothers might
+have read in secret but would have blushed while reading. Each age would
+do better if it studied its own faults and endeavoured to mend them,
+instead of comparing itself with others to its own advantage.
+
+This only was clear to me in thinking over what Mr. Gladstone was
+reported to have said, and in thinking of his own achievements and
+career, that there are two classes of men who have played and still play
+a prominent part in the world--those who accomplish great things, and
+those who talk and make speeches about them. The doers of things are for
+the most part silent. Those who build up empires or discover secrets of
+science, those who paint great pictures or write great poems, are not
+often to be found spouting upon platforms. The silent men do the work.
+The talking men cry out at what is done because it is not done as they
+would have had it, and afterwards take possession of it as if it was
+their own property. Warren Hastings wins India for us; the eloquent
+Burke desires and passionately tries to hang him for it. At the supreme
+crisis in our history when America had revolted and Ireland was defiant,
+when the great powers of Europe had coalesced to crush us, and we were
+staggering under the disaster at York Town, Rodney struck a blow in the
+West Indies which sounded over the world and saved for Britain her ocean
+sceptre. Just in time, for the popular leaders had persuaded the House
+of Commons that Rodney ought to be recalled and peace made on any terms.
+Even in politics the names of oratorical statesmen are rarely associated
+with the organic growth of enduring institutions. The most distinguished
+of them have been conspicuous only as instruments of destruction.
+Institutions are the slow growths of centuries. The orator cuts them
+down in a day. The tree falls, and the hand that wields the axe is
+admired and applauded. The speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero pass into
+literature, and are studied as models of language. But Demosthenes and
+Cicero did not understand the facts of their time; their language might
+be beautiful, and their sentiments noble, but with their fine words and
+sentiments they only misled their countrymen. The periods where the
+orator is supreme are marked always by confusion and disintegration.
+Goethe could say of Luther that he had thrown back for centuries the
+spiritual cultivation of mankind, by calling the passions of the
+multitude to judge of matters which should have been left to the
+thinkers. We ourselves are just now in one of those uneasy periods, and
+we have decided that orators are the fittest people to rule over us. The
+constituencies choose their members according to the fluency of their
+tongues. Can he make a speech? is the one test of competency for a
+legislator, and the most persuasive of the whole we make prime minister.
+We admire the man for his gifts, and we accept what he says for the
+manner in which it is uttered. He may contradict to-day what he asserted
+yesterday. No matter. He can persuade others wherever he is persuaded
+himself. And such is the nature of him that he can convince himself of
+anything which it is his interest to believe. These are the persons who
+are now regarded as our wisest. It was not always so. It is not so now
+with nations who are in a sound state of health. The Americans, when
+they choose a President or a Secretary of State or any functionary from
+whom they require wise action, do not select these famous speech-makers.
+Such periods do not last, for the condition which they bring about
+becomes always intolerable. I do not believe in the degeneracy of our
+race. I believe the present generation of Englishmen to be capable of
+all that their fathers were and possibly of more; but we are just now in
+a moulting state, and are sick while the process is going on. Or to take
+another metaphor. The bow of Ulysses is unstrung. The worms have not
+eaten into the horn or the moths injured the string, but the owner of
+the house is away and the suitors of Penelope Britannia consume her
+substance, rivals one of another, each caring only for himself, but with
+a common heart in evil. They cannot string the bow. Only the true lord
+and master can string it, and in due time he comes, and the cord is
+stretched once more upon the notch, singing to the touch of the finger
+with the sharp note of the swallow; and the arrows fly to their mark in
+the breasts of the pretenders, while Pallas Athene looks on approving
+from her coign of vantage.
+
+Random meditations of this kind were sent flying through me by the
+newspaper articles on Tennyson and Mr. Gladstone. The air cleared, and
+my mind also, as we ran beyond the smoke. The fields were covered deep
+with snow; a white vapour clung along the ground, the winter sky shining
+through it soft and blue. The ponds and canals were hard frozen, and men
+were skating and boys were sliding, and all was brilliant and beautiful.
+The ladies of the forest, the birch trees beside the line about
+Farnborough, were hung with jewels of ice, and glittered like a fretwork
+of purple and silver. It was like escaping out of a nightmare into happy
+healthy England once more. In the carriage with me were several
+gentlemen; officers going out to join their regiments; planters who had
+been at home on business; young sportsmen with rifles and cartridge
+cases who were hoping to shoot alligators, &c., all bound like myself
+for the West Indian mail steamer. The elders talked of sugar and of
+bounties, and of the financial ruin of the islands. I had heard of this
+before I started, and I learnt little from them which I had not known
+already; but I had misgivings whether I was not wandering off after all
+on a fool's errand. I did not want to shoot alligators, I did not
+understand cane growing or want to understand it, nor was I likely to
+find a remedy for encumbered and bankrupt landowners. I was at an age
+too when men grow unfit for roaming, and are expected to stay quietly at
+home. Plato says that to travel to any profit one should go between
+fifty and sixty; not sooner because one has one's duties to attend to as
+a citizen; not after because the mind becomes hebetated. The chief
+object of going abroad, in Plato's opinion, is to converse with [Greek:
+theioi andres] inspired men, whom Providence scatters about the globe,
+and from whom alone wisdom can be learnt. And I, alas! was long past the
+limit, and [Greek: theioi andres] are not to be met with in these times.
+But if not with inspired men, I might fall in at any rate with sensible
+men who would talk on things which I wanted to know. Winter and spring
+in a warm climate were pleasanter than a winter and spring at home; and
+as there is compensation in all things, old people can see some objects
+more clearly than young people can see them. They have no interest of
+their own to mislead their perception. They have lived too long to
+believe in any formulas or theories. 'Old age,' the Greek poet says, 'is
+not wholly a misfortune. Experience teaches things which the young know
+not.'[1] Old men at any rate like to think so.
+
+The 'Moselle,' in which I had taken my passage, was a large steamer of
+4,000 tons, one of the best where all are good--on the West Indian mail
+line. Her long straight sides and rounded bottom promised that she would
+roll, and I may say that the promise was faithfully kept; but except to
+the stomachs of the inexperienced rolling is no disadvantage. A vessel
+takes less water on board in a beam sea when she yields to the wave than
+when she stands up stiff and straight against it. The deck when I went
+on board was slippery with ice. There was the usual crowd and confusion
+before departure, those who were going out being undistinguishable, till
+the bell rang to clear the ship, from the friends who had accompanied
+them to take leave. I discovered, however, to my satisfaction that our
+party in the cabin would not be a large one. The West Indians who had
+come over for the Colonial Exhibition were most of them already gone.
+They, along with the rest, had taken back with them a consciousness that
+their visit had not been wholly in vain, and that the interest of the
+old country in her distant possessions seemed quickening into life once
+more. The commissioners from all our dependencies had been fêted in the
+great towns, and the people had come to Kensington in millions to admire
+the productions which bore witness to the boundless resources of British
+territory. Had it been only a passing emotion of wonder and pride, or
+was it a prelude to a more energetic policy and active resolution?
+Anyway it was something to be glad of. Receptions and public dinners and
+loyal speeches will not solve political problems, but they create the
+feeling of good will which underlies the useful consideration of them.
+The Exhibition had served the purpose which it was intended for. The
+conference of delegates grew out of it which has discussed in the
+happiest temper the elements of our future relations.
+
+But the Exhibition doors were now closed, and the multitude of admirers
+or contributors were dispersed or dispersing to their homes. In the
+'Moselle' we had only the latest lingerers or the ordinary passengers
+who went to and fro on business or pleasure. I observed them with the
+curiosity with which one studies persons with whom one is to be shut up
+for weeks in involuntary intimacy. One young Demerara planter attracted
+my notice, as he had with him a newly married and beautiful wife whose
+fresh complexion would so soon fade, as it always does in those lands
+where nature is brilliant with colour and English cheeks grow pale. I
+found also to my surprise and pleasure a daughter of one of my oldest
+and dearest friends, who was going out to join her husband in Trinidad.
+This was a happy accident to start with. An announcement printed in
+Spanish in large letters in a conspicuous position intimated that I must
+be prepared for habits in some of our companions of a less agreeable
+kind.
+
+'Se suplica á los señores pasajeros de no escupir sobre la cubierta de
+popa.'
+
+I may as well leave the words untranslated, but the 'supplication' is
+not unnecessary. The Spanish colonists, like their countrymen at home,
+smoke everywhere with the usual consequences. The captain of one of our
+mail boats found it necessary to read one of them who disregarded it a
+lesson which he would remember. He sent for the quartermaster with a
+bucket and a mop, and ordered him to stay by this gentleman and clean up
+till he had done.
+
+The wind when we started was light and keen from the north. The
+afternoon sky was clear and frosty. Southampton Water was still as oil,
+and the sun went down crimson behind the brown woods of the New Forest.
+Of the 'Moselle's' speed we had instant evidence, for a fast Government
+launch raced us for a mile or two, and off Netley gave up the chase. We
+went leisurely along, doing thirteen knots without effort, swept by
+Calshot into the Solent, and had cleared the Needles before the last
+daylight had left us. In a few days the ice would be gone, and we should
+lie in the soft air of perennial summer.
+
+    Singula de nobis anni prædantur euntes:
+    Eripuere jocos, Venerem, convivia, ludum--
+
+But the flying years had not stolen from me the delight of finding
+myself once more upon the sea; the sea which is eternally young, and
+gives one back one's own youth and buoyancy.
+
+Down the Channel the north wind still blew, and the water was still
+smooth. We set our canvas at the Needles, and flew on for three days
+straight upon our course with a steady breeze. We crossed 'the Bay'
+without the fiddles on the dinner table; we were congratulating
+ourselves that, mid-winter as it was, we should reach the tropics and
+never need them. I meanwhile made acquaintances among my West Indian
+fellow-passengers, and listened to their tale of grievances. The
+Exhibition had been well enough in its way, but Exhibitions would not
+fill an empty exchequer or restore ruined plantations. The mother
+country I found was still regarded as a stepmother, and from more than
+one quarter I heard a more than muttered wish that they could be 'taken
+into partnership' by the Americans. They were wasting away under Free
+Trade and the sugar bounties. The mother country gave them fine words,
+but words were all. If they belonged to the United States they would
+have the benefit of a close market in a country where there were
+60,000,000 sugar drinkers. Energetic Americans would come among them and
+establish new industries, and would control the unmanageable negroes.
+From the most loyal I heard the despairing cry of the Britons, 'the
+barbarians drive us into the sea and the sea drives us back upon the
+barbarians.' They could bear Free Trade which was fair all round, but
+not Free Trade which was made into a mockery by bounties. And it seemed
+that their masters in Downing Street answered them as the Romans
+answered our forefathers. 'We have many colonies, and we shall not miss
+Britain. Britain is far off, and must take care of herself. She brings
+us responsibility, and she brings us no revenue; we cannot tax Italy for
+the sake of Britons. We have given them our arms and our civilisation.
+We have done enough. Let them do now what they can or please.' Virtually
+this is what England says to the West Indians, or would say if despair
+made them actively troublesome, notwithstanding Exhibitions and
+expansive sentiments. The answer from Rome we can now see was the voice
+of dying greatness, which was no longer worthy of the place in the world
+which it had made for itself in the days of its strength; but it
+doubtless seemed reasonable enough at the time, and indeed was the only
+answer which the Rome of Honorius could give.
+
+A change in the weather cut short our conversations, and drove half the
+company to their berths. On the fourth morning the wind chopped back to
+the north-west. A beam sea set in, and the 'Moselle' justified my
+conjectures about her. She rolled gunwale under, rolled at least forty
+degrees each way, and unshipped a boat out of her davits to windward.
+The waves were not as high as I have known the Atlantic produce when in
+the humour for it, but they were short, steep, and curling. Tons of
+water poured over the deck. The few of us who ventured below to dinner
+were hit by the dumb waiters which swung over our heads; and the living
+waiters staggered about with the dishes and upset the soup into our
+laps. Everybody was grumbling and miserable. Driven to my cabin I was
+dozing on a sofa when I was jerked off and dropped upon the floor. The
+noise down below on these occasions is considerable. The steering chains
+clank, unfastened doors slam to and fro, plates and dishes and glass
+fall crashing at some lurch which is heavier than usual, with the roar
+of the sea underneath as a constant accompaniment.
+
+When a wave strikes the ship full on the quarter and she staggers from
+stem to stern, one wonders how any construction of wood and iron can
+endure such blows without being shattered to fragments. And it would be
+shattered, as I heard an engineer once say, if the sea was not such a
+gentle creature after all. I crept up to the deck house to watch through
+the lee door the wild magnificence of the storm. Down came a great green
+wave, rushed in a flood over everything, and swept me drenched to the
+skin down the stairs into the cabin. I crawled to bed to escape cold,
+and slid up and down my berth like a shuttle at every roll of the ship
+till I fell into the unconsciousness which is a substitute for sleep,
+slept at last really, and woke at seven in the morning to find the sun
+shining, and the surface of the ocean still undulating but glassy calm.
+The only signs left of the tempest were the swallow-like petrels
+skimming to and fro in our wake, picking up the scraps of food and the
+plate washings which the cook's mate had thrown overboard; smallest and
+beautifullest of all the gull tribe, called petrel by our ancestors, who
+went to their Bibles more often than we do for their images, in memory
+of St. Peter, because they seem for a moment to stand upon the water
+when they stoop upon any floating object.[2] In the afternoon we passed
+the Azores, rising blue and fairy-like out of the ocean; unconscious
+they of the bloody battles which once went on under their shadows. There
+it was that Grenville, in the 'Revenge,' fought through a long summer
+day alone against a host of enemies, and died there and won immortal
+honour. The Azores themselves are Grenville's monument, and in the
+memory of Englishmen are associated for ever with his glorious story.
+Behind these islands, too, lay Grenville's comrades, the English
+privateers, year after year waiting for Philip's plate fleet. Behind
+these islands lay French squadrons waiting for the English sugar ships.
+They are calm and silent now, and are never likely to echo any more to
+battle thunder. Men come and go and play out their little dramas, epic
+or tragic, and it matters nothing to nature. Their wild pranks leave no
+scars, and the decks are swept clean for the next comers.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] [Greek: hô teknon ouch hapanta thô gêra kaka
+                                hê empeiria
+            echei ti lexai thôn neôn sophôteron.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+    The tropics--Passengers on board--Account of the Darien
+    Canal--Planters' complaints--West Indian history--The Spanish
+    conquest--Drake and Hawkins--The buccaneers--The pirates--French and
+    English--Rodney--Battle of April 12--Peace with honour--Doers and
+    talkers.
+
+
+Another two days and we were in the tropics. The north-east trade blew
+behind us, and our own speed being taken off from the speed of the wind
+there was scarcely air enough to fill our sails. The waves went down and
+the ports were opened, and we had passed suddenly from winter into
+perpetual summer, as Jean Paul says it will be with us in death. Sleep
+came back soft and sweet, and the water was warm in our morning bath,
+and the worries and annoyances of life vanished in these sweet
+surroundings like nightmares when we wake. How well the Greeks
+understood the spiritual beauty of the sea! [Greek: thalassa klyzei
+panta tanthrôpôn kaka], says Euripides. 'The sea washes off all the woes
+of men.' The passengers lay about the decks in their chairs reading
+story books. The young ones played Bull. The officers flirted mildly
+with the pretty young ladies. For a brief interval care and anxiety had
+spread their wings and flown away, and existence itself became
+delightful.
+
+There was a young scientific man on board who interested me much. He had
+been sent out from Kew to take charge of the Botanical Gardens in
+Jamaica--was quiet, modest, and unaffected, understood his own subjects
+well, and could make others understand them; with him I had much
+agreeable conversation. And there was another singular person who
+attracted me even more. I took him at first for an American. He was a
+Dane I found, an engineer by profession, and was on his way to some
+South American republic. He was a long lean man with grey eyes, red
+hair, and a laugh as if he so enjoyed the thing that amused him that he
+wished to keep it all to himself, laughing inwardly till he choked and
+shook with it. His chief amusement seemed to have lain in watching the
+performances of Liberal politicians in various parts of the world. He
+told me of an opposition leader in some parliament whom his rival in
+office had disposed of by shutting him up in the caboose. 'In the
+caboose,' he repeated, screaming with enjoyment at the thought of it,
+and evidently wishing that all the parliamentary orators on the globe
+were in the same place. In his wanderings he had been lately at the
+Darien Canal, and gave me a wonderful account of the condition of things
+there. The original estimate of the probable cost had been twenty-six
+millions of our (English) money. All these millions had been spent
+already, and only a fifth of the whole had as yet been executed. The
+entire cost would not be less, under the existing management, than one
+hundred millions, and he evidently doubted whether the canal would ever
+be completed at all, though professionally he would not confess to such
+an opinion. The waste and plunder had been incalculable. The works and
+the gold that were set moving by them made a feast for unclean harpies
+of both sexes from every nation in the four continents. I liked
+everything about Mr. ----. Tom Cringle's _Obed_ might have been
+something like him, had not _Obed's_ evil genius driven him into more
+dangerous ways.
+
+There was a small black boy among us, evidently of pure blood, for his
+hair was wool and his colour black as ink. His parents must have been
+well-to-do, for the boy had been in Europe to be educated. The officers
+on board and some of the ladies played with him as they would play with
+a monkey. He had little more sense than a monkey, perhaps less, and the
+gestures of him grinning behind gratings and pushing out his long thin
+arms between the bars were curiously suggestive of the original from
+whom we are told now that all of us came. The worst of it was that,
+being lifted above his own people, he had been taught to despise them.
+He was spoilt as a black and could not be made into a white, and this I
+found afterwards was the invariable and dangerous consequence whenever a
+superior negro contrived to raise himself. He might do well enough
+himself, but his family feel their blood as a degradation. His children
+will not marry among their own people, and not only will no white girl
+marry a negro, but hardly any dowry can be large enough to tempt a West
+Indian white to make a wife of a black lady. This is one of the most
+sinister features in the present state of social life there.
+
+Small personalities cropped up now and then. We had representatives of
+all professions among us except the Church of England clergy. Of them we
+had not one. The captain, as usual, read us the service on Sundays on a
+cushion for a desk, with the union jack spread over it. On board ship
+the captain, like a sovereign, is supreme, and in spiritual matters as
+in secular. Drake was the first commander who carried the theory into
+practice when he excommunicated his chaplain. It is the law now, and the
+tradition has gone on unbroken. In default of clergy we had a
+missionary, who for the most part kept his lips closed. He did open them
+once, and at my expense. Apropos of nothing he said to me, 'I wonder,
+sir, whether you ever read the remarks upon you in the newspapers. If
+all the attacks upon your writings which I have seen were collected
+together they would make an interesting volume.' This was all. He had
+delivered his soul and relapsed into silence.
+
+From a Puerto Rico merchant I learnt that, if the English colonies were
+in a bad way, the Spanish colonies were in a worse. His own island, he
+said, was a nest of squalor, misery, vice, and disease. Blacks and
+whites were equally immoral; and so far as habits went, the whites were
+the filthier of the two. The complaints of the English West Indians were
+less sweeping, and, as to immorality between whites and blacks, neither
+from my companions in the 'Moselle' nor anywhere afterward did I hear or
+see a sign of it. The profligacy of planter life passed away with
+slavery, and the changed condition of the two races makes impossible any
+return to the old habits. But they had wrongs of their own, and were
+eloquent in their exposition of them. We had taken the islands from
+France and Spain at an enormous expense, and we were throwing them aside
+like a worn-out child's toy. We did nothing for them. We allowed them no
+advantage as British subjects, and when they tried to do something for
+themselves, we interposed with an Imperial veto. The United States,
+seeing the West Indian trade gravitating towards New York, had offered
+them a commercial treaty, being willing to admit their sugar duty free,
+in consideration of the islands admitting in return their salt fish and
+flour and notions. A treaty was in process of negotiation between the
+United States and the Spanish islands. A similar treaty had been freely
+offered to them, which might have saved them from ruin, and the Imperial
+Government had disallowed it. How, under such treatment, could we
+expect them to be loyal to the British connection?
+
+It was a relief to turn back from these lamentations to the brilliant
+period of past West Indian history. With the planters of the present it
+was all _sugar_--sugar and the lazy blacks who were England's darlings
+and would not work for them. The handbooks were equally barren. In them
+I found nothing but modern statistics pointing to dreary conclusions,
+and in the place of any human interest, long stories of constitutions,
+suffrages, representative assemblies, powers of elected members, and
+powers reserved to the Crown. Such things, important as they might be,
+did not touch my imagination; and to an Englishman, proud of his
+country, the West Indies had a far higher interest. Strange scenes
+streamed across my memory, and a shadowy procession of great figures who
+have printed their names in history. Columbus and Cortez, Vasco Nuñez,
+and Las Casas; the millions of innocent Indians who, according to Las
+Casas, were destroyed out of the islands, the Spanish grinding them to
+death in their gold mines; the black swarms who were poured in to take
+their place, and the frightful story of the slave trade. Behind it all
+was the European drama of the sixteenth century--Charles V. and Philip
+fighting against the genius of the new era, and feeding their armies
+with the ingots of the new world. The convulsion spread across the
+Atlantic. The English Protestants and the French Huguenots took to sea
+like water dogs, and challenged their enemies in their own special
+domain. To the popes and the Spaniards the new world was the property of
+the Church and of those who had discovered it. A papal bull bestowed on
+Spain all the countries which lay within the tropics west of the
+Atlantic--a form of Monroe doctrine, not unreasonable as long as there
+was force to maintain it, but the force was indispensable, and the
+Protestant adventurers tried the question with them at the cannon's
+mouth. They were of the reformed faith all of them, these sea rovers of
+the early days, and, like their enemies, they were of a very mixed
+complexion. The Spaniards, gorged with plunder and wading in blood,
+were at the same time, and in their own eyes, crusading soldiers of the
+faith, missionaries of the Holy Church, and defenders of the doctrines
+which were impiously assailed in Europe. The privateers from Plymouth
+and Rochelle paid also for the cost of their expeditions with the
+pillage of ships and towns and the profits of the slave trade; and they
+too were the unlicensed champions of spiritual freedom in their own
+estimate of themselves. The gold which was meant for Alva's troops in
+Flanders found its way into the treasure houses of the London companies.
+The logs of the voyages of the Elizabethan navigators represent them
+faithfully as they were, freebooters of the ocean in one aspect of them;
+in another, the sea warriors of the Reformation--uncommissioned,
+unrecognised, fighting on their own responsibility, liable to be
+disowned when they failed, while the Queen herself would privately be a
+shareholder in the adventure. It was a wild anarchic scene, fit cradle
+of the spiritual freedom of a new age, when the nations of the earth
+were breaking the chains in which king and priest had bound them.
+
+To the Spaniards, Drake and his comrades were _corsarios_, robbers,
+enemies of the human race, to be treated to a short shrift whenever
+found and caught. British seamen who fell into their hands were carried
+before the Inquisition at Lima or Carthagena and burnt at the stake as
+heretics. Four of Drake's crew were unfortunately taken once at Vera
+Cruz. Drake sent a message to the governor-general that if a hair of
+their heads was singed he would hang ten Spaniards for each one of them.
+(This curious note is at Simancas, where I saw it.) So great an object
+of terror at Madrid was El Draque that he was looked on as an
+incarnation of the old serpent, and when he failed in his last
+enterprise and news came that he was dead, Lope de Vega sang a hymn of
+triumph in an epic poem which he called the 'Dragontea.'
+
+When Elizabeth died and peace was made with Spain, the adventurers lost
+something of the indirect countenance which had so far been extended to
+them; the execution of Raleigh being one among other marks of the change
+of mind. But they continued under other names, and no active effort was
+made to suppress them. The Spanish Government did in 1627 agree to leave
+England in possession of Barbadoes, but the pretensions to an exclusive
+right to trade continued to be maintained, and the English and French
+refused to recognise it. The French privateers seized Tortuga, an island
+off St. Domingo, and they and their English friends swarmed in the
+Caribbean Sea as buccaneers or flibustiers. They exchanged names,
+perhaps as a symbol of their alliance. 'Flibustier' was English and a
+corruption of freebooter. 'Buccaneer' came from the boucan, or dried
+beef, of the wild cattle which the French hunters shot in Española, and
+which formed the chief of their sea stores. Boucan became a French verb,
+and, according to Labat, was itself the Carib name for the cashew nut.
+
+War breaking out again in Cromwell's time, Penn and Venables took
+Jamaica. The flibustiers from the Tortugas drove the Spaniards out of
+Hayti, which was annexed to the French crown. The comradeship in
+religious enthusiasm which had originally drawn the two nations together
+cooled by degrees, as French Catholics as well as Protestants took to
+the trade. Port Royal became the headquarters of the English
+buccaneers--the last and greatest of them being Henry Morgan, who took
+and plundered Panama, was knighted for his services, and was afterwards
+made vice-governor of Jamaica. From the time when the Spaniards threw
+open their trade, and English seamen ceased to be delivered over to the
+Inquisition, the English buccaneers ceased to be respectable characters
+and gradually drifted into the pirates of later history, when under
+their new conditions they produced their more questionable heroes, the
+Kidds and Blackbeards. The French flibustiers continued long after--far
+into the eighteenth century--some of them with commissions as
+privateers, others as _forbans_ or unlicensed rovers, but still connived
+at in Martinique.
+
+Adventurers, buccaneers, pirates pass across the stage--the curtain
+falls on them, and rises on a more glorious scene. Jamaica had become
+the depôt of the trade of England with the western world, and golden
+streams had poured into Port Royal. Barbadoes was unoccupied when
+England took possession of it, and never passed out of our hands; but
+the Antilles--the Anterior Isles--which stand like a string of emeralds
+round the neck of the Caribbean Sea, had been most of them colonised and
+occupied by the French, and during the wars of the last century were the
+objects of a never ceasing conflict between their fleets and ours. The
+French had planted their language there, they had planted their religion
+there, and the blacks of these islands generally still speak the French
+patois and call themselves Catholics; but it was deemed essential to our
+interests that the Antilles should be not French but English, and
+Antigua, Martinique, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Grenada were taken and
+retaken and taken again in a struggle perpetually renewed. When the
+American colonies revolted, the West Indies became involved in the
+revolutionary hurricane. France, Spain, and Holland--our three ocean
+rivals--combined in a supreme effort to tear from us our Imperial power.
+The opportunity was seized by Irish patriots to clamour for Irish
+nationality, and by the English Radicals to demand liberty and the
+rights of man. It was the most critical moment in later English history.
+If we had yielded to peace on the terms which our enemies offered, and
+the English Liberals wished us to accept, the star of Great Britain
+would have set for ever.
+
+The West Indies were then under the charge of Rodney, whose brilliant
+successes had already made his name famous. He had done his country more
+than yeoman's service. He had torn the Leeward Islands from the French.
+He had punished the Hollanders for joining the coalition by taking the
+island of St. Eustachius and three millions' worth of stores and money.
+The patriot party at home led by Fox and Burke were ill pleased with
+these victories, for they wished us to be driven into surrender. Burke
+denounced Rodney as he denounced Warren Hastings, and Rodney was called
+home to answer for himself. In his absence Demerara, the Leeward
+Islands, St. Eustachius itself, were captured or recovered by the enemy.
+The French fleet, now supreme in the western waters, blockaded Lord
+Cornwallis at York Town and forced him to capitulate. The Spaniards had
+fitted out a fleet at Havannah, and the Count de Grasse, the French
+admiral, fresh from the victorious thunder of the American cannon,
+hastened back to refurnish himself at Martinique, intending to join the
+Spaniards, tear Jamaica from us, and drive us finally and completely out
+of the West Indies. One chance remained. Rodney was ordered back to his
+station, and he went at his best speed, taking all the ships with him
+which could then be spared. It was mid-winter. He forced his way to
+Barbadoes in five weeks spite of equinoctial storms. The Whig orators
+were indignant. They insisted that we were beaten; there had been
+bloodshed enough, and we must sit down in our humiliation. The
+Government yielded, and a peremptory order followed on Rodney's track,
+'Strike your flag and come home.' Had that fatal command reached him
+Gibraltar would have fallen and Hastings's Indian Empire would have
+melted into air. But Rodney knew that his time was short, and he had
+been prompt to use it. Before the order came, the severest naval battle
+in English annals had been fought and won. De Grasse was a prisoner, and
+the French fleet was scattered into wreck and ruin.
+
+De Grasse had refitted in the Martinique dockyards. He himself and every
+officer in the fleet was confident that England was at last done for,
+and that nothing was left but to gather the fruits of the victory which
+was theirs already. Not Xerxes, when he broke through Thermopylae and
+watched from the shore his thousand galleys streaming down to the Gulf
+of Salamis, was more assured that his prize was in his hands than De
+Grasse on the deck of the 'Ville de Paris,' the finest ship then
+floating on the seas, when he heard that Rodney was at St. Lucia and
+intended to engage him. He did not even believe that the English after
+so many reverses would venture to meddle with a fleet superior in force
+and inspirited with victory. All the Antilles except St. Lucia were his
+own. Tobago, Grenada, the Grenadines, St. Vincent, Martinique, Dominica,
+Guadaloupe, Montserrat, Nevis, Antigua, and St. Kitts, he held them all
+in proud possession, a string of gems, each island large as or larger
+than the Isle of Man, rising up with high volcanic peaks clothed from
+base to crest with forest, carved into deep ravines, and fringed with
+luxuriant plains. In St. Lucia alone, lying between St. Vincent and
+Dominica, the English flag still flew, and Rodney lay there in the
+harbour at Castries. On April 8, 1782, the signal came from the north
+end of the island that the French fleet had sailed. Martinique is in
+sight of St. Lucia, and the rock is still shown from which Rodney had
+watched day by day for signs that they were moving. They were out at
+last, and he instantly weighed and followed. The air was light, and De
+Grasse was under the high lands of Dominica before Rodney came up with
+him. Both fleets were becalmed, and the English were scattered and
+divided by a current which runs between the islands. A breeze at last
+blew off the land. The French were the first to feel it, and were able
+to attack at advantage the leading English division. Had De Grasse 'come
+down as he ought,' Rodney thought that the consequences might have been
+serious. In careless imagination of superiority they let the chance go
+by. They kept at a distance, firing long shots, which as it was did
+considerable damage. The two following days the fleets manoeuvred in
+sight of each other. On the night of the eleventh Rodney made signal for
+the whole fleet to go south under press of sail. The French thought he
+was flying. He tacked at two in the morning, and at daybreak found
+himself where he wished to be, with the French fleet on his lee
+quarter. The French looking for nothing but again a distant cannonade,
+continued leisurely along under the north highlands of Dominica towards
+the channel which separates that island from Guadaloupe. In number of
+ships the fleets were equal; in size and complement of crew the French
+were immensely superior; and besides the ordinary ships' companies they
+had twenty thousand soldiers on board who were to be used in the
+conquest of Jamaica. Knowing well that a defeat at that moment would be
+to England irreparable ruin, they did not dream that Rodney would be
+allowed, even if he wished it, to risk a close and decisive engagement.
+The English admiral was aware also that his country's fate was in his
+hands. It was one of those supreme moments which great men dare to use
+and small men tremble at. He had the advantage of the wind, and could
+force a battle or decline it, as he pleased. With clear daylight the
+signal to engage was flying from the masthead of the 'Formidable,'
+Rodney's ship. At seven in the morning, April 12, 1782, the whole fleet
+bore down obliquely on the French line, cutting it directly in two.
+Rodney led in person. Having passed through and broken up their order he
+tacked again, still keeping the wind. The French, thrown into confusion,
+were unable to reform, and the battle resolved itself into a number of
+separate engagements in which the English had the choice of position.
+
+Rodney in passing through the enemy's lines the first time had exchanged
+broadsides with the 'Glorieux,' a seventy-four, at close range. He had
+shot away her masts and bowsprit, and left her a bare hull; her flag,
+however, still flying, being nailed to a splintered spar. So he left her
+unable to stir; and after he had gone about came himself yardarm to
+yardarm with the superb 'Ville de Paris,' the pride of France, the
+largest ship in the then world, where De Grasse commanded in person. All
+day long the cannon roared. Rodney had on board a favourite bantam cock,
+which stood perched upon the poop of the 'Formidable' through the whole
+action, its shrill voice heard crowing through the thunder of the
+broadsides. One by one the French ships struck their flags or fought on
+till they foundered and went down. The carnage on board them was
+terrible, crowded as they were with the troops for Jamaica. Fourteen
+thousand were reckoned to have been killed, besides the prisoners. The
+'Ville de Paris' surrendered last, fighting desperately after hope was
+gone till her masts were so shattered that they could not bear a sail,
+and her decks above and below were littered over with mangled limbs. De
+Grasse gave up his sword to Rodney on the 'Formidable's' quarter-deck.
+The gallant 'Glorieux,' unable to fly, and seeing the battle lost,
+hauled down her flag, but not till the undisabled remnants of her crew
+were too few to throw the dead into the sea. Other ships took fire and
+blew up. Half the French fleet were either taken or sunk; the rest
+crawled away for the time, most of them to be picked up afterwards like
+crippled birds.
+
+So on that memorable day was the English Empire saved. Peace followed,
+but it was 'peace with honour.' The American colonies were lost; but
+England kept her West Indies; her flag still floated over Gibraltar; the
+hostile strength of Europe all combined had failed to twist Britannia's
+ocean sceptre from her: she sat down maimed and bleeding, but the wreath
+had not been torn from her brow, she was still sovereign of the seas.
+
+The bow of Ulysses was strung in those days. The order of recall arrived
+when the work was done. It was proudly obeyed; and even the great Burke
+admitted that no honour could be bestowed upon Rodney which he had not
+deserved at his country's hands. If the British Empire is still to have
+a prolonged career before it, the men who make empires are the men who
+can hold them together. Oratorical reformers can overthrow what deserves
+to be overthrown. Institutions, even the best of them, wear out, and
+must give place to others, and the fine political speakers are the
+instruments of their overthrow. But the fine speakers produce nothing of
+their own, and as constructive statesmen their paths are strewed with
+failures. The worthies of England are the men who cleared and tilled her
+fields, formed her laws, built her colleges and cathedrals, founded her
+colonies, fought her battles, covered the ocean with commerce, and
+spread our race over the planet to leave a mark upon it which time will
+not efface. These men are seen in their work, and are not heard of in
+Parliament. When the account is wound up, where by the side of them will
+stand our famous orators? What will any one of these have left behind
+him save the wreck of institutions which had done their work and had
+ceased to serve a useful purpose? That was their business in this world,
+and they did it and do it; but it is no very glorious work, not a work
+over which it is possible to feel any 'fine enthusiasm.' To chop down a
+tree is easier than to make it grow. When the business of destruction is
+once completed, they and their fame and glory will disappear together.
+Our true great ones will again be visible, and thenceforward will be
+visible alone.
+
+Is there a single instance in our own or any other history of a great
+political speaker who has added anything to human knowledge or to human
+worth? Lord Chatham may stand as a lonely exception. But except Chatham
+who is there? Not one that I know of. Oratory is the spendthrift sister
+of the arts, which decks itself like a strumpet with the tags and
+ornaments which it steals from real superiority. The object of it is not
+truth, but anything which it can make appear truth; anything which it
+can persuade people to believe by calling in their passions to obscure
+their intelligence.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] This is the explanation of the name which is given by Dampier.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+    First sight of Barbadoes--Origin of the name--Père Labat--Bridgetown
+    two hundred years ago--Slavery and Christianity--Economic
+    crisis--Sugar bounties--Aspect of the streets--Government House and
+    its occupants--Duties of a governor of Barbadoes.
+
+
+England was covered with snow when we left it on December 30. At sunrise
+on January 12 we were anchored in the roadstead at Bridgetown, and the
+island of Barbadoes lay before us shining in the haze of a hot summer
+morning. It is about the size of the Isle of Wight, cultivated so far as
+eye could see with the completeness of a garden; no mountains in it,
+scarcely even high hills, but a surface pleasantly undulating, the
+prevailing colour a vivid green from the cane fields; houses in town and
+country white from the coral rock of which they are built, but the glare
+from them relieved by heavy clumps of trees. What the trees were I had
+yet to discover. You could see at a glance that the island was as
+thickly peopled as an ant-hill. Not an inch of soil seemed to be allowed
+to run to waste. Two hundred thousand is, I believe, the present number
+of Barbadians, of whom nine-tenths are blacks. They refuse to emigrate.
+They cling to their home with innocent vanity as though it was the
+finest country in the world, and multiply at a rate so rapid that no one
+likes to think about it. Labour at any rate is abundant and cheap. In
+Barbadoes the negro is willing enough to work, for he has no other means
+of living. Little land is here allowed him to grow his yams upon. Almost
+the whole of it is still held by the whites in large estates, cultivated
+by labourers on the old system, and, it is to be admitted, cultivated
+most admirably. If the West Indies are going to ruin, Barbadoes, at any
+rate, is being ruined with a smiling face. The roadstead was crowded
+with shipping--large barques, steamers, and brigs, schooners of all
+shapes and sorts. The training squadron had come into the bay for a day
+or two on their way to Trinidad, four fine ships, conspicuous by their
+white ensigns, a squareness of yards, and generally imposing presence.
+Boats were flying to and fro under sail or with oars, officials coming
+off in white calico dress, with awnings over the stern sheets and
+chattering crews of negroes. Notwithstanding these exotic symptoms, it
+was all thoroughly English; we were under the guns of our own
+men-of-war. The language of the Anglo-Barbadians was pure English, the
+voices without the smallest transatlantic intonation. On no one of our
+foreign possessions is the print of England's foot more strongly
+impressed than on Barbadoes. It has been ours for two centuries and
+three-quarters, and was organised from the first on English traditional
+lines, with its constitution, its parishes and parish churches and
+churchwardens, and schools and parsons, all on the old model; which the
+unprogressive inhabitants have been wise enough to leave undisturbed.
+
+Little is known of the island before we took possession of it--so little
+that the origin of the name is still uncertain. Barbadoes, if not a
+corruption of some older word, is Spanish or Portuguese, and means
+'bearded.' The local opinion is that the word refers to a banyan or fig
+tree which is common there, and which sends down from its branches long
+hairs or fibres supposed to resemble beards. I disbelieve in this
+derivation. Every Spaniard whom I have consulted confirms my own
+impression that 'barbados' standing alone could no more refer to trees
+than 'barbati' standing alone could refer to trees in Latin. The name is
+a century older than the English occupation, for I have seen it in a
+Spanish chart of 1525. The question is of some interest, since it
+perhaps implies that at the first discovery there was a race of bearded
+Caribs there. However this may be, Barbadoes, after we became masters of
+the island, enjoyed a period of unbroken prosperity for two hundred
+years. Before the conquest of Jamaica, it was the principal mart of our
+West Indian trade; and even after that conquest, when all Europe drew
+its new luxury of sugar from these islands, the wealth and splendour of
+the English residents at Bridgetown astonished and stirred the envy of
+every passing visitor. Absenteeism as yet was not. The owners lived on
+their estates, governed the island as magistrates unpaid for their
+services, and equally unpaid, took on themselves the defences of the
+island. Père Labat, a French missionary, paid a visit to Barbadoes at
+the beginning of the eighteenth century. He was a clever, sarcastic kind
+of man, with fine literary skill, and describes what he saw with a
+jealous appreciation which he intended to act upon his own countrymen.
+The island, according to him, was running over with wealth, and was very
+imperfectly fortified. The jewellers' and silversmiths' shops in
+Bridgetown were brilliant as on the Paris boulevards. The port was full
+of ships, the wharves and warehouses crammed with merchandise from all
+parts of the globe. The streets were handsome, and thronged with men of
+business, who were piling up fortunes. To the Father these sumptuous
+gentlemen were all most civil. The governor, an English milor, asked him
+to dinner, and talked such excellent French that Labat forgave him his
+nationality. The governor, he said, resided in a fine palace. He had a
+well-furnished library, was dignified, courteous, intelligent, and
+lived in state like a prince. A review was held for the French priest's
+special entertainment, of the Bridgetown cavalry. Five hundred gentlemen
+turned out from this one district admirably mounted and armed.
+Altogether in the island he says that there were 3,000 horse and 2,000
+foot, every one of them of course white and English. The officers struck
+him particularly. He met one who had been five years a prisoner in the
+Bastille, and had spent his time there in learning mathematics. The
+planters opened their houses to him. Dinners then as now were the
+received form of English hospitality. They lived well, Labat says. They
+had all the luxuries of the tropics, and they had imported the
+partridges which they were so fond of from England. They had the
+costliest and choicest wines, and knew how to enjoy them. They dined at
+two o'clock, and their dinner lasted four hours. Their mansions were
+superbly furnished, and gold and silver plate, he observed with an eye
+to business, was so abundant that the plunder of it would pay the cost
+of an expedition for the reduction of the island.
+
+There was another side to all this magnificence which also might be
+turned to account by an enterprising enemy. There were some thousands of
+wretched Irish, who had been transplanted thither after the last
+rebellion, and were bound under articles to labour. These might be
+counted on to rise if an invading force appeared; and there were 60,000
+slaves, who would rebel also if they saw a hope of success. They were
+ill fed and hard driven. On the least symptom of insubordination they
+were killed without mercy: sometimes they were burnt alive, or were hung
+up in iron cages to die.[3] In the French and Spanish islands care was
+taken of the souls of the poor creatures. They were taught their
+catechism, they were baptised, and attended mass regularly. The Anglican
+clergy, Labat said with professional malice, neither baptised them nor
+taught them anything, but regarded them as mere animals. To keep
+Christians in slavery they held would be wrong and indefensible, and
+they therefore met the difficulty by not making their slaves into
+Christians. That baptism made any essential difference, however, he does
+not insist. By the side of Christianity, in the Catholic islands, devil
+worship and witchcraft went on among the same persons. No instance had
+ever come to his knowledge of a converted black who returned to his
+country who did not throw away his Christianity just as he would throw
+away his clothes; and as to cruelty and immorality, he admits that the
+English at Barbadoes were no worse than his own people at Martinique.
+
+In the collapse of West Indian prosperity which followed on
+emancipation, Barbadoes escaped the misfortunes of the other islands.
+The black population being so dense, and the place itself being so
+small, the squatting system could not be tried; there was plenty of
+labour always, and the planters being relieved of the charge of their
+workmen when they were sick or worn out, had rather gained than lost by
+the change. Barbadoes, however, was not to escape for ever, and was now
+having its share of misfortunes. It is dangerous for any country to
+commit its fortunes to an exclusive occupation. Sugar was the most
+immediately lucrative of all the West Indian productions. Barbadoes is
+exceptionally well suited to sugar-growing. It has no mountains and no
+forests. The soil is clean and has been carefully attended to for two
+hundred and fifty years. It had been owned during the present century by
+gentlemen who for the most part lived in England on the profits of their
+properties, and left them to be managed by agents and attorneys. The
+method of management was expensive. Their own habits were expensive.
+Their incomes, to which they had lived up, had been cut short lately by
+a series of bad seasons. Money had been borrowed at high interest year
+after year to keep the estates and their owners going. On the top of
+this came the beetroot competition backed up by a bounty, and the
+Barbadian sugar interest, I was told, had gone over a precipice. Even
+the unencumbered resident proprietors could barely keep their heads
+above water. The returns on three-quarters of the properties on the
+island no longer sufficed to pay the expenses of cultivation and the
+interest of the loans which had been raised upon them. There was
+impending a general bankruptcy which might break up entirely the present
+system and leave the negroes for a time without the wages which were the
+sole dependence.
+
+A very dark picture had thus been drawn to me of the prospects of the
+poor little island which had been once so brilliant. Nothing could be
+less like it than the bright sunny landscape which we saw from the deck
+of our vessel. The town, the shipping, the pretty villas, the woods, and
+the wide green sea of waving cane had no suggestion of ruin about them.
+If the ruin was coming, clearly enough it had not yet come. After
+breakfast we went on shore in a boat with a white awning over it, rowed
+by a crew of black boatmen, large, fleshy, shining on the skin with
+ample feeding and shining in the face with innocent happiness. They
+rowed well. They were amusing. There was a fixed tariff, and they were
+not extortionate. The temperature seemed to rise ten degrees when we
+landed. The roads were blinding white from the coral dust, the houses
+were white, the sun scorching. The streets were not the streets
+described by Labat; no splendid magazines or jewellers' shops like those
+in Paris or London; but there were lighters at the quays loading or
+unloading, carts dashing along with mule teams and making walking
+dangerous; signs in plenty of life and business; few white faces, but
+blacks and mulattoes swarming. The houses were substantial, though in
+want of paint. The public buildings, law courts, hall of assembly &c.
+were solid and handsome, nowhere out of repair, though with something to
+be desired in point of smartness. The market square would have been well
+enough but for a statue of Lord Nelson which stands there, very like,
+but small and insignificant, and for some extraordinary reason they
+have painted it a bright pea-green.
+
+We crept along in the shade of trees and warehouses till we reached the
+principal street. Here my friends brought me to the Icehouse, a sort of
+club, with reading rooms and dining rooms, and sleeping accommodation
+for members from a distance who do not like colonial hotels. Before
+anything else could be thought of I was introduced to cocktail, with
+which I had to make closer acquaintance afterwards, cocktail being the
+established corrective of West Indian languor, without which life is
+impossible. It is a compound of rum, sugar, lime juice, Angostura
+bitters, and what else I know not, frisked into effervescence by a
+stick, highly agreeable to the taste and effective for its immediate
+purpose. Cocktail over, and walking in the heat being a thing not to be
+thought of, I sat for two hours in a balcony watching the people, who
+were thick as bees in swarming time. Nine-tenths of them were pure
+black; you rarely saw a white face, but still less would you see a
+discontented one, imperturbable good humour and self-satisfaction being
+written on the features of every one. The women struck me especially.
+They were smartly dressed in white calico, scrupulously clean, and
+tricked out with ribands and feathers; but their figures were so good,
+and they carried themselves so well and gracefully, that, although they
+might make themselves absurd, they could not look vulgar. Like the old
+Greek and Etruscan women, they are trained from childhood to carry heavy
+weights on their heads. They are thus perfectly upright, and plant their
+feet firmly and naturally on the ground. They might serve for sculptors'
+models, and are well aware of it. There were no signs of poverty. Old
+and young seemed well-fed. Some had brought in baskets of fruit,
+bananas, oranges, pine apples, and sticks of sugar cane; others had yams
+and sweet potatoes from their bits of garden in the country. The men
+were active enough driving carts, wheeling barrows, or selling flying
+fish, which are caught off the island in shoals and are cheaper than
+herrings in Yarmouth. They chattered like a flock of jackdaws, but there
+was no quarrelling; not a drunken man was to be seen, and all was
+merriment and good humour. My poor downtrodden black brothers and
+sisters, so far as I could judge from this first introduction, looked to
+me a very fortunate class of fellow-creatures.
+
+Government House, where we went to luncheon, is a large airy building
+shaded by heavy trees with a garden at the back of it. West Indian
+houses, I found afterwards, are all constructed on the same pattern, the
+object being to keep the sun out and let in the wind. Long verandahs or
+galleries run round them protected by green Venetian blinds which can be
+opened or closed at pleasure; the rooms within with polished floors,
+little or no carpet, and contrivances of all kinds to keep the air in
+continual circulation. In the subdued green light, human figures lose
+their solidity and look as if they were creatures of air also.
+
+Sir Charles Lees and his lady were all that was polite and hospitable.
+They invited me to make their house my home during my stay, and more
+charming host and hostess it would have been impossible to find or wish
+for. There was not the state which Labat described, but there was the
+perfection of courtesy, a courtesy which must have belonged to their
+natures, or it would have been overstrained long since by the demands
+made upon it. Those who have looked on at a skating ring will have
+observed an orange or some such object in the centre round which the
+evolutions are described, the ice artist sweeping out from it in long
+curves to the extreme circumference, returning on interior arcs till he
+gains the orange again, and then off once more on a fresh departure.
+Barbadoes to the West Indian steam navigation is like the skater's
+orange. All mails, all passengers from Europe, arrive at Barbadoes
+first. There the subsidiary steamers catch them up, bear them north or
+south to the Windward or Leeward Isles, and on their return bring them
+back to Carlisle Bay. Every vessel brings some person or persons to whom
+the Governor is called on to show hospitality. He must give dinners to
+the officials and gentry of the island, he must give balls and concerts
+for their ladies, he must entertain the officers of the garrison. When
+the West Indian squadron or the training squadron drop into the
+roadstead, admirals, commodores, captains must all be invited. Foreign
+ships of war go and come continually, Americans, French, Spaniards, or
+Portuguese. Presidents of South American republics, engineers from
+Darien, all sorts and conditions of men who go to Europe in the English
+mail vessels, take their departure from Carlisle Bay, and if they are
+neglected regard it as a national affront. Cataracts of champagne must
+flow if the British name is not to be discredited. The expense is
+unavoidable and is enormous, while the Governor's very moderate salary
+is found too large by economic politicians, and there is a cry for
+reduction of it.
+
+I was of course most grateful for Sir Charles's invitation to myself.
+From him, better perhaps than from anyone, I could learn how far the
+passionate complaints which I had heard about the state of the islands
+were to be listened to as accounts of actual fact. I found, however,
+that I must postpone both this particular pleasure and my stay in
+Barbadoes itself till a later opportunity. My purpose had been to remain
+there till I had given it all the time which I could spare, thence to go
+on to Jamaica, and from Jamaica to return at leisure round the Antilles.
+But it had been ascertained that in Jamaica there was small-pox. I
+suppose that there generally is small-pox there, or typhus fever, or
+other infectious disorder. But spasms of anxiety assail periodically the
+souls of local authorities. Vessels coming from Jamaica had been
+quarantined in all the islands, and I found that if I proceeded thither
+as I proposed, I should be refused permission to land afterwards in any
+one of the other colonies. In my perplexity my Trinidad friends invited
+me to accompany them at once to Port of Spain. Trinidad was the most
+thriving, or was at all events the least dissatisfied, of all the
+British possessions. I could have a glance at the Windward Islands on
+the way. I could afterwards return to Barbadoes, where Sir Charles
+assured me that I should still find a room waiting for me. The steamer
+to Trinidad sailed the same afternoon. I had to decide in haste, and I
+decided to go. Our luncheon over, we had time to look over the pretty
+gardens at Government House. There were great cabbage palms, cannon-ball
+trees, mahogany trees, almond trees, and many more which were wholly new
+acquaintances. There was a grotto made by climbing plants and creepers,
+with a fountain playing in the middle of it, where orchids hanging on
+wires threw out their clusters of flowers for the moths to fertilize,
+ferns waved their long fronds in the dripping showers, humming birds
+cooled their wings in the spray, and flashed in and out like rubies and
+emeralds. Gladly would I have lingered there, at least for a cigar, but
+it could not be; we had to call on the Commander of the Forces, Sir C.
+Pearson, the hero of Ekowe in the Zulu war. Him, too, I was to see
+again, and hear interesting stories from about our tragic enterprise in
+the Transvaal. For the moment my mind was filled sufficiently with new
+impressions. One reads books about places, but the images which they
+create are always unlike the real object. All that I had seen was
+absolutely new and unexpected. I was glad of an opportunity to readjust
+the information which I had brought with me. We joined our new vessel
+before sunset, and we steamed away into the twilight.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[3] Labat seems to say that they were hung up alive in these cages, and
+left to die there. He says elsewhere, and it may be hoped that the
+explanation is the truer one, that the recently imported negroes often
+destroyed themselves, in the belief that when dead they would return to
+their own country. In the French islands as well as the English, the
+bodies of suicides were exposed in these cages, from which they could
+not be stolen, to convince the poor people of their mistake by their own
+eyes. He says that the contrivance was successful, and that after this
+the slaves did not destroy themselves any more.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+    West Indian politeness--Negro morals and felicity--Island of St.
+    Vincent--Grenada--The harbour--Disappearance of the whites--An
+    island of black freeholders--Tobago--Dramatic art--A promising
+    incident.
+
+
+West Indian civilisation is old-fashioned, and has none of the pushing
+manners which belong to younger and perhaps more thriving communities.
+The West Indians themselves, though they may be deficient in energy, are
+uniformly ladies and gentlemen, and all their arrangements take their
+complexion from the general tone of society. There is a refinement
+visible at once in the subsidiary vessels of the mail service which ply
+among the islands. They are almost as large as those which cross the
+Atlantic, and never on any line in the world have I met with officers so
+courteous and cultivated. The cabins were spacious and as cool as a
+temperature of 80°, gradually rising as we went south, would permit.
+Punkahs waved over us at dinner. In our berths a single sheet was all
+that was provided for us, and this was one more than we needed. A sea
+was running when we cleared out from under the land. Among the cabin
+passengers was a coloured family in good circumstances moving about with
+nurses and children. The little things, who had never been at sea
+before, sat on the floor, staring out of their large helpless black
+eyes, not knowing what was the matter with them. Forward there were
+perhaps two or three hundred coloured people going from one island to
+another, singing, dancing, and chattering all night long, as radiant and
+happy as carelessness and content could make them. Sick or not sick made
+no difference. Nothing could disturb the imperturbable good humour and
+good spirits.
+
+It was too hot to sleep; we sat several of us smoking on deck, and I
+learnt the first authentic particulars of the present manner of life of
+these much misunderstood people. Evidently they belonged to a race far
+inferior to the Zulus and Caffres, whom I had known in South Africa.
+They were more coarsely formed in limb and feature. They would have been
+slaves in their own country if they had not been brought to ours, and at
+the worst had lost nothing by the change. They were good-natured,
+innocent, harmless, lazy perhaps, but not more lazy than is perfectly
+natural when even Europeans must be roused to activity by cocktail.
+
+In the Antilles generally, Barbadoes being the only exception, negro
+families have each their cabin, their garden ground, their grazing for a
+cow. They live surrounded by most of the fruits which grew in Adam's
+paradise--oranges and plantains, bread-fruit, and cocoa-nuts, though not
+apples. Their yams and cassava grow without effort, for the soil is
+easily worked and inexhaustibly fertile. The curse is taken off from
+nature, and like Adam again they are under the covenant of innocence.
+Morals in the technical sense they have none, but they cannot be said to
+sin, because they have no knowledge of a law, and therefore they can
+commit no breach of the law. They are naked and not ashamed. They are
+_married_ as they call it, but not _parsoned_. The woman prefers a
+looser tie that she may be able to leave a man if he treats her
+unkindly. Yet they are not licentious. I never saw an immodest look in
+one their faces, and never heard of any venal profligacy. The system is
+strange, but it answers. A missionary told me that a connection rarely
+turns out well which begins with a legal marriage. The children scramble
+up anyhow, and shift for themselves like chickens as soon as they are
+able to peck. Many die in this way by eating unwholesome food, but also
+many live, and those who do live grow up exactly like their parents. It
+is a very peculiar state of things, not to be understood, as priest and
+missionary agree, without long acquaintance. There is immorality, but an
+immorality which is not demoralising. There is sin, but it is the sin of
+animals, without shame, because there is no sense of doing wrong. They
+eat the forbidden fruit, but it brings with it no knowledge of the
+difference between good and evil. They steal, but as a tradition of the
+time when they were themselves chattels, and the laws of property did
+not apply to them. They are honest about money, more honest perhaps than
+a good many whites. But food or articles of use they take freely, as
+they were allowed to do when slaves, in pure innocence of heart. In fact
+these poor children of darkness have escaped the consequences of the
+Fall, and must come of another stock after all.
+
+Meanwhile they are perfectly happy. In no part of the globe is there any
+peasantry whose every want is so completely satisfied as her Majesty's
+black subjects in these West Indian islands. They have no aspirations to
+make them restless. They have no guilt upon their consciences. They have
+food for the picking up. Clothes they need not, and lodging in such a
+climate need not be elaborate. They have perfect liberty, and are safe
+from dangers, to which if left to themselves they would be exposed, for
+the English rule prevents the strong from oppressing the weak. In their
+own country they would have remained slaves to more warlike races. In
+the West Indies their fathers underwent a bondage of a century or two,
+lighter at its worst than the easiest form of it in Africa; their
+descendants in return have nothing now to do save to laugh and sing and
+enjoy existence. Their quarrels, if they have any, begin and end in
+words. If happiness is the be all and end all of life, and those who
+have most of it have most completely attained the object of their being,
+the 'nigger' who now basks among the ruins of the West Indian
+plantations is the supremest specimen of present humanity.
+
+We retired to our berths at last. At waking we were at anchor off St.
+Vincent, an island of volcanic mountains robed in forest from shore to
+crest. Till late in the last century it was the headquarters of the
+Caribs, who kept up a savage independence there, recruited by runaway
+slaves from Barbadoes or elsewhere. Brandy and Sir Ralph Abercrombie
+reduced them to obedience in 1796, and St. Vincent throve tolerably down
+to the days of free trade. Even now when I saw it, Kingston, the
+principal town, looked pretty and well to do, reminding me, strange to
+say, of towns in Norway, the houses stretching along the shore painted
+in the same tints of blue or yellow or pink, with the same red-tiled
+roofs, the trees coming down the hill sides to the water's edge, villas
+of modest pretensions shining through the foliage, with the patches of
+cane fields, the equivalent in the landscape of the brilliant Norwegian
+grass. The prosperity has for the last forty years waned and waned.
+There are now two thousand white people there, and forty thousand
+coloured people, and proportions alter annually to our disadvantage. The
+usual remedies have been tried. The constitution has been altered a
+dozen times. Just now I believe the Crown is trying to do without one,
+having found the results of the elective principle not encouraging, but
+we shall perhaps revert to it before long; any way, the tables show that
+each year the trade of the island decreases, and will continue to
+decrease while the expenditure increases and will increase.
+
+I did not land, for the time was short, and as a beautiful picture the
+island was best seen from the deck. The characteristics of the people
+are the same in all the Antilles, and could be studied elsewhere. The
+bustle and confusion in the ship, the crowd of boats round the ladder,
+the clamour of negro men's tongues, and the blaze of colours from the
+negro women's dresses, made up together a scene sufficiently
+entertaining for the hour which we remained. In the middle of it the
+Governor, Mr. S----, came on board with another official. They were
+going on in the steamer to Tobago, which formed part of his dominions.
+
+Leaving St. Vincent, we were all the forenoon passing the Grenadines, a
+string of small islands fitting into their proper place in the Antilles
+semicircle, but as if Nature had forgotten to put them together or else
+had broken some large island to pieces and scattered them along the
+line. Some were large enough to have once carried sugar plantations, and
+are now made over wholly to the blacks; others were fishing stations,
+droves of whales during certain months frequenting these waters; others
+were mere rocks, amidst which the white-sailed American coasting
+schooners were beating up against the north-east trade. There was a
+stiff breeze, and the sea was white with short curling waves, but we
+were running before it and the wind kept the deck fresh. At Grenada, the
+next island, we were to go on shore.
+
+Grenada was, like St. Vincent, the home for centuries of man-eating
+Caribs, French for a century and a half, and finally, after many
+desperate struggles for it, was ceded to England at the peace of
+Versailles. It is larger than St. Vincent, though in its main features
+it has the same character. There are lakes in the hills, and a volcanic
+crater not wholly quiescent; but the especial value of Grenada, which
+made us fight so hardly to win it, is the deep and landlocked harbour,
+the finest in all the Antilles.
+
+Père Labat, to whose countrymen it belonged at the time of his own
+visit there, says that 'if Barbadoes had such a harbour as Grenada it
+would be an island without a rival in the world. If Grenada belonged to
+the English, who knew how to turn to profit natural advantages, it would
+be a rich and powerful colony. In itself it was all that man could
+desire. To live there was to live in paradise.' Labat found the island
+occupied by countrymen of his own, '_paisans aisez_', he calls them,
+growing their tobacco, their indigo and scarlet rocou, their pigs and
+their poultry, and contented to be without sugar, without slaves, and
+without trade. The change of hands from which he expected so much had
+actually come about. Grenada did belong to the English, and had belonged
+to us ever since Rodney's peace. I was anxious to see how far Labat's
+prophecy had been fulfilled.
+
+St. George's, the 'capital,' stands on the neck of a peninsula a mile in
+length, which forms one side of the harbour. Of the houses, some look
+out to sea, some inwards upon the _carenage_, as the harbour is called.
+At the point there was a fort, apparently of some strength, on which the
+British flag was flying. We signalled that we had the Governor on board,
+and the fort replied with a puff of smoke. Sound there was none or next
+to none, but we presumed that it had come from a gun of some kind. We
+anchored outside. Mr. S---- landed in an official boat with two flags, a
+missionary in another, which had only one. The crews of a dozen other
+boats then clambered up the gangway to dispute possession of the rest of
+us, shouting, swearing, lying, tearing us this way and that way as if we
+were carcases and they wild beasts wanting to dine upon us. We engaged a
+boat for ourselves as we supposed; we had no sooner entered it than the
+scandalous boatman proceeded to take in as many more passengers as it
+would hold. Remonstrance being vain, we settled the matter by stepping
+into the boat next adjoining, and amidst howls and execrations we were
+borne triumphantly off and were pulled in to the land.
+
+Labat had not exaggerated the beauty of the landlocked basin into which
+we entered on rounding the point. On three sides wooded hills rose high
+till they passed into mountains; on the fourth was the castle with its
+slopes and batteries, the church and town beyond it, and everywhere
+luxuriant tropical forest trees overhanging the violet-coloured water. I
+could well understand the Frenchman's delight when he saw it, and also
+the satisfaction with which he would now acknowledge that he had been a
+shortsighted prophet. The English had obtained Grenada, and this is what
+they had made of it. The forts which had been erected by his countrymen
+had been deserted and dismantled; the castle on which we had seen our
+flag flying was a ruin; the walls were crumbling and in many places had
+fallen down. One solitary gun was left, but that was honeycombed and
+could be fired only with half a charge to salute with. It was true that
+the forts had ceased to be of use, but that was because there was
+nothing left to defend. The harbour is, as I said, the best in the West
+Indies. There was not a vessel in it, nor so much as a boat-yard that I
+could see where a spar could be replaced or a broken rivet mended. Once
+there had been a line of wharves, but the piles had been eaten by worms
+and the platforms had fallen through. Round us when we landed were
+unroofed warehouses, weed-choked courtyards, doors gone, and window
+frames fallen in or out. Such a scene of desolation and desertion I
+never saw in my life save once, a few weeks later at Jamaica. An English
+lady with her children had come to the landing place to meet my friends.
+They, too, were more like wandering ghosts than human beings with warm
+blood in them. All their thoughts were on going home--home out of so
+miserable an exile.[4]
+
+Nature and the dark race had been simply allowed by us to resume
+possession of the island. Here, where the cannon had roared, and ships
+and armies had fought, and the enterprising English had entered into
+occupancy, under whom, as we are proud to fancy, the waste places of the
+earth grow green, and industry and civilisation follow as an inevitable
+fruit, all was now silence. And this was an English Crown colony, as
+rich in resources as any area of soil of equal size in the world.
+England had demanded and seized the responsibility of managing it--this
+was the result.
+
+A gentleman who for some purpose was a passing resident in the island,
+had asked us to dine with him. His house was three or four miles inland.
+A good road remained as a legacy from other times, and a pair of horses
+and a phaeton carried us swiftly to his door. The town of St. George's
+had once been populous, and even now there seemed no want of people, if
+mere numbers sufficed. We passed for half a mile through a straggling
+street, where the houses were evidently occupied though unconscious for
+many a year of paint or repair. They were squalid and dilapidated, but
+the luxuriant bananas and orange trees in the gardens relieved the
+ugliness of their appearance. The road when we left the town was
+overshadowed with gigantic mangoes planted long ago, with almond trees
+and cedar trees, no relations of our almonds or our cedars, but the most
+splendid ornaments of the West Indian forest. The valley up which we
+drove was beautiful, and the house, when we reached it, showed taste and
+culture. Mr. ---- had rare trees, rare flowers, and was taking advantage
+of his temporary residence in the tropics to make experiments in
+horticulture. He had been brought there, I believe, by some necessities
+of business. He told us that Grenada was now the ideal country of modern
+social reformers. It had become an island of pure peasant proprietors.
+The settlers, who had once been a thriving and wealthy community, had
+almost melted away. Some thirty English estates remained which could
+still be cultivated, and were being cultivated with remarkable success.
+But the rest had sold their estates for anything which they could get.
+The free blacks had bought them, and about 8,000 negro families, say
+40,000 black souls in all, now shared three-fourths of the soil between
+them. Each family lived independently, growing coffee and cocoa and
+oranges, and all were doing very well. The possession of property had
+brought a sense of its rights with it. They were as litigious as Irish
+peasants; everyone was at law with his neighbour, and the island was a
+gold mine to the Attorney-General; otherwise they were quiet harmless
+fellows, and if the politicians would only let them alone, they would be
+perfectly contented, and might eventually, if wisely managed, come to
+some good. To set up a constitution in such a place was a ridiculous
+mockery, and would only be another name for swindling and jobbery. Black
+the island was, and black it would remain. The conditions were never
+likely to arise which would bring back a European population; but a
+governor who was a sensible man, who would reside and use his natural
+influence, could manage it with perfect ease. The island belonged to
+England; we were responsible for what we made of it, and for the
+blacks' own sakes we ought not to try experiments upon them. They knew
+their own deficiencies and would infinitely prefer a wise English ruler
+to any constitution which could be offered them. If left entirely to
+themselves, they would in a generation or two relapse into savages;
+there were but two alternatives before not Grenada only, but all the
+English West Indies--either an English administration pure and simple,
+like the East Indian, or a falling eventually into a state like that of
+Hayti, where they eat the babies, and no white man can own a yard of
+land.
+
+It was dark night when we drove back to the port. The houses along the
+road, which had looked so miserable on the outside, were now lighted
+with paraffin lamps. I could see into them, and was astonished to
+observe signs of comfort and even signs of taste--arm-chairs, sofas,
+sideboards with cut glass upon them, engravings and coloured prints upon
+the walls. The old state of things is gone, but a new state of things is
+rising which may have a worth of its own. The plant of civilisation as
+yet has taken but feeble root, and is only beginning to grow. It may
+thrive yet if those who have troubled all the earth will consent for
+another century to take their industry elsewhere.
+
+The ship's galley was waiting at the wharf when we reached it. The
+captain also had been dining with a friend on shore, and we had to wait
+for him. The off-shore night breeze had not yet risen. The harbour was
+smooth as a looking glass, and the stars shone double in the sky and on
+the water. The silence was only broken by the whistle of the lizards or
+the cry of some far-off marsh frog. The air was warmer than we ever feel
+it in the depth of an English summer, yet pure and delicious and charged
+with the perfume of a thousand flowers. One felt it strange that with so
+beautiful a possession lying at our doors, we should have allowed it to
+slide out of our hands. I could say for myself, like Père Labat, the
+island was all that man could desire. 'En un mot, la vie y est
+délicieuse.'
+
+The anchor was got up immediately that we were on board. In the morning
+we were to find ourselves at Port of Spain. Mr. S----, the Windward
+Island governor, who had joined us at St. Vincent, was, as I said, going
+to Tobago. De Foe took the human part of his Robinson Crusoe from the
+story of Juan Fernandez. The locality is supposed to have been Tobago,
+and Trinidad the island from which the cannibal savages came. We are
+continually shuffling the cards, in a hope that a better game may be
+played with them. Tobago is now-annexed to Trinidad. Last year it was a
+part of Mr. S----'s dominions which he periodically visited. I fell in
+with him again on his return, and he told us an incident which befell
+him there, illustrating the unexpected shapes in which the schoolmaster
+is appearing among the blacks. An intimation was brought to him on his
+arrival that, as the Athenian journeymen had played Pyramus and Thisbe
+at the nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta, so a party of villagers from
+the interior of Tobago would like to act before his Excellency. Of
+course he consented. They came, and went through their performance. To
+Mr. S----'s, and probably to the reader's astonishment, the play which
+they had selected was the 'Merchant of Venice.' Of the rest of it he
+perhaps thought, like the queen of the Amazons, that it was 'sorry
+stuff;' but Shylock's representative, he said, showed real appreciation.
+With freedom and a peasant proprietary, the money lender is a necessary
+phenomenon, and the actor's imagination may have been assisted by
+personal recollections.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[4] I have been told that this picture is overdrawn, that Grenada is the
+most prosperous of the Antilles, that its exports are increasing, that
+English owners are making large profits again, that the blacks are
+thriving beyond example, that there are twenty guns in the Fort, that
+the wharves and Quay are in perfect condition, that there are no
+roofless warehouses, that in my description of St. George's I must have
+been asleep or dreaming. I can only repeat and insist upon what I myself
+saw. I know very well that in parts of the island a few energetic
+English gentlemen are cultivating their land with remarkable success.
+Any enterprising Englishman with capital and intelligence might do the
+same. I know also that in no part of the West Indies are the blacks
+happier or better off. But notwithstanding the English interest in the
+Island has sunk to relatively nothing. Once Englishmen owned the whole
+of it. Now there are only thirty English estates. There are five
+thousand peasant freeholds, owned almost entirely by coloured men, and
+the effect of the change is written upon the features of the harbour.
+Not a vessel of any kind was to be seen in it. The great wooden jetty
+where cargoes used to be landed, or taken on board, was a wreck, the
+piles eaten through, the platform broken. On the Quay there was no sign
+of life, or of business, the houses along the side mean and
+insignificant, while several large and once important buildings,
+warehouses, custom houses, dwelling houses, or whatever they had been,
+were lying in ruins, tropical trees growing in the courtyards, and
+tropical creepers climbing over the masonry showing how long the decay
+had been going on. These buildings had once belonged to English
+merchants, and were evidence of English energy and enterprise, which
+once had been and now had ceased to be. As to the guns in the fort, I
+cannot say how much old iron may be left there. But I was informed that
+only one gun could be fired and that with but half a charge.
+
+This is of little consequence or none, but unless the English population
+can be reinforced, Grenada in another generation will cease to be
+English at all, while the prosperity, the progress, even the continued
+civilisation of the blacks depends on the maintenance there of English
+influence and authority.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+    Charles Kingsley at Trinidad--'Lay of the Last Buccaneer'--A French
+    _forban_--Adventure at Aves--Mass on board a pirate ship--Port of
+    Spain--A house in the tropics--A political meeting--Government
+    House--The Botanical Gardens'--Kingsley's rooms--Sugar estates and
+    coolies.
+
+
+I might spare myself a description of Trinidad, for the natural features
+of the place, its forests and gardens, its exquisite flora, the
+loveliness of its birds and insects, have been described already, with a
+grace of touch and a fullness of knowledge which I could not rival if I
+tried, by my dear friend Charles Kingsley. He was a naturalist by
+instinct, and the West Indies and all belonging to them had been the
+passion of his life. He had followed the logs and journals of the
+Elizabethan adventurers till he had made their genius part of himself.
+In Amyas Leigh, the hero of 'Westward Ho,' he produced a figure more
+completely representative of that extraordinary set of men than any
+other novelist, except Sir Walter, has ever done for an age remote from
+his own. He followed them down into their latest developments, and sang
+their swan song in his 'Lay of the Last Buccaneer.' So characteristic is
+this poem of the transformation of the West Indies of romance and
+adventure into the West Indies of sugar and legitimate trade, that I
+steal it to ornament my own prosaic pages.
+
+THE LAY OF THE LAST BUCCANEER.
+
+    Oh! England is a pleasant place for them that's rich and high,
+    But England is a cruel place for such poor folks as I;
+    And such a port for mariners I'll never see again
+    As the pleasant Isle of Aves beside the Spanish main.
+
+    There were forty craft in Aves that were both swift and stout,
+    All furnished well with small arms and cannon all about;
+    And a thousand men in Aves made laws so fair and free
+    To choose their valiant captains and obey them loyally.
+
+    Then we sailed against the Spaniard with his hoards of plate and gold,
+    Which he wrung with cruel tortures from Indian folks of old;
+    Likewise the merchant captains, with hearts as hard as stone,
+    Who flog men and keelhaul them and starve them to the bone.
+
+    Oh! palms grew high in Aves, and fruits that shone like gold,
+    And the colibris and parrots they were gorgeous to behold,
+    And the negro maids to Aves from bondage fast did flee
+    To welcome gallant sailors a sweeping in from sea.
+
+    Oh! sweet it was in Aves to hear the landward breeze,
+    A swing with good tobacco in a net between the trees,
+    With a negro lass to fan you while you listened to the roar
+    Of the breakers on the reef outside which never touched the shore.
+
+    But Scripture saith an ending to all fine things must be,
+    So the king's ships sailed on Aves and quite put down were we.
+    All day we fought like bull dogs, but they burnt the booms at night,
+    And I fled in a piragua sore wounded from the fight.
+
+    Nine days I floated starving, and a negro lass beside,
+    Till for all I tried to cheer her the poor young thing she died.
+    But as I lay a gasping a Bristol sail came by,
+    And brought me home to England here to beg until I die.
+
+    And now I'm old and going: I'm sure I can't tell where.
+    One comfort is, this world's so hard I can't be worse off there.
+    If I might but be a sea dove, I'd fly across the main
+    To the pleasant Isle of Aves to look at it once again.
+
+By the side of this imaginative picture of a poor English sea rover, let
+me place another, an authentic one, of a French _forban_ or pirate in
+the same seas. Kingsley's Aves, or Isle of Birds, is down on the
+American coast. There is another island of the same name, which was
+occasionally frequented by the same gentry, about a hundred miles south
+of Dominica. Père Labat going once from Martinique to Guadaloupe had
+taken a berth with Captain Daniel, one of the most noted of the French
+corsairs of the day, for better security. People were not scrupulous in
+those times, and Labat and Daniel had been long good friends. They were
+caught in a gale off Dominica, blown away, and carried to Aves, where
+they found an English merchant ship lying a wreck. Two English ladies
+from Barbadoes and a dozen other people had escaped on shore. They had
+sent for help, and a large vessel came for them the day after Daniel's
+arrival. Of course he made a prize of it. Labat said prayers on board
+for him before the engagement, and the vessel surrendered after the
+first shot. The good humour of the party was not disturbed by this
+incident. The pirates, their prisoners, and the ladies stayed together
+for a fortnight at Aves, catching turtles and boucanning them,
+picnicking, and enjoying themselves. Daniel treated the ladies with the
+utmost politeness, carried them afterwards to St. Thomas's, dismissed
+them unransomed, sold his prizes, and wound up the whole affair to the
+satisfaction of every one. Labat relates all this with wonderful humour,
+and tells, among other things, the following story of Daniel. On some
+expedition, when he was not so fortunate as to have a priest on board,
+he was in want of provisions. Being an outlaw he could not furnish
+himself in an open port. One night he put into the harbour of a small
+island, called Los Santos, not far from Dominica, where only a few
+families resided. He sent a boat on shore in the darkness, took the
+priest and two or three of the chief inhabitants out of their beds, and
+carried them on board, where he held them as hostages, and then under
+pretence of compulsion requisitioned the island to send him what he
+wanted. The priest and his companions were treated meanwhile as guests
+of distinction. No violence was necessary, for all parties understood
+one another. While the stores were being collected, Daniel suggested
+that there was a good opportunity for his crew to hear mass. The priest
+of Los Santos agreed to say it for them. The sacred vessels &c. were
+sent for from the church on shore. An awning was rigged over the
+forecastle, and an altar set up under it. The men chanted the prayers.
+The cannon answered the purpose of music. Broadsides were fired at the
+first sentence, at the _Exaudiat_, at the _Elevation_, at the
+_Benediction_, and a fifth at the prayer for the king. The service was
+wound up by a _Vive le Roi_! A single small accident only had disturbed
+the ceremony. One of the pirates, at the _Elevation_, being of a profane
+mind, made an indecent gesture. Daniel rebuked him, and, as the offence
+was repeated, drew a pistol and blew the man's brains out, saying he
+would do the same to any one who was disrespectful to the Holy
+Sacrament. The priest being a little startled, Daniel begged him not to
+be alarmed; he was only chastising a rascal to teach him his duty. At
+any rate, as Labat observed, he had effectually prevented the rascal
+from doing anything of the same kind again. Mass being over, the body
+was thrown overboard, and priest and congregation went their several
+ways.
+
+Kingsley's 'At Last' gave Trinidad an additional interest to me, but
+even he had not prepared me completely for the place which I was to see.
+It is only when one has seen any object with one's own eyes, that the
+accounts given by others become recognisable and instructive.
+
+Trinidad is the largest, after Jamaica, of the British West Indian
+Islands, and the hottest absolutely after none of them. It is
+square-shaped, and, I suppose, was once a part of South America. The
+Orinoco river and the ocean currents between them have cut a channel
+between it and the mainland, which has expanded into a vast shallow lake
+known as the Gulf of Paria. The two entrances by which the gulf is
+approached are narrow and are called _bocas_ or mouths--one the Dragon's
+Mouth, the other the Serpent's. When the Orinoco is in flood, the water
+is brackish, and the brilliant violet blue of the Caribbean Sea is
+changed to a dirty yellow; but the harbour which is so formed would hold
+all the commercial navies of the world, and seems formed by nature to be
+the depôt one day of an enormous trade.
+
+Trinidad has had its period of romance. Columbus was the first
+discoverer of it. Raleigh was there afterwards on his expedition in
+search of his gold mine, and tarred his vessels with pitch out of the
+famous lake. The island was alternately Spanish and French till Picton
+took it in 1797, since which time it has remained English. The Carib
+part of the population has long vanished. The rest of it is a medley of
+English, French, Spaniards, negroes, and coolies. The English, chiefly
+migratory, go there to make money and go home with it. The old colonial
+families have few representatives left, but the island prospers, trade
+increases, coolies increase, cocoa and coffee plantations and indigo
+plantations increase. Port of Spain, the capital, grows annually; and
+even sugar holds its own in spite of low prices, for there is money at
+the back of it, and a set of people who, being speculative and
+commercial, are better on a level with the times than the old-fashioned
+planter aristocracy of the other islands. The soil is of extreme
+fertility, about a fourth of it under cultivation, the rest natural
+forest and unappropriated Crown land.
+
+We passed the 'Dragon's Jaws' before daylight. The sun had just risen
+when we anchored off Port of Spain. We saw before us the usual long line
+of green hills with mountains behind them; between the hills and the sea
+was a low, broad, alluvial plain, deposited by an arm of the Orinoco and
+by the other rivers which run into the gulf. The cocoa-nut palms thrive
+best on the water's edge. They stretched for miles on either side of us
+as a fringe to the shore. Where the water was shoal, there were vast
+swamps of mangrove, the lower branches covered with oysters.
+
+However depressed sugar might be, business could not be stagnant. Ships
+of all nations lay round us taking in or discharging cargo. I myself
+formed for the time being part of the cargo of my friend and host Mr.
+G----, who had brought me to Trinidad, the accomplished son of a
+brilliant mother, himself a distinguished lawyer and member of the
+executive council of the island, a charming companion, an invaluable
+public servant, but with the temperament of a man of genius, half
+humorous, half melancholy, which does not find itself entirely at home
+in West Indian surroundings.
+
+On landing we found ourselves in a large foreign-looking town, 'Port of
+Spain' having been built by French and Spaniards according to their
+national tendencies, and especially with a view to the temperature,
+which is that of a forcing house and rarely falls below 80°. The streets
+are broad and are planted with trees for shade, each house where room
+permits having a garden of its own, with palms and mangoes and coffee
+plants and creepers. Of sanitary arrangements there seemed to be none.
+There is abundance of rain, and the gutters which run down by the
+footway are flushed almost every day. But they are all open. Dirt of
+every kind lies about freely, to be washed into them or left to putrefy
+as fate shall direct. The smell would not be pleasant without the help
+of that natural scavenger the Johnny crow, a black vulture who roosts on
+the trees and feeds in the middle of the streets. We passed a dozen of
+these unclean but useful birds in a fashionable thoroughfare gobbling up
+chicken entrails and refusing to be disturbed. When gorged they perch in
+rows upon the roofs. On the ground they are the nastiest to look at of
+all winged creatures; yet on windy days they presume to soar like their
+kindred, and when far up might be taken for eagles.
+
+The town has between thirty and forty thousand people living in it, and
+the rain and Johnny crows between them keep off pestilence. Outside is a
+large savannah or park, where the villas are of the successful men of
+business. One of these belonged to my host, a cool airy habitation with
+open doors and windows, overhanging portico, and rooms into which all
+the winds might enter, but not the sun. A garden in front was shut off
+from the savannah by a fence of bananas. At the gate stood as sentinel a
+cabbage palm a hundred feet high; on the lawn mangoes, oranges, papaws,
+and bread-fruit trees, strange to look at, but luxuriantly shady. Before
+the door was a tree of good dimensions, whose name I have forgotten, the
+stem and branches of which were hung with orchids which G---- had
+collected in the woods. The borders were blazing with varieties of the
+single hibiscus, crimson, pink, and fawn colour, the largest that I had
+ever seen. The average diameter of each single flower was from seven to
+eight inches. Wind streamed freely through the long sitting room, loaded
+with the perfume of orange trees; on table and in bookcase the hand and
+mind visible of a gifted and cultivated man. The particular room
+assigned to myself would have been equally delightful but that my
+possession of it was disputed even in daylight by mosquitoes, who for
+bloodthirsty ferocity had a bad pre-eminence over the worst that I had
+ever met with elsewhere. I killed one who was at work upon me, and
+examined him through a glass. Bewick, with the inspiration of genius,
+had drawn his exact likeness as the devil--a long black stroke for a
+body, nick for neck, horns on the head, and a beak for a mouth, spindle
+arms, and longer spindle legs, two pointed wings, and a tail. Line for
+line there the figure was before me which in the unforgetable tailpiece
+is driving the thief under the gallows, and I had a melancholy
+satisfaction in identifying him. I had been warned to be on the look-out
+for scorpions, centipedes, jiggers, and land crabs, who would bite me if
+I walked slipperless over the floor in the dark. Of these I met with
+none, either there or anywhere, but the mosquito of Trinidad is enough
+by himself. For malice, mockery, and venom of tooth and trumpet, he is
+without a match in the world.
+
+From mosquitoes, however, one could seek safety in tobacco smoke, or
+hide behind the lace curtains with which every bed is provided.
+Otherwise I found every provision to make life pass deliciously. To walk
+is difficult in a damp steamy temperature hotter during daylight than
+the hottest forcing house in Kew. I was warned not to exert myself and
+to take cocktail freely. In the evening I might venture out with the
+bats and take a drive if I wished in the twilight. Languidly charming as
+it all was, I could not help asking myself of what use such a possession
+could be either to England or the English nation. We could not colonise
+it, could not cultivate it, could not draw a revenue from it. If it
+prospered commercially the prosperity would be of French and Spaniards,
+mulattoes and blacks, but scarcely, if at all, of my own countrymen. For
+here too, as elsewhere, they were growing fewer daily, and those who
+remained were looking forward to the day when they could be released. If
+it were not for the honour of the thing, as the Irishman said after
+being carried in a sedan chair which had no bottom, we might have spared
+ourselves so unnecessary a conquest.
+
+Beautiful, however, it was beyond dispute. Before sunset a carriage took
+us round the savannah. Tropical human beings, like tropical birds, are
+fond of fine colours, especially black human beings, and the park was as
+brilliant as Kensington Gardens on a Sunday. At nightfall the scene
+became yet more wonderful; air, grass, and trees being alight with
+fireflies, each as brilliant as an English glowworm. The palm tree at
+our own gate stood like a ghostly sentinel clear against the starry sky,
+a single long dead frond hanging from below the coronet of leaves and
+clashing against the stem as it was blown to and fro by the night wind,
+while long-winged bats swept and whistled over our heads.
+
+The commonplace intrudes upon the imaginative. At moments one can fancy
+that the world is an enchanted place after all, but then comes generally
+an absurd awakening. On the first night of my arrival, before we went to
+bed there came an invitation to me to attend a political meeting which
+was to be held in a few days on the savannah. Trinidad is a purely Crown
+colony, and has escaped hitherto the introduction of the election virus.
+The newspapers and certain busy gentlemen in 'Port of Spain' had
+discovered that they were living under 'a degrading tyranny,' and they
+demanded a 'constitution.' They did not complain that their affairs had
+been ill managed. On the contrary, they insisted that they were the most
+prosperous of the West Indian colonies, and alone had a surplus in their
+treasury. If this was so, it seemed to me that they had better let well
+alone. The population, all told, was but 170,000, less by thirty
+thousand than that of Barbadoes. They were a mixed and motley assemblage
+of all races and colours, busy each with their own affairs, and never
+hitherto troubling themselves about politics. But it had pleased the
+Home Government to set up the beginning of a constitution again in
+Jamaica, no one knew why, but so it was, and Trinidad did not choose to
+be behindhand. The official appointments were valuable, and had been
+hitherto given away by the Crown. The local popularities very naturally
+wished to have them for themselves. This was the reality in the thing so
+far as there was a reality. It was dressed up in the phrases borrowed
+from the great English masters of the art, about privileges of manhood,
+moral dignity, the elevating influence of the suffrage, &c., intended
+for home consumption among the believers in the orthodox Radical faith.
+
+For myself I could but reply to the gentlemen who had sent the
+invitation, that I was greatly obliged by the compliment, but that I
+knew too little of their affairs to make my presence of any value to
+them. As they were doing so well, I did not see myself why they wanted
+an alteration. Political changes were generally little more than turns
+of a kaleidoscope; you got a new pattern, but it was made of the same
+pieces, and things went on much as before. If they wanted political
+liberty I did not doubt that they would get it if they were loud and
+persistent enough. Only they must understand that at home we were now a
+democracy. Any constitution which was granted them would be on the
+widest basis. The blacks and coolies outnumbered the Europeans by four
+to one, and perhaps when they had what they asked for they might be less
+pleased than they expected.
+
+You rise early in the tropics. The first two hours of daylight are the
+best of the day. My friend drove me round the town in his buggy the next
+morning. My second duty was to pay my respects to the Governor, Sir
+William Robinson, who had kindly offered me hospitality, and for which I
+must present myself to thank him. In Sir William I found one of those
+happy men whose constitution is superior to climate, who can do a long
+day's work in his office, play cricket or lawn tennis in the afternoon,
+and entertain his miscellaneous subjects in the evening with sumptuous
+hospitality--a vigorous, effective, perhaps ambitious gentleman, with a
+clear eye to the views of his employers at home on whom his promotion
+depends--certain to make himself agreeable to them, likely to leave his
+mark to useful purpose on the colonies over which he presides or may
+preside hereafter. Here in Trinidad he was learning Spanish in addition
+to his other linguistic accomplishments, that he might show proper
+courtesies to Spanish residents and to visitors from South America.
+
+The 'Residence' stands in a fine situation, in large grounds of its own
+at the foot of the mountains. It has been lately built regardless of
+expense, for the colony is rich, and likes to do things handsomely. On
+the lawn, under the windows, stood a tree which was entirely new to me,
+an enormous ceiba or silk cotton tree, umbrella shaped, fifty yards in
+diameter, the huge and buttressed trunk throwing out branches so massive
+that one wondered how any woody fibre could bear the strain of their
+weight, the boughs twisting in and out till they made a roof over one's
+head, which was hung with every fantastic variety of parasites.
+
+Vast as the ceibas were which I saw afterwards in other parts of the
+West Indies, this was the largest. The ceiba is the sacred tree of the
+negro, the temple of Jumbi the proper home of Obeah. To cut one down is
+impious. No black in his right mind would wound even the bark. A Jamaica
+police officer told me that if a ceiba had to be removed, the men who
+used the axe were well dosed with rum to give them courage to defy the
+devil.
+
+From Government House we strolled into the adjoining Botanical Gardens.
+I had long heard of the wonders of these. The reality went beyond
+description. Plants with which I was familiar as _shrubs_ in English
+conservatories were here expanded into forest giants, with hundreds of
+others of which we cannot raise even Lilliputian imitations. Let man be
+what he will, nature in the tropics is always grand. Palms were growing
+in the greatest luxuriance, of every known species, from the cabbage
+towering up into the sky to the fan palm of the desert whose fronds are
+reservoirs of water. Of exogenous trees, the majority were leguminous in
+some shape or other, forming flowers like a pea or vetch and hanging
+their seed in pods; yet in shape and foliage they distanced far the most
+splendid ornaments of an English park. They had Old World names with
+characters wholly different: cedars which were not conifers, almonds
+which were no relations to peaches, and gum trees as unlike eucalypti as
+one tree can be unlike another. Again, you saw forms which you seemed to
+recognise till some unexpected anomaly startled you out of your mistake.
+A gigantic Portugal laurel, or what I took for such, was throwing out a
+flower direct from the stem like a cactus. Grandest among them all, and
+happily in full bloom, was the sacred tree of Burmah, the _Amherstia
+nobilis_, at a distance like a splendid horse-chestnut, with crimson
+blossoms in pendant bunches, each separate flower in the convolution of
+its parts exactly counterfeiting a large orchid, with which it has not
+the faintest affinity, the Amherstia being leguminous like the rest.
+
+Underneath, and dispersed among the imperial beauties, were spice trees,
+orange trees, coffee plants and cocoa, or again, shrubs with special
+virtues or vices. We had to be careful what we were about, for fruits of
+fairest appearance were tempting us all round. My companion was
+preparing to eat something to encourage me to do the same. A gardener
+stopped him in time. It was nux vomica. I was straying along a less
+frequented path, conscious of a heavy vaporous odour, in which I might
+have fainted had I remained exposed to it. I was close to a manchineel
+tree.
+
+Prettiest and freshest were the nutmegs, which had a glen all to
+themselves and perfumed the surrounding air. In Trinidad and in Grenada
+I believe the nutmegs are the largest that are known, being from thirty
+to forty feet high; leaves brilliant green, something like the leaves of
+an orange, but extremely delicate and thin, folded one over the other,
+the lowest branches sweeping to the ground till the whole tree forms a
+natural bower, which is proof against a tropical shower. The fragrance
+attracts moths and flies; not mosquitoes, who prefer a ranker
+atmosphere. I saw a pair of butterflies the match of which I do not
+remember even in any museum, dark blue shot with green like a peacock's
+neck, and the size of English bats. I asked a black boy to catch me one.
+'That sort no let catchee, massa,' he said; and I was penitently glad to
+hear it.
+
+Among the wonders of the gardens are the vines as they call them, that
+is, the creepers of various kinds that climb about the other trees.
+Standing in an open space there was what once had been a mighty 'cedar.'
+It was now dead, only the trunk and dead branches remaining, and had
+been murdered by a 'fig' vine which had started from the root, twined
+itself like a python round the stem, strangled out the natural life, and
+spreading out in all directions had covered boughs and twigs with a
+foliage not their own. So far the 'vine' had done no worse than ivy does
+at home, but there was one feature about it which puzzled me altogether.
+The lowest of the original branches of the cedar were about twenty feet
+above our heads. From these in four or five places the parasite had let
+fall shoots, perhaps an inch in diameter, which descended to within a
+foot of the ground and then suddenly, without touching that or anything,
+formed a bight like a rope, went straight up again, caught hold of the
+branch from which they started, and so hung suspended exactly as an
+ordinary swing. In three distinctly perfect instances the 'vine' had
+executed this singular evolution, while at the extremity of one of the
+longest and tallest branches high up in the air it had made a clean leap
+of fifteen feet without visible help and had caught hold of another tree
+adjoining on the same level. These performances were so inexplicable
+that I conceived that they must have been a freak of the gardener's. I
+was mistaken. He said that at particular times in the year the fig vine
+threw out fine tendrils which hung downwards like strings. The strongest
+among them would lay hold of two or three others and climb up upon them,
+the rest would die and drop off, while the successful one, having found
+support for itself above, would remain swinging in the air and thicken
+and prosper. The leap he explained by the wind. I retained a suspicion
+that the wind had been assisted by some aspiring energy in the plant
+itself, so bold it was and so ambitious.
+
+But the wonders of the garden were thrown into the shade by the cottage
+at the extreme angle of it (the old Government House before the present
+fabric had been erected), where Kingsley had been the guest of Sir
+Arthur Gordon. It is a long straggling wooden building with deep
+verandahs lying in a hollow overshadowed by trees, with views opening
+out into the savannah through arches formed by clumps of tall bamboos,
+the canes growing thick in circular masses and shooting up a hundred
+feet into the air, where they meet and form frames for the landscape,
+peculiar and even picturesque when there are not too many of them. These
+bamboos were Kingsley's special delight, as he had never seen the like
+of them elsewhere. The room in which he wrote is still shown, and the
+gallery where he walked up and down with his long pipe. His memory is
+cherished in the island as of some singular and beautiful presence which
+still hovers about the scenes which so delighted him in the closing
+evening of his own life.
+
+It was the dry season, mid-winter, yet raining every day for two or
+three hours, and when it rains in these countries it means business.
+When the sky cleared the sun was intolerably hot, and distant
+expeditions under such conditions suited neither my age nor my health.
+With cocktail I might have ventured, but to cocktail I could never
+heartily reconcile myself. Trinidad has one wonder in it, a lake of
+bitumen some ninety acres in extent, which all travellers are expected
+to visit, and which few residents care to visit. A black lake is not so
+beautiful as an ordinary lake. I had no doubt that it existed, for the
+testimony was unimpeachable. Indeed I was shown an actual specimen of
+the crystallised pitch itself. I could believe without seeing and
+without undertaking a tedious journey. I rather sympathised with a noble
+lord who came to Port of Spain in his yacht, and like myself had the
+lake impressed upon him. As a middle course between going thither and
+appearing to slight his friends' recommendations, he said that he would
+send his steward.
+
+In Trinidad, as everywhere else, my own chief desire was to see the
+human inhabitants, to learn what they were doing, how they were living,
+and what they were thinking about, and this could best be done by drives
+about the town and neighbourhood. The cultivated land is a mere fringe
+round the edges of the forest. Three-fourths of the soil are untouched.
+The rivers running out of the mountains have carved out the usual long
+deep valleys, and spread the bottoms with rich alluvial soil. Here among
+the wooded slopes are the country houses of the merchants. Here are the
+cabins of the black peasantry with their cocoa and coffee and orange
+plantations, which as in Grenada they hold largely as freeholds,
+reproducing as near as possible the life in Paradise of our first
+parents, without the consciousness of a want which they are unable to
+gratify, not compelled to work, for the earth of her own self bears for
+them all that they need, and ignorant that there is any difference
+between moral good and evil.
+
+Large sugar estates, of course, there still are, and as the owners have
+not succeeded in bringing the negroes to work regularly for them,[5]
+they have introduced a few thousand Coolies under indentures for five
+years. These Asiatic importations are very happy in Trinidad; they save
+money, and many of them do not return home when their time is out, but
+stay where they are, buy land, or go into trade. They are proud,
+however, and will not intermarry with the Africans. Few bring their
+families with them; and women being scanty among them, there arise
+inconveniences and sometimes serious crimes.
+
+It were to be wished that there was more prospect of the Coolie race
+becoming permanent than I fear there is. They work excellently. They are
+picturesque additions to the landscape, as they keep to the bright
+colours and graceful drapery of India. The grave dignity of their faces
+contrasts remarkably with the broad, good-humoured, but common features
+of the African. The black women look with envy at the straight hair of
+Asia, and twist their unhappy wool into knots and ropes in the vain hope
+of being mistaken for the purer race; but this is all. The African and
+the Asiatic will not mix, and the African being the stronger will and
+must prevail in Trinidad as elsewhere in the West Indies. Out of a total
+population of 170,000, there are 25,000 whites and mulattoes, 10,000
+coolies, the rest negroes. The English part of the Europeans shows no
+tendency to increase. The English come as birds of passage, and depart
+when they have made their fortunes. The French and Spaniards may hold on
+to Trinidad as a home. Our people do not make homes there, and must be
+looked on as a transient element.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] The negroes in the interior are beginning to cultivate sugar cane in
+small patches, with common mills to break it up. If the experiment
+succeeds it may extend.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+    A Coolie village--Negro
+    freeholds--Waterworks--Pythons--Slavery--Evidence of Lord
+    Rodney--Future of the negroes--Necessity of English rule--The Blue
+    Basin--Black boy and cray fish.
+
+
+The second morning after my arrival, my host took me to a Coolie village
+three miles beyond the town. The drive was between spreading cane
+fields, beneath the shade of bamboos, or under rows of cocoa-nut palms,
+between the stems of which the sea was gleaming.
+
+Human dwelling places are rarely interesting in the tropics. A roof
+which will keep the rain out is all that is needed. The more free the
+passage given to the air under the floor and through the side, the more
+healthy the habitation; and the houses, when we came among them, seemed
+merely enlarged packing cases loosely nailed together and raised on
+stones a foot or two from the ground. The rest of the scene was
+picturesque enough. The Indian jewellers were sitting cross-legged
+before their charcoal pans, making silver bracelets and earrings.
+Brilliant garments, crimson and blue and orange, were hanging to dry on
+clothes lines. Men were going out to their work, women cooking, children
+(not many) playing or munching sugar cane, while great mango trees and
+ceibas spread a cool green roof over all. Like Rachel, the Coolies had
+brought their gods to their new home. In the centre of the village was a
+Hindoo temple, made up rudely out of boards with a verandah running
+round it. The doors were locked. An old man who had charge told us we
+could not enter; a crowd, suspicious and sullen, gathered about us as we
+tried to prevail upon him; so we had to content ourselves with the
+outside, which was gaudily and not unskilfully painted in Indian
+fashion. There were gods and goddesses in various attitudes; Vishnu
+fighting with the monkey god, Vishnu with cutlass and shield, the monkey
+with his tail round one tree while he brandished two others, one in each
+hand, as clubs. I suppose that we smiled, for our curiosity was
+resented, and we found it prudent to withdraw.
+
+The Coolies are useful creatures. Without them sugar cultivation in
+Trinidad and Demerara would cease altogether. They are useful and they
+are singularly ornamental. Unfortunately they have not the best
+character with the police. There is little crime among the negroes, who
+quarrel furiously with their tongues only. The Coolies have the fiercer
+passions of their Eastern blood. Their women being few are tempted
+occasionally into infidelities, and would be tempted more often but that
+a lapse in virtue is so fearfully avenged. A Coolie regards his wife as
+his property, and if she is unfaithful to him he kills her without the
+least hesitation. One of the judges told me that he had tried a case of
+this kind, and could not make the man understand that he had done
+anything wrong. It is a pity that a closer intermixture between them and
+the negroes seems so hopeless, for it would solve many difficulties.
+There is no jealousy. The negro does not regard the Coolie as a
+competitor and interloper who has come to lower his wages. The Coolie
+comes to work. The negro does not want to work, and both are satisfied.
+But if there is no jealousy there is no friendship. The two races are
+more absolutely apart than the white and the black. The Asiatic insists
+the more on his superiority in the fear perhaps that if he did not the
+white might forget it.
+
+Among the sights in the neighbourhood of Port of Spain are the
+waterworks, extensive basins and reservoirs a few miles off in the
+hills. We chose a cool afternoon, when the temperature in the shade was
+not above 86°, and went to look at them. It was my first sight of the
+interior of the island, and my first distinct acquaintance with the
+change which had come over the West Indies. Trinidad is not one of our
+oldest possessions, but we had held it long enough for the old planter
+civilisation to take root and grow, and our road led us through jungles
+of flowering shrubs which were running wild over what had been once
+cultivated estates. Stranger still (for one associates colonial life
+instinctively with what is new and modern), we came at one place on an
+avenue of vast trees, at the end of which stood the ruins of a mansion
+of some great man of the departed order. Great man he must have been,
+for there was a gateway half crumbled away on which were his crest and
+shield in stone, with supporters on either side, like the Baron of
+Bradwardine's Bears; fallen now like them, but unlike them never, I
+fear, to be set up again. The Anglo-West Indians, like the English
+gentry in Ireland, were a fine race of men in their day, and perhaps the
+improving them off the earth has been a less beneficial process in
+either case than we are in the habit of supposing.
+
+Entering among the hills we came on their successors. In Trinidad there
+are 18,000 freeholders, most of them negroes and representatives of the
+old slaves. Their cabins are spread along the road on either side,
+overhung with bread-fruit trees, tamarinds, calabash trees, out of which
+they make their cups and water jugs. The luscious granadilla climbs
+among the branches; plantains throw their cool shade over the doors;
+oranges and limes and citrons perfume the air, and droop their boughs
+under the weight of their golden burdens. There were yams in the gardens
+and cows in the paddocks, and cocoa bushes loaded with purple or yellow
+pods. Children played about in swarms, in happy idleness and abundance,
+with schools, too, at intervals, and an occasional Catholic chapel, for
+the old religion prevails in Trinidad, never having been disturbed. What
+form could human life assume more charming than that which we were now
+looking on? Once more, the earth does not contain any peasantry so well
+off, so well cared for, so happy, so sleek and contented as the sons and
+daughters of the emancipated slaves in the English West Indian Islands.
+Sugar may fail the planter, but cocoa, which each peasant can grow with
+small effort for himself, does not fail and will not. He may 'better his
+condition,' if he has any such ambition, without stirring beyond his own
+ground, and so far, perhaps, his ambition may extend, if it is not
+turned off upon politics. Even the necessary evils of the tropics are
+not many or serious. His skin is proof against mosquitoes. There are
+snakes in Trinidad as there were snakes in Eden. 'Plenty snakes,' said
+one of them who was at work in his garden, 'plenty snakes, but no
+bitee.' As to costume, he would prefer the costume of innocence if he
+was allowed. Clothes in such a climate are superfluous for warmth, and
+to the minds of the negroes, unconscious as they are of shame,
+superfluous for decency. European prejudice, however, still passes for
+something; the women have a love for finery, which would prevent a
+complete return to African simplicity; and in the islands which are
+still French, and in those like Trinidad, which the French originally
+colonised, they dress themselves with real taste. They hide their wool
+in red or yellow handkerchiefs, gracefully twisted; or perhaps it is not
+only to conceal the wool. Columbus found the Carib women of the island
+dressing their hair in the same fashion.[6]
+
+The waterworks, when we reached them, were even more beautiful than we
+had been taught to expect. A dam has been driven across a perfectly
+limpid mountain stream; a wide open area has been cleared, levelled,
+strengthened with masonry, and divided into deep basins and reservoirs,
+through which the current continually flows. Hedges of hibiscus shine
+with crimson blossoms. Innumerable humming birds glance to and fro among
+the trees and shrubs, and gardens and ponds are overhung by magnificent
+bamboos, which so astonished me by their size that I inquired if their
+height had been measured. One of them, I was told, had lately fallen,
+and was found to be 130 feet long. A single drawback only there was to
+this enchanting spot, and it was again the snakes. There are huge
+pythons in Trinidad which are supposed to have crossed the straits from
+the continent. The cool water pools attract them, and they are seen
+occasionally coiled among the branches of the bamboos. Some washerwomen
+at work in the stream had been disturbed a few days before our visit by
+one of these monsters, who had come down to see what they were about.
+They are harmless, but trying to the nerves. One of the men about the
+place shot this one, and he told me that he had shot another a short
+time before asleep in a tree. The keeper of the works was a retired
+soldier, an Irish-Scot from Limerick, hale, vigorous, and happy as the
+blacks themselves. He had married one of them--a remarkable exception to
+an almost universal rule. He did not introduce us, but the dark lady
+passed by us in gorgeous costume, just noticing our presence with a
+sweep which would have done credit to a duchess.
+
+We made several similar small expeditions into the settled parts of the
+neighbourhood, seeing always (whatever else we saw) the boundless
+happiness of the black race. Under the rule of England in these islands
+the two million of these poor brothers-in-law of ours are the most
+perfectly contented specimens of the human race to be found upon the
+planet. Even Schopenhauer, could he have known them, would have admitted
+that there were some of us who were not hopelessly wretched. If
+happiness be the satisfaction of every conscious desire, theirs is a
+condition which admits of no improvement: were they independent, they
+might quarrel among themselves, and the weaker become the bondmen of the
+stronger; under the beneficent despotism of the English Government,
+which knows no difference of colour and permits no oppression, they can
+sleep, lounge, and laugh away their lives as they please, fearing no
+danger. If they want money, work and wages are waiting for them. No one
+can say what may be before them hereafter. The powers which envy human
+beings too perfect felicity may find ways one day of disturbing the West
+Indian negro; but so long as the English rule continues, he may be
+assured of the same tranquil existence.
+
+As life goes he has been a lucky mortal. He was taken away from Dahomey
+and Ashantee--to be a slave indeed, but a slave to a less cruel master
+than he would have found at home. He had a bad time of it occasionally,
+and the plantation whip and the branding irons are not all dreams, yet
+his owner cared for him at least as much as he cared for his cows and
+his horses. Kind usage to animals is more economical than barbarity,
+and Englishmen in the West Indies were rarely inhuman. Lord Rodney says:
+
+'I have been often in all the West India Islands, and I have often made
+my observations on the treatment of the negro slaves, and can aver that
+I never knew the least cruelty inflicted on them, but that in general
+they lived better than the honest day-labouring man in England, without
+doing a fourth part of his work in a day, and I am fully convinced that
+the negroes in our islands are better provided for and live better than
+when in Guinea.'
+
+Rodney, it is true, was a man of facts and was defective in sentiment.
+Let us suppose him wrong, let us believe the worst horrors of the slave
+trade or slave usage as fluent tongue of missionary or demagogue has
+described them, yet nevertheless, when we consider what the lot of
+common humanity has been and is, we shall be dishonest if we deny that
+the balance has been more than redressed; and the negroes who were taken
+away out of Africa, as compared with those who were left at home, were
+as the 'elect to salvation,' who after a brief purgatory are secured an
+eternity of blessedness. The one condition is the maintenance of the
+authority of the English crown. The whites of the islands cannot
+equitably rule them. They have not shaken off the old traditions. If,
+for the sake of theory or to shirk responsibility, we force them to
+govern themselves, the state of Hayti stands as a ghastly example of the
+condition into which they will then inevitably fall. If we persist, we
+shall be sinning against light--the clearest light that was ever given
+in such affairs. The most hardened believers in the regenerating effects
+of political liberty cannot be completely blind to the ruin which the
+infliction of it would necessarily bring upon the race for whose
+interests they pretend particularly to care.
+
+The Pitch Lake I resisted all exhortations to visit, but the days in the
+forest were delightful--pre-eminently a day which we spent at the 'Blue
+Basin,' a pool scooped out in the course of ages by a river falling
+through a mountain gorge; blue, not from any colour in the water, which
+is purely transparent, but from a peculiar effect of sky reflection
+through an opening in the overhanging trees. As it was far off, we had
+to start early and encounter the noonday heat. We had to close the
+curtains of the carriage to escape the sun, and in losing the sun we
+shut out the wind. All was well, however, when we turned into the hills.
+Thenceforward the road followed the bottom of a densely wooded ravine;
+impenetrable foliage spreading over our heads, and a limpid river
+flashing along in which our horses cooled their feet and lips as we
+crossed it again and again. There were the usual cabins and gardens on
+either side of us, sometimes single, sometimes clustering into villages,
+and high above them the rocks stood out, broken into precipices or
+jutting out into projecting crags, with huge trees starting from the
+crevices, dead trunks with branching arms clothed scantily with
+creepers, or living giants with blue or orange-coloured flowers. Mangoes
+scented the valley with their blossom. Bananas waved their long broad
+leaves--some flat and unbroken as we know them in conservatories, some
+split into palm-like fronds which quivered in the breeze. The cocoa pods
+were ripe or ripening, those which had been gathered being left on the
+ground in heaps as we see apples in autumn in an English orchard.
+
+We passed a lady on the way who was making sketches and daring the
+mosquitoes, that were feeding at leisure upon her face and arms. The
+road failed us at last. We alighted with our waterproofs and luncheon
+basket. A couple of half-naked boys sprang forward to act as guides and
+porters--nice little fellows, speaking a French patois for their natural
+language, but with English enough to earn shillings and amuse the
+British tourist. With their help we scrambled along a steep slippery
+path, the river roaring below, till we came to a spot where, the rock
+being soft, a waterfall had cut out in the course of ages a natural
+hollow, of which the trees formed the roof, and of which the floor was
+the pool we had come in search of. The fall itself was perpendicular,
+and fifty or sixty feet high, the water issuing at the top out of a dark
+green tunnel among overhanging branches. The sides of the basin were
+draped with the fronds of gigantic ferns and wild plantains, all in
+wild luxuriance and dripping with the spray. In clefts above the rocks,
+large cedars or gum trees had struck their roots and flung out their
+gnarled and twisted branches, which were hung with ferns; while at the
+lower end of the pool, where the river left it again, there grew out
+from among the rocks near the water's edge tall and exquisitely grouped
+acacias with crimson flowers for leaves.
+
+[Illustration: BLUE BASIN, TRINIDAD.]
+
+The place broke on us suddenly as we scrambled round a corner from
+below. Three young blacks were bathing in the pool, and as we had a lady
+with us, they were induced, though sullenly and with some difficulty, to
+return into their scanty garments and depart. Never certainly was there
+a more inviting spot to swim in, the more so from exciting possibilities
+of adventure. An English gentleman went to bathe there shortly before
+our coming. He was on a rock, swaying his body for a plunge, when
+something caught his eye among the shadows at the bottom. It proved to
+be a large dead python.
+
+We had not the luck ourselves of falling in with so interesting a beast.
+Great butterflies and perhaps a humming bird or two were flitting among
+the leaves as we came up; other signs of life there were none, unless we
+call life the motion of the plantain leaves, waving in the draughts of
+air which were eddying round the waterfall. We sat down on stones, or on
+the trunk of a fallen tree, the mosquitoes mercifully sparing us. We
+sketched a little, talked a little, ate our sandwiches, and the male
+part of us lighted our cigars. G---- then, to my surprise, produced a
+fly rod. In the streams in the Antilles, which run out of the mountains,
+there is a fish in great abundance which they call _mullet_, an inferior
+trout, but a good substitute where the real thing is not. He runs
+sometimes to five pounds weight, will take the fly, and is much sought
+after by those who try to preserve in the tropics the amusements and
+habits of home. G---- had caught many of them in Dominica. If in
+Dominica, why not in Trinidad?
+
+He put his tackle together, tied up a cast of trout flies, and
+commenced work. He tried the still water at the lower end of the basin.
+He crept round the rock and dropped his line into the foam at the foot
+of the fall. No mullet rose, nor fish of any kind. One of our small boys
+had looked on with evident impatience. He cried out at last, 'No mullet,
+but plenty crayfish,' pointing down into the water; and there, following
+the direction of his finger, we beheld strange grey creatures like
+cuttle-fish, moving about on the points of their toes, the size of small
+lobsters. The flies were dismounted, a bare hook was fitted on a fine
+gut trace, with a split shot or two to sink the line, all trim and
+excellent. A fresh-water shrimp was caught under a stone for a bait.
+G---- went to work, and the strange things took hold and let themselves
+be lifted halfway to the surface. But then, somehow, they let go and
+disappeared.
+
+Our small boy said nothing; but I saw a scornful smite upon his lips. He
+picked up a thin dry cane, found some twine in the luncheon basket which
+had tied up our sandwiches, found a pin there also, and bent it, and put
+a shrimp on it. With a pebble stone for a sinker he started in
+competition, and in a minute he had brought out upon the rock the
+strangest thing in the shape of a fish which I had ever seen in fresh
+water or salt. It was a true 'crayfish,' _écrevisse_, eight inches long,
+formed regularly with the thick powerful tail, the sharp serrated snout,
+the long antennæ, and the spider-like legs of the lobster tribe. As in a
+crayfish, the claws were represented by the correctly shaped but
+diminutive substitutes.
+
+When we had done wondering at the prize, we could admire the smile of
+conscious superiority in the face of the captor. The fine tackle had
+been beaten, as usual, by the proverbial string and crooked pin, backed
+by knowledge in the head of a small nigger boy.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[6] Traen las cabezas atadas con unos panuelos labrados hermosos que
+parecen de lejos de seda y almazarrones.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+    Home Rule in Trinidad--Political aspirations--Nature of the
+    problem--Crown administration--Colonial governors--A Russian
+    apologue--Dinner at Government House--'The Three Fishers'--Charles
+    Warner--Alternative futures of the colony.
+
+
+The political demonstration to which I had been invited came off the
+next day on the savannah. The scene was pretty enough. Black coats and
+white trousers, bright-coloured dresses and pink parasols, look the same
+at a distance whether the wearer has a black face or a white one, and
+the broad meadow was covered over with sparkling groups. Several
+thousand persons must have attended, not all to hear the oratory, for
+the occasion had been taken when the Governor was to play close by in a
+cricket match, and half the crowd had probably collected to see His
+Excellency at the wicket. Placards had been posted about the town,
+setting out the purpose of the meeting. Trinidad, as I said, is at
+present a Crown colony, the executive council and the legislature being
+equally nominated by the authorities. The popular orators, the newspaper
+writers, and some of the leading merchants in Port of Spain had
+discovered, as I said, that they were living under what they called 'a
+degrading tyranny.' They had no grievances, or none that they alleged,
+beyond the general one that they had no control over the finance. They
+very naturally desired that the lucrative Government appointments for
+which the colony paid should be distributed among themselves. The
+elective principle had been reintroduced in Jamaica, evidently as a step
+towards the restoration of the full constitution which had been
+surrendered and suppressed after the Gordon riots. Trinidad was almost
+as large as Jamaica, in proportion to the population wealthier and more
+prosperous, and the people were invited to come together in overwhelming
+numbers to insist that the 'tyranny' should end. The Home Government in
+their action about Jamaica had shown a spontaneous readiness to
+transfer responsibility from themselves to the inhabitants. The
+promoters of the meeting at Port of Spain may have thought that a little
+pressure on their part might not be unwelcome as an excuse for further
+concessions of the same kind. Whether this was so I do not know. At any
+rate they showed that they were as yet novices in the art of agitation.
+The language of the placard of invitation was so violent that, in the
+opinion of the legal authorities, the printer might have been indicted
+for high treason. The speakers did their best to imitate the fine
+phrases of the apostles of liberty in Europe, but they succeeded only in
+caricaturing their absurdities. The proceedings were described at length
+in the rival newspapers. One gentleman's speech was said to have been so
+brilliant that every sentence was a 'gem of oratory,' the gem of gems
+being when he told his hearers that, 'if they went into the thing at
+all, they should go the entire animal.' All went off good-humouredly. In
+the Liberal journal the event of the day was spoken of as the most
+magnificent demonstration in favour of human freedom which had ever been
+seen in the West Indian Islands. In the Conservative journal it was
+called a ridiculous _fiasco_, and the people were said to have come
+together only to admire the Governor's batting, and to laugh at the
+nonsense which was coming from the platform. Finally, the same journal
+assured us that, beyond a handful of people who were interested in
+getting hold of the anticipated spoils of office, no one in the island
+cared about the matter.
+
+The result, I believe, was some petition or other which would go home
+and pass as evidence, to minds eager to believe, that Trinidad was
+rapidly ripening for responsible government, promising relief to an
+overburdened Secretary for the Colonies, who has more to do than he can
+attend to, and is pleased with opportunities of gratifying popular
+sentiment, or of showing off in Parliament the development of colonial
+institutions. He knows nothing, can know nothing, of the special
+conditions of our hundred dependencies. He accepts what his
+representatives in the several colonies choose to tell him; and his
+representatives, being birds of passage responsible only to their
+employers at home, and depending for their promotion on making
+themselves agreeable, are under irresistible temptations to report what
+it will please the Secretary of State to hear.
+
+For the Secretary of State, too, is a bird of passage as they are,
+passing through the Colonial Office on his way to other departments, or
+holding the seals as part of an administration whose tenure of office
+grows every year more precarious, which exists only upon popular
+sentiment, and cannot, and does not try to look forward beyond at
+furthest the next session of Parliament.
+
+But why, it may be asked, should not Trinidad govern itself as well as
+Tasmania or New Zealand? Why not Jamaica, why not all the West Indian
+Islands? I will answer by another question. Do we wish these islands to
+remain as part of the British Empire? Are they of any use to us, or have
+we responsibilities connected with them of which we are not entitled to
+divest ourselves? A government elected by the majority of the people
+(and no one would think of setting up constitutions on any other basis)
+reflects from the nature of things the character of the electors. All
+these islands tend to become partitioned into black peasant
+proprietaries. In Grenada the process is almost complete. In Trinidad it
+is rapidly advancing. No one can stop it. No one ought to wish to stop
+it. But the ownership of freeholds is one thing, and political power is
+another. The blacks depend for the progress which they may be capable of
+making on the presence of a white community among them; and although it
+is undesirable or impossible for the blacks to be ruled by the minority
+of the white residents, it is equally undesirable and equally impossible
+that the whites should be ruled by them. The relative numbers of the two
+races being what they are, responsible government in Trinidad means
+government by a black parliament and a black ministry. The negro voters
+might elect, to begin with, their half-caste attorneys or such whites
+(the most disreputable of their colour) as would court their suffrages.
+But the black does not love the mulatto, and despises the white man who
+consents to be his servant. He has no grievances. He is not naturally a
+politician, and if left alone with his own patch of land, will never
+trouble himself to look further. But he knows what has happened in St.
+Domingo. He has heard that his race is already in full possession of the
+finest of all the islands. If he has any thought or any hopes about the
+matter, it is that it may be with the rest of them as it has been with
+St. Domingo, and if you force the power into his hands, you must expect
+him to use it. Under the constitution which you would set up, whites and
+blacks may be nominally equal; but from the enormous preponderance of
+numbers the equality would be only in name, and such English people, at
+least, as would be really of any value, would refuse to remain in a
+false and intolerable position. Already the English population of
+Trinidad is dwindling away under the uncertainties of their future
+position. Complete the work, set up a constitution with a black prime
+minister and a black legislature, and they will withdraw of themselves
+before they are compelled to go. Spaniards and French might be tempted
+by advantages of trade to remain in Port of Spain, as a few are still to
+be found in Hayti. They, it is possible, might in time recover and
+reassert their supremacy. Englishmen have the world open to them, and
+will prefer lands where they can live under less degrading conditions.
+In Hayti the black republic allows no white man to hold land in
+freehold. The blacks elsewhere with the same opportunities will develop
+the same aspirations.
+
+Do we, or do we not, intend to retain our West Indian Islands under the
+sovereignty of the Queen? If we are willing to let them go, the question
+is settled. But we ought to face the alternative. There is but one form
+of government under which we can retain these colonies with honour and
+security to ourselves and with advantage to the negroes whom we have
+placed there--the mode of government which succeeds with us so admirably
+that it is the world's wonder in the _East_ Indies, a success so unique
+and so extraordinary that it seems the last from which we are willing
+to take example.
+
+In Natal, where the circumstances are analogous, and where report says
+that efforts are being also made to force on constitutional
+independence, I remember suggesting a few years ago that the governor
+should be allowed to form his own council, and that in selecting the
+members of it he should go round the colony, observe the farms where the
+land was well inclosed, the fields clean, the farm buildings substantial
+and in good repair; that he should call on the owners of these to be his
+advisers and assistants. In all Natal he might find a dozen such. They
+would be unwilling to leave their own business for so thankless a
+purpose; but they might be induced by good feeling to grant him a few
+weeks of their time. Under such an administration I imagine Natal would
+have a happier future before it than it will experience with the boon
+which is designed for it.
+
+In the West Indies there is indefinite wealth waiting to be developed by
+intelligence and capital; and men with such resources, both English and
+American, might be tempted still to settle there, and lead the blacks
+along with them into more settled manners and higher forms of
+civilisation. But the future of the blacks, and our own influence over
+them for good, depend on their being protected from themselves and from
+the schemers who would take advantage of them. However little may be the
+share to which the mass of a population be admitted in the government of
+their country, they are never found hard to manage where they prosper
+and are justly dealt with. The children of darkness are even easier of
+control than the children of light. Under an administration formed on
+the model of that of our Eastern Empire these islands would be peopled
+in a generation or two with dusky citizens, as proud as the rest of us
+of the flag under which they will have thriven, and as willing to defend
+it against any invading enemy as they are now unquestionably
+indifferent. Partially elected councils, local elected boards, &c.,
+serve only as contrivances to foster discontent and encourage jobbery.
+They open a rift which time will widen, and which will create for us, on
+a smaller scale, the conditions which have so troubled us in Ireland,
+where each concession of popular demands makes the maintenance of the
+connection more difficult. In the Pacific colonies self-government is a
+natural right; the colonists are part of ourselves, and have as complete
+a claim to the management of their own affairs as we have to the
+management of ours. The less we interfere with them the more heartily
+they identify themselves with us. But if we choose besides to indulge
+our ambition with an empire, if we determine to keep attached to our
+dominion countries which, like the East Indies, have been conquered by
+the sword, countries, like the West Indies, which, however acquired, are
+occupied by races enormously outnumbering us, many of whom do not speak
+our language, are not connected with us by sentiment, and not visibly
+connected by interest, with whom our own people will not intermarry or
+hold social intercourse, but keep aloof from, as superior from
+inferior--to impose on such countries forms of self-government at which
+we have ourselves but lately arrived, to put it in the power of these
+overwhelming numbers to shake us off if they please, and to assume that
+when our real motive has been only to save ourselves trouble they will
+be warmed into active loyalty by gratitude for the confidence which we
+pretend to place in them, is to try an experiment which we have not the
+slightest right to expect to be successful, and which if it fails is
+fatal.
+
+Once more, if we mean to keep the blacks as British subjects, we are
+bound to govern them, and to govern them well. If we cannot do it, we
+had better let them go altogether. And here is the real difficulty. It
+is not that men competent for such a task cannot be found. Among the
+public servants of Great Britain there are persons always to be found
+fit and willing for posts of honour and difficulty if a sincere effort
+be made to find them. Alas! in times past we have sent persons to rule
+our Baratarias to whom Sancho Panza was a sage--troublesome members of
+Parliament, younger brothers of powerful families, impecunious peers;
+favourites, with backstairs influence, for whom a provision was to be
+found; colonial clerks, bred in the office, who had been obsequious and
+useful.
+
+One had hoped that in the new zeal for the colonial connection such
+appointments would have become impossible for the future, yet a recent
+incident at the Mauritius has proved that the colonial authorities are
+still unregenerate. The unfit are still maintained in their places; and
+then, to prevent the colonies from suffering too severely under their
+incapacity, we set up the local councils, nominated or elected, to do
+the work, while the Queen's representative enjoys his salary. Instances
+of glaring impropriety like that to which I have alluded are of course
+rare, and among colonial governors there are men of quality so high that
+we would desire only to see their power equal to it. But so limited is
+the patronage, on the other hand, which remains to the home
+administrations, and so heavy the pressure brought to bear upon them,
+that there are persons also in these situations of whom it may be said
+that the less they do, and the less they are enabled to do, the better
+for the colony over which they preside.
+
+The West Indies have been sufferers from another cause. In the absence
+of other use for them they have been made to serve as places where
+governors try their 'prentice hand and learn their business before
+promotion to more important situations. Whether a man has done well or
+done ill makes, it seems, very little difference unless he has offended
+prejudices or interests at home: once in the service he acquires a
+vested right to continue in it. A governor who had been suspended for
+conduct which is not denied to have been most improper, is replaced with
+the explanation that if he was not sent back to his old post it would
+have been necessary to provide a situation for him elsewhere. Why would
+it? Has a captain of a man-of-war whose ship is taken from him for
+misconduct an immediate claim to have another? Unfortunate colonies! It
+is not their interest which is considered under this system. But the
+subject is so delicate that I must say no more about it. I will
+recommend only to the attention of the British democracy, who are now
+the parties that in the last instance are responsible, because they are
+the real masters of the Empire, the following apologue.
+
+In the time of the Emperor Nicholas the censors of the press seized a
+volume which had been published by the poet Kriloff, on the ground that
+it contained treasonable matter. Nicholas sent for Kriloff. The censor
+produced the incriminated passage, and Kriloff was made to read it
+aloud. It was a fable. A governor of a Russian province was represented
+as arriving in the other world, and as being brought up before
+Rhadamanthus. He was accused, not of any crime, but of having been
+simply a nonentity--of having received his salary and spent it, and
+nothing more. Rhadamanthus listened, and when the accusing angel had
+done sentenced the prisoner into Paradise. 'Into Paradise!' said the
+angel, 'why, he has done nothing!' 'True,' said Rhadamanthus, 'but how
+would it have been if he had done anything?'
+
+'Write away, old fellow,' said Nicholas to Kriloff.
+
+Has it never happened that British colonial officials who have similarly
+done nothing have been sent into the Paradise of promotion because they
+have kept things smooth and have given no trouble to their employers at
+home?
+
+In the evening of the day of the political meeting we dined at
+Government House. There was a large representative party, English,
+French, Spaniards, Corsicans--ladies and gentlemen each speaking his or
+her own language. There were the mayors of the two chief towns of
+Trinidad--Port of Spain and San Fernando--both enthusiastic for a
+constitution. The latter was my neighbour at dinner, and insisted much
+on the fine qualities of the leading persons in the island and the
+splendid things to be expected when responsible government should be
+conceded. The training squadron had arrived from Barbadoes, and the
+commodore and two or three officers were present in their uniforms.
+There was interesting talk about Trinidad's troublesome neighbour,
+Guzman Blanco, the President of Venezuela. It seems that Sir Walter
+Raleigh's Eldorado has turned out to be a fact after all. On the higher
+waters of the Orinoco actual gold mines do exist, and the discovery has
+quickened into life a long unsettled dispute about boundaries between
+British Guiana and the republic. Don Guzman had been encroaching, so it
+was alleged, and in other ways had been offensive and impertinent. Ships
+were going--had been actually ordered to La Guyra, to pull his nose for
+him, and to tell him to behave himself. The time is past when we flew
+our hawks at game birds. The opinion of most of the party was that Don
+Guzman knew it, and that his nose would not be pulled. He would regard
+our frigates as picturesque ornaments to his harbour, give the officers
+in command the politest reception, evade their demands, offer good words
+in plenty, and nothing else but words, and in the end would have the
+benefit of our indifference.[7]
+
+In the late evening we had music. Our host sang well, our hostess was an
+accomplished artist. They had duets together, Italian and English, and
+the lady then sang 'The Three Fishers,' Kingsley being looked on as the
+personal property of Trinidad and as one of themselves. She sang it very
+well, as well as any one could do who had no direct acquaintance with an
+English sea-coast people. Her voice was beautiful, and she showed
+genuine feeling. The silence when she ended was more complimentary than
+the loudest applause. It was broken by a stupid member of council, who
+said to me, 'Is it not strange that a poet with such a gift of words as
+Mr. Kingsley should have ended that song with so weak a line? "The
+sooner it's over the sooner to sleep" is nothing but prose.' He did not
+see that the fault which he thought he had discovered is no more than
+the intentional 'dying away' of the emotion created by the story in the
+common lot of poor humanity. We drove back across the savannah in a
+blaze of fireflies. It is not till midnight that they put their lights
+out and go to sleep with the rest of the world.
+
+One duty remained to me before I left the island. The Warners are among
+the oldest of West Indian families, distinguished through many
+generations, not the least in their then living chief and
+representative, Charles Warner, who in the highest ministerial offices
+had steered Trinidad through the trying times which followed the
+abolition of slavery. I had myself in early life been brought into
+relations with other members of his family. He himself was a very old
+man on the edge of the grave; but hearing that I was in Port of Spain,
+he had expressed a wish to see me. I found him in his drawing room,
+shrunk in stature, pale, bent double by weight of years, and but feebly
+able to lift his head to speak. I thought, and I judged rightly, that he
+could have but a few weeks, perhaps but a few days, to live.
+
+There is something peculiarly solemn in being brought to speak with a
+supremely eminent man, who is already struggling with the moment which
+is to launch him into a new existence. He raised himself in his chair.
+He gave me his withered hand. His eyes still gleamed with the light of
+an untouched intelligence. All else of him seemed dead. The soul,
+untouched by the decay of the frame which had been its earthly tenement,
+burnt bright as ever on the edge of its release.
+
+    When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain,
+    And they breathe truth who breathe their words in pain.
+
+He roused himself to talk, and he talked sadly, for all things at home
+and everywhere were travelling on the road which he well knew could lead
+to no good end. No statesman had done better practical work than he, or
+work which had borne better fruit, could it be allowed to ripen. But for
+him Trinidad would have been a wilderness, savage as when Columbus found
+the Caribs there. He belonged to the race who make empires, as the
+orators lose them, who do things and do not talk about them, who build
+and do not cast down, who reverence ancient habits and institutions as
+the organic functions of corporate national character; a Tory of the
+Tories, who nevertheless recognised that Toryism itself was passing
+away under the universal solvent, and had ceased to be a faith which
+could be believed in as a guide to conduct.
+
+He no more than any one could tell what it was now wisest or even
+possible to do. He spoke like some ancient _seer_, whose eyes looked
+beyond the present time and the present world, and saw politics and
+progress and the wild whirlwind of change as the play of atoms dancing
+to and fro in the sunbeams of eternity. Yet he wished well to our poor
+earth, and to us who were still struggling upon it. He was sorry for the
+courses on which he saw mankind to be travelling. Spite of all the
+newspapers and the blowing of the trumpets, he well understood whither
+all that was tending. He spoke with horror and even loathing of the
+sinister leader who was drawing England into the fatal whirlpool. He
+could still hope, for he knew the power of the race. He knew that the
+English heart was unaffected, that we were suffering only from delirium
+of the brain. The day would yet come, he thought, when we should
+struggle back into sanity again with such wreck of our past greatness as
+might still be left to us, torn and shattered, but clothed and in our
+right mind, and cured for centuries of our illusions.
+
+My forebodings of the nearness of the end were too well founded. A month
+later I heard that Charles Warner was dead. To have seen and spoken with
+such a man was worth a voyage round the globe.
+
+On the prospects of Trinidad I have a few more words to add. The
+tendency of the island is to become what Grenada has become already--a
+community of negro freeholders, each living on his own homestead, and
+raising or gathering off the ground what his own family will consume.
+They will multiply, for there is ample room. Three-quarters of the soil
+are still unoccupied. The 140,000 blacks will rapidly grow into a
+half-million, and the half-million, as long as we are on the spot to
+keep the peace, will speedily double itself again. The English
+inhabitants will and must be crowded out. The geographical advantages of
+the Gulf of Paria will secure a certain amount of trade. There will be
+merchants and bankers in the town as floating passage birds, and there
+will be mulatto lawyers and shopkeepers and newspaper writers. But the
+blacks hate the mulattoes, and the mulatto breed will not maintain
+itself, as with the independence of the blacks the intimacy between
+blacks and whites diminishes and must diminish. The English peasant
+immigration which enthusiasts have believed in is a dream, a dream which
+passed through the ivory gate, a dream which will never turn to a waking
+reality; and unless under the Indian system, which our rulers will never
+try unless the democracy orders them to adopt it, the English interest
+will come to an end.
+
+The English have proved in India that they can play a great and useful
+part as rulers over recognised inferiors. Even in the West Indies the
+planters were a real something. Like the English in Ireland, they
+produced a remarkable breed of men: the Codringtons, the Warners, and
+many illustrious names besides. They governed cheaply on their own
+resources, and the islands under their rule were so profitable that we
+fought for them as if our Empire was at stake. All that is gone. The
+days of ruling races are supposed to be numbered. Trade drifts away to
+the nearest market--to New York or New Orleans--and in a money point of
+view the value of such possessions as Trinidad will soon be less than
+nothing to us.
+
+As long as the present system holds, there will be an appreciable
+addition to the sum of human (coloured human) happiness. Lighter-hearted
+creatures do not exist on the globe. But the continuance of it depends
+on the continuance of the English rule. The peace and order which they
+benefit by is not of their own creation. In spite of schools and
+missionaries, the dark connection still maintains itself with Satan's
+invisible world, and modern education contends in vain with Obeah
+worship. As it has been in Hayti, so it must be in Trinidad if the
+English leave the blacks to be their own masters.
+
+Scene after scene passes by on the magic slide. The man-eating Caribs
+first, then Columbus and his Spaniards, the French conquest, the English
+occupation, but they have left behind them no self-quickening seed of
+healthy civilisation, and the prospect darkens once more. It is a pity,
+for there is no real necessity that it should darken. The West Indian
+negro is conscious of his own defects, and responds more willingly than
+most to a guiding hand. He is faithful and affectionate to those who are
+just and kind to him, and with a century or two of wise administration
+he might prove that his inferiority is not inherent, and that with the
+same chances as the white he may rise to the same level. I cannot part
+with the hope that the English people may yet insist that the chance
+shall not be denied to him, and that they may yet give their officials
+to understand that they must not, shall not, shake off their
+responsibilities for this unfortunate people, by flinging them back upon
+themselves 'to manage their own affairs,' now that we have no further
+use for them.
+
+I was told that the keener-witted Trinidad blacks are watching as
+eagerly as we do the development of the Irish problem. They see the
+identity of the situation. They see that if the Radical view prevails,
+and in every country the majority are to rule, Trinidad will be theirs
+and the government of the English will be at an end. I, for myself, look
+upon Trinidad and the West Indies generally as an opportunity for the
+further extension of the influence of the English race in their special
+capacity of leaders and governors of men. We cannot with honour divest
+ourselves of our responsibility for the blacks, or after the eloquence
+we have poured out and the self-laudation which we have allowed
+ourselves for the suppression of slavery, leave them now to relapse into
+a state from which slavery itself was the first step of emancipation.
+Our world-wide dominion will not be of any long endurance if we consider
+that we have discharged our full duty to our fellow-subjects when we
+have set them free to follow their own devices. If that is to be all,
+the sooner it vanishes into history the better for us and for the
+world.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[7] A squadron did go while I was in the West Indies. I have not heard
+that any advance has been made in consequence towards the settlement of
+the Border.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+    Barbadoes again--Social condition of the island--Political
+    constitution--Effects of the sugar bounties--Dangers of general
+    bankruptcy--The Hall of Assembly--Sir Charles Pearson--Society in
+    Bridgetown--A morning drive--Church of St. John's--Sir Graham
+    Briggs--An old planter's palace--The Chief Justice of Barbadoes.
+
+
+Again at sea, and on the way back to Barbadoes. The commodore of the
+training squadron had offered me a berth to St. Vincent, but he intended
+to work up under sail against the north-east trade, which had risen to
+half a gale, and I preferred the security and speed of the mail boat.
+Among the passengers was Miss ----, the lady whom I had seen sketching
+on the way to the Blue Basin. She showed me her drawings, which were
+excellent. She showed me in her mosquito-bitten arms what she had
+endured to make them, and I admired her fortitude. She was English, and
+was on her way to join her father at Codrington College.
+
+We had a wild night, but those long vessels care little for winds and
+waves. By morning we had fought our way back to Grenada. In the St.
+Vincent roadstead, which we reached the same day, the ship was stormed
+by boatloads of people who were to go on with us; boys on their way to
+school at Barbadoes, ladies young and old, white, black, and mixed, who
+were bound I know not where. The night fell dark as pitch, the storm
+continued, and we were no sooner beyond the shelter of the land than
+every one save Miss ---- and myself was prostrate. The vessel ploughed
+on upon her way indifferent to us and to them. We were at Bridgetown by
+breakfast time, and I was now to have an opportunity of studying more at
+leisure the earliest of our West Indian colonies.
+
+Barbadoes is as unlike in appearance as it is in social condition to
+Trinidad or the Antilles. There are no mountains in it, no forests, no
+rivers, and as yet no small freeholders. The blacks, who number nearly
+200,000 in an island not larger than the Isle of Wight, are labourers,
+working for wages on the estates of large proprietors. Land of their own
+they have none, for there is none for them. Work they must, for they
+cannot live otherwise. Thus every square yard of soil is cultivated, and
+turn your eyes where you will you see houses, sugar canes, and sweet
+potatoes. Two hundred and fifty years of occupation have imprinted
+strongly an English character; parish churches solid and respectable,
+the English language, the English police and parochial system. However
+it may be in the other islands, England in Barbadoes is still a solid
+fact. The headquarters of the West Indian troops are there. There is a
+commander-in-chief residing in a 'Queen's House,' so called. There is a
+savannah where there are English barracks under avenues of almond and
+mahogany. Red coats are scattered about the grass. Officers canter about
+playing polo, and naval and military uniforms glitter at the side of
+carriages, and horsemen and horsewomen take their evening rides, as well
+mounted and as well dressed as you can see in Rotten Row. Barbadoes is
+thus in pleasing contrast with the conquered islands which we have not
+taken the trouble to assimilate. In them remain the wrecks of the French
+civilisation which we superseded, while we have planted nothing of our
+own. Barbadoes, the European aspect of it at any rate, is English
+throughout.
+
+The harbour, when we arrived, was even more brilliant than we had left
+it a fortnight before. The training squadron had gone, but in the place
+of it the West Indian fleet was there, and there were also three
+American frigates, old wooden vessels out merely on a cruise, but
+heavily sparred, smart and well set up, with the stars and stripes
+floating carelessly at their sterns, as if in these western seas, be the
+nominal dominion British, French, or Spanish, the American has a voice
+also and intends to be heard.
+
+We had no sooner anchored than a well-appointed boat was alongside with
+an awning and an ensign at the stern. Colonel ----, the chief of the
+police, to whom it belonged, came on board in search of Miss ----, who
+was to be his guest in Bridgetown. She introduced me to him. He insisted
+on my accompanying him home to breakfast, and, as he was a person in
+authority, I had nothing to do but obey. Colonel ----, to whose
+politeness then and afterwards I was in many ways indebted, had seen
+life in various forms. He had been in the navy. He had been in the army.
+He had been called to the bar. He was now the head of the Barbadoes
+police, with this anomalous addition to his other duties, that in
+default of a chaplain he read the Church service on Sundays in the
+barracks. He had even a license from the bishop to preach sermons, and
+being a man of fine character and original sense he discharged this last
+function, I was told, remarkably well. His house was in the heart of the
+town, but shaded with tropical trees. The rooms were protected by deep
+outside galleries, which were overrun with Bougainvillier creepers. He
+was himself the kindest of entertainers, his Irish lady the kindest of
+hostesses, with the humorous high breeding of the old Sligo aristocracy,
+to whom she belonged. I found that I had been acquainted with some of
+her kindred there long ago, in the days when the Anglo-Irish rule had
+not been discovered to be a upas tree, and cultivated human life was
+still possible in Connaught. Of the breakfast, which consisted of all
+the West Indian dainties I had ever heard or read of, I can say nothing,
+nor of the pleasant talk which followed. I was to see more of Colonel
+----, for he offered to drive me some day across the island, a promise
+which he punctually fulfilled. My stay with him for the present could be
+but brief, as I was expected at Government House.
+
+I have met with exceptional hospitality from the governors of British
+colonies in many parts of the world. They are not chosen like the Roman
+proconsuls from the ranks of trained statesmen who have held high
+administrative offices at home. They are appointed, as I said just now,
+from various motives, sometimes with a careful regard to fitness for
+their post, sometimes with a regard merely to routine or convenience or
+to personal influence brought to bear in their favour. I have myself
+seen some for whom I should have thought other employment would have
+been more suitable; but always and everywhere those that I have fallen
+in with have been men of honour and integrity above reproach or
+suspicion, and I have met with one or two gentlemen in these situations
+whose admirable qualities it is impossible to praise too highly, who in
+their complicated responsibilities--responsibilities to the colonies and
+responsibilities to the authorities at home--have considered conscience
+and duty to be their safest guides, have cared only to do what they
+believed to be right to the best of their ability, and have left their
+interests to take care of themselves.
+
+The Governor of Barbadoes is not despotic. He controls the
+administration, but there is a constitution as old as the Stuarts; an
+Assembly of thirty-three members, nine of whom the Crown nominates, the
+rest are elected. The friction is not so violent as when the number of
+the nominated and elected members is equal, and as long as a property
+qualification was required for the franchise, the system may have worked
+tolerably without producing any violent mischief. There have been recent
+modifications, however, pointing in the same direction as those which
+have been made in Jamaica. By an ordinance from home the suffrage has
+been widely extended, obviously as a step to larger intended changes.
+
+Under such conditions and with an uncertain future a governor can do
+little save lead and influence, entertain visitors, discharge the
+necessary courtesies to all classes of his subjects, and keep his eyes
+open. These duties at least Sir Charles Lee discharges to perfection,
+the entertaining part of them on a scale so liberal that if Père Labat
+came back he would suppose that the two hundred years which have gone by
+since his visit was a dream, and that Government House at least was
+still as he left it. In an establishment which had so many demands upon
+it, and where so many visitors of all kinds were going and coming, I had
+no claim to be admitted. I felt that I should be an intruder, and had I
+been allowed would have taken myself elsewhere, but Sir Charles's
+peremptory generosity admitted of no refusal. As a subject I was bound
+to submit to the Queen's representative. I cannot say I was sorry to be
+compelled. In Government House I should see and hear what I could
+neither have seen nor heard elsewhere. I should meet people who could
+tell me what I most wanted to know. I had understood already that owing
+to the sugar depression the state of the island was critical. Officials
+were alarmed. Bankers were alarmed. No one could see beyond the next
+year what was likely to happen. Sir Charles himself would have most to
+say. He was evidently anxious. Perhaps if he had a fault, he was over
+anxious; but with the possibility of social confusion before him, with
+nearly 200,000 peasant subjects, who in a few months might be out of
+work and so out of food, with the inflammable negro nature, and a
+suspicious and easily excited public opinion at home, the position of a
+Governor of Barbadoes is not an enviable one. The Government at home, no
+doubt with the best intentions, has aggravated any peril which there may
+be by enlarging the suffrage. The experience of Governor Eyre in Jamaica
+has taught the danger of being too active, but to be too inactive may be
+dangerous also. If there is a stir again in any part of these islands,
+and violence and massacre come of it, as it came in St. Domingo, the
+responsibility is with the governor, and the account will be strictly
+exacted of him.
+
+I must describe more particularly the reasons which there are for
+uneasiness. On the day on which I landed I saw an article in a
+Bridgetown paper in which my coming there was spoken of as perhaps the
+last straw which would break the overburdened back. I know not why I
+should be thought likely to add anything to the load of Barbadian
+afflictions. I should be a worse friend to the colonies than I have
+tried to be if I was one of those who would quench the smoking flax of
+loyalty in any West Indian heart. But loyalty, I very well know, is
+sorely tried just now. The position is painfully simple. The great
+prosperity of the island ended with emancipation. Barbadoes suffered
+less than Jamaica or the Antilles because the population was large and
+the land limited, and the blacks were obliged to work to keep
+themselves alive. The abolition of the sugar duties was the next blow.
+The price of sugar fell, and the estates yielded little more than the
+expense of cultivation. Owners of properties who were their own
+managers, and had sense and energy, continued to keep themselves afloat;
+but absenteeism had become the fashion. The brilliant society which is
+described by Labat had been melting for more than a century. More and
+more the old West Indian families removed to England, farmed their lands
+through agents and overseers, or sold them to speculating capitalists.
+The personal influence of the white man over the black, which might have
+been brought about by a friendly intercourse after slavery was
+abolished, was never so much as attempted. The higher class of gentry
+found the colony more and more distasteful to them, and they left the
+arrangement of the labour question to persons to whom the blacks were
+nothing, emancipated though they might be, except instruments of
+production. A negro can be attached to his employer at least as easily
+as a horse or a dog. The horse or dog requires kind treatment, or he
+becomes indifferent or sullen; so it is with the negro. But the forced
+equality of the races before the law made more difficult the growth of
+any kindly feeling. To the overseer on a plantation the black labourer
+was a machine out of which the problem was to get the maximum of work
+with the minimum of pay. In the slavery times the horse and dog relation
+was a real thing. The master and mistress joked and laughed with their
+dark bondsmen, knew Cæsar from Pompey, knew how many children each had,
+gave them small presents, cared for them when they were sick, and
+maintained them when they were old and past work. All this ended with
+emancipation. Between whites and blacks no relations remained save that
+of employer and employed. They lived apart. They had no longer, save in
+exceptional instances, any personal communication with each other. The
+law refusing to recognise a difference, the social line was drawn the
+harder, which the law was unable to reach.
+
+In the Antilles the plantations broke up as I had seen in Grenada. The
+whites went away, and the land was divided among the negroes. In
+Barbadoes, the estates were kept together. The English character and the
+English habits were stamped deeper there, and were not so easily
+obliterated. But the stars in their courses have fought against the old
+system. Once the West Indies had a monopoly of the sugar trade. Steam
+and progress have given them a hundred _natural_ competitors; and on the
+back of these came the _unnatural_ bounty-fed beetroot sugar
+competition. Meanwhile the expense of living increased in the days of
+inflated hope and 'unexampled prosperity.' Free trade, whatever its
+immediate consequences, was to make everyone rich in the end. When the
+income of an estate fell short one year, it was to rise in the next, and
+the money was borrowed to make ends meet; when it didn't rise, more
+money was borrowed; and there is now hardly a property in the island
+which is not loaded to the sinking point. Tied to sugar-growing,
+Barbadoes has no second industry to fall back upon. The blacks, who are
+heedless and light-hearted, increase and multiply. They will not
+emigrate, they are so much attached to their homes; and the not distant
+prospect is of a general bankruptcy, which may throw the land for the
+moment out of cultivation, with a hungry unemployed multitude to feed
+without means of feeding them, and to control without the personal
+acquaintance and influence which alone can make control possible.
+
+At home there is a general knowledge that things are not going on well
+out there. But, true to our own ways of thinking, we regard it as their
+affair and not as ours. If cheap sugar ruins the planters, it benefits
+the English workman. The planters had their innings; it is now the
+consumer's turn. What are the West Indies to us? On the map they appear
+to belong more to the United States than to us. Let the United States
+take them and welcome. So thinks, perhaps, the average Englishman; and,
+analogous to him, the West Indian proprietor reflects that, if admitted
+into the Union, he would have the benefit of the American market, which
+would set him on his feet again; and that the Americans, probably
+finding that they, if not we, could make some profit out of the islands,
+would be likely to settle the black question for him in a more
+satisfactory manner.
+
+That such a feeling as this should exist is natural and pardonable; and
+it would have gone deeper than it has gone if it were not that there are
+two parties to every bargain, and those in favour of such a union have
+met hitherto with no encouragement. The Americans are wise in their
+generation. They looked at Cuba; they looked at St. Domingo. They might
+have had both on easy terms, but they tell you that their constitution
+does not allow them to hold dependent states. What they annex they
+absorb, and they did not wish to absorb another million and a half of
+blacks and as many Roman Catholics, having enough already of both. Our
+English islands may be more tempting, but there too the black cloud
+hangs thick and grows yearly thicker, and through English indulgence is
+more charged with dangerous elements. Already, they say, they have every
+advantage which the islands can give them. They exercise a general
+protectorate, and would probably interfere if France or England were to
+attempt again to extend their dominions in that quarter; but they prefer
+to leave to the present owners the responsibility of managing and
+feeding the cow, while they are to have the milking of it.
+
+Thus the proposal of annexation, which has never gone beyond wishes and
+talk, has so far been coldly received; but the Americans did make their
+offer a short time since, at which the drowning Barbadians grasped as at
+a floating plank. England would give them no hand to save them from the
+effects of the beetroot bounties. The Americans were willing to relax
+their own sugar duties to admit West Indian sugar duty free, and give
+them the benefit of their own high prices. The colonies being unable to
+make treaties for themselves, the proposal was referred home and was
+rejected. The Board of Trade had, no doubt, excellent reasons for
+objecting to an arrangement which would have flung our whole commerce
+with the West Indies into American hands, and might have formed a
+prelude to a closer attachment. It would have been a violation also of
+those free-trade principles which are the English political gospel.
+Moreover, our attitude towards our colonies has changed in the last
+twenty years; we now wish to preserve the attachment of communities whom
+a generation back we should have told to do as they liked, and have
+bidden them God speed on their way; and this treaty may have been
+regarded as a step towards separation. But the unfortunate Barbadians
+found themselves, with the harbour in sight, driven out again into the
+free-trade hurricane. We would not help them ourselves; we declined to
+let the Americans help them; and help themselves they could not. They
+dare not resent our indifference to their interests, which, if they were
+stronger, would have been more visibly displayed. They must wait now for
+what the future will bring with as much composure as they can command,
+but I did hear outcries of impatience to which it was unpleasant to
+listen. Nay, it was even suggested as a means of inducing the Americans
+to forego their reluctance to take them into the Union, that we might
+relinquish such rights as we possessed in Canada if the Americans would
+relieve us of the West Indies, for which we appeared to care so little.
+
+If Barbadoes is driven into bankruptcy, the estates will have to be
+sold, and will probably be broken up as they have been in the Antilles.
+The first difficulty will thus be got over. But the change cannot be
+carried out in a day. If wages suddenly cease the negroes will starve,
+and will not take their starvation patiently. At the worst, however,
+means will probably be found to keep the land from falling out of
+cultivation. The Barbadians see their condition in the light of their
+grievances, and make the worst of it. The continental powers may tire of
+the bounty system, or something else may happen to make sugar rise. The
+prospect is not a bright one, but what actually happens in this world is
+generally the unexpected.
+
+As a visit my stay at Government House was made simply delightful to me.
+I remained there (with interruptions) for a fortnight, and Lady L----
+did not only permit, but she insisted that I should be as if in an
+hotel, and come and go as I liked. The climate of Barbadoes, so far as I
+can speak of it, is as sparkling and invigorating as champagne. Cocktail
+may be wanted in Trinidad. In Barbadoes the air is all one asks for, and
+between night breezes and sea breezes one has plenty of it. Day begins
+with daylight, as it ought to do. You have slept without knowing
+anything about it. There are no venomous crawling creatures. Cockroaches
+are the worst, but they scuttle out of the way so alarmed and ashamed of
+themselves if you happen to see them, that I never could bring myself to
+hurt one. You spring out of bed as if the process of getting up were
+actually pleasant. Well-appointed West Indian houses are generally
+provided with a fresh-water swimming bath. Though cold by courtesy the
+water seldom falls below 65°, and you float luxuriously upon it without
+dread of chill. The early coffee follows the bath, and then the stroll
+under the big trees, among strange flowers, or in the grotto with the
+ferns and humming birds. If it were part of one's regular life, I
+suppose that one would want something to do. Sir Charles was the most
+active of men, and had been busy in his office for an hour before I had
+come down to lounge. But for myself I discovered that it was possible,
+at least for an interval, to be perfectly idle and perfectly happy,
+surrounded by the daintiest beauties of an English hothouse, with palm
+trees waving like fans to cool one, and with sensitive plants, which are
+common as daisies, strewing themselves under one's feet to be trodden
+upon.
+
+After breakfast the heat would be considerable, but with an umbrella I
+could walk about the town and see what was to be seen. Alas! here one
+has something to desire. Where Père Labat saw a display of splendour
+which reminded him of Paris and London, you now find only _stores_ on
+the American pattern, for the most part American goods, bad in quality
+and extravagantly dear. Treaty or no treaty, it is to America that the
+trade is drifting, and we might as well concede with a good grace what
+must soon come of itself whether we like it or not. The streets are
+relieved from ugliness by the trees and by occasional handsome
+buildings. Often I stood to admire the pea-green Nelson. Once I went
+into the Assembly where the legislature was discussing more or less
+unquietly the prospects of the island. The question of the hour was
+economy. In the opinion of patriot Barbadians, sore at the refusal of
+the treaty, the readiest way to reduce expenditure was to diminish the
+salaries of officials from the governor downwards. The officials,
+knowing that they were very moderately paid already, naturally demurred.
+The most interesting part of the thing to me was the _hall_ in which the
+proceedings were going on. It is handsome in itself, and has a series of
+painted windows representing the English sovereigns from James I. to
+Queen Victoria. Among them in his proper place stood Oliver Cromwell,
+the only formal recognition of the great Protector that I know of in any
+part of the English dominions. Barbadoes had been Cavalier in its
+general sympathies, but has taken an independent view of things, and
+here too has had an opinion of its own.
+
+Hospitality was always a West Indian characteristic. There were
+luncheons and dinners, and distinguished persons to be met and talked
+to. Among these I had the special good fortune of making acquaintance
+with Sir Charles Pearson, now commanding-in-chief in those parts. Even
+in these days, crowded as they are by small incidents made large by
+newspapers, we have not yet forgotten the defence of a fort in the
+interior of Zululand where Sir Charles Pearson and his small garrison
+were cut off from their communications with Natal. For a week or two he
+was the chief object of interest in every English house. In obedience to
+orders which it was not his business to question, he had assisted Sir T.
+Shepstone in the memorable annexation of the Transvaal. He had seen also
+to what that annexation led, and, being a truth-speaking man, he did not
+attempt to conceal the completeness of our defeat. Our military
+establishment in the West Indies is of modest dimensions; but a strong
+English soldier, who says little and does his duty, and never told a lie
+in his life or could tell one, is a comforting figure to fall in with.
+One feels that there will be something to retire upon when
+parliamentary oratory has finished its work of disintegration.
+
+The pleasantest incident of the day was the evening drive with Lady
+L----. She would take me out shortly before sunset, and bring me back
+again when the tropical stars were showing faintly and the fireflies had
+begun to sparkle about the bushes, and the bats were flitting to and fro
+after the night moths like spirits of darkness chasing human souls.
+
+The neighbourhood of Bridgetown has little natural beauty; but the roads
+are excellent, the savannah picturesque with riding parties and polo
+players and lounging red jackets, every one being eager to pay his or
+her respect to the gracious lady of the Queen's representative. We
+called at pretty villas where there would be evening teas and lawn
+tennis in the cool. The society is not extensive, and here would be
+collected most of it that was worth meeting. At one of these parties I
+fell in with the officers of the American squadron, the commodore a very
+interesting and courteous gentleman whom I should have taken for a
+fellow-countryman. There are many diamonds, and diamonds of the first
+water, among the Americans as among ourselves; but the cutting and
+setting is different. Commodore D---- was cut and set like an
+Englishman. He introduced me to one of his brother officers who had been
+in Hayti. Spite of Sir Spenser St. John, spite of all the confirmatory
+evidence which I had heard, I was still incredulous about the alleged
+cannibalism there. To my inquiries this gentleman had only the same
+answer to give. The fact was beyond question. He had himself known
+instances of it.
+
+The commodore had a grievance against us illustrating West Indian
+manners. These islands are as nervous about their health as so many old
+ladies. The yellow flags float on ship after ship in the Bridgetown
+roadstead, and crews, passengers, and cargoes are sternly interdicted
+from the land. Jamaica was in ill name from small-pox, and, as Cuba will
+not drop its intercourse with Jamaica, Cuba falls also under the ban.
+The commodore had directed a case of cigars from Havana to meet him at
+Barbadoes. They arrived, but might not be transferred from the steamer
+which brought them, even on board his own frigate, lest he might bring
+infection on shore in his pocket. They went on to England, to reach him
+perhaps eventually in New York.
+
+Colonel ----'s duties, as chief of the police, obliged him to make
+occasional rounds to visit his stations. He recollected his promise, and
+he invited me one morning to accompany him. We were to breakfast at his
+house on our return, so I anticipated an excursion of a few miles at the
+utmost. He called for me soon after sunrise with a light carriage and a
+brisk pair of horses. We were rapidly clear of the town. The roads were
+better than the best I have seen out of England, the only fault in them
+being the white coral dust which dazzles and blinds the eyes. Everywhere
+there were signs of age and of long occupation. The stone steps leading
+up out of the road to the doors of the houses had been worn by human
+feet for hundreds of years. The houses themselves were old, and as if
+suffering from the universal depression--gates broken, gardens
+disordered, and woodwork black and blistered for want of paint. But if
+the habitations were neglected, there was no neglect in the fields.
+Sugar cane alternated with sweet potatoes and yams and other strange
+things the names of which I heard and forgot; but there was not a weed
+to be seen or broken fence where fence was needed. The soil was clean
+every inch of it, as well hoed and trenched as in a Middlesex market
+garden. Salt fish and flour, which is the chief food of the blacks, is
+imported; but vegetables enough are raised in Barbadoes to keep the cost
+of living incredibly low; and, to my uninstructed eyes, it seemed that
+even if sugar and wages did fail there could be no danger of any sudden
+famine. The people were thick as rabbits in a warren; women with loaded
+baskets on their heads laughing and chirruping, men driving donkey
+carts, four donkeys abreast, smoking their early pipes as if they had
+not a care in the world, as, indeed, they have not.
+
+On we went, the Colonel's horses stepping out twelve miles an hour, and
+I wondered privately what was to become of our breakfast. We were
+striking right across the island, along the coral ridge which forms the
+backbone of it. We found ourselves at length in a grove of orange trees
+and shaddocks, at the old church of St. John's, which stands upon a
+perpendicular cliff; Codrington College on the level under our feet, and
+beyond us the open Atlantic and the everlasting breakers from the trade
+winds fringing the shore with foam. Far out were the white sails of the
+fishing smacks. The Barbadians are careless of weather, and the best of
+boat sailors. It was very pretty in the bright morning, and the church
+itself was not the least interesting part of the scene. The door was
+wide open. We went in, and I seemed to be in a parish church in England
+as parish churches used to be when I was a child. There were the
+old-fashioned seats, the old unadorned communion table, the old pulpit
+and reading desk and the clerk's desk below, with the lion and the
+unicorn conspicuous above the chancel arch. The white tablets on the
+wall bore familiar names dating back into the last century. On the floor
+were flagstones still older with armorial bearings and letters cut in
+stone, half effaced by the feet of the generations who had trodden up
+the same aisles till they, too, lay down and rested there. And there was
+this, too, to be remembered--that these Barbadian churches, old as they
+might seem, had belonged always to the Anglican communion. No mass had
+ever been said at that altar. It was a milestone on the high road of
+time, and was venerable to me at once for its antiquity and for the era
+at which it had begun to exist.
+
+At the porch was an ancient slab on which was a coat of arms, a crest
+with a hand and sword, and a motto, '_Sic nos, sic nostra tuemur._' The
+inscription said that it was in memory of Michael Mahon, 'of the kingdom
+of Ireland,' erected by his children and grandchildren. Who was Michael
+Mahon? Some expatriated, so-called rebel, I suppose, whose sword could
+not defend him from being Barbados'd with so many other poor wretches
+who were sent the same road--victims of the tragi-comedy of the English
+government of Ireland. There were plenty of them wandering about in
+Labat's time, ready, as Labat observes, to lend a help to the French,
+should they take a fancy to land a force in the island.
+
+The churchyard was scarcely so home-like. The graves were planted with
+tropical shrubs and flowers. Palms waved over the square stone
+monuments--stephanotis and jessamine crept about the iron railings. The
+primroses and hyacinths and violets, with which we dress the mounds
+under which our friends are sleeping, will not grow in the tropics. In
+the place of them are the exotics of our hot-houses. We too are,
+perhaps, exotics of another kind in these islands, and may not, after
+all, have a long abiding place in them.
+
+Colonel ----, who with his secular duties combined serious and spiritual
+feeling, was a friend of the clergyman of St. John's, and hoped to
+introduce me to him. This gentleman, however, was absent from home. Our
+round was still but half completed; we had to mount again and go another
+seven miles to inspect a police station. The police themselves were, of
+course, blacks--well-grown fine men, in a high state of discipline. Our
+visit was not expected, but all was as it should be; the rooms well
+swept and airy, the horses in good condition, stables clean, harness and
+arms polished and ready for use. Serious as might be the trials of the
+Barbadians and decrepit the financial condition, there were no symptoms
+of neglect either on the farms or in the social machinery.
+
+Altogether we drove between thirty and forty miles that morning. We were
+in time for breakfast after all, and I had seen half the island. It is
+like the Isle of Thanet, or the country between Calais and Boulogne. One
+characteristic feature must not be forgotten: there are no rivers and no
+waterpower; steam engines have been introduced, but the chief motive
+agent is still the never-ceasing trade wind. You see windmills
+everywhere, as it was in the time of Labat. The planters are reproached
+as being behind the age; they are told that with the latest improvements
+they might still defy their beetroot enemy. It may be so, but a wind
+which never rests is force which costs little, and it is possible that
+they understand their own business best.
+
+Another morning excursion showed me the rest of the country, and
+introduced me to scenes and persons still more interesting. Sir Graham
+Briggs[8] is perhaps the most distinguished representative of the old
+Barbadian families. He is, or was, a man of large fortune, with vast
+estates in this and other islands. A few years ago, when prospects were
+brighter, he was an advocate of the constitutional development so much
+recommended from England. The West Indian Islands were to be
+confederated into a dominion like that of Canada, to take over the
+responsibilities of government, and to learn to stand alone. The decline
+in the value of property, the general decay of the white interest in the
+islands, and the rapid increase of the blacks, taught those who at one
+time were ready for the change what the real nature of it would be. They
+have paused to consider; and the longer they consider the less they like
+it.
+
+Sir Graham had called upon me at Government House, and had spoken fully
+and freely about the offered American sugar treaty. As a severe sufferer
+he was naturally irritated at the rejection of it; and in the mood in
+which I found him, I should think it possible that if the Americans
+would hold their hands out with an offer of admission into the Union, he
+and a good many other gentlemen would meet them halfway. He did not say
+so--I conjecture only from natural probabilities, and from what I should
+feel myself if I were in their position. Happily the temptation cannot
+fall in their way. An American official laconically summed up the
+situation to me: 'As satellites, sir, as much as you please; but as
+parts of the primary--no, sir.' The Americans will not take them into
+the Union; they must remain, therefore, with their English primary and
+make the best of it; neither as satellites, for they have no proper
+motion of their own, nor as incorporated in the British Empire, for they
+derive no benefit from their connection with it, but as poor relations
+distantly acknowledged. I did not expect that Sir Graham would have
+more to say to me than he had said already: but he was a cultivated and
+noteworthy person, his house was said to be the most splendid of the old
+Barbadian merchant palaces, and I gratefully accepted an invitation to
+pay him a short visit.
+
+I started as before in the early morning, before the sun was above the
+trees. The road followed the line of the shore. Originally, I believe,
+Barbadoes was like the Antilles, covered with forest. In the interior
+little remains save cabbage palms and detached clumps of mangy-looking
+mahogany trees. The forest is gone, and human beings have taken the
+place of it. For ten miles I was driving through a string of straggling
+villages, each cottage or cabin having its small vegetable garden and
+clump of plantains. Being on the western or sheltered side of the
+island, the sea was smooth and edged with mangrove, through which at
+occasional openings we saw the shining water and the white coral beach,
+and fishing boats either drawn up upon it or anchored outside with their
+sails up. Trees had been planted for shade among the houses. There were
+village greens with great silk-cotton trees, banyans and acacias,
+mangoes and oranges, and shaddocks with their large fruit glowing among
+the leaves like great golden melons. The people swarmed, children
+tumbling about half naked, so like each other that one wondered whether
+their mothers knew their own from their neighbours'; the fishermen's
+wives selling flying fish, of which there are infinite numbers. It was
+an innocent, pretty scene. One missed green fields with cows upon them.
+Guinea grass, which is all that they have, makes excellent fodder, but
+is ugly to look at; and is cut and carried, not eaten where it grows. Of
+animal life there were innumerable donkeys--no black man will walk if he
+can find a donkey to carry him--infinite poultry, and pigs, familiar
+enough, but not allowed a free entry into the cabins as in Ireland. Of
+birds there was not any great variety. The humming birds preferred less
+populated quarters. There were small varieties of finches and sparrows
+and buntings, winged atoms without beauty of form or colour; there were
+a few wild pigeons; but the prevailing figure was the Barbadian crow, a
+little fellow no bigger than a blackbird, a diminutive jackdaw, who gets
+his living upon worms and insects and parasites, and so tame that he
+would perch upon a boy's head if he saw a chance of finding anything
+eatable there. The women dress ill in Barbadoes, for they imitate
+English ladies; but no dress can conceal the grace of their forms when
+they are young. It struck Père Labat two centuries ago, and time and
+their supposed sufferings as slaves have made no difference. They work
+harder than the men, and are used as beasts of burden to fetch and
+carry, but they carry their loads on their heads, and thus from
+childhood have to stand upright with the neck straight and firm. They do
+not spoil their shapes with stays, or their walk with high-heeled shoes.
+They plant their feet firmly on the ground. Every movement is elastic
+and rounded, and the grace of body gives, or seems to give, grace also
+to the eyes and expression. Poor things! it cannot compensate for their
+colour, which now when they are free is harder to bear than when they
+were slaves. Their prettiness, such as it is, is short-lived. They grow
+old early, and an old negress is always hideous.
+
+After keeping by the sea for an hour we turned inland, and at the foot
+of a steep hill we met my host, who transferred me to his own carriage.
+We had still four or five miles to go through cane fields and among
+sugar mills. At the end of them we came to a grand avenue of cabbage
+palms, a hundred or a hundred and twenty feet high. How their slim stems
+with their dense coronet of leaves survive a hurricane is one of the
+West Indian marvels. They escape destruction by the elasticity with
+which they yield to it. The branches, which in a calm stand out
+symmetrically, forming a circle of which the stem is the exact centre,
+bend round before a violent wind, are pressed close together, and stream
+out horizontally like a horse's tail.
+
+The avenue led up to Sir Graham's house, which stands 800 feet above the
+sea. The garden, once the wonder of the island, was running wild, though
+rare trees and shrubs survived from its ancient splendour. Among them
+were two Wellingtonias as tall as the palms, but bent out of shape by
+the trade winds. Passing through a hall, among a litter of Carib
+curiosities, we entered the drawing-room, a magnificent saloon extending
+with various compartments over the greater part of the ground-floor
+story. It was filled with rare and curious things, gathered in the days
+when sugar was a horn of plenty, and selected with the finest taste;
+pictures, engravings, gems, antiquarian relics, books, maps, and
+manuscripts. There had been fine culture in the West Indies when all
+these treasures were collected. The English settlers there, like the
+English in Ireland, had the tastes of a grand race, and by-and-by we
+shall miss both of them when they are overwhelmed, as they are likely to
+be, in the revolutionary tide. Sir Graham was stemming it to the best of
+his ability, and if he was to go under would go under like a gentleman.
+A dining room almost as large had once been the scene of hospitalities
+like those which are celebrated by Tom Cringle. A broad staircase led up
+from the hall to long galleries, out of which bedrooms opened; with cool
+deep balconies and the universal green blinds. It was a palace with
+which Aladdin himself might have been satisfied, one of those which had
+stirred the envying admiration of foreign travellers in the last
+century, one of many then, now probably the last surviving
+representative of Anglo-West Indian civilisation. Like other forms of
+human life, it has had its day and could not last for ever. Something
+better may grow in the place of it, but also something worse may grow.
+The example of Hayti ought to suggest misgivings to the most ardent
+philonegro enthusiast.
+
+West Indian cookery was famous over the world. Père Labat devotes at
+least a thousand pages to the dishes compounded of the spices and fruits
+of the islands, and their fish and fowl. Carib tradition was developed
+by artists from London and Paris. The Caribs, according to Labat, only
+ate one another for ceremony and on state occasions; their common diet
+was as excellent as it was innocent; and they had ascertained by careful
+experience the culinary and medicinal virtues of every animal and plant
+around them. Tom Cringle is eloquent on the same subject, but with less
+scientific knowledge. My own unfortunately is less than his, and I can
+do no justice at all to Sir Graham's entertainment of me; I can but say
+that he treated me to a West Indian banquet of the old sort, infinite in
+variety, and with subtle differences of flavour for which no language
+provides names. The wine--laid up _consule Planco_, when Pitt was prime
+minister, and the days of liberty as yet were not--was as admirable as
+the dishes, and the fruit more exquisite than either. Such pineapples,
+such shaddocks, I had never tasted before, and shall never taste again.
+
+Hospitable, generous, splendid as was Sir Graham's reception of me, it
+was nevertheless easy to see that the prospects of the island sat heavy
+upon him. We had a long conversation when breakfast was over, which, if
+it added nothing new to what I had heard before, deepened and widened
+the impression of it.
+
+The English West Indies, like other parts of the world, are going
+through a silent revolution. Elsewhere the revolution, as we hope, is a
+transition state, a new birth; a passing away of what is old and worn
+out, that a fresh and healthier order may rise in its place. In the West
+Indies the most sanguine of mortals will find it difficult to entertain
+any such hope at all. We have been a ruling power there for two hundred
+and fifty years; the whites whom we planted as our representatives are
+drifting into helplessness, and they regard England and England's policy
+as the principal cause of it. The blacks whom, in a fit of virtuous
+benevolence, we emancipated, do not feel that they are particularly
+obliged to us. They think, if they think at all, that they were ill
+treated originally, and have received no more than was due to them, and
+that perhaps it was not benevolence at all on our part, but a desire to
+free ourselves from the reproach of slaveholding. At any rate, the
+tendencies now in operation are loosening the hold which we possess on
+the islands, and the longer they last the looser that hold will become.
+French influence is in no danger of dying out in Martinique and
+Guadaloupe. The Spanish race is not dying in Cuba and Puerto Rico.
+England will soon be no more than a name in Barbadoes and the Antilles.
+Having acquitted our conscience by emancipation, we have left our West
+Indian interest to sink or swim. Our principle has been to leave each
+part of our empire (except the East Indies) to take care of itself: we
+give the various inhabitants liberty, and what we understand by fair
+play; that we have any further moral responsibilities towards them we do
+not imagine, even in our dreams, when they have ceased to be of
+commercial importance to us; and we assume that the honour of being
+British subjects will suffice to secure their allegiance. It will not
+suffice, as we shall eventually discover. We have decided that if the
+West Indies are to become again prosperous they must recover by their
+own energy. Our other colonies can do without help; why not they? We
+ought to remember that they are not like the other colonies. We occupied
+them at a time when slavery was considered a lawful institution,
+profitable to ourselves and useful to the souls of the negroes, who were
+brought by it within reach of salvation.[9] We became ourselves the
+chief slave dealers in the world. We peopled our islands with a
+population of blacks more dense by far in proportion to the whites than
+France or Spain ever ventured to do. We did not recognise, as the French
+and Spaniards did, that if our western colonies were permanently to
+belong to us, we must occupy them ourselves. We thought only of the
+immediate profit which was to be gathered out of the slave gangs; and
+the disproportion of the two races--always dangerously large--has
+increased with ever-gathering velocity since the emancipation. It is now
+beyond control on the old lines. The scanty whites are told that they
+must work out their own salvation on equal terms with their old
+servants. The relation is an impossible one. The independent energy
+which we may fairly look for in Australia and New Zealand is not to be
+looked for in Jamaica and Barbadoes; and the problem must have a new
+solution.
+
+Confederation is to be the remedy, we are told. Let the islands be
+combined under a constitution. The whites collectively will then be a
+considerable body, and can assert themselves successfully. Confederation
+is, as I said before of the movement in Trinidad, but a turn of the
+kaleidoscope, the same pieces with a new pattern. A West Indian
+self-governed Dominion is possible only with a full negro vote. If the
+whites are to combine, so will the blacks. It will be a rule by the
+blacks and for the blacks. Let a generation or two pass by and carry
+away with them the old traditions, and an English governor-general will
+be found presiding over a black council, delivering the speeches made
+for him by a black prime minister; and how long could this endure? No
+English gentleman would consent to occupy so absurd a situation. The two
+races are not equal and will not blend. If the white people do not
+depart of themselves, black legislation will make it impossible for any
+of them to stay who would not be better out of the way. The Anglo-Irish
+Protestants will leave Ireland if there is an Irish Catholic parliament
+in College Green; the whites, for the same reason, will leave the West
+Indies; and in one and the other the connection with the British Empire
+will disappear along with them. It must be so; only politicians whose
+horizon does not extend beyond their personal future, and whose ambition
+is only to secure the immediate triumph of their party, can expect
+anything else.
+
+Before my stay at Barbadoes ended, I had an opportunity of meeting at
+dinner a negro of pure blood who has risen to eminence by his own talent
+and character. He has held the office of attorney-general. He is now
+chief justice of the island. Exceptions are supposed proverbially to
+prove nothing, or to prove the opposite of what they appear to prove.
+When a particular phenomenon occurs rarely, the probabilities are strong
+against the recurrence of it. Having heard the craniological and other
+objections to the supposed identity of the negro and white races, I came
+to the opinion long ago in Africa, and I have seen no reason to change
+it, that whether they are of one race or not there is no original or
+congenital difference of capacity between them, any more than there is
+between a black horse and a black dog and a white horse and a white dog.
+With the same chances and with the same treatment, I believe that
+distinguished men would be produced equally from both races, and Mr.
+----'s well-earned success is an additional evidence of it. But it does
+not follow that what can be done eventually can be done immediately, and
+the gulf which divides the colours is no arbitrary prejudice, but has
+been opened by the centuries of training and discipline which have given
+us the start in the race. We set it down to slavery. It would be far
+truer to set it down to freedom. The African blacks have been free
+enough for thousands, perhaps for tens of thousands of years, and it has
+been the absence of restraint which has prevented them from becoming
+civilised. Generation has followed generation, and the children are as
+like their father as the successive generations of apes. The whites, it
+is likely enough, succeeded one another with the same similarity for a
+long series of ages. It is now supposed that the human race has been
+upon the planet for a hundred thousand years at least, and the first
+traces of civilisation cannot be thrown back at farthest beyond six
+thousand. During all those ages mankind went on treading in the same
+steps, century after century making no more advance than the birds and
+beasts. In Egypt or in India or one knows not where, accident or natural
+development quickened into life our moral and intellectual faculties;
+and these faculties have grown into what we now experience, not in the
+freedom in which the modern takes delight, but under the sharp rule of
+the strong over the weak, of the wise over the unwise. Our own
+Anglo-Norman race has become capable of self-government only after a
+thousand years of civil and spiritual authority. European government,
+European instruction, continued steadily till his natural tendencies are
+superseded by a higher instinct, may shorten the probation period of the
+negro. Individual blacks of exceptional quality, like Frederick Douglas
+in America, or the Chief Justice of Barbadoes, will avail themselves of
+opportunities to rise, and the freest opportunities ought to be offered
+them. But it is as certain as any future event can be that if we give
+the negroes as a body the political powers which we claim for ourselves,
+they will use them only to their own injury. They will slide back into
+their old condition, and the chance will be gone of lifting them to the
+level to which we have no right to say that they are incapable of
+rising.
+
+Chief Justice R---- owes his elevation to his English environment and
+his English legal training. He would not pretend that he could have made
+himself what he is in Hayti or in Dahomey. Let English authority die
+away, and the average black nature, such as it now is, be left free to
+assert itself, and there will be no more negroes like him in Barbadoes
+or anywhere.
+
+Naturally, I found him profoundly interested in the late revelations of
+the state of Hayti. Sir Spenser St. John, an English official, after
+residing for twelve years in Port au Prince, had in a published
+narrative with many details and particulars, declared that the republic
+of Toussaint l'Ouverture, the idol of all believers in the new gospel of
+liberty, had, after ninety years of independence, become a land where
+cannibalism could be practised with impunity. The African Obeah, the
+worship of serpents and trees and stones, after smouldering in all the
+West Indies in the form of witchcraft and poisoning, had broken out in
+Hayti in all its old hideousness. Children were sacrificed as in the old
+days of Moloch and were devoured with horrid ceremony, salted limbs
+being preserved and sold for the benefit of those who were unable to
+attend the full solemnities.
+
+That a man in the position of a British resident should have ventured on
+a statement which, if untrue, would be ruinous to himself, appeared in a
+high degree improbable. Yet one had to set one incredibility against
+another. Notwithstanding the character of the evidence, when I went out
+to the West Indies I was still unbelieving. I could not bring myself to
+credit that in an island nominally Catholic, where the French language
+was spoken, and there were cathedrals and churches and priests and
+missionaries, so horrid a revival of devil-worship could have been
+really possible. All the inquiries which I had been able to make, from
+American and other officers who had been in Hayti, confirmed Sir S. St.
+John's story. I had hardly found a person who entertained a doubt of it.
+I was perplexed and uncertain, when the Chief Justice opened the subject
+and asked me what I thought. Had I been convinced I should have turned
+the conversation, but I was not convinced and I was not afraid to say
+so. I reminded him of the universal conviction through Europe that the
+Jews were habitually guilty of sacrificing children also. There had been
+detailed instances. Alleged offenders had been brought before courts of
+justice at any time for the last six hundred years. Witnesses had been
+found to swear to facts which had been accepted as conclusive. Wretched
+creatures in Henry III.'s time had been dragged by dozens at horses'
+tails through the streets of London, broken on the wheel, or torn to
+pieces by infuriated mobs. Even within the last two years, the same
+accusation had been brought forward in Russia and Germany, and had been
+established apparently by adequate proof. So far as popular conviction
+of the guilt of the Jews was an evidence against them, nothing could be
+stronger; and no charge could be without foundation on ordinary
+principles of evidence which revived so often and in so many places. And
+yet many persons, I said, and myself among them, believed that although
+the accusers were perfectly sincere, the guilt of the Jews was from end
+to end an hallucination of hatred. I had looked into the particulars of
+some of the trials. They were like the trials for witchcraft. The belief
+had created the fact, and accusation was itself evidence. I was
+prepared to find these stories of child murder in Hayti were bred
+similarly of anti-negro prejudice.
+
+Had the Chief Justice caught at my suggestion with any eagerness I
+should have suspected it myself. His grave diffidence and continued
+hesitation in offering an opinion confirmed me in my own. I told him
+that I was going to Hayti to learn what I could on the spot. I could not
+expect that I, on a flying visit, could see deeper into the truth than
+Sir Spenser St. John had seen, but at least I should not take with me a
+mind already made up, and I was not given to credulity. He took leave of
+me with an expression of passionate anxiety that it might be found
+possible to remove so black a stain from his unfortunate race.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[8] As I correct the proofs I learn, to my great sorrow, that Sir Graham
+is dead. I have lost in him a lately made but valued friend; and the
+colony has lost the ablest of its legislators.
+
+[9] It was on this ground alone that slavery was permitted in the French
+islands. Labat says:
+
+C'est une loi très-ancienne que les terres soumises aux rois de France
+rendent libres tous ceux qui s'y peuvent retirer. C'est ce qui fit que
+le roi Louis XIII, de glorieuse mémoire, aussi pieux qu'il étoit sage,
+eut toutes les peines du monde à consentir que les premiers habitants
+des isles eussent des esclaves: et ne se rendit enfin qu'aux pressantes
+sollicitations qu'on luy faisoit de leur octroyer cette permission que
+parce qu'on lui remontra que c'étoit un moyen infaillible et l'unique
+qu'il y eût pour inspirer le culte du vrai Dieu aux Africains, les
+retirer de l'idolâtrie, et les faire persévérer jusqu'à la mort dans la
+religion chrétienne qu'on leur feroit embrasser.--Vol. iv. p. 14.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+    Leeward and Windward Islands--The Caribs of Dominica--Visit of Père
+    Labat--St. Lucia--The Pitons--The harbour at Castries--Intended
+    coaling station--Visit to the administrator--The old fort and
+    barracks--Conversation with an American--Constitution of
+    Dominica--Land at Roseau.
+
+
+Beyond all the West Indian Islands I had been curious to see
+Dominica.[10] It was the scene of Rodney's great fight on April 12. It
+was the most beautiful of the Antilles and the least known. A tribe of
+aboriginal Caribs still lingered in the forests retaining the old look
+and the old language, and, except that they no longer ate their
+prisoners, retaining their old habits. They were skilful fishermen,
+skilful basket makers, skilful in many curious arts.
+
+The island lies between Martinique and Guadaloupe, and is one of the
+group now called Leeward Islands, as distinguished from St. Lucia, St.
+Vincent, Grenada, &c., which form the Windward. The early geographers
+drew the line differently and more rationally. The main direction of the
+trade winds is from east to west. To them the Windward Islands were the
+whole chain of the Antilles, which form the eastern side of the
+Caribbean Sea. The Leeward were the great islands on the west of
+it--Cuba, St. Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. The modern division
+corresponds to no natural phenomenon. The drift of the trades is rather
+from the north-east than from the south-east, and the names serve only
+now to describe our own not very successful political groupings.
+
+Dominica cuts in two the French West Indian possessions. The French took
+it originally from the Spaniards, occupied it, colonised it, planted in
+it their religion and their language, and fought desperately to maintain
+their possession. Lord Rodney, to whom we owe our own position in the
+West Indies, insisted that Dominica must belong to us to hold the French
+in check, and regarded it as the most important of all our stations
+there. Rodney made it English, and English it has ever since remained in
+spite of the furious efforts which France made to recover an island
+which she so highly valued during the Napoleon wars. I was anxious to
+learn what we had made of a place which we had fought so hard for.
+
+Though Dominica is the most mountainous of all the Antilles, it is split
+into many valleys of exquisite fertility. Through each there runs a full
+and ample river, swarming with fish, and yielding waterpower enough to
+drive all the mills which industry could build. In these valleys and on
+the rich levels along the shore the French had once their cane fields
+and orange gardens, their pineapple beds and indigo plantations.
+
+Labat, who travelled through the island at the close of the seventeenth
+century, found it at that time chiefly occupied by Caribs. With his
+hungry appetite for knowledge, he was a guest in their villages,
+acquainted himself with their characters and habits, and bribed out of
+them by lavish presents of brandy the secrets of their medicines and
+poisons. The Père was a clever, curious man, with a genial human
+sympathy about him, and was indulgent to the faults which the poor
+coloured sinners fell into from never having known better. He tried to
+make Christians of them. They were willing to be baptised as often as he
+liked for a glass of brandy. But he was not very angry when he found
+that the Christianity went no deeper. Moral virtues, he concluded
+charitably, could no more be expected out of a Carib than reason and
+good sense out of a woman.
+
+At Roseau, the capital, he fell in with the then queen of Dominica, a
+Madame Ouvernard, a Carib of pure blood, who in her time of youth and
+beauty had been the mistress of an English governor of St. Kitts. When
+Labat saw her she was a hundred years old with a family of children and
+grandchildren. She was a grand old lady, unclothed almost absolutely,
+bent double, so that under ordinary circumstances nothing of her face
+could be seen. Labat, however, presented her with a couple of bottles of
+eau de vie, under the influence of which she lifted up to him a pair of
+still brilliant eyes and a fair mouthful of teeth. They did very well
+together, and on parting they exchanged presents in Homeric fashion, she
+loading him with baskets of fruit, he giving a box in return full of
+pins and needles, knives and scissors.
+
+Labat was a student of languages before philology had become a science.
+He discovered from the language of the Caribs that they were North
+American Indians. They called themselves _Banari_, which meant 'come
+from over sea.' Their dialect was almost identical with what he had
+heard spoken in Florida. They were cannibals, but of a peculiar kind.
+Human flesh was not their ordinary food; but they 'boucanned' or dried
+the limbs of distinguished enemies whom they had killed in, battle, and
+handed them round to be gnawed at special festivals. They were a
+light-hearted, pleasant race, capital shots with bows and arrows, and
+ready to do anything he asked in return for brandy. They killed a hammer
+shark for his amusement by diving under the monster and stabbing him
+with knives. As to their religion, they had no objection to anything.
+But their real belief was in a sort of devil.
+
+Soon after Labat's visit the French came in, drove the Caribs into the
+mountains, introduced negro slaves, and an ordered form of society.
+Madame Ouvernard and her court went to their own place. Canes were
+planted, and indigo and coffee. A cathedral was built at Roseau, and
+parish churches were scattered about the island. There were convents of
+nuns and houses of friars, and a fort at the port with a garrison in it.
+The French might have been there till now had not we turned them out
+some ninety years ago; English enterprise then setting in that direction
+under the impulse of Rodney's victories. I was myself about to see the
+improvements which we had introduced into an acquisition which had cost
+us so dear.
+
+I was to be dropped at Roseau by the mail steamer from Barbadoes to St.
+Thomas's. On our way we touched at St. Lucia, another once famous
+possession of ours. This island was once French also. Rodney took it in
+1778. It was the only one of the Antilles which was left to us in the
+reverses which followed the capitulation of York Town. It was in the
+harbour at Castries, the chief port, that Rodney collected the fleet
+which fought and won the great battle with the Count de Grasse. At the
+peace of Versailles, St. Lucia was restored to France; but was retaken
+in 1796 by Sir Ralph Abercrombie, and, like Dominica, has ever since
+belonged to England. This, too, is a beautiful mountainous island, twice
+as large as Barbadoes, in which even at this late day we have suddenly
+discovered that we have an interest. The threatened Darien canal has
+awakened us to a sense that we require a fortified coaling station in
+those quarters. St. Lucia has the greatest natural advantages for such a
+purpose, and works are already in progress there, and the long-deserted
+forts and barracks which had been made over to snakes and lizards, are
+again to be occupied by English troops.
+
+We sailed one evening from Barbadoes. In the grey of the next morning we
+were in the passage between St. Lucia and St. Vincent just under the
+'Pitons,' which were soaring grandly above us in the twilight. The
+Pitons are two conical mountains rising straight out of the sea at the
+southern end of St. Lucia, one of them 3,000 feet high, the other a few
+feet lower, symmetrical in shape like sugar loaves, and so steep as to
+be inaccessible to any one but a member of the Alpine Club. Tradition
+says that four English seamen, belonging to the fleet, did once set out
+to climb the loftier of the two. They were watched in their ascent
+through a telescope. When halfway up one of them was seen to drop, while
+three went on; a few hundred feet higher a second dropped, and
+afterwards a third; one had almost reached the summit, when he fell
+also. No account of what had befallen them ever reached their ship. They
+were supposed to have been bitten by the fer de lance, the deadliest
+snake in St. Lucia and perhaps in the world, who had resented and
+punished their intrusion into regions where they had no business. Such
+is the local legend, born probably out of the terror of a reptile which
+is no legend at all, but a living and very active reality.
+
+I had gone on deck on hearing where we were, and saw the twin grey peaks
+high above me in the sky, the last stars glimmering over their tops and
+the waves washing against the black precipices at their base. The night
+had been rough, and a considerable sea was running, which changed,
+however, to an absolute calm when we had passed the Pitons and were
+under the lee of the island. I could then observe the peculiar blue of
+the water which I was told that I should find at St. Lucia and Dominica.
+I have seen the sea of very beautiful colours in several parts of the
+world, but I never saw any which equalled this. I do not know the cause.
+The depth is very great even close to the shore. The islands are merely
+volcanic mountains with sides extremely steep. The coral insect has made
+anchorages in the bays and inlets; elsewhere you are out of soundings
+almost immediately. As to St. Lucia itself, if I had not seen Grenada,
+if I had not known what I was about to see in Dominica, I should have
+thought it the most exquisite place which nature had ever made, so
+perfect were the forms of the forest-clothed hills, the glens dividing
+them and the high mountain ranges in the interior still draped in the
+white mist of morning. Here and there along the shore there were bright
+green spots which meant cane fields. Sugar cane in these countries is
+always called for brevity _cane_.
+
+Here, as elsewhere, the population is almost entirely negro, forty
+thousand blacks and a few hundred whites, the ratio altering every year
+to white disadvantage. The old system has not, however, disappeared as
+completely as in other places. There are still white planters with large
+estates, which are not encumbered as in Barbadoes. They are struggling
+along, discontented of course, but not wholly despondent. The chief
+complaint is the somewhat weary one of the laziness of the blacks, who
+they say will work only when they please, and are never fully awake
+except at dinner time. I do not know that they have a right to expect
+anything else from poor creatures whom the law calls human, but who to
+them are only mechanical tools, not so manageable as tools ought to be,
+with whom they have no acquaintance and no human relations, whose wages
+are but twopence an hour and are diminished by fines at the arbitrary
+pleasure of the overseer.
+
+Life and hope and energy are the qualities most needed. When the troops
+return there will be a change, and spirit may be put into them again.
+Castries, the old French town, lies at the head of a deep inlet which
+runs in among the mountains like a fiord. This is to be the future
+coaling station. The mouth of the bay is narrow with a high projecting
+'head' on either side of it, and can be easily and cheaply fortified.
+There is little or no tide in these seas. There is depth of water
+sufficient in the greater part of the harbour for line-of-battle ships
+to anchor and turn, and the few coral shoals which would be in the way
+are being torn up with dredging machines. The island has borrowed
+seventy thousand pounds on Government security to prepare for the
+dignity which awaits it and for the prosperity which is to follow.
+There was real work actively going on, a rare and perhaps unexampled
+phenomenon in the English West Indies.
+
+We brought up alongside of a wharf to take in coal. It was a strange
+scene; cocoa-nut palms growing incongruously out of coal stores, and
+gorgeous flowering creepers climbing over the workmen's sheds. Volumes
+of smoke rose out of the dredging engines and hovered over the town. We
+had come back to French costume again; we had left the white dresses
+behind at Barbadoes, and the people at Castries were bright as parrots
+in crimsons and blues and greens; but fine colours looked oddly out of
+place by the side of the grimy reproduction of England.
+
+I went on shore and fell in with the engineer of the works, who kindly
+showed me his plans of the harbour, and explained what was to be done.
+He showed me also some beautiful large bivalves which had been brought
+up in the scrapers out of the coral. They were new to me and new to him,
+though they may be familiar enough to more experienced naturalists.
+Among other curiosities he had a fer de lance, lately killed and
+preserved in spirits, a rat-tailed, reddish, powerful-looking brute,
+about four feet long and as thick as a child's wrist. Even when dead I
+looked at him respectfully, for his bite is fatal and the effect almost
+instantaneous. He is fearless, and will not, like most snakes, get out
+of your way if he hears you coming, but leaves you to get out of his. He
+has a bad habit, too, of taking his walks at night; he prefers a path or
+a road to the grass, and your house or your garden to the forest; while
+if you step upon him you will never do it again. They have introduced
+the mongoose, who has cleared the snakes out of Jamaica, to deal with
+him; but the mongoose knows the creature that he has to encounter, and
+as yet has made little progress in extirpating him.
+
+St. Lucia is under the jurisdiction of Barbadoes. It has no governor of
+its own, but only an administrator indifferently paid. The elective
+principle has not yet been introduced into the legislature, and perhaps
+will not be introduced since we have discovered the island to be of
+consequence to us, unless as part of some general confederation. The
+present administrator--Mr. Laborde, a gentleman, I suppose, of French
+descent--is an elderly official, and resides in the old quarters of the
+general of the forces, 900 feet above the sea. He has large
+responsibilities, and, having had large experience also, seems fully
+equal to the duties which attach to him. He cannot have the authority of
+a complete governor, or undertake independent enterprises for the
+benefit of the island, as a Rajah Brooke might do, but he walks steadily
+on in the lines assigned to him. St. Lucia is better off in this respect
+than most of the Antilles, and may revive perhaps into something like
+prosperity when the coaling station is finished and under the command of
+some eminent engineer officer.
+
+Mr. Laborde had invited us to lunch with him. Horses were waiting for
+us, and we rode up the old winding track which led from the town to the
+barracks. The heat below was oppressive, but the air cooled as we rose.
+The road is so steep that resting places had been provided at intervals,
+where the soldiers could recover breath or shelter themselves from the
+tropical cataracts of rain which fall without notice, as if the string
+had been pulled of some celestial shower bath. The trees branched
+thickly over it, making an impenetrable shade, till we emerged on the
+plateau at the top, where we were on comparatively level ground, with
+the harbour immediately at our feet. The situation had been chosen by
+the French when St. Lucia was theirs. The general's house, now Mr.
+Laborde's residence, is a long airy building with a deep colonnade, the
+drawing and dining rooms occupying the entire breadth of the ground
+floor, with doors and windows on both sides for coolness and air. The
+western front overlooked the sea. Behind were wooded hills, green
+valleys, a mountain range in the background, and the Pitons blue in the
+distance. As we were before our time, Mr. Laborde walked me out to see
+the old barracks, magazines, and water tanks. They looked neglected and
+dilapidated, the signs of decay being partly hid by the creepers with
+which the walls were overgrown. The soldiers' quarters were occupied for
+the time by a resident gentleman, who attended to the essential repairs
+and prevented the snakes from taking possession as they were inclined to
+do. I forget how many of the fer de lance sort he told me he had killed
+in the rooms since he had lived in them.
+
+In the war time we had maintained a large establishment in St. Lucia;
+with what consequences to the health of the troops I could not clearly
+make out. One informant told me that they had died like flies of yellow
+fever, and that the fields adjoining were as full of bodies as the
+Brompton cemetery; another that yellow fever had never been known there
+or any dangerous disorder; and that if we wanted a sanitary station this
+was the spot for it. Many thousands of pounds will have to be spent
+there before the troops can return; but that is our way with the
+colonies--to change our minds every ten years, to do and undo, and do
+again, according to parliamentary humours, while John Bull pays the bill
+patiently for his own irresolution.
+
+The fortress, once very strong, is now in ruins, but, I suppose, will be
+repaired and rearmed unless we are to trust to the Yankees, who are
+supposed to have established a _Pax Dei_ in these waters and will permit
+no aggressive action there either by us or against us. We walked round
+the walls; we saw the hill a mile off from which Abercrombie had
+battered out the French, having dragged his guns through a roadless
+forest to a spot to which there seemed no access except on wings. The
+word 'impossible' was not known in those days. What Englishmen did once
+they may do again perhaps if stormy days come back. The ruins themselves
+were silently impressive. One could hear the note of the old bugles as
+they sounded the reveille and the roaring of the _feu de joie_ when the
+shattered prizes were brought in from the French fleet. The signs of
+what once had been were still visible in the parade ground, in the large
+mangoes which the soldiers had planted, in the English grass which they
+had introduced and on which cattle were now grazing. There was a clump
+of guavas, hitherto only known to me in preserves. I gathered a blossom
+as a remembrance, white like a large myrtle flower, but heavily
+scented--too heavily, with an odour of death about it.
+
+Mr. Laborde's conversation was instructive. His entertainment of us was
+all which our acquired West Indian fastidiousness could desire. The
+inevitable cigars followed, and Mr. L. gave me a beating at billiards.
+There were some lively young ladies in the party, and two or three of
+the ship's officers. The young ones played lawn tennis, and we old ones
+looked on and wished the years off our shoulders. So passed the day. The
+sun was setting when we mounted to ride down. So short is the twilight
+in these latitudes, that it was dark night when we reached the town, and
+we required the light of the stars to find our boat.
+
+When the coaling process was finished, the ship had been washed down in
+our absence and was anchored off beyond the reach of the dirt; but the
+ports were shut; the windsails had been taken down; the air in the
+cabins was stifling; so I stayed on deck till midnight with a clever
+young American, who was among our fellow-passengers, talking of many
+things. He was ardent, confident, self-asserting, but not disagreeably
+either one or the other. It was rather a pleasure to hear a man speak in
+these flabby uncertain days as if he were sure of anything, and I had to
+notice again, as I had often noticed before, how well informed casual
+American travellers are on public affairs, and how sensibly they can
+talk of them. He had been much in the West Indies and seemed to know
+them well. He said that all the whites in the islands wished at the
+bottom of their hearts to be taken into the Union; but the Union
+Government was too wise to meddle with them. The trade would fall to
+America of itself. The responsibility and trouble might remain where it
+was. I asked him about the Canadian fishery dispute. He thought it would
+settle itself in time, and that nothing serious would come of it. 'The
+Washington Cabinet had been a little hard on England,' he admitted; 'but
+it was six of one and half a dozen of the other.' 'Honours were easy;
+neither party could score.' 'We had been equally hard on them about
+Alaska.'
+
+He was less satisfied about Ireland. The telegraph had brought the news
+of Mr. Goschen's defeat at Liverpool, and Home Rule, which had seemed to
+have been disposed of, was again within the range of probabilities. He
+was watching with pitying amusement, like most of his countrymen, the
+weakness of will with which England allowed herself to be worried by so
+contemptible a business; but he did seem to fear, and I have heard
+others of his countrymen say the same, that if we let it go on much
+longer the Americans may become involved in the thing one way or
+another, and trouble may rise about it between the two countries.
+
+We weighed; and I went to bed and to sleep, and so missed Pigeon Island,
+where Rodney's fleet lay before the action, and the rock from which,
+through his telescope, he watched De Grasse come out of Martinique, and
+gave his own signal to chase. We rolled as usual between the islands. At
+daylight we were again in shelter under Martinique, and again in classic
+regions; for close to us was Diamond Rock--once his Majesty's ship
+'Diamond,' commissioned with crew and officers--one of those curious
+true incidents, out of which a legend might have grown in other times,
+that ship and mariners had been turned to stone. The rock, a lonely
+pyramid six hundred feet high, commanded the entrance to Port Royal in
+Martinique. Lord Howe took possession of it, sent guns up in slings to
+the top, and left a midshipman with a handful of men in charge. The
+gallant little fellow held his fortress for several months, peppered
+away at the French, and sent three of their ships of war to the bottom.
+He was blockaded at last by an overwhelming force. No relief could be
+spared for him. Escape was impossible, as he had not so much as a boat,
+and he capitulated to famine.
+
+We stayed two hours under Martinique. I did not land. It has been for
+centuries a special object of care on the part of the French Government.
+It is well looked after, and, considering the times, prosperous. It has
+a fine garrison, and a dockyard well furnished, with frigates in the
+harbours ready for action should occasion arise. I should infer from
+what I heard that in the event of war breaking out between England and
+France, Martinique, in the present state of preparation on both sides,
+might take possession of the rest of the Antilles with little
+difficulty. Three times we took it, and we gave it back again. In turn,
+it may one day, perhaps, take us, and the English of the West Indies
+become a tradition like the buccaneers.
+
+The mountains of Dominica are full in sight from Martinique. The channel
+which separates them is but thirty miles across, and the view of
+Dominica as you approach it is extremely grand. Grenada, St. Vincent,
+St. Lucia, Martinique are all volcanic, with lofty peaks and ridges; but
+Dominica was at the centre of the force which lifted the Antilles out of
+the ocean, and the features which are common to all are there in a
+magnified form. The mountains range from four to five thousand feet in
+height. Mount Diablot, the highest of them, rises to between five and
+six thousand feet. The mountains being the tallest in all the group, the
+rains are also the most violent, and the ravines torn out by the
+torrents are the wildest and most magnificent. The volcanic forces are
+still active there. There are sulphur springs and boiling water
+fountains, and in a central crater there is a boiling lake. There are
+strange creatures there besides: great snakes--harmless, but ugly to
+look at; the diablot--from which the mountain takes its name--a great
+bird, black as charcoal, half raven, half parrot, which nests in holes
+in the ground as puffins do, spends all the day in them, and flies down
+to the sea at night to fish for its food. There were once great numbers
+of these creatures, and it was a favourite amusement to hunt and drag
+them out of their hiding places. Labat says that they were excellent
+eating. They are confined now in reduced numbers to the inaccessible
+crags about the peak which bears their name.
+
+Martinique has two fine harbours. Dominica has none. At the north end of
+the island there is a bay, named after Prince Rupert, where there is
+shelter from all winds but the south, but neither there nor anywhere is
+there an anchorage which can be depended upon in dangerous weather.
+
+Roseau, the principal or only town, stands midway along the western
+shore. The roadstead is open, but as the prevailing winds are from the
+east the island itself forms a breakwater. Except on the rarest
+occasions there is neither surf nor swell there. The land shelves off
+rapidly, and a gunshot from shore no cable can find the bottom, but
+there is an anchorage in front of the town, and coasting smacks,
+American schooners, passing steamers bring up close under the rocks or
+alongside of the jetties which are built out from the beach upon piles.
+
+The situation of Roseau is exceedingly beautiful. The sea is, if
+possible, a deeper azure even than at St. Lucia; the air more
+transparent; the forests of a lovelier green than I ever saw in any
+other country. Even the rain, which falls in such abundance, falls often
+out of a clear sky as if not to interrupt the sunshine, and a rainbow
+almost perpetually hangs its arch over the island. Roseau itself stands
+on a shallow promontory. A long terrace of tolerable-looking houses
+faces the landing place. At right angles to the terrace, straight
+streets strike backwards at intervals, palms and bananas breaking the
+lines of roof. At a little distance, you see the towers of the old
+French Catholic cathedral, a smaller but not ungraceful-looking Anglican
+church, and to the right a fort, or the ruins of one, now used as a
+police barrack, over which flies the English flag as the symbol of our
+titular dominion. Beyond the fort is a public garden with pretty trees
+in it along the brow of a precipitous cliff, at the foot of which, when
+we landed, lay at anchor a couple of smart Yankee schooners and half a
+dozen coasting cutters, while rounding inwards behind was a long shallow
+bay dotted over with the sails of fishing boats. White negro villages
+gleamed among the palms along the shore, and wooded mountains rose
+immediately above them. It seemed an attractive, innocent, sunny sort of
+place, very pleasant to spend a few days in, if the inner side of things
+corresponded to the appearance. To a looker-on at that calm scene it
+was not easy to realise the desperate battles which had been fought for
+the possession of it, the gallant lives which had been laid down under
+the walls of that crumbling castle. These cliffs had echoed the roar of
+Rodney's guns on the day which saved the British Empire, and the island
+I was gazing at was England's Salamis.
+
+The organisation of the place, too, seemed, so far as I could gather
+from official books, to have been carefully attended to. The
+constitution had been touched and retouched by the home authorities as
+if no pains could be too great to make it worthy of a spot so sacred.
+There is an administrator, which is a longer word than governor. There
+is an executive council, a colonial secretary, an attorney-general, an
+auditor-general, and other such 'generals of great charge.' There is a
+legislative assembly of fourteen members, seven nominated by the Crown
+and seven elected by the people. And there are revenue officers and
+excise officers, inspectors of roads, and civil engineers, and school
+boards, and medical officers, and registrars, and magistrates. Where
+would political perfection be found if not here with such elaborate
+machinery?
+
+The results of it all, in the official reports, seemed equally
+satisfactory till you looked closely into them. The tariff of articles
+on which duties were levied, and the list of articles raised and
+exported, seemed to show that Dominica must be a beehive of industry and
+productiveness. The revenue, indeed, was a little startling as the
+result of this army of officials. Eighteen thousand pounds was the whole
+of it, scarcely enough to pay their salaries. The population, too, on
+whose good government so much thought had been expended, was only
+30,000; of these 30,000 only a hundred were English. The remaining
+whites, and those in scanty numbers, were French and principally
+Catholics. The soil was as rich as the richest in the world. The
+cultivation was growing annually less. The inspector of roads was likely
+to have an easy task, for except close to the town there were no roads
+at all on which anything with wheels could travel, the old roads made by
+the French having dropped into horse tracks, and the horse tracks into
+the beds of torrents. Why in an island where the resources of modern
+statesmanship had been applied so lavishly and with the latest
+discoveries in political science, the effect should have so ill
+corresponded to the means employed, was a problem into which it would be
+curious to inquire.
+
+The steamer set me down upon the pier and went on upon its way. At the
+end of a fortnight it would return and pick me up again. Meanwhile, I
+was to make the best of my time. I had been warned beforehand that there
+was no hotel in Roseau where an Englishman with a susceptible skin and
+palate could survive more than a week; and as I had two weeks to provide
+for, I was uncertain what to do with myself. I was spared the trial of
+the hotels by the liberality of her Majesty's representative in the
+colony. Captain Churchill, the administrator of the island, had heard
+that I was coming there, and I was met on the landing stage by a message
+from him inviting me to be his guest during my stay. Two tall handsome
+black girls seized my bags, tossed them on their heads, and strode off
+with a light step in front of me, cutting jokes with their friends; I
+following, and my mind misgiving me that I was myself the object of
+their wit.
+
+I was anxious to see Captain Churchill, for I had heard much of him. The
+warmest affection had been expressed for him personally, and concern for
+the position in which he was placed. Notwithstanding 'the latest
+discoveries of political science,' the constitution was still imperfect.
+The administrator, to begin with, is allowed a salary of only 500_l._ a
+year. That is not much for the chief of such an army of officials; and
+the hospitalities and social civilities which smooth the way in such
+situations are beyond his means. His business is to preside at the
+council, where, the official and the elected members being equally
+balanced and almost invariably dividing one against the other, his duty
+is to give the casting vote. He cannot give it against his own officers,
+and thus the machine is contrived to create the largest amount of
+friction, and to insure the highest amount of unpopularity to the
+administrator. His situation is the more difficult because the European
+element in Roseau, small as it is at best, is more French than English.
+The priests, the sisterhoods, are French or French-speaking. A French
+patois is the language of the blacks. They are almost to a man
+Catholics, and to the French they look as their natural leaders. England
+has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to introduce her own civilisation;
+and thus Dominica is English only in name. Should war come, a boatload
+of soldiers from Martinique would suffice to recover it. Not a black in
+the whole island would draw a trigger in defence of English authority,
+and, except the Crown officials, not half a dozen Europeans. The
+administrator can do nothing to improve this state of things. He is too
+poor to open Government House to the Roseau shopkeepers and to bid for
+social popularity. He is no one. He goes in and out unnoticed, and flits
+about like a bat in the twilight. He can do no good, and from the nature
+of the system on the construction of which so much care was expended, no
+one else can do any good. The maximum of expense, the minimum of benefit
+to the island, is all that has come of it.
+
+Meanwhile the island drifts along, without credit to borrow money and
+therefore escaping bankruptcy. The blacks there, as everywhere, are
+happy with their yams, and cocoa nuts and land crabs. They desire
+nothing better than they have, and do not imagine that they have any
+rulers unless agitated by the elected members. These gentlemen would
+like the official situations for themselves as in Trinidad, and they
+occasionally attempt a stir with partial success; otherwise the island
+goes on in a state of torpid content. Captain Churchill, quiet and
+gentlemanlike, gives no personal offence, but popularity he cannot hope
+for, having no means of recommending himself. The only really powerful
+Europeans are the Catholic bishop and the priests and sisterhoods. They
+are looked up to with genuine respect. They are reaping the harvest of
+the long and honourable efforts of the French clergy in all their West
+Indian possessions to make the blacks into Catholic Christians. In the
+Christian part of it they have succeeded but moderately; but such
+religion as exists in the island is mainly what they have introduced
+and taught, and they have a distinct influence which we ourselves have
+not tried to rival.
+
+But we have been too long toiling up the paved road to Captain
+Churchill's house. My girl-porter guides led me past the fort, where
+they exchanged shots with the lounging black police, past the English
+church, which stood buried in trees, the churchyard prettily planted
+with tropical flowers. The sun was dazzling, the heat was intense, and
+the path which led through it, if not apparently much used, looked shady
+and cool.
+
+A few more steps brought us to the gate of the Residence, where Captain
+Churchill had his quarters in the absence of the Governor-in-Chief of
+the Leeward Islands, whose visits were few and brief. In the event of
+the Governor's arrival he removed to a cottage in the hills. The house
+was handsome, the gardens well kept; a broad walk led up to the door, a
+hedge of lime trees closely clipt on one side of it, on the other a lawn
+with orange trees, oleanders, and hibiscus, palms of all varieties and
+almond trees, which in Dominica grow into giants, their broad leaves
+turning crimson before they fall, like the Virginia creeper. We reached
+the entrance of the house by wide stone steps, where countless lizards
+were lazily basking. Through the bars of the railings on each side of
+them there were intertwined the runners of the largest and most
+powerfully scented stephanotis which I have ever seen. Captain Churchill
+(one of the Marlborough Churchills) received me with more than
+cordiality. Society is not abundant in his Barataria, and perhaps as
+coming from England I was welcome to him in his solitude. His wife, an
+English Creole--that is, of pure English blood, but born in the
+island--was as hospitable as her husband. They would not let me feel
+that I was a stranger, and set me at my ease in a moment with a warmth
+which was evidently unassumed. Captain C. was lame, having hurt his
+foot. In a day or two he hoped to be able to mount his horse again, when
+we were to ride together and see the curiosities. Meanwhile, he talked
+sorrowfully enough of his own situation and the general helplessness of
+it. A man whose feet are chained and whose hands are in manacles is not
+to be found fault with if he cannot use either. He is not intended to
+use either. The duty of an administrator of Dominica, it appears, is to
+sit still and do nothing, and to watch the flickering in the socket of
+the last remains of English influence and authority. Individually he was
+on good terms with everyone, with the Catholic bishop especially, who,
+to his regret and mine, was absent at the time of my visit.
+
+His establishment was remarkable; it consisted of two black girls--a
+cook and a parlourmaid--who 'did everything;' and 'everything,' I am
+bound to say, was done well enough to please the most fastidious nicety.
+The cooking was excellent. The rooms, which were handsomely furnished,
+were kept as well and in as good order as in the Churchills' ancestral
+palace at Blenheim. Dominica has a bad name for vermin. I had been
+threatened with centipedes and scorpions in my bedroom. I had been
+warned there, as everywhere in the West Indies, never to walk across the
+floor with bare feet, lest a land crab should lay hold of my toe or a
+jigger should bite a hole in it, lay its eggs there, and bring me into
+the hands of the surgeon. Never while I was Captain C.'s guest did I see
+either centipede, or scorpion, or jigger, or any other unclean beast in
+any room of which these girls had charge. Even mosquitoes did not
+trouble me, so skilfully and carefully they arranged the curtains. They
+were dressed in the fashion of the French islands, something like the
+Moorish slaves whom one sees in pictures of Eastern palaces. They
+flitted about silent on their shoeless feet, never stumbled, or upset
+chairs or plates or dishes, but waited noiselessly like a pair of elves,
+and were always in their place when wanted. One had heard much of the
+idleness and carelessness of negro servants. In no part of the globe
+have I ever seen household work done so well by two pairs of hands. Of
+their morals I know nothing. It is usually said that negro girls have
+none. They appeared to me to be perfectly modest and innocent. I asked
+in wonder what wages were paid to these black fairies, believing that at
+no price at all could the match of them be found in England. I was
+informed that they had three shillings a week each, and 'found
+themselves,' i.e. found their own food and clothes. And this was above
+the usual rate, as Government House was expected to be liberal. The
+scale of wages may have something to do with the difficulty of obtaining
+labour in the West Indies. I could easily believe the truth of what I
+had been often told, that free labour is more economical to the employer
+than slave labour.
+
+The views from the drawing room windows were enchantingly beautiful. It
+is not the form only in these West Indian landscapes, or the colour
+only, but form and colour seen through an atmosphere of very peculiar
+transparency. On one side we looked up a mountain gorge, the slopes
+covered with forest; a bold lofty crag jutting out from them brown and
+bare, and the mountain ridge behind half buried in mist. From the other
+window we had the Botanical Gardens, the bay beyond them sparkling in
+the sunshine, and on the farther side of it, a few miles off, an island
+fortress which the Marquis de Bouillé, of Revolution notoriety, took
+from the English in 1778. The sea stretched out blue and lovely under
+the fringe of sand, box trees, and almonds which grew along the edge of
+the cliff. The air was perfumed by white acacia flowers sweeter than
+orange blossom.
+
+Captain C. limped down with me into the gardens for a fuller look at the
+scene. Dusky fishermen were busy with their nets catching things like
+herrings, which come in daily to the shore to escape the monsters which
+prey upon them. Canoes on the old Carib pattern were slipping along
+outside, trailing lines for kingfish and bonitos. Others were setting
+baskets, like enormous lobster pots or hoop nets--such as we use to
+catch tench in English ponds--these, too, a legacy from the Caribs, made
+of strong tough cane. At the foot of the cliff were the smart American
+schooners which I had seen on landing--broad-beamed, shallow, low in the
+water with heavy spars, which bring Yankee 'notions' to the islands and
+carry back to New York bananas and limes and pineapples. There they
+were, models of Tom Cringle's 'Wave,' airy as English yachts, and equal
+to anything from a smuggling cruise to a race for a cup. I could have
+gazed for ever, so beautiful, so new, so like a dream it was, had I not
+been brought back swiftly to prose and reality. Suddenly out of a clear
+sky, without notice, and without provocation, first a few drops of rain
+fell, and then a deluge which set the gutters running. We had to scuttle
+home under our umbrellas. I was told, and I discovered afterwards by
+fuller experience, that this was the way in Dominica, and that if I went
+out anywhere I must be prepared for it. In our retreat we encountered a
+distinguished-looking abbé with a collar and a gold cross, who bowed to
+my companion. I would gladly have been introduced to him, but neither he
+nor we had leisure for courtesies in the torrent which was falling upon
+us.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[10] Not to be confounded with St. Domingo, which is called after St.
+Domenic, where the Spaniards first settled, and is now divided into the
+two black republics of St. Domingo and Hayti. Dominica lies in the chain
+of the Antilles between Martinique and Guadaloupe, and was so named by
+Columbus because he discovered it on a Sunday.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+    Curiosities in Dominica--Nights in the tropics--English and Catholic
+    churches--The market place at Roseau--Fishing extraordinary--A
+    storm--Dominican boatmen--Morning walks--Effects of the Leeward
+    Islands Confederation--An estate cultivated as it ought to be--A
+    mountain ride--Leave the island--Reflections.
+
+
+There was much to be seen in Dominica of the sort which travellers go in
+search of. There was the hot sulphur spring in the mountains; there was
+the hot lake; there was another volcanic crater, a hollow in the centre
+of the island now filled with water and surrounded with forest; there
+were the Caribs, some thirty families of them living among thickets,
+through which paths must be cut before we could reach them. We could
+undertake nothing till Captain C. could ride again. Distant expeditions
+can only be attempted on horses. They are bred to the work. They climb
+like cats, and step out safely where a fall or a twisted ankle would be
+the probable consequence of attempting to go on foot. Meanwhile, Roseau
+itself was to be seen and the immediate neighbourhood, and this I could
+manage for myself.
+
+My first night was disturbed by unfamiliar noises and strange
+imaginations. I escaped mosquitoes through the care of the black
+fairies. But mosquito curtains will not keep out sounds, and when the
+fireflies had put out their lights there began the singular chorus of
+tropical midnight. Frogs, lizards, bats, croaked, sang, and whistled
+with no intermission, careless whether they were in discord or harmony.
+The palm branches outside my window swayed in the land breeze, and the
+dry branches rustled crisply, as if they were plates of silver. At
+intervals came cataracts of rain, and above all the rest the deep boom
+of the cathedral bell tolling out the hours like a note of the Old
+World. The Catholic clergy had brought the bells with them as they had
+brought their faith into these new lands. It was pathetic, it was
+ominous music; for what had we done and what were we doing to set beside
+it in the century for which the island had been ours? Towards morning I
+heard the tinkle of the bell of the convent adjoining the garden calling
+the nuns to matins. Happily in the tropics hot nights do not imply an
+early dawn. The darkness lingers late, sleep comes at last and drowns
+our fancies in forgetfulness.
+
+The swimming bath was immediately under my room. I ventured into it with
+some trepidation. The basement story in most West Indian houses is open,
+to allow the air free passage under them. The space thus left vacant is
+used for lumber and rubbish, and, if scorpions or snakes are in the
+neighbourhood, is the place where one would look for them. There the
+bath was. I had been advised to be careful, and as it was dark this was
+not easy. The fear, however, was worse than the reality. Awkward
+encounters do happen if one is long in these countries; but they are
+rare, and seldom befall the accidental visitor; and the plunge into
+fresh water is so delicious that one is willing to risk the chance.
+
+I wandered out as soon as the sun was over the horizon. The cool of the
+morning is the time to see the people. The market girls were streaming
+into the town with their baskets of vegetables on their heads. The
+fishing boats were out again on the bay. Our Anglican church had its
+bell too as well as the cathedral. The door was open, and I went in and
+found a decent-looking clergyman preparing a flock of seven or eight
+blacks and mulattoes for the Communion. He was taking them through their
+catechism, explaining very properly, that religion meant doing one's
+duty, and that it was not enough to profess particular opinions.
+Dominica being Roman Catholic, and Roman Catholics not generally
+appreciating or understanding the claims of Anglicans to the possession
+of the sacraments, he pointed out where the difference lay. He insisted
+that we had priests as well as they; we had confession; we had
+absolution; only our priests did not claim, as the Catholics did, a
+direct power in themselves to forgive sins. Their office was to tell
+sinners that if they truly and sincerely repented and amended their
+lives God would forgive them. What he said was absolutely true; but I
+could not see in the dim faces of the catechumens that the distinction
+was particularly intelligible to them. If they thought at all, they
+probably reflected that no divinely constituted successor of the
+Apostles was needed to communicate a truism which every sensible person
+was equally able and entitled to tell them. Still the good earnest man
+meant well, and I wished him more success in his missionary enterprise
+than he was likely to find.
+
+From the Church of England to the great rival establishment was but a
+few minutes' walk. The cathedral was five times as large, at least, as
+the building which I had just left--old in age, old in appearance, with
+the usual indifferent pictures or coloured prints, with the usual
+decorated altar, but otherwise simple and venerable. There was no
+service going on, for it was a week-day; a few old men and women only
+were silently saying their prayers. On Sundays I was told that it was
+overflowing. The negro morals are as emancipated in Dominica as in the
+rest of the West Indies. Obeah is not forgotten; and along with the
+Catholic religion goes on an active belief in magic and witchcraft. But
+their religion is not necessarily a sham to them; it was the same in
+Europe in the ages of faith. Even in enlightened Protestant countries
+people calling themselves Christians believe that the spirits of the
+dead can be called up to amuse an evening party. The blacks in this
+respect are no worse than their white kinsmen. The priests have a
+genuine human hold upon them; they baptize the children; they commit the
+dead to the cemetery with the promise of immortality; they are
+personally loved and respected: and when a young couple marry, as they
+seldom but occasionally do, it is to the priest that they apply to tie
+them together.
+
+From the cathedral I wandered through the streets of Roseau; they had
+been well laid out; the streets themselves, and the roads leading to
+them from the country, had been carefully paved, and spoke of a time
+when the town had been full of life and vigour. But the grass was
+growing between the stones, and the houses generally were dilapidated
+and dirty. A few massive stone buildings there were, on which time and
+rain had made no impression; but these probably were all French--built
+long ago, perhaps in the days of Labat and Madame Ouvernard. The English
+hand had struck the island with paralysis. The British flag was flying
+over the fort, but for once I had no pride in looking at it. The fort
+itself was falling to pieces, like the fort at Grenada. The stones on
+the slope on which it stands had run with the blood which we spilt in
+the winning of it. Dominica had then been regarded as the choicest jewel
+in the necklace of the Antilles. For the last half-century we have left
+it to desolation, as a child leaves a plaything that it is tired of.
+
+In Roseau, as in most other towns, the most interesting spot is the
+market. There you see the produce of the soil; there you see the people
+that produce it; and you see them, not on show, as in church on Sundays,
+but in their active working condition. The market place at Roseau is a
+large square court close to the sea, well paved, surrounded, by
+warehouses, and luxuriantly shaded by large overhanging trees. Under
+these trees were hundreds of black women, young and old, with their fish
+and fowls, and fruit and bread, their yams and sweet potatoes, their
+oranges and limes and plantains. They had walked in from the country
+five or ten miles before sunrise with their loaded baskets on their
+heads. They would walk back at night with flour or salt fish, or oil, or
+whatever they happened to want. I did not see a single sullen face among
+them. Their figures were unconscious of lacing, and their feet of the
+monstrosities which we call shoes. They moved with the lightness and
+elasticity of leopards. I thought that I had never seen in any drawing
+room in London so many perfectly graceful forms. They could not mend
+their faces, but even in some of these there was a swarthy beauty. The
+hair was hopeless, and they knew it, but they turn the defect into an
+ornament by the coloured handkerchief which they twist about their
+heads, leaving the ends flowing. They chattered like jackdaws about a
+church tower. Two or three of the best looking, seeing that I admired
+them a little, used their eyes and made some laughing remarks. They
+spoke in their French _patois_, clipping off the first and last
+syllables of the words. I but half understood them, and could not return
+their bits of wit. I can only say that if their habits were as loose as
+white people say they are, I did not see a single licentious expression
+either in face or manner. They seemed to me light-hearted, merry,
+innocent young women, as free from any thought of evil as the peasant
+girls in Brittany.
+
+Two middle-aged dames were in a state of violent excitement about some
+subject on which they differed in opinion. A ring gathered about them,
+and they declaimed at one another with fiery volubility. It did not go
+beyond words; but both were natural orators, throwing their heads back,
+waving their arms, limbs and chest quivering with emotion. There was no
+personal abuse, or disposition to claw each other. On both sides it was
+a rhetorical outpouring of emotional argument. One of them, a tall pure
+blood negress, black as if she had just landed from Guinea, began at
+last to get the best of it. Her gesticulations became more imposing. She
+shook her finger. _Mandez_ this, she said, and _mandez_ that, till she
+bore her antagonist down and sent her flying. The audience then melted
+away, and I left the conqueror standing alone shooting a last volley
+at the retreating enemy and making passionate appeals to the universe.
+The subject of the discussion was a curious one. It was on the merits of
+race. The defeated champion had a taint of white blood in her. The black
+woman insisted that blacks were of pure breed, and whites were of pure
+breed. Mulattoes were mongrels, not creatures of God at all, but
+creatures of human wickedness. I do not suppose that the mulatto was
+convinced, but she accepted her defeat. The conqueror, it was quite
+clear, was satisfied that she had the best of the discussion, and that
+the hearers were of the same opinion.
+
+[Illustration: MORNING WALK, DOMINICA.]
+
+From the market I stepped back upon the quay, where I had the luck to
+witness a novel form of fishing, the most singular I have ever fallen in
+with. I have mentioned the herring-sized white fish which come in upon
+the shores of the island. They travel, as most small fish do, in
+enormous shoals, and keep, I suppose, in the shallow waters to avoid the
+kingfish and bonitos, who are good judges in their way, and find these
+small creatures exceptionally excellent. The wooden pier ran out perhaps
+a hundred and fifty feet into the sea. It was a platform standing on
+piles, with openings in several places from which stairs led down to
+landing stages. The depth at the extremity was about five fathoms. There
+is little or no tide, the difference between high water and low being
+not more than a couple of feet. Looking down the staircases, I saw among
+the piles in the brilliantly clear water unnumbered thousands of the
+fish which I have described. The fishermen had carried a long net round
+the pier from shore to shore, completely inclosing it. The fish were
+shut in, and had no means of escape except at the shore end, where boys
+were busy driving them back with stones; but how the net was to be drawn
+among the piles, or what was to be done next, I was curious to learn. I
+was not left long to conjecture. A circular bag net was produced, made
+of fine strong thread, coloured a light green, and almost invisible in
+the sea. When it was spread, one side could be left open and could be
+closed at will by a running line from above. This net was let carefully
+down between the piles, and was immediately swollen out by the current
+which runs along the coast into a deep bag. Two young blacks then dived;
+one saw them swimming about under water like sharks, hunting the fish
+before them as a dog would hunt a flock of sheep. Their companions, who
+were watching from the platform, waited till they saw as many driven
+into the purse of the inner net as they could trust the meshes to bear
+the weight of. The cord was then drawn. The net was closed. Net and all
+that it contained were hoisted into a boat, carried ashore and emptied.
+The net itself was then brought back and spread again for a fresh haul.
+In this way I saw as many fish caught as would have filled a large cart.
+The contrivance, I believe, is one more inheritance from the Caribs,
+whom Labat describes as doing something of a similar kind.
+
+Another small incident happened a day or two after, which showed the
+capital stuff of which the Dominican boatmen and fishermen are made.
+They build their own vessels large and small, and sail them themselves,
+not afraid of the wildest weather, and doing the local trade with
+Martinique and Guadaloupe. Four of these smacks, cutter rigged, from ten
+to twenty tons burden, I had seen lying at anchor one evening with an
+American schooner under the gardens. In the night, the off-shore wind
+rose into one of those short violent tropical storms which if they
+lasted longer would be called hurricanes, but in these winter months are
+soon over. It came on at midnight, and lasted for two hours. The noise
+woke me, for the house shook, and the roar was like Niagara. It was too
+dark, however, to see anything. The tempest died away at last, and I
+slept till daybreak. My first thought on waking was for the smacks and
+the schooner Had they sunk at their moorings? Had they broken loose, or
+what had become of them? I got up and went down to the cliff to see. The
+damage to the trees had been less than I expected. A few torn branches
+lay on the lawn and the leaves were cast about, but the anchorage was
+empty. Every vessel of every sort and size was gone. There was still a
+moderate gale blowing. As the wind was off-shore the sea was tolerably
+smooth for a mile or two, but outside the waves were breaking
+violently, and the foam scuds were whirling off their crests. The
+schooner was about four miles off, beating back under storm canvas,
+making good weather of it and promising in a tack or two to recover the
+moorings. The smacks, being less powerful vessels, had been driven
+farther out to sea. Three of them I saw labouring heavily in the offing.
+The fourth I thought at first had disappeared altogether, but finally I
+made out a white speck on the horizon which I supposed to be the missing
+cutter. One of the first three presently dropped away to leeward, and I
+lost sight of her. The rest made their way back in good time. Towards
+the afternoon when the wind had gone down the two that remained came in
+after them, and before night they were all in their places again.
+
+The gale had struck them at about midnight. Their cables had parted, and
+they had been blown away to sea. The crews of the schooner and of three
+of the cutters were all on board. They got their vessels under command,
+and had been in no serious danger. In the fourth there was no one but a
+small black boy of the island. He had been asleep, and woke to find
+himself driving before the wind. In an hour or two he would have been
+beyond the shelter of the land, and in the high seas which were then
+running must have been inevitably swamped. The little fellow contrived
+in the darkness--no one could tell how--to set a scrap of his mainsail,
+get his staysail up, and in this condition to lie head to the wind. So
+handled, small cutters, if they have a deck over them, can ride out an
+ordinary gale in tolerable security. They drift, of course; in a
+hurricane the only safety is in yielding to it; but they make fair
+resistance, and the speed is checked. The most practical seaman could
+have done no better than this boy. He had to wait for help in the
+morning. He was not strong enough to set his canvas properly, and work
+his boat home. He would have been driven out at last, and as he had
+neither food nor water would have been starved had he escaped drowning.
+But his three consorts saw him. They knew how it was, and one of them
+went back to his assistance.
+
+I have known the fishing boys of the English Channel all my life; they
+are generally skilful, ready, and daring beyond their years; but I never
+knew one lad not more than thirteen or fourteen years old who, if woke
+out of his sleep by a hurricane in a dark night and alone, would have
+understood so well what to do, or have it done so effectually. There are
+plenty more of such black boys in Dominica, and they deserve a better
+fate than to be sent drifting before constitutional whirlwinds back into
+barbarism, because we, on whom their fate depends, are too ignorant or
+too careless to provide them with a tolerable government.
+
+The kind Captain Churchill, finding himself tied to his chair, and
+wishing to give me every assistance towards seeing the island, had
+invited a creole gentleman from the other side of it to stay a few days
+with us. Mr. F----, a man about thirty, was one of the few survivors
+from among the planters; he had never been out of the West Indies, but
+was a man of honesty and intelligence, could use his eyes, and form
+sound judgments on subjects which immediately concerned him. I had
+studied Roseau for myself. With Mr. F---- for a companion, I made
+acquaintance with the environs. We started for our walks at daybreak, in
+the cool of the morning. We climbed cliffs, we rambled on the rich
+levels about the river, once amply cultivated, and even now the soil is
+luxuriant in neglect; a few canefields still survive, but most of them
+are turned to other uses, and you pass wherever you go the ruins of old
+mills, the massive foundations of ancient warehouses, huge hewn stones
+built and mortared well together, telling what once had been; the mango
+trees, which the owners had planted, waving green over the wrecks of
+their forgotten industry. Such industry as is now to be found is, as
+elsewhere in general, the industry of the black peasantry. It is the
+same as in Grenada: the whites, or the English part of them, have lost
+heart, and cease to struggle against the stream. A state of things more
+helplessly provoking was never seen. Skill and capital and labour have
+only to be brought to bear together, and the land might be a Garden of
+Eden. All precious fruits, and precious spices, and gums, and plants of
+rarest medicinal virtues will spring and grow and flourish for the
+asking. The limes are as large as lemons, and in the markets of the
+United States are considered the best in the world.
+
+As to natural beauty, the West Indian Islands are like Scott's novels,
+where we admire most the one which we have read the last. But Dominica
+bears the palm away from all of them. One morning Mr. F---- took me a
+walk up the Roseau river, an ample stream even in what is called the dry
+season, with deep pools full of eels and mullet. We entered among the
+hills which were rising steep above us. The valley grew deeper, or
+rather there were a series of valleys, gorges dense with forest, which
+had been torn out by the cataracts. The path was like the mule tracts of
+the Alps, cut in other days along the sides of the precipices with
+remnants of old conduits which supplied water to the mills below. Rich
+odorous acacias bent over us. The flowers, the trees, the birds, the
+insects, were a maze of perfume and loveliness. Occasionally some valley
+opposite the sun would be spanned by a rainbow as the rays shone through
+a morning shower out of the blue sky. We wandered on and on, wading
+through tributary brooks, stopping every minute to examine some new fern
+or plant, peasant women and children meeting us at intervals on their
+way into the town. There were trees to take shelter under when
+indispensable, which even the rain of Dominica could not penetrate. The
+levels at the bottom of the valleys and the lower slopes, where the soil
+was favourable, were carelessly planted with limes which were in full
+bearing. Small black boys and girls went about under the trees,
+gathering the large lemon-shaped fruit which lay on the ground thick as
+apples in a West of England orchard. Here was all this profusion of
+nature, lavish beyond example, and the enterprising youth of England
+were neglecting a colony which might yield them wealth beyond the
+treasures of the old sugar planters, going to Florida, to Texas, to
+South America, taking their energy and their capital to the land of the
+foreigner, leaving Dominica, which might be the garden of the world, a
+precious emerald set in the ring of their own Antilles, enriched by the
+sacred memories of glorious English achievements, as if such a place had
+no existence. Dominica would surrender herself to-morrow with a light
+heart to France, to America, to any country which would accept the
+charge of her destinies. Why should she care any more for England, which
+has so little care for her? Beauties conscious of their charms do not
+like to be so thrown aside. There is no dislike to us among the blacks;
+they are indifferent, but even their indifference would be changed into
+loyalty if we made the slightest effort to recover it. The poor black
+was a faithful servant as long as he was a slave. As a freeman he is
+conscious of his inferiority at the bottom of his heart, and would
+attach himself to a rational white employer with at least as much
+fidelity as a spaniel. Like the spaniel, too, if he is denied the chance
+of developing under guidance the better qualities which are in him, he
+will drift back into a mangy cur.
+
+In no country ought a government to exist for which respect is
+impossible, and English rule as it exists in Dominica is a subject for a
+comedy. The Governor-General of the Leeward Islands resides in Antigua,
+and in theory ought to go on progress and visit in turn his subordinate
+dominions. His visits are rare as those of angels. The eminent person,
+who at present holds that high office, has been once in Nevis; and
+thrice in Dominica, but only for the briefest stay there. Perhaps he has
+held aloof in consequence of an adventure which befell a visiting
+governor some time ago on one of these occasions. When there is a
+constitution there is an opposition. If there are no grievances the
+opposition manufacture them, and the inhabitants of Roseau were
+persuaded that they were an oppressed people and required fuller
+liberties. I was informed that His Excellency had no sooner landed and
+taken possession of the Government House, than a mob of men and women
+gathered in the market place under the leadership of their elected
+representative. The girls that I had admired very likely made a part of
+it. They swarmed up into the gardens, they demonstrated under the
+windows, laughing, shouting, and petitioning. His Excellency first
+barricaded the doors, then opened them and tried a speech, telling the
+dear creatures how much he loved and respected them. Probably they did
+not understand him, as few of them speak English. Producing no effect,
+he retreated again, barred the door once more, slipped out at a back
+entrance down a lane to the port, took refuge on board his steamer, and
+disappeared. So the story was told me--not by the administrator, who was
+not a man to turn English authority into ridicule--but by some one on
+the spot, who repeated the current report of the adventure. It may be
+exaggerated in some features, but it represents, at any rate, the
+feeling of the place towards the head representative of the existing
+government.
+
+I will mention another incident, said to have occurred still more
+recently to one of these great persons, very like what befell Sancho
+Panza in Barataria. This, too, may have been wickedly turned, but it was
+the subject of general talk and general amusement on board the steamers
+which make the round of the Antilles. Universal belief is a fact of its
+kind, and though it tends to shape itself in dramatic form more
+completely than the facts justify, there is usually some truth at the
+bottom of it. The telegrams to the West Indies pass through New York,
+and often pick up something on the way. A warning message reached a
+certain colony that a Yankee-Irish schooner with a Fenian crew was
+coming down to annex the island, or at least to kidnap the governor.
+This distinguished gentleman ought perhaps to have suspected that a joke
+was being played upon his fears; but he was a landlord. A
+governor-general had been threatened seriously in Canada, why not he in
+the Antilles? He was as much agitated as Sancho himself. All these
+islands were and are entirely undefended save by a police which cannot
+be depended on to resist a serious invasion. They were called out.
+Rumour said that in half the rifles the cartridges were found afterwards
+inverted. The next day dispelled the alarm. The schooner was the
+creation of some Irish telegraph clerk, and the scare ended in laughter.
+But under the jest lies the wretched certainty that the Antilles have no
+protection except in their own population, and so little to thank
+England for that scarcely one of the inhabitants, except the officials,
+would lift a finger to save the connection.
+
+Once more, I tell these stories not as if they were authenticated facts,
+but as evidence of the scornful feeling towards English authority. The
+current belief in them is a fact of a kind and a very serious one.
+
+The confederation of the Leeward Islands may have been a convenience to
+the Colonial Office, and may have allowed a slight diminution in the
+cost of administration. The whole West Indies might be placed under a
+single governor with only good results if he were a real one like the
+Governor-General at Calcutta. But each single island has lost from the
+change, so far, more than it has gained. Each ship of war has a captain
+of its own and officers of its own trained specially for the service. If
+the Antilles are ever to thrive, each of them also should have some
+trained and skilful man at its head, unembarrassed by local elected
+assemblies. The whites have become so weak that they would welcome the
+abolition of such assemblies. The blacks do not care for politics, and
+would be pleased to see them swept away to-morrow if they were governed
+wisely and fairly. Of course, in that case it would be necessary to
+appoint governors who would command confidence and respect. But let
+governors be sent who would be governors indeed, like those who
+administer the Indian presidencies, and the white residents would gather
+heart again, and English and American capitalists would bring their
+money and their enterprise, and the blacks would grow upwards instead of
+downwards. Let us persist in the other line, let us use the West Indian
+governments as asylums for average worthy persons who have to be
+provided for, and force on them black parliamentary institutions as a
+remedy for such persons' inefficiency, and these beautiful countries
+will become like Hayti, with Obeah triumphant, and children offered to
+the devil and salted and eaten, till the conscience of mankind wakes
+again and the Americans sweep them all away.
+
+I had an opportunity of seeing what can really be done in Dominica by
+an English gentleman who has gone the right way to work there. Dr.
+Nicholls came out a few years ago to Roseau as a medical officer. He was
+described to me as a man not only of high professional skill, but with
+considerable scientific attainments. Either by purchase or legacy (I
+think the latter) he had become possessed of a small estate on a
+hillside a mile or two from the town. He had built a house upon it. He
+was cultivating the soil on scientific principles, and had politely sent
+me an invitation to call on him and see what he was about. I was
+delighted to avail myself of such an opportunity.
+
+I do not know the exact extent of the property which was under
+cultivation; perhaps it was twenty-five or thirty acres. The chief part
+of it was planted with lime trees, the limes which I saw growing being
+as large as moderate-sized lemons; most of the rest was covered with
+Liberian coffee, which does not object to the moist climate, and was
+growing with profuse luxuriance. Each tree, each plant had been
+personally attended to, pruned when it needed pruning, supported by
+bamboos if it was overgrowing its strength, while the ground about the
+house was consecrated to botanical experiments, and specimens were to be
+seen there of every tropical flower, shrub, or tree, which was either
+remarkable for its beauty or valuable for its chemical properties. His
+limes and coffee went principally to New York, where they had won a
+reputation, and were in special demand; but ingenuity tries other tracks
+besides the beaten one. Dr. Nicholls had a manufactory of citric acid
+which had been found equally excellent in Europe. Everything which he
+produced was turning to gold, except donkeys, seven or eight of which
+were feeding under his windows, and which multiplied so fast that he
+could not tell what to do with them.
+
+Industries so various and so active required labour, and I saw many of
+the blacks at work on the grounds. In apparent contradiction to the
+general West Indian experience, he told me that he had never found a
+difficulty about it. He paid them fair wages, and paid them regularly
+without the overseer's fines and drawbacks. He knew one from the other
+personally could call each by his name, remembered where he came from,
+where he lived, and how, and could joke with him about his wife or
+mistress. They in consequence clung to him with an innocent affection,
+stayed with him all the week without asking for holidays, and worked
+with interest and goodwill. Four years only had elapsed since Dr.
+Nicholls commenced his undertakings, and he already saw his way to
+clearing a thousand pounds a year on that one small patch of acres. I
+may mention that, being the only man in the island of really superior
+attainments, he had tried in vain to win one of the seats in the
+elective part of the legislature.
+
+There was nothing particularly favourable in the situation of his land.
+All parts of Dominica would respond as willingly to similar treatment.
+What could be the reason, Dr. Nicholls asked me, why young Englishmen
+went planting to so many other countries, went even to Ceylon and
+Borneo, while comparatively at their own doors, within a fortnight's
+sail of Plymouth, there was this island immeasurably more fertile than
+either? The explanation, I suppose, is the misgiving that the West
+Indies are consigned by the tendencies of English policy to the black
+population, and that a local government created by representatives of
+the negro vote would make a residence there for an energetic and
+self-respecting European less tolerable than in any other part of the
+globe. The republic of Hayti not only excludes a white man from any
+share of the administration, but forbids his acquisition or possession
+of real property in any form. Far short of such extreme provisions, the
+most prosperous industry might be blighted by taxation. Self-government
+is a beautiful subject for oratorical declamation. If the fact
+corresponded to the theory and if the possession of a vote produced the
+elevating effects upon the character which are so noisily insisted upon,
+it would be the welcome panacea for political and social disorder.
+Unfortunately the fact does not correspond to the theory. The possession
+of a vote never improved the character of any human being and never
+will.
+
+There are many islands in the West Indies, and an experiment might be
+ventured without any serious risk. Let the suffrage principle be applied
+in its fullness where the condition of the people seems best to promise
+success. In some one of them--Dominica would do as well as any
+other--let a man of ability and character with an ambition to
+distinguish himself be sent to govern with a free hand. Let him choose
+his own advisers, let him be untrammelled, unless he falls into fatal
+and inexcusable errors, with interference from home. Let him have time
+to carry out any plans which he may form, without fear of recall at the
+end of the normal period. After ten or fifteen years, let the results of
+the two systems be compared side by side. I imagine the objection to
+such a trial would be the same which was once made in my hearing by an
+Irish friend of mine, who was urging on an English statesman the
+conversion of Ireland into a Crown colony. 'You dare not try it,' he
+said, 'for if you did, in twenty years we would be the most prosperous
+island of the two, and you would be wanting to follow our example.'
+
+We had exhausted the neighbourhood of Roseau. After a few days Captain
+C. was again able to ride, and we could undertake more extended
+expeditions. He provided me with a horse or pony or something between
+both, a creature that would climb a stone staircase at an angle of
+forty-five, or slide down a clay slope soaked by a tropical shower, with
+the same indifference with which it would canter along a meadow. In the
+slave times cultivation had been carried up into the mountains. There
+were the old tracks through the forest engineered along the edges of
+precipices, torrents roaring far down below, and tall green trees
+standing in hollows underneath, whose top branches were on a level with
+our eyes. We had to ride with mackintosh and umbrella, prepared at any
+moment to have the floods descend upon us. The best costume would be
+none at all. While the sun is above the horizon the island seems to lie
+under the arches of perpetual rainbows. One gets wet and one dries
+again, and one is none the worse for the adventure. I had heard that it
+was dangerous. It did no harm to me. A very particular object was to
+reach the crest of the mountain ridge which divides Dominica down the
+middle. We saw the peaks high above us, but it was useless to try the
+ascent if one could see nothing when one arrived, and mists and clouds
+hung about so persistently that we had to put off our expedition day
+after day.
+
+A tolerable morning came at last. We started early. A faithful black
+youth ran alongside of the horses to pick us up if we fell, and to carry
+the indispensable luncheon basket. We rode through the town, over the
+bridge and by the foot of Dr. Nicholls's plantations. We passed through
+lime and banana gardens rising slowly along the side of a glen above the
+river. The road had been made by the French long ago, and went right
+across the island. It had once been carefully paved, but wet and neglect
+had loosened the stones and tumbled them out of their places. Trees had
+driven their roots through the middle of the track. Mountain streams had
+taken advantage of convenient cuttings and scooped them into waterways.
+The road commissioner on the official staff seemed a merely ornamental
+functionary. We could only travel at a foot pace and in single file.
+Happily our horses were used to it. Along this road in 1805 Sir George
+Prevost retreated with the English garrison of Roseau, when attacked in
+force from Martinique; saved his men and saved the other part of the
+island till relief came and the invaders were driven out again. That was
+the last of the fighting, and we have been left since in undisturbed
+possession. Dominica was then sacred as the scene of Rodney's glories.
+Now I suppose, if the French came again, we should calculate the
+mercantile value of the place to us, and having found it to be nothing
+at all, might conclude that it would be better to let them keep it.
+
+We went up and up, winding round projecting spurs of mountain, here and
+there coming on plateaus where pioneering blacks were clearing patches
+of forest for their yams and coffee. We skirted the edge of a valley
+several miles across, on the far side of which we saw the steaming of
+the sulphur springs, and beyond and above it a mountain peak four
+thousand feet high and clothed with timber to the summit. In most
+countries the vegetation grows thin as you rise into the higher
+altitudes. Here the bush only seems to grow denser, the trees grander
+and more self-asserting, the orchids and parasites on the boughs more
+variously brilliant. There were tree ferns less splendid than those in
+New Zealand and Australia, but larger than any one can see in English
+hot-houses, wild oranges bending under the weight of ripe fruit which
+was glowing on their branches, wild pines, wild begonias scattered along
+the banks, and a singularly brilliant plant which they call the wild
+plantain, but it is not a plantain at all, with large broad pointed
+leaves radiating out from a centre like an aloe's, and a crimson flower
+stem rising up straight in the middle. It was startling to see such
+insolent beauty displaying itself indifferently in the heart of the
+wilderness with no human eye to look at it unless of some passing black
+or wandering Carib.
+
+The track had been carried across hot streams fresh from boiling
+springs, and along the edge of chasms where there was scarcely foothold
+for the horses. At length we found ourselves on what was apparently the
+highest point of the pass. We could not see where we were for the trees
+and bushes which surrounded us, but the path began to descend on the
+other side. Near the summit was a lake formed in an old volcanic crater
+which we had come specially to look at. We descended a few hundred feet
+into a hollow among the hills where the lake was said to be. Where was
+it, then? I asked the guide, for I could discover nothing that suggested
+a lake or anything like one. He pointed into the bush where it was
+thicker with tropical undergrowth than a wheatfield with ears of corn.
+If I cared to creep below the branches for two hundred yards at the risk
+of meeting snakes, scorpions, and other such charming creatures, I
+should find myself on the water's edge.
+
+To ride up a mountain three thousand feet high, to be near a wonder
+which I could not see after all, was not what I had proposed to myself.
+There was a traveller's rest at the point where we halted, a cool damp
+grotto carved into the sand-stone. We picketed our horses, cutting leafy
+boughs off the trees for them, and making cushions for ourselves out of
+the ferns. We were told that if we walked on for half a mile we should
+see the other side of the island, and if we were lucky we might catch a
+glimpse of the lake. Meanwhile clouds rolled, down off the mountains,
+filled the hollow where we stood, and so wrapped us in mist, that the
+question seemed rather how we were to return than whether we should
+venture farther.
+
+While we were considering what to do, we heard steps approaching through
+the fog, and a party of blacks came up on their way to Roseau with a
+sick companion whom they were carrying in a palanquin. We were eating
+our luncheon in the grotto, and they stopped to talk to our guide and
+stare at us. Two of them, a lad and a girl, came up closer to me than
+good manners would have allowed if they had possessed such things; the
+'I am as good as you, and you will be good enough to know it,' sort of
+tone which belongs to these democratic days showing itself rather
+notably in the rising generation in parts of these islands. I defended
+myself with producing a sketch book and proceeding to take their
+likenesses, on which they fled precipitately.
+
+Our sandwiches finished, we were pensively consuming our cigars, I
+speculating on Sir George Prevost and his party of redcoats who must
+have bivouacked on that very spot, when the clouds broke and the sun
+came out. The interval was likely to be a short one, so we hurried to
+our feet, walked rapidly on, and at a turn of the path where a hurricane
+had torn a passage through the trees, we caught a sight of our lake as
+we had been told that perhaps we might do. It lay a couple of hundred
+feet beneath us deep and still, winding away round a promontory under
+the crags and woods of the opposite hills: they call it a crater, and I
+suppose it may have been one, for the whole island shows traces of
+violent volcanic disturbance, but in general a crater is a bowl, and
+this was like a reach of a river, which lost itself before one could see
+where it ended. They told us that in old times, when troops were in the
+fort, and the white men of the island went about and enjoyed
+themselves, there were boats on this lake, and parties came up and
+fished there. Now it was like the pool in the gardens of the palace of
+the sleeping princess, guarded by impenetrable thickets, and whether
+there are fish there, or enchanted princesses, or the huts of some tribe
+of Caribs, hiding in those fastnesses from negroes whom they hate, or
+from white men whom they do not love, no one knows or cares to know. I
+made a hurried pencil sketch, and we went on.
+
+A little farther and we were out of the bush, at a rocky terrace on the
+rim of the great valley which carries the rainfall on the eastern side
+of the mountains down into the Atlantic. We were 3,000 feet above the
+sea. Far away the ocean stretched out before us, the horizon line where
+sky met water so far distant that both had melted into mist at the point
+where they touched. Mount Diablot, where Labat spent a night catching
+the devil birds, soared up on our left hand. Below, above, around us, it
+was forest everywhere; forest, and only forest, a land fertile as Adam's
+paradise, still waiting for the day when 'the barren woman shall bear
+children.' Of course it was beautiful, if that be of any
+consequence--mountain peaks and crags and falling waters, and the dark
+green of the trees in the foreground, dissolving from tint to tint to
+grey, violet, and blue in the far-off distance. Even at the height where
+we stood, the temperature must have been 70°. But the steaming damp of
+the woods was gone, the air was clear and exhilarating as champagne.
+What a land! And what were we doing with it? This fair inheritance, won
+by English hearts and hands for the use of the working men of England,
+and the English working men lying squalid in the grimy alleys of crowded
+towns, and the inheritance turned into a wilderness. Visions began to
+rise of what might be, but visions which were taken from me before they
+could shape themselves. The curtain of vapour fell down over us again,
+and all was gone, and of that glorious picture nothing was left but our
+own two selves and the few yards of red rock and soil on which we were
+standing.
+
+There was no need for haste now. We return slowly to our horses, and
+our horses carried us home by the way that we had come. Captain C. went
+carelessly in front through the fog, over boulders and watercourses and
+roots of fallen trees. I followed as I could, expecting every moment to
+find myself flying over my horse's head; stumbling, plunging, sliding,
+but getting through with it somehow. The creature had never seen me
+before, but was as careful of my safety as if I had been an old
+acquaintance and friend. Only one misadventure befell me, if
+misadventure it may be called. Shaken, and damp with heat, I was riding
+under a wild orange tree, the fruit within reach of my hand. I picked an
+orange and plunged my teeth into the skin, and I had to remember my
+rashness for days. The oil in the rind, pungent as aromatic salts,
+rushed on my palate, and spurted on my face and eyes. The smart for the
+moment half blinded me. I bethought me, however, that oranges with such
+a flavour would be worth something, and a box of them which was sent
+home for me was converted into marmalade with a finer flavour than ever
+came from Seville.
+
+What more can I say of Dominica? I stayed with the hospitable C.'s for a
+fortnight. At the appointed time the returning steamer called for me. I
+left Capt. C. with a warm hope that he might not be consigned for ever
+to a post which an English gentleman ought not to be condemned to
+occupy; that if matters could not be mended for him where he stood, he
+might find a situation where his courage and his understanding might be
+turned to useful purpose. I can never forget the kindness both of
+himself and his clever, good, graceful lady. I cannot forget either the
+two dusky damsels who waited upon me like spirits in a fairy tale. It
+was night when I left. The packet came alongside the wharf. We took
+leave by the gleaming of her lights. The whistle screamed, and Dominica,
+and all that I had seen, faded into a memory. All that I had seen, but
+not all that I had thought. That island was the scene of the most
+glorious of England's many famous actions. It had been won for us again
+and again by the gallantry of our seamen and soldiers. It had been
+secured at last to the Crown by the genius of the greatest of our
+admirals. It was once prosperous. It might be prosperous again, for the
+resources of the soil are untouched and inexhaustible. The black
+population are exceptionally worthy. They are excellent boatmen,
+excellent fishermen, excellent mechanics, ready to undertake any work if
+treated with courtesy and kindness. Yet in our hands it is falling into
+ruin. The influence of England there is gone. It is nothing.
+Indifference has bred indifference in turn as a necessary consequence.
+Something must be wrong when among 30,000 of our fellow-subjects not one
+could be found to lift a hand for us if the island were invaded, when a
+boat's crew from Martinique might take possession of it without a show
+of resistance.
+
+If I am asked the question, What use is Dominica to us? I decline to
+measure it by present or possible marketable value; I answer simply that
+it is part of the dominions of the Queen. If we pinch a finger, the
+smart is felt in the brain. If we neglect a wound in the least important
+part of our persons, it may poison the system. Unless the blood of an
+organised body circulates freely through the extremities, the
+extremities mortify and drop off, and the dropping off of any colony of
+ours will not be to our honour and may be to our shame. Dominica seems
+but a small thing, but our larger colonies are observing us, and the
+world is observing us, and what we do or fail to do works beyond the
+limits of its immediate operation. The mode of management which produces
+the state of things which I have described cannot possibly be a right
+one. We have thought it wise, with a perfectly honest intention, to
+leave our dependencies generally to work out their own salvation. We
+have excepted India, for with India we dare not run the risk. But we
+have refused to consider that others among our possessions may be in a
+condition analogous to India, and we have allowed them to drift on as
+they could. It was certainly excusable, and it may have been prudent, to
+try popular methods first, but we have no right to persist in the face
+of a failure so complete. We are obliged to keep these islands, for it
+seems that no one will relieve us of them; and if they are to remain
+ours, we are bound so to govern them that our name shall be respected
+and our sovereignty shall not be a mockery. Am I asked what shall be
+done? I have answered already. Among the silent thousands whose quiet
+work keeps the Empire alive, find a Rajah Brooke if you can, or a Mr.
+Smith of Scilly. If none of these are attainable, even a Sancho Panza
+would do. Send him out with no more instructions than the knight of La
+Mancha gave Sancho--to fear God and do his duty. Put him on his mettle.
+Promise him the respect and praise of all good men if he does well; and
+if he calls to his help intelligent persons who understand the
+cultivation of soils and the management of men, in half a score of years
+Dominica would be the brightest gem of the Antilles. From America, from
+England, from all parts of the world, admiring tourists would be
+flocking there to see what Government could do, and curious politicians
+with jealous eyes admitting reluctantly unwelcome conclusions.
+
+    Woman! no mortal o'er the widespread earth
+    Can find a fault in thee; thy good report
+    Doth reach the widespread heaven, as of some prince
+    Who, in the likeness of a god, doth rule
+    O'er subjects stout of heart and strong of hand;
+    And men speak greatly of him, and his land
+    Bears wheat and rye, his orchards bend with fruit,
+    His flocks breed surely, the sea yields her fish,
+    Because he guides his folk with wisdom.
+    In grace and manly virtue.[11]
+
+Because 'He guides with wisdom.' That is the whole secret. The
+leading of the wise few, the willing obedience of the many, is the
+beginning and the end of all right action. Secure this, and you secure
+everything. Fail to secure it, and be your liberties as wide as you can
+make them, no success is possible.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[11] [Greek: ô gynai ouk an tis se brotôn ep' apeirona gaian
+             neikeoi; ê gar seu kleos ouranon euryn hikanei;
+             hôste teu ê basilêost amymonos, hoste theoudês
+             andrasin en polloisi kai iphthimoisin anassôn,
+             eudikias anechêsi; pherêsi de gaia melaina
+             purous kai krithas, brithêsi de dendrea karpôi
+             tiktei de empeda mêla, thalassa de parechei ichthys,
+             ex euêgesiês; aretôsi de laoi hupo autou.--_Odyssey_,
+             xix. 107.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+    The Darien canal--Jamaica mail packet--Captain W.--Retrospect of
+    Jamaican history--Waterspout at sea--Hayti--Jacmel--A walk through
+    the town--A Jamaican planter--First sight of the Blue
+    Mountains--Port Royal--Kingston--The Colonial Secretary--Gordon
+    riots--Changes in the Jamaican constitution.
+
+
+Once more to Barbadoes, but merely to change there from steamer to
+steamer. My course was now across the Caribbean Sea to the great islands
+at the bottom of it. The English mail, after calling and throwing off
+its lateral branches at Bridgetown, pursues its direct course to Hayti
+and Jamaica, and so on to Vera Cruz and the Darien canal. This wonderful
+enterprise of M. Lesseps has set moving the loose negro population of
+the Antilles and Jamaica. Unwilling to work as they are supposed to be,
+they have swarmed down to the isthmus, and are still swarming thither in
+tens of thousands, tempted by the dollar or dollar and a half a day
+which M. Lesseps is furnishing. The vessel which called for us at
+Dominica was crowded with them, and we picked up more as we went on.
+Their average stay is for a year. At the end of a year half of them have
+gone to the other world. Half go home, made easy for life with money
+enough to buy a few acres of land and 'live happy ever after.' Heedless
+as school-boys they plunge into the enterprise, thinking of nothing but
+the harvest of dollars. They might earn as much or more at their own
+doors if there were any one to employ them, but quiet industry is out of
+joint, and Darien has seized their imaginations as an Eldorado.
+
+If half the reports which reached me are correct, in all the world there
+is not perhaps now concentrated in any single spot so much foul disease,
+such a hideous dungheap of moral and physical abomination, as in the
+scene of this far-famed undertaking of nineteenth-century engineering.
+By the scheme, as it was first propounded, six-and-twenty millions of
+English money were to unite the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to form a
+highway for the commerce of the globe, and enrich with untold wealth the
+happy owners of original shares. The thrifty French peasantry were
+tempted by the golden bait, and poured their savings into M. Lesseps's
+lottery box. All that money and more besides, I was told, had been
+already spent, and only a fifth of the work was done. Meanwhile the
+human vultures have gathered to the spoil. Speculators, adventurers,
+card sharpers, hell keepers, and doubtful ladies have carried their
+charms to this delightful market. The scene of operations is a damp
+tropical jungle, intensely hot, swarming with mosquitoes, snakes,
+alligators, scorpions, and centipedes; the home, even as nature made it,
+of yellow fever, typhus, and dysentery, and now made immeasurably more
+deadly by the multitudes of people who have crowded thither. Half buried
+in mud lie about the wrecks of costly machinery, consuming by rust, sent
+out under lavish orders, and found unfit for the work for which they
+were intended. Unburied altogether lie also skeletons of the human
+machines which have broken down there.[12] Everything which imagination
+can conceive that is ghastly and loathsome seems to be gathered into
+that locality just now. I was pressed to go on and look at the moral
+surroundings of 'the greatest undertaking of our age,' but my curiosity
+was less strong than my disgust. I did not see the place and the
+description which I have given is probably too highly coloured. The
+accounts which reached me, however, were uniform and consistent. Not one
+person whom I met and who could speak from personal knowledge had any
+other story to tell.
+
+We looked again into St. Lucia on our way. The training squadron was
+lying outside, and the harbour was covered with boats full of
+blue-jackets. The big ships were rolling heavily. They could have eaten
+up Rodney's fleet. The great 'Ville de Paris' would have been a mouthful
+to the smallest of them. Man for man, officers and crew were as good as
+Rodney ever commanded. Yet, somehow, they produce small effect on the
+imagination of the colonists. The impression is that they are meant more
+for show than for serious use. Alas! the stars and stripes on a Yankee
+trader have more to say in the West Indies than the white ensigns of a
+fleet of British iron-clads.
+
+At Barbadoes there was nothing more for me to do or see. The English
+mail was on the point of sailing, and I hastened on board. One does not
+realise distance on maps. Jamaica belongs to the West Indies, and the
+West Indies are a collective entity. Yet it is removed from the Antilles
+by the diameter of the Caribbean Sea, and is farther off than Gibraltar
+from Southampton. Thus it was a voyage of several days, and I looked
+about to see who were to be my companions. There were several Spaniards,
+one or two English tourists, and some ladies who never left their
+cabins. The captain was the most remarkable figure: an elderly man with
+one eye lost or injured, the other as peremptory as I have often seen in
+a human face; rough and prickly on the outside as a pineapple,
+internally very much resembling the same fruit, for at the bottom he was
+true, genuine, and kindly hearted, very amusing, and intimately known to
+all travellers on the West Indian line, in the service of which he had
+passed forty years of his life. In his own ship he was sovereign and
+recognised no superior. Bishops, colonial governors, presidents of South
+American republics were, so far as their office went, no more to him
+than other people, and as long as they were on board were chattels of
+which he had temporary charge. Peer and peasant were alike under his
+orders, which were absolute as the laws of Medes and Persians. On the
+other hand, his eye was quick to see if there was any personal merit in
+a man, and if you deserved his respect you would have it. One
+particular merit he had which I greatly approved. He kept his cabin to
+himself, and did not turn it into a smoking room, as I have known
+captains do a great deal too often.
+
+All my own thoughts were fixed upon Jamaica. I had read so much about
+it, that my memory was full of persons and scenes and adventures of
+which Jamaica was the stage or subject. Penn and Venables and the
+Puritan conquest, and Morgan and the buccaneers; Port Royal crowded with
+Spanish prizes; its busy dockyards, and English frigates and privateers
+fitting out there for glorious or desperate enterprises. The name of
+Jamaica brought them crowding up with incident on incident; and behind
+the history came Tom Cringle and the wild and reckless, yet wholesome
+and hearty, planter's life in Kingston; the dark figures of the pirates
+swinging above the mangroves at Gallows Point; the balls and parties and
+the beautiful quadroons, and the laughing, merry innocent children of
+darkness, with the tricks of the middies upon them. There was the tragic
+side of it, too, in slavery, the last ugly flash out of the cloud being
+not two decades distant in the Eyre and Gordon time. Interest enough
+there was about Jamaica, and things would be strangely changed in
+Kingston if nothing remained of the society which was once so brilliant.
+There, if anywhere, England and English rule were not yet a vanished
+quantity. There was a dockyard still, and a commodore in command, and a
+guardship and gunboats, and English regiments and West Indian regiments
+with English officers. Some representatives, too, I knew were to be
+found of the old Anglo-West Indians, men whose fathers and grandfathers
+were born in the island, and whose fortunes were bound up in it. Aaron
+Bang! what would not one have given to meet Aaron? The real Aaron had
+been gathered to his fathers, and nature does not make two such as he
+was; but I might fall in with something that would remind me of him.
+Paul Gelid and Pepperpot Wagtail, and Peter Mangrove, better than either
+of them--the likeness of these might be surviving, and it would be
+delightful to meet and talk to them. They would give fresh flavour to
+the immortal 'Log.' Even another Tom was not impossible; some middy to
+develop hereafter into a frigate captain and to sail again into Port
+Royal with his prizes in tow.
+
+Nature at all events could not be changed. The white rollers would still
+be breaking on the coral reefs. The palms would still be waving on the
+sand ridge which forms the harbour, and the amber mist would be floating
+round the peaks of the Blue Mountains. There were English soldiers and
+sailors and English people. The English language was spoken there by
+blacks as well as whites. The religion was English. Our country went for
+something, and there would be some persons, at least, to whom the old
+land was more than a stepmother, and who were not sighing in their
+hearts for annexation to the American Union. The governor, Sir Henry
+Norman, of Indian fame, I was sorry to learn, was still absent; he had
+gone home on some legal business. Sir Henry had an Imperial reputation.
+He had been spoken of to me in Barbadoes as able, if he were allowed a
+chance, to act as Viceroy of all the islands, and to set them on their
+feet again. I could well believe that a man of less than Sir Henry's
+reputed power could do it--for in the thing itself there was no great
+difficulty--if only we at home were once disenchanted; though all the
+ability in the world would be thrown away as long as the enchantment
+continued. I did see Sir Henry, as it turned out, but only for a few
+hours.
+
+Our voyage was without remarkable incident; as voyages are apt to be in
+these days of powerful steamboats. One morning there was a tropical rain
+storm which was worth seeing. We had a strong awning over the
+quarter-deck, so I could stand and watch it. An ink-black cloud came
+suddenly up from the north which seemed to hang into the sea, the
+surface of the water below being violently agitated. According to
+popular belief, the cloud on these occasions is drawing up water which
+it afterwards discharges. Were this so the water discharged would be
+salt, which it never is. The cause of the agitation is a cyclonic
+rotation of air or local whirlwind. The most noticeable feature was the
+blackness of the cloud itself. It became so dark that it would have been
+difficult to read any ordinary print. The rain, when it burst, fell not
+in drops but in torrents. The deck was flooded, and the scuttle-holes
+ran like jets from a pump. The awning was ceasing to be a shelter, for
+the water was driven bodily through it; but the downpour passed off as
+suddenly as it had risen. There was no lightning and no wind. The sea
+under our side was glassy smooth, and was dashed into millions of holes
+by the plunging of the rain pellets.
+
+The captain in his journeys to and fro had become acquainted with the
+present black President of Hayti, Mr. Salomon. I had heard of this
+gentleman as an absolute person, who knew how to make himself obeyed,
+and who treated opposition to his authority in a very summary manner. He
+seemed to be a favourite of the captain's. He had been educated in
+France, had met with many changes of fortune, and after an exile in
+Jamaica had become quasi-king of the black republic. I much wished to
+see this paradise of negro liberty; we were to touch at Jacmel, which is
+one of the principal ports, to leave the mails, and Captain W---- was
+good enough to say that, if I liked, I might go ashore for an hour or
+two with the officer in charge.
+
+Hayti, as everyone knows who has studied the black problem, is the
+western portion of Columbus's Española, or St. Domingo, the largest
+after Cuba and the most fertile in natural resources of all the islands
+of the Caribbean Sea. It was the earliest of the Spanish settlements in
+the New World. The Spaniards found there a million or two of mild and
+innocent Indians, whom in their first enthusiasm they intended to
+convert to Christianity, and to offer as the first fruits of their
+discovery to the Virgin Mary and St. Domenic. The saint gave his name to
+the island, and his temperament to the conquerors. In carrying out their
+pious design, they converted the Indians off the face of the earth,
+working them to death in their mines and plantations. They filled their
+places with blacks from Africa, who proved of tougher constitution. They
+colonised, they built cities; they throve and prospered for nearly two
+hundred years; when Hayti, the most valuable half of the island, was
+taken from them by the buccaneers and made into a French province. The
+rest which keeps the title of St. Domingo, continued Spanish, and is
+Spanish still--a thinly inhabited, miserable, Spanish republic. Hayti
+became afterwards the theatre of the exploits of the ever-glorious
+Toussaint l'Ouverture. When the French Revolution broke out, and Liberty
+and the Rights of Man became the new gospel, slavery could not be
+allowed to continue in the French dominions. The blacks of the colony
+were emancipated and were received into the national brotherhood. In
+sympathy with the Jacobins of France, who burnt the chateaux of the
+nobles and guillotined the owners of them, the liberated slaves rose as
+soon as they were free, and massacred the whole French population, man,
+woman, and child. Napoleon sent an army to punish the murderers and
+recover the colony. Toussaint, who had no share in the atrocities, and
+whose fault was only that he had been caught by the prevailing political
+epidemic and believed in the evangel of freedom, surrendered and was
+carried to France, where he died or else was made an end of. The yellow
+fever avenged him, and secured for his countrymen the opportunity of
+trying out to the uttermost the experiment of negro self-government. The
+French troops perished in tens of thousands. They were reinforced again
+and again, but it was like pouring water into a sieve. The climate won a
+victory to the black man which he could not win for himself. They
+abandoned their enterprise at last, and Hayti was free. We English tried
+our hand to recover it afterwards, but we failed also, and for the same
+reason.
+
+Hayti has thus for nearly a century been a black independent state. The
+negro race have had it to themselves and have not been interfered with.
+They were equipped when they started on their career of freedom with
+the Catholic religion, a civilised language, European laws and manners,
+and the knowledge of various arts and occupations which they had learnt
+while they were slaves. They speak French still; they are nominally
+Catholics still; and the tags and rags of the gold lace of French
+civilisation continue to cling about their institutions. But in the
+heart of them has revived the old idolatry of the Gold Coast, and in the
+villages of the interior, where they are out of sight and can follow
+their instincts, they sacrifice children in the serpent's honour after
+the manner of their forefathers. Perhaps nothing better could be
+expected from a liberty which was inaugurated by assassination and
+plunder. Political changes which prove successful do not begin in that
+way.
+
+The Bight of Leogane is a deep bay carved in the side of the island, one
+arm of which is a narrow ridge of high mountains a hundred and fifty
+miles long and from thirty to forty wide. At the head of this bay, to
+the north of the ridge, is Port au Prince, the capital of this
+remarkable community. On the south, on the immediately opposite side of
+the mountains and facing the Caribbean Sea, is Jacmel, the town next in
+importance. We arrived off it shortly after daybreak. The houses, which
+are white, looked cheerful in the sunlight. Harbour there was none, but
+an open roadstead into which the swell of the sea sets heavily, curling
+over a long coral reef which forms a partial shelter. The mountain range
+rose behind, sloping off into rounded woody hills. Here were the feeding
+grounds of the herds of wild cattle which tempted the buccaneers into
+the island, and from which they took their name. The shore was abrupt;
+the land broke off in cliffs of coral rock tinted brilliantly with
+various colours. One rather striking white-cliff, a ship's officer
+assured me, was chalk; adding flint when I looked incredulous. His
+geological education was imperfect. We brought up a mile outside the
+black city. The boat was lowered. None of the other passengers
+volunteered to go with me; the English are out of favour in Hayti just
+now; the captain discouraged landings out of mere curiosity; and,
+indeed, the officer with the mails had to reassure himself of Captain
+W----'s consent before he would take me. The presence of Europeans in
+any form is barely tolerated. A few only are allowed to remain about the
+ports, just as the Irish say they let a few Danes remain in Dublin and
+Waterford after the battle of Clontarf, to attend to the ignoble
+business of trade.
+
+The country after the green of the Antilles looked brown and parched. In
+the large islands the winter months are dry. As we approached the reef
+we saw the long hills of water turn to emerald as they rolled up the
+shoal, then combing and breaking in cataracts of snow-white foam. The
+officer in charge took me within oar's length of the rock to try my
+nerves, and the sea, he did not fail to tell me, swarmed with sharks of
+the worst propensities. Two steamers were lying inside, one of which,
+belonging to an English company, had 'happened a misfortune,' and was
+breaking up as a deserted wreck. A Yankee clipper schooner had just come
+in with salt fish and crackers--a singularly beautiful vessel, with
+immense beam, which would have startled the builders of the Cowes
+racers. It was precisely like the schooner which Tom Cringle commanded
+before the dockyard martinets had improved her into ugliness, built on
+the lines of the old pirate craft of the islands, when the lives and
+fortunes of men hung on the extra speed, or the point which they could
+lie closer to the wind. Her return cargo would be coffee and bananas.
+
+Englishmen move about in Jacmel as if they were ashamed of themselves
+among their dusky lords and masters. I observed the Yankee skipper
+paddling himself off in a canoe with his broad straw hat and his cigar
+in his mouth, looking as if all the world belonged to him, and as if all
+the world, and the Hayti blacks in particular, were aware of the fact.
+The Yankee, whether we like it or not, is the acknowledged sovereign in
+these waters.
+
+The landing place was, or had been, a jetty built on piles and boarded
+over. Half the piles were broken; the planks had rotted and fallen
+through. The swell was rolling home, and we had to step out quickly as
+the boat rose on the crest of the wave. A tattered crowd of negroes were
+loafing about variously dressed, none, however, entirely without clothes
+of some kind. One of them did kindly give me a hand, observing that I
+was less light of foot than once I might have been. The agent's office
+was close by. I asked the head clerk--a Frenchman--to find me a guide
+through the town. He called one of the bystanders whom he knew, and we
+started together, I and my black companion, to see as much as I could in
+the hour which was allowed me. The language was less hopeless than at
+Dominica. We found that we could understand each other--he, me,
+tolerably; I, him, in fragments, for his tongue went as fast as a
+shuttle. Though it was still barely eight o'clock the sun was scalding.
+The streets were filthy and the stench abominable. The houses were of
+white stone, and of some pretensions, but ragged and uninviting--paint
+nowhere, and the woodwork of the windows and verandahs mouldy and
+worm-eaten. The inhabitants swarmed as in a St. Giles's rookery. I
+suppose they were all out of doors. If any were left at home Jacmel must
+have been as populous as an African ants' nest. As I had looked for
+nothing better than a Kaffir kraal, the degree of civilisation was more
+than I expected. I expressed my admiration of the buildings; my guide
+was gratified, and pointed out to me with evident pride a new hotel or
+boarding house kept by a Madame Somebody who was the great lady of the
+place. Madame Ellemême was sitting in a shady balcony outside the
+first-floor windows. She was a large menacing-looking mulatto, like some
+ogress of the 'Arabian Nights,' capable of devouring, if she found them
+palatable, any number of salt babies. I took off my hat to this
+formidable dame, which she did not condescend to notice, and we passed
+on. A few houses in the outskirts stood in gardens with inclosures about
+them. There is some trade in the place, and there were evidently
+families, negro or European, who lived in less squalid style than the
+generality. There was a governor there, my guide informed me--an
+ornamental personage, much respected. To my question whether he had any
+soldiers, I was answered 'No,' the Haytians didn't like soldiers. I was
+to understand, however, that they were not common blacks. They aspired
+to be a commonwealth with public rights and alliances. Hayti a republic,
+France a republic: France and Hayti good friends now. They had a French
+bishop and French priests and a French currency. In spite of their land
+laws, they were proud of their affinity with the great nation; and I
+heard afterwards, though not from my Jacmel companion, that the better
+part of the Haytians would welcome back the French dominion if they were
+not afraid that the Yankees would disapprove.
+
+My guide persisted in leading me outside the town, and as my time was
+limited, I tried in various ways to induce him to take me back into it.
+He maintained, however, that he had been told to show me whatever was
+most interesting, and I found that I was to see an American
+windmill-pump which had been just erected to supply Jacmel with fresh
+water. It was the first that had been seen in the island, and was a
+wonder of wonders. Doubtless it implied 'progress,' and would assist in
+the much-needed ablution of the streets and kennels. I looked at it and
+admired, and having thus done homage, I was allowed my own way.
+
+It was market day. The Yankee cargo had been unloaded, and a great open
+space in front of the cathedral was covered with stalls or else blankets
+stretched on poles to keep the sun off, where hundreds of Haytian dames
+were sitting or standing disposing of their wares--piles of salt fish,
+piles of coloured calicoes, knives, scissors, combs, and brushes. Of
+home produce there were great baskets of loaves, fruit, vegetables, and
+butcher's meat on slabs. I looked inquisitively at these last; but I
+acknowledge that I saw no joints of suspicious appearance. Children were
+running about in thousands, not the least as if they were in fear of
+being sacrificed, and babies hung upon their mothers as if natural
+affection existed in Jacmel as much as in other places. I asked no
+compromising questions, not wishing to be torn in pieces. Sir Spenser
+St. John's book has been heard of in Hayti, and the anger about it is
+considerable. The scene was interesting enough, but the smell was
+unendurable. The wild African black is not filthy in his natural state.
+He washes much, as wild animals do, and at least tries to keep himself
+clear of vermin. The blacks in Jacmel appeared (like the same animals as
+soon as they are domesticated) to lose the sense which belongs to them
+in their wild condition. My prejudices, if I have any, had not blinded
+me to the good qualities of the men and women in Dominica. I do not
+think it was prejudice wholly which made me think the faces which I saw
+in Hayti the most repulsive which I had ever seen in the world, or
+Jacmel itself, taken for all in all, the foulest, dirtiest, and nastiest
+of human habitations. The dirt, however, I will do them the justice to
+say did not seem to extend to their churches. The cathedral stood at the
+upper end of the market place. I went in. It was airy, cool, and
+decent-looking. Some priests were saying mass, and there was a fairly
+large congregation. I wished to get a nearer sight of the altar and the
+images and pictures, imagining that in Hayti the sacred persons might
+assume a darker colour than in Europe; but I could not reach the chancel
+without disturbing people who were saying their prayers, and, to the
+disappointment of my companion, who beckoned me on, and would have
+cleared a way for me, I controlled my curiosity and withdrew.
+
+My hour's leave of absence was expired. I made my way back to the
+landing place, where the mail steamer's boat was waiting for me. On the
+steamer herself the passengers were waiting impatiently for breakfast,
+which had been put off on our account. We hurried on board at our best
+speed; but before breakfast could be thought of, or any other thing, I
+had to strip and plunge into a bath and wash away the odour of the great
+negro republic of the West which clung to my clothes and skin.
+
+Leaving Jacmel and its associations, we ran all day along the land,
+skirting a range of splendid mountains between seven and eight thousand
+feet high; past the Isle à Vache; past the bay of Cayes, once famous as
+the haunt of the sea-rovers; past Cape Tubiron, the Cape of Sharks. At
+evening we were in the channel which divides St. Domingo from Jamaica.
+Captain ---- insisted to me that this was the scene of Rodney's action,
+and he pointed out to me the headland under which the British fleet had
+been lying. He was probably right in saying that it was the scene of
+some action of Rodney's, for there is hardly a corner of the West Indies
+where he did not leave behind him the print of his cannon shot; but it
+was not the scene of the great fight which saved the British Empire.
+That was below the cliffs of Dominica; and Captain W----, as many others
+have done, was confounding Dominica with St. Domingo.
+
+The next morning we were to anchor at Port Royal. We had a Jamaica
+gentleman of some consequence on board. I had failed so far to make
+acquaintance with him, but on this last evening he joined me on deck,
+and I gladly used the opportunity to learn something of the present
+condition of things. I was mistaken in expecting to find a more vigorous
+or more sanguine tone of feeling than I had left at the Antilles. There
+was the same despondency, the same sense that their state was hopeless,
+and that nothing which they could themselves do would mend it. He
+himself, for instance, was the owner of a large sugar estate which a few
+years ago was worth 60,000_l._ It was not encumbered. He was his own
+manager, and had spared no cost in providing the newest machinery. Yet,
+with the present prices and with the refusal of the American Commercial
+Treaty, it would not pay the expense of cultivation. He held on, for it
+was all that he could do. To sell was impossible, for no one would buy
+even at the price of the stock on the land. It was the same story which
+I had heard everywhere. The expenses of the administration, this
+gentleman said, were out of all proportion to the resources of the
+island, and were yearly increasing. The planters had governed in the old
+days as the English landlords had governed Ireland. They had governed
+cheaply and on their own resources. They had authority; they were
+respected; their word was law. Now their power had been taken from them,
+and made over to paid officials, and the expense was double what it used
+to be. Between the demands made on them in the form of taxation and the
+fall in the value of their produce their backs were breaking, and the
+'landed interest' would come to an end. I asked him, as I had asked many
+persons without getting a satisfactory answer, what he thought that the
+Imperial Government could do to mend matters. He seemed to think that it
+was too late to do anything. The blacks were increasing so fast, and the
+white influence was diminishing so fast, that Jamaica in a few years
+would be another Hayti.
+
+In this gentleman, too, I found to my sorrow that there was the same
+longing for admission to the American Union which I had left behind me
+at the Antilles. In spite of soldiers and the naval station, the old
+country was still looked upon as a stepmother, and of genuine loyalty
+there was, according to him, little or nothing. If the West Indies were
+ever to become prosperous again, it could only be when they were annexed
+to the United States. For the present, at least, he admitted that
+annexation was impossible. Not on account of any possible objection on
+the part of the British Government; for it seems to be assumed by every
+one that the British Government cares nothing what they do; nor wholly
+on account of the objections of the Americans, though he admitted that
+the Americans were unwilling to receive them; but because in the
+existing state of feeling such a change could not be carried out without
+civil war. In Jamaica, at least, the blacks and mulattoes would resist.
+There were nearly 700,000 of them, while of the whites there were but
+15,000, and the relative numbers were every year becoming more
+unfavourable. The blacks knew that under England they had nothing to
+fear. They would have everything more and more their own way, and in a
+short time they expected to have the island to themselves. They might
+collect arms; they might do what they pleased, and no English officer
+dared to use rough measures with them; while, if they belonged to the
+Union, the whites would recover authority one way or another. The
+Americans were ready with their rifles on occasions of disorder, and
+their own countrymen did not call them to account for it as we did. The
+blacks, therefore, preferred the liberty which they had and the
+prospects to which they looked forward, and they and the mulattoes also
+would fight, and fight desperately, before they would allow themselves
+to be made American citizens.
+
+The prospect which Mr. ---- laid before me was not a beautiful one, and
+was coming a step nearer at each advance that was made in the direction
+of constitutional self-government; for, like every other person with
+whom I spoke on the subject, he said emphatically that Europeans would
+not remain to be ruled under a black representative system; nor would
+they take any part in it when they would be so overwhelmingly outvoted
+and outnumbered. They would sooner forfeit all that they had in the
+world and go away. An effective and economical administration on the
+Indian pattern might have saved all a few years ago. It was too late
+now, and Jamaica was past recovery. At this rate it was a sadly altered
+Jamaica since Tom Cringle's time, though his friend Aaron even then had
+seen what was probably coming. But I could not accept entirely all that
+Mr. ---- had been saying, and had to discount the natural irritation of
+a man who sees his fortune sliding out of his hands. Moreover, for
+myself, I never listen much to a desponding person. Even when a cause is
+lost utterly, and no rational hope remains, I would still go down, if it
+had to be so, with my spirit unbroken and my face to the enemy. Mr. ----
+perhaps would recover heart if the price of sugar mended a little. For
+my own part, I do not care much whether it mends or not. The economics
+of the islands ought not to depend exclusively on any single article of
+produce. I believe, too, in spite of gloomy prognostics, that a loyal
+and prosperous Jamaica is still among the possibilities of the future,
+if we will but study in earnest the character of the problem. Mr. ----,
+however, did most really convey to me the convictions of a large and
+influential body of West Indians--convictions on which they are already
+acting, and will act more and more. With Hayti so close, and with
+opinion in England indifferent to what becomes of them, they will clear
+out while they have something left to lose, and will not wait till ruin
+is upon them or till they are ordered off the land by a black
+legislature. There is a saying in Hayti that the white man has no
+rights which the blacks are bound to recognise.
+
+I walked forward after we had done talking. We had five hundred of the
+poor creatures on board on their way to the Darien pandemonium. The
+vessel was rolling with a heavy beam sea. I found the whole mass of them
+reduced into the condition of the pigs who used to occupy the foredeck
+in the Cork and Bristol packets. They were lying in a confused heap
+together, helpless, miserable, without consciousness apparently, save a
+sense in each that he was wretched. Unfortunate brothers-in-law!
+following the laws of political economy, and carrying their labour to
+the dearest market, where, before a year was out, half of them were to
+die. They had souls, too, some of them, and honest and kindly hearts. I
+observed one man who was suffering less than the rest reading aloud to a
+prostrate group a chapter of the New Testament; another was reading to
+himself a French Catholic book of devotion.
+
+The dawn was breaking in the east when I came on deck in the morning.
+The Blue Mountains were hanging over us on our right hand, the peaks
+buried in white mist which the unrisen sun was faintly tinting with
+orange. We had passed Morant Bay, the scene of Gordon's rash attempt to
+imitate Toussaint l'Ouverture. As so often in the Antilles, a level
+plain stretched between the sea and the base of the hills, formed by the
+debris washed down by the rivers in the rainy season. Among cane fields
+and cocoa-nut groves we saw houses and the chimneys of the sugar
+factories; and, as we came nearer, we saw men and horses going to their
+early work. Presently Kingston itself came in sight, and Up Park Camp,
+and the white barracks high up on the mountain side, of which one had
+read and heard so much. Here was actually Tom Cringle's Kingston, and
+between us and the town was the long sand spit which incloses the lagoon
+at the head of which Kingston is built. How this natural breakwater had
+been deposited I could find no one to tell me. It is eight miles long,
+rising but a few feet above the water-line, in places not more than
+thirty yards across--nowhere, except at the extremity, more than sixty
+or a hundred.
+
+[Illustration: PORT ROYAL, JAMAICA.]
+
+The thundering swell of the Caribbean Sea breaks upon it from year's
+end to year's end, and never washes it any thinner. Where the sand is
+dry, beyond the reach of the waves, it is planted thickly all along with
+palms, and appears from the sea a soft green line, over which appear the
+masts and spars of the vessels at anchor in the harbour, and the higher
+houses of Kingston itself. To reach the opening into the lagoon you have
+to run on to the end of the sandbank, where there is a peninsula on
+which is built the Port Royal so famous in West Indian story. Halfway
+down among the palms the lighthouse stands, from which a gun was fired
+as we passed, to give notice that the English mail was coming in.
+Treacherous coral reefs rise out of the deep water for several miles,
+some under water and visible only by the breakers over them, others
+forming into low wooded islands. Only local pilots can take a ship
+safely through these powerful natural defence works. There are but two
+channels through which the lagoon can be approached. The eastern
+passage, along which we were steaming, runs so near the shore that an
+enemy's ship would be destroyed by the batteries among the sandhills
+long before it could reach the mouth. The western passage is less
+intricate, but that also is commanded by powerful forts. In old times
+Kingston was unattackable, so strong had the position been made by
+nature and art combined. It could be shelled now over the spit from the
+open sea. It might be destroyed, but even so could not easily be taken.
+
+I do not know that I have ever seen any scene more interesting than that
+which broke upon my eyes as we rounded the point, and the lagoon opened
+out before me. Kingston, which we had passed half an hour, before, lay
+six miles off at the head of the bay, now inside the sand, ridge, blue
+and hazy in the distance. At the back were the mountains. The mist had
+melted off, standing in shadowy grey masses with the sun rising behind
+them. Immediately in front were the dockyards, forts, and towers of Port
+Royal, with the guardship, gunboats, and tenders, with street and
+terrace, roof and turret and glistening vane, all clearly and sharply
+defined in the exquisite transparency of the air. The associations of
+the place no doubt added to the impression. Before the first hut was run
+up in Kingston, Port Royal was the rendezvous of all English ships
+which, for spoil or commerce, frequented the West Indian seas. Here the
+buccaneers sold their plunder and squandered their gains in gambling and
+riot. Here in the later century of legitimate wars, whole fleets were
+gathered to take in stores, or refit when shattered by engagements. Here
+Nelson had been, and Collingwood and Jervis, and all our other naval
+heroes. Here prizes were brought in for adjudication, and pirates to be
+tried and hanged. In this spot more than in any other, beyond Great
+Britain herself, the energy of the Empire once was throbbing. The
+'Urgent,' an old two-decker, and three gunboats were all that were now
+floating in the once crowded water; the 'Urgent,' no longer equipped for
+active service, imperfectly armed, inadequately manned, but still
+flaunting the broad white ensign, and as if grandly watching over the
+houses which lay behind her. There were batteries at the point, and
+batteries on the opposite shore. The morning bugle rang out clear and
+inspiriting from the town, and white coats and gold and silver lace
+glanced in and out as men and officers were passing to parade. Here, at
+any rate, England was still alive.
+
+The channel at the entrance is a mile in width. The lagoon (the open
+part of it) may be seven or eight miles long and half as many broad. It
+forms the mouth of the Cobre river, one of the largest in Jamaica, on
+which, ten miles up, stands the original seat of government established
+by the Spaniards, and called after them Spanish Town. The fashion of
+past times, as old as the times of Thucydides, and continued on till the
+end of the last century, was to choose the sites for important towns in
+estuaries, at a distance from the sea, to be out of the reach of
+pirates. The Cobre, running down from Spanish Town, turns the plain
+through which it flows into a swamp. The swamp covers itself with
+mangroves, and the mangroves fringe the shore of the lagoon itself for
+two-thirds of its circuit. As Jamaica grew in wealth and population the
+trade was carried from Port Royal deeper into the bay. Another town
+sprang up there, called King's Town, or shortly 'Kingston.' The
+administration was removed thither for convenience, and though fallen
+away from its old consequence, Kingston, with its extended suburbs, its
+churches and warehouses, and large mansions overhung with trees, looks
+at a distance like a place of consideration. Many ships lay along the
+wharves, or anchored a few cables' distance off. Among them were a
+couple of Spanish frigates, which remain there in permanence on the
+watch for refugees from Cuba. On the slopes behind the town, as far as
+eye could see, were the once splendid estates of the sugar princes of
+the last century. One of them was pointed out to me as the West Indian
+home of the author of 'Tom Cringle.'
+
+We had to stop for a few minutes as the officer of the port came
+alongside for the mails. We then went on at reduced speed. The lagoon is
+generally shoal. A deep water channel runs along the side of it which is
+farthest from the sea; made, I suppose, by the river, for as usual there
+is little tide or none. Halfway up we passed under the walls of Fort
+Augusta, now a ruin and almost deserted, but once mounting a hundred
+guns. The money which we spent on the defence of Jamaica in the old
+times was not always laid out wisely, as will be seen in an account
+which I shall have to give of this remarkable structure; but, at any
+rate, we were lavish of it.
+
+Of the sharks with which the water used to swarm we saw none. Port Royal
+Jack and his kindred are said to have disappeared, driven or frightened
+out by the screws of the steamers. But it is not a place which I should
+choose for a swim. Nor did the nigger boys seem as anxious as I had seen
+them in other spots to dive for sixpences under the ship's side.
+
+No account is made of days when you come into port after a voyage.
+Cargoes have to be landed, or coal has to be taken in. The donkey
+engines are at work, hoisting packing cases and luggage out of the hold.
+Stewards run to and fro, and state-room doors are opened, and busy
+figures are seen through each, stuffing their portmanteaus and preparing
+for departure. The church bells at Kingston, ringing for early service,
+reminded me that it was Sunday. We brought up at a jetty, and I cannot
+say that, close at hand, the town was as attractive as it had appeared
+when first I saw it. The enchantment was gone. The blue haze of distance
+gave place to reality. The water was so fetid under the ship's side that
+it could not be pumped into the baths. Odours, not Arabian, from open
+drains reminded me of Jacmel. The streets, up which I could see from the
+afterdeck, looked dirty and the houses shabby. Docks and wharves,
+however, are never the brightest part of any town, English or foreign.
+There were people enough at any rate, and white faces enough among them.
+Gangways were rigged from the ship to the shore, and ladies and
+gentlemen rushed on board to meet their friends. The companies' agents
+appeared in the captain's cabin. Porters were scrambling for luggage;
+pushing, shoving, and swearing. Passengers who had come out with us, and
+had never missed attendance at the breakfast table, were hurrying home
+unbreakfasted to their wives and families. My own plans were uncertain.
+I had no friends, not even an acquaintance. I knew nothing of the hotels
+and lodging houses, save that they had generally a doubtful reputation.
+I had brought with me a letter of introduction to Sir H. Norman, the
+governor, but Sir Henry had gone to England. On the whole, I thought it
+best to inclose the letter to Mr. Walker, the Colonial Secretary, who I
+understood was in Kingston, with a note asking for advice. This I sent
+by a messenger. Meanwhile I stayed on board to look about me from the
+deck. The ship was to go on the next morning to the canal works at
+Darien. Time was precious. Immediately on arriving she had begun to take
+in coal, Sunday though it might be, and a singular spectacle it was. The
+coal yard was close by, and some hundreds of negroes, women and men, but
+women, in four times the number, were hard at work. The entire process
+was by hand and basket, each basket holding from eighty to a hundred
+pounds weight. Two planks were laid down at a steep incline from the
+ship's deck to the yard. Swinging their loads on their heads, erect as
+statues, and with a step elastic as a racehorse's, they marched up one
+of the planks, emptied their baskets into the coal bunkers, and ran down
+the other. Round and round they went under the blazing sun all the
+morning through, and round and round they would continue to go all the
+afternoon. The men took it comparatively easy. The women flew along,
+laughing, and clamouring, as if not knowing what weariness was--willing
+beasts of burden, for they had the care upon them of their children; the
+men disclaiming all responsibilities on that score, after the babies
+have been once brought into the world. The poor women are content with
+the arrangement, which they prefer to what they would regard as legal
+bondage. They earn at this coaling work seven or eight shillings a day.
+If they were wives, their husbands would take it from them and spend it
+in rum. The companion who is not a wife can refuse and keep her earnings
+for her little ones. If black suffrage is to be the rule in Jamaica, I
+would take it away from the men and would give it to the superior sex.
+The women are the working bees of the hive. They would make a tolerable
+nation of black amazons, and the babies would not be offered to Jumbi.
+
+When I had finished my meditations on the coaling women, there were
+other black creatures to wonder at; great boobies or pelicans, old
+acquaintances of the Zoological Gardens, who act as scavengers in these
+waters. We had perhaps a couple of dozen of them round us as large as
+vultures, ponderous and sleepy to look at when squatting on rocks or
+piles, over-weighted by their enormous bills. On the wing they were
+astonishingly swift, wheeling in circles, till they could fix their prey
+with their eyes, then pouncing upon it with a violent slanting plunge. I
+suppose their beaks might be broken if they struck directly, but I never
+saw one miss its aim. Nor do they ever go below the surface, but seize
+always what is close to it. I was told--I do not know how truly--that
+like the diablots in Dominica, they nest in the mountains and only come
+down to the sea to feed.
+
+Hearing that I was in search of quarters, a Miss Burton, a handsome
+mulatto woman, came up and introduced herself to me. Hotels in the
+English West Indies are generally detestable. This dame had set up a
+boarding house on improved principles, or rather two boarding houses,
+between which she invited me to take my choice, one in the suburbs of
+Kingston, one on the bank of a river in a rocky gorge in the Blue
+Mountains. In either of these she promised that she would make me happy,
+and I do not doubt that she would have succeeded, for her fame had
+spread through all Jamaica, and her face was as merry as it was honest.
+As it turned out I was provided for elsewhere, and I lost the chance of
+making an acquaintance which I should have valued. When she spoke to me
+she seemed a very model of vigour and health. She died suddenly while I
+was in the island.
+
+The day was still early. When the vessel was in some order again, and
+those who were going on shore had disappeared, the rest of us were
+called down to breakfast to taste some of those Jamaica delicacies on
+which Paul Gelid was so eloquent. The fruit was the chief attraction:
+pineapples, of which one can eat as much as one likes in these countries
+with immunity from after suffering; oranges, more excellent than even
+those of Grenada and Dominica; shaddocks, admirable as that memorable
+one which seduced Adam; and for the first time mangoes, the famous
+Number Eleven of which I had heard such high report, and was now to
+taste. The English gardeners can do much, but they cannot ripen a Number
+Eleven, and it is too delicate to bear carriage. It must be eaten in the
+tropics or nowhere. The mango is the size and shape of a swan's egg, of
+a ruddy yellow colour when ripe, and in flavour like an exceptionally
+good apricot, with a very slight intimation of resin. The stone is
+disproportionately large. The flesh adheres to it, and one abandons as
+hopeless the attempt to eat mangoes with clean lips and fingers. The
+epicures insist that they should be eaten only in a bath.
+
+The heat was considerable, and the feast of fruit was the more welcome.
+Soon after the Colonial Secretary politely answered my note in person.
+In the absence of the governor of a colony, the colonial secretary, as
+a rule, takes his place. In Jamaica, and wherever we have a garrison,
+the commander of the forces becomes acting governor; I suppose because
+it is not convenient to place an officer of high military rank under the
+orders of a civilian who is not the direct representative of the
+sovereign. In the gentleman who now called on me I found an old
+acquaintance whom I had known as a boy many years ago. He told me that,
+if I had made no other arrangements, Colonel J----, who was the present
+chief, was expecting me to be his guest at the 'King's House' during my
+stay in Jamaica. My reluctance to trespass on the hospitality of an
+entire stranger was not to be allowed. Soldiers who have distinguished
+themselves are, next to lawyers, the most agreeable people to be met
+with, and when I was convinced that I should really be welcome, I had no
+other objection. An aide-de-camp, I was told, would call for me in the
+afternoon. Meanwhile the secretary stayed with me for an hour or two,
+and I was able to learn something authentic from him as to the general
+condition of things. I had not given entire credit to the
+representations of my planter friend of the evening before. Mr. Walker
+took a more cheerful view, and, although the prospects were not as
+bright as they might be, he saw no reason for despondency. Sugar was
+down of course. The public debt had increased, and taxation was heavy.
+Many gentlemen in Jamaica, as in the Antilles, were selling, or trying
+to sell, their estates and go out of it. On the other hand, expenses of
+government were being reduced, and the revenue showed a surplus. The
+fruit trade with the United States was growing, and promised to grow
+still further. American capitalists had come into the island, and were
+experimenting on various industries. The sugar treaty with America would
+naturally have been welcome; but Jamaica was less dependent on its sugar
+crop, and the action of the British Government was less keenly resented.
+In the Antilles, the Colonial Secretary admitted, there might be a
+desire for annexation to the United States, and Jamaican landowners had
+certainly expressed the same wish to myself. Mr. Walker, however,
+assured me that, while the blacks would oppose it unanimously, the
+feeling, if it existed at all among the whites, was confined as yet to a
+very few persons. They had been English for 230 years, and the large
+majority of them wished to remain English. There had been suffering
+among them; but there had been suffering in other places besides
+Jamaica. Better times might perhaps be coming with the opening of the
+Darien canal, when Kingston might hope to become again the centre of a
+trade. Of the negroes, both men and women, Mr. Walker spoke extremely
+favourably. They were far less indolent than they were supposed to be;
+they were settling on the waste lands, acquiring property, growing yams
+and oranges, and harming no one; they had no grievance left; they knew
+it, and were perfectly contented.
+
+As Mr. Walker was an official, I did not ask him about the working of
+the recent changes in the constitution; nor could he have properly
+answered me if I had. The state of things is briefly this: Jamaica,
+after the first settlement, received a parliamentary form of government,
+modelled on that of Ireland, the colonial liberties being restricted by
+a law analogous to Poynings' Act. The legislature, so constructed, of
+course represented the white interest only and was entirely composed of
+whites. It remained substantially unaltered till 1853, when
+modifications were made which admitted coloured men to the suffrage,
+though with so high a franchise as to be almost exclusive. It became
+generally felt that the franchise would have to be extended. A popular
+movement, led by Mr. Gordon, who was a member of the legislature,
+developed into a riot, into bloodshed and panic. Gordon was hanged by a
+court-martial, and the assembly, aware that, if allowed to exist any
+longer, it could exist only with the broad admission of the negro vote,
+pronounced its own dissolution, surrendered its powers to the Crown, and
+represented formally 'that nothing but a strong government could prevent
+the island from lapsing into the condition of Hayti.'
+
+The surrender was accepted. Jamaica was administered till within the
+last four years by a governor, officials, and council all nominated by
+the Queen. No dissatisfaction had been expressed, and the blacks at
+least had enjoyed a prosperity and tranquillity which had been unbroken
+by a single disturbance. If the island has suffered, it has suffered
+from causes with which political dissatisfaction has had nothing to do,
+and which, therefore, political changes cannot remove. In 1884 Mr.
+Gladstone's Government, for reasons which I have not been able to
+ascertain, revived suddenly the representative system; constructed a
+council composed equally of nominated and of elected members, and placed
+the franchise so low as to include practically every negro peasant who
+possessed a hut and a garden. So long as the Crown retains and exercises
+its power of nomination, no worse results can ensue than the inevitable
+discontent when the votes of the elected members are disregarded or
+overborne. But to have ventured so important an alteration with the
+intention of leaving it without further extension would have been an act
+of gratuitous folly, of which it would be impossible to imagine an
+English cabinet to have been capable. It is therefore assumed and
+understood to have been no more than an initial step towards passing
+over the management of Jamaica to the black constituencies. It has been
+so construed in the other islands, and was the occasion of the agitation
+in Trinidad which I observed when I was there.
+
+My own opinion as to the wisdom of such an experiment matters little:
+but I have a right to say that neither blacks nor whites have asked for
+it; that no one who knows anything of the West Indies and wishes them to
+remain English sincerely asked for it; that no one has agitated for it
+save a few newspaper writers and politicians whom it would raise into
+consequence. If tried at all, it will be tried either with a deliberate
+intention of cutting Jamaica free from us altogether, or else in
+deference to English political superstitions, which attribute
+supernatural virtues to the exercise of the franchise, and assume that a
+form of self-government which suits us tolerably at home will be equally
+beneficial in all countries and under all conditions.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[12] This has been angrily denied. A gentleman whose veracity I cannot
+doubt assured me that he had himself seen a dead body lying unburied
+among some bushes. When he returned to the place a month after it was
+still there. The frightful mortality among the labourers, at least in
+the early years of the undertaking, is too notorious to be called in
+question.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+    The English mails--Irish agitation--Two kinds of colonies--Indian
+    administration--How far applicable in the West Indies--Land at
+    Kingston--Government House--Dinner party--Interesting
+    officer--Majuba Hill--Mountain station--Kingston
+    curiosities--Tobacco--Valley in the Blue Mountains.
+
+
+I am reminded as I write of an adventure which befell Archbishop Whately
+soon after his promotion to the see of Dublin. On arriving in Ireland he
+saw that the people were miserable. The cause, in his mind, was their
+ignorance of political economy, of which he had himself written what he
+regarded as an excellent manual. An Irish translation of this manual he
+conceived would be the best possible medicine, and he commissioned a
+native Scripture reader to make one. To insure correctness he required
+the reader to retranslate to him what he had written line by line. He
+observed that the man as he read turned sometimes two pages at a time.
+The text went on correctly, but his quick eye perceived that something
+was written on the intervening leaves. He insisted on knowing what it
+was, and at last extorted an explanation, 'Your Grace, me and my comrade
+conceived that it was mighty dry reading, so we have just interposed now
+and then a bit of a pawem, to help it forward, your Grace.' I am myself
+imitating the translators, and making sandwiches out of politics and
+local descriptions.
+
+We had brought the English mails with us. There were letters to read
+which had been in the ship with us, though out of our reach. There were
+the newspapers to read. They told me nothing but the weary round of
+Irish outrages and the rival remedies of Tory or Radical politicians who
+cared for Ireland less than I did, and considered only how to trim their
+sails to keep in office or to get it. How sick one is of all that!
+Half-a-dozen times at least in Anglo-Irish history things have come to
+the same point. 'All Ireland cannot govern the Earl of Kildare,' said
+someone in Henry VIII.'s privy council. Then answered Wolsey, in the
+tone of Mr. Gladstone, 'Let the Earl of Kildare govern all Ireland.'
+Elizabeth wished to conciliate. Shan O'Neil, Desmond, Tyrone promised in
+turn to rule Ireland in loyal union with England under Irish ideas. Lord
+Grey, who was for 'a Mahometan conquest,' was censured and 'girded at:'
+yet the end was always broken heads. From 1641 to 1649 an Irish
+parliament sat at Kilkenny, and Charles I. and the Tories dreamt of an
+alliance between Irish popery and English loyalism. Charles lost his
+head, and Cromwell had to make an end of Irish self-government at
+Drogheda and Wexford. Tyrconnell and James II. were to repeal the Act of
+Settlement and restore the forfeited lands to the old owners. The end of
+that came at the Boyne and at Aghrim. Grattan would remake the Irish
+nation. The English Liberals sent Lord Fitzwilliam to help him, and the
+Saxon mastiff and the Celtic wolf were to live as brothers evermore. The
+result has been always the same; the wretched country inflated with a
+dream of independence, and then trampled into mud again. So it has been.
+So it will be again. Ireland cannot be independent, for England is
+stronger than she, and cannot permit it. Yet nothing less will satisfy
+her. And so there has been always a weary round of fruitless concessions
+leading to demands which cannot be gratified, and in the end we are
+driven back upon force, which the miserable people lack the courage to
+encounter like men. Mr. Gladstone's experiment differs only from its
+antecedents because in the past the English friends of Irish liberty had
+a real hope that a reconciliation was possible. They believed in what
+they were trying to do. The present enterprise is the creation of
+parliamentary faction. I have never met any person acquainted with the
+minds and motives of the public men of the day who would not confess to
+me that, if it had suited the interests of the leaders of the present
+Radical party to adopt the Irish policy of the Long Parliament, their
+energy and their eloquence would have been equally at the service of the
+Protestant ascendency, which they have now denounced as a upas tree.
+They even ask you with wide eyes what else you would expect?
+
+Mr. Sexton says that if England means to govern Ireland she must keep an
+army there as large as she keeps in India. England could govern Ireland
+in perfect peace, without an army at all, if there was no faction in the
+House of Commons. The spirit of party will either destroy the British
+Empire, or the British nation will make an end of party government on
+its present lines. There are sounds in the air like the cracking of the
+ice of the Neva at the incoming of spring, as if a nobler purpose was at
+last awaking in us. In a few more years there may be no more Radicals
+and no more Conservatives, and the nation will be all in all.
+
+Here is the answer to the question so often asked, What is the use of
+the colonies to us? The colonies are a hundredfold multiplication of the
+area of our own limited islands. In taking possession of so large a
+portion of the globe, we have enabled ourselves to spread and increase,
+and carry our persons, our language and our liberties, into all climates
+and continents. We overflow at home; there are too many of us here
+already; and if no lands belonged to us but Great Britain and Ireland,
+we should become a small insignificant power beside the mighty nations
+which are forming around us. There is space for hundreds of millions of
+us in the territories of which we and our fathers have possessed
+ourselves. In Canada, Australia, New Zealand we add to our numbers and
+our resources. There are so many more Englishmen in the world able to
+hold their own against the mightiest of their rivals. And we have
+another function, such as the Romans had. The sections of men on this
+globe are unequally gifted. Some are strong and can govern themselves;
+some are weak and are the prey of foreign invaders or internal anarchy;
+and freedom, which all desire, is only attainable by weak nations when
+they are subject to the rule of others who are at once powerful and
+just. This was the duty which fell to the Latin race two thousand years
+ago. In these modern times it has fallen to ours, and in the discharge
+of it the highest features in the English character have displayed
+themselves. Circumstances forced on us the conquest of India; we have
+given India in return internal peace undisturbed by tribal quarrels or
+the ambitions of dangerous neighbours, with a law which deals out right
+to high and low among 250,000,000 human beings.
+
+Never have rulers been less self-seeking than we have been in our
+Asiatic empire. No 'lex de repetundis' has been needed to punish
+avaricious proconsuls who had fattened on the provinces. In such
+positions the English show at their best, and do their best. India has
+been the training school of our greatest soldiers and greatest
+administrators. Strike off the Anglo-Indian names from the roll of
+famous Englishmen, and we shall lose the most illustrious of them all.
+
+In India the rule of England has been an unexampled success, glorious to
+ourselves and of infinite benefit to our subjects, because we have been
+upright and disinterested, and have tried sincerely and honourably to do
+our duty. In other countries belonging to us, where with the same
+methods we might have produced the same results, we have applied them
+with a hesitating and less clean hand. We planted Ireland as a colony
+with our own people, we gave them a parliament of their own, and set
+them to govern the native Irish for us instead of doing it ourselves, to
+save appearances and to save trouble. We have not failed altogether. All
+the good that has been done at all in that poor island has been done by
+the Anglo-Irish landlords. But it has not been much, as the present
+condition of things shows. In the West Indies similarly the first
+settlers carried with them their English institutions. They were
+themselves a handful. The bulk of the population were slaves, and as
+long as slavery continued those institutions continued to work tolerably
+in the interest of the white race. When the slaves were emancipated, the
+distinction of colour done away with, and the black multitude and their
+white employers made equal before the law and equally privileged,
+constitutional government became no longer adapted to the new
+conditions. The white minority could not be trusted with the exclusive
+possession of political power. The blacks could not be trusted with the
+equally dangerous supremacy which their numbers would insure them. Our
+duty, if we did not and do not mean to abandon them altogether, has been
+to govern both with the same equity with which we govern at Calcutta. If
+you choose to take a race like the Irish or like the negroes whom you
+have forced into an unwilling subjection and have not treated when in
+that condition with perfect justice--if you take such a race, strike the
+fetters off them, and arm them at once with all the powers and
+privileges of loyal citizens, you ought not to be surprised if they
+attribute your concessions to fear, and if they turn again and rend you.
+When we are brought in contact with races of men who are not strong
+enough or brave enough to defend their own independence, and whom our
+own safety cannot allow to fall under any other power, our right and our
+duty is to govern such races and to govern them well, or they will have
+a right in turn to cut our throats. This is our mission. When we have
+dared to act up to it we have succeeded magnificently; we have failed
+when we have paltered and trifled; and we shall fail again, and the
+great empire on which the sun never sets will be shattered to atoms, if
+we refuse to look facts in the face.
+
+From these meditations, suggested by the batch of newspapers which I had
+been studying, I was roused by the arrival of the promised aide-de-camp,
+a good-looking and good-humoured young officer in white uniform (they
+all wear white in the tropics), who had brought the governor's carriage
+for me. Government House, or King's House, as it is called, answering to
+a 'Queen's House' in Barbadoes, is five miles from Kingston, on the
+slope which gradually ascends from the sea to the mountains. We drove
+through the town, which did not improve on closer acquaintance. The
+houses which front towards the streets are generally insignificant. The
+better sort, being behind walls or overhung with trees, were imperfectly
+visible. The roads were deep in white dust, which flies everywhere in
+whirling clouds from the unceasing wind. It was the dry season. The
+rains are not constant in Jamaica, as they are in the Antilles. The
+fields and the sides of the mountains were bare and brown and parched.
+The blacks, however, were about in crowds in their Sunday finery. Being
+in a British island, we had got back into the white calicoes and ostrich
+plumes, and I missed the grace of the women at Dominica; but men and
+women seemed as if they had not a care in the world. We passed Up Park
+Camp and the cantonments of the West India regiments, and then through a
+'scrub' of dwarf acacia and blue flowered lignum vitae. Handsome villas
+were spread along the road with lawns and gardens, and the road itself
+was as excellent as those in Barbadoes. Half an hour's drive brought us
+to the lodge, and through the park to the King's House itself, which
+stands among groups of fine trees four hundred feet above the sea.
+
+All the large houses in Jamaica--and this was one of the largest of
+them--are like those in Barbadoes, with the type more completely
+developed, generally square, built of stone, standing on blocks, hollow
+underneath for circulation of air, and approached by a broad flight of
+steps. On the three sides which the sun touches, deep verandahs or
+balconies are thrown out on the first and second floors, closed in front
+by green blinds, which can be shut either completely or partially, so
+that at a distance they look like houses of cards or great green boxes,
+made pretty by the trees which shelter them or the creepers which climb
+over them. Behind the blinds run long airy darkened galleries, and into
+these the sitting rooms open which are of course still darker with a
+subdued green light, in which, till you are used to it, you can hardly
+read. The floors are black, smooth, and polished, with loose mats for
+carpets. The reader of 'Tom Cringle' will remember Tom's misadventure
+when he blundered into a party of pretty laughing girls, slipped on one
+of these floors with a retrospective misadventure, and could not rise
+till his creole cousin slipped a petticoat over his head. All the
+arrangements are made to shut out heat and light. The galleries have
+sofas to lounge upon--everybody smokes, and smokes where he pleases; the
+draught sweeping away all residuary traces. At the King's House to
+increase the accommodation a large separate dining saloon has been
+thrown out on the north side, to which you descend from the drawing room
+by stairs, and thence along a covered passage. Among the mango trees
+behind there is a separate suite of rooms for the aides de-camp, and a
+superb swimming bath sixty feet long and eight feet deep. Altogether it
+was a sumptuous sort of palace where a governor with 7,000_l._ a year
+might spend his term of office with considerable comfort were it not
+haunted by recollections of poor Eyre. He, it seems, lived in the
+'King's House,' and two miles off, within sight of his windows, lived
+Gordon.
+
+I had a more than gracious welcome from Colonel J----and his family. In
+him I found a high-bred soldier, who had served with distinction in
+India, who had been at the storm of Delhi, and who was close by when
+Nicholson was shot. No one could have looked fitter for the post which
+he now temporarily occupied. I felt uncomfortable at being thus thrust
+upon his hospitality. I had letters of introduction with me to the
+various governors of the islands, but on Colonel J---- I had no claim at
+all. I was not even aware of his existence, or he, very likely, of mine.
+If not he, at any rate the ladies of his establishment, might reasonably
+look upon me as a bore, and if I had been allowed I should simply have
+paid my respects and have gone on to my mulatto. But they would not hear
+of it. They were so evidently hearty in their invitation to me that I
+could only submit and do my best _not_ to be a bore, the one sin for
+which there is no forgiveness.
+
+In the circle into which I was thrown I was unlikely to hear much of
+West Indian politics or problems. Colonel J----was acting as governor by
+accident, and for a few months only. He had his professional duties to
+look after; his term of service in Jamaica had nearly expired; and he
+could not trouble himself with possibilities and tendencies with which
+he would have no personal concern. As a spectator he considered probably
+that we were not making much of the West Indies, and were not on the way
+to make much. He confirmed the complaint which I had heard so often,
+that the blacks would not work for wages more than three days in the
+week, or regularly upon those, preferring to cultivate their own yams
+and sweet potatoes; but as it was admitted that they did work one way or
+another at home, I could not see that there was much to complain of. The
+blacks were only doing as we do. We, too, only work as much as we like
+or as we must, and we prefer working for ourselves to working for
+others.
+
+On his special subjects the Colonel was as interesting as he could not
+help being. He talked of the army and of the recent changes in it
+without insisting that it was going to the devil. He talked of India and
+the Russians, and for a wonder he had no Russophobia. He thought that
+England and Russia might as easily be friends as enemies, and that it
+would be better for the world if they were. As this had been my own
+fixed opinion for the last thirty years, I thought him a very sensible
+man. In the evening there was a small dinner party, made up chiefly of
+officers from the West Indian regiments at Kingston. The English troops
+are in the mountains at Newcastle, four or five thousand feet up and
+beyond common visiting distance. Among those whom I met on this occasion
+was an officer who struck me particularly. There was a mystery about his
+origin. He had risen from the ranks, but was evidently a gentleman by
+birth; he had seen service all over the world; he had been in Chili,
+and, among his other accomplishments, spoke Spanish fluently; he entered
+the English army as a private, had been in the war in the Transvaal, and
+was the only survivor of the regiment which was surprised and shot down
+by the Boers in an intricate pass where they could neither retreat nor
+defend themselves. On that occasion he had escaped and saved the
+colours, for which he was rewarded by a commission. He was acquainted
+with many of my friends there who had been in the thick of the campaign;
+knew Sir Owen Lanyon, Sir Morrison Barlow, and Colley. He had surveyed
+the plateau on Majuba Hill after the action, and had gathered the
+rumours which were flying many coloured about Colley's death. Friend and
+foe alike loved Colley, and his already legendary fame is an
+unconscious tribute to his memory. By whose hand he fell can never be
+known. We believe as we wish or as we fancy. Mr. ---- was so fine an
+officer, so clever a man, and so reserved about his personal affairs,
+that about him too 'myths' were growing. He was credited in the mess
+room with being the then unknown author of 'Solomon's Mines.' Mr.
+Haggard will forgive a mistake which, if he knows Mr. ----, he will feel
+to be a compliment.
+
+From general conversation I gathered that the sanguine views of the
+Colonial Secretary were not widely shared. The English interest was
+still something in Jamaica; but the phenomena of the Antilles were
+present there also, if in a less extreme form. There were 700,000
+coloured people in the island, with but 15,000 or 16,000 whites; and the
+blacks there also were increasing rapidly, and the whites were
+stationary if not declining. There was the same uneasy social jealousy,
+and the absence of any social relation between the two races. There were
+mulattoes in the island of wealth and consequence, and at Government
+House there are no distinctions; but the English residents of pure
+colonial blood would not associate with them, social exclusiveness
+increasing with political equality. The blacks disliked the mulattoes;
+the mulattoes despised the blacks, and would not intermarry with them.
+The impression was that the mulatto would die out, that the tendency of
+the whites and blacks was to a constantly sharpening separation, and
+that if things went on as they were going for another generation, it was
+easy to see which of the two colours would then be in the ascendant. The
+blacks were growing saucy, too; with much else of the same kind. I could
+but listen and wait to judge for myself.
+
+Meanwhile my quarters were unexceptionable, my kind entertainers leaving
+nothing undone to make my stay with them agreeable. In hot climates one
+sleeps lightly; but light sleep is all that one wants, and one wakes
+early. The swimming bath was waiting for me underneath my window. After
+a plunge in the clear cold water came coffee, grown and dried and
+roasted on the spot, and 'made' as such coffee ought to be. Then came
+the early walk. One missed the tropical luxuriance of Trinidad and
+Dominica, for the winter months in Jamaica are almost rainless; but it
+would have been beautiful anywhere else, and the mango trees were in
+their glory. There was a corner given to orchids, which were hung in
+baskets and just coming into flower. Lizards swarmed in the sunshine,
+running up the tree trunks, or basking on the garden seats. Snakes there
+are none; the mongoose has cleared them all away so completely that
+there is nothing left for him to eat but the poultry, in which he makes
+havoc, and, having been introduced to exterminate the vermin, has become
+a vermin himself.
+
+To drive, to ride, to visit was the employment of the days. I saw the
+country. I saw what people were doing, and heard what they had to say.
+
+The details are mostly only worth forgetting. The senior aide-de-camp,
+Captain C----, an officer in the Artillery, was a man of ability and
+observation. He, too, like the Colonel, was mainly interested in his
+profession, to which he was anxious to return; but he was watching, too,
+with serious interest the waning fortunes of the West Indies. He
+superintended the social part of the governor's business to perfection.
+Anything which I wished for had only to be mentioned to be provided. He
+gave me the benefit, though less often than I could have wished, of his
+shrewd, and not ungenial, observations. He drove me one morning into
+Kingston. I had passed through it hastily on the day of my landing.
+There were libraries, museums, public offices, and such like to be seen,
+besides the town itself. High up on the mountain side, more often in the
+clouds than out of them, the cantonments of the English regiments were
+visible from the park at Government House. The slope where they had been
+placed was so steep that one wondered how they held on. They looked like
+tablecloths stretched out to dry. I was to ride up there one day.
+Meanwhile, as we were driving through the park and saw the white spots
+shining up above us, I asked the aide-de-camp what the privates found
+to do in such a place. The ground was too steep for athletics; no
+cricket could be possible there, no lawn tennis, no quoits, no anything.
+There were no neighbours. Sports there were none. The mongoose had
+destroyed the winged game, and there was neither hare nor rabbit, pig
+nor deer; not a wild animal to be hunted and killed. With nothing to do,
+no one to speak to, and nothing to kill, what could become of them? Did
+they drink? Well, yes. They drank rum occasionally; but there were no
+public houses. They could only get it at the canteen, and the daily
+allowance was moderate. As to beer, it was out of reach altogether. At
+the foot of the mountains it was double the price which it was in
+England. At Newcastle the price was doubled again by the cost of
+carriage to the camp. I inquired if they did not occasionally hang
+themselves. 'Perhaps they would,' he said, 'if they had no choice, but
+they preferred to desert, and this they did in large numbers. They
+slipped down the back of the range, made their way to the sea, and
+escaped to the United States.' The officers--what became of them? The
+officers! Oh, well! they gardened! Did they like it? Some did and some
+didn't. They were not so ill off as the men, as occasionally they could
+come down on leave.
+
+One wondered what the process had been which had led the authorities to
+select such a situation. Of course it was for the health of the troops,
+but the hill country in Jamaica is wide; there were many other places
+available, less utterly detestable, and ennui and discontent are as
+mischievous as fever. General ----, a short time ago, went up to hold an
+inquiry into the desertions, and expressed his wonder how such things
+could be. With such air, such scenery, such views far and wide over the
+island, what could human creatures wish for more? 'You would desert
+yourself, general,' said another officer, 'if you were obliged to stay
+there a month.'
+
+Captain C---- undertook that I should go up myself in a day or two. He
+promised to write and make arrangements. Meanwhile we went on to
+Kingston. It was not beautiful. There was Rodney's statue. Rodney is
+venerated in Jamaica, as he ought to be; but for him it would have been
+a Spanish colony again. But there is nothing grand about the buildings,
+nothing even handsome, nothing even specially characteristic of England
+or the English mind. They were once perhaps business-like, and business
+having slackened they are now dingy. Shops, houses, wharves, want
+brightness and colour. We called at the office of the Colonial
+Secretary, the central point of the administration. It was an old
+mansion, plain, unambitious, sufficient perhaps for its purpose, but
+lifeless and dark. If it represented economy there would be no
+objection. The public debt has doubled since Jamaica became a Crown
+colony. In 1876 it was half a million. It is now more than a million and
+a half. The explanation is the extension of the railway system, and
+there has been no culpable extravagance. I do not suppose that the
+re-establishment of a constitution would mend matters. Democracies are
+always extravagant. The majority, who have little property or none,
+regulate the expenditure. They lay the taxes on the minority, who have
+to find the money, and have no interest in sparing them.
+
+Ireland when it was governed by the landowners, Jamaica in the days of
+slavery, were administered at a cost which seems now incredibly small.
+The authority of the landowners and of the planters was undisputed. They
+were feared and obeyed, and magistrates unpaid and local constables
+sufficed to maintain tolerable order. Their authority is gone. Their
+functions are transferred to the police, and every service has to be
+paid for. There may be fewer serious crimes, but the subordination is
+immeasurably less, the expense of administration is immeasurably
+greater. I declined to be taken over sugar mills, or to be shown the
+latest improvements. I was too ignorant to understand in what the
+improvements consisted, and could take them upon trust. The public
+bakery was more interesting. In tropical climates a hot oven in a small
+house makes an inconvenient addition to the temperature. The bread for
+Kingston, and for many miles around it, is manufactured at night by a
+single company and is distributed in carts in the morning. We saw the
+museum and public library. There were the usual specimens of island
+antiquities--of local fish, birds, insects, reptiles, plants, geological
+formations, and such like. In the library were old editions of curious
+books at the West Indies, some of them unique, ready to yield ampler
+pictures of the romance of the old life there than we at present
+possess. I had but leisure to glance at title-pages and engravings. The
+most noticeable relic preserved there, if it be only genuine, is the
+identical bauble which Cromwell ordered to be taken away from the
+Speaker's table in the House of Commons. Explanations are given of the
+manner in which it came to Jamaica. The evidence, so far as I could
+understand it, did not appear conclusive.
+
+Among the new industries in the island in the place of sugar was, or
+ought to be, tobacco. A few years ago I asked Sir J. Hooker, the chief
+living authority in such matters, why Cuba was allowed the monopoly of
+delicate cigar tobacco--whether there were no other countries where it
+could be grown equally good. He said that at the very moment cigars, as
+fine as the finest Havanas, were being produced in Jamaica. He gave me
+an excellent specimen with the address of the house which supplied it;
+and for a year or two I was able to buy from it what, if not perfect,
+was more than tolerable. The house acquired a reputation; and then, for
+some reason or other, perhaps from weariness of the same flavour,
+perhaps from a falling off in the character of the cigars, I, and
+possibly others, began to be less satisfied. Here on the spot I wished
+to make another experiment. Captain C---- introduced me to a famous
+manufacturer, a Spaniard, with a Spanish manager under him who had been
+trained at Havana. I bespoke his good will by adjuring him in his own
+tongue not to disappoint me; and I believe that he gave me the best that
+he had. But, alas! it is with tobacco as with most other things.
+Democracy is king; and the greatest happiness of the greatest number is
+the rule of modern life. The average of everything is higher than it
+used to be; the high quality which rises above mediocrity is rare or is
+non-existent. We are swept away by the genius of the age, and must be
+content with such other blessings as it has been pleased to bring with
+it.
+
+    Why should I murmur thus and vainly moan?
+    The Gods will have it so--their will be done.[13]
+
+The earth is patient also, and allows the successive generations of
+human creatures to play their parts upon her surface as they please. She
+spins on upon her own course; and seas and skies, and crags and forests,
+are spiritual and beautiful as ever.
+
+Gordon's Town is a straggling village in the Blue Range underneath
+Newcastle. Colonel J---- had a villa there, and one afternoon he took me
+over to see it. You pass abruptly from the open country into the
+mountains. The way to Gordon's Town was by the side of the Hope river,
+which cuts its way out of them in a narrow deep ravine. The stream was
+now trickling faintly among the stones; the enormous boulders in the bed
+were round as cannon balls, and, weighing hundreds of tons, show what
+its power must be in the coming down of the floods. Within the limits of
+the torrent, which must rise at such times thirty feet above its winter
+level, the rocks were bare and stern, no green thing being able to grow
+there. Above the line the tropical vegetation was in all its glory:
+ferns and plantains waving in the moist air; cedars, tamarinds, gum
+trees, orange trees striking their roots among the clefts of the crags,
+and hanging out over the abysses below them. Aloes flung up their tall
+spiral stems; flowering shrubs and creepers covered bank and slope with
+green and blue and white and yellow, and above and over our heads, as we
+drove along, frowned the great limestone blocks which thunder down when
+loosened by the rain. Farther up the hill sides, where the slopes are
+less precipitous, the forest has been burnt off by the unthrifty blacks,
+who use fire to clear the ground for their yam gardens, and destroy the
+timber over a dozen acres when they intend to cultivate but a single
+one. The landscape suffers less than the soil. The effect to the eye is
+merely that the mountains in Jamaica, as in temperate climates, become
+bare at a moderate altitude, and their outlines are marked more sharply
+against the sky.
+
+Introduced among scenery of this kind, we followed the river two or
+three miles, when it was crossed by a bridge, above which stood my
+friend Miss Burton's lodging house, where she had designed entertaining
+me. At Gordon's Town, which is again a mile farther on, the valley
+widens out, and there are cocoa and coffee plantations. Through an
+opening we saw far above our heads, like specks of snow against the
+mountain side, the homes or prisons of our unfortunate troops.
+Overlooking the village through which we were passing, and three hundred
+feet above it, was perched the Colonel's villa on a projecting spur
+where a tributary of the Hope river has carved out a second ravine. We
+drove to the door up a steep winding lane among coffee bushes, which
+scented the air with their jessamine-like blossom, and wild oranges on
+which the fruit hung untouched, glowing like balls of gold. We were now
+eleven hundred feet above the sea. The air was already many degrees
+cooler than at Kingston. The ground in front of the house was levelled
+for a garden. Ivy was growing about the trellis work, and scarlet
+geraniums and sweet violets and roses which cannot be cultivated in the
+lower regions, were here in full bloom. Elsewhere in the grounds there
+was a lawn tennis court to tempt the officers down from their eyrie in
+the clouds. The house was empty, in charge of servants. From the balcony
+in front of the drawing room we saw peak rising behind peak, till the
+highest, four thousand feet above us, was lost in the white mist. Below
+was the valley of the Hope river with its gardens and trees and
+scattered huts, with buildings here and there of higher pretensions. On
+the other side the tributary stream rushed down its own ravine, while
+the breeze among the trees and the sound of the falling waters swayed up
+to us in intermittent pulsations.
+
+[ILLUSTRATION: VALLEY IN THE BLUE MOUNTAINS, JAMAICA.]
+
+The place had been made, I believe, in the days of plantation
+prosperity. What would become of it all, if Jamaica drifted after her
+sisters in the Antilles, as some persons thought that she was
+drifting, and became, like Grenada, an island of small black
+proprietors? Was such a fate really hanging over her? Not necessarily,
+not by any law of nature. If it came, it would come from the
+dispiritment, the lack of energy and hope in the languid representatives
+of the English colonists; for the land even in the mountains will grow
+what it is asked to grow, and men do not live by sugar alone; and my
+friend Dr. Nicholl in Dominica and Colonel Duncan in Grenada itself were
+showing what English energy could do if it was alive and vigorous. The
+pale complaining beings of whom I saw too many, seemed as if they could
+not be of the same race as the men who ruled in the days of the slave
+trade. The question to be asked in every colony is, what sort of men is
+it rearing? If that cannot be answered satisfactorily, the rest is not
+worth caring for. The blacks do not deserve the ill that is spoken of
+them. Colonel J----'s house is twelve miles from Kingston. He told me
+that a woman would walk in with a load for him, and return on the same
+day with another, for a shilling. With such material of labour wisely
+directed, whites and blacks might live and prosper together; but even
+the poor negro will not work when he is regarded only as a machine to
+bring grist to his master's mill.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[13] Euripides.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+    Visit to Port Royal--Dockyard--Town--Church--Fort Augusta--The eyrie
+    in the mountains--Ride to Newcastle--Society in Jamaica--Religious
+    bodies--Liberty and authority.
+
+
+A new fort was being built at the mouth of the harbour. New batteries
+were being armed on the sandbanks at Port Royal. Colonel J---- had to
+inspect what was going on, and he allowed me to go with him. We were to
+lunch with the commodore of the station at the Port Royal dockyard. I
+could then see the town--or what was left of it, for the story went that
+half of it had been swallowed up by an earthquake. We ran out in a
+steam launch from Kingston, passing under the sterns of the Spanish
+frigates. I was told that there were always one or more Spanish ships of
+war stationed there, but no one knew anything about them except
+generally that they were on the look-out for Cuban conspirators. There
+was no exchange of courtesies between their officers and ours, nor even
+official communication beyond what was formally necessary. I thought it
+strange, but it was no business of mine. My surprise, however, was
+admitted to be natural. As the launch drew little water, we had no
+occasion to follow the circuitous channel, but went straight over the
+shoals. We passed close by Gallows Point, where the Johnny crows used to
+pick the pirates' bones. In the mangrove swamp adjoining, it was said
+that there was an old Spanish cemetery; but the swamp was poisonous, and
+no one had ever seen it. At the dockyard pier the commodore was waiting
+for us. I found that he was an old acquaintance whom I had met ten years
+before at the Cape. He was a brisk, smart officer, quiet and sailor-like
+in his manners, but with plenty of talent and cultivation. He showed us
+his stores and his machinery, large engines, and engineers to work them,
+ready for any work which might be wanted, but apparently with none to
+do. We went over the hospital, airy and clean, with scarcely a single
+occupant, so healthy has now been made a spot which was once a nest of
+yellow fever. Naval stores soon become antiquated; and parts of the
+great square were paved with the old cannon balls which had become
+useless on the introduction of rifled guns. The fortifications were
+antiquated also, but new works were being thrown up armed with the
+modern monster cannon. One difficulty struck me; Port Royal stood upon a
+sandbank. In such a place no spring of fresh water could be looked for.
+On the large acreage of roofs there were no shoots to catch the rain and
+carry it into cisterns. Whence did the water come for the people in the
+town? How were the fleets supplied which used to ride there? How was it
+in the old times when Port Royal was crowded with revelling crews of
+buccaneers? I found that every drop which is consumed in the place, or
+which is taken on board either of merchant ship or man-of-war, is
+brought in a steam tug from a spring ten miles off upon the coast.
+Before steam came in, it was fetched in barges rowed by hand. Nothing
+could be easier than to save the rain which falls in abundance. Nothing
+could be easier than to lay pipes along the sand-spit to the spring. But
+the tug plies daily to and fro, and no one thinks more about the matter.
+
+A West Indian regiment is stationed at Port Royal. After the dockyard we
+went through the soldiers' quarters and then walked through the streets
+of the once famous station. It is now a mere hamlet of boatmen and
+fishermen, squalid and wretched, without and within. Half-naked children
+stared at us from the doors with their dark, round eyes. I found it hard
+to call up the scenes of riot, and confusion, and wild excitement which
+are alleged to have been witnessed there. The story that it once covered
+a far larger area has been, perhaps, invented to account for the
+incongruity. Old plans exist which seem to show that the end of the spit
+could never have been of any larger dimensions than it is at present.
+There is proof enough, however, that in the sand there lie the remains
+of many thousand English soldiers and seamen, who ended their lives
+there for one cause or other. The bones lie so close that they are
+turned up as in a country churchyard when a fresh grave is dug. The
+walls of the old church are inlaid thickly with monuments and monumental
+tablets to the memory of officers of either service, young and old; some
+killed by fever, some by accidents of war or sea; some decorated with
+the honours which they had won in a hundred fights, some carried off
+before they had gathered the first flower of fame. The costliness of
+many of these memorials was an affecting indication how precious to
+their families those now resting there once had been. One in high relief
+struck me as a characteristic specimen of Rubillac's workmanship. It was
+to a young lieutenant who had been killed by the bursting of a gun.
+Flame and vapour were rushing out of the breech. The youth himself was
+falling backwards, with his arms spread out, and a vast preternatural
+face--death, judgment, eternity, or whatever it was meant to be--was
+glaring at him through the smoke. Bad art, though the execution was
+remarkable; but better, perhaps, than the weeping angels now grown
+common among ourselves.
+
+After luncheon the commodore showed us his curiosities, especially his
+garden, which, considering the state of his water supply, he had created
+under unfavourable conditions. He had a very respectable collection of
+tropical ferns and flowers, with palms and plantains to shade and
+shelter them. He was an artist besides, within the lines of his own
+profession. Drawings of ships and boats of all sorts and in all
+attitudes by his own brush or pencil were hanging on the walls of his
+working room. He was good enough to ask me to spend a day or two with
+him at Port Royal before I left the island, and I looked forward with
+special pleasure to becoming closer acquainted with such a genuine piece
+of fine-grained British oak.
+
+There were the usual ceremonies to be attended to. The officers of the
+guardship and gunboats had to be called on. The forts constructed, or in
+the course of construction, were duly inspected. I believe that there is
+a real serious intention to strengthen Port Royal in view of the changes
+which may come about through the opening, if that event ever takes
+place, of the Darien canal.
+
+Our last visit was to a fort deserted, or all but deserted--the once too
+celebrated Fort Augusta, which deserves particular description. It
+stands on the inner side of the lagoon commanding the deep-water channel
+at the point of the great mangrove swamp at the mouth of the Cobre
+river. For the purpose for which it was intended no better situation
+could have been chosen, had there been nothing else to be considered
+except the defence of the harbour, for a vessel trying to reach Kingston
+had to pass close in front of its hundred guns. It was constructed on a
+scale becoming its importance, with accommodation for two or three
+regiments, and the regiments were sent thither, and they perished,
+regiment after regiment, officers and men, from the malarious
+exhalations of the morass. Whole battalions were swept away. The ranks
+were filled up by reinforcements from home, and these, too, went the
+same road. Of one regiment the only survivors, according to the
+traditions of the place, were a quartermaster and a corporal. Finally it
+occurred to the authorities at the Horse Guards that a regiment of
+Hussars would be a useful addition to the garrison. It was not easy to
+see what Hussars were to do there. There is not a spot where the horses
+could stand twenty yards beyond the lines; nor could they reach Fort
+Augusta at all except in barges. However, it was perhaps well that they
+were sent. Horses and men went the way of the rest. The loss of the men
+might have been supplied, but horses were costly, and the loss of them
+was more serious. Fort Augusta was gradually abandoned, and is now used
+only as a powder magazine. A guard is kept there of twenty blacks from
+the West Indian force, but even these are changed every ten days--so
+deadly the vapour of that malarious jungle is now understood to be.
+
+I never saw so spectral a scene as met my eyes when we steamed up to the
+landing place--ramparts broken down, and dismantled cannon lying at the
+foot of the wall overgrown by jungle. The sentinel who presented arms
+was like a corpse in uniform. He was not pale, for he was a negro--he
+was green, and he looked like some ghoul or afrite in a ghastly
+cemetery. The roofs of the barracks and storehouses had fallen in, the
+rafters being left standing with the light shining between them as
+through the bones of skeletons. Great piles of shot lay rusting, as not
+worth removal; among them conical shot, so recently, had this fatal
+charnel house been regarded as a fit location for British artillerymen.
+
+I breathed more freely as we turned our backs upon the hideous memorial
+of parliamentary administration, and steamed away into a purer air. My
+conservative instincts had undergone a shock. As we look back into the
+past, the brighter features stand out conspicuously. The mistakes and
+miseries have sunk in the shade and are forgotten. In the present
+faults and merits are visible alike. The faults attract chief notice
+that they may be mended; and as there seem so many of them, the impulse
+is to conclude that the past was better. It is well to be sometimes
+reminded what the past really was. In Colonel J---- I found a strong
+advocate of the late army reforms. Thanks to recovering energy and more
+distinct conscientiousness, thanks to the all-seeing eye of the Press,
+such an experiment as that of Fort Augusta could hardly be tried again,
+or if tried could not be persisted in. Extravagance and absurdities,
+however, remain, and I was next to witness an instance of them.
+
+Having ceased to quarter our regiments in mangrove swamps, we now build
+a camp for them among the clouds. I mentioned that Captain C---- had
+undertaken that I should see Newcastle. He had written to a friend there
+to say that I was coming up, and the junior aide-de-camp kindly lent his
+services as a guide. As far as Gordon's Town we drove along the same
+road which we had followed before. There, at a small wayside inn, we
+found horses waiting which were accustomed to the mountain. Suspicious
+mists were hanging about aloft, but the landlord, after a glance at
+them, promised us a fine day, and we mounted and set off. My animal's
+merits were not in his appearance, but he had been up and down a hundred
+times, and might be trusted to accomplish his hundred and first without
+misfortune. For the first mile or so the road was tolerably level,
+following the bank of the river under the shade of the forest. It then
+narrowed into a horse path and zigzagged upwards at the side of a
+torrent into the deep pools of which we occasionally looked down over
+the edges of uncomfortable precipices. Then again there was a level,
+with a village and coffee plantations and oranges and bananas. After
+this the vegetation changed. We issued out upon open mountain, with
+English grass, English clover, English gorse, and other familiar
+acquaintances introduced to make the isolation less intolerable. The
+track was so rough and narrow that we could ride only in single file,
+and was often no better than a watercourse; yet by this and no other
+way every article had to be carried on donkeys' backs or human heads
+which was required for the consumption of 300 infantry and 100
+artillerymen. Artillerymen might seem to imply artillery, but they have
+only a single small field gun. They are there for health's sake only,
+and to be fit for work if wanted below. An hour's ride brought us to the
+lowest range of houses, which were 4,000 feet above the sea. From thence
+they rose, tier above tier, for 500 feet more. The weather so far had
+held up, and the views had been glorious, but we passed now into a
+cloud, through which we saw, dimly, groups of figures listlessly
+lounging. The hillside was bare, and the slope so steep that there was
+no standing on it, save where it had been flattened by the spade; and
+here in this extraordinary place were 400 young Englishmen of the common
+type of which soldiers are made, with nothing to do and nothing to
+enjoy--remaining, unless they desert or die of ennui, for one, two, or
+three years, as their chance may be. Every other day they can see
+nothing, save each other's forms and faces in the fog; for, fine and
+bright as the air may be below, the moisture in the air is condensed
+into cloud by the chill rock and soil of the high ranges. The officers
+come down now and then on furlough or on duty; the men rarely and hardly
+at all, and soldiers, in spite of General ----, cannot always be made
+happy by the picturesque. They are not educated enough to find
+employment for their minds, and of amusement there is none.
+
+We continued our way up, the track if anything growing steeper, till we
+reached the highest point of the camp, and found ourselves before a
+pretty cottage with creepers climbing about it belonging to the major in
+command. A few yards off was the officers' mess room. They expected us.
+They knew my companion, and visitors from the under-world were naturally
+welcome. The major was an active clever man, with a bright laughing
+Irish wife, whose relations in the old country were friends of my own.
+The American consul and his lady happened to have ridden up also the
+same day; so, in spite of fog, which grew thicker every moment, we had a
+good time. As to seeing, we could see nothing; but then there was
+nothing to see except views; and panoramic views from mountain tops,
+extolled as they may be, do not particularly interest me. The officers,
+so far as I could learn, are less ill off than the privates. Those who
+are married have their wives with them; they can read, they can draw,
+they can ride; they have gardens about their houses where they can grow
+English flowers and vegetables and try experiments. Science can be
+followed anywhere, and is everywhere a resource. Major ----told me that
+he had never known what it was to find the day too long. Healthy the
+camp is at any rate. The temperature never rises above 70° nor sinks
+often below 60°. They require charcoal fires to keep the damp out and
+blankets to sleep under; and when they see the sun it is an agreeable
+change and something to talk about. There are no large incidents, but
+small ones do instead. While I was there a man came to report that he
+had slipped by accident and set a stone rolling; the stone had cut a
+water pipe in two, and it had to be mended, and was an afternoon's work
+for somebody. Such officers as have no resources in themselves are, of
+course, bored to extinction. There is neither furred game to hunt nor
+feathered game to shoot; the mongoose has eaten up the partridges. I
+suggested that they should import two or three couple of bears from
+Norway; they would fatten and multiply among the roots and sugar canes,
+with a black piccaninny now and then for a special delicacy. One of the
+party extemporised us a speech which would be made on the occasion in
+Exeter Hall.
+
+We had not seen the worst of the weather. As we mounted to ride back the
+fog changed to rain, and the rain to a deluge. The track became a
+torrent. Macintoshes were a vanity, for the water rushed down one's
+neck, and every crease made itself into a conduit carrying the stream
+among one's inner garments. Dominica itself had not prepared me for the
+violence of these Jamaican downpourings. False had proved our prophet
+down below. There was no help for it but to go on; and we knew by
+experience that one does not melt on these occasions. At a turn of the
+road we met another group of riders, among them Lady N----, who, during
+her husband's absence in England, was living at a country house in the
+hills. She politely stopped and would have spoken, but it was not
+weather to stand talking in; the torrent washed us apart.
+
+And now comes the strangest part of the story. A thousand feet down we
+passed out below the clouds into clear bright sunshine. Above us it was
+still black as ever. The vapour clung about the peaks and did not leave
+them. Underneath us and round us it was a lovely summer's day. The
+farther we descended the fewer the signs that any rain had fallen. When
+we reached the stables at Gordon's Town, the dust was on the road as we
+left it, and the horsekeeper congratulated us on the correctness of his
+forecast. Clothes soon dry in that country, and we drove down home none
+the worse for our wetting. I was glad to have seen a place of which I
+had heard so much. On the whole, I hoped that perhaps by-and-by the
+authorities may discover some camping ground for our poor soldiers
+halfway between the Inferno of Fort Augusta and the Caucasian cliffs to
+which they are chained like Prometheus. Malice did say that Newcastle
+was the property of a certain Sir ----, a high official of a past
+generation, who wished to part with it, and found a convenient purchaser
+in the Government.
+
+The hospitalities at Government House were well maintained under the
+J---- administration. The Colonel was gracious, the lady beautiful and
+brilliant. There were lawn parties and evening parties, when all that
+was best in the island was collected; the old Jamaican aristocracy, army
+and navy officers, civilians, eminent lawyers, a few men among them of
+high intelligence. The tone was old-fashioned and courteous, with
+little, perhaps too little, of the _go-a-headism_ of younger colonies,
+but not the less agreeable on that account. As to prospects, or the
+present condition of things in the island, there were wide differences
+of opinion. If there was unanimity about anything, it was about the
+consequences likely to arise from an extension of the principle of
+self-government. There, at all events, lay the right road to the wrong
+place. The blacks had nothing to complain of, and the wrong at present
+was on the other side. The taxation fell heavily on the articles
+consumed by the upper classes. The duty on tea, for instance, was a
+shilling a pound, and the duties on other luxuries in the same
+proportion. It scarcely touched the negroes at all. They were acquiring
+land, and some thought that there ought to be a land tax. They would
+probably object and resist, and trouble would come if it was proposed,
+for the blacks object to taxes. As long as there are white men to pay
+them, they will be satisfied to get the benefit of the expenditure; but
+let not their English friends suppose that when they have the island for
+their own they will tax themselves for police or schools, or for any
+other of those educational institutions from which the believers in
+progress anticipate such glorious results.
+
+As to the planters, it seemed agreed that when an estate was
+unencumbered and the owner resided upon it and managed it himself, he
+could still keep afloat. It was agreed also that when the owner was an
+absentee the cost of management consumed all the profits, and thus the
+same impulse to sell which had gone so far in the Antilles was showing
+itself more and more in Jamaica also. Fine properties all about the
+island were in the market for any price which purchasers could be found
+to give. Too many even of the old English families were tired of the
+struggle, and were longing to be out of it at any cost.
+
+At one time we heard much of the colonial Church and the power which it
+was acquiring, and as it seems unlikely that the political authority of
+the white race will be allowed to reassert itself, it must be through
+their minds and through those other qualities which religion addresses
+that the black race will be influenced by the white, if it is ever to be
+influenced at all.
+
+I had marked the respect with which the Catholic clergy were treated in
+Dominica, and even the Hayti Republic still maintains the French
+episcopate and priesthood. But I could not find that the Church of
+England in Jamaica either was at present or had ever been more than the
+Church of the English in Jamaica, respected as long as the English
+gentry were a dominant power there, but with no independent charm to
+work on imagination or on superstition. Labat says, as I noted above,
+that the English clergy in his time did not baptise the black babies, on
+the curious ground that Christians could not lawfully be held as slaves,
+and the slaves therefore were not to be made Christians. A Jesuit Father
+whom I met at Government House told me that even now the clergy refuse
+to baptise the illegitimate children, and as, according to the official
+returns, nearly two-thirds of the children that are born in Jamaica come
+into the world thus irregularly, they are not likely to become more
+popular than they used to be. Perhaps Father ----was doing what a good
+many other people do, making a general practice out of a few instances.
+Perhaps the blacks themselves who wish their children to be Christians
+carry them to the minister whom they prefer, and that minister may not
+be the Anglican clergyman. Of Catholics there are not many in Jamaica;
+of the Moravians I heard on all sides the warmest praise. They, above
+all the religious bodies in the island, are admitted to have a practical
+power for good over the limited number of people which belong to them.
+But the Moravians are but a few. They do not rush to make converts in
+the highways and hedges, and my observations in Dominica almost led me
+to wish that, in the absence of other forms of spiritual authority, the
+Catholics might become more numerous than they are. The priests in
+Dominica were the only Europeans who, for their own sakes and on
+independent grounds, were looked up to with fear and respect.
+
+The religion of the future! That is the problem of problems that rises
+before us at the close of this waning century. The future of the West
+Indies is a small matter. Yet that, too, like all else, depends on the
+spiritual beliefs which are to rise out of the present confusion. Men
+will act well and wisely, or ill and foolishly, according to the form
+and force of their conceptions of duty. Once before, under the Roman
+Empire, the conditions were not wholly dissimilar. The inherited creed
+had become unbelievable, and the scientific intellect was turning
+materialist. Christianity rose out of the chaos, confounding statesmen
+and philosophers, and became the controlling power among mankind for
+1,800 years. But Christianity found a soil prepared for the seed. The
+masses of the inhabitants of the Roman world were not materialist. The
+masses of the people believed already in the supernatural and in penal
+retribution after death for their sins. Lucretius complains of the
+misery produced upon them by the terrors of the anticipated Tartarus.
+Serious and good men were rather turning away from atheism than
+welcoming it; and if they doubted the divinity of the Olympian gods, it
+was not because they doubted whether gods existed at all, but because
+the immoralities attributed to them were unworthy of the exalted nature
+of the Divine Being. The phenomena are different now. Who is now made
+wretched by the fear of hell? The tendency of popular thought is against
+the supernatural in any shape. Far into space as the telescope can
+search, deep as analysis can penetrate into mind and consciousness or
+the forces which govern natural things, popular thought finds only
+uniformity and connection of cause and effect--no sign anywhere of a
+personal will which is influenced by prayer or moral motive. When a
+subject is still obscure we are confident that it admits of scientific
+explanation; we no longer refer 'ad Deum,' whom we regard as a
+constitutional monarch taking no direct part at all. The new creed,
+however, not having crystallised as yet into a shape which can be openly
+professed, and as without any creed at all the flesh and the devil might
+become too powerful, we maintain the old names and forms, as we maintain
+the monarchy. We surround both with reverence and majesty, and the
+reverence, being confined to feeling, continues to exercise a vague but
+wholesome influence. We row in one way while we look another. In the
+presence of the marked decay of Protestantism as a positive creed, the
+Protestant powers of Europe may, perhaps, patch up some kind of
+reconciliation with the old spiritual organisation which was shattered
+in the sixteenth century, and has since shown no unwillingness to adapt
+itself to modern forms of thought. The Olympian gods survived for seven
+centuries after Aristophanes with the help of allegory and 'economy.'
+The Church of Rome may survive as long after Calvin and Luther. Carlyle
+mocked at the possibility when I ventured to say so to him. Yet Carlyle
+seemed to think that the mass was the only form of faith in Europe which
+had any sincerity remaining in it.
+
+A religion, at any rate, which will keep the West Indian blacks from
+falling into devil worship is still to seek. Constitutions and belief in
+progress may satisfy Europe, but will not answer in Jamaica. In spite of
+the priests, child murder and cannibalism have reappeared in Hayti; but
+without them things might have been worse than they are, and the
+preservation of white authority and influence in any form at all may be
+better than none.
+
+White authority and white influence may, however, still be preserved in
+a nobler and better way. Slavery was a survival from a social order
+which had passed away, and slavery could not be continued. It does not
+follow that _per se_ it was a crime. The negroes who were sold to the
+dealers in the African factories were most of them either slaves already
+to worse masters or were _servi_, servants in the old meaning of the
+word, prisoners of war, or else criminals, _servati_ or reserved from
+death. They would otherwise have been killed; and since the slave trade
+has been abolished are again killed in the too celebrated 'customs.' The
+slave trade was a crime when the chiefs made war on each other for the
+sake of captives whom they could turn into money. In many instances,
+perhaps in most, it was innocent and even beneficent. Nature has made us
+unequal, and Acts of Parliament cannot make us equal. Some must lead and
+some must follow, and the question is only of degree and kind. For
+myself, I would rather be the slave of a Shakespeare or a Burghley than
+the slave of a majority in the House of Commons or the slave of my own
+folly. Slavery is gone, with all that belonged to it; but it will be an
+ill day for mankind if no one is to be compelled any more to obey those
+who are wiser than himself, and each of us is to do only what is right
+in our own eyes. There may be authority, yet not slavery: a soldier is
+not a slave, a sailor is not a slave, a child is not a slave, a wife is
+not a slave; yet they may not live by their own wills or emancipate
+themselves at their own pleasure from positions in which nature has
+placed them, or into which they have themselves voluntarily entered. The
+negroes of the West Indies are children, and not yet disobedient
+children. They have their dreams, but for the present they are dreams
+only. If you enforce self-government upon them when they are not asking
+for it, you may turn the dream into a reality, and wilfully drive them
+back into the condition of their ancestors, from which the slave trade
+was the beginning of their emancipation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+    The Church of England in Jamaica--Drive to Castleton--Botanical
+    Gardens--Picnic by the river--Black women--Ball at Government
+    House--Mandeville--Miss Roy--Country society--Manners--American
+    visitors--A Moravian missionary--The modern Radical creed.
+
+
+If I have spoken without enthusiasm of the working of the Church of
+England among the negroes, I have not meant to be disrespectful. As I
+lay awake at daybreak on the Sunday morning after my arrival, I heard
+the sound of church bells, not Catholic bells as at Dominica, but good
+old English chimes. The Church is disestablished so far as law can
+disestablish it, but, as in Barbadoes, the royal arms still stand over
+the arches of the chancel. Introduced with the English conquest, it has
+been identified with the ruling order of English gentry, respectable,
+harmless, and useful, to those immediately connected with it.
+
+The parochial system, as in Barbadoes also, was spread over the island.
+Each parish had its church, its parsonage and its school, its fonts
+where the white children were baptised--in spite of my Jesuit, I shall
+hope not whites only; and its graveyard, where in time they were laid
+to rest. With their quiet Sunday services of the old type the country
+districts were exact reproductions of English country villages. The
+church whose bells I had heard was of the more fashionable suburban
+type, standing in a central situation halfway to Kingston. The service
+was at the old English hour of eleven. We drove to it in the orthodox
+fashion, with our prayer books and Sunday costumes, the Colonel in
+uniform. The gentry of the neighbourhood are antiquated in their habits,
+and to go to church on Sunday is still regarded as a simple duty. A
+dozen carriages stood under the shade at the doors. The congregation was
+upper middle-class English of the best sort, and was large, though
+almost wholly white. White tablets as at Port Royal covered the walls,
+with familiar English names upon them. But for the heat I could have
+imagined myself at home. There were no Aaron Bangs to be seen, or Paul
+Gelids, with the rough sense, the vigour, the energy, and roystering
+light-heartedness of our grandfathers. The faces of the men were serious
+and thoughtful, with the shadow resting on them of an uncertain future.
+They are good Churchmen still, and walk on in the old paths, wherever
+those paths may lead. They are old-fashioned and slow to change, and are
+perhaps belated in an eddy of the great stream of progress; but they
+were pleasant to see and pleasant to talk to. After service there were
+the usual shakings of hands among friends outside; arrangements were
+made for amusements and expeditions in which I was invited to
+join--which were got up, perhaps, for my own entertainment. I was to be
+taken to the sights of the neighbourhood. I was to see this; I was to
+see that; above all, I must see the Peak of the Blue Mountains. The peak
+itself I could see better from below, for there it stood, never moving,
+between seven and eight thousand feet high. But I had had mountain
+riding enough and was allowed to plead my age and infirmities. It was
+arranged finally that I should be driven the next day to Castleton,
+seventeen miles off over a mountain pass, to see the Botanical Gardens.
+
+Accordingly early on the following morning we set off; two carriages
+full of us; Mr. M----, a new friend lately made, but I hope long to be
+preserved, on the box of his four-in-hand. The road was as good as all
+roads are in Jamaica and Barbadoes, and more cannot be said in their
+favour. Forest trees made a roof over our heads as we climbed to the
+crest of the ridge. Thence we descended the side of a long valley, a
+stream running below us which gradually grew into a river. We passed
+through all varieties of cultivation. On the high ground there was a
+large sugar plantation, worked by coolies, the first whom I had seen in
+Jamaica. In the alluvial meadows on the river-side were tobacco fields,
+cleanly and carefully kept, belonging to my Spanish friend in Kingston,
+and only too rich in leaves. There were sago too, and ginger, and
+tamarinds, and cocoa, and coffee, and cocoa-nut palms. On the hill-sides
+were the garden farms of the blacks, which were something to see and
+remember. They receive from the Government at an almost nominal quit
+rent an acre or two of uncleared forest. To this as the first step they
+set light; at twenty different spots we saw their fires blazing. To
+clear an acre they waste the timber on half a dozen or a dozen. They
+plant their yams and sweet potatoes among the ashes and grow crops there
+till the soil is exhausted. Then they move on to another, which they
+treat with the same recklessness, leaving the first to go back to scrub.
+Since the Chinaman burnt his house to roast his pig, such waste was
+never seen. The male proprietors were lounging about smoking. Their
+wives, as it was market day, were tramping into Kingston with their
+baskets on their head. We met them literally in thousands, all merry and
+light-hearted, their little ones with little baskets trudging at their
+side. Of the lords of the creation we saw, perhaps, one to each hundred
+women, and he would be riding on mule or donkey, pipe in mouth and
+carrying nothing. He would be generally sulky too, while the ladies,
+young and old, had all a civil word for us and curtsied under their
+loads. Decidedly if there is to be a black constitution I would give the
+votes only to the women.
+
+We reached Castleton at last. It was in a hot damp valley, said to be a
+nest of yellow fever. The gardens slightly disappointed me; my
+expectations had been too much raised by Trinidad. There were lovely
+flowers of course, and curious plants and trees. Every known palm is
+growing there. They try hard to grow roses, and they say that they
+succeed. The roses were not in flower, and I could not judge. Bye the
+familiar names were all there, and others which were not familiar, the
+newest importations called after the great ladies of the day. I saw one
+labelled Mabel Morrison. To find the daughter of an ancient college
+friend and contemporary giving name to a plant in the New World makes
+one feel dreadfully old; but I expected to find, and I did not find,
+some useful practical horticulture going on. They ought, for instance,
+to have been trying experiments with orange trees. The orange in Jamaica
+is left to nature. They plant the seeds, and leave the result to chance.
+They neither bud nor graft, and go upon the hypothesis that as the seed
+is, so will be the tree which comes of it. Yet even thus, so favourable
+is the soil and climate that the oranges of Jamaica are prized above all
+others which are sold in the American market. With skill and knowledge
+and good selection they might produce the finest in the world. 'There
+are dollars in that island, sir,' as an American gentleman said to me,
+'if they look for them in the right way.' Nothing of this kind was going
+on at Castleton; so much the worse, but perhaps things will mend
+by-and-by. I was consoled partly by another specimen of the _Amherstia
+nobilis_. It was not so large as those which I had seen at Trinidad, but
+it was in splendid bloom, and certainly is the most gorgeous flowering
+tree which the world contains.
+
+Wild nature also was luxuriantly beautiful. We picnicked by the river,
+which here is a full rushing stream with pools that would have held a
+salmon, and did hold abundant mullet. We found a bower formed by a
+twisted vine, so thick that neither sun nor rain could penetrate the
+roof. The floor was of shining shingle, and the air breathed cool from
+off the water. It was a spot which nymph or naiad may haunt hereafter,
+when nymphs are born again in the new era. The creatures of imagination
+have fled away from modern enlightenment. But we were a pleasant party
+of human beings, lying about under the shade upon the pebbles. We had
+brought a blanket of ice with us, and the champagne was manufactured
+into cup by choicest West Indian skill. Figures fall unconsciously at
+such moments into attitudes which would satisfy a painter, and the
+scenes remain upon the memory like some fine finished work of art. We
+had done with the gardens, and I remember no more of them except that I
+saw a mongoose stalking a flock of turkeys. The young ones and their
+mother gathered together and showed fight. The old cock, after the
+manner of the male animal, seemed chiefly anxious for his own skin,
+though a little ashamed at the same time, as if conscious that more was
+expected of him. On the way back we met the returning stream of women
+and children, loaded heavily as before and with the same elastic step.
+In spite of all that is incorrect about them, the women are the material
+to work upon; and if they saw that we were in earnest, they would lend
+their help to make their husbands bestir themselves. A Dutch gentleman
+once boasted to me of the wonderful prosperity of Java, where everybody
+was well off and everybody was industrious. He so insisted upon the
+industry that I ask him how it was brought about. Were the people
+slaves? 'Oh,' he cried, as if shocked, 'God forbid that a Christian
+nation should be so wicked as to keep slaves!' 'Do they never wish to be
+idle?' I asked. 'Never, never,' he said; 'no, no: we do not permit
+anyone to be idle.'
+
+My stay with Colonel J---- was drawing to a close; one great festivity
+was impending, which I wished to avoid; but the gracious lady insisted
+that I must remain. There was to be a ball, and all the neighbourhood
+was invited. Pretty it was sure to be. Windows and doors, galleries and
+passages, would be all open. The gardens would be lighted up, and the
+guests could spread as they pleased. Brilliant it all was; more
+brilliant than you would see in our larger colonies. A ball in Sydney or
+Melbourne is like a ball in the north of England or in New York. There
+are the young men in black coats, and there are brightly dressed young
+ladies for them to dance with. The chaperons sit along the walls; the
+elderly gentlemen withdraw to the card room. Here all was different. The
+black coats in the ball at Jamaica were on the backs of old or
+middle-aged men, and, except Government officials, there was hardly a
+young man present in civilian dress. The rooms glittered with scarlet
+and white and blue and gold lace. The officers were there from the
+garrison and the fleet; but of men of business, of professional men,
+merchants, planters, lawyers, &c. there were only those who had grown up
+to middle age in the island, whose fortunes, bad or good, were bound up
+with it. When these were gone, it seemed as if there would be no one to
+succeed them. The coveted heirs of great estates were no longer to be
+found for mothers to angle after. The trades and professions in Kingston
+had ceased to offer the prospect of an income to younger brothers who
+had to make their own way. For 250 years generations of Englishmen had
+followed one upon another, but we seemed to have come to the last. Of
+gentlemen unconnected with the public service, under thirty-five or
+forty, there were few to be seen, they were seeking their fortunes
+elsewhere. The English interest in Jamaica is still a considerable
+thing. The English flag flies over Government House, and no one so far
+wishes to remove it. But the British population is scanty and refuses to
+grow. Ships and regiments come and go, and officers and State employés
+make what appears to be a brilliant society. But it is in appearance
+only. The station is no longer a favourite one. They are gone, those
+pleasant gentry whose country houses were the paradise of _middies_
+sixty years ago. All is changed, even to the officers themselves. The
+drawling ensign of our boyhood, brave as a lion in the field, and in the
+mess room or the drawing room an idiot, appears also to be dead as the
+dodo. Those that one meets now are intelligent and superior men--no
+trace of the frivolous sort left. Is it the effect of the abolition of
+purchase, and competitive examinations? Is it that the times themselves
+are growing serious, and even the most empty-headed feel that this is no
+season for levity?
+
+I had seen what Jamaican life was like in the upper spheres, and I had
+heard the opinions that were current in them; but I wished to see other
+parts of the country. I wished to see a class of people who were farther
+from headquarters, and who might not all sing to the same note. I
+determined to start off on an independent cruise of my own. In the
+centre of the island, two thousand feet above the sea, it was reported
+to me that I should find a delightful village called Mandeville, after
+some Duke of Manchester who governed Jamaica a hundred years ago. The
+scenery was said to have a special charm of its own, the air to be
+exquisitely pure, the land to be well cultivated. Village manners were
+to be found there of the old-fashioned sort, and a lodging house and
+landlady of unequalled merit. There was a railway for the first fifty
+miles. The line at starting crosses the mangrove swamps at the mouth of
+the Cobre river. You see the trees standing in the water on each side of
+the road. Rising slowly, it hardens into level grazing ground, stocked
+with cattle and studded with mangoes and cedars. You pass Spanish Town,
+of which only the roofs of the old State buildings are visible from the
+carriages. Sugar estates follow, some of which are still in cultivation,
+while ruined mills and fallen aqueducts show where others once had been.
+The scenery becomes more broken as you begin to ascend into the hills.
+River beds, dry when I saw them, but powerful torrents in the rainy
+season, are crossed by picturesque bridges. You come to the forest,
+where the squatters were at their usual work, burning out their yam
+patches. Columns of white smoke were rising all about us, yet so
+abundant the timber and so rapid the work of restoration when the
+devastating swarm has passed, that in this direction they have as yet
+made no marked impression, and the forest stretches as far as eye can
+reach. The glens grew more narrow and the trees grander as the train
+proceeded. After two hours we arrived at the present terminus, an inland
+town with the singular name of Porus. No explanation is given of it in
+the local handbooks; but I find a Porus among the companions of
+Columbus, and it is probably an interesting relic of the first Spanish
+occupation. The railway had brought business. Mule carts were going
+about, and waggons; omnibuses stood in the yards, and there were stores
+of various kinds. But it was all black. There was not a white face to be
+seen after we left the station. One of my companions in the train was a
+Cuban engineer, now employed upon the line; a refugee, I conjectured,
+belonging to the beaten party in the late rebellion, from the bitterness
+with which he spoke of the Spanish administration.
+
+Porus is many hundred feet above the sea, in a hollow where three
+valleys meet. Mandeville, to which I was bound, was ten miles farther
+on, the road ascending all the way. A carriage was waiting for me, but
+too small for my luggage. A black boy offered to carry up a heavy bag
+for a shilling, a feat which he faithfully and expeditiously performed.
+After climbing a steep hill, we came out upon a rich undulating plateau,
+long cleared and cultivated; green fields with cows feeding on them;
+pretty houses standing in gardens; a Wesleyan station; a Moravian
+station, with chapels and parsonages. The red soil was mixed with
+crumbling lumps of white coral, a ready-made and inexhaustible supply of
+manure. Great silk-cotton trees towered up in lonely magnificence, the
+home of the dreaded Jumbi--woe to the wretch who strikes an axe into
+those sacred stems! Almonds, cedars, mangoes, gum trees spread their
+shade over the road. Orange trees were everywhere; sometimes in
+orchards, sometimes growing at their own wild will in hedges and copse
+and thicket. Finally, at the outskirts of a perfectly English village,
+we brought up at the door of the lodging house kept by the justly
+celebrated Miss Roy. The house, or cottage, stood at the roadside, at
+the top of a steep flight of steps; a rambling one-story building, from
+which rooms, creeper-covered, had been thrown out as they were wanted.
+There was the universal green verandah into which they all opened; and
+the windows looked out on a large common, used of old, and perhaps now,
+as a race-course; on wooded slopes, with sunny mansions dropped here and
+there in openings among the woods; on farm buildings at intervals in
+the distance, surrounded by clumps of palms; and beyond them ranges of
+mountains almost as blue as the sky against which they were faintly
+visible. Miss Roy, the lady and mistress of the establishment, came out
+to meet me: middle-aged, with a touch of the black blood, but with a
+face in which one places instant and sure dependence, shrewd, quiet,
+sensible, and entirely good-humoured. A white-haired brother, somewhat
+infirm and older than she, glided behind her as her shadow. She attends
+to the business. His pride is in his garden, where he has gathered a
+collection of rare plants in admired disorder; the night-blowing cereus
+hanging carelessly over a broken paling, and a palm, unique of its kind,
+waving behind it. At the back were orange trees and plantains and coffee
+bushes, with long-tailed humming birds flitting about their nests among
+the branches. All kinds of delicacies, from fruit and preserves to
+coffee, Miss Roy grows for her visitors on her own soil, and prepares
+from the first stage to the last with her own cunning hands.
+
+Having made acquaintance with the mistress, I strolled out to look about
+me. After walking up the road for a quarter of a mile, I found myself in
+an exact reproduction of a Warwickshire hamlet before the days of
+railways and brick chimneys. There were no elms to be sure--there were
+silk cotton-trees and mangoes where the elms should have been; but there
+were the boys playing cricket, and a market house, and a modest inn, and
+a shop or two, and a blacksmith's forge with a shed where horses were
+standing waiting their turn to be shod. Across the green was the parish
+church, with its three aisles and low square tower, in which hung an old
+peal of bells. Parish stocks I did not observe, though, perhaps, I might
+have had I looked for them; but there was a schoolhouse and parsonage,
+and, withdrawn at a distance as of superior dignity, what had once
+perhaps been the squire's mansion, when squire and such-like had been
+the natural growth of the country. It was as if a branch of the old tree
+had been carried over and planted there ages ago, and as if it had taken
+root and become an exact resemblance of the parent stock. The people
+had black faces; but even they, too, had shaped their manners on the
+old English models. The men touched their hats respectfully (as they
+eminently did not in Kingston and its environs). The women smiled and
+curtsied, and the children looked shy when one spoke to them. The name
+of slavery is a horror to us; but there must have been something human
+and kindly about it, too, when it left upon the character the marks of
+courtesy and good breeding. I wish I could say as much for the effect of
+modern ideas. The negroes in Mandeville were, perhaps, as happy in their
+old condition as they have been since their glorious emancipation, and
+some of them to this day speak regretfully of a time when children did
+not die of neglect; when the sick and the aged were taken care of, and
+the strong and healthy were, at least, as well looked after as their
+owner's cattle.
+
+Slavery could not last; but neither can the condition last which has
+followed it. The equality between black and white is a forced equality
+and not a real one, and nature in the long run has her way, and
+readjusts in their proper relations what theorists and philanthropists
+have disturbed.
+
+I was not Miss Roy's only guest. An American lady and gentleman were
+staying there; he, I believe, for his health, as the climate of
+Mandeville is celebrated. Americans, whatever may be their faults, are
+always unaffected; and so are easy to get on with. We dined together,
+and talked of the place and its inhabitants. They had been struck like
+myself with the manners of the peasants, which were something entirely
+new to them. The lady said, and without expressing the least
+disapproval, that she had fallen in with an old slave who told her that,
+thanks to God, he had seen good times. 'He was bred in a good home, with
+a master and mistress belonging to him. What the master and mistress had
+the slaves had, and there was no difference; and his master used to
+visit at King's House, and his men were all proud of him. Yes, glory be
+to God, he had seen good times.'
+
+In the evening we sat out in the verandah in the soft sweet air, the
+husband and I smoking our cigars, and the lady not minding it. They had
+come to Mandeville, as we go to Italy, to escape the New England winter.
+They had meant to stay but a few days; they found it so charming that
+they had stayed for many weeks. We talked on till twilight became night,
+and then appeared a show of natural pyrotechnics which beat anything of
+the kind which I had ever seen or read of: fireflies as large as
+cockchafers flitting round us among the leaves of the creepers, with two
+long antennæ, at the point of each of which hangs out a blazing
+lanthorn. The unimaginative colonists call them gig-lamps. Had
+Shakespeare ever heard of them, they would have played round Ferdinand
+and Miranda in Prospero's cave, and would have borne a fairer name. The
+light is bluish-green, like a glowworm's, but immeasurably brighter; and
+we could trace them far away glancing like spirits over the meadows.
+
+I could not wonder that my new friends had been charmed with the place.
+The air was exquisitely pure; the temperature ten degrees below that of
+Kingston, never oppressively hot and never cold; the forest scenery as
+beautiful as at Arden; and Miss Roy's provision for us, rooms, beds,
+breakfasts, dinners, absolutely without fault. If ever there was an
+inspired coffee maker, Miss Roy was that person. The glory of Mandeville
+is in its oranges. The worst orange I ate in Jamaica was better than the
+best I ever ate in Europe, and the best oranges of Jamaica are the
+oranges of Mandeville. New York has found out their merits. One
+gentleman alone sent twenty thousand boxes to New York last year,
+clearing a dollar on each box; and this, as I said just now, when Nature
+is left to produce what she pleases, and art has not begun to help her.
+Fortunes larger than were ever made by sugar wait for any man, and the
+blessings of the world along with it, who will set himself to work at
+orange growing with skill and science in a place where heat will not
+wither the trees, nor frosts, as in Florida, bite off the blossoms.
+Yellow fever was never heard of there, nor any dangerous epidemic, nor
+snake nor other poisonous reptile. The droughts which parch the lowlands
+are unknown, for an even rain falls all the year and the soil is always
+moist. I inquired with wonder why the unfortunate soldiers who were
+perched among the crags at Newcastle were not at Mandeville instead. I
+was told that water was the difficulty; that there was no river or
+running stream there, and that it had to be drawn from wells or
+collected into cisterns. One must applaud the caution which the
+authorities have at last displayed; but cattle thrive at Mandeville, and
+sheep, and black men and women in luxuriant abundance. One would like to
+know that the general who sold the Newcastle estate to the Government
+was not the same person who was allowed to report as to the capabilities
+of a spot which, to the common observer, would seem as perfectly adapted
+for the purpose as the other is detestable.
+
+A few English families were scattered about the neighbourhood, among
+whom I made a passing acquaintance. They had a lawn-tennis club in the
+village, which met once a week; they drove in with their pony carriages;
+a lady made tea under the trees; they had amusements and pleasant
+society which cost nothing. They were not rich; but they were courteous,
+simple, frank, and cordial.
+
+Mandeville is the centre of a district which all resembles it in
+character and extends for many miles. It is famous for its cattle as
+well as for its fruit, and has excellent grazing grounds. Mr. ----, an
+officer of police, took me round with him one morning. It was the old
+story. Though there were still a few white proprietors left, they were
+growing fewer, and the blacks were multiplying upon them. The smoke of
+their clearances showed where they were at work. Many of them are
+becoming well-to-do. We met them on the roads with their carts and
+mules; the young ones armed, too, in some instances with good
+double-barrelled muzzle-loaders. There is no game to shoot, but to have
+a gun raises them in their own estimation, and they like to be prepared
+for contingencies. Mr. ---- had a troublesome place of it. The negro
+peasantry were good-humoured, he said, but not universally honest. They
+stole cattle, and would not give evidence against each other. If brought
+into court, they held a pebble in their mouths, being under the
+impression that when they were so provided perjury did not count. Their
+education was only skin-deep, and the schools which the Government
+provided had not touched their characters at all. Mr. ----'s duties
+brought him in contact with the unfavourable specimens. I received a far
+pleasanter impression from a Moravian minister, who called on me with a
+friend who had lately taken a farm. I was particularly glad to see this
+gentleman, for of the Moravians everyone had spoken well to me. He was
+not the least enthusiastic about his poor black sheep, but he said that,
+if they were not better than the average English labourers, he did not
+think them worse. They were called idle. They would work well enough if
+they had fair wages, and if the wages were paid regularly; but what
+could be expected when women servants had but three shillings a week and
+'found themselves,' when the men had but a shilling a day and the pay
+was kept in arrear, in order that, if they came late to work, or if they
+came irregularly, it might be kept back or cut down to what the employer
+chose to give? Under such conditions any man of any colour would prefer
+to work for himself if he had a garden, or would be idle if he had none.
+'Living' costs next to nothing either to them or their families. But the
+minister said, and his friend confirmed it by his own experience, that
+these same fellows would work regularly and faithfully for any master
+whom they personally knew and could rely upon, and no Englishman coming
+to settle there need be afraid of failing for want of labour, if he had
+sense and energy, and did not prefer to lie down and groan. The blacks,
+my friends said, were kindly hearted, respectful, and well-disposed, but
+they were children; easily excited, easily tempted, easily misled, and
+totally unfit for self-government. If we wished to ruin them altogether,
+we should persevere in the course to which, they were sorry to hear, we
+were so inclined. The real want in the island was of intelligent
+Englishmen to employ and direct them, and Englishmen were going away so
+fast that they feared there would soon be none of them left. This was
+the opinion of two moderate and excellent men, whose natural and
+professional prejudices were all on the black man's side.
+
+It was confirmed both in its favourable and unfavourable aspects by
+another impartial authority. My first American acquaintances had gone,
+but their rooms were occupied by another of their countrymen, a specimen
+of a class of whom more will be heard in Jamaica if the fates are kind.
+The English in the island cast in their lot with sugar, and if sugar is
+depressed they lose heart. Americans keep their 'eyes skinned,' as they
+call it, to look out for other openings. They have discovered, as I
+said, 'that there are dollars in Jamaica,' and one has come, and has set
+up a trade in plantains, in which he is making a fortune; and this
+gentleman has perceived that there were 'dollars in the bamboo,' and for
+bamboos there was no place in the world like the West Indies. He came to
+Jamaica, brought machines to clear the fibre, tried to make ropes of it,
+to make canvas, paper, and I know not what. I think he told me that he
+had spent a quarter of a million dollars, instead of finding any, before
+he hit upon a paying use for it. The bamboo fibre has certain elastic
+incompressible properties in which it is without a rival. He forms it
+into 'packing' for the boxes of the wheels of railway carriages, where
+it holds oil like a sponge, never hardens, and never wears out. He sends
+the packing over the world, and the demand grows as it is tried. He has
+set up a factory, thirty miles from Mandeville, in the valley of the
+Black River. He has a large body of the negroes working for him who are
+said to be so unmanageable. He, like Dr. Nicholls in Dominica, does not
+find them unmanageable at all. They never leave him; they work for him
+from year to year as regularly as if they were slaves. They have their
+small faults, but he does not magnify them into vices. They are attached
+to him with the old-fashioned affection which good labourers always feel
+for employers whom they respect, and dismissal is dreaded as the
+severest of punishments. In the course of time he thought that they
+might become fit for political privileges. To confer such privileges on
+them at present would fling Jamaica back into absolute barbarism.
+
+I said I wished that more of his countrymen would come and settle in
+Jamaica as he had done and a few others already. American energy would
+be like new blood in the veins of the poor island. He answered that many
+would probably come if they could be satisfied that there would be no
+more political experimenting; but they would not risk their capital if
+there was a chance of a black parliament.
+
+If we choose to make Jamaica into a Hayti, we need not look for
+Americans down that way.
+
+Let us hope that enthusiasm for constitutions will for once moderate its
+ardour. The black race has suffered enough at our hands. They have been
+sacrificed to slavery; are they to be sacrificed again to a dream or a
+doctrine? There has a new creed risen, while the old creed is failing.
+It has its priests and its prophets, its formulas and its articles of
+belief.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold
+the Radical faith.
+
+And the Radical faith is this: all men are equal, and the voice of one
+is as the voice of another.
+
+And whereas one man is wise and another foolish, and one is upright and
+another crooked, yet in this suffrage none is greater or less than
+another. The vote is equal, the dignity co-eternal.
+
+Truth is one and right is one; yet right is right because the majority
+so declare it, and justice is justice because the majority so declare
+it.
+
+And if the majority affirm one thing to-day, that is right; and if the
+majority affirm the opposite to-morrow, that is right.
+
+Because the will of the majority is the ground of right and there is no
+other, &c. &c. &c.
+
+This is the Radical faith, which, except every man do keep whole and
+undefiled, he is a Tory and an enemy of the State, and without doubt
+shall perish everlastingly.
+
+Once the Radical was a Liberal and went for toleration and freedom of
+opinion. He has become a believer now. He is right and you are wrong,
+and if you do not agree with him you are a fool, and you are wicked
+besides. Voltaire says that atheism and superstition are the two poles
+of intellectual disease. Superstition he thinks the worse of the two.
+The atheist is merely mistaken, and can be cured if you show him that he
+is wrong. The fanatic can never be cured. Yet each alike, if he
+prevails, will destroy human society. What would Voltaire have expected
+for poor mankind had he seen both the precious qualities combined in
+this new _Symbolum Fidei_?
+
+A creed is not a reasoned judgment based upon experience and insight. It
+is a child of imagination and passion. Like an organised thing, it has
+its appointed period and then dies. You cannot argue it out of
+existence. It works for good; it works for evil; but work it will while
+the life is in it. Faith, we are told, is not contradictory to reason,
+but is above reason. Whether reason or faith sees truer, events will
+prove.
+
+One more observation this American gentleman made to me. He was speaking
+of the want of spirit and of the despondency of the West Indian whites.
+'I never knew, sir,' he said, 'any good come of desponding men. If you
+intend to strike a mark, you had better believe that you can strike it.
+No one ever hit anything if he thought that he was most likely to miss
+it. You must take a cheerful view of things, or you will have no success
+in this world.'
+
+'Tyne heart tyne a',' the Scotch proverb says. The Anglo-West Indians
+are tyning heart, and that is the worst feature about them. They can get
+no help except in themselves, and they can help themselves after all if
+we allow them fair play. The Americans will not touch them politically,
+but they will trade with them; they will bring their capital and their
+skill and knowledge among them, and make the islands richer and more
+prosperous than ever they were--on one condition: they will risk nothing
+in such enterprises as long as the shadow hangs over them of a possible
+government by a black majority. Let it suffice to have created one
+Ireland without deliberately manufacturing a second.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+    Jamaican hospitality--Cherry Garden--George William Gordon--The
+    Gordon riots--Governor Eyre--A dispute and its
+    consequences--Jamaican country-house society--Modern speculation--A
+    Spanish fable--Port Royal--The commodore--Naval theatricals--The
+    modern sailor.
+
+
+The surviving representatives of the Jamaican gentry are as hospitable
+as their fathers and grandfathers used to be. An English visitor who
+wishes to see the island is not allowed to take his chance at
+hotels--where, indeed, his chance would be a bad one. A single
+acquaintance is enough to start with. He is sent on with letters of
+introduction from one house to another, and is assured of a favourable
+reception. I was treated as kindly as any stranger would be, and that
+was as kindly as possible. But friends do not ask us to stay with them
+that their portraits may be drawn in the traveller's journals; and I
+mention no one who was thus good to me, unless some general interest
+attaches either to himself or his residence. Such interest does,
+however, attach to a spot where, after leaving Mandeville, I passed a
+few days. The present owner of it was the chief manager of the Kingston
+branch of the Colonial Bank: a clever accomplished man of business, who
+understood the financial condition of the West Indies better perhaps
+than any other man living. He was a botanist besides; he had a fine
+collection of curious plants which were famous in the island; and was
+otherwise a gentleman of the highest standing and reputation. His lady
+was one of the old island aristocracy--high-bred, cultivated, an
+accomplished artist; a person who would have shone anywhere and in any
+circle, and was, therefore, contented to be herself, and indifferent
+whether she shone or not. A visit in such a family was likely to be
+instructive, and was sure to be agreeable; and on these grounds alone I
+should have accepted gratefully the opportunity of knowing them better
+which they kindly made for me by an invitation to stay with them. But
+their place, which was called Cherry Garden, and which I had seen from
+the grounds at Government House, had a further importance of its own in
+having been the home of the unfortunate George William Gordon.
+
+The disturbances with which Mr. Gordon was connected, and for his share
+in which he was executed, are so recent and so notorious that I need
+give no detailed account of them, though, of course, I looked into the
+history again and listened to all that I could hear about it. Though I
+had taken no part in Mr. Eyre's defence, I was one of those who thought
+from the first that Mr. Eyre had been unworthily sacrificed to public
+clamour. Had the agitation in Jamaica spread, and taken the form which
+it easily might have taken, he would have been blamed as keenly by one
+half the world if he had done nothing to check it as he was blamed, in
+fact, by the other for too much energy. Carlyle used to say that it was
+as if, when a ship had been on fire, and the captain by skill and
+promptitude had put the fire out, his owner were to say to him, 'Sir,
+you poured too much water down the hold and damaged the cargo.' The
+captain would answer, 'Yes, sir, but I have saved your ship.' This was
+the view which I carried with me to Jamaica, and I have brought it back
+with me the same in essentials, though qualified by clearer perceptions
+of the real nature of the situation.
+
+Something of a very similar kind had happened in Natal just before I
+visited that colony in 1874. I had seen the whites there hardly
+recovering from a panic in which a common police case had been magnified
+by fear into the beginning of an insurrection. Langalibalele, a Caffre
+chief within the British dominions, had been insubordinate. He had been
+sent for to Maritzberg, and had invented excuses for disobedience to a
+lawful order. The whites believed at once that there was to be a general
+Caffre rebellion in which they would all be murdered. They resolved to
+be beforehand with it. They carried fire and sword through two
+considerable tribes. At first they thought that they had covered
+themselves with glory; calmer reflection taught many of them that
+perhaps they had been too hasty, and that Langalibalele had never
+intended to rebel at all. The Jamaican disturbance was of a similar
+kind. Mr. Gordon had given less provocation than the Caffre chief, but
+the circumstances were analogous, and the actual danger was probably
+greater. Jamaica had then constitutional, though not what is called
+responsible, government. The executive power remained with the Crown.
+There had been differences of opinion between the governor and the
+Assembly. Gordon, a man of colour, was a prominent member of the
+opposition. He had called public meetings of the blacks in a distant
+part of the island, and was endeavouring to bring the pressure of public
+opinion on the opposition side. Imprudent as such a step might have been
+among an ignorant and excitable population, where whites and blacks were
+so unequal in numbers, and where they knew so little of each other, Mr.
+Gordon was not going beyond what in constitutional theory he was legally
+entitled to do; nor was his language on the platform, though violent and
+inflammatory, any more so than what we listen to patiently at home.
+Under a popular constitution the people are sovereign; the members of
+the assemblies are popular delegates; and when there is a diversion of
+opinion any man has a right to call the constituencies to express their
+sentiments. If stones were thrown at the police and seditious cries were
+raised, it was no more than might be reasonably expected.
+
+We at home can be calm on such occasions because we know that there is
+no real danger, and that the law is strong enough to assert itself. In
+Jamaica a few thousand white people were living in the middle of negroes
+forty times their number--once their slaves, now raised to be their
+political equals--each regarding the other on the least provocation with
+resentment and suspicion. In England the massacre in Hayti is a
+half-forgotten story. Not one person in a thousand of those who
+clamoured for the prosecution of Governor Eyre had probably ever heard
+of it. In Jamaica it is ever present in the minds of the Europeans as a
+frightful evidence of what the negroes are capable when roused to
+frenzy. The French planters had done nothing particularly cruel to
+deserve their animosity, and were as well regarded by their slaves as
+ever we had been in the English islands. Yet in a fever of political
+excitement, and as a reward for the decree of the Paris Revolutionary
+Government, which declared them free, they allowed the liberty which was
+to have elevated them to the white man's level to turn them into devils;
+and they massacred the whole of the French inhabitants. It was
+inevitable that when the volcano in Jamaica began to show symptoms of
+similar activity the whites residing there should be unable to look on
+with the calmness which we, from thousands of miles away, unreasonably
+expected of them. They imagined their houses in flames, and themselves
+and their families at the mercy of a furious mob. No personal relation
+between the two races has grown up to take the place of slavery. The
+white gentry have blacks for labourers, blacks for domestic servants,
+yet as a rule (though, of course, there are exceptions) they have no
+interest in each other, no esteem nor confidence: therefore any symptom
+of agitation is certain to produce a panic, and panic is always violent.
+
+The blacks who attended Gordon's meetings came armed with guns and
+cutlasses; a party of white volunteers went in consequence to watch
+them, and to keep order if they showed signs of meaning insurrection.
+Stones were thrown; the Riot Act was read, more stones followed, and
+then the volunteers fired, and several persons were killed. Of course
+there was fury. The black mob then actually did rise. They marched about
+that particular district destroying plantations and burning houses. That
+they did so little, and that the flame did not spread, was a proof that
+there was no premeditation of rebellion, no prepared plan of action, no
+previous communication between the different parts of the island with a
+view to any common movement. There was no proof, and there was no
+reason to suppose, that Gordon had intended an armed outbreak. He would
+have been a fool if he had, when constitutional agitation and the weight
+of numbers at his back would have secured him all that he wanted. When
+inflammable materials are brought together, and sparks are flying, you
+cannot equitably distribute the blame or the punishment. Eyre was
+responsible for the safety of the island. He was not a Jamaican. The
+rule in the colonial service is that a governor remains in any colony
+only long enough to begin to understand it. He is then removed to
+another of which he knows nothing. He is therefore absolutely dependent
+in any difficulty upon local advice. When the riots began every white
+man in Jamaica was of one opinion, that unless the fire was stamped out
+promptly they would all be murdered. Being without experience himself,
+it was very difficult for Mr. Eyre to disregard so complete a unanimity.
+I suppose that a perfectly calm and determined man would have seen in
+the unanimity itself the evidence of alarm and imagination. He ought
+perhaps to have relied entirely on the police and the regular troops,
+and to have called in the volunteers. But here again was a difficulty;
+for the police were black, and the West India regiments were black, and
+the Sepoy rebellion was fresh in everybody's memory. He had no time to
+deliberate. He had to act, and to act promptly; and if, relying on his
+own judgment, he had disregarded what everyone round him insisted upon,
+and if mischief had afterwards come of it, the censure which would have
+fallen upon him would have been as severe as it would have been
+deserved. He assumed that the English colonists were right and that a
+general rebellion had begun. They all armed. They formed into companies.
+The disturbed district was placed under martial law, and these
+extemporised regiments, too few in number to be merciful, saw safety
+only in striking terror into the poor wretches. It was in Jamaica as it
+was in Natal afterwards; but we must allow for human nature and not be
+hasty to blame. If the rising at Morant Bay was but the boiling over of
+a pot from the orator of an excited patriot, there was deplorable
+cruelty and violence. But, again, it was all too natural. Men do not
+bear easily to see their late servants on their way to become their
+political masters, and they believe the worst of them because they are
+afraid. A model governor would have rather restrained their ardour than
+encouraged it; but all that can be said against Mr. Eyre (so far as
+regarded the general suppression of the insurgents) is that he acted as
+nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand would have acted in
+his place, and more ought not to be expected of average colonial
+governors.
+
+His treatment of Gordon, the original cause of the disturbance, was more
+questionable. Gordon had returned to his own house, the house where I
+was going, within sight of Eyre's windows. It would have been fair, and
+perhaps right, to arrest him, and right also to bring him to trial, if
+he had committed any offence for which he could be legally punished. So
+strong was the feeling against him that, if every white man in Kingston
+had been empannelled, there would have been a unanimous verdict, and
+they would not have looked too closely into niceties of legal
+construction. Unfortunately it was doubtful whether Gordon had done
+anything which could be construed into a capital crime. He had a right
+to call public meetings together. He had a right to appeal to political
+passions, and to indulge as freely as he pleased in the patriotic
+commonplaces of platforms, provided he did not himself advise or
+encourage a breach of the peace, and this it could not be easily proved
+that he had done. He was, however, the leader of the opposition to the
+Government. The opposition had broken into a riot, and Gordon was guilty
+of having excited the feelings which led to it. The leader could not be
+allowed to escape unpunished while his followers were being shot and
+flogged. The Kingston district where he resided was under the ordinary
+law. Eyre sent him into the district which was under martial law, tried
+him by a military court and hanged him.
+
+The Cabinet at home at first thanked their representative for having
+saved the island. A clamour rose, and they sent out a commission to
+examine into what had happened. The commission reported unfavourably,
+and Eyre was dismissed and ruined. In Jamaica I never heard anyone
+express a doubt on the full propriety of his action. He carried away
+with him the affection and esteem of the whole of the English colonists,
+who believe that he saved them from destruction. In my own opinion the
+fault was not in Mr. Eyre, and was not in the unfortunate Gordon, but in
+those who had insisted on applying a constitutional form of government
+to a country where the population is so unfavourably divided. If the
+numbers of white and black were more nearly equal, the objection would
+be less, for the natural superiority of the white would then assert
+itself without difficulty, and there would be no panics. Where the
+disproportion is so enormous as it is in Jamaica, where intelligence and
+property are in a miserable minority, and a half-reclaimed race of
+savages, cannibals not long ago, and capable, as the state of Hayti
+shows, of reverting to cannibalism again, are living beside them as
+their political equals, such panics arise from the nature of things, and
+will themselves cause the catastrophe from the dread of which they
+spring. Mutual fear and mistrust can lead to nothing in the end but
+violent collisions. The theory of constitutional government is that the
+majority shall rule the minority, and as long as the qualities, moral
+and mental, of the parties are not grossly dissimilar, such an
+arrangement forms a tolerable _modus vivendi_. Where in character, in
+mental force, in energy, in cultivation, there is no equality at all,
+but an inequality which has existed for thousands of years, and is as
+plain to-day as it was in the Egypt of the Pharaohs, to expect that the
+intelligent few will submit to the unintelligent many is to expect what
+has never been found and what never ought to be found. The whites cannot
+be trusted to rule the blacks, but for the blacks to rule the whites is
+a yet grosser anomaly. Were England out of the way, there would be a war
+of extermination between them. England prohibits it, and holds the
+balance in forced equality. England, therefore, so long as the West
+Indies are English, must herself rule, and rule impartially, and so
+acquit herself of her self-chosen responsibilities. Let the colonies
+which are occupied by our own race rule themselves as we rule ourselves.
+The English constituencies have no rights over the constituencies of
+Canada and Australia, for the Canadians and Australians are as well able
+to manage their own affairs as we are to manage ours. If they prefer
+even to elect governors of their own, let them do as they please. The
+link between us is community of blood and interest, and will not part
+over details of administration. But in these other colonies which are
+our own we must accept the facts as they are. Those who will not
+recognise realities are always beaten in the end.
+
+The train from Porus brought us back to Kingston an hour before sunset.
+The evening was lovely, even for Jamaica. The sea breeze had fallen. The
+land breeze had not risen, and the dust lay harmless on road and hedge.
+Cherry Garden, to which I was bound, was but seven miles distant by the
+direct road, so I calculated on a delightful drive which would bring me
+to my destination before dark. So I calculated; but alas! for human
+expectation. I engaged a 'buggy' at the station, with a decent-looking
+conductor, who assured me that he knew the way to Cherry Garden as well
+as to his own door. His horse looked starved and miserable. He insisted
+that there was not another in Kingston that was more than a match for
+it. We set out, and for the first two or three miles we went on well
+enough, conversing amicably upon things in general. But it so happened
+that it was again market day. The road was thronged as before with women
+plodding along with their baskets on their heads, a single male on a
+donkey to each detachment of them, carrying nothing, like an officer
+with a company of soldiers. Foolish indignation rose in me, and I asked
+my friend if he was not ashamed of seeing the poor creatures toiling so
+cruelly, while their lords and masters amused themselves. I appealed to
+his feelings as a man, as if it was likely that he had got any. The
+wretch only laughed. 'Ah, massa,' he said, with his tongue in his cheek,
+'women do women's work, men do men's work--all right.' 'And what is
+men's work?' I asked. Instead of answering he went on, 'Look at they
+women, massa--how they laugh--how happy they be! Nobody more happy than
+black woman, massa.' I would not let him off. I pricked into him, till
+he got excited too, and we argued and contradicted each other, till at
+last the horse, finding he was not attended to, went his own way and
+that was a wrong one. Between Kingston and our destination there is a
+deep sandy flat, overgrown with bush and penetrated in all directions
+with labyrinthine lanes. Into this we had wandered in our quarrels, and
+neither of us knew where we were. The sand was loose; our miserable
+beast was above his fetlocks in it, and was visibly dropping under his
+efforts to drag us along even at a walk. The sun went down. The tropic
+twilight is short. The evening star shone out in the west, and the
+crescent moon over our heads. My man said this and said that; every word
+was a lie, for he had lost his way and would not allow it. We saw a
+light through some trees. I sent him to inquire. We were directed one
+way and another way, every way except the right one. We emerged at last
+upon a hard road of some kind. The stars told me the general direction.
+We came to cottages where the name of Cherry Garden was known, and we
+were told that it was two miles off; but alas! again there were two
+roads to it; a short and good one, and a long and bad one, and they sent
+us by the last. There was a steep hill to climb, for the house is 800
+feet above the sea. The horse could hardly crawl, and my 'nigger' went
+to work to flog him to let off his own ill humour. I had to stop that by
+force, and at last, as it grew too dark to see the road under the trees,
+I got out and walked, leaving him to follow at a foot's pace. The night
+was lovely. I began to think that we should have to camp out after all,
+and that it would be no great hardship.
+
+It was like the gloaming of a June night in England, the daylight in the
+open spots not entirely gone, and mixing softly with the light of moon
+and planet and the flashing of the fireflies. I plodded on mile after
+mile, and Cherry Garden still receded to one mile farther. We came to a
+gate of some consequence. The outline of a large mansion was visible
+with gardens round it. I concluded that we had arrived, and was feeling
+for the latch when the forms of a lady and gentleman appeared against
+the sky who were strolling in the grounds. They directed me still
+upwards, with the mile which never diminished still to be travelled.
+Like myself, our weary animal had gathered hopes from the sight of the
+gate. He had again to drag on as he could. His owner was subdued and
+silent, and obeyed whatever order I gave him. The trees now closed over
+us so thick that I could see nothing. Vainly I repented of my
+unnecessary philanthropy which had been the cause of the mischief; what
+had I to do with black women, or white either for that matter? I had to
+feel the way with my feet and a stick. I came to a place where the lane
+again divided. I tried the nearest turn. I found a trench across it
+three feet deep, which had been cut by a torrent. This was altogether
+beyond the capacity of our unfortunate animal, so I took the other
+boldly, prepared if it proved wrong to bivouac till morning with my
+'nigger,' and go on with my argument. Happily there was no need; we came
+again on a gate which led into a field. There was a drive across it and
+wire fences. Finally lights began to glimmer and dogs to bark: we were
+at the real Cherry Garden at last, and found the whole household alarmed
+for what had become of us. I could not punish my misleader by stinting
+his fare, for I knew that I had only myself to blame. He was an honest
+fellow after all. In the disturbance of my mind I left a rather valuable
+umbrella in his buggy. He discovered it after he had gone, and had grace
+enough to see that it was returned to me.
+
+My entertainers were much amused at the cause of the misadventure,
+perhaps unique of its kind; to address homilies to the black people on
+the treatment of their wives not being the fashion in these parts.
+
+If there are no more Aaron Bangs in Jamaica, there are very charming
+people; as I found when I turned this new leaf in my West Indian
+experience. Mr. M---- could not have taken more pains with me if I had
+been his earliest friend. The chief luxury which he allowed himself in
+his simple life was a good supply of excellent horses. His business took
+him every day to Kingston, but he left me in charge of his family, and I
+had 'a good time,' as the Americans say. The house was large, with fine
+airy rooms, a draught so constantly blowing through it that the candles
+had to be covered with bell glasses; but the draughts in these countries
+are the very breath of life. It had been too dark when I arrived to see
+anything of the surroundings, and the next morning I strolled out to see
+what the place was like. It lies just at the foot of the Blue Mountains,
+where the gradual slope from the sea begins to become steep. The plain
+of Kingston lay stretched before me, with its woods and cornfields and
+villas, the long straggling town, the ships at anchor in the harbour,
+the steamers passing in and out with their long trails of smoke, the
+sand-spit like a thin grey line lying upon the water, as the natural
+breakwater by which the harbour is formed, and beyond it the broad blue
+expanse of the Caribbean Sea. The foreground was like an English park,
+studded over with handsome forest trees and broken by the rains into
+picturesque ravines. Some acres were planted with oranges of the choicer
+sorts, as an experiment to show what Jamaica could do, but they were as
+yet young and had not come into bearing. Round the house were gardens
+where the treasures of our hot-houses were carelessly and lavishly
+scattered. Stephanotis trailed along the railing or climbed over the
+trellis. Oleanders white and pink waved over marble basins, and were
+sprinkled by the spray from spouting fountains. Crotons stood about in
+tubs, not small plants as we know them, but large shrubs; great purple
+or parti-coloured bushes. They have a fancy for crotons in the West
+Indies; I suppose as a change from the monotony of green. I cannot share
+it. A red leaf, except in autumn before it falls, is a kind of monster,
+and I am glad that Nature has made so few of them. In the shade of the
+trees behind the house was a collection of orchids, the most perfect, I
+believe, in the island.
+
+[Illustration: KINGSTON AND HARBOUR FROM CHERRY GARDEN.]
+
+And here Gordon had lived. Here he had been arrested and carried away to
+his death; his crime being that he had dreamt of regenerating the negro
+race by baptising them in the Jordan of English Radicalism. He would
+have brought about nothing but confusion, and have precipitated Jamaica
+prematurely into the black anarchy into which perhaps it is still
+destined to fall. But to hang him was an extreme measure, and, in the
+present state of public opinion, a dangerous one.
+
+One does not associate the sons of darkness with keen perceptions of the
+beautiful. Yet no mortal ever selected a lovelier spot for a residence
+than did Gordon in choosing Cherry Garden. How often had his round dark
+eyes wandered over the scenes at which I was gazing, watched the early
+rays of the sun slanting upwards to the high peaks of the Blue
+Mountains, or the last as he sank in gold and crimson behind the hills
+at Mandeville; watched the great steamers entering or leaving Port
+Royal, and at night the gleam of the lighthouse from among the palm
+trees on the spit. Poor fellow! one felt very sorry for him, and sorry
+for Mr. Eyre, too. The only good that came of it all was the surrender
+of the constitution and the return to Crown government, and this our
+wonderful statesmen are beginning to undo.
+
+No one understood better than Mr. M---- the troubles and dangers of the
+colony, but he was inclined, perhaps by temperament, perhaps by
+knowledge, to take a cheerful view of things. For the present at least
+he did not think that there was anything serious to be feared. The
+finances, of which he had the best means of judging, were in tolerable
+condition. The debt was considerable, but more than half of it was
+represented by a railway. If sugar was languishing, the fruit trade with
+the United States was growing with the liveliest rapidity. Planters and
+merchants were not making fortunes, but business went on. The shares in
+the Colonial Bank were not at a high quotation, but the securities were
+sound, the shareholders got good dividends, and eight and ten per cent.
+was the interest charged on loans. High interest might be a good sign or
+a bad one. Anyway Mr. M---- could not see that there was much to be
+afraid of in Jamaica. There had been bad times before, and they had
+survived notwithstanding. He was a man of business, and talked himself
+little about politics. As it had been, so it would be again.
+
+In his absence at his work I found friends in the neighbourhood who were
+all attention and politeness. One took me to see my acquaintances at the
+camp again. Another drove me about, showed me the house where Scott had
+lived, the author of 'Tom Cringle.' One round in particular left a
+distinct impression. It was through a forest which had once been a
+flourishing sugar estate. Deep among the trees were the ruins of an
+aqueduct which had brought water to the mill, now overgrown and
+crumbling. The time had not been long as we count time in the history of
+nations, but there had been enough for the arches to fall in, the stream
+to return to its native bed, the tropical vegetation to spring up in its
+wild luxuriance and bury in shade the ruins of a past civilisation.
+
+I fell in with interesting persons who talked metaphysics and theology
+with me, though one would not have expected it in Jamaica. In this
+strange age of ours the spiritual atmosphere is more confused than at
+any period during the last eighteen hundred years. Men's hearts are
+failing them for fear, not knowing any longer where to rest. We look
+this way and that way, and catch at one another like drowning men. Go
+where you will, you find the same phenomena. Science grows, and
+observers are adding daily to our knowledge of the nature and structure
+of the material universe, but they tell us nothing, and can tell us
+nothing, of what we most want to know. They cannot tell us what our own
+nature is. They cannot tell us what God is, or what duty is. We had a
+belief once, in which, as in a boat, we floated safely on the unknown
+ocean; but the philosophers and critics have been boring holes in the
+timbers to examine the texture of the wood, and now it leaks at every
+one of them. We have to help ourselves in the best way that we can. Some
+strike out new ideas for themselves, others go back to the seven sages,
+and lay again for themselves the old eggs, which, after laborious
+incubation, will be addled as they were addled before. To my
+metaphysical friends in Jamaica the 'Light of Asia' had been shining
+amidst German dreams, and the moonlight of the Vedas had been
+illuminating the pessimism of Schopenhauer. So it is all round. Mr. ----
+goes to Mount Carmel to listen for communications from Elijah;
+fashionable countesses to the shrine of Our Lady at Lourdes. 'Are you a
+Buddhist?' lisps the young lady in Mayfair to the partner with whom she
+is sitting out at a ball. 'It is so nice,' said a gentleman to me who
+has been since promoted to high office in an unfortunate colony, 'it is
+so nice to talk of such things to pretty girls, and it always ends in
+one way, you know.' Conversations on theology, at least between persons
+of opposite sex, ought to be interdicted by law for everyone under
+forty. But there are questions on which old people may be permitted to
+ask one another what they think, if it only be for mutual comfort in the
+general vacancy. We are born alone, we pass alone into the great
+darkness. When the curtain falls is the play over? or is a new act to
+commence? Are we to start again in a new sphere, carrying with us what
+we have gained in the discipline of our earthly trials? Are we to become
+again as we were before we came into this world, when eternity had not
+yet splintered into time, or the universal being dissolved into
+individual existences? For myself, I have long ceased to speculate on
+these subjects, being convinced that they have no bottom which can be
+reasoned out by the intellect. We are in a world where much can be
+learnt which affects our own and others' earthly welfare, and we had
+better leave the rest alone. Yet one listens and cannot choose but
+sympathise when anxious souls open out to you what is going on within
+them. A Spanish legend, showing with whom these inquiries began and with
+what result, is not without its value.
+
+Jupiter, having made the world, proceeded to make animals to live in it.
+The ass was the earliest created. He looked about him. He looked at
+himself; and, as the habit of asses is, he asked himself what it all
+meant; what it was to be an ass, where did he come from, and what he was
+for? Not being able to discover, he applied to his maker. Jupiter told
+him that he was made to be the slave of another animal to be called Man.
+He was to carry men on his back, drag loads for them, and be their
+drudge. He was to live on thistles and straw, and to be beaten
+continually with sticks and ropes'-ends. The ass complained. He said
+that he had done nothing to deserve so hard a fate. He had not asked to
+be born, and he would rather not have been born. He inquired how long
+this life, or whatever it was, had to continue. Jupiter said it had to
+last thirty years. The poor ass was in consternation. If Jupiter would
+reduce the thirty to ten he undertook to be patient, to be a good
+servant, and to do his work patiently. Jupiter reflected and consented,
+and the ass retired grateful and happy.
+
+The dog, who had been born meanwhile, heard what had passed. He, too,
+went to Jupiter with the same question. He learnt that he also was a
+slave to men. In the day he was to catch their game for them, but was
+not to eat it himself. At night he was to be chained by a ring and to
+lie awake to guard their houses. His food was to be bones and refuse.
+Like the ass he was to have had thirty years of it, but on petition they
+were similarly exchanged for ten.
+
+The monkey came next. His function, he was told, was to mimic humanity,
+to be led about by a string, and grimace and dance for men's amusement.
+He also remonstrated at the length of time, and obtained the same
+favour.
+
+Last came the man himself. Conscious of boundless desires and, as he
+imagined, of boundless capabilities, he did not inquire what he was, or
+what he was to do. Those questions had been already answered by his
+vanity. He did not come to ask for anything, but to thank Jupiter for
+having created so glorious a being and to ascertain for how many ages
+he might expect to endure. The god replied that thirty years was the
+term allotted to all personal existences.
+
+'Only thirty years!' he exclaimed. 'Only thirty years for such
+capacities as mine. Thirty years will be gone like a dream. Extend them!
+oh, extend them, gracious Jupiter, that I may have leisure to use the
+intellect which thou hast given me, search into the secrets of nature,
+do great and glorious actions, and serve and praise thee, O my creator!
+longer and more worthily.'
+
+The lip of the god curled lightly, and again he acquiesced. 'I have some
+spare years to dispose of,' he said, 'of which others of my creatures
+have begged to be relieved. You shall have thirty years of your own.
+From thirty to fifty you shall have the ass's years, and labour and
+sweat for your support. From fifty to seventy you shall have the dog's
+years, and take care of the stuff, and snarl and growl at what younger
+men are doing. From seventy to ninety you shall have the monkey's years,
+and smirk and grin and make yourself ridiculous. After that you may
+depart.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was going on to Cuba. The commodore had insisted on my spending my
+last days with him at Port Royal. He undertook to see me on board the
+steamer as it passed out of the harbour. I have already described his
+quarters. The naval station has no colonial character except the
+climate, and is English entirely. The officers are the servants of the
+Admiralty, not of the colonial government. Their interests are in their
+profession. They look to promotion in other parts of the world, and
+their functions are on the ocean and not on the land. The commodore is
+captain of the guardship; but he has a commander under him and he
+resides on shore. Everyone employed in the dockyard, even down to his
+own household, is rated on the ship's books, consequently they are all
+men. There is not a woman servant about the place, save his lady's
+ladies'-maid. His daughters learn to take care of themselves, and are
+not brought up to find everything done for them. His boys are about the
+world in active service growing into useful and honourable manhood.
+
+Thus the whole life tastes of the element to which it belongs, and is
+salt and healthy as the ocean itself. It was not without its
+entertainments. The officers of the garrison were to give a ball. The
+young ladies of Kingston are not afraid of the water, cross the harbour
+in the steam launches, dance till the small hours, return in the dark,
+drive their eight or ten miles home, and think nothing of it. In that
+climate, night is pleasanter to be abroad in than day. I could not stay
+to be present, but I was in the midst of the preparations, and one
+afternoon there was a prospect of a brilliant addition to the party. A
+yacht steamed inside the Point--long, narrow, and swift as a torpedo
+boat. She carried American colours, and we heard that she was the famous
+vessel of the yet more famous Mr. Vanderbilt, who was on board with his
+family. Here was an excitement! The commodore was ordered to call the
+instant that she was anchored. Invitations were prepared--all was
+eagerness. Alas! she did not anchor at all. She learnt from the pilot
+that, the small-pox being in Jamaica, if any of her people landed there
+she would be quarantined in the other islands, and to the disappointment
+of everyone, even of myself, who would gladly have seen the great
+millionaire, she turned about and went off again to sea.
+
+I was very happy at the commodore's--low spirits not being allowed in
+that wholesome element. Decks were washed every morning as if at sea,
+i.e. every floor was scrubbed and scoured. It was an eternal washing
+day, lines of linen flying in the brisk sea breeze. The commodore was
+always busy making work if none had been found for him. He took me one
+day to see the rock spring where Rodney watered his fleet, as the great
+admiral describes in one of his letters, and from which Port Royal now
+draws its supply. The spring itself bursts full and clear out of the
+limestone rock close to the shore, four or five miles from Kingston.
+There is a natural basin, slightly improved by art, from which the old
+conduit pipes carry the stream to the sea. The tug comes daily, fills
+its tanks, and returns. The commodore has tidied up the place, planted
+shrubs, and cleared away the bush; but half the water at least, is still
+allowed to leak away, and turns the hollow below into an unwholesome
+swamp. It may be a necessity, but it is also a misfortune, that the
+officers at distant stations hold their appointments for so short a
+term. By the time that they have learnt what can or ought to be done,
+they are sent elsewhere, and their successor has to begin over again.
+The water in this spring, part of which is now worse than wasted and the
+rest carried laboriously in a vessel to Port Royal to be sold by measure
+to the people there, might be all conducted thither by pipes at small
+cost and trouble, were the commodore to remain a few years longer at the
+Jamaica Station.
+
+He is his own boatman, and we had some fine sails about the lagoon--the
+breeze always fresh and the surface always smooth. The shallow bays
+swarm with small fish, and it was a pretty thing to watch the pelicans
+devouring them. They gather in flocks, sweep and wheel in the air, and
+when they plunge they strike the water with a violence which one would
+expect would break their wings. They do not dive, but seize their prey
+with their long, broad bills, and seem never to miss.
+
+Between the ships and the barracks, there are many single men in Port
+Royal, for whom amusement has to be found if they are to be kept from
+drink. A canteen is provided for them, with bowling alley, tennis court,
+beer in moderation, and a reading room, for such as like it, with
+reviews and magazines and newspapers They can fish if they want sport,
+and there are sharks in plenty a cable's length from shore; but the
+schoolmaster has been abroad, and tastes run in more refined directions.
+The blacks of Tobago acted 'The Merchant of Venice' before Governor
+S----. The ships' companies of the gunboats at Port Royal gave a concert
+while I was there. The officers took no part, and left the men to manage
+it as they pleased. The commodore brought his party; the garrison, the
+crews of the other ships, and stray visitors came, and the large room at
+the canteen was completely full. The taste of the audience was curious.
+Dibdin was off the boards altogether, and favour was divided between the
+London popular comic song and the sentimental--no longer with any
+flavour of salt about it, but the sentimental spoony and sickly. 'She
+wore a wreath of roses' called out the highest enthusiasm. One of the
+performers recited a long poem of his own about Mary Stuart, 'the lovely
+and unfortunate.' Then followed the buffoonery; and this was at least
+genuine rough and tumble if there was little wit in it. A lad capered
+about on a tournament horse which flung him every other moment. Various
+persons pretended to be drunk, and talked and staggered as drunken men
+do. Then there was a farce, how conceived and by what kind of author I
+was puzzled to make out. A connoisseur of art is looking for Greek
+antiques. He has heard that a statue has recently been discovered of
+'Ajax quarrelling with his mother-in-law.' What Ajax was quarrelling
+about or who his mother-in-law might be does not appear. A couple of
+rogues, each unknown to the other, practise on the connoisseur's
+credulity. Each promises him the statue; each dresses up a confederate
+on a pedestal with a modern soldier's helmet and a blanket to represent
+a Greek hero. The two figures are shown to him. One of them, I forget
+how, contrived to pass as Ajax; the other had turned into Hercules doing
+something to the Stymphalides. At last they get tired of standing to be
+looked at, jump down, and together knock over the connoisseur. Ajax then
+turns on Hercules, who, of course, is ready for a row. They fight till
+they are tired, and then make it up over a whisky bottle.
+
+So entirely new an aspect of the British tar took me by surprise, and I
+speculated whether the inventors and performers of this astonishing
+drama were an advance on the Ben Bunting type. I was, of course,
+inclined to say no, but my tendency is to dislike changes, and I allow
+for it. The commodore said that in certain respects there really was an
+advance. The seamen fell into few scrapes, and they did not get drunk so
+often. This was a hardy assertion of the commodore, as a good many of
+them were drunk at that moment. I could see myself that they were
+better educated. If Ben Bunting had been asked who Ajax and Hercules
+were, he would have taken them to be three-deckers which were so named,
+and his knowledge would have gone no farther. Whether these tars of the
+new era are better sailors and braver and truer men is another question.
+They understand their rights much better, if that does any good to them.
+The officers used to be treated with respect at all times and seasons.
+This is now qualified. When they are on duty, the men are as respectful
+as they used to be; when they are off duty, the commodore himself is
+only old H----.
+
+We returned to the dockyard in a boat under a full moon, the guardship
+gleaming white in the blue midnight and the phosphorescent water
+flashing under the oars. The 'Dee,' which was to take me to Havana, was
+off Port Royal on the following morning. The commodore put me on board
+in his gig, with the white ensign floating over the stern. I took leave
+of him with warm thanks for his own and his family's hospitable
+entertainment of me. The screw went round--we steamed away out of the
+harbour, and Jamaica and the kind friends whom I had found there faded
+out of sight. Jamaica was the last of the English West India Islands
+which I visited. I was to see it again, but I will here set down the
+impressions which had been left upon me by what I had seen there and
+seen in the Antilles.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+    Present state of Jamaica--Test of progress--Resources of the
+    island--Political alternatives--Black supremacy and probable
+    consequences--The West Indian problem.
+
+
+As I was stepping into the boat at Port Royal, a pamphlet was thrust
+into my hand, which I was entreated to read at my leisure. It was by
+some discontented white of the island--no rare phenomenon, and the
+subject of it was the precipitate decline in the value of property
+there. The writer, unlike the planters, insisted that the people were
+taxed in proportion to their industry. There were taxes on mules, on
+carts, on donkeys, all bearing on the small black proprietors, whose
+ability to cultivate was thus checked, and who were thus deliberately
+encouraged in idleness. He might have added, although he did not, that
+while both in Jamaica and Trinidad everyone is clamouring against the
+beetroot bounty which artificially lowers the price of sugar, the local
+councils in these two islands try to counteract the effect and
+artificially raise the price of sugar by an export duty on their own
+produce--a singular method of doing it which, I presume, admits of
+explanation. My pamphleteer was persuaded that all the world were fools,
+and that he and his friends were the only wise ones: again a not
+uncommon occurrence in pamphleteers. He demanded the suppression of
+absenteeism; he demanded free trade. In exchange for the customs duties,
+which were to be abolished, he demanded a land tax--the very mention of
+which, I had been told by others, drove the black proprietors whom he
+wished to benefit into madness. He wanted Home Rule. He wanted fifty
+things besides which I have forgotten, but his grand want of all was a
+new currency. Mankind, he thought, had been very mad at all periods of
+their history. The most significant illustration of their madness had
+been the selection of gold and silver as the medium of exchange. The
+true base of the currency was the land. The Government of Jamaica was to
+lend to every freeholder up to the mortgage value of his land in paper
+notes, at 5 per cent. interest, the current rate being at present 8 per
+cent. The notes so issued, having the land as their security, would be
+in no danger of depreciation, and they would flow over the sugar estates
+like an irrigating stream. On the produce of sugar the fate of the
+island depended.
+
+On the produce of sugar? And why not on the produce of a fine race of
+men? The prospects of Jamaica, the prospects of all countries, depend
+not on sugar or on any form or degree of material wealth, but on the
+characters of the men and women whom they are breeding and rearing.
+Where there are men and women of a noble nature, the rest will go well
+of itself; where these are not, there will be no true prosperity though
+the sugar hogsheads be raised from thousands into millions. The colonies
+are interesting only as offering homes where English people can increase
+and multiply; English of the old type with simple habits, who do not
+need imported luxuries. There is room even in the West Indies for
+hundreds of thousands of them if they can be contented to lead human
+lives, and do not go there to make fortunes which they are to carry home
+with them. The time may not be far off when men will be sick of making
+fortunes, sick of being ground to pattern in the commonplace mill-wheel
+of modern society; sick of a state of things which blights and kills
+simple and original feeling, which makes us think and speak and act
+under the tyranny of general opinion, which masquerades as liberty and
+means only submission to the newspapers. I can conceive some modern men
+may weary of all this, and retire from it like the old ascetics, not as
+they did into the wilderness, but behind their own walls and hedges,
+shutting out the world and its noises, to inquire whether after all they
+have really immortal souls, and, if they have, what ought to be done
+about them. The West India Islands, with their inimitable climate and
+soil and prickly pears _ad libitum_ to make fences with, would be fine
+places for such recluses. Failing these ideal personages, there is work
+enough of the common sort to create wholesome prosperity. There are
+oranges to be grown, and pines and plantains, and coffee and cocoa, and
+rice and indigo and tobacco, not to speak of the dollars which my
+American friend found in the bamboos, and of the further dollars which
+other Americans will find in the untested qualities of thousands of
+other productions. Here are opportunities for innocent industrious
+families, where children can be brought up to be manly and simple and
+true and brave as their fathers were brought up, or as their fathers
+expressed it 'in the nurture and admonition of the Lord;' while such
+neighbours as their dark brothers-in-law might have a chance of a rise
+in life, in the only sense in which a 'rise' can be of real benefit to
+them. These are the objects which statesmen who have the care and
+conduct of a nation's welfare ought to set before themselves, and
+unfortunately they are the last which are remembered in countries which
+are popularly governed. There is a clamour for education in such
+countries, but education means to them only the sharpening of the
+faculties for the competitive race which is called progress. In
+democracies no one man is his brother's keeper. Each lives and struggles
+to make his own way and his own position. All that is insisted on is
+that there shall be a fair stage and that every lad shall learn the use
+of the weapons which will enable him to fight his own way. [Greek:
+Aretê],'manliness,' the most essential of all acquisitions and the
+hardest to cultivate, as Aristotle observed long ago, is assumed in
+democracies as a matter of course. Of [Greek: aretê] a moderate
+quantity [Greek: hoposonoun] would do, and in Aristotle's opinion this
+was the rock on which the Greek republics foundered. Their [Greek:
+aretê] did not come as a matter of course, and they lost it, and the
+Macedonians and the Romans ate them up.
+
+From this point of view political problems, and the West Indian among
+them, present unusual aspects. Looking to the West Indies only, we took
+possession of those islands when they were of supreme importance in our
+great wrestle with Spain and France. We were fighting then for the
+liberties of the human race. The Spaniards had destroyed the original
+Carib and Indian inhabitants. We induced thousands of our own
+fellow-countrymen to venture life and fortune in the occupation of our
+then vital conquests. For two centuries we furnished them with black
+servants whom we purchased on the African coast and carried over and
+sold there, making our own profits out of the trade, and the colonists
+prospered themselves and poured wealth and strength into the empire of
+which they were then an integral part. A change passed over the spirit
+of the age. Liberty assumed a new dress. We found slavery to be a crime;
+we released our bondmen; we broke their chains as we proudly described
+it to ourselves; we compensated the owners, so far as money could
+compensate, for the entire dislocation of a state of society which we
+had ourselves created; and we trusted to the enchantment of liberty to
+create a better in its place. We had delivered our own souls; we had
+other colonies to take our emigrants. Other lands under our open trade
+would supply us with the commodities for which we had hitherto been
+dependent on the West Indies. They ceased to be of commercial, they
+ceased to be of political, moment to us, and we left them to their own
+resources. The modern English idea is that everyone must take care of
+himself. Individuals or aggregates of individuals have the world before
+them, to open the oyster or fail to open it according to their
+capabilities. The State is not to help them; the State is not to
+interfere with them unless for political or party reasons it happens to
+be convenient. As we treat ourselves we treat our colonies. Those who
+have gone thither have gone of their own free will, and must take the
+consequences of their own actions. We allow them no executional
+privileges which we do not claim for ourselves. They must stand, if they
+are to stand, by their own strength. If they cannot stand they must
+fall. This is our notion of education in 'manliness,' and for immediate
+purposes answers well enough. Individual enterprise, unendowed but
+unfettered, built the main buttresses of the British colonial empire.
+Australians and New Zealanders are English and Scotchmen who have
+settled at the antipodes where there is more room for them than at home.
+They are the same people as we are, and they have the same privileges as
+we have. They are parts of one and the same organic body as branches
+from the original trunk. The branch does not part from the trunk, but it
+discharges its own vital functions by its own energy, and we no more
+desire to interfere than London desires to interfere with Manchester.
+
+So it stands with us where the colonists are of our race, with the same
+character and the same objects; and, as I said, the system answers.
+Under no other relations could we continue a united people. But it does
+not answer--it has failed wherever we have tried it--when the majority
+of the inhabitants of countries of which for one or other reason we have
+possessed ourselves, and of which we keep possession, are not united to
+us by any of these natural bonds, where they have been annexed by
+violence or otherwise been forced under our flag. It has failed
+conspicuously in Ireland. We know that it would fail in the East Indies
+if we were rash enough to venture the experiment. Self-government in
+connection with the British Empire implies a desire or a willingness in
+those who are so left to themselves that the connection shall continue.
+We have been so sanguine as to believe that the privilege of being
+British subjects is itself sufficient to secure their allegiance; that
+the liberties which we concede will not be used for purposes which we
+are unable to tolerate; that, being left to govern themselves, they will
+govern in harmony with English interests and according to English
+principles. The privilege is not estimated so highly. They go their own
+way and not our way, and therefore we must look facts in the face as
+they are, and not as we wish them to be. If we extend to Ireland the
+independence which only links us closer to Australia, Ireland will use
+it to break away from us. If we extend it to Bengal and Madras and
+Bombay, we shall fling them into anarchy and bring our empire to an end.
+We cannot for our safety's sake part with Ireland. We do not mean to
+part with our Asiatic dominions. The reality of the relation in both
+cases is the superior force of England, and we must rely upon it and
+need not try to conceal that we do, till by the excellence of our
+administration we have converted submission into respect and respect
+into willingness for union. This may be a long process and a difficult
+one. If we choose to maintain our empire, however, we must pay the price
+for empire, and it is wiser, better, safer, in all cases to admit the
+truth and act upon it. Yet Englishmen so love liberty that they struggle
+against confessing what is disagreeable to them. Many of us would give
+Ireland, would give India Home Rule, and run the risk of what would
+happen, and only a probability, which reaches certainty, of the
+consequences to be expected to follow prevents us from unanimously
+agreeing. About the West Indies we do not care very earnestly. Nothing
+seriously alarming can happen there. So much, therefore, for the
+general policy of leaving them to help themselves out of their
+difficulties we have adopted completely. The corollary that they must
+govern themselves also on their own responsibilities we hesitate as yet
+to admit completely; but we do not recognise that any responsibility for
+their failing condition rests on us; and the inclination certainly, and
+perhaps the purpose, is to throw them entirely upon themselves at the
+earliest moment. Cuba sends representatives to the Cortes at Madrid,
+Martinique and Guadaloupe to the Assembly at Paris. In the English
+islands, being unwilling to govern without some semblance of a
+constitution, we try tentatively varieties of local boards and local
+councils, admitting the elective principle but not daring to trust it
+fully; creating hybrid constitutions, so contrived as to provoke ill
+feeling where none would exist without them, and to make impossible any
+tolerable government which could actively benefit the people. We cannot
+intend that arrangements the effects of which are visible so plainly in
+the sinking fortunes of our own kindred there, are to continue for ever.
+We suppose that we cannot go back in these cases. It is to be presumed,
+therefore, that we mean to go forward, and in doing so I venture to
+think myself that we shall be doing equal injustice both to our own race
+and to the blacks, and we shall bring the islands into a condition which
+will be a reproach and scandal to the empire of which they will remain a
+dishonoured part. The slave trade was an imperial monopoly, extorted by
+force, guaranteed by treaties, and our white West Indian interest was
+built up in connection with and in reliance upon it. We had a right to
+set the slaves free; but the payment of the indemnity was no full
+acquittance of our obligations for the condition of a society which we
+had ourselves created. We have no more right to make the emancipated
+slave his master's master in virtue of his numbers than we have a right
+to lay under the heel of the Catholics of Ireland the Protestant
+minority whom we planted there to assist us in controlling them.
+
+It may be said that we have no intention of doing anything of the kind,
+that no one at present dreams of giving a full colonial constitution to
+the West Indian Islands. They are allowed such freedom as they are
+capable of using; they can be allowed more as they are better educated
+and more fit for it, &c. &c.
+
+One knows all that, and one knows what it is worth in the half-elected,
+half-nominated councils. Either the nominated members are introduced
+merely as a drag upon the wheel, and are instructed to yield in the end
+to the demands of the representative members, or they are themselves the
+representatives of the white minority. If the first, the majority rule
+already; if the second, such constitutions are contrived ingeniously to
+create the largest amount of irritation, and to make impossible, as long
+as they last, any form of effective and useful government. Therefore
+they cannot last, and are not meant to last. A principle once conceded
+develops with the same certainty with which a seed grows when it is
+sown. In the English world, as it now stands, there is no middle
+alternative between self-government and government by the Crown, and the
+cause of our reluctance to undertake direct charge of the West Indies is
+because such undertaking carries responsibility along with it. If they
+are brought so close to us we shall be obliged to exert ourselves, and
+to rescue them from a condition which would be a reproach to us.
+
+The English of those islands are melting away. That is a fact to which
+it is idle to try to shut our eyes. Families who have been for
+generations on the soil are selling their estates everywhere and are
+going off. Lands once under high cultivation are lapsing into jungle.
+Professional men of ability and ambition carry their talents to
+countries where they are more sure of reward. Every year the census
+renews its warning. The rate may vary; sometimes for a year or two there
+may seem to be a pause in the movement, but it begins again and is
+always in the same direction. The white is relatively disappearing, the
+black is growing; that is the fact with which we have to deal.
+
+We may say if we please, 'Be it so then; we do not want those islands;
+let the blacks have them, poor devils. They have had wrongs enough in
+this world; let them take their turn and have a good time now.' This I
+imagine is the answer which will rise to the lips of most of us, yet it
+will be an answer which will not be for our honour, nor in the long run
+for our interest. Our stronger colonies will scarcely attach more value
+to their connection with us if they hear us declare impatiently that
+because part of our possessions have ceased to be of money value to us,
+we will not or we cannot take the trouble to provide them with a decent
+government, and therefore cast them off. Nor in the long run will it
+benefit the blacks either. The islands will not be allowed to run wild
+again, and if we leave them some one else will take them who will be
+less tender of his coloured brother's sensibilities. We may think that
+it would not come to that. The islands will still be ours; the English
+flag will still float over the forts; the government, whatever it be,
+will be administered in the Queen's name. Were it worth while, one might
+draw a picture of the position of an English governor, with a black
+parliament and a black ministry, recommending by advice of his
+constitutional ministers some measure like the Haytian Land Law.
+
+No Englishman, not even a bankrupt peer, would consent to occupy such a
+position; the blacks themselves would despise him if he did; and if the
+governor is to be one of their own race and colour, how long could such
+a connection endure?
+
+No one I presume would advise that the whites of the island should
+govern. The relations between the two populations are too embittered,
+and equality once established by law, the exclusive privilege of colour
+over colour cannot be restored. While slavery continued the whites ruled
+effectively and economically; the blacks are now free as they; there are
+two classes in the community; their interests are opposite as they are
+now understood, and one cannot be trusted with control over the other.
+As little can the present order of things continue. The West India
+Islands, once the pride of our empire, the scene of our most brilliant
+achievements, are passing away out of our hands; the remnant of our own
+countrymen, weary of an unavailing struggle, are more and more eager to
+withdraw from the scene, because they find no sympathy and no
+encouragement from home, and are forbidden to accept help from America
+when help is offered them, while under their eyes their quondam slaves
+are multiplying, thriving, occupying, growing strong, and every day more
+conscious of the changed order of things. One does not grudge the black
+man his prosperity, his freedom, his opportunities of advancing himself;
+one would wish to see him as free and prosperous as the fates and his
+own exertions can make him, with more and more means of raising himself
+to the white man's level. But left to himself, and without the white man
+to lead him, he can never reach it, and if we are not to lose the
+islands altogether, or if they are not to remain with us to discredit
+our capacity to rule them, it is left to us only to take the same course
+which we have taken in the East Indies with such magnificent success,
+and to govern whites and blacks alike on the Indian system. The
+circumstances are precisely analogous. We have a population to deal
+with, the enormous majority of whom are of an inferior race. Inferior, I
+am obliged to call them, because as yet, and as a body, they have shown
+no capacity to rise above the condition of their ancestors except under
+European laws, European education, and European authority, to keep them
+from making war on one another. They are docile, good-tempered,
+excellent and faithful servants when they are kindly treated; but their
+notions of right and wrong are scarcely even elementary; their
+education, such as it may be, is but skin deep, and the old African
+superstitions lie undisturbed at the bottom of their souls. Give them
+independence, and in a few generations they will peel off such
+civilisation as they have learnt as easily and as willingly as their
+coats and trousers.
+
+Govern them as we govern India, with the same conscientious care, with
+the same sense of responsibility, with the same impartiality, the same
+disinterested attention to the well-being of our subjects in its
+highest and most honourable sense, and we shall give the world one more
+evidence that while Englishmen can cover the waste places of it with
+free communities of their own blood, they can exert an influence no less
+beneficent as the guides and rulers of those who need their assistance,
+and whom fate and circumstances have assigned to their care. Our kindred
+far away will be more than ever proud to form part of a nation which has
+done more for freedom than any other nation ever did, yet is not a slave
+to formulas, and can adapt its actions to the demands of each community
+which belongs to it. The most timid among us may take courage, for it
+would cost us nothing save the sacrifice of a few official traditions,
+and an abstinence for the future from doubtful uses of colonial
+patronage. The blacks will be perfectly happy when they are satisfied
+that they have nothing to fear for their persons or their properties. To
+the whites it would be the opening of a new era of hope. Should they be
+rash enough to murmur, they might then be justly left to the
+consequences of their own folly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+    Passage to Cuba--A Canadian commissioner--Havana--The Moro--The city
+    and harbour--Cuban money--American visitors--The cathedral--Tomb of
+    Columbus--New friends--The late rebellion--Slave emancipation--Spain
+    and progress--A bull fight.
+
+
+I had gone to the West Indies to see our own colonies, but I could not
+leave those famous seas which were the scene of our ocean duels with the
+Spaniards without a visit to the last of the great possessions of Philip
+II. which remained to his successors. I ought not to say the last, for
+Puerto Rico is Spanish also, but this small island is insignificant and
+has no important memories connected with it. Puerto Rico I had no
+leisure to look at and did not care about, and to see Cuba as it ought
+to be seen required more time than I could afford; but Havana was so
+interesting, both from its associations and its present condition, that
+I could not be within reach of it and pass it by. The body of Columbus
+lies there for one thing, unless a trick was played when the remains
+which were said to be his were removed from St. Domingo, and I wished to
+pay my orisons at his tomb. I wished also to see the race of men who
+have shared the New World with the Anglo-Saxons, and have given a
+language and a religion to half the American continent, in the oldest
+and most celebrated of their Transatlantic cities.
+
+Cuba also had an immediate and present interest. Before the American
+civil war it was on the point of being absorbed into the United States.
+The Spanish Cubans had afterwards a civil war of their own, of which
+only confused accounts had reached us at home. We knew that it had
+lasted ten years, but who had been the parties and what their objects
+had been was very much a mystery. No sooner was it over than, without
+reservation or compensation, the slaves had been emancipated. How a
+country was prospering which had undergone such a succession of shocks,
+and how the Spaniards were dealing with the trials which were bearing so
+hard on our own islands, were inquiries worth making. But beyond these
+it was the land of romance. Columbus and Las Casas, Cortez and Pizarro,
+are the demigods and heroes of the New World. Their names will be
+familiar to the end of time as the founders of a new era, and although
+the modern Spaniards sink to the level of the modern Greeks, their
+illustrious men will hold their place for ever in imagination and
+memory.
+
+Our own Antilles had, as I have said, in their terror of small-pox,
+placed Jamaica under an interdict. The Spaniards at Cuba were more
+generous or more careless. Havana is on the north side of the island,
+facing towards Florida; thus, in going to it from Port Royal, we had to
+round the westernmost cape, and had four days of sea before us. We slid
+along the coast of Jamaica in smooth water, the air, while day lasted,
+intensely hot, but the breeze after nightfall blowing cool from off the
+mountains. We had a polite captain, polite officers, and agreeable
+fellow-passengers, two or three Cubans among them, swarthy, dark-eyed,
+thick-set men--_Americanos_; Spaniards with a difference--with whom I
+cultivated a kind of intimacy. In a cabin it was reported that there
+were again Spanish ladies on their way to the demonic gaieties at
+Darien, but they did not show.
+
+Among the rest of the party was a Canadian gentleman, a Mr. ----,
+exceptionally well-informed and intelligent. Their American treaty
+having been disallowed, the West Indies had proposed to negotiate a
+similar one with the Canadian Dominion. The authorities at Ottawa had
+sent Mr. M---- to see if anything could be done, and Mr. M---- was now
+on his way home, not in the best of humours with our poor relations.
+'The Jamaicans did not know what they wanted,' he said. 'They were
+without spirit to help themselves; they cried out to others to help
+them, and if all they asked could not be granted they clamoured as if
+the whole world was combining to hurt them. There was not the least
+occasion for these passionate appeals to the universe; they could not at
+this moment perhaps "go ahead" as fast as some countries, but there was
+no necessity to be always going ahead. They had a fine country, soil and
+climate all that could be desired, they had all that was required for a
+quiet and easy life, why could they not be contented and make the best
+of things?' Unfortunate Jamaicans! The old mother at home acts like an
+unnatural parent, and will neither help them nor let their Cousin
+Jonathan help them. They turn for comfort to their big brother in the
+north, and the big brother being himself robust and healthy, gives them
+wholesome advice.
+
+Adventures do occasionally happen at sea even in this age of steam
+engines. Ships catch fire or run into each other, or go on rocks in
+fogs, or are caught in hurricanes, and Nature can still assume her old
+terrors if she pleases. Shelley describes a wreck on the coast of
+Cornwall, and the treacherous waters of the ocean in the English
+Channel, now wild in fury, now smiling
+
+    As on the morn When the exulting elements in scorn Satiated with
+    destroyed destruction lay Sleeping in beauty on their mangled prey,
+    As panthers sleep.
+
+The wildest gale which ever blew on British shores was a mere summer
+breeze compared to a West Indian tornado. Behind all that beauty there
+lies the temper and caprice, not of a panther, but of a woman. But no
+tornadoes fell in our way, nor anything else worth mentioning, not even
+a buccaneer or a pirate. We saw the islands which these gentry haunted,
+and the headlands made memorable by their desperate deeds, but they are
+gone, even to the remembrance of them. What they were and what they did
+lies buried away in book mausoleums like Egyptian mummies, all as clean
+forgotten as if they had been honest men, they and all the wild scenes
+which these green estuaries have witnessed.
+
+Havana figures much in English naval history. Drake tried to take it and
+failed; Penn and Venables failed. We stormed the forts in 1760, and held
+them and held the city till the Seven Years' War was over. I had read
+descriptions of the place, but they had given me no clear conception of
+what it would be like, certainly none at all of what it was like.
+Kingston is the best of our West Indian towns, and Kingston has not one
+fine building in it. Havana is a city of palaces, a city of streets and
+plazas, of colonnades, and towers, and churches and monasteries. We
+English have built in those islands as if we were but passing visitors,
+wanting only tenements to be occupied for a time. The Spaniards built as
+they built in Castile; built with the same material, the white limestone
+which they found in the New World as in the Old. The palaces of the
+nobles in Havana, the residence of the governor, the convents, the
+cathedral, are a reproduction of Burgos or Valladolid, as if by some
+Aladdin's lamp a Castilian city had been taken up and set down again
+unaltered on the shore of the Caribbean Sea. And they carried with them
+their laws, their habits, their institutions and their creed, their
+religious orders, their bishops, and their Inquisition. Even now in her
+day of eclipse, when her genius is clouded by the modern spirit against
+which she fought so long and so desperately, the sons of Spain still
+build as they used to build, and the modern squares and market places,
+the castles and fortresses, which have risen in and round the ancient
+Havana, are constructed on the old massive model, and on the same lines.
+However it may be with us, and whatever the eventual fate of Cuba, the
+Spanish race has taken root there, and is visibly destined to remain.
+They have poured their own people into it. In Cuba alone there are ten
+times as many Spaniards as there are English and Scotch in all our West
+Indies together, and Havana is ten times the size of the largest of our
+West Indian cities. Refugees have flocked thither from the revolutions
+in the Peninsula. The Canary Islands overflow into it. You know the
+people from Teneriffe by their stature; they are the finest surviving
+specimens of the old conquering breed. The political future is dark; the
+government is unimaginably corrupt--so corrupt that change is
+inevitable, though what change it would be idle to prophesy. The
+Americans looked at the island which lay so temptingly near them, but
+they were wise in their generation. They reflected that to introduce
+into an Anglo-Saxon republic so insoluble an element as a million
+Spanish Roman Catholics alien in blood and creed, with half a million
+blacks to swell the dusky flood which runs too full among them already,
+would be to invite an indigestion of serious consequence. A few years
+since the Cubans born were on the eve of achieving their independence
+like their brothers in Mexico and South America. Perhaps they will yet
+succeed. Spanish, at any rate, they are to the bone and marrow, and
+Spanish they will continue. The magnitude of Havana, and the fullness of
+life which was going on there, entirely surprised me. I had thought of
+Cuba as a decrepit state, bankrupt or finance-exhausted by civil wars,
+and on the edge of social dissolution, and I found Havana at least a
+grand imposing city--a city which might compare for beauty with any in
+the world. The sanitary condition is as bad as negligence can make
+it--so bad that a Spanish gentleman told me that if it were not for the
+natural purity of the air they would have been all dead like flies long
+ago. The tideless harbour is foul with the accumulations of three
+hundred years. The administration is more good-for-nothing than in Spain
+itself. If, in spite of this, Havana still sits like a queen upon the
+waters, there are some qualities to be found among her people which
+belonged to the countrymen and subjects of Ferdinand the Catholic.
+
+The coast line from Cape Tubiron has none of the grand aspects of the
+Antilles or Jamaica. Instead of mountains and forests you see a series
+of undulating hills, cultivated with tolerable care, and sprinkled with
+farmhouses. All the more imposing, therefore, from the absence of marked
+natural forms, are the walls and towers of the great Moro, the fortress
+which defends the entrance of the harbour. Ten miles off it was already
+a striking object. As we ran nearer it rose above us stern, proud, and
+defiant, upon a rock right above the water, with high frowning bastions,
+the lighthouse at an angle of it, and the Spanish banner floating
+proudly from a turret which overlooked the whole. The Moro as a
+fortification is, I am told, indefensible against modern artillery,
+presenting too much surface as a target; but it is all the grander to
+look at. It is a fine specimen of the Vauban period, and is probably
+equal to any demands which will be made upon it. The harbour is
+something like Port Royal, a deep lagoon with a narrow entrance and a
+long natural breakwater between the lagoon and the ocean; but what at
+Port Royal is a sand-spit eight miles long, is at Havana a rocky
+peninsula on which the city itself is built. The opening from the sea is
+half a mile wide. On the city side there are low semicircular batteries
+which sweep completely the approaches and the passage itself. The Moro
+rises opposite at the extreme point of the entrance, and next to it,
+farther in towards the harbour on the same side, on the crest and slopes
+of a range of hills, stands the old Moro, the original castle which beat
+off Drake and Oliver's sea-generals, and which was captured by the
+English in the last century. The lines were probably weaker than they
+are at present, and less adequately manned. A monument is erected there
+to the officers and men who fell in the defence.
+
+[Illustration: HAVANA, FROM THE QUARRIES]
+
+The city as we steamed by looked singularly beautiful, with its domes
+and steeples and marble palaces, and glimpses of long boulevards and
+trees and handsome mansions and cool arcades. Inside we found ourselves
+in a basin, perhaps of three miles diameter, full of shipping of all
+sorts and nationalities. The water, which outside is pure as sapphire,
+has become filthy with the pollutions of a dozen generations. The tide,
+which even at the springs has but a rise and fall of a couple of feet,
+is totally ineffective to clear it, and as long as they have the Virgin
+Mary to pray to, the pious Spaniards will not drive their sewage into
+the ocean. The hot sun rays stream down into the thick black liquid.
+Horrible smells are let loose from it when it is set in motion by screw
+or paddle, and ships bring up at mooring buoys lest their anchors should
+disturb the compost which lies at the bottom. Yet one forgot the
+disagreeables in the novelty and striking character of the scene. A
+hundred boats were plying to and fro among the various vessels, with
+their white sails and white awnings. Flags of all countries were blowing
+out at stern or from masthead; among them, of course, the stars and
+stripes flying jauntily on some splendid schooner which stood there like
+a cock upon a dunghill that might be his own if he chose to crow for it.
+
+As soon as we had brought up we were boarded by the inevitable hotel
+touters, custom-house officers, porters, and boatmen. Interpreters
+offered their services in the confusion of languages. Gradually there
+emerged out of the general noise two facts of importance. First, that I
+ought to have had a passport, and if I had not brought one that I was
+likely to be fined at the discretion of Spanish officials. Secondly,
+that if I trusted to my own powers of self-defence, I should be the
+victim of indefinite other extortions. Passport I had none--such things
+are not required any longer in Spain, and it had not occurred to me that
+they might still be in demand in a Spanish colony. As to being cheated,
+no one could or would tell me what I was to pay for anything, for there
+were American dollars, Spanish dollars, Mexican dollars, and Cuban
+dollars, all different. And there were multiples of dollars in gold, and
+single dollars in silver, and last and most important of all there was
+the Cuban paper dollar, which was 230 per cent. below the Cuban gold
+dollar. And in this last the smaller transactions of common life were
+carried on, the practical part of it to a stranger being that when you
+had to receive you received in paper, and when you had to pay you paid
+in specie.
+
+I escaped for the time the penalty which would have been inflicted on me
+about the passport. I had a letter of introduction to the
+Captain-General of the island, and the Captain-General--so the viceroy
+is called--was so formidable a person that the officials did not venture
+to meddle with me. For the rest I was told that as soon as I had chosen
+my hotel, the agent, who was on board, would see me through all
+obstructions, and would not allow me to be plundered by anyone but
+himself. To this I had to submit. I named an hotel at random; a polite
+gentleman in a few moments had a boat alongside for me; I had stept into
+it when the fair damsels bound for Darien, who had been concealed all
+this time in their cabin, slipped down the ladder and took their places
+at my side, to the no small entertainment of the friends whom I had left
+on board and who were watching us from the deck.
+
+At the wharf I was able to shake off my companions, and I soon forgot
+the misadventure, for I found myself in Old Castile once more, amidst
+Spanish faces, Spanish voices, Spanish smells, and Spanish scenes. On
+the very wharf itself was a church grim and stern, and so massive that
+it would stand, barring earthquakes, for a thousand years. Church,
+indeed, it was no longer; it had been turned into a custom-house. But
+this was because it had been desecrated when we were in Havana by having
+an English service performed in it. They had churches enough without it,
+and they preferred to leave this one with a mark upon it of the anger of
+the Almighty. Of churches, indeed, there was no lack; churches thick as
+public-houses in a Welsh town. Church beyond church, palace beyond
+palace, the narrow streets where neighbours on either side might shake
+hands out of the upper stories, the deep colonnades, the private houses
+with the windows grated towards the street, with glimpses through the
+street door into the court and garden within, with its cloisters, its
+palm trees, and its fountains; the massiveness of the stonework, the
+curious old-fashioned bookstalls, the dirt, the smell, the carriages,
+the swearing drivers, the black-robed priest gliding along the
+footway--it was Toledo or Valladolid again with the sign manual on it of
+Spain herself in friendly and familiar form. Every face that I saw was
+Spanish. In Kingston or Port of Spain you meet fifty blacks for one
+European; all the manual work is done by them. In Havana the proportion
+is reversed, you hardly see a coloured man at all. Boatmen, porters,
+cab-drivers or cart-drivers, every one of whom are negroes in our
+islands, are there Spaniards, either Cuban born or emigrants from home.
+A few black beggars there were--permitted, as objects of charity to
+pious Catholics and as a sign of their inferiority of race. Of poverty
+among the whites, real poverty that could be felt, I saw no sign at all.
+
+After driving for about a mile we emerged out of the old town into a
+large square and thence into a wide Alameda or boulevard with double
+avenues of trees, statues, fountains, theatres, clubhouses, and all the
+various equipments of modern luxuriousness and so-called civilised life.
+Beyond the Alameda was another still larger square, one side of which
+was a railway station and terminus. In a colonnade at right angles was
+the hotel to which I had been recommended; spacious, handsome, in style
+half Parisian half Spanish, like the Fondas in the Puerto del Sol at
+Madrid.
+
+Spanish was the language generally spoken; but there were interpreters
+and waiters more or less accomplished in other tongues, especially in
+English, of which they heard enough, for I found Havana to be the winter
+resort of our American cousins, who go, generally, to Cuba, as we go to
+the Riviera, to escape the ice and winds of the eastern and middle
+States. This particular hotel was a favourite resort, and was full to
+overflowing with them. It was large, with an interior quadrangular
+garden, into which looked tiers of windows; and wings had been thrown
+out with terraced roofs, suites of rooms opening out upon them; each
+floor being provided with airy sitting rooms and music rooms. Here were
+to be heard at least a hundred American voices discussing the
+experiences and plans of their owners. The men lounged in the hall or at
+the bar, or sat smoking on the rows of leather chairs under the
+colonnade, or were under the hands of barbers or haircutters in an airy
+open saloon devoted to these uses. When I retreated upstairs to collect
+myself, a lady was making the corridors ring close by as she screamed at
+a piano in the middle of an admiring and criticising crowd. Dear as the
+Americans are to me, and welcome in most places as is the sound of those
+same sweet voices, one had not come to Havana for this. It was necessary
+to escape somewhere, and promptly, from the discord of noises which I
+hoped might be due to some momentary accident. The mail company's agent,
+Mr. R----, lived in the hotel. He kindly found me out, initiated me in
+the mysteries of Cuban paper money, and giving me a tariff of the fares,
+found me a cab, and sent me out to look about me.
+
+My first object was the cathedral and the tomb of Columbus. In Catholic
+cities in Europe churches stand always open; the passer-by can enter
+when he pleases, fall on his knees and say his silent prayers to his
+Master whom he sees on the altar. In Havana I discovered afterward that,
+except at special hours, and those as few as might be, the doors were
+kept locked and could only be opened by a golden key. It was carnival
+time, however; there were functions going on of various kinds, and I
+found the cathedral happily accessible. It was a vast building, little
+ornamented, but the general forms severe and impressive, in the style of
+the time of Philip II., when Gothic art had gone out in Spain and there
+had come in the place of it the implacable sternness which expresses the
+very genius of the Inquisition. A broad flight of stone steps led up to
+the great door. The afternoon was extremely hot; the curtains were
+thrown back to admit as much air as possible. There was some function
+proceeding of a peculiar kind. I know not what it was; something
+certainly in which the public had no interest, for there was not a
+stranger present but myself. But the great cathedral officials were busy
+at work, and liked to be at their ease. On the wall as you entered a box
+invited contributions, as _limosna por el Santo Padre_. The service was
+I know not what. In the middle of the nave stood twelve large chairs
+arranged in a semicircle; on these chairs sat twelve canons, like a row
+of mandarins, each with his little white patch like a silver dollar on
+the crown of his black head. Five or six minor dignitaries, deacons,
+precentors, or something of that sort, were droning out monotonous
+recitations like the buzzing of so many humble-bees in the warm summer
+air. The dean or provost sat in the central biggest chair of all. His
+face was rosy, and he wiped it from time to time with a red
+handkerchief; his chin was double or perhaps treble; he had evidently
+dined, and would or might have slept but for a pile of snuff on his
+chair arm, with continual refreshments from which he kept his faculties
+alive. I sat patiently till it was over, and the twelve holy men rose
+and went their way. I could then stroll about at leisure. The pictures
+were of the usual paltry kind. On the chancel arch stood the royal arms
+of Spain, as the lion and the unicorn used to stand in our parish
+churches till the High Church clergy mistook them for Erastian wild
+beasts. At the right side of the altar was the monument which I had come
+in search of; a marble tablet fixed against the wall, and on it a poorly
+executed figure in high relief, with a ruff about its neck and features
+which might be meant for anyone and for no one in particular. Somewhere
+near me there were lying I believed and could hope the mortal remains of
+the discoverer of the New World. An inscription said so. There was
+written:
+
+    O Restos y Imagen del grande Colon
+    Mil siglos durad guardados en la Urna
+    Y en remembranza de nuestra Nacion.
+
+The court poet, or whoever wrote the lines, was as poor an artist in
+verse as the sculptor in stone. The image of the grande Colon is
+certainly not 'guarded in the urn,' since you see it on the wall before
+your eyes. The urn, if urn there be, with the 'relics' in it, must be
+under the floor. Columbus and his brother Diego were originally buried
+to the right and left of the altar in the cathedral of St. Domingo. When
+St. Domingo was abandoned, a commission was appointed to remove the body
+of Christophe to Havana. They did remove _a_ body, but St. Domingo
+insists that it was Diego that was taken away, that Christophe remains
+where he was, and that if Spain wants him Spain must pay for him. I
+followed the canons into the sacristy where they were unrobing. I did
+not venture to address either of themselves, but I asked an acolyte if
+he could throw any light upon the matter. He assured me that there
+neither was nor could have been any mistake. They had the right body and
+were in no doubt about it. In more pious ages disputes of this sort were
+settled by an appeal to miracles. Rival pretenders for the possession of
+the same bones came, however, at last to be able to produce authentic
+proofs of miracles which had been worked at more than one of the
+pretended shrines; so that it was concluded that saints' relics were
+like the loaves and fishes, capable of multiplication without losing
+their identity, and of having the property of being in several places at
+the same moment. The same thing has been alleged of the Holy Coat of
+Trèves and of the wood of the true cross. Havana and St. Domingo may
+perhaps eventually find a similar solution of their disagreement over
+the resting place of Columbus.
+
+I walked back to my hotel up a narrow shady street like a long arcade.
+Here were the principal shops; several libraries among them, into which
+I strayed to gossip and to look over the shelves. That so many persons
+could get a living by bookselling implied a reading population, but the
+books themselves did not indicate any present literary productiveness.
+They were chiefly old, and from the Old World, and belonged probably to
+persons who had been concerned in the late rebellion and whose property
+had been confiscated. They were absurdly cheap; I bought a copy of
+Guzman de Alfarache for a few pence.
+
+I had brought letters of introduction to several distinguished people in
+Havana; to one especially, Don G----, a member of a noble Peninsular
+family, once an officer in the Spanish navy, now chairman of a railway
+company and head of an important commercial house. His elder brother,
+the Marques de ----, called on me on the evening of the day of my
+arrival; a distinguished-looking man of forty or thereabouts, with
+courteous high-bred manners, rapid, prompt, and incisive, with the air
+of a soldier, which in early life he had been. He had travelled, spoke
+various languages, and spoke to me in admirable English. Don G----, who
+might be a year or two younger, came later and stayed an hour and a half
+with me. Let me acknowledge here, and in as warm language as I can
+express it, the obligations under which I stand to him, not for the
+personal attentions only which he showed me during my stay in Havana,
+but for giving me an opportunity of becoming acquainted with a real
+specimen of Plato's superior men, who were now and then, so Plato said,
+to be met with in foreign travel. It is to him that I owe any knowledge
+which I brought away with me of the present state of Cuba. He had seen
+much, thought much, read much. He was on a level with the latest phases
+of philosophical and spiritual speculation, could talk of Darwin and
+Spencer, of Schopenhauer, of Strauss, and of Renan, aware of what they
+had done, aware of the inconvenient truths which they had forced into
+light, but aware also that they had left the most important questions
+pretty much where they found them. He had taken no part in the political
+troubles of the late years in Cuba, but he had observed everything. No
+one knew better the defects of the present system of government; no one
+was less ready to rush into hasty schemes for violently mending it.
+
+The ten years' rebellion, of which I had heard so much and knew so
+little, he first made intelligible to me. Cuba had been governed as a
+province of Spain, and Spain, like other mother countries, had thought
+more of drawing a revenue out of it for herself than of the interests of
+the colony. Spanish officials had been avaricious, and Spanish fiscal
+policy oppressive and ruinous. The resources of the island in metals,
+in minerals, in agriculture were as yet hardly scratched, yet every
+attempt to develop them was paralysed by fresh taxation. The rebellion
+had been an effort of the Cuban Spaniards, precisely analogous to the
+revolt of our own North American colonies, to shake off the authority of
+the court of Madrid and to make themselves independent. They had fought
+desperately and had for several years been masters of half the island.
+They had counted on help from the United States, and at one time they
+seemed likely to get it. But the Americans could not see their way to
+admitting Cuba into the Union, and without such a prospect did not care
+to quarrel with Spain on their account. Finding that they were to be
+left to themselves, the insurgents came to terms and Spanish authority
+was re-established. Families had been divided, sons taking one side and
+fathers the other, as in our English Wars of the Roses, perhaps for the
+same reason, to save the family estates whichever side came out
+victorious. The blacks had been indifferent, the rebellion having no
+interest for them at all. They had remained by their masters, and they
+had been rewarded after the peace by complete emancipation. There was
+not a slave now in Cuba. No indemnity had been granted to their owners,
+nor had any been asked for, and the business on the plantations had gone
+on without interruption. Those who had been slaves continued to work at
+the same locations, receiving wages instead of food and maintenance; all
+were satisfied at the change, and this remarkable revolution had been
+carried out with an ease and completeness which found no parallel in any
+other slave-owning country.
+
+In spite of rebellion, in spite of the breaking up and reconstruction of
+the social system, in spite of the indifferent administration of
+justice, in spite of taxation, and the inexplicable appropriation of the
+revenue, Cuba was still moderately prosperous, and that it could
+flourish at all after trials so severe was the best evidence of the
+greatness of its natural wealth. The party of insurrection was
+dissolved, and would revive again only under the unlikely contingency of
+encouragement from the United States. There was a party, however, which
+desired for Cuba a constitution like the Canadian--Home Rule and the
+management of its own affairs--and as the black element was far
+outnumbered and under control, such a constitution would not be
+politically dangerous.
+
+If the Spanish Government does not mend its ways, concessions of this
+kind may eventually have to be made, though the improvement to be
+expected from it is doubtful. Official corruption is engrained in the
+character and habits of the Spanish people. Judges allowed their
+decisions to be 'influenced' under Philip III. as much as to-day in the
+colonies of Queen Christina; and when a fault is the habit of a people,
+it survives political reforms and any number of turnings of the
+kaleidoscope.
+
+The encouraging feature is the success of emancipation. There is no
+jealousy, no race animosity, no supercilious contempt of whites for
+'niggers.' The Spaniards have inherited a tinge of colour themselves
+from their African ancestors, and thus they are all friends together.
+The liberated slave can acquire and own land if he wishes for it, but as
+a rule he prefers to work for wages. These happy conditions arise in
+part from the Spanish temperament, but chiefly from the numerical
+preponderance of the white element, which, as in the United States, is
+too secure to be uneasy. The black is not encouraged in insubordination
+by a sense that he could win in a contest of strength, and the aspect of
+things is far more promising for the future than in our own islands. The
+Spaniards, however inferior we may think them to ourselves, have filled
+their colonies with their own people and are reaping the reward of it.
+We have so contrived that such English as had settled in the West Indies
+on their own account are leaving them.
+
+Spain, four centuries ago, was the greatest of European nations, the
+first in art, or second only to Italy, the first in arms, the first in
+the men whom she produced. She has been swept along in the current of
+time. She fought against the stream of tendency, and the stream proved
+too strong for her, great as she was. The modern spirit, which she
+would not have when it came in the shape of the Reformation, has flowed
+over her borders as revolution, not to her benefit, for she is unable to
+assimilate the new ideas. The old Spain of the Inquisition is gone; the
+Spain of to-day is divided between Liberalism and Catholic belief. She
+is sick in the process of the change, and neither she nor her colonies
+stand any longer in the front lines in the race of civilisation; yet the
+print of her foot is stamped on the New World in characters which will
+not be effaced, and may be found to be as enduring as our own.
+
+The colony is perhaps in advance of the mother country. The Catholic
+Church, Don G---- said, has little influence in Cuba; 'she has had no
+rival,' he explained, 'and so has grown lazy.' I judged the same from my
+own observations. The churches on Sundays were thinly attended, and men
+smiled when I asked them about 'confession.' I inquired about famous
+preachers. I was told that there was no preaching in Havana, famous or
+otherwise. I might if I was lucky and chose to go there in the early
+morning, hear a sermon in the church of the Jesuits; that was all. I
+went; I heard my Jesuit, who was fluent, eloquent, and gesticulating,
+but he was pouring out his passionate rhetoric to about fifty women with
+scarcely a man amongst them. It was piteous to look at him. The Catholic
+Church, whether it be for want of rivals, or merely from force of time,
+has fallen from its high estate. It can burn no more heretics, for it
+has lost the art to raise conviction to sufficient intensity. The power
+to burn was the measure of the real belief, which people had in the
+Church and its doctrines. The power has departed with the waning of
+faith; and religion in Havana, as in Madrid, is but 'use and wont;' not
+'belief' but opinion, and opinion which is half insincere. Nothing else
+can take its place. The day is too late for Protestantism, which has
+developed into wider forms, and in the matter of satisfied and complete
+religious conviction Protestants are hardly better off than Catholics.
+
+Don G---- had been much in Spain; he was acquainted with many of the
+descendants of the old aristocracy, who lingered there in faded
+grandeur. He had studied the history of his own country. He compared the
+Spain and England of the sixteenth century with the Spain and England of
+the present; and, like most of us, he knew where the yoke galled his own
+neck. But economical and political prosperity is no exhaustive measure
+of human progress. The Rome of Trajan was immeasurably more splendid
+than the Rome of the Scipios; yet the progress had been downwards
+nevertheless. If the object of our existence on this planet is the
+development of character, if the culminating point in any nation's
+history be that at which it produces its noblest and bravest men, facts
+do not tend to assure us that the triumphant march of the last hundred
+years is accomplishing much in that direction. I found myself arguing
+with Don G---- that if Charles V. and Philip II. were to come back to
+this world, and to see whither the movement had brought us of which they
+had worked so hard to suppress the beginning, they would still say that
+they had done right in trying to strangle it. The Reformation called
+itself a protest against lies, and the advocates of it imagined that
+when the lies, or what they called such, were cleared away, the pure
+metal of Christianity would remain unsullied. The great men who fought
+against the movement, Charles V. in his cabinet and Erasmus in his
+closet, had seen that it could not rest there; that it was the cradle of
+a revolution in which the whole spiritual and political organisation of
+Europe would be flung into the crucible. Under that organisation human
+nature had ascended to altitudes of chivalry, of self-sacrifice, which
+it had never before reached. The sixteenth century was the blossoming
+time of the Old World, and no such men had appeared since as then came
+to the front, either in Spain or Italy, or Germany or France or England.
+The actual leaders of the Reformation had been bred in the system which
+they destroyed. Puritanism and Calvinism produced men of powerful
+character, but they were limited and incapable of continuance; and now
+the liberty which was demanded had become what the instinct of the great
+Emperor had told him from the first must be the final shape of it, a
+revolution which would tolerate no inequalities of culture or position,
+which insisted that no man was better than another, which was to exalt
+the low and bring down the high till all mankind should stand upon a
+common level--a level, not of baseness or badness, but a level of
+good-humoured, smart, vulgar and vulgarising mediocrity, with melodrama
+for tragedy, farce for comedy, sounding speech for statesmanlike wisdom;
+and for a creed, when our fathers thought that we had been made a little
+lower than the angels, the more modest knowledge that we were only a
+little higher than the apes. This was the aspect in which the world of
+the nineteenth century would appear to Sir Thomas More or the Duke of
+Alva. From the Grand Captain to Señor Castelar, from Lord Burghley to
+Mr. Gladstone, from Leonardo da Vinci or Velasquez to Gustave Doré, from
+Cervantes and Shakespeare to 'Pickwick' and the 'Innocents at Home;'
+from the faith which built the cathedrals to evolution and the survival
+of the fittest; from the carving and architecture of the Middle Ages to
+the workmanship of the modern contractor; the change in the spiritual
+department of things had been the same along the whole line. Charles V.
+after seeing all that has been achieved, the railways, the steam
+engines, the telegraphs, the Yankee and his United States, which are the
+embodiment of the highest aspirations of the modern era, after attending
+a session of the British Association itself, and seeing the bishops
+holding out their hands to science which had done such great things for
+them, might fairly claim that it was a doubtful point whether the change
+had been really for the better.
+
+It may be answered, and answered truly, that the old thing was dead. The
+Catholic faith, where it was left standing and where it still stands,
+produces now nothing higher, nothing better than the Protestant. Human
+systems grow as trees grow. The seed shoots up, the trunk forms, the
+branches spread; leaves and flowers and fruit come out year after year
+as if they were able to renew themselves for ever. But that which has a
+beginning has an end, that which has life must die when the vital force
+is exhausted. The faith of More, as well as the faith of Ken or Wilson,
+were elevating and ennobling as long as they were sincerely believed,
+but the time came when they became clouded with uncertainty; and
+confused, perplexed, and honestly anxious, humanity struggles on as well
+as it can, all things considered, respectably enough, in its chrysalis
+condition, the old wings gone, the new wings that are to be (if we are
+ever to have another set) as yet imprisoned in their sheath.
+
+The same Sunday morning when I went in search of my sermon, the hotel
+was alive as bees at swarming time. There was to be a bull fight in
+honour of the carnival, and such a bull fight as had never been seen in
+Havana. Placards on the wall announced that a lady from Spain, Gloriana
+they called her, was to meet and slay a bull in single combat, and
+everyone must go and see the wonderful sight. I myself, having seen the
+real thing in Madrid many years ago, felt no more curiosity, and that a
+woman should be an actress in such a scene did not revive it. To those
+who went the performance was a disappointment. The bull provided turned
+out to be a calf of tender years. The spectators insisted that they
+would have a mature beast of strength and ferocity, and Gloriana when
+brought to the point declined the adventure.
+
+There was a prettier scene in the evening. In the cool after nightfall
+the beauty and fashion of Havana turns out to stroll in the illuminated
+Alameda. As it was now a high festival the band was to play, and the
+crowd was as dense as on Exhibition nights at South Kensington. The
+music was equally good, and the women as graceful and well dressed. I
+sat for an hour or two listening under the statue of poor Queen
+Isabella. The image of her still stands where it was placed, though
+revolution has long shaken her from her throne. All is forgotten now
+except that she was once a Spanish sovereign, and time and distance have
+deodorised her memory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+    Hotels in Havana--Sights in the city--Cigar manufactories--West
+    Indian industries--The Captain-General--The Jesuit college--Father
+    Viñez--Clubs in Havana--Spanish aristocracy--Sea lodging house.
+
+
+There was much to be seen in Havana, and much to think about. I
+regretted only that I had not been better advised in my choice of an
+hotel The dining saloon rang with American voices in their shrillest
+tones. Every table was occupied by groups of them, nor was there a sound
+in the room of any language but theirs. In the whole company I had not a
+single acquaintance. I have liked well almost every individual American
+that I have fallen in with and come to know. They are frank, friendly,
+open, and absolutely unaffected, and, like my friend at Miss Roy's in
+Jamaica, they take cheerful views of life, which is the highest of all
+recommendations. The distinctness and sharpness of utterance is
+tolerable and even agreeable in conversation with a single person. When
+a large number of them are together, all talking in a high tone, it
+tries the nerves and sets the teeth on edge. Nor could I escape from
+them in any part of the building. The gentlemen were talking politics in
+the hall, or lounging under the colonnade. One of them, an absolute
+stranger, who perhaps knew who I was, asked me abruptly for my opinion
+of Cardinal Newman. The ladies filled the sitting rooms; their pianos
+and their duets pierced the walls of my bedroom, and only ceased an hour
+after midnight. At five in the morning the engines began to scream at
+the adjoining railway station. The church bells woke at the same hour
+with their superfluous summons to matins which no one attended. Sleep
+was next to an impossibility under these hard conditions, and I wanted
+more and not less of it when I had the duties upon me of sightseeing.
+Sleep or no sleep, however, I determined that I would see what I could
+as long as I could keep going.
+
+A few hundred yards off was one of the most famous of the Havana cigar
+manufactories. A courteous message from the manager, Señor Bances, had
+informed me that he would be happy to show me over it on any morning
+before the sun was above the roofs of the houses. I found the señor a
+handsome elderly gentleman, tall and lean, with Castilian dignity of
+manner, free and frank in all his communications, with no reserve,
+concealments, or insincerities. I told him that in my experience cigars
+were not what they had been, that the last good one which I had smoked I
+had bought twenty years ago from a _contrabandista_ at Madrid. I had
+come to Havana to see whether I could find another equally good at the
+fountain head. He said that he was not at all surprised. It was the same
+story as at Jamaica; the consumption of cigars had increased with
+extreme rapidity; the area on which the finest tobacco had been grown
+was limited, and the expense of growing it was very great. Only a small
+quantity of the best cigars was now made for the market. In general the
+plants were heavily manured, and the flavour suffered. Leaf of coarse
+fibre was used for the core of the cigars, with only a fold or two
+wrapped round it of more delicate quality. He took me into the different
+rooms where the manufacture was going on. In the first were perhaps a
+hundred or a hundred and fifty sallow-faced young men engaged in
+rolling. They were all Cubans or Spaniards with the exception of a
+single negro; and all, I should think, under thirty. On each of the
+tables was one of the names with which we have grown familiar in modern
+cigar shops, Reynas, Regalias, Principes, and I know not how many else.
+The difference of material could not be great, but there was a real
+difference in the fineness of the make, and in the quality of the
+exterior leaf. The workmen were of unequal capacity and were unequally
+paid. The señor employed in all about 1,400; at least so I understood
+him.
+
+The black field hands had eighteenpence a day. The rollers were paid by
+quality and quantity; a good workman doing his best could earn sixty
+dollars a week, an idle and indifferent one about twelve. They smoked as
+they rolled, and there was no check upon the consumption, the loss in
+this way being estimated at 40,000 dollars a year. The pay was high;
+but there was another side to it--the occupation was dangerous. If there
+were no boys in the room, there were no old men. Those who undertook it
+died often in two or three years. Doubtless with precaution the
+mortality might be diminished; but, like the needle and the scissor
+grinders in England, the men themselves do not wish it to be diminished.
+The risk enters into the wages, and they prefer a short life and a merry
+one.
+
+The cigarettes, of which the varieties are as many as there are of
+cigars, were made exclusively by Chinese. The second room which we
+entered was full of them, their curious yellow faces mildly bending over
+their tobacco heaps. Of these there may have been a hundred. Of the
+general expenses of the establishment I do not venture to say anything,
+bewildered as I was in the labyrinthine complication of the currency,
+but it must certainly be enormous, and this house, the Partagas, was but
+one of many equally extensive in Havana alone.
+
+The señor was most liberal. He filled my pockets with packets of
+excellent cigarettes; he gave me a bundle of cigars. I cannot say
+whether they were equal to what I bought from my _contrabandista_, for
+these may have been idealised by a grateful memory, but they were so
+incomparably better than any which I have been able to get in London
+that I was tempted to deal with him, and so far I have had no reason to
+repent. The boxes with which he provided me bettered the sample, and the
+price, duty at home included, was a third below what I should have paid
+in London for an article which I would rather leave unconsumed. A broker
+whom I fell in with insisted to me that the best cigars all went to
+London, that my preference for what I got from my señor was mere fancy
+and vanity, and that I could buy better in any shop in Regent Street. I
+said that he might but I couldn't, and so we left it.
+
+I tell all this, not with the affectation of supposing that tobacco or
+my own taste about it can have any interest, but as an illustration of
+what can be done in the West Indies, and to show how immense a form of
+industry waits to be developed in our own islands, if people with
+capital and knowledge choose to set about it. Tobacco as good as the
+best in Cuba has been grown and can be grown in Jamaica, in St. Domingo,
+and probably in every one of the Antilles. 'There are dollars in those
+islands,' as my Yankee said, and many a buried treasure will be brought
+to light there when capitalists can feel assured that they will not be
+at the mercy of black constitutional governments.
+
+My letter of introduction to the Captain-General was still undelivered,
+and as I had made use of it on landing I thought it right at least to
+pay my respects to the great man. The Marques M---- kindly consented to
+go with me and help me through the interview, being of course acquainted
+with him. He was at his country house, a mile out of the town. The
+buildings are all good in Havana. It was what it called itself, not a
+palace but a handsome country residence in the middle of a large
+well-kept garden. The viceroyalty has a fair but not extravagant income
+attached to it. The Captain-General receives about 8,000_l._ a year
+besides allowances. Were the balls and dinners expected of him which our
+poor governors are obliged to entertain their subjects with, he would
+not be able to make much out of it. The large fortunes which used to be
+brought back by the fortunate Captains-General who could connive at the
+slave trade were no longer attainable; those good days are gone. Public
+opinion therefore permits them to save their incomes. The Spaniards are
+not a hospitable people, or rather their notion of hospitality differs
+in form from ours. They are ready to dine with you themselves as often
+as you will ask them. Nothing in the shape of dinners is looked for from
+the Captain-General, and when I as a stranger suggested the possibility
+of such a thing as an invitation happening to me, my companion assured
+me that I need not be in the least alarmed. We were introduced into a
+well-proportioned hall, with a few marble busts in it and casts of Greek
+and Roman statues. Aides-de-camp and general officers were lounging
+about, with whom we exchanged distant civilities. After waiting for a
+quarter of an hour we were summoned by an official into an adjoining
+room and found ourselves in his Excellency's presence. He was a small
+gentlemanlike-looking man, out of uniform, in plain morning dress with a
+silk sash. He received us with natural politeness; cordiality was
+uncalled for, but he was perfectly gracious. He expressed his pleasure
+at seeing me in the island; he hoped that I should enjoy myself, and on
+his part would do everything in his power to make my stay agreeable. He
+spoke of the emancipation of the slaves and of the social state of the
+island with pardonable satisfaction, enquired about our own West Indies,
+&c., and finally asked me to tell him in what way he could be of service
+to me. I told him that I had found such kind friends in Havana already,
+that I could think of little. One thing only he could do if he pleased.
+I had omitted to bring a passport with me, not knowing that it would be
+required. My position was irregular and might be inconvenient. I was
+indebted to my letter of introduction to his Excellency for admission
+into his dominions. Perhaps he would write a few words which would
+enable me to remain in them and go out of them when my visit was over.
+His Excellency said that he would instruct the Gobierno Civil to see to
+it, an instruction the meaning of which I too sadly understood. I was
+not to be allowed to escape the fine. A fresh shower followed of polite
+words, and with these we took ourselves away.
+
+The afternoon was spent more instructively, perhaps more agreeably, in a
+different scene. The Marques M---- had been a pupil of the Jesuits. He
+had personal friends in the Jesuit college at Havana, especially one,
+Father Viñez, whose name is familiar to students of meteorological
+science, and who has supplemented and corrected the accepted law of
+storms by careful observation of West Indian hurricanes. The Jesuits
+were as well spoken of in Havana as the Moravians in Jamaica. Everyone
+had a good word for them. They alone, as I have said, took the trouble
+to provide the good people there with a sermon on Sundays. They alone
+among the Catholic clergy, though they live poorly and have no
+endowment, exert themselves to provide a tolerable education for the
+middle and upper classes. The Marques undertook that if we called we
+should be graciously received, and I was curious and interested. Their
+college had been an enormous monastery. Wherever the Spaniards went they
+took an army of monks with them of all the orders. The monks contrived
+always to house themselves handsomely. While soldiers fought and
+settlers planted, the monks' duty was to pray. In process of time it
+came to be doubted whether the monks' prayers were worth what they cost,
+or whether, in fact, they had ever had much effect of any kind. They
+have been suppressed in Spain; they have been clipped short in all the
+Spanish dominions, and in Havana there are now left only a handful of
+Dominicans, a few nuns, and these Jesuits, who have taken possession of
+the largest of the convents, much as a soldier-crab becomes the vigorous
+tenant of the shell of some lazy sea-snail. They have a college there
+where there are four hundred lads and young men who pay for their
+education; some hundreds more are taken out of charity. The Jesuits
+conduct the whole, and do it all unaided, on their own resources. And
+this is far from all that they do. They keep on a level with the age;
+they are men of learning; they are men of science; they are the Royal
+Society of Cuba. They have an observatory in the college, and the Father
+Viñez of whom I have spoken is in charge of it. Father Viñez was our
+particular object. The porter's lodge opened into a courtyard like the
+quadrangle of a college at Oxford. From the courtyard we turned into a
+narrow staircase, up which we climbed till we reached the roof, on and
+under which the Father had his lodgings and his observing machinery. We
+entered a small room, plainly furnished with a table and a few
+uncushioned chairs; tables and chairs, all save the Father's, littered
+with books and papers. Cases stood round the wall, containing
+self-registering instruments of the most advanced modern type, each with
+its paper barrel unrolling slowly under clockwork, while a pencil noted
+upon it the temperature of the air, the atmospheric pressure, the degree
+of moisture, the ozone, the electricity. In the middle, surrounded by
+his tools and his ticking clocks, sat the Father, middle-aged, lean and
+dry, with shrivelled skin and brown threadbare frock. He received my
+companion with a warm affectionate smile. The Marques told him that I
+was an Englishman who was curious about the work in which he was
+engaged, and he spoke to me at once with the politeness of a man of
+sense. After a few questions asked and answered, he took us out to a
+shed among the roof-tiles, where he kept his large telescope, his
+equatorial, and his transit instruments--not on the great scale of
+State-supported observatories, but with everything which was really
+essential. He had a laboratory, too, and a workshop, with all the recent
+appliances. He was a practical optician and mechanic. He managed and
+repaired his own machinery, observed, made his notes, and wrote his
+reports to the societies with which he was in correspondence, all by
+himself. The outfit of such an establishment, even on a moderate scale,
+is expensive. I said I supposed that the Government gave him a grant.
+'So far from it,' he said, 'that we have to pay a duty on every
+instrument which we import.' 'Who, then, pays for it all?' I asked. 'The
+order,' he answered, quite simply.
+
+The house, I believe, _was_ a gift, though it cost the State nothing,
+having been simply seized when the monks were expelled. The order now
+maintains it, and more than repays the Government for their single act
+of generosity. At my companion's suggestion Father Viñez gave me a copy
+of his book on hurricanes. It contains a record of laborious journeys
+which he made to the scene of the devastations of the last ten years.
+The scientific value of the Father's work is recognised by the highest
+authorities, though I cannot venture even to attempt to explain what he
+has done. He then conducted us over the building, and showed us the
+libraries, dormitories, playgrounds, and the other arrangements which
+were made for the students. Of these we saw none, they were all out, but
+the long tables in the refectory were laid for afternoon tea. There was
+a cup of milk for each lad, with a plate of honey and a roll of bread;
+and supper would follow in the evening. The sleeping gallery was
+divided into cells, open at the top for ventilation, with bed, table,
+chest of drawers, and washing apparatus--all scrupulously clean. So far
+as I could judge, the Fathers cared more for the boys' comfort than for
+their own. Through an open door our conductor faintly indicated the
+apartment which belonged to himself. Four bare walls, a bare tiled
+floor, a plain pallet, with a crucifix above the pillow, was all that it
+contained. There was no parade of ecclesiasticism. The libraries were
+well furnished, but the books were chiefly secular and scientific. The
+chapel was unornamented; there were a few pictures, but they were simple
+and inoffensive. Everything was good of its kind, down to the gymnastic
+courts and swimming bath. The holiness was kept in the back ground. It
+was in the spirit and not in the body. The cost of the whole
+establishment was defrayed out of the payments of the richer students
+managed economically for the benefit of the rest, with complete
+indifference on the part of the Fathers to indulgence and pleasures of
+their own. As we took leave the Marques kissed his old master's brown
+hand. I rather envied him the privilege.
+
+Something I saw of Havana society in the received sense of the word.
+There are many clubs there, and high play in most of them, for the
+Cubans are given to the roulette tables. The Union club which is the
+most distinguished among them, invites occasional strangers staying in
+the city to temporary membership as we do at the Athenæum. Here you meet
+Spanish _grandes_, who have come to Cuba to be out of reach of
+revolution, proud as ever and not as poor as you might expect; and when
+you ask who they are you hear the great familiar names of Spanish
+history. I was introduced to the president--young, handsome, and
+accomplished. I was startled to learn that he was the head of the old
+house of Sandoval. The house of Columbus ought to be there also, for
+there is still a Christophe Colon, the direct linear representative of
+the discoverer, disguised under the title of the Duque de Veragua. A
+perpetual pension of 20,000 dollars a year was granted to the great
+Christophe and his heirs for ever as a charge on the Cuban revenue. It
+has been paid to the family through all changes of dynasty and forms of
+government, and is paid to them still. But the Duque resides in Spain,
+and the present occupation of him, I was informed, is the breeding and
+raising bulls for the Plaza de Toros at Seville.
+
+Thus, every way, my stay was made agreeable to me. There were breakfasts
+and dinners and introductions. Don G---- and his brother were not fine
+gentlemen only, but were men of business and deeply engaged in the
+active life of the place. The American consul was a conspicuous figure
+at these entertainments. America may not find it her interest to annex
+these islands, but since she ordered the French out of Mexico, and the
+French obeyed, she is universally felt on that side of the Atlantic to
+be the supreme arbiter of all their fates. Her consuls are thus persons
+of consequence. The Cubans like the Americans well. The commercial
+treaty which was offered to our islands by the United States would have
+been accepted eagerly by the Spaniards. To them, the Americans have, as
+yet, not been equally liberal, but an arrangement will soon be
+completed. They say that they have hills of solid iron in the island and
+mountains of copper with fifty per cent. of virgin ore in them waiting
+for the Americans to develop. The present administration would swallow
+up in taxation the profits of the most promising enterprise that ever
+was undertaken, but the metals are there, and will come one day into
+working. The consul was a swift peremptory man who knew his own mind at
+any rate. Between his 'Yes, sir,' and his 'No, sir,' you were at no loss
+for his meaning. He told me a story of a 'nigger' officer with whom he
+had once got into conversation at Hayti. He had inquired why they let so
+fine an island run to waste? Why did they not cultivate it? The dusky
+soldier laid his hand upon his breast and waved his hand. 'Ah,' he said,
+'that might do for English or Germans or Americans; we of the Latin race
+have higher things to occupy us.'
+
+I liked the consul well. I could not say as much for his countrymen and
+countrywomen at my hotel. Individually I dare say they would have been
+charming; collectively they drove me to distraction. Space and time had
+no existence for them; they and their voices were heard in all places
+and at all hours. The midnight bravuras at the pianos mixed wildly in my
+broken dreams. The Marques M---- wished to take me with him to his
+country seat and show me his sugar plantations. Nothing could have been
+more delightful, but with want of sleep and the constant racket I found
+myself becoming unwell. In youth and strength one can defy the foul
+fiend and bid him do his worst; in age one finds it wiser to get out of
+the way.
+
+On the sea, seven miles from Havana, and connected with it by a
+convenient railway, at a place called Vedado, I found a lodging house
+kept by a Frenchman (the best cook in Cuba) with a German wife. The
+situation was so attractive, and the owners of it so attentive, that
+quiet people went often into 'retreat' there. There were delicious
+rooms, airy and solitary as I could wish. The sea washed the coral rock
+under the windows. There were walks wild as if there was no city within
+a thousand miles--up the banks of lonely rivers, over open moors, or
+among inclosures where there were large farming establishments with
+cattle and horses and extensive stables and sheds. There was a village
+and a harbour where fishing people kept their boats and went out daily
+with their nets and lines--blacks and whites living and working side by
+side. I could go where I pleased without fear of interference or
+question. Only I was warned to be careful of the dogs, large and
+dangerous, descendants of the famous Cuban bloodhounds, which are kept
+everywhere to guard the yards and houses. These beasts were really
+dangerous, and had to be avoided. The shore was of inexhaustible
+interest. It was a level shelf of coral rock extending for many miles
+and littered over with shells and coral branches which had been flung up
+by the surf. I had hoped for bathing. In the open water it is not to be
+thought of on account of the sharks, but baths have been cut in the rock
+all along that part of the coast at intervals of half a mile; deep
+square basins with tunnels connecting them with the sea, up which the
+waves run clear and foaming. They are within inclosures, roofed over to
+keep out the sun, and with attendants regularly present. Art and nature
+combined never made more charming pools; the water clear as sapphire,
+aerated by the constant inrush of the foaming breakers, and so warm that
+you could lie in it without a chill for hours. Alas! that I could but
+look at them and execrate the precious Government which forbade me their
+use. So severe a tax is laid on these bathing establishments that the
+owners can only afford to keep them open during the three hottest months
+in the year, when the demand is greatest.
+
+In the evenings people from Havana would occasionally come down to dine
+as we go to Greenwich, being attracted partly by the air and partly by
+my host's reputation. There was a long verandah under which tables were
+laid out, and there were few nights on which one or more parties were
+not to be seen there. Thus I encountered several curious specimens of
+Cuban humanity, and on one of my runs up to Havana I met again the cigar
+broker who had so roughly challenged my judgment. He was an original and
+rather diverting man; I should think a Jew. Whatever he was he fell upon
+me again and asked me scornfully whether I supposed that the cigars
+which I had bought of Señor Bances were anything out of the way. I said
+that they suited my taste and that was enough. 'Ah,' he replied, '_Cada
+loco con su tema._ Every fool had his opinion.' 'I am the _loco_
+(idiot), then,' said I, 'but that again is matter of opinion.' He spoke
+of Cuba and professed to know all about it. 'Can you tell me, then,'
+said I, 'why the Cubans hate the Spaniards?' 'Why do the Irish hate the
+English?' he answered. I said it was not an analogous case. Cubans and
+Spaniards were of the same breed and of the same creed. 'That is
+nothing,' he replied; 'the Americans will have both Cuba and Ireland
+before long.' I said I thought the Americans were too wise to meddle
+with either. If they did, however, I imagined that on our own side of
+the Atlantic we should have something to say on the subject before
+Ireland was taken from us. He laughed good-humouredly. 'Is it possible,
+sir,' he said, 'that you live in England and are so absolutely
+ignorant?' I laughed too. He was a strange creature, and would have made
+an excellent character in a novel.
+
+Don G---- or his brother came down occasionally to see how I was getting
+on and to talk philosophy and history. Other gentlemen came, and the
+favourite subject of conversation was Spanish administration. One of
+them told me this story as an illustration of it. His father was the
+chief partner in a bank; a clerk absconded, taking 50,000 dollars with
+him; he had been himself sent in pursuit of the man, overtook him with
+the money still in his possession, and recovered it. With this he ought
+to have been contented, but he tried to have the offender punished. The
+clerk replied to the criminal charge by a counter-charge against the
+house. It was absurd in itself, but he found that a suit would grow out
+of it which would swallow more than the 50,000 dollars, and finally he
+bribed the judge to allow him to drop the prosecution. _Cosas de
+España_; it lies in the breed. Guzman de Alfarache was robbed of his
+baggage by a friend. The facts were clear, the thief was caught with
+Guzman's clothes on his back; but he had influential friends--he was
+acquitted. He prosecuted Guzman for a false accusation, got a judgment
+and ruined him.
+
+The question was, whether if the Cubans could make themselves
+independent there would be much improvement. The want in Cuba just now,
+as in a good many other places, is the want of some practical religion
+which insists on moral duty. A learned English judge was trying a case
+one day, when there seemed some doubt about the religious condition of
+one of the witnesses. The clerk of the court retired with him to
+ascertain what it really was, and returned radiant almost immediately,
+saying, 'All right, my lord. Knows he'll be damned--competent
+witness--knows he'll be damned.' That is really the whole of the matter.
+If a man is convinced that if he does wrong he will infallibly be
+punished for it he has then 'a saving faith.' This, unfortunately, is
+precisely the conviction which modern forms of religion produce hardly
+anywhere. The Cubans are Catholics, and hear mass and go to confession;
+but confession and the mass between them are enough for the consciences
+of most of them, and those who think are under the influence of the
+modern spirit, to which all things are doubtful. Some find comfort in
+Mr. Herbert Spencer. Some regard Christianity as a myth or poem, which
+had passed in unconscious good faith into the mind of mankind, and there
+might have remained undisturbed as a beneficent superstition had not
+Protestantism sprung up and insisted on flinging away everything which
+was not literal and historical fact. Historical fact had really no more
+to do with it than with the stories of Prometheus or the siege of Troy.
+The end was that no bottom of fact could be found, and we were all set
+drifting.
+
+Notably too I observed among serious people there, what I have observed
+in other places, the visible relief with which they begin to look
+forward to extinction after death. When the authority is shaken on which
+the belief in a future life rests, the question inevitably recurs. Men
+used to pretend that the idea of annihilation was horrible to them; now
+they regard the probability of it with calmness, if not with actual
+satisfaction. One very interesting Cuban gentleman said to me that life
+would be very tolerable if one was certain that death would be the end
+of it. The theological alternatives were equally unattractive; Tartarus
+was an eternity of misery, and the Elysian Fields an eternity of ennui.
+
+There is affectation in the talk of men, and one never knows from what
+they say exactly what is in their mind. I have often thought that the
+real character of a people shows itself nowhere with more unconscious
+completeness than in their cemeteries. Philosophise as we may, few of us
+are deliberately insincere in the presence of death; and in the
+arrangements which we make for the reception of those who have been dear
+to us, and in the lines which we inscribe upon their monuments, we show
+what we are in ourselves perhaps more than what they were whom we
+commemorate. The parish churchyard is an emblem and epitome of English
+country life; London reflects itself in Brompton and Kensal Green, and
+Paris in Père la Chaise. One day as I was walking I found myself at the
+gate of the great suburban cemetery of Havana. It was enclosed within
+high walls; the gateway was a vast arch of brown marble, beautiful and
+elaborately carved. Within there was a garden simply and gracefully laid
+out with trees and shrubs and flowers in borders. The whole space
+inclosed may have been ten acres, of which half was assigned to those
+who were contented with a mere mound of earth to mark where they lay;
+the rest was divided into family vaults covered with large white marble
+slabs, separate headstones marking individuals for whom a particular
+record was required, and each group bearing the name of the family the
+members of which were sleeping there. The peculiarity of the place was
+the absence of inscriptions. There was a name and date, with E.P.D.--'en
+paz descansa'[14]--or E.G.E.--'en gracia está'[15]--and that seemed all
+that was needed. The virtues of the departed and the grief of the
+survivors were taken for granted in all but two instances. There may
+have been more, but I could find only these.
+
+One was in Latin:
+
+    AD COELITES EVOCATÆ UXORI EXIMÆ IGNATIUS.
+    _Ignatius to his admirable wife who has been called up to heaven._
+
+The other was in Spanish verse, and struck me as a graceful imitation of
+the old manner of Cervantes and Lope de Vega. The design on the monument
+was of a girl hanging an immortelle upon a cross. The tomb was of a
+Caridad del Monte, and the lines were:
+
+    Bendita Caridad, las que piadosa
+    Su mano vierte en la funérea losa
+    Son flores recogidas en el suelo,
+    Mas con su olor perfumaián el cielo.
+
+It is dangerous for anyone to whom a language is only moderately
+familiar to attempt an appreciation of elegiac poetry, the effect of
+which, like the fragrance of a violet, must rather be perceived than
+accounted for. He may imagine what is not there, for a single word ill
+placed or ill chosen may spoil the charm, and of this a foreigner can
+never entirely judge. He may know what each word means, but he cannot
+know the associations of it. Here, however, is a translation in which
+the sense is preserved, though the aroma is gone.
+
+    The flowers which thou, oh Blessed Charity,
+    With pious hand hast twined in funeral wreath,
+    Although on earthly soil they gathered be,
+    Will sweeten heaven with their perfumed breath.
+
+The flowers, I suppose, were the actions of Caridad's own innocent life,
+which she was offering on the cross of Christ; but one never can be sure
+that one has caught the exact sentiment of emotional verse in a foreign
+language. The beauty lies in an undefinable sweetness which rises from
+the melody of the words, and in a translation disappears altogether. Who
+or what Caridad del Monte was, whether a young girl whom somebody had
+loved, or an allegoric and emblematic figure, I had no one to tell me.
+
+I must not omit one acquaintance which I was fortunate enough to make
+while staying at my seaside lodging. There appeared there one day,
+driven out of Havana like myself by the noise, an American ecclesiastic
+with a friend who addressed him as 'My lord.' By the ring and purple, as
+well as by the title, I perceived that he was a bishop. His friend was
+his chaplain, and from their voices I gathered that they were both by
+extraction Irish. The bishop had what is called a 'clergy-man's throat,'
+and had come from the States in search of a warmer climate. They kept
+entirely to themselves, but from the laughter and good-humour they were
+evidently excellent company for one another, and wanted no other. I
+rather wished than hoped that accident might introduce me to them. Even
+in Cuba the weather is uncertain. One day there came a high wind from
+the sea; the waves roared superbly upon the rocks, flying over them in
+rolling cataracts. I never saw foam so purely white or waves so
+transparent. As a spectacle it was beautiful, and the shore became a
+museum of coralline curiosities. Indoors the effect was less agreeable.
+Windows rattled and shutters broke from their fastenings and flew to and
+fro. The weathercock on the house-top creaked as he was whirled about,
+and the verandahs had to be closed, and the noise was like a prolonged
+thunder peal. The second day the wind became a cyclone, and chilly as if
+it came from the pole. None of us could stir out. The bishop suffered
+even more than I did; he walked up and down on the sheltered side of the
+house wrapped in a huge episcopalian cloak. I think he saw that I was
+sorry for him, as I really was. He spoke to me; he said he had felt the
+cold less in America when the thermometer marked 25° below zero. It was
+not much, but the silence was broken. Common suffering made a kind of
+link between us. After this he dropped an occasional gracious word as he
+passed, and one morning he came and sat by me and began to talk on
+subjects of extreme interest. Chiefly he insisted on the rights of
+conscience and the tenderness for liberty of thought which had always
+been shown by the Church of Rome. He had been led to speak of it by the
+education question which has now become a burning one in the American
+Union. The Church, he said, never had interfered, and never could or
+would interfere, with any man's conscientious scruples. Its own
+scruples, therefore, ought to be respected. The American State schools
+were irreligious, and Catholic parents were unwilling to allow their
+children to attend them. They had established schools of their own, and
+they supported them by subscriptions among themselves. In these schools
+the boys and girls learnt everything which they could learn in the State
+schools, and they learnt to be virtuous besides. They were thus
+discharging to the full every duty which the State could claim of them,
+and the State had no right to tax them in addition for the maintenance
+of institutions of which they made no use, and of the principles of
+which they disapproved. There were now eight millions of Catholics in
+the Union. In more than one state they had an actual majority; and they
+intended to insist that as long as their children came up to the present
+educational standard, they should no longer be compelled to pay a second
+education tax to the Government. The struggle, he admitted, would be a
+severe one, but the Catholics had justice on their side, and would fight
+on till they won.
+
+In democracies the majority is to prevail, and if the control of
+education falls within the province of each separate state government,
+it is not easy to see on what ground the Americans will be able to
+resist, or how there can be a struggle at all where the Catholic vote is
+really the largest. The presence of the Catholic Church in a democracy
+is the real anomaly. The principle of the Church is authority resting on
+a divine commission; the principle of democracy is the will of the
+people; and the Church in the long run will have as hard a battle to
+fight with the divine right of the majority of numbers as she had with
+the divine right of the Hohenstauffens and the Plantagenets. She is
+adroit in adapting herself to circumstances, and, like her emblem the
+fish, she changes her colour with that of the element in which she
+swims. No doubt she has a strong position in this demand and will know
+how to use it.
+
+But I was surprised to hear even a Catholic bishop insist that his
+Church had always paid so much respect to the rights of conscience. I
+had been taught to believe that in the days of its power the Church had
+not been particularly tender towards differences of opinion. Fire and
+sword had been used freely enough as long as fire and sword were
+available. I hinted my astonishment. The bishop said the Church had been
+slandered; the Church had never in a single instance punished any man
+merely for conscientious error. Protestants had falsified history.
+Protestants read their histories, Catholics read theirs, and the
+Catholic version was the true one. The separate governments of Europe
+had no doubt been cruel. In France, Spain, the Low Countries, even in
+England, heretics had been harshly dealt with, but it was the
+governments that had burnt and massacred all those people, not the
+Church. The governments were afraid of heresy because it led to
+revolution. The Church had never shed any blood at all; the Church
+could not, for she was forbidden to do so by her own canons. If she
+found a man obstinate in unbelief, she cut him off from the communion
+and handed him over to the secular arm. If the secular arm thought fit
+to kill him, the Church's hands were clear of it.
+
+[Illustration: PORT AU PRINCE, HAYTI.]
+
+So Pilate washed his hands; so the judge might say he never hanged a
+murderer; the execution was the work of the hangman. The bishop defied
+me to produce an instance in which in Rome, when the temporal power was
+with the pope and the civil magistrates were churchmen, there had ever
+been an execution for heresy. I mentioned Giordano Bruno, whom the
+bishop had forgotten; but we agreed not to quarrel, and I could not
+admire sufficiently the hardihood and the ingenuity of his argument. The
+English bishops and abbots passed through parliament the Act _de
+hæretico comburendo_, but they were acting as politicians, not as
+churchmen. The Spanish Inquisition burnt freely and successfully. The
+inquisitors were archbishops and bishops, but the Holy Office was a
+function of the State. When Gregory XIII. struck his medal in
+commemoration of the massacre of St. Bartholomew he was then only the
+secular ruler of Rome, and therefore fallible and subject to sin like
+other mortals. The Church has many parts to play; her stage wardrobe is
+well furnished, and her actors so well instructed in their parts that
+they believe themselves in all that they say. The bishop was speaking no
+more than his exact conviction. He told me that in the Middle Ages
+secular princes were bound by their coronation oath to accept the pope
+as the arbiter of all quarrels between them. I asked where this oath
+was, or what were the terms of it? The words, he said, were unimportant.
+The fact was certain, and down to the fatal schism of the sixteenth
+century the pope had always been allowed to arbitrate, and quarrels had
+been prevented. I could but listen and wonder. He admitted that he had
+read one set of books and I another, as it was clear that he must have
+done.
+
+In the midst of our differences we found we had many points of
+agreement. We agreed that the breaking down of Church authority at the
+Reformation had been a fatal disaster; that without a sense of
+responsibility to a supernatural power, human beings would sink into
+ingenious apes, that human society would become no more than a
+congregation of apes, and that with differences of opinion and belief,
+that sense was becoming more and more obscured. So long as all serious
+men held the same convictions, and those convictions were embodied in
+the law, religion could speak with authority. The authority being denied
+or shaken, the fact itself became uncertain. The notion that everybody
+had a right to think as he pleased was felt to be absurd in common
+things. In every practical art or science the ignorant submitted to be
+guided by those who were better instructed than themselves. Why should
+they be left to their private judgment on subjects where to go wrong was
+the more dangerous. All this was plain sailing. The corollary that if it
+is to retain its influence the Church must not teach doctrines which
+outrage the common sense of mankind as Luther led half Europe to believe
+that the Church was doing in the sixteenth century, we agreed that we
+would not dispute about. But I was interested to see that the leopard
+had not changed its spots, that it merely readjusted its attitudes to
+suit the modern taste, and that if it ever recovered its power it would
+claw and scratch in the old way. Rome, like Pilate, may protest its
+innocence of the blood which was spilt in its name and in its interests.
+Did that tender and merciful court ever suggest to those prelates who
+passed the Act in England for the burning of heretics that they were
+transgressing the sacred rights of conscience? Did it reprove the
+Inquisition or send a mild remonstrance to Philip II.? The eyes of those
+who are willing to be blinded will see only what they desire to see.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[14] He rests in peace.
+
+[15] He is now in grace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+    Return to Havana--The Spaniards in Cuba--Prospects--American
+    influence--Future of the West Indies--English rumours--Leave
+    Cuba--The harbour at night--The Bahama Channel--Hayti--Port au
+    Prince--The black republic--West Indian history.
+
+
+The air and quiet of Vedado (so my retreat was called) soon set me up
+again, and I was able to face once more my hotel and its Americans. I
+did not attempt to travel in Cuba, nor was it necessary for my purpose.
+I stayed a few days longer at Havana. I went to operas and churches; I
+sailed about the harbour in boats, the boatmen, all of them, not
+negroes, as in the Antilles, but emigrants from the old country, chiefly
+Gallicians. I met people of all sorts, among the rest a Spanish
+officer--a major of engineers--who, if he lives, may come to something.
+Major D---- took me over the fortifications, showed me the interior
+lines of the Moro, and their latest specimens of modern artillery. The
+garrison are, of course, Spanish regiments made of home-bred Castilians,
+as I could not fail to recognise when I heard any of them speak. There
+are certain words of common use in Spain powerful as the magic formulas
+of enchanters over the souls of men. You hear them everywhere in the
+Peninsula; at cafe's, at tables d'hôte, and in private conversation.
+They are a part of the national intellectual equipment. Either from
+prudery or because they are superior to old-world superstitions, the
+Cubans have washed these expressions out of their language; but the
+national characteristics are preserved in the army, and the spell does
+not lose its efficacy because the islanders disbelieve in it. I have
+known a closed post office in Madrid, where the clerk was deaf to polite
+entreaty, blown open by an oath as by a bomb shell. A squad of recruits
+in the Moro, who were lying in the shade under a tree, neglected to rise
+as an officer went by. 'Saludad, C----o!' he thundered out, and they
+bounded to their feet as if electrified.
+
+On the whole Havana was something to have seen. It is the focus and
+epitome of Spanish dominion in those seas, and I was forced to conclude
+that it was well for Cuba that the English attempts to take possession
+of it had failed. Be the faults of their administration as heavy as they
+are alleged to be, the Spaniards have done more to Europeanise their
+islands than we have done with ours. They have made Cuba
+Spanish--Trinidad, Dominica, St. Lucia, Grenada have never been English
+at all, and Jamaica and Barbadoes are ceasing to be English. Cuba is a
+second home to the Spaniards, a permanent addition to their soil. We are
+as birds of passage, temporary residents for transient purposes, with no
+home in our islands at all. Once we thought them worth fighting for, and
+as long as it was a question of ships and cannon we made ourselves
+supreme rulers of the Caribbean Sea; yet the French and Spaniards will
+probably outlive us there. They will remain perhaps as satellites of the
+United States, or in some other confederacy, or in recovered strength of
+their own; we, in a generation or two, if the causes now in operation
+continue to work as they are now working, shall have disappeared from
+the scene. In Cuba there is a great Spanish population; Martinique and
+Guadaloupe are parts of France; to us it seems a matter of indifference
+whether we keep our islands or abandon them, and we leave the remnants
+of our once precious settlements to float or drown as they can.
+Australia and Canada take care of themselves; we expect our West Indies
+to do the same, careless of the difference of circumstance. We no longer
+talk of cutting our colonies adrift; the tone of public opinion is
+changed, and no one dares to advocate openly the desertion of the least
+important of them. But the neglect and indifference continue. We will
+not govern them effectively ourselves: our policy, so far as we have any
+policy, is to extend among them the principles of self-government, and
+self-government can only precipitate our extinction there as completely
+as we know that it would do in India if we were wild enough to venture
+the plunge. There is no enchantment in self-government which will make
+people love each other when they are indifferent or estranged. It can
+only force them into sharper collision.
+
+The opinion in Cuba was, and is, that America is the residuary legatee
+of all the islands, Spanish and English equally, and that she will be
+forced to take charge of them in the end whether she likes it or not.
+Spain governs unjustly and corruptly; the Cubans will not rest till they
+are free from her, and if once independent they will throw themselves on
+American protection.
+
+We will not govern our islands at all, but leave them to drift. Jamaica
+and the Antilles, given over to the negro majorities, can only become
+like Hayti and St. Domingo; and the nature of things will hardly permit
+so fair a part of the earth which has been once civilised and under
+white control to fall back into barbarism.
+
+To England the loss of the West Indies would not itself be serious; but
+in the life of nations discreditable failures are not measured by their
+immediate material consequences. To allow a group of colonies to slide
+out of our hands because we could not or would not provide them with a
+tolerable government would be nothing less than a public disgrace. It
+would be an intimation to all the world that we were unable to maintain
+any longer the position which our fathers had made for us; and when the
+unravelling of the knitted fabric of the Empire has once begun the
+process will be a rapid one.
+
+'But what would you do?' I am asked impatiently. 'We send out peers or
+gentlemen against whose character no direct objection can be raised; we
+assist them with local councils partly chosen by the people themselves.
+We send out bishops, we send out missionaries, we open schools. What can
+we do more? We cannot alter the climate, we cannot make planters prosper
+when sugar will not pay, we cannot convert black men into whites, we
+cannot force the blacks to work for the whites when they do not wish to
+work for them. "Governing," as you call it, will not change the natural
+conditions of things. You can suggest no remedy, and mere fault-finding
+is foolish and mischievous.'
+
+I might answer a good many things. Government cannot do everything, but
+it can do something, and there is a difference between governors against
+whom there is nothing to object and men of special and marked capacity.
+There is a difference between governors whose hands are tied by local
+councils and whose feet are tied by instructions from home, and a
+governor with a free hand and a wise head left to take his own measures
+on the spot. I presume that no one can seriously expect that an orderly
+organised nation can be made out of the blacks, when, in spite of your
+schools and missionaries, sixty per cent. of the children now born among
+them are illegitimate. You can do for the West Indies, I repeat over and
+over again, what you do for the East; you can establish a firm
+authoritative government which will protect the blacks in their civil
+rights and protect the whites in theirs. You cannot alter the climate,
+it is true, or make the soil more fertile. Already it is fertile as any
+in the earth, and the climate is admirable for the purposes for which it
+is needed. But you can restore confidence in the stability of your
+tenure, you can give courage to the whites who are on the spot to remain
+there, and you can tempt capital and enterprise to venture there which
+now seek investments elsewhere. By keeping the rule in your own hands
+you will restore the white population to their legitimate influence; the
+blacks will again look up to them and respect them as they ought to do.
+This you can do, and it will cost you nothing save a little more pains
+in the selection of the persons whom you are to trust with powers
+analogous to those which you grant to your provincial governors in the
+Indian peninsula.
+
+A preliminary condition of this, as of all other real improvements, is
+one, however, which will hardly be fulfilled. Before a beginning can be
+made, a conviction is wanted that life has other objects besides present
+interest and convenience; and very few of us indeed have at the bottom
+of our hearts any such conviction at all. We can talk about it in fine
+language--no age ever talked more or better--but we don't believe in it;
+we believe only in professing to believe, which soothes our vanity and
+does not interfere with our actions. From fine words no harvests grow.
+The negroes are well disposed to follow and obey any white who will be
+kind and just to them, and in such following and obedience their only
+hope of improvement lies. The problem is to create a state of things
+under which Englishmen of vigour and character will make their homes
+among them. Annexation to the United States would lead probably to their
+extermination at no very distant time. The Antilles are small, and the
+fate of the negroes there might be no better than the fate of the
+Caribs. The Americans are not a people who can be trifled with; no one
+knows it better than the negroes. They fear them. They prefer infinitely
+the mild rule of England, and under such a government as we might
+provide if we cared to try, the whole of our islands might become like
+the Moravian settlement in Jamaica, and the black nature, which has
+rather degenerated than improved in these late days of licence, might be
+put again in the way of regeneration. The process would be slow--your
+seedlings in a plantation hang stationary year after year, but they do
+move at last. We cannot disown our responsibility for these poor adopted
+brothers of ours. We send missionaries into Africa to convert them to a
+better form of religion; why should the attempt seem chimerical to
+convert them practically to a higher purpose in our own colonies?
+
+The reader will be weary of a sermon the points of which have been
+reiterated so often. I might say that he requires to have the lesson
+impressed upon him--that it is for his good that I insist upon it, and
+not for my own. But this is the common language of all preachers, and it
+is not found to make the hearers more attentive. I will not promise to
+say no more upon the subject, for it was forced upon me at every moment
+and point of my journey. I am arriving near the end, however, and if he
+has followed so far, he will perhaps go on with me to the conclusion. I
+had three weeks to give to Havana; they were fast running out, and it
+was time for me to be going. Strange stories, too, came from England,
+which made me uneasy till I knew how they were set in circulation. One
+day Mr. Gladstone was said to have gone mad, and the Queen the next.
+The Russians were about to annex Afghanistan. Our troops had been cut to
+pieces in Burmah. Something was going wrong with us every day in one
+corner of the world or another. I found at last that the telegraphic
+intelligence was supplied to the Cuban newspapers from New York, that
+the telegraph clerks there were generally Irish, and their facts were
+the creation of their wishes. I was to return to Jamaica in the same
+vessel which had brought me from it. She had been down to the isthmus,
+and was to call at Havana on her way back. The captain's most English
+face was a welcome sight to me when he appeared one evening at dinner.
+He had come to tell me that he was to sail early on the following
+morning, and I arranged to go on board with him the same night. The
+Captain-General had not forgotten to instruct the Gobierno Civil to
+grant me an _exeat regno_. I do not know that I gained much by his
+intercession, for without it I should hardly have been detained
+indefinitely, and as it was I had to pay more dollars than I liked to
+part with. The necessary documents, however, had been sent through the
+British consul, and I was free to leave when I pleased. I paid my bill
+at the hotel, which was not after all an extravagant one, cleared my
+pocket-book of the remainder of the soiled and tattered paper which is
+called money, and does duty for it down to a half-penny, and with my
+distinguished friend Don G----, the real acquisition which I had made in
+coming to his country, and who would not leave me till I was in the
+boat, I drove away to the wharf.
+
+It was a still, lovely, starlight night. The moon had risen over the
+hills, and was shining brightly on the roofs and towers of the city, and
+on the masts and spars of the vessels which were riding in the harbour.
+There was not a ripple on the water, and stars and city, towers and
+ships, stood inverted on the surface pointing downward as into a second
+infinity. The charm was unfortunately interfered with by odours worse
+than Coleridge found at Cologne and cursed in rhyme. The drains of
+Havana, like orange blossom, give off their most fragrant vapours in
+the dark hours. I could well believe Don G----'s saying, that but for
+the natural healthiness of the place, they would all die of it like
+poisoned flies. We had to cut our adieus short, for the mouth of some
+horrid sewer was close to us. In the boat I did not escape; the water
+smelt horribly as it was stirred by the oars, charged as it was with
+three centuries of pollution, and the phosphorescent light shone with a
+sickly, sulphur-like brilliance. One could have fancied that one was in
+Charon's boat and was crossing Acheron. When I reached the steamer I
+watched from the deck the same ghost-like phenomenon which is described
+by Tom Cringle. A fathom deep, in the ship's shadow, some shark or other
+monster sailed slowly by in an envelope of spectral lustre. When he
+stopped his figure disappeared, when he moved on again it was like the
+movement of a streak of blue flame. Such a creature did not seem as if
+it could belong to our familiar sunlit ocean.
+
+The state of the harbour is not creditable to the Spanish Government,
+and I suppose will not be improved till there is some change of dynasty.
+All that can be said for it is that it is not the worst in these seas.
+Our ship had just come from the Canal, and had brought the latest news
+from thence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the miscalculations of the work to be done and of the expense of
+doing it are now notorious to all the world. The alternatives are to
+abandon an enterprise so splendid in conception, so disastrous in the
+execution, or to raise and spend fresh tens of millions to follow those
+that are gone with no certain prospect of success after all. The saddest
+part of the story will be soonest forgotten--the frightful consumption
+of human life in those damp and pestilential jungles. M. Lesseps having
+made his name immortal at Suez, aspired at eclipsing his first
+achievement, by a second yet more splendidly ambitious, at a time of
+life when common men are content to retire upon their laurels. He
+deserves and will receive an unstinted admiration for his energy and his
+enthusiasm. But his countrymen who have so zealously supported him will
+be rewarded with no dividend upon their shares, even if the two oceans
+are eventually united, and no final success can be looked for in the
+bold projector's life time.
+
+At dawn we swept out under the Moro, and away once more into the free
+fresh open sea. We had come down on the south side of the island, we
+returned by the north up the old Bahama Channel where Drake died on his
+way home from his last unsuccessful expedition--Lope de Vega singing a
+pæan over the end of the great 'dragon.' Fresh passengers brought fresh
+talk. There was a clever young Jamaican on board returning from a
+holiday; he had the spirits of youth about him, and would have pleased
+my American who never knew good come of despondency. He had hopes for
+his country, but they rested, like those of every sensible man that I
+met, on an inability to believe that there would be further advances in
+the direction of political liberty. A revised constitution, he said,
+could issue only in fresh Gordon riots and fresh calamities. He had been
+travelling in the Southern States. He had seen the state of Mississippi
+deserted by the whites, and falling back into a black wilderness. He had
+seen South Carolina, which had narrowly escaped ruin under a black and
+carpet-bagger legislature, and had recovered itself under the steady
+determination of the Americans that the civil war was not to mean the
+domination of negro over white. The danger was greater in the English
+islands than in either of these states, from the enormous disproportion
+of numbers. The experiment could be ventured only under a high census
+and a restricted franchise. But the experience of all countries showed
+that these limited franchises were invidious and could not be
+maintained, the end was involved in the beginning, and he trusted that
+prudent counsels would prevail. We had gone too far already.
+
+On board also there was a traveller from a Manchester house of business,
+who gave me a more flourishing account than I expected of the state of
+our trade, not so much with the English islands as with the Spaniards in
+Cuba and on the mainland. His own house, he said, had a large business
+with Havana; twenty firms in the north of England were competing there,
+and all were doing well. The Spanish Americans on the west side of the
+continent were good customers, with the exception of the Mexicans, who
+were energetic and industrious, and manufactured for their own
+consumption. These modern Aztecs were skilful workmen, nimble-fingered
+and inventive. Wages were low, but they were contented with them.
+Mexico, I was surprised to hear from him, was rising fast into
+prosperity. Whether human life was any safer then than it was a few
+years ago, he did not tell me.
+
+Amidst talk and chess and occasional whist after nightfall when reading
+became difficult, we ran along with smooth seas, land sometimes in
+sight, with shoals on either side of us.
+
+We were to have one more glimpse of Hayti; we were to touch at Port au
+Prince, the seat of government of the successors of Toussaint. If beauty
+of situation could mould human character, the inhabitants of Port au
+Prince might claim to be the first of mankind. St. Domingo or Española,
+of which Hayti is the largest division, was the earliest island
+discovered by Columbus and the finest in the Caribbean Ocean. It
+remained Spanish, as I have already said, for 200 years, when Hayti was
+taken by the French buccaneers, and made over by them to Louis XIV. The
+French kept it till the Revolution. They built towns; they laid out
+farms and sugar fields; they planted coffee all over the island, where
+it now grows wild.' Vast herds of cattle roamed over the mountains;
+splendid houses rose over the rich savannahs. The French Church put out
+its strength; there were churches and priests in every parish; there
+were monasteries and nunneries for the religious orders. So firm was the
+hold that they had gained that Hayti, like Cuba, seemed to have been
+made a part of the old world, and as civilised as France itself. But
+French civilisation became itself electric. The Revolution came, and the
+reign of Liberty. The blacks took arms; they surprised the plantations;
+they made a clean sweep of the whole French population. Yellow fever
+swept away the armies which were sent to avenge the massacre, and France
+being engaged in annexing Europe had no leisure to despatch more. The
+island being thus derelict, Spain and England both tried their hand to
+recover it, but failed from the same cause, and a black nation, with a
+republican constitution and a population perhaps of about a million and
+a half of pure-blood negroes, has since been in unchallenged possession,
+and has arrived at the condition which has been described to us by Sir
+Spenser St. John. Republics which begin with murder and plunder do not
+come to much good in this world. Hayti has passed through many
+revolutions, and is no nearer than at first to stability. The present
+president, M. Salomon, who was long a refugee in Jamaica, came into
+power a few years back by a turn of the wheel. He was described to me as
+a peremptory gentleman who made quick work with his political opponents.
+His term of office having nearly expired, he had re-elected himself
+shortly before for another seven years and was prepared to maintain his
+right by any measures which he might think expedient. He had a few
+regiments of soldiers, who, I was told, were devoted to him, and a fleet
+consisting of two gunboats commanded by an American officer, to whom he
+chiefly owed his security.
+
+We had steamed along the Hayti coast all one afternoon, underneath a
+high range of hills which used to be the hunting ground of the
+buccaneers. We had passed their famous Tortugas[16] without seeing them.
+Towards evening we entered the long channel between Gonaive island and
+the mainland, going slowly that we might not arrive at Port au Prince
+before daylight. It was six in the morning when the anchor rattled down,
+and I went on deck to look about me. We were at the head of a fiord
+rather broader than those in Norway, but very like them--wooded
+mountains rising on either side of us, an open valley in front, and on
+the rich level soil washed down by the rains and deposited along the
+shore, the old French and now President Salomon's capital. Palms and
+oranges and other trees were growing everywhere among the houses giving
+the impression of graceful civilisation. Directly before us were three
+or four wooded islets which form a natural breakwater, and above them
+were seen the masts of the vessels which were lying in the harbour
+behind. Close to where we were brought up lay the 'Canada,' an English
+frigate, and about a quarter of a mile from her an American frigate of
+about the same size, with the stars and stripes conspicuously flying. We
+have had some differences of late with the Hayti authorities, and the
+satisfaction which we asked for having been refused or delayed, a
+man-of-war had been sent to ask redress in more peremptory terms. The
+town lay under her guns; the president's ships, which she might perhaps
+have seized as a security, had been taken out of sight into shallow
+water, where she could not follow them. The Americans have no particular
+rights in Hayti, and are as little liked as we are, but they are feared,
+and they do not allow any business of a serious kind to go on in those
+waters without knowing what it is about. Perhaps the president's admiral
+of the station being an American may have had something to do with their
+presence. Anyway, there the two ships were lying when I came up from
+below, their hulks and spars outlined picturesquely against the steep
+wooded shores. The air was hot and steamy; fishing vessels with white
+sails were drifting slowly about the glassy water. Except for the heat
+and a black officer of the customs in uniform, and his boat and black
+crew alongside, I could have believed myself off Mölde or some similar
+Norwegian town, so like everything seemed, even to the colour of the
+houses.
+
+We were to stay some hours. After breakfast we landed. I had seen
+Jacmel, and therefore thought myself prepared for the worst which I
+should find. Jacmel was an outlying symptom; Port au Prince was the
+central ulcer. Long before we came to shore there came off whiffs, not
+of drains as at Havana, but of active dirt fermenting in the sunlight.
+Calling our handkerchiefs to our help and looking to our feet carefully,
+we stepped up upon the quay and walked forward as judiciously as we
+could. With the help of stones we crossed a shallow ditch, where rotten
+fish, vegetables, and other articles were lying about promiscuously, and
+we came on what did duty for a grand parade.
+
+We were in a Paris of the gutter, with boulevards and _places_, _fiacres_
+and crimson parasols. The boulevards were littered with the refuse of
+the houses and were foul as pigsties, and the ladies under the parasols
+were picking their way along them in Parisian boots and silk dresses. I
+saw a _fiacre_ broken down in a black pool out of which a blacker
+ladyship was scrambling. Fever breeds so prodigally in that pestilential
+squalor that 40,000 people were estimated to have died of it in a single
+year. There were shops and stores and streets, men and women in tawdry
+European costume, and officers on horseback with a tatter of lace and
+gilding. We passed up the principal avenue, which opened on the market
+place. Above the market was the cathedral, more hideous than even the
+Mormon temple at Salt Lake. It was full of ladies; the rank, beauty, and
+fashion of Port au Prince were at their morning mass, for they are
+Catholics with African beliefs underneath. They have a French clergy, an
+archbishop and bishop, paid miserably but still subsisting; subsisting
+not as objects of reverence at all, as they are at Dominica, but as the
+humble servants and ministers of black society. We English are in bad
+favour just now; no wonder, with the guns of the 'Canada' pointed at the
+city; but the chief complaint is on account of Sir Spenser St. John's
+book, which they cry out against with a degree of anger which is the
+surest evidence of its truth. It would be unfair even to hint at the
+names or stations of various persons who gave me information about the
+condition of the place and people. Enough that those who knew well what
+they were speaking about assured me that Hayti was the most ridiculous
+caricature of civilisation in the whole world. Doubtless the whites
+there are not disinterested witnesses; for they are treated as they once
+treated the blacks. They can own no freehold property, and exist only on
+tolerance. They are called 'white trash.' Black dukes and marquises
+drive over them in the street and swear at them, and they consider it an
+invasion of the natural order of things. If this was the worst, or even
+if the dirt and the disease was the worst, it might be borne with, for
+the whites might go away if they pleased, and they pay the penalty
+themselves for choosing to be there. But this is not the worst.
+Immorality is so universal that it almost ceases to be a fault, for a
+fault implies an exception, and in Hayti it is the rule. Young people
+make experiment of one another before they will enter into any closer
+connection. So far they are no worse than in our own English islands,
+where the custom is equally general; but behind the immorality, behind
+the religiosity, there lies active and alive the horrible revival of the
+West African superstitions; the serpent worship, and the child
+sacrifice, and the cannibalism. There is no room to doubt it. A
+missionary assured me that an instance of it occurred only a year ago
+within his own personal knowledge. The facts are notorious; a full
+account was published in one of the local newspapers, and the only
+result was that the president imprisoned the editor for exposing his
+country. A few years ago persons guilty of these infamies were tried and
+punished; now they are left alone, because to prosecute and convict them
+would be to acknowledge the truth of the indictment.
+
+In this, as in all other communities, there is a better side as well as
+a worse. The better part is ashamed of the condition into which the
+country has fallen; rational and well-disposed Haytians would welcome
+back the French but for an impression, whether well founded or ill I
+know not, that the Americans would not suffer any European nation to
+reacquire or recover any new territory on their side of the Atlantic.
+They make the most they can of their French connection. They send their
+children to Paris to be educated, and many of them go thither
+themselves. There is money among them, though industry there is none.
+The Hayti coffee which bears so high a reputation is simply gathered
+under the bushes which the French planters left behind them, and is half
+as excellent as it ought to be because it is so carelessly cleaned. Yet
+so rich is the island in these and other natural productions that they
+cannot entirely ruin it. They have a revenue from their customs of
+5,000,000 dollars to be the prey of political schemers. They have a
+constitution, of course, with a legislature--two houses of a
+legislature--universal suffrage, &c., but it does not save them from
+revolutions, which recurred every two or three years till the time of
+the present president. He being of stronger metal than the rest, takes
+care that the votes are given as he pleases, shoots down recusants, and
+knows how to make himself feared. He is a giant, they say--I did not see
+him--six feet some inches in height and broad in proportion. When in
+Jamaica he was a friend of Gordon, and the intimacy between them is
+worth noting, as throwing light on Gordon's political aspirations.
+
+I stayed no longer than the ship's business detained the captain, and I
+breathed more freely when I had left that miserable cross-birth of
+ferocity and philanthropic sentiment. No one can foretell the future
+fate of the black republic, but the present order of things cannot last
+in an island so close under the American shores. If the Americans forbid
+any other power to interfere, they will have to interfere themselves. If
+they find Mormonism an intolerable blot upon their escutcheon, they will
+have to put a stop in some way or other to cannibalism and
+devil-worship. Meanwhile, the ninety years of negro self-government have
+had their use in showing what it really means, and if English statesmen,
+either to save themselves trouble or to please the prevailing
+uninstructed sentiment, insist on extending it, they will be found when
+the accounts are made up to have been no better friends to the unlucky
+negro than their slave-trading forefathers.
+
+From the head of the bay on which Port au Prince stands there reaches
+out on the west the long arm or peninsula which is so peculiar a feature
+in the geography of the island. The arm bone is a continuous ridge of
+mountains rising to a height of 8,000 feet and stretching for 160 miles.
+At the back towards the ocean is Jacmel, on the other side is the bight
+of Leogane, over which and along the land our course lay after leaving
+President Salomon's city. The day was unusually hot, and we sat under an
+awning on deck watching the changes in the landscape as ravines opened
+and closed again, and tall peaks changed their shapes and angles.
+Clouds came down upon the mountain tops and passed off again, whole
+galleries of pictures swept by, and nature never made more lovely ones.
+The peculiarity of tropical mountain scenery is that the high summits
+are clothed with trees. The outlines are thus softened and rounded, save
+where the rock is broken into precipices. Along the sea and for several
+miles inland are the Basses Terres as they used to be called, level
+alluvial plains, cut and watered at intervals by rivers, once covered
+with thriving plantations and now a jungle. There are no wild beasts
+there save an occasional man, few snakes, and those not dangerous. The
+acres of richest soil which are waiting there till reasonable beings can
+return and cultivate them, must be hundreds of thousands. In the valleys
+and on the slopes there are all gradations of climate, abundant water,
+grass lands that might be black with cattle, or on the loftier ranges
+white with sheep.
+
+It is strange to think how chequered a history these islands have had,
+how far they are even yet from any condition which promises permanence.
+Not one of them has arrived at any stable independence. Spaniards,
+English and French, Dutch and Danes scrambled for them, fought for them,
+occupied them more or less with their own people, but it was not to
+found new nations, but to get gold or get something which could be
+changed for gold. Only occasionally, and as it were by accident, they
+became the theatre of any grander game. The war of the Reformation was
+carried thither, and heroic deeds were done there, but it was by
+adventurers who were in search of plunder for themselves. France and
+England fought among the Antilles, and their names are connected with
+many a gallant action; but they fought for the sovereignty of the seas,
+not for the rights and liberties of the French or English inhabitants of
+the islands. Instead of occupying them with free inhabitants, the
+European nations filled them with slave gangs. They were valued only for
+the wealth which they yielded, and society there has never assumed any
+particularly noble aspect. There has been splendour and luxurious
+living, and there have been crimes and horrors, and revolts and
+massacres. There has been romance, but it has been the romance of
+pirates and outlaws. The natural graces of human life do not show
+themselves under such conditions. There has been no saint in the West
+Indies since Las Casas, no hero, unless philonegro enthusiasm can make
+one out of Toussaint. There are no people there in the true sense of the
+word, with a character and purpose of their own, unless to some extent
+in Cuba, and therefore when the wind has changed and the wealth for
+which the islands were alone desired is no longer to be made among them,
+and slavery is no longer possible and would not pay if it were, there is
+nothing to fall back upon. The palaces of the English planters and
+merchants fall to decay; their wines and their furniture, their books
+and their pictures, are sold or dispersed. Their existence is a struggle
+to keep afloat, and one by one they go under in the waves.
+
+The blacks as long as they were slaves were docile and partially
+civilised. They have behaved on the whole well in our islands since
+their emancipation, for though they were personally free the whites were
+still their rulers, and they looked up to them with respect. They have
+acquired land and notions of property, some of them can read, many of
+them are tolerable workmen and some excellent, but in character the
+movement is backwards, not forwards. Even in Hayti, after the first
+outburst of ferocity, a tolerable government was possible for a
+generation or two. Orderly habits are not immediately lost, but the
+effect of leaving the negro nature to itself is apparent at last. In the
+English islands they are innocently happy in the unconsciousness of the
+obligations of morality. They eat, drink, sleep, and smoke, and do the
+least in the way of work that they can. They have no ideas of duty, and
+therefore are not made uneasy by neglecting it. One or other of them
+occasionally rises in the legal or other profession, but there is no
+sign, not the slightest, that the generality of the race are improving
+either in intelligence or moral habits; all the evidence is the other
+way. No Uncle Tom, no Aunt Chloe need be looked for in a negro's cabin
+in the West Indies. If such specimens of black humanity are to be found
+anywhere, it will be where they have continued under the old influences
+as servants in white men's houses. The generality are mere good-natured
+animals, who in service had learnt certain accomplishments, and had
+developed certain qualities of a higher kind. Left to themselves they
+fall back upon the superstitions and habits of their ancestors. The key
+to the character of any people is to be found in the local customs which
+have spontaneously grown or are growing among them. The customs of
+Dahomey have not yet shown themselves in the English West Indies and
+never can while the English authority is maintained; but no custom of
+any kind will be found in a negro hut or village from which his most
+sanguine friend can derive a hope that he is on the way to mending
+himself.
+
+Roses do not grow on thorn trees, nor figs on thistles. A healthy human
+civilisation was not perhaps to be looked for in countries which have
+been alternately the prey of avarice, ambition, and sentimentalism. We
+visit foreign countries to see varieties of life and character, to learn
+languages that we may gain an insight into various literatures, to see
+manners unlike our own springing naturally out of different soils and
+climates, to see beautiful works of art, to see places associated with
+great men and great actions, and subsidiary to these, to see lakes and
+mountains, and strange skies and seas. But the localities of great
+events and the homes of the actors in them are only saddening when the
+spiritual results are disappointing, and scenery loses its charm unless
+the grace of humanity is in the heart of it. To the man of science the
+West Indies may be delightful and instructive. Rocks and trees and
+flowers remain as they always were, and Nature is constant to herself.
+But the traveller whose heart is with his kind, and who cares only to
+see his brother mortals making their corner of this planet into an
+orderly and rational home, had better choose some other object for his
+pilgrimage.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[16] Tortoise Islands; the buccaneers' head quarters.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+    Return to Jamaica--Cherry Garden again--Black servants--Social
+    conditions--Sir Henry Norman--King's House once more--Negro
+    suffrage--The will of the people--The Irish python--Conditions of
+    colonial union--Oratory and statesmanship.
+
+
+I had to return to Jamaica from Cuba to meet the mail to England. My
+second stay could be but brief. For the short time that was allowed me I
+went back to my hospitable friends at Cherry Garden, which is an oasis
+in the wilderness. In the heads of the family there was cultivation and
+simplicity and sense. There was a home life with its quiet occupations
+and enjoyments--serious when seriousness was needed, light and bright in
+the ordinary routine of existence. The black domestics, far unlike the
+children of liberty whom I had left at Port au Prince, had caught their
+tone from their master and mistress, and were low-voiced, humorous, and
+pleasant to talk with. So perfect were they in their several capacities,
+that, like the girls at Government House at Dominica, I would have liked
+to pack them in my portmanteau and carry them home. The black butler
+received me on my arrival as an old friend. He brought me a pair of
+boots which I had left behind me on my first visit; he told me 'the
+female' had found them. The lady of the house took me out for a drive
+with her. The coachman half-upset us into a ditch, and we narrowly
+escaped being pitched into a ravine. The dusky creature insisted
+pathetically that it was not his fault, nor the horse's fault. His ebony
+wife had left him for a week's visit to a friend, and his wits had gone
+after her. Of course he was forgiven. Cherry Garden was a genuine
+homestead, a very menagerie of domestic animals of all sorts and breeds.
+Horses loitered under the shade of the mangoes; cows, asses, dogs,
+turkeys, cocks and hens, geese, guinea fowl and pea fowl lounged and
+strutted about the paddocks. In the grey of the morning they held their
+concerts; the asses brayed, the dogs barked, the turkeys gobbled, and
+the pea fowl screamed. It was enough to waken the seven sleepers, but
+the noises seemed so home-like and natural that they mixed pleasantly in
+one's dreams. One morning, after they had been holding a special
+jubilee, the butler apologised for them when he came to call me, and
+laughed as at the best of jokes when I said they did not mean any harm.
+The great feature of the day was five cats, with blue eyes and
+spotlessly white, who walked in regularly at breakfast, ranged
+themselves on their tails round their mistress's chair, and ate their
+porridge and milk like reasonable creatures. Within and without all was
+orderly. The gardens were in perfect condition; fields were being
+inclosed and planted; the work of the place went on of itself, with the
+eye of the mistress on it, and her voice, if necessary, heard in
+command; but black and white were all friends together. What could man
+ask for, more than to live all his days in such a climate and with such
+surroundings? Why should a realised ideal like this pass away? Why may
+it not extend itself till it has transformed the features of all our
+West Indian possessions? Thousand of English families might be living in
+similar scenes, happy in themselves and spreading round them a happy,
+wholesome English atmosphere. Why not indeed? Only because we are
+enchanted. Because in Jamaica and Barbadoes the white planters had a
+constitution granted them two hundred years ago, therefore their
+emancipated slaves must now have a constitution also. Wonderful logic of
+formulas, powerful as a witches' cauldron for mischief as long as it is
+believed in. The colonies and the Empire! If the colonies were part
+indeed of the Empire, if they were taken into partnership as the
+Americans take theirs, and were members of an organised body, if an
+injury to each single limb would be felt as an injury to the whole, we
+should not be playing with their vital interests to catch votes at home.
+Alas! at home we are split in two, and party is more than the nation,
+and famous statesmen, thinly disguising their motives under a mask of
+policy, condemn to-day what they approved of yesterday, and catch at
+power by projects which they would be the first to denounce if suggested
+by their adversaries. Till this tyranny be overpast, to bring into one
+the scattered portions of the Empire is the idlest of dreams, and the
+most that is to be hoped for is to arrest any active mischief. Happy
+Americans, who have a Supreme Court with a code of fundamental laws to
+control the vagaries of politicians and check the passions of
+fluctuating electoral majorities! What the Supreme Court is to them, the
+Crown ought to be for us; but the Crown is powerless and must remain
+powerless, and therefore we are as we are, and our national existence is
+made the shuttlecock of party contention.
+
+Time passed so pleasantly with me in these concluding days that I could
+have wished it to be the nothing which metaphysicians say that it is,
+and that when one was happy it would leave one alone. We wandered in the
+shade in the mornings, we made expeditions in the evenings, called at
+friends' houses, and listened to the gossip of the island. It turned
+usually on the one absorbing subject--black servants and the difficulty
+of dealing with them. An American lady from Pennsylvania declared
+emphatically as her opinion that emancipation had been a piece of folly,
+and that things would never mend till they were slaves again.
+
+One of my own chief hopes in going originally to Jamaica had been to see
+and learn the views of the distinguished Governor there. Sir Henry
+Norman had been one of the most eminent of the soldier civilians in
+India. He had brought with him a brilliant reputation; he had won the
+confidence in the West Indies of all classes and all colours. He, if
+anyone, would understand the problem, and from the high vantage ground
+of experience would know what could or could not be done to restore the
+influence of England and the prosperity of the colonies. Unfortunately,
+Sir Henry had been called to London, as I mentioned before, on a
+question of the conduct of some official, and I was afraid that I should
+miss him altogether. He returned, however, the day before I was to sail.
+He was kind enough to ask me to spend an evening with him, and I was
+again on my last night a guest at King's House.
+
+A dinner party offers small opportunity for serious conversation, nor,
+indeed, could I expect a great person in Sir Henry's position to enter
+upon subjects of consequence with a stranger like myself. I could see,
+however, that I had nothing to correct in the impression of his
+character which his reputation had led me to form about him, and I
+wished more than ever that the system of government of which he had been
+so admirable a servant in India could be applied to his present
+position, and that he or such as he could have the administration of it.
+We had common friends in the Indian service to talk about; one
+especially, Reynell Taylor, now dead, who had been the earliest of my
+boy companions. Taylor had been one of the handful of English who held
+the Punjaub in the first revolt of the Sikhs. With a woman's modesty he
+had the spirit of a knight-errant. Sir Henry described him as the 'very
+soul of chivalry,' and seemed himself to be a man of the same pure and
+noble nature, perhaps liable, from the generosity of his temperament, to
+believe more than I could do in modern notions and in modern political
+heroes, but certainly not inclining of his own will to recommend any
+rash innovations. I perceived that like myself he felt no regret that so
+much of the soil of Jamaica was passing to peasant black proprietors. He
+thought well of their natural disposition; he believed them capable of
+improvement. He thought that the possession of land of their own would
+bring them into voluntary industry, and lead them gradually to the
+adoption of civilised habits. He spoke with reserve, and perhaps I may
+not have understood him fully, but he did not seem to me to think much
+of their political capacity. The local boards which have been
+established as an education for higher functions have not been a
+success. They had been described to me in all parts of the island as
+inflammable centres of peculation and mismanagement. Sir Henry said
+nothing from which I could gather his own opinion. I inferred, however
+(he will pardon me if I misrepresent him), that he had no great belief
+in a federation of the islands, in 'responsible government,' and such
+like, as within the bounds of present possibilities. Nor did he think
+that responsible statesmen at home had any such arrangement in view.
+
+That such an arrangement was in contemplation a few years ago, I knew
+from competent authority. Perhaps the unexpected interest which the
+English people have lately shown in the colonies has modified opinion in
+those high circles, and has taught politicians that they must advance
+more cautiously. But the wind still sits in the old quarter. Three years
+ago, the self-suppressed constitution in Jamaica was partially
+re-established. A franchise was conceded both there and in Barbadoes
+which gave every black householder a vote. Even in poor Dominica, an
+extended suffrage was hung out as a remedy for its wretchedness. If
+nothing further is intended, these concessions have been gratuitously
+mischievous. It has roused the hopes of political agitators, not in
+Jamaica only, but all over the Antilles. It has taught the people, who
+have no grievances at all, who in their present state are better
+protected than any peasantry in the world except the Irish, to look to
+political changes as a road to an impossible millennium. It has
+rekindled hopes which had been long extinguished, that, like their
+brothers in Hayti, they were on the way to have the islands to
+themselves. It has alienated the English colonists, filled them with the
+worst apprehensions, and taught them to look wistfully from their own
+country to a union with America. A few elected members in a council
+where they may be counterbalanced by an equal number of official members
+seems a small thing in itself. So long as the equality was maintained,
+my Yankee friend was still willing to risk his capital in Jamaican
+enterprises. But the principle has been allowed. The existing
+arrangement is a half-measure which satisfies none and irritates all,
+and collisions between the representatives of the people and the
+nominees of the Government are only avoided by leaving a sufficient
+number of official seats unfilled. To have re-entered upon a road where
+you cannot stand still, where retreat is impossible, and where to go
+forward can only be recommended on the hypothesis that to give a man a
+vote will itself qualify him for the use of it, has been one of the
+minor achievements of the last Government of Mr. Gladstone, and is
+likely to be as successful as his larger exploits nearer home have as
+yet proved to be. A supreme court, were we happy enough to possess such
+a thing, would forbid these venturous experiments of sanguine statesmen
+who may happen, for a moment, to command a trifling majority in the
+House of Commons.
+
+I could not say what I felt completely to Sir Henry, who, perhaps, had
+been in personal relations with Mr. Gladstone's Government. Perhaps,
+too, he was one of those numerous persons of tried ability and
+intelligence who have only a faint belief that the connection between
+Great Britain and the colonies can be of long continuance. The public
+may amuse themselves with the vision of an imperial union; practical
+statesmen who are aware of the tendencies of self-governed communities
+to follow lines of their own in which the mother country cannot support
+them may believe that they know it to be impossible.
+
+As to the West Indies there are but two genuine alternatives: one to
+leave them to themselves to shape their own destinies, as we leave
+Australia; the other to govern them as if they were a part of Great
+Britain with the same scrupulous care of the people and their interests
+with which we govern Bengal, Madras, and Bombay. England is responsible
+for the social condition of those islands. She filled them with negroes
+when it was her interest to maintain slavery, she emancipated those
+negroes when popular opinion at home demanded that slavery should end.
+It appears to me that England ought to bear the consequences of her own
+actions, and assume to herself the responsibilities of a state of things
+which she has herself created. We are partly unwilling to take the
+trouble, partly we cling to the popular belief that to trust all
+countries with the care of their own concerns is the way to raise the
+character of the inhabitants and to make them happy and contented. We
+dimly perceive that the population of the West Indies is not a natural
+growth of internal tendencies and circumstances, and we therefore
+hesitate before we plunge completely and entirely into the downward
+course; but we play with it, we drift towards it, we advance as far as
+we dare, giving them the evils of both systems and the advantages of
+neither. At the same moment we extend the suffrage to the blacks with
+one hand, while with the other we refuse to our own people the benefit
+of a treaty which would have rescued them from imminent ruin and brought
+them into relations with their powerful kindred close at hand--relations
+which might save them from the most dangerous consequences of a negro
+political supremacy--and the result is that the English in those islands
+are melting away and will soon be crowded out, or will have departed of
+themselves in disgust. A policy so far-reaching, and affecting so
+seriously the condition of the oldest of our colonial possessions, ought
+not to have been adopted on their own authority, by doctrinaire
+statesmen in a cabinet, without fully and frankly consulting the English
+nation; and no further step ought to be taken in that direction until
+the nation has had the circumstances of the islands laid before it, and
+has pronounced one way or the other its own sovereign pleasure. Does or
+does not England desire that her own people shall be enabled to live and
+thrive in the West Indies? If she decides that her hands are too full,
+that she is over-empired and cannot attend to them--_caditquæstio_--there
+is no more to be said. But if this is her resolution the hands of the
+West Indians ought to be untied. They ought to be allowed to make their
+sugar treaties, to make any treaties, to enter into the closest relations
+with America which the Americans will accept, as the only chance which
+will be left them.
+
+Such abandonment, however, will bring us no honour. It will not further
+that federation of the British Empire which so many of us now profess to
+desire. If we wish Australia and Canada to draw into closer union with
+us, it will not be by showing that we are unable to manage a group of
+colonies which are almost at our doors. Englishmen all round the globe
+have rejoiced together in this year which is passing by us over the
+greatness of their inheritance, and have celebrated with enthusiasm the
+half-century during which our lady-mistress has reigned over the English
+world. Unity and federation are on our lips, and we have our leagues and
+our institutes, and in the eagerness of our wishes we dream that we see
+the fulfilment of them. Neither the kingdom of heaven nor any other
+kingdom 'comes with observation.' It comes not with after-dinner
+speeches however eloquent, or with flowing sentiments however for the
+moment sincere. The spirit which made the Empire can alone hold it
+together. The American Union was not saved by oratory. It was saved by
+the determination of the bravest of the people; it was cemented by the
+blood which dyed the slopes of Gettysburg. The union of the British
+Empire, if it is to be more than a dream, can continue only while the
+attracting force of the primary commands the willing attendance of the
+distant satellites. Let the magnet lose its power, let the confidence of
+the colonies in the strength and resolution of their central orb be once
+shaken, and the centrifugal force will sweep them away into orbits of
+their own.
+
+The race of men who now inhabit this island of ours show no signs of
+degeneracy. The bow of Ulysses is sound as ever; moths and worms have
+not injured either cord or horn; but it is unstrung, and the arrows
+which are shot from it drop feebly to the ground. The Irish python rises
+again out of its swamp, and Phoebus Apollo launches no shaft against
+the scaly sides of it. Phoebus Apollo attempts the milder methods of
+concession and persuasion. 'Python,' he says, 'in days when I was
+ignorant and unjust I struck you down and bound you. I left officers and
+men with you of my own race to watch you, to teach you, to rule you; to
+force you, if your own nature could not be changed, to leave your
+venomous ways. You have refused to be taught, you twist in your chains,
+you bite and tear, and when you can you steal and murder. I see that I
+was wrong from the first. Every creature has a right to live according
+to its own disposition. I was a tyrant, and you did well to resist; I
+ask you to forgive and forget. I set you free; I hand you over my own
+representatives as a pledge of my goodwill, that you may devour them at
+your leisure. They have been the instruments of my oppression; consume
+them, destroy them, do what you will with them; and henceforward I hope
+that we shall live together as friends, and that you will show yourself
+worthy of my generosity and of the freedom which you have so gloriously
+won.'
+
+A sun-god who thus addressed a disobedient satellite might have the
+eloquence of a Demosthenes and the finest of the fine intentions which
+pave the road to the wrong place, but he would not be a divinity who
+would command the willing confidence of a high-spirited kindred. Great
+Britain will make the tie which holds the colonies to her a real one
+when she shows them and shows the world that she is still equal to her
+great place, that her arm is not shortened and her heart has not grown
+faint.
+
+Men speak of the sacredness of liberty. They talk as if the will of
+everyone ought to be his only guide, that allegiance is due only to
+majorities, that allegiance of any other kind is base and a relic of
+servitude. The Americans are the freest people in the world; but in
+their freedom they have to obey the fundamental laws of the Union. Again
+and again in the West Indies Mr. Motley's words came back to me. To be
+taken into the American Union is to be adopted into a partnership. To
+belong as a Crown colony to the British Empire, as things stand, is no
+partnership at all. It is to belong to a power which sacrifices, as it
+has always sacrificed, the interest of its dependencies to its own. The
+blood runs freely through every vein and artery of the American body
+corporate. Every single citizen feels his share in the life of his
+nation. Great Britain leaves her Crown colonies to take care of
+themselves, refuses what they ask, and forces on them what they had
+rather be without. If I were a West Indian I should feel that under the
+stars and stripes I should be safer than I was at present from political
+experimenting. I should have a market in which to sell my produce where
+I should be treated as a friend; I should have a power behind me and
+protecting me, and I should have a future to which I could look forward
+with confidence. America would restore me to home and life; Great
+Britain allows me to sink, contenting herself with advising me to be
+patient. Why should I continue loyal when my loyalty was so
+contemptuously valued?
+
+But I will not believe that it will come to this. An Englishman may be
+heavily tempted, but in evil fortune as in good his heart is in the old
+place. The administration of our affairs is taken for the present from
+prudent statesmen, and is made over to those who know how best to
+flatter the people with fine-sounding sentiments and idle adulation. All
+sovereigns have been undone by flatterers. The people are sovereign now,
+and, being new to power, listen to those who feed their vanity. The
+popular orator has been the ruin of every country which has trusted to
+him. He never speaks an unwelcome truth, for his existence depends on
+pleasing, and he cares only to tickle the ears of his audience. His
+element is anarchy; his function is to undo what better men have done.
+In wind he lives and moves and has his being. When the gods are angry,
+he can raise it to a hurricane and lay waste whole nations in ruin and
+revolution. It was said long ago, a man full of words shall not prosper
+upon the earth. Times have changed, for in these days no one prospers so
+well. Can he make a speech? is the first question which the
+constituencies ask when a candidate is offered to their suffrages. When
+the Roman commonwealth developed from an aristocratic republic into a
+democracy, and, as now with us, the sovereignty was in the mass of the
+people, the oratorical faculty came to the front in the same way. The
+finest speaker was esteemed the fittest man to be made a consul or a
+prætor of, and there were schools of rhetoric where aspirants for office
+had to go to learn gesture and intonation before they could present
+themselves at the hustings. The sovereign people and their orators could
+do much, but they could not alter facts, or make that which was not, to
+be, or that which was, not to be. The orators could perorate and the
+people could decree, but facts remained and facts proved the strongest,
+and the end of that was that after a short supremacy the empire which
+they had brought to the edge of ruin was saved at the last extremity;
+the sovereign people lost their liberties, and the tongues of political
+orators were silenced for centuries. Illusion at last takes the form of
+broken heads, and the most obstinate credulity is not proof against that
+form of argument.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+    Going home--Retrospect--Alternative courses--Future of the
+    Empire--Sovereignty of the sea--The Greeks--The rights of
+    man--Plato--The voice of the people--Imperial federation--Hereditary
+    colonial policy--New Irelands--Effects of party government.
+
+
+Once more upon the sea on our homeward way, carrying, as Emerson said,
+'the bag of Æolus in the boiler of our boat,' careless whether there be
+wind or calm. Our old naval heroes passed and repassed upon the same
+waters under harder conditions. They had to struggle against tempests,
+to fight with enemy's cruisers, to battle for their lives with nature as
+with man--and they were victorious over them all. They won for Britannia
+the sceptre of the sea, and built up the Empire on which the sun never
+sets. To us, their successors, they handed down the splendid
+inheritance, and we in turn have invented steam ships and telegraphs,
+and thrown bridges over the ocean, and made our far-off possessions as
+easy of access as the next parish. The attractive force of the primary
+ought to have increased in the same ratio, but we do not find that it
+has, and the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies of our
+satellites are year by year becoming more nicely balanced. These
+beautiful West Indian Islands were intended to be homes for the
+overflowing numbers of our own race, and the few that have gone there
+are being crowded out by the blacks from Jamaica and the Antilles. Our
+poor helots at home drag on their lives in the lanes and alleys of our
+choking cities, and of those who gather heart to break off on their own
+account and seek elsewhere for a land of promise, the large majority are
+weary of the flag under which they have only known suffering, and prefer
+America to the English colonies. They are waking now to understand the
+opportunities which are slipping through their hands. Has the awakening
+come too late? We have ourselves mixed the cup; must we now drink it the
+dregs?
+
+It is too late to enable us to make homes in the West Indies for the
+swarms who are thrown off by our own towns and villages. We might have
+done it. Englishmen would have thriven as well in Jamaica and the
+Antilles as the Spaniards have thriven in Cuba. But the islands are now
+peopled by men of another colour. The whites there are as units among
+hundreds, and the proportion cannot be altered. But it is not too late
+to redeem our own responsibilities. We brought the blacks there; we have
+as yet not done much for their improvement, when their notions of
+morality are still so elementary that more than half of their children
+are born out of marriage. The English planters were encouraged to settle
+there when it suited our convenience to maintain the islands for
+Imperial purposes; like the landlords in Ireland, they were our English
+garrison; and as with the landlords in Ireland, when we imagine that
+they have served their purpose and can be no longer of use to us, we
+calmly change the conditions of society. We disclaim obligations to help
+them in the confusion which we have introduced; we tell them to help
+themselves, and they cannot help themselves in such an element as that
+in which they are now struggling, unless they know that they may count
+on the sympathy and the support of their countrymen at home. Nothing is
+demanded of the English exchequer; the resources of the islands are
+practically boundless; there is a robust population conscious at the
+bottom of their native inferiority, and docile and willing to work if
+anyone will direct them and set them to it. There will be capital
+enough forthcoming, and energetic men enough and intelligence enough,
+if we on our part will provide one thing, the easiest of all if we
+really set our minds to it--an effective and authoritative government.
+It is not safe even for ourselves to leave a wound unattended to, though
+it be in the least significant part of our bodies. The West Indies are a
+small limb in the great body corporate of the British Empire, but there
+is no great and no small in the life of nations. The avoidable decay of
+the smallest member is an injury to the whole. Let it be once known and
+felt that England regards the West Indies as essentially one with
+herself, and the English in the islands will resume their natural
+position, and respect and order will come back, and those once thriving
+colonies will again advance with the rest on the high road of
+civilisation and prosperity. Let it be known that England considers only
+her immediate interests and will not exert herself, and the other
+colonies will know what they have to count upon, and the British Empire
+will dwindle down before long into a single insignificant island in the
+North Sea.
+
+So end the reflections which I formed there from what I saw and what I
+heard. I have written as an outside observer unconnected with practical
+politics, with no motive except a loyal pride in the greatness of my own
+country, and a conviction, which I will not believe to be a dream, that
+the destinies have still in store for her a yet grander future. The
+units of us come and go; the British Empire, the globe itself and all
+that it inherits, will pass away as a vision.
+
+    [Greek: essetai êmar hotan pot' olôlêi Hilios hirê,
+            kai Priamos kai laos eummeliô Priamoio.]
+
+    The day will be when Ilium's towers may fall,
+    And large-limbed[17] Priam, and his people all.
+
+But that day cannot be yet. Out of the now half-organic fragments may
+yet be formed one living Imperial power, with a new era of beneficence
+and usefulness to mankind. The English people are spread far and wide.
+The sea is their dominion, and their land is the finest portion of the
+globe. It is theirs now, it will be theirs for ages to come if they
+remain themselves unchanged and keep the heart and temper of their
+forefathers.
+
+          Naught shall make us rue,
+    If England to herself do rest but true.
+
+The days pass, and our ship flies fast upon her way.
+
+    [Greek: glaukon huper oidma kuanochroa te kumatôn
+            rhothia polia thalassas.]
+
+How perfect the description! How exactly in those eight words Euripides
+draws the picture of the ocean; the long grey heaving swell, the darker
+steel-grey on the shadowed slope of the surface waves, and the foam on
+their breaking crests. Our thoughts flow back as we gaze to the times
+long ago, when the earth belonged to other races as it now belongs to
+us. The ocean is the same as it was. Their eyes saw it as we see it:
+
+    Time writes no wrinkle on that azure brow.
+
+Nor is the ocean alone the same. Human nature is still vexed with the
+same problems, mocked with the same hopes, wandering after the same
+illusions. The sea affected the Greeks as it affects us, and was equally
+dear to them. It was a Greek who said, 'The sea washes off all the ills
+of men;' the 'stainless one' as Æschylus called it--the eternally pure.
+On long voyages I take Greeks as my best companions. I had Plato with me
+on my way home from the West Indies. He lived and wrote in an age like
+ours, when religion had become a debatable subject on which every one
+had his opinion, and democracy was master of the civilised world, and
+the Mediterranean states were running wild after liberty, preparatory to
+the bursting of the bubble. Looking out on such a world Plato left
+thoughts behind him the very language of which is as full of
+application to our own larger world as if it was written yesterday. It
+throws light on small things as well as large, and interprets alike the
+condition of the islands which I had left, the condition of England, the
+condition of all civilised countries in this modern epoch.
+
+The chief characteristic of this age, as it was the chief characteristic
+of Plato's, is the struggle for what we call the 'rights of man.' In
+other times the thing insisted on was that men should do what was
+'right' as something due to a higher authority. Now the demand is for
+what is called their 'rights' as something due to themselves, and among
+these rights is a right to liberty; liberty meaning the utmost possible
+freedom of every man consistent with the freedom of others, and the
+abolition of every kind of authority of one man over another. It is with
+this view that we have introduced popular suffrage, that we give
+everyone a vote, or aim at giving it, as the highest political
+perfection.
+
+We turn to Plato and we find: 'In a healthy community there ought to be
+some authority over every single man and woman. No person--not
+one--ought to act on his or her judgment alone even in the smallest
+trifle. The soldier on a campaign obeys his commander in little things
+as well as great. The safety of the army requires it. But it is in peace
+as it is in war, and there is no difference. Every person should be
+trained from childhood to rule and to be ruled. So only can the life of
+man, and the life of all creatures dependent on him, be delivered from
+anarchy.'
+
+It is worth while to observe how diametrically opposite to our notions
+on this subject were the notions of a man of the finest intellect, with
+the fullest opportunities of observation, and every one of whose
+estimates of things was confirmed by the event. Such a discipline as he
+recommends never existed in any community of men except perhaps among
+the religious orders in the enthusiasm of their first institution, nor
+would a society be long tolerable in which it was tried. Communities,
+however, have existed where people have thought more of their
+obligations than of their 'rights,' more of the welfare of their
+country, or of the success of a cause to which they have devoted
+themselves, than of their personal pleasure or interest--have preferred
+the wise leading of superior men to their own wills and wishes. Nay,
+perhaps no community has ever continued long, or has made a mark in the
+world of serious significance, where society has not been graduated in
+degrees, and there have not been deeper and stronger bands of coherence
+than the fluctuating votes of majorities.
+
+Times are changed we are told. We live in a new era, when public opinion
+is king, and no other rule is possible; public opinion, as expressed in
+the press and on the platform, and by the deliberately chosen
+representatives of the people. Every question can be discussed and
+argued, all sides of it can be heard, and the nation makes up its mind.
+The collective judgment of all is wiser than the wisest single
+man--_securus judicat orbis_.
+
+Give the public time, and I believe this to be true; general opinion
+does in the long run form a right estimate of most persons and of most
+things. As surely its immediate impulses are almost invariably in
+directions which it afterwards regrets and repudiates, and therefore
+constitutions which have no surer basis than the popular judgment, as it
+shifts from year to year or parliament to parliament, are built on
+foundations looser than sand.
+
+In concluding this book I have a few more words to say on the subject,
+so ardently canvassed, of Imperial federation. It seems so easy. You
+have only to form a new parliament in which the colonies shall be
+represented according to numbers, while each colony will retain its own
+for its own local purposes. Local administration is demanded everywhere;
+England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, can each have theirs, and the vexed
+question of Home Rule can be disposed of in the reconstruction of the
+whole. A central parliament can then be formed in which the parts can
+all be represented in proportion to their number; and a cabinet can be
+selected out of this for the management of Imperial concerns. Nothing
+more is necessary; the thing will be done.
+
+So in a hundred forms, but all on the same principle, schemes of
+Imperial union have fallen under my eye. I should myself judge from
+experience of what democratically elected parliaments are growing into,
+that at the first session of such a body the satellites would fly off
+into space, shattered perhaps themselves in the process. We have
+parliaments enough already, and if no better device can be found than by
+adding another to the number, the rash spirit of innovation has not yet
+gone far enough to fling our ancient constitution into the crucible on
+so wild a chance.
+
+Imperial federation, as it is called, is far away, if ever it is to be
+realised at all. If it is to come it will come of itself, brought about
+by circumstances and silent impulses working continuously through many
+years unseen and unspoken of. It is conceivable that Great Britain and
+her scattered offspring, under the pressure of danger from without, or
+impelled by some general purpose, might agree to place themselves for a
+time under a single administrative head. It is conceivable that out of a
+combination so formed, if it led to a successful immediate result, some
+union of a closer kind might eventually emerge. It is not only
+conceivable, but it is entirely certain, that attempts made when no such
+occasion has arisen, by politicians ambitious of distinguishing
+themselves, will fail, and in failing will make the object that is aimed
+at more confessedly unattainable than it is now.
+
+The present relation between the mother country and her self-governed
+colonies is partly that of parent and children who have grown to
+maturity and are taking care of themselves, partly of independent
+nations in friendly alliance, partly as common subjects of the same
+sovereign, whose authority is exercised in each by ministers of its own.
+Neither of these analogies is exact, for the position alters from year
+to year. So much the better. The relation which now exists cannot be
+more than provisional; let us not try to shape it artificially, after a
+closet-made pattern. The threads of interest and kindred must be left to
+spin themselves in their own way. Meanwhile we can work together
+heartily and with good will where we need each other's co-operation.
+Difficulties will rise, perhaps, from time to time, but we can meet them
+as they come, and we need not anticipate them. If we are to be
+politically one, the organic fibres which connect us are as yet too
+immature to bear a strain. All that we can do, and all that at present
+we ought to try, is to act generously whenever our assistance can be of
+use. The disposition of English statesmen to draw closer to the colonies
+is of recent growth. They cannot tell, and we cannot tell, how far it
+indicates a real change of attitude or is merely a passing mood. One
+thing, however, we ought to bear in mind, that the colonies sympathise
+one with another, and that wrong or neglect in any part of the Empire
+does not escape notice. The larger colonies desire to know what the
+recent professions of interest are worth, and they look keenly at our
+treatment of their younger brothers who are still in our power. They are
+practical, they attend to results, they guard jealously their own
+privileges, but they are not so enamoured of constitutional theory that
+they will patiently see their fellow-countrymen in less favoured
+situations swamped under the votes of the coloured races. Australians,
+Canadians, New Zealanders, will not be found enthusiastic for the
+extension of self-government in the West Indies, when they know that it
+means the extinction of their own white brothers who have settled there.
+The placing English colonists at the mercy of coloured majorities they
+will resent as an injury to themselves; they will not look upon it as an
+extension of a generous principle, but as an act of airy virtue which
+costs us nothing, and at the bottom is but carelessness and
+indifference.
+
+We imagine that we have seen the errors of our old colonial policy, and
+that we are in no danger of repeating them. Yet in the West Indies we
+are treading over again the too familiar road. The Anglo-Irish colonists
+in 1705 petitioned for a union with Great Britain. A union would have
+involved a share in British trade; it was refused therefore, and we gave
+them the penal laws instead. They set up manufactures, built ships, and
+tried to raise a commerce of their own. We laid them under disabilities
+which ruined their enterprises, and when they were resentful and became
+troublesome we turned round to the native Irish and made a virtue of
+protecting them against our own people whom we had injured. When the
+penal laws ceased to be useful to us, we did not allow them to be
+executed. We played off Catholic against Protestant while we were
+sacrificing both to our own jealousy. Having made the government of the
+island impossible for those whom we had planted there to govern it, we
+emancipate the governed, and to conciliate them we allow them to
+appropriate the possessions of their late masters. And we have not
+conciliated the native Irish; it was impossible that we should; we have
+simply armed them with the only weapons which enable them to revenge
+their wrongs upon us.
+
+The history of the West Indies is a precise parallel. The islands were
+necessary to our safety in our struggle with France and Spain. The
+colonists held them chiefly for us as a garrison, and we in turn gave
+the colonists their slaves. The white settlers ruled as in Ireland, the
+slaves obeyed, and all went swimmingly. Times changed at home. Slavery
+became unpopular; it was abolished; and, with a generosity for which we
+never ceased to applaud ourselves, we voted an indemnity of twenty
+millions to the owners. We imagined that we had acquitted our
+consciences, but such debts are not discharged by payments of money. We
+had introduced the slaves into the islands for our own advantage; in
+setting them free we revolutionised society. We remained still
+responsible for the social consequences, and we did not choose to
+remember it. The planters were guilty only, like the Irish landlords, of
+having ceased to be necessary to us. We practised our virtues
+vicariously at their expense: we had the praise and honour, they had the
+suffering. They begged that the emancipation might be gradual; our
+impatience to clear our reputation refused to wait. Their system of
+cultivation being deranged, they petitioned for protection against the
+competition of countries where slavery continued. The request was
+natural, but could not be listened to because to grant it might raise
+infinitesimally the cost of the British workman's breakfast. They
+struggled on, and even when a new rival rose in the beetroot sugar they
+refused to be beaten. The European powers, to save their beetroot, went
+on to support it with a bounty. Against the purse of foreign governments
+the sturdiest individuals cannot compete. Defeated in a fight which had
+become unfair, the planters looked, and looked in vain, to their own
+government for help. Finding none, they turned to their kindred in the
+United States; and there, at last, they found a hand held out to them.
+The Americans were willing, though at a loss of two millions and a half
+of revenue, to admit the poor West Indians to their own market. But a
+commercial treaty was necessary; and a treaty could not be made without
+the sanction of the English Government. The English Government, on some
+fine-drawn crotchet, refused to colonies which were weak and helpless
+what they would have granted without a word if demanded by Victoria or
+New South Wales, whose resentment they feared. And when the West
+Indians, harassed, desperate, and half ruined, cried out against the
+enormous injustice, in the fear that their indignation might affect
+their allegiance and lead them to seek admission into the American
+Union, we extend the franchise among the blacks, on whose hostility to
+such a measure we know that we can rely.
+
+There is no occasion to suspect responsible English politicians of any
+sinister purpose in what they have done or not done, or suspect them,
+indeed, of any purpose at all. They act from day to day under the
+pressure of each exigency as it rises, and they choose the course which
+is least directly inconvenient. But the result is to have created in the
+Antilles and Jamaica so many fresh Irelands, and I believe that British
+colonists the world over will feel together in these questions. They
+will not approve; rather they will combine to condemn the betrayal of
+their own fellow-countrymen. If England desires her colonies to rally
+round her, she must deserve their affection and deserve their respect.
+She will find neither one nor the other if she carelessly sacrifices her
+own people in any part of the world to fear or convenience. The
+magnetism which will bind them to her must be found in herself or
+nowhere.
+
+Perhaps nowhere! Perhaps if we look to the real origin of all that has
+gone wrong with us, of the policy which has flung Ireland back into
+anarchy, which has weakened our influence abroad, which has ruined the
+oldest of our colonies, and has made the continuance under our flag of
+the great communities of our countrymen who are forming new nations in
+the Pacific a question of doubt and uncertainty, we shall find it in our
+own distractions, in the form of government which is fast developing
+into a civil war under the semblance of peace, where party is more than
+country, and a victory at the hustings over a candidate of opposite
+principles more glorious than a victory in the field over a foreign foe.
+Society in republican Rome was so much interested in the faction fights
+of Clodius and Milo that it could hear with apathy of the destruction of
+Crassus and a Roman army. The senate would have sold Cæsar to the Celtic
+chiefs in Gaul, and the modern English enthusiast would disintegrate the
+British Islands to purchase the Irish vote. Till we can rise into some
+nobler sphere of thought and conduct we may lay aside the vision of a
+confederated empire.
+
+    Oh, England, model to thy inward greatness,
+    Like little body with a mighty heart,
+    What might'st thou do that honour would thee do
+    Were all thy children kind and natural!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[17] I believe this to be the true meaning of [Greek: eummeliês]. It is
+usually rendered, 'armed with a stout spear.'
+
+
+KELLY & CO., Printers, Gate Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, W.C.; and
+Kingston-on-Thames.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The English in the West Indies, by 
+James Anthony Froude
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The English in the West Indies, by James Anthony Froude.
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+
+Project Gutenberg's The English in the West Indies, by James Anthony Froude
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The English in the West Indies
+       or, The Bow of Ulysses
+
+Author: James Anthony Froude
+
+Release Date: June 7, 2010 [EBook #32728]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENGLISH IN THE WEST INDIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Jane Hyland and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="Frontispiece" id="Frontispiece"><img src="images/image0001.jpg" alt="MOUNTAIN CRATER, DOMINICA." title="" /></a><br />
+<span class="caption">MOUNTAIN CRATER, DOMINICA.</span>
+<br /><br /><br /></div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i">[Pg i]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<h1>THE ENGLISH</h1>
+
+<h5>IN</h5>
+
+<h1>THE WEST INDIES</h1>
+
+<h5>OR</h5>
+
+<h4>THE BOW OF ULYSSES</h4>
+
+<h5>BY</h5>
+
+<h2>JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE<br /><br /></h2>
+
+<h5>WITH ILLUSTRATIONS ENGRAVED ON WOOD BY G. PEARSON
+AFTER DRAWINGS BY THE AUTHOR</h5>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="title" id="title"><img src="images/image0002.jpg" alt="" title="" /></a>
+</div>
+
+
+<h5>NEW EDITION</h5>
+
+
+<h4>LONDON</h4>
+
+<h3>LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.</h3>
+
+<p class="center">1888</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>All rights reserved</i>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii">[Pg ii]</a></span><br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p style="margin-left:8em">
+F&uuml;rsten pr&auml;gen so oft auf kaum versilbertes Kupfer<br />
+Ihr bedeutendes Bild: lange betr&uuml;gt sich das Volk<br />
+Schw&auml;rmer pr&auml;gen den Stempel des Geist's auf L&uuml;gen und Unsinn:<br />
+Wem der Probirstein fehlt, h&auml;lt sie f&uuml;r redliches Gold.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left:20em;" class="smcap">Goethe.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">[Pg iii]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION.</h3>
+
+<p>My purpose in writing this book is so fully explained
+in the book itself that a Preface is unnecessary. I
+visited the West India Islands in order to increase my
+acquaintance with the condition of the British Colonies.
+I have related what I saw and what I heard, with
+the general impressions which I was led to form.</p>
+
+<p>In a few instances, when opinions were conveyed
+to me which were important in themselves, but which
+it might be undesirable to assign to the persons from
+whom I heard them, I have altered initials and disguised
+localities and circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>The illustrations are from sketches of my own,
+which, except so far as they are tolerably like the
+scenes which they represent, are without value. They
+have been made producible by the skill and care of
+the engraver, Mr. Pearson, to whom my warmest
+thanks are due.</p>
+
+<p style="text-align:right">J.A.F.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Onslow Gardens</span>: <i>November 15, 1887</i>.<br />
+<br /><br /><br /></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[Pg iv]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/image0003.jpg" alt="" title="" />
+<br /><span class="link"><a href="images/image03full.jpg">View larger image</a></span>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS.</h2>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="8" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER I.</td><td align='left'>PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Colonial policy&mdash;Union or separation&mdash;Self-government&mdash;Varieties of
+ condition&mdash;The Pacific colonies&mdash;The West Indies&mdash;Proposals for a West Indian
+ federation&mdash;Nature of the population&mdash;American union and British plantations&mdash;Original
+ conquest of the West Indies</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER II.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>In the train for Southampton&mdash;Morning papers&mdash;The new 'Locksley
+Hall'&mdash;Past and present&mdash;The> 'Moselle'&mdash;Heavy weather&mdash;The Petrel&mdash;The
+ Azores</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_10">10</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER III.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The tropics&mdash;Passengers on board&mdash;Account of the Darien canal&mdash;Planters'
+ complaints&mdash;West Indian history&mdash;The Spanish conquest&mdash;Drake and Hawkins&mdash;The
+ buccaneers&mdash;The pirates&mdash;French and English&mdash;Rodney&mdash;Battle of April 12&mdash;Peace
+ with honour&mdash;Doers and talkers</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_20">20</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER IV.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>First sight of Barbadoes&mdash;Origin of the name&mdash;P&egrave;re Labat&mdash;Bridgetown
+ two hundred years ago&mdash;Slavery and Christianity&mdash;Economic crisis&mdash;Sugar bounties&mdash;Aspect
+ of the streets&mdash;Government House and its occupants&mdash;Duties of a governor of Barbadoes</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_32">32</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER V.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>West Indian politeness&mdash;Negro morals and felicity&mdash;Island of St.
+Vincent&mdash;Grenada&mdash;The harbour&mdash;Disappearance of the whites&mdash;An island of black
+ freeholders&mdash;Tobago&mdash;Dramatic art&mdash;A promising incident</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_41">41</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER VI.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Charles Kingsley at Trinidad&mdash;'Lay of the Last Buccaneer'&mdash;A French
+ <i>forban</i>&mdash;Adventure at Aves&mdash;Mass on board a pirate ship&mdash;Port of Spain&mdash;A
+ house in the tropics&mdash;A political meeting&mdash;Government House&mdash;The Botanical
+ Gardens&mdash;Kingsley's
+ rooms&mdash;Sugar estates and coolies</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_51">51</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER VII.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>A coolie village&mdash;Negro freeholds&mdash;Waterworks&mdash;Snakes&mdash;Slavery&mdash;Evidence
+ of Lord Rodney&mdash;Future of the negroes&mdash;Necessity of English rule&mdash;The Blue Basin&mdash;Black boy
+ and crayfish</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_66">66</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER VIII.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Home Rule in Trinidad&mdash;Political aspirations&mdash;Nature of the
+ problem&mdash;Crown administration&mdash;Colonial governors&mdash;A Russian apologue&mdash;Dinner
+ at Government House&mdash;'The Three Fishers'&mdash;Charles Warner&mdash;Alternative futures of the colony</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_75">75</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER IX.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Barbadoes again&mdash;Social condition of the island&mdash;Political constitution&mdash;Effects
+ of the sugar bounties&mdash;Dangers of general bankruptcy&mdash;The Hall of Assembly&mdash;Sir Charles
+ Pearson&mdash;Society in Bridgetown&mdash;A morning drive&mdash;Church of St. John's&mdash;Sir Graham
+ Briggs&mdash;An old planter's palace&mdash;The Chief Justice of Barbadoes</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_88">88</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER X.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Leeward and Windward Islands&mdash;The Caribs of Dominica&mdash;Visit of P&egrave;re
+ Labat&mdash;St. Lucia&mdash;The Pitons&mdash;The harbour at Castries&mdash;Intended coaling station&mdash;Visit
+ to the administrator&mdash;The old fort and barracks&mdash;Conversation with an American&mdash;Constitution of
+ Dominica&mdash;Land at Roseau</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_113">113</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER XI.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Curiosities in Dominica&mdash;Nights in the tropics&mdash;English and Catholic
+ churches&mdash;The market place at Roseau&mdash;Fishing extraordinary&mdash;A storm&mdash;Dominican
+ boatmen&mdash;Morning walks&mdash;Effects of the Leeward Islands Confederation&mdash;An estate cultivated
+ as it ought to be&mdash;A mountain ride&mdash;Leave the island&mdash;Reflections</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_132">132</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER XII.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The Darien canal&mdash;Jamaican mail packet&mdash;Captain W.&mdash;Retrospect of
+ Jamaican history&mdash;Waterspout at sea&mdash;Hayti&mdash;Jacmel&mdash;A walk through the town&mdash;A
+ Jamaican planter&mdash;First sight of the Blue Mountains&mdash;Port Royal&mdash;Kingston&mdash;The Colonial
+ Secretary&mdash;Gordon riots&mdash;Changes in the Jamaican constitution</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_155">155</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER XIII.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The English mails&mdash;Irish agitation&mdash;Two kinds of colonies&mdash;Indian
+ administration&mdash;How far applicable in the West Indies&mdash;Land at Kingston&mdash;Government
+ House&mdash;Dinner party&mdash;Interesting officer&mdash;Majuba Hill&mdash;Mountain station&mdash;Kingston
+ curiosities&mdash;Tobacco&mdash;Valley in the Blue Mountains</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_180">180</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER XIV.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Visit to Port Royal&mdash;Dockyard&mdash;Town&mdash;Church&mdash;Fort Augusta&mdash;The
+ eyrie in the mountains&mdash;Ride to Newcastle&mdash;Society in Jamaica&mdash;Religious bodies&mdash;Liberty and
+ authority</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_195">195</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER XV.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The Church of England in Jamaica&mdash;Drive to Castleton&mdash;Botanical Gardens&mdash;Picnic
+ by the river&mdash;Black women&mdash;Ball at Government House&mdash;Mandeville&mdash;Miss Roy&mdash;Country
+ society&mdash;Manners&mdash;American visitors&mdash;A Moravian missionary&mdash;The modern Radical creed</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_208">208</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER XVI.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Jamaican hospitality&mdash;Cherry Garden&mdash;George William Gordon&mdash;The Gordon
+ riots&mdash;Governor Eyre&mdash;A dispute and its consequences&mdash;Jamaican country-house society&mdash;Modern
+ speculation&mdash;A Spanish fable&mdash;Port Royal&mdash;The commodore&mdash;Naval theatricals&mdash;The
+ modern sailor</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_224">224</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER XVII.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Present state of Jamaica&mdash;Test of progress&mdash;Resources of the island&mdash;Political
+ alternatives&mdash;Black supremacy and probable consequences&mdash;The West Indian problem</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_243">243</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER XVIII.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Passage to Cuba&mdash;A Canadian commissioner&mdash;Havana&mdash;The Moro&mdash;The city and
+ harbour&mdash;Cuban money&mdash;American visitors&mdash;The cathedral&mdash;Tomb of Columbus&mdash;New friends&mdash;The
+ late rebellion&mdash;Slave emancipation&mdash;Spain and progress&mdash;A bull fight</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_253">253</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER XIX.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Hotels in Havana&mdash;Sights in the city&mdash;Cigar manufactories&mdash;West Indian
+ industries&mdash;The Captain-General&mdash;The Jesuit college&mdash;Father Vi&ntilde;ez&mdash;Clubs in
+ Havana&mdash;Spanish aristocracy&mdash;Sea lodging house</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_272">272</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER XX.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Return to Havana&mdash;The Spaniards in Cuba&mdash;Prospects&mdash;American influence&mdash;Future
+ of the West Indies&mdash;English rumours&mdash;Leave Cuba&mdash;The harbour at night&mdash;The Bahama
+ Channel&mdash;Hayti&mdash;Port au Prince&mdash;The black republic&mdash;West Indian history</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_291">291</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER XXI.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Return to Jamaica&mdash;Cherry Garden again&mdash;Black servants&mdash;Social
+ conditions&mdash;Sir Henry Norman&mdash;King's House once more&mdash;Negro suffrage&mdash;The will of
+ the people&mdash;The Irish python&mdash;Conditions of colonial union&mdash;Oratory and statesmanship</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_308">308</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>CHAPTER XXII.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Going home&mdash;Retrospect&mdash;Alternative courses&mdash;Future of the
+ Empire&mdash;Sovereignty of the sea&mdash;The Greeks&mdash;The rights of man&mdash;Plato&mdash;The
+ voice of the people&mdash;Imperial federation&mdash;Hereditary colonial policy&mdash;New Irelands&mdash;Effects
+ of party government</td><td align='left'><a href="#Page_318">318</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+
+<h3>ILLUSTRATIONS.</h3>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="illustrations">
+<tr><td align='left'>Mountain Crater, Dominica</td><td align='right'><i><a href="#Frontispiece">Frontispiece</a></i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Silk Cotton Tree, Jamaica</td><td align='right'><i><a href="#title">Title page</a></i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Blue Basin, Trinidad</td><td align='right'><i>To face page</i> <a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Morning Walk, Dominica</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_136">136</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Port Royal, Jamaica</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_171">171</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Valley in the Blue Mountains, Jamaica</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_194">194</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Kingston and Harbour, from Cherry Gardens</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_234">234</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Havana, from the Quarries</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_258">258</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Port au Prince, Hayti</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_288">288</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE ENGLISH IN THE WEST INDIES.</h2>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Colonial policy&mdash;Union or separation&mdash;Self-government&mdash;Varieties of condition&mdash;The
+Pacific colonies&mdash;The West Indies&mdash;Proposals for a West
+Indian federation&mdash;Nature of the population&mdash;American union and
+British plantations&mdash;Original conquest of the West Indies.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The Colonial Exhibition has come and gone. Delegates from
+our great self-governed dependencies have met and consulted
+together, and have determined upon a common course of
+action for Imperial defence. The British race dispersed over
+the world have celebrated the Jubilee of the Queen with an
+enthusiasm evidently intended to bear a special and peculiar
+meaning. The people of these islands and their sons and
+brothers and friends and kinsfolk in Canada, in Australia,
+and in New Zealand have declared with a general voice,
+scarcely disturbed by a discord, that they are fellow-subjects
+of a single sovereign, that they are united in feeling, united
+in loyalty, united in interest, and that they wish and mean
+to preserve unbroken the integrity of the British Empire.
+This is the answer which the democracy has given to the
+advocates of the doctrine of separation. The desire for union
+while it lasts is its own realisation. As long as we have no
+wish to part we shall not part, and the wish can never rise
+if when there is occasion we can meet and deliberate together
+with the same regard for each other's welfare which has been
+shown in the late conference in London.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Events mock at human foresight, and nothing is certain but
+the unforeseen. Constitutional government and an independent
+executive were conferred upon our larger colonies, with
+the express and scarcely veiled intention that at the earliest
+moment they were to relieve the mother country of responsibility
+for them. They were regarded as fledgelings who are
+fed only by the parent birds till their feathers are grown, and
+are then expected to shift for themselves. They were provided
+with the full plumage of parliamentary institutions on
+the home pattern and model, and the expectation of experienced
+politicians was that they would each at the earliest
+moment go off on their separate accounts, and would bid us
+a friendly farewell. The irony of fate has turned to folly the
+wisdom of the wise. The wise themselves, the same political
+party which were most anxious twenty years ago to see the
+colonies independent, and contrived constitutions for them
+which they conceived must inevitably lead to separation, appeal
+now to the effect of those very constitutions in drawing
+the Empire closer together, as a reason why a similar method
+should be immediately adopted to heal the differences between
+Great Britain and Ireland. New converts to any belief,
+political or theological, are proverbially zealous, and perhaps
+in this instance they are over-hasty. It does not follow that
+because people of the same race and character are
+drawn together by equality and liberty, people of different
+races and different characters, who have quarrelled
+for centuries, will be similarly attracted to one another.
+Yet so far as our own colonies are concerned it is clear
+that the abandonment by the mother country of all pretence
+to interfere in their internal management has removed
+the only cause which could possibly have created a desire for
+independence. We cannot, even if we wish it ourselves,
+shake off connections who cost us nothing and themselves refuse
+to be divided. Politicians may quarrel; the democracies
+have refused to quarrel; and the result of the wide extension
+of the suffrage throughout the Empire has been to show that
+being one the British people everywhere intend to remain one.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>
+With the same blood, the same language, the same habits, the
+same traditions, they do not mean to be shattered into dishonoured
+fragments. All of us, wherever we are, can best
+manage our own affairs within our own limits; yet local
+spheres of self-management can revolve round a common centre
+while there is a centripetal power sufficient to hold them;
+and so long as England 'to herself is true' and continues
+worthy of her ancient reputation, there are no causes working
+visibly above the political horizon which are likely to induce
+our self-governed colonies to take wing and leave us. The
+strain will come with the next great war. During peace these
+colonies have only experienced the advantage of union with
+us. They will then have to share our dangers, and may ask why
+they are to be involved in quarrels which are not of their own
+making. How they will act then only experience can tell;
+and that there is any doubt about it is a sufficient answer to
+those rapid statesmen who would rush at once into the application
+of the same principle to countries whose continuance
+with us is vital to our own safety, whom we cannot part with
+though they were to demand it at the cannon's mouth.</p>
+
+<p>But the result of the experiment is an encouragement as far
+as it has gone to those who would extend self-government
+through the whole of our colonial system. It seems to lead
+as a direct road into the 'Imperial Federation' which has
+fascinated the general imagination. It removes friction. We
+relieve ourselves of responsibilities. If federation is to come
+about at all as a definite and effective organisation, the
+spontaneous action of the different members of the Empire
+in a position in which they are free to stay with us or to leave
+us as they please, appears the readiest and perhaps the only
+means by which it can be brought to pass. So plausible is the
+theory, so obviously right would it be were the problem as
+simple and the population of all our colonies as homogeneous
+as in Australia, that one cannot wonder at the ambition of
+politicians to win themselves a name and achieve a great
+result by the immediate adoption of it. Great results
+generally imply effort and sacrifice. Here effort is un<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>necessary
+and sacrifice is not demanded. Everybody is to
+have what he wishes, and the effect is to come about of itself.
+When we think of India, when we think of Ireland, prudence
+tells us to hesitate. Steps once taken in this direction cannot
+be undone, even if found to lead to the wrong place. But
+undoubtedly, wherever it is possible, the principle of self-government
+ought to be applied in our colonies and will be
+applied, and the danger now is that it will be tried in haste in
+countries either as yet unripe for it or from the nature of
+things unfit for it. The liberties which we grant freely to
+those whom we trust and who do not require to be restrained,
+we bring into disrepute if we concede them as readily to
+perversity or disaffection or to those who, like most Asiatics,
+do not desire liberty, and prosper best when they are led
+and guided.</p>
+
+<p>In this complex empire of ours the problem presents itself
+in many shapes, and each must be studied and dealt with
+according to its character. There is the broad distinction
+between colonies and conquered countries. Colonists are
+part of ourselves. Foreigners attached by force to our
+dominions may submit to be ruled by us, but will not always
+consent to rule themselves in accordance with our views or
+interests, or remain attached to us if we enable them to leave
+us when they please. The Crown, therefore, as in India,
+rules directly by the police and the army. And there are
+colonies which are neither one nor the other, where our own
+people have been settled and have been granted the land in
+possession with the control of an insubordinate population,
+themselves claiming political privileges which had to be
+refused to the rest. This was the position of Ireland, and
+the result of meddling theoretically with it ought to have
+taught us caution. Again, there are colonies like the West
+Indies, either occupied originally by ourselves, as Barbadoes,
+or taken by force from France or Spain, where the mass of
+the population were slaves who have been since made free,
+but where the extent to which the coloured people can be
+admitted to share in the administration is still an unsettled<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>
+question. To throw countries so variously circumstanced
+under an identical system would be a wild experiment.
+Whether we ought to try such an experiment at all, or even
+wish to try it and prepare the way for it, depends perhaps
+on whether we have determined that under all circumstances
+the retention of them under our own flag is indispensable to
+our safety.</p>
+
+<p>I had visited our great Pacific colonies. Circumstances
+led me afterwards to attend more particularly to the West
+ladies. They were the earliest, and once the most prized, of
+all our distant possessions. They had been won by the most
+desperate struggles, and had been the scene of our greatest
+naval glories. In the recent discussion on the possibility of an
+organised colonial federation, various schemes came under my
+notice, in every one of which the union of the West Indian
+Islands under a free parliamentary constitution was regarded
+as a necessary preliminary. I was reminded of a conversation
+which I had held seventeen years ago with a high colonial
+official specially connected with the West Indian department,
+in which the federation of the islands under such a constitution
+was spoken of as a measure already determined on,
+though with a view to an end exactly the opposite of that
+which was now desired. The colonies universally were then
+regarded in such quarters as a burden upon our resources, of
+which we were to relieve ourselves at the earliest moment.
+They were no longer of special value to us; the whole world
+had become our market; and whether they were nominally
+attached to the Empire, or were independent, or joined themselves
+to some other power, was of no commercial moment to
+us. It was felt, however, that as long as any tie remained, we
+should be obliged to defend them in time of war; while they,
+in consequence of their connection, would be liable to attack.
+The sooner, therefore, the connection was ended, the better
+for them and for us.</p>
+
+<p>By the constitutions which had been conferred upon them,
+Australia and Canada, New Zealand and the Cape, were
+assumed to be practically gone. The same measures were to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>
+be taken with the West Indies. They were not prosperous.
+They formed no outlet for British emigration; the white
+population was diminishing; they were dissatisfied; they lay
+close to the great American republic, to which geographically
+they more properly belonged. Representative assemblies
+under the Crown had failed to produce the content expected
+from them or to give an impulse to industry. The free
+negroes could not long be excluded from the franchise. The
+black and white races had not amalgamated and were not
+inclining to amalgamate. The then recent Gordon riots had
+been followed by the suicide of the old Jamaican constitution.
+The government of Jamaica had been flung back upon the
+Crown, and the Crown was impatient of the addition to its
+obligations. The official of whom I speak informed me that a
+decision had been irrevocably taken. The troops were to be
+withdrawn from the islands, and Jamaica, Trinidad, and the
+English Antilles were to be masters of their own destiny,
+either to form into free communities like the Spanish American
+republics, or to join the United States, or to do what they
+pleased, with the sole understanding that we were to have no
+more responsibilities.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know how far the scheme was matured. To
+an outside spectator it seemed too hazardous to have been
+seriously meditated. Yet I was told that it had not been
+meditated only but positively determined upon, and that
+further discussion of a settled question would be fruitless and
+needlessly irritating.</p>
+
+<p>Politicians with a favourite scheme are naturally sanguine.
+It seemed to me that in a West Indian Federation the black
+race would necessarily be admitted to their full rights as
+citizens. Their numbers enormously preponderated, and the
+late scenes in Jamaica were signs that the two colours would
+not blend into one, that there might be, and even inevitably
+would be, collisions between them which would lead to actions
+which we could not tolerate. The white residents and the
+negroes had not been drawn together by the abolition of
+slavery, but were further apart than ever. The whites, if by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>
+superior intelligence they could gain the upper hand, would
+not be allowed to keep it. As little would they submit to
+be ruled by a race whom they despised; and I thought it
+quite certain that something would happen which would
+compel the British Government to interfere again, whether
+we liked it or not. Liberty in Hayti had been followed
+by a massacre of the French inhabitants, and the French
+settlers had done no worse than we had done to deserve the
+ill will of their slaves. Fortunately opinion changed in England
+before the experiment could be tried. The colonial
+policy of the doctrinaire statesmen was no sooner understood
+than it was universally condemned, and they could not press
+proposals on the West Indies which the West Indians showed
+so little readiness to meet.</p>
+
+<p>So things drifted on, remaining to appearance as they were.
+The troops were not recalled. A minor confederation was
+formed in the Leeward Antilles. The Windward group
+was placed under Barbadoes, and islands which before had
+governors of their own passed under subordinate administrators.
+Local councils continued under various conditions,
+the popular element being cautiously and silently introduced.
+The blacks settled into a condition of easy-going peasant
+proprietors. But so far as the white or English interest was
+concerned, two causes which undermined West Indian prosperity
+continued to operate. So long as sugar maintained its
+price the planters with the help of coolie labour were able to
+struggle on; but the beetroot bounties came to cut from
+under them the industry in which they had placed their main
+dependence; the reports were continually darker of distress
+and rapidly approaching ruin; petitions for protection were
+not or could not be granted. They were losing heart&mdash;the
+worst loss of all; while the Home Government, no longer with
+a view to separation, but with the hope that it might produce
+the same effect which it produced elsewhere, were still looking
+to their old remedy of the extension of the principle of self-government.
+One serious step was taken very recently towards
+the re-establishment of a constitution in Jamaica. It was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>
+assumed that it had failed before because the blacks were not
+properly represented. The council was again made partially
+elective, and the black vote was admitted on the widest basis.
+A power was retained by the Crown of increasing in case of
+necessity the nominated official members to a number which
+would counterbalance the elected members; but the power
+had not been acted on and was not perhaps designed to
+continue, and a restless hope was said to have revived among
+the negroes that the day was not far off when Jamaica would
+be as Hayti and they would have the island to themselves.</p>
+
+<p>To a person like myself, to whom the preservation of the
+British Empire appeared to be the only public cause in which
+just now it was possible to feel concern, the problem was
+extremely interesting. I had no prejudice against self-government.
+I had seen the Australian colonies growing under it in
+health and strength with a rapidity which rivalled the progress
+of the American Union itself. I had observed in South Africa
+that the confusions and perplexities there diminished exactly
+in proportion as the Home Government ceased to interfere. I
+could not hope that as an outsider I could see my way through
+difficulties where practised eyes were at a loss. But it was
+clear that the West Indies were suffering, be the cause what it
+might. I learnt that a party had risen there at last which was
+actually in favour of a union with America, and I wished to
+find an answer to a question which I had long asked myself to
+no purpose. My old friend Mr. Motley was once speaking to
+me of the probable accession of Canada to the American
+republic. I asked him if he was sure that Canada would like
+it. 'Like it?' he replied. 'Would I like the house of Baring
+to take me into partnership?' To be a partner in the British
+Empire appeared to me to be at least as great a thing as
+to be a State under the stars and stripes. What was it that
+Canada, what was it that any other colony, would gain by exchanging
+British citizenship for American citizenship? What
+did America offer to those who joined her which we refused
+to give or neglected to give? Was it that Great Britain did
+not take her colonies into partnership at all? was it that while<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>
+in the United States the blood circulated freely from the heart
+to the extremities, so that 'if one member suffered all the
+body suffered with it,' our colonies were simply (as they used
+to be called) 'plantations,' offshoots from the old stock set
+down as circumstances had dictated in various parts of the
+globe, but vitally detached and left to grow or to wither
+according to their own inherent strength?</p>
+
+<p>At one time the West Indian colonies had been more to
+us than such casual seedlings. They had been precious regarded as
+jewels, which hundreds of thousands of English
+lives had been sacrificed to tear from France and Spain.
+The Caribbean Sea was the cradle of the Naval Empire of
+Great Britain. There Drake and Hawkins intercepted the
+golden stream which flowed from Panama into the exchequer
+at Madrid, and furnished Philip with the means to carry on
+his war with the Reformation. The Pope had claimed to
+be lord of the new world as well as of the old, and had declared
+that Spaniards, and only Spaniards, should own territory
+or carry on trade there within the tropics. The seamen
+of England took up the challenge and replied with cannon
+shot. It was not the Crown, it was not the Government,
+which fought that battle: it was the people of England who
+fought it with their own hands and their own resources. Adventurers,
+buccaneers, corsairs, privateers, call them by what
+name we will, stand as extraordinary, but characteristic figures
+on the stage of history, disowned or acknowledged by their
+sovereign as suited diplomatic convenience. The outlawed
+pirate of one year was promoted the next to be a governor
+and his country's representative. In those waters, the men
+were formed and trained who drove the Armada through the
+Channel into wreck and ruin. In those waters, in the centuries
+which followed, France and England fought for the
+ocean empire, and England won it&mdash;won it on the day when
+her own politicians' hearts had failed them, and all the powers
+of the world had combined to humiliate her, and Rodney
+shattered the French fleet, saved Gibraltar, and avenged York
+Town. If ever the naval exploits of this country are done<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>
+into an epic poem&mdash;and since the Iliad there has been no
+subject better fitted for such treatment or better deserving
+it&mdash;the West Indies will be the scene of the most brilliant
+cantos. For England to allow them to drift away from her
+because they have no immediate marketable value would be
+a sign that she had lost the feelings with which great nations
+always treasure the heroic traditions of their fathers. When
+those traditions come to be regarded as something which
+concerns them no longer, their greatness is already on the
+wane.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In the train for Southampton&mdash;Morning papers&mdash;The new 'Locksley Hall'&mdash;Past
+and present&mdash;The 'Moselle'&mdash;Heavy weather&mdash;The petrel&mdash;The
+Azores.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The last week in December, when the year 1886 was waning
+to its close, I left Waterloo station to join a West Indian mail
+steamer at Southampton. The air was frosty; the fog lay thick
+over city and river; the Houses of Parliament themselves
+were scarcely visible as I drove across Westminster Bridge in
+the heavy London vapour&mdash;a symbol of the cloud which was
+hanging over the immediate political future. The morning
+papers were occupied with Lord Tennyson's new 'Locksley
+Hall' and Mr. Gladstone's remarks upon it. I had read
+neither; but from the criticisms it appeared that Lord Tennyson
+fancied himself to have seen a change pass over England
+since his boyhood, and a change which was not to his mind.
+The fruit of the new ideas which were then rising from the
+ground had ripened, and the taste was disagreeable to him.
+The day which had followed that 'august sunrise' had not
+been 'august' at all; and 'the beautiful bold brow of Freedom'
+had proved to have something of brass upon it. The 'use
+and wont' England, the England out of which had risen the
+men who had won her great position for her, was losing its old
+characteristics. Things which in his eager youth Lord Tenny<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>son
+had despised he saw now that he had been mistaken in
+despising; and the new notions which were to remake the
+world were not remaking it in a shape that pleased him. Like
+Goethe, perhaps he felt that he was stumbling over the roots of
+the tree which he had helped to plant.</p>
+
+<p>The contrast in Mr. Gladstone's article was certainly remarkable.
+Lord Tennyson saw in institutions which were passing
+away the decay of what in its time had been great and noble,
+and he saw little rising in the place of them which humanly
+could be called improvement. To Mr. Gladstone these
+revolutionary years had been years of the sweeping off of long
+intolerable abuses, and of awaking to higher and truer perceptions
+of duty. Never, according to him, in any period of her
+history had England made more glorious progress, never had
+stood higher than at the present moment in material power
+and moral excellence. How could it be otherwise when they
+were the years of his own ascendency?</p>
+
+<p>Metaphysicians tell us that we do not know anything as it
+really is. What we call outward objects are but impressions
+generated upon our sense by forces of the actual nature of
+which we are totally ignorant. We imagine that we hear a
+sound, and that the sound is something real which is outside
+us; but the sound is in the ear and is made by the ear, and
+the thing outside is but a vibration of air. If no animal
+existed with organs of hearing, the vibrations might be as
+before, but there would be no such thing as sound; and all
+our opinions on all subjects whatsoever are equally subjective.
+Lord Tennyson's opinions and Mr. Gladstone's opinions
+reveal to us only the nature and texture of their own minds,
+which have been affected in this way or that way. The scale
+has not been made in which we can weigh the periods in a
+nation's life, or measure them one against the other. The past
+is gone, and nothing but the bones of it can be recalled. We
+but half understand the present, for each age is a chrysalis, and
+we are ignorant into what it may develop. We do not even
+try to understand it honestly, for we shut our eyes against what
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>we do not wish to see. I will not despond with Lord Tennyson.
+To take a gloomy view of things will not mend them,
+and modern enlightenment may have excellent gifts in store
+for us which will come by-and-by. But I will not say that they
+have come as yet. I will not say that public life is improved
+when party spirit has degenerated into an organised civil war,
+and a civil war which can never end, for it renews its life like
+the giant of fable at every fresh election. I will not say that
+men are more honest and more law-abiding when debts are
+repudiated and law is defied in half the country, and Mr.
+Gladstone himself applauds or refuses to condemn acts of open
+dishonesty. We are to congratulate ourselves that duelling
+has ceased, but I do not know that men act more honourably
+because they can be called less sharply to account. 'Smuggling,'
+we are told, has disappeared also, but the wrecker scuttles
+his ship or runs it ashore to cheat the insurance office. The
+Church may perhaps be improved in the arrangement of the
+services and in the professional demonstrativeness of the clergy,
+but I am not sure that the clergy have more influence over
+the minds of men than they had fifty years ago, or that the
+doctrines which the Church teaches are more powerful over
+public opinion. One would not gather that our morality was
+so superior from the reports which we see in the newspapers,
+and girls now talk over novels which the ladies' maids of their
+grandmothers might have read in secret but would have blushed
+while reading. Each age would do better if it studied its own
+faults and endeavoured to mend them, instead of comparing
+itself with others to its own advantage.</p>
+
+<p>This only was clear to me in thinking over what Mr. Gladstone
+was reported to have said, and in thinking of his own
+achievements and career, that there are two classes of men who
+have played and still play a prominent part in the world&mdash;those
+who accomplish great things, and those who talk and
+make speeches about them. The doers of things are for the
+most part silent. Those who build up empires or discover
+secrets of science, those who paint great pictures or write great
+poems, are not often to be found spouting upon platforms.
+The silent men do the work. The talking men cry out at what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
+is done because it is not done as they would have had it, and
+afterwards take possession of it as if it was their own property.
+Warren Hastings wins India for us; the eloquent Burke desires
+and passionately tries to hang him for it. At the supreme
+crisis in our history when America had revolted and Ireland
+was defiant, when the great powers of Europe had coalesced to
+crush us, and we were staggering under the disaster at York
+Town, Rodney struck a blow in the West Indies which sounded
+over the world and saved for Britain her ocean sceptre. Just
+in time, for the popular leaders had persuaded the House of
+Commons that Rodney ought to be recalled and peace made
+on any terms. Even in politics the names of oratorical statesmen
+are rarely associated with the organic growth of enduring
+institutions. The most distinguished of them have been conspicuous
+only as instruments of destruction. Institutions are
+the slow growths of centuries. The orator cuts them down in
+a day. The tree falls, and the hand that wields the axe is
+admired and applauded. The speeches of Demosthenes and
+Cicero pass into literature, and are studied as models of
+language. But Demosthenes and Cicero did not understand
+the facts of their time; their language might be beautiful, and
+their sentiments noble, but with their fine words and sentiments
+they only misled their countrymen. The periods where
+the orator is supreme are marked always by confusion and
+disintegration. Goethe could say of Luther that he had
+thrown back for centuries the spiritual cultivation of mankind,
+by calling the passions of the multitude to judge of matters
+which should have been left to the thinkers. We ourselves
+are just now in one of those uneasy periods, and we have
+decided that orators are the fittest people to rule over us. The
+constituencies choose their members according to the fluency
+of their tongues. Can he make a speech? is the one test of
+competency for a legislator, and the most persuasive of the
+whole we make prime minister. We admire the man for his
+gifts, and we accept what he says for the manner in which it is
+uttered. He may contradict to-day what he asserted yesterday.
+No matter. He can persuade others wherever he is persuaded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>
+himself. And such is the nature of him that he can convince
+himself of anything which it is his interest to believe. These
+are the persons who are now regarded as our wisest. It was
+not always so. It is not so now with nations who are in a
+sound state of health. The Americans, when they choose a
+President or a Secretary of State or any functionary from
+whom they require wise action, do not select these famous
+speech-makers. Such periods do not last, for the condition
+which they bring about becomes always intolerable. I do not
+believe in the degeneracy of our race. I believe the present
+generation of Englishmen to be capable of all that their
+fathers were and possibly of more; but we are just now in a
+moulting state, and are sick while the process is going on. Or
+to take another metaphor. The bow of Ulysses is unstrung.
+The worms have not eaten into the horn or the moths injured
+the string, but the owner of the house is away and the suitors
+of Penelope Britannia consume her substance, rivals one of
+another, each caring only for himself, but with a common
+heart in evil. They cannot string the bow. Only the true
+lord and master can string it, and in due time he comes, and
+the cord is stretched once more upon the notch, singing to the
+touch of the finger with the sharp note of the swallow; and
+the arrows fly to their mark in the breasts of the pretenders,
+while Pallas Athene looks on approving from her coign of
+vantage.</p>
+
+<p>Random meditations of this kind were sent flying through
+me by the newspaper articles on Tennyson and Mr. Gladstone.
+The air cleared, and my mind also, as we ran beyond
+the smoke. The fields were covered deep with snow; a white
+vapour clung along the ground, the winter sky shining through
+it soft and blue. The ponds and canals were hard frozen, and
+men were skating and boys were sliding, and all was brilliant
+and beautiful. The ladies of the forest, the birch trees beside
+the line about Farnborough, were hung with jewels of ice, and
+glittered like a fretwork of purple and silver. It was like
+escaping out of a nightmare into happy healthy England once
+more. In the carriage with me were several gentlemen;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>
+officers going out to join their regiments; planters who had
+been at home on business; young sportsmen with rifles and
+cartridge cases who were hoping to shoot alligators, &amp;c., all
+bound like myself for the West Indian mail steamer. The
+elders talked of sugar and of bounties, and of the financial ruin
+of the islands. I had heard of this before I started, and I
+learnt little from them which I had not known already; but I
+had misgivings whether I was not wandering off after all on a
+fool's errand. I did not want to shoot alligators, I did not
+understand cane growing or want to understand it, nor was I
+likely to find a remedy for encumbered and bankrupt landowners.
+I was at an age too when men grow unfit for roaming,
+and are expected to stay quietly at home. Plato says that to
+travel to any profit one should go between fifty and sixty; not
+sooner because one has one's duties to attend to as a citizen;
+not after because the mind becomes hebetated. The chief
+object of going abroad, in Plato's opinion, is to converse with
+<span class="greek">&#952;&#949;&#953;&#959;&#953; &#7941;&#957;&#948;&#961;&#949;&#962;</span> inspired men, whom Providence scatters about
+the globe, and from whom alone wisdom can be learnt. And
+I, alas! was long past the limit, and <span class="greek">&#952;&#949;&#953;&#959;&#953; &#7941;&#957;&#948;&#961;&#949;&#962;</span> are not to be
+met with in these times. But if not with inspired men, I
+might fall in at any rate with sensible men who would talk on
+things which I wanted to know. Winter and spring in a warm
+climate were pleasanter than a winter and spring at home; and
+as there is compensation in all things, old people can see some
+objects more clearly than young people can see them. They
+have no interest of their own to mislead their perception.
+They have lived too long to believe in any formulas or
+theories. 'Old age,' the Greek poet says, 'is not wholly a
+misfortune. Experience teaches things which the young know
+not.'<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> Old men at any rate like to think so.</p>
+
+<p>The 'Moselle,' in which I had taken my passage, was a
+large steamer of 4,000 tons, one of the best where all are good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>&mdash;on
+the West Indian mail line. Her long straight sides and
+rounded bottom promised that she would roll, and I may say
+that the promise was faithfully kept; but except to the
+stomachs of the inexperienced rolling is no disadvantage. A
+vessel takes less water on board in a beam sea when she yields
+to the wave than when she stands up stiff and straight against
+it. The deck when I went on board was slippery with ice.
+There was the usual crowd and confusion before departure,
+those who were going out being undistinguishable, till the bell
+rang to clear the ship, from the friends who had accompanied
+them to take leave. I discovered, however, to my satisfaction
+that our party in the cabin would not be a large one.
+The West Indians who had come over for the Colonial
+Exhibition were most of them already gone. They, along
+with the rest, had taken back with them a consciousness that
+their visit had not been wholly in vain, and that the interest of
+the old country in her distant possessions seemed quickening
+into life once more. The commissioners from all our dependencies
+had been f&ecirc;ted in the great towns, and the people had
+come to Kensington in millions to admire the productions
+which bore witness to the boundless resources of British
+territory. Had it been only a passing emotion of wonder and
+pride, or was it a prelude to a more energetic policy and
+active resolution? Anyway it was something to be glad of.
+Receptions and public dinners and loyal speeches will not
+solve political problems, but they create the feeling of good
+will which underlies the useful consideration of them. The
+Exhibition had served the purpose which it was intended for.
+The conference of delegates grew out of it which has discussed
+in the happiest temper the elements of our future relations.</p>
+
+<p>But the Exhibition doors were now closed, and the multitude
+of admirers or contributors were dispersed or dispersing
+to their homes. In the 'Moselle' we had only the latest
+lingerers or the ordinary passengers who went to and fro
+on business or pleasure. I observed them with the curiosity
+with which one studies persons with whom one is to be
+shut up for weeks in involuntary intimacy. One young<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+Demerara planter attracted my notice, as he had with him
+a newly married and beautiful wife whose fresh complexion
+would so soon fade, as it always does in those lands where
+nature is brilliant with colour and English cheeks grow
+pale. I found also to my surprise and pleasure a daughter
+of one of my oldest and dearest friends, who was going out
+to join her husband in Trinidad. This was a happy accident
+to start with. An announcement printed in Spanish in large
+letters in a conspicuous position intimated that I must be
+prepared for habits in some of our companions of a less
+agreeable kind.</p>
+
+<p>'Se suplica &aacute; los se&ntilde;ores pasajeros de no escupir sobre la
+cubierta de popa.'</p>
+
+<p>I may as well leave the words untranslated, but the 'supplication'
+is not unnecessary. The Spanish colonists, like their
+countrymen at home, smoke everywhere with the usual consequences.
+The captain of one of our mail boats found it
+necessary to read one of them who disregarded it a lesson
+which he would remember. He sent for the quartermaster
+with a bucket and a mop, and ordered him to stay by this
+gentleman and clean up till he had done.</p>
+
+<p>The wind when we started was light and keen from the
+north. The afternoon sky was clear and frosty. Southampton
+Water was still as oil, and the sun went down crimson
+behind the brown woods of the New Forest. Of the 'Moselle's'
+speed we had instant evidence, for a fast Government
+launch raced us for a mile or two, and off Netley gave up the
+chase. We went leisurely along, doing thirteen knots without
+effort, swept by Calshot into the Solent, and had cleared the
+Needles before the last daylight had left us. In a few days
+the ice would be gone, and we should lie in the soft air of
+perennial summer.</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left:10em">
+Singula de nobis anni pr&aelig;dantur euntes:<br />
+Eripuere jocos, Venerem, convivia, ludum&mdash;<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But the flying years had not stolen from me the delight of
+finding myself once more upon the sea; the sea which is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>
+eternally young, and gives one back one's own youth and
+buoyancy.</p>
+
+<p>Down the Channel the north wind still blew, and the water
+was still smooth. We set our canvas at the Needles, and
+flew on for three days straight upon our course with a steady
+breeze. We crossed 'the Bay' without the fiddles on the
+dinner table; we were congratulating ourselves that, mid-winter
+as it was, we should reach the tropics and never need them.
+I meanwhile made acquaintances among my West Indian
+fellow-passengers, and listened to their tale of grievances.
+The Exhibition had been well enough in its way, but Exhibitions
+would not fill an empty exchequer or restore ruined
+plantations. The mother country I found was still regarded
+as a stepmother, and from more than one quarter I heard a
+more than muttered wish that they could be 'taken into partnership'
+by the Americans. They were wasting away under
+Free Trade and the sugar bounties. The mother country
+gave them fine words, but words were all. If they belonged
+to the United States they would have the benefit of a close
+market in a country where there were 60,000,000 sugar
+drinkers. Energetic Americans would come among them and
+establish new industries, and would control the unmanageable
+negroes. From the most loyal I heard the despairing cry of
+the Britons, 'the barbarians drive us into the sea and the sea
+drives us back upon the barbarians.' They could bear Free
+Trade which was fair all round, but not Free Trade which was
+made into a mockery by bounties. And it seemed that their
+masters in Downing Street answered them as the Romans
+answered our forefathers. 'We have many colonies, and we
+shall not miss Britain. Britain is far off, and must take care
+of herself. She brings us responsibility, and she brings us no
+revenue; we cannot tax Italy for the sake of Britons. We
+have given them our arms and our civilisation. We have
+done enough. Let them do now what they can or please.'
+Virtually this is what England says to the West Indians, or
+would say if despair made them actively troublesome, notwithstanding
+Exhibitions and expansive sentiments. The answer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+from Rome we can now see was the voice of dying greatness,
+which was no longer worthy of the place in the world which it
+had made for itself in the days of its strength; but it
+doubtless seemed reasonable enough at the time, and indeed
+was the only answer which the Rome of Honorius could
+give.</p>
+
+<p>A change in the weather cut short our conversations, and
+drove half the company to their berths. On the fourth morning
+the wind chopped back to the north-west. A beam sea set
+in, and the 'Moselle' justified my conjectures about her. She
+rolled gunwale under, rolled at least forty degrees each way,
+and unshipped a boat out of her davits to windward. The
+waves were not as high as I have known the Atlantic produce
+when in the humour for it, but they were short, steep, and
+curling. Tons of water poured over the deck. The few of us
+who ventured below to dinner were hit by the dumb waiters
+which swung over our heads; and the living waiters staggered
+about with the dishes and upset the soup into our laps. Everybody
+was grumbling and miserable. Driven to my cabin I
+was dozing on a sofa when I was jerked off and dropped upon
+the floor. The noise down below on these occasions is considerable.
+The steering chains clank, unfastened doors slam to
+and fro, plates and dishes and glass fall crashing at some lurch
+which is heavier than usual, with the roar of the sea underneath
+as a constant accompaniment.</p>
+
+<p>When a wave strikes the ship full on the quarter and she
+staggers from stem to stern, one wonders how any construction
+of wood and iron can endure such blows without being
+shattered to fragments. And it would be shattered, as I
+heard an engineer once say, if the sea was not such a gentle
+creature after all. I crept up to the deck house to watch
+through the lee door the wild magnificence of the storm.
+Down came a great green wave, rushed in a flood over everything,
+and swept me drenched to the skin down the stairs into
+the cabin. I crawled to bed to escape cold, and slid up and
+down my berth like a shuttle at every roll of the ship till I fell
+into the unconsciousness which is a substitute for sleep, slept<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>
+at last really, and woke at seven in the morning to find the
+sun shining, and the surface of the ocean still undulating but
+glassy calm. The only signs left of the tempest were the
+swallow-like petrels skimming to and fro in our wake, picking
+up the scraps of food and the plate washings which the cook's
+mate had thrown overboard; smallest and beautifullest of all
+the gull tribe, called petrel by our ancestors, who went to their
+Bibles more often than we do for their images, in memory of
+St. Peter, because they seem for a moment to stand upon the
+water when they stoop upon any floating object.<a name="FNanchor_1_2" id="FNanchor_1_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> In the afternoon
+we passed the Azores, rising blue and fairy-like out of the
+ocean; unconscious they of the bloody battles which once
+went on under their shadows. There it was that Grenville, in
+the 'Revenge,' fought through a long summer day alone
+against a host of enemies, and died there and won immortal
+honour. The Azores themselves are Grenville's monument,
+and in the memory of Englishmen are associated for ever with
+his glorious story. Behind these islands, too, lay Grenville's
+comrades, the English privateers, year after year waiting for
+Philip's plate fleet. Behind these islands lay French squadrons
+waiting for the English sugar ships. They are calm and silent
+now, and are never likely to echo any more to battle thunder.
+Men come and go and play out their little dramas, epic or
+tragic, and it matters nothing to nature. Their wild pranks
+leave no scars, and the decks are swept clean for the next
+comers.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a>
+&#8038; &#964;&#7953;&#954;&#957;&#959;&#957;, &#959;&#8016;&#967; &#7941;&#960;&#945;&#957;&#964;&#945; &#964;&#8183; &#947;&#8053;&#961;&#8115; &#954;&#945;&#954;&#7937;;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&#7969; &#8127;&#949;&#956;&#960;&#949;&#953;&#961;&#7985;&#945;<br />
+&#7957;&#967;&#949;&#953; &#964;&#953; &#955;&#8051;&#958;&#945;&#953; &#964;&#8182;&#957; &#957;&#8051;&#969;&#957; &#963;&#959;&#966;&#8061;&#964;&#949;&#961;&#959;&#957;.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_2" id="Footnote_1_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> This is the explanation of the name which is given by Dampier.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The tropics&mdash;Passengers on board&mdash;Account of the Darien Canal&mdash;Planters'
+complaints&mdash;West Indian history&mdash;The Spanish conquest&mdash;Drake and
+Hawkins&mdash;The buccaneers&mdash;The pirates&mdash;French and English&mdash;Rodney&mdash;Battle
+of April 12&mdash;Peace with honour&mdash;Doers and talkers.</p></div>
+
+<p>Another two days and we were in the tropics. The north-east
+trade blew behind us, and our own speed being taken off
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>from the speed of the wind there was scarcely air enough to
+fill our sails. The waves went down and the ports were opened,
+and we had passed suddenly from winter into perpetual summer,
+as Jean Paul says it will be with us in death. Sleep came
+back soft and sweet, and the water was warm in our morning
+bath, and the worries and annoyances of life vanished in these
+sweet surroundings like nightmares when we wake. How well
+the Greeks understood the spiritual beauty of the sea! <span class="greek">&#952;&#8049;&#955;&#945;&#963;&#963;&#945;
+&#954;&#955;&#8059;&#958;&#949;&#953; &#960;&#8049;&#957;&#964;&#945; &#964;&#7936;&#957;&#952;&#961;&#8061;&#960;&#969;&#957;
+&#954;&#945;&#954;&#8049;</span>, says Euripides. 'The sea washes
+off all the woes of men.' The passengers lay about the decks
+in their chairs reading story books. The young ones played
+Bull. The officers flirted mildly with the pretty young ladies.
+For a brief interval care and anxiety had spread their wings
+and flown away, and existence itself became delightful.</p>
+
+<p>There was a young scientific man on board who interested
+me much. He had been sent out from Kew to take charge of
+the Botanical Gardens in Jamaica&mdash;was quiet, modest, and
+unaffected, understood his own subjects well, and could make
+others understand them; with him I had much agreeable conversation.
+And there was another singular person who attracted
+me even more. I took him at first for an American.
+He was a Dane I found, an engineer by profession, and was
+on his way to some South American republic. He was a long
+lean man with grey eyes, red hair, and a laugh as if he so
+enjoyed the thing that amused him that he wished to keep it
+all to himself, laughing inwardly till he choked and shook with
+it. His chief amusement seemed to have lain in watching the
+performances of Liberal politicians in various parts of the
+world. He told me of an opposition leader in some parliament
+whom his rival in office had disposed of by shutting him
+up in the caboose. 'In the caboose,' he repeated, screaming
+with enjoyment at the thought of it, and evidently wishing that
+all the parliamentary orators on the globe were in the same
+place. In his wanderings he had been lately at the Darien
+Canal, and gave me a wonderful account of the condition of
+things there. The original estimate of the probable cost had
+been twenty-six millions of our (English) money. All these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>
+millions had been spent already, and only a fifth of the whole
+had as yet been executed. The entire cost would not be less,
+under the existing management, than one hundred millions,
+and he evidently doubted whether the canal would ever be
+completed at all, though professionally he would not confess
+to such an opinion. The waste and plunder had been incalculable.
+The works and the gold that were set moving by
+them made a feast for unclean harpies of both sexes from
+every nation in the four continents. I liked everything about
+Mr. &mdash;&mdash;. Tom Cringle's <i>Obed</i> might have been something
+like him, had not <i>Obed's</i> evil genius driven him into more
+dangerous ways.</p>
+
+<p>There was a small black boy among us, evidently of pure
+blood, for his hair was wool and his colour black as ink. His
+parents must have been well-to-do, for the boy had been in
+Europe to be educated. The officers on board and some of
+the ladies played with him as they would play with a monkey.
+He had little more sense than a monkey, perhaps less, and the
+gestures of him grinning behind gratings and pushing out his
+long thin arms between the bars were curiously suggestive of
+the original from whom we are told now that all of us came.
+The worst of it was that, being lifted above his own people, he
+had been taught to despise them. He was spoilt as a black
+and could not be made into a white, and this I found afterwards
+was the invariable and dangerous consequence whenever
+a superior negro contrived to raise himself. He might do well
+enough himself, but his family feel their blood as a degradation.
+His children will not marry among their own people,
+and not only will no white girl marry a negro, but hardly any
+dowry can be large enough to tempt a West Indian white to
+make a wife of a black lady. This is one of the most sinister
+features in the present state of social life there.</p>
+
+<p>Small personalities cropped up now and then. We had
+representatives of all professions among us except the Church
+of England clergy. Of them we had not one. The captain,
+as usual, read us the service on Sundays on a cushion for a
+desk, with the union jack spread over it. On board ship the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
+captain, like a sovereign, is supreme, and in spiritual matters
+as in secular. Drake was the first commander who carried
+the theory into practice when he excommunicated his chaplain.
+It is the law now, and the tradition has gone on unbroken.
+In default of clergy we had a missionary, who for the most
+part kept his lips closed. He did open them once, and at my
+expense. Apropos of nothing he said to me, 'I wonder, sir,
+whether you ever read the remarks upon you in the newspapers.
+If all the attacks upon your writings which I have
+seen were collected together they would make an interesting
+volume.' This was all. He had delivered his soul and relapsed
+into silence.</p>
+
+<p>From a Puerto Rico merchant I learnt that, if the English
+colonies were in a bad way, the Spanish colonies were in a
+worse. His own island, he said, was a nest of squalor, misery,
+vice, and disease. Blacks and whites were equally immoral;
+and so far as habits went, the whites were the filthier of the
+two. The complaints of the English West Indians were less
+sweeping, and, as to immorality between whites and blacks,
+neither from my companions in the 'Moselle' nor anywhere
+afterward did I hear or see a sign of it. The profligacy of
+planter life passed away with slavery, and the changed condition
+of the two races makes impossible any return to the old
+habits. But they had wrongs of their own, and were eloquent
+in their exposition of them. We had taken the islands from
+France and Spain at an enormous expense, and we were throwing
+them aside like a worn-out child's toy. We did nothing for
+them. We allowed them no advantage as British subjects, and
+when they tried to do something for themselves, we interposed
+with an Imperial veto. The United States, seeing the West
+Indian trade gravitating towards New York, had offered them
+a commercial treaty, being willing to admit their sugar duty
+free, in consideration of the islands admitting in return their
+salt fish and flour and notions. A treaty was in process of
+negotiation between the United States and the Spanish islands.
+A similar treaty had been freely offered to them, which might
+have saved them from ruin, and the Imperial Government had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>
+disallowed it. How, under such treatment, could we expect
+them to be loyal to the British connection?</p>
+
+<p>It was a relief to turn back from these lamentations to the
+brilliant period of past West Indian history. With the planters
+of the present it was all <i>sugar</i>&mdash;sugar and the lazy blacks who
+were England's darlings and would not work for them. The
+handbooks were equally barren. In them I found nothing
+but modern statistics pointing to dreary conclusions, and in
+the place of any human interest, long stories of constitutions,
+suffrages, representative assemblies, powers of elected members,
+and powers reserved to the Crown. Such things, important
+as they might be, did not touch my imagination; and to an
+Englishman, proud of his country, the West Indies had a far
+higher interest. Strange scenes streamed across my memory,
+and a shadowy procession of great figures who have printed
+their names in history. Columbus and Cortez, Vasco Nu&ntilde;ez,
+and Las Casas; the millions of innocent Indians who, according
+to Las Casas, were destroyed out of the islands, the
+Spanish grinding them to death in their gold mines; the black
+swarms who were poured in to take their place, and the
+frightful story of the slave trade. Behind it all was the
+European drama of the sixteenth century&mdash;Charles V. and
+Philip fighting against the genius of the new era, and feeding
+their armies with the ingots of the new world. The convulsion
+spread across the Atlantic. The English Protestants and
+the French Huguenots took to sea like water dogs, and challenged
+their enemies in their own special domain. To the
+popes and the Spaniards the new world was the property of
+the Church and of those who had discovered it. A papal bull
+bestowed on Spain all the countries which lay within the tropics
+west of the Atlantic&mdash;a form of Monroe doctrine, not unreasonable
+as long as there was force to maintain it, but the force
+was indispensable, and the Protestant adventurers tried the
+question with them at the cannon's mouth. They were of the
+reformed faith all of them, these sea rovers of the early days,
+and, like their enemies, they were of a very mixed complexion.
+The Spaniards, gorged with plunder and wading in blood, were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>
+at the same time, and in their own eyes, crusading soldiers of
+the faith, missionaries of the Holy Church, and defenders of
+the doctrines which were impiously assailed in Europe. The
+privateers from Plymouth and Rochelle paid also for the cost
+of their expeditions with the pillage of ships and towns and the
+profits of the slave trade; and they too were the unlicensed
+champions of spiritual freedom in their own estimate of themselves.
+The gold which was meant for Alva's troops in
+Flanders found its way into the treasure houses of the London
+companies. The logs of the voyages of the Elizabethan navigators
+represent them faithfully as they were, freebooters of
+the ocean in one aspect of them; in another, the sea warriors
+of the Reformation&mdash;uncommissioned, unrecognised, fighting
+on their own responsibility, liable to be disowned when they
+failed, while the Queen herself would privately be a shareholder
+in the adventure. It was a wild anarchic scene, fit
+cradle of the spiritual freedom of a new age, when the nations
+of the earth were breaking the chains in which king and priest
+had bound them.</p>
+
+<p>To the Spaniards, Drake and his comrades were <i>corsarios</i>,
+robbers, enemies of the human race, to be treated to a short
+shrift whenever found and caught. British seamen who fell
+into their hands were carried before the Inquisition at Lima
+or Carthagena and burnt at the stake as heretics. Four of
+Drake's crew were unfortunately taken once at Vera Cruz.
+Drake sent a message to the governor-general that if a hair of
+their heads was singed he would hang ten Spaniards for each
+one of them. (This curious note is at Simancas, where I saw
+it.) So great an object of terror at Madrid was El Draque that
+he was looked on as an incarnation of the old serpent, and
+when he failed in his last enterprise and news came that he was
+dead, Lope de Vega sang a hymn of triumph in an epic poem
+which he called the 'Dragontea.'</p>
+
+<p>When Elizabeth died and peace was made with Spain, the
+adventurers lost something of the indirect countenance which
+had so far been extended to them; the execution of Raleigh
+being one among other marks of the change of mind. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>
+they continued under other names, and no active effort was
+made to suppress them. The Spanish Government did in
+1627 agree to leave England in possession of Barbadoes, but
+the pretensions to an exclusive right to trade continued to be
+maintained, and the English and French refused to recognise
+it. The French privateers seized Tortuga, an island off St.
+Domingo, and they and their English friends swarmed in the
+Caribbean Sea as buccaneers or flibustiers. They exchanged
+names, perhaps as a symbol of their alliance. 'Flibustier'
+was English and a corruption of freebooter. 'Buccaneer'
+came from the boucan, or dried beef, of the wild cattle which
+the French hunters shot in Espa&ntilde;ola, and which formed the
+chief of their sea stores. Boucan became a French verb, and,
+according to Labat, was itself the Carib name for the cashew
+nut.</p>
+
+<p>War breaking out again in Cromwell's time, Penn and
+Venables took Jamaica. The flibustiers from the Tortugas
+drove the Spaniards out of Hayti, which was annexed to the
+French crown. The comradeship in religious enthusiasm
+which had originally drawn the two nations together cooled by
+degrees, as French Catholics as well as Protestants took to
+the trade. Port Royal became the headquarters of the
+English buccaneers&mdash;the last and greatest of them being
+Henry Morgan, who took and plundered Panama, was knighted
+for his services, and was afterwards made vice-governor of
+Jamaica. From the time when the Spaniards threw open
+their trade, and English seamen ceased to be delivered over
+to the Inquisition, the English buccaneers ceased to be respectable
+characters and gradually drifted into the pirates of later
+history, when under their new conditions they produced their
+more questionable heroes, the Kidds and Blackbeards. The
+French flibustiers continued long after&mdash;far into the eighteenth
+century&mdash;some of them with commissions as privateers, others
+as <i>forbans</i> or unlicensed rovers, but still connived at in
+Martinique.</p>
+
+<p>Adventurers, buccaneers, pirates pass across the stage&mdash;the
+curtain falls on them, and rises on a more glorious scene.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>
+Jamaica had become the dep&ocirc;t of the trade of England with
+the western world, and golden streams had poured into Port
+Royal. Barbadoes was unoccupied when England took possession
+of it, and never passed out of our hands; but the
+Antilles&mdash;the Anterior Isles&mdash;which stand like a string of emeralds
+round the neck of the Caribbean Sea, had been most of
+them colonised and occupied by the French, and during the
+wars of the last century were the objects of a never ceasing
+conflict between their fleets and ours. The French had
+planted their language there, they had planted their religion
+there, and the blacks of these islands generally still speak the
+French patois and call themselves Catholics; but it was
+deemed essential to our interests that the Antilles should
+be not French but English, and Antigua, Martinique, St.
+Lucia, St. Vincent, and Grenada were taken and retaken and
+taken again in a struggle perpetually renewed. When the
+American colonies revolted, the West Indies became involved
+in the revolutionary hurricane. France, Spain, and Holland&mdash;our
+three ocean rivals&mdash;combined in a supreme effort to
+tear from us our Imperial power. The opportunity was seized
+by Irish patriots to clamour for Irish nationality, and by the
+English Radicals to demand liberty and the rights of man.
+It was the most critical moment in later English history. If
+we had yielded to peace on the terms which our enemies
+offered, and the English Liberals wished us to accept, the star
+of Great Britain would have set for ever.</p>
+
+<p>The West Indies were then under the charge of Rodney,
+whose brilliant successes had already made his name famous.
+He had done his country more than yeoman's service. He
+had torn the Leeward Islands from the French. He had
+punished the Hollanders for joining the coalition by taking
+the island of St. Eustachius and three millions' worth of stores
+and money. The patriot party at home led by Fox and Burke
+were ill pleased with these victories, for they wished us to be
+driven into surrender. Burke denounced Rodney as he
+denounced Warren Hastings, and Rodney was called home to
+answer for himself. In his absence Demerara, the Leeward<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+Islands, St. Eustachius itself, were captured or recovered by
+the enemy. The French fleet, now supreme in the western
+waters, blockaded Lord Cornwallis at York Town and forced
+him to capitulate. The Spaniards had fitted out a fleet at
+Havannah, and the Count de Grasse, the French admiral,
+fresh from the victorious thunder of the American cannon,
+hastened back to refurnish himself at Martinique, intending to
+join the Spaniards, tear Jamaica from us, and drive us finally
+and completely out of the West Indies. One chance remained.
+Rodney was ordered back to his station, and he
+went at his best speed, taking all the ships with him which
+could then be spared. It was mid-winter. He forced his
+way to Barbadoes in five weeks spite of equinoctial storms.
+The Whig orators were indignant. They insisted that we
+were beaten; there had been bloodshed enough, and we must
+sit down in our humiliation. The Government yielded, and a
+peremptory order followed on Rodney's track, 'Strike your
+flag and come home.' Had that fatal command reached him
+Gibraltar would have fallen and Hastings's Indian Empire
+would have melted into air. But Rodney knew that his time
+was short, and he had been prompt to use it. Before the
+order came, the severest naval battle in English annals had
+been fought and won. De Grasse was a prisoner, and the
+French fleet was scattered into wreck and ruin.</p>
+
+<p>De Grasse had refitted in the Martinique dockyards. He
+himself and every officer in the fleet was confident that
+England was at last done for, and that nothing was left but to
+gather the fruits of the victory which was theirs already. Not
+Xerxes, when he broke through Thermopylae and watched
+from the shore his thousand galleys streaming down to the
+Gulf of Salamis, was more assured that his prize was in his
+hands than De Grasse on the deck of the 'Ville de Paris,'
+the finest ship then floating on the seas, when he heard that
+Rodney was at St. Lucia and intended to engage him. He
+did not even believe that the English after so many reverses
+would venture to meddle with a fleet superior in force and
+inspirited with victory. All the Antilles except St. Lucia<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+were his own. Tobago, Grenada, the Grenadines, St. Vincent,
+Martinique, Dominica, Guadaloupe, Montserrat, Nevis, Antigua,
+and St. Kitts, he held them all in proud possession, a
+string of gems, each island large as or larger than the Isle of
+Man, rising up with high volcanic peaks clothed from base to
+crest with forest, carved into deep ravines, and fringed with
+luxuriant plains. In St. Lucia alone, lying between St.
+Vincent and Dominica, the English flag still flew, and Rodney
+lay there in the harbour at Castries. On April 8, 1782, the
+signal came from the north end of the island that the French
+fleet had sailed. Martinique is in sight of St. Lucia, and the
+rock is still shown from which Rodney had watched day by
+day for signs that they were moving. They were out at last,
+and he instantly weighed and followed. The air was light,
+and De Grasse was under the high lands of Dominica before
+Rodney came up with him. Both fleets were becalmed, and
+the English were scattered and divided by a current which
+runs between the islands. A breeze at last blew off the land.
+The French were the first to feel it, and were able to attack at
+advantage the leading English division. Had De Grasse
+'come down as he ought,' Rodney thought that the consequences
+might have been serious. In careless imagination of
+superiority they let the chance go by. They kept at a
+distance, firing long shots, which as it was did considerable
+damage. The two following days the fleets man&oelig;uvred in
+sight of each other. On the night of the eleventh Rodney
+made signal for the whole fleet to go south under press of
+sail. The French thought he was flying. He tacked at two
+in the morning, and at daybreak found himself where he
+wished to be, with the, French fleet on his lee quarter. The
+French looking for nothing but again a distant cannonade,
+continued leisurely along under the north highlands of Dominica
+towards the channel which separates that island from
+Guadaloupe. In number of ships the fleets were equal; in
+size and complement of crew the French were immensely
+superior; and besides the ordinary ships' companies they had
+twenty thousand soldiers on board who were to be used in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
+conquest of Jamaica. Knowing well that a defeat at that
+moment would be to England irreparable ruin, they did not
+dream that Rodney would be allowed, even if he wished it, to
+risk a close and decisive engagement. The English admiral
+was aware also that his country's fate was in his hands. It
+was one of those supreme moments which great men dare to
+use and small men tremble at. He had the advantage of the
+wind, and could force a battle or decline it, as he pleased.
+With clear daylight the signal to engage was flying from the
+masthead of the 'Formidable,' Rodney's ship. At seven in
+the morning, April 12, 1782, the whole fleet bore down
+obliquely on the French line, cutting it directly in two.
+Rodney led in person. Having passed through and broken
+up their order he tacked again, still keeping the wind. The
+French, thrown into confusion, were unable to reform, and
+the battle resolved itself into a number of separate engagements
+in which the English had the choice of position.</p>
+
+<p>Rodney in passing through the enemy's lines the first time
+had exchanged broadsides with the 'Glorieux,' a seventy-four,
+at close range. He had shot away her masts and bowsprit,
+and left her a bare hull; her flag, however, still flying,
+being nailed to a splintered spar. So he left her unable
+to stir; and after he had gone about came himself yardarm
+to yardarm with the superb 'Ville de Paris,' the pride of
+France, the largest ship in the then world, where De Grasse
+commanded in person. All day long the cannon roared.
+Rodney had on board a favourite bantam cock, which stood
+perched upon the poop of the 'Formidable' through the
+whole action, its shrill voice heard crowing through the thunder
+of the broadsides. One by one the French ships struck
+their flags or fought on till they foundered and went down.
+The carnage on board them was terrible, crowded as they were
+with the troops for Jamaica. Fourteen thousand were reckoned
+to have been killed, besides the prisoners. The 'Ville de
+Paris' surrendered last, fighting desperately after hope was
+gone till her masts were so shattered that they could not bear
+a sail, and her decks above and below were littered over with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+mangled limbs. De Grasse gave up his sword to Rodney on
+the 'Formidable's' quarter-deck. The gallant 'Glorieux,'
+unable to fly, and seeing the battle lost, hauled down her flag,
+but not till the undisabled remnants of her crew were too few
+to throw the dead into the sea. Other ships took fire and blew
+up. Half the French fleet were either taken or sunk; the rest
+crawled away for the time, most of them to be picked up afterwards
+like crippled birds.</p>
+
+<p>So on that memorable day was the English Empire saved.
+Peace followed, but it was 'peace with honour.' The American
+colonies were lost; but England kept her West Indies; her
+flag still floated over Gibraltar; the hostile strength of Europe
+all combined had failed to twist Britannia's ocean sceptre
+from her: she sat down maimed and bleeding, but the wreath
+had not been torn from her brow, she was still sovereign of the
+seas.</p>
+
+<p>The bow of Ulysses was strung in those days. The order
+of recall arrived when the work was done. It was proudly
+obeyed; and even the great Burke admitted that no honour
+could be bestowed upon Rodney which he had not deserved at
+his country's hands. If the British Empire is still to have a
+prolonged career before it, the men who make empires are the
+men who can hold them together. Oratorical reformers can
+overthrow what deserves to be overthrown. Institutions, even
+the best of them, wear out, and must give place to others, and
+the fine political speakers are the instruments of their overthrow.
+But the fine speakers produce nothing of their own,
+and as constructive statesmen their paths are strewed with
+failures. The worthies of England are the men who cleared
+and tilled her fields, formed her laws, built her colleges and
+cathedrals, founded her colonies, fought her battles, covered
+the ocean with commerce, and spread our race over the planet
+to leave a mark upon it which time will not efface. These men
+are seen in their work, and are not heard of in Parliament.
+When the account is wound up, where by the side of them will
+stand our famous orators? What will any one of these have
+left behind him save the wreck of institutions which had done<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>
+their work and had ceased to serve a useful purpose? That
+was their business in this world, and they did it and do it; but
+it is no very glorious work, not a work over which it is possible
+to feel any 'fine enthusiasm.' To chop down a tree is easier
+than to make it grow. When the business of destruction is
+once completed, they and their fame and glory will disappear
+together. Our true great ones will again be visible, and thenceforward
+will be visible alone.</p>
+
+<p>Is there a single instance in our own or any other history of
+a great political speaker who has added anything to human
+knowledge or to human worth? Lord Chatham may stand as
+a lonely exception. But except Chatham who is there? Not
+one that I know of. Oratory is the spendthrift sister of the
+arts, which decks itself like a strumpet with the tags and ornaments
+which it steals from real superiority. The object of it
+is not truth, but anything which it can make appear truth;
+anything which it can persuade people to believe by calling in
+their passions to obscure their intelligence.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>First sight of Barbadoes&mdash;Origin of the name&mdash;P&egrave;re Labat&mdash;Bridgetown
+two hundred years ago&mdash;Slavery and Christianity&mdash;Economic crisis&mdash;Sugar
+bounties&mdash;Aspect of the streets&mdash;Government House and its occupants&mdash;Duties
+of a governor of Barbadoes.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>England was covered with snow when we left it on December
+30. At sunrise on January 12 we were anchored in the roadstead
+at Bridgetown, and the island of Barbadoes lay before us
+shining in the haze of a hot summer morning. It is about the
+size of the Isle of Wight, cultivated so far as eye could see
+with the completeness of a garden; no mountains in it, scarcely
+even high hills, but a surface pleasantly undulating, the prevailing
+colour a vivid green from the cane fields; houses in
+town and country white from the coral rock of which they are
+built, but the glare from them relieved by heavy clumps of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>
+trees. What the trees were I had yet to discover. You could
+see at a glance that the island was as thickly peopled as an ant-hill.
+Not an inch of soil seemed to be allowed to run to
+waste. Two hundred thousand is, I believe, the present number
+of Barbadians, of whom nine-tenths are blacks. They refuse
+to emigrate. They cling to their home with innocent
+vanity as though it was the finest country in the world, and
+multiply at a rate so rapid that no one likes to think about it.
+Labour at any rate is abundant and cheap. In Barbadoes the
+negro is willing enough to work, for he has no other means of
+living. Little land is here allowed him to grow his yams upon.
+Almost the whole of it is still held by the whites in large
+estates, cultivated by labourers on the old system, and, it is to
+be admitted, cultivated most admirably. If the West Indies
+are going to ruin, Barbadoes, at any rate, is being ruined with
+a smiling face. The roadstead was crowded with shipping&mdash;large
+barques, steamers, and brigs, schooners of all shapes and
+sorts. The training squadron had come into the bay for a day
+or two on their way to Trinidad, four fine ships, conspicuous
+by their white ensigns, a squareness of yards, and generally
+imposing presence. Boats were flying to and fro under sail or
+with oars, officials coming off in white calico dress, with awnings
+over the stern sheets and chattering crews of negroes.
+Notwithstanding these exotic symptoms, it was all thoroughly
+English; we were under the guns of our own men-of-war.
+The language of the Anglo-Barbadians was pure English, the
+voices without the smallest transatlantic intonation. On no
+one of our foreign possessions is the print of England's foot
+more strongly impressed than on Barbadoes. It has been
+ours for two centuries and three-quarters, and was organised
+from the first on English traditional lines, with its constitution,
+its parishes and parish churches and churchwardens, and schools
+and parsons, all on the old model; which the unprogressive
+inhabitants have been wise enough to leave undisturbed.</p>
+
+<p>Little is known of the island before we took possession
+of it&mdash;so little that the origin of the name is still uncertain.
+Barbadoes, if not a corruption of some older word, is Spanish<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+or Portuguese, and means 'bearded.' The local opinion is that
+the word refers to a banyan or fig tree which is common there,
+and which sends down from its branches long hairs or fibres
+supposed to resemble beards. I disbelieve in this derivation.
+Every Spaniard whom I have consulted confirms my own impression
+that 'barbados' standing alone could no more refer
+to trees than 'barbati' standing alone could refer to trees in
+Latin. The name is a century older than the English occupation,
+for I have seen it in a Spanish chart of 1525. The
+question is of some interest, since it perhaps implies that at
+the first discovery there was a race of bearded Caribs there.
+However this may be, Barbadoes, after we became masters of
+the island, enjoyed a period of unbroken prosperity for two
+hundred years. Before the conquest of Jamaica, it was the
+principal mart of our West Indian trade; and even after that
+conquest, when all Europe drew its new luxury of sugar from
+these islands, the wealth and splendour of the English residents
+at Bridgetown astonished and stirred the envy of every passing
+visitor. Absenteeism as yet was not. The owners lived on
+their estates, governed the island as magistrates unpaid for
+their services, and equally unpaid, took on themselves the
+defences of the island. P&egrave;re Labat, a French missionary, paid
+a visit to Barbadoes at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
+He was a clever, sarcastic kind of man, with fine literary skill,
+and describes what he saw with a jealous appreciation which
+he intended to act upon his own countrymen. The island,
+according to him, was running over with wealth, and was very
+imperfectly fortified. The jewellers' and silversmiths' shops
+in Bridgetown were brilliant as on the Paris boulevards. The
+port was full of ships, the wharves and warehouses crammed
+with merchandise from all parts of the globe. The streets
+were handsome, and thronged with men of business, who were
+piling up fortunes. To the Father these sumptuous gentlemen
+were all most civil. The governor, an English milor, asked
+him to dinner, and talked such excellent French that Labat
+forgave him his nationality. The governor, he said, resided
+in a fine palace. He had a well-furnished library, was dignified,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>
+courteous, intelligent, and lived in state like a prince. A
+review was held for the French priest's special entertainment,
+of the Bridgetown cavalry. Five hundred gentlemen turned
+out from this one district admirably mounted and armed.
+Altogether in the island he says that there were 3,000 horse
+and 2,000 foot, every one of them of course white and English.
+The officers struck him particularly. He met one who had
+been five years a prisoner in the Bastille, and had spent his
+time there in learning mathematics. The planters opened
+their houses to him. Dinners then as now were the received
+form of English hospitality. They lived well, Labat says.
+They had all the luxuries of the tropics, and they had imported
+the partridges which they were so fond of from England.
+They had the costliest and choicest wines, and knew how to
+enjoy them. They dined at two o'clock, and their dinner
+lasted four hours. Their mansions were superbly furnished,
+and gold and silver plate, he observed with an eye to business,
+was so abundant that the plunder of it would pay the cost of
+an expedition for the reduction of the island.</p>
+
+<p>There was another side to all this magnificence which also
+might be turned to account by an enterprising enemy. There
+were some thousands of wretched Irish, who had been transplanted
+thither after the last rebellion, and were bound under
+articles to labour. These might be counted on to rise if an
+invading force appeared; and there were 60,000 slaves, who
+would rebel also if they saw a hope of success. They were ill
+fed and hard driven. On the least symptom of insubordination
+they were killed without mercy: sometimes they were burnt
+alive, or were hung up in iron cages to die.<a name="FNanchor_1_3" id="FNanchor_1_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_3" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> In the French and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>Spanish islands care was taken of the souls of the poor creatures.
+They were taught their catechism, they were baptised, and attended
+mass regularly. The Anglican clergy, Labat said with
+professional malice, neither baptised them nor taught them
+anything, but regarded them as mere animals. To keep Christians
+in slavery they held would be wrong and indefensible,
+and they therefore met the difficulty by not making their slaves
+into Christians. That baptism made any essential difference,
+however, he does not insist. By the side of Christianity, in the
+Catholic islands, devil worship and witchcraft went on among
+the same persons. No instance had ever come to his knowledge
+of a converted black who returned to his country who
+did not throw away his Christianity just as he would throw
+away his clothes; and as to cruelty and immorality, he admits
+that the English at Barbadoes were no worse than his own
+people at Martinique.</p>
+
+<p>In the collapse of West Indian prosperity which followed
+on emancipation, Barbadoes escaped the misfortunes of the
+other islands. The black population being so dense, and the
+place itself being so small, the squatting system could not be
+tried; there was plenty of labour always, and the planters
+being relieved of the charge of their workmen when they were
+sick or worn out, had rather gained than lost by the change.
+Barbadoes, however, was not to escape for ever, and was now
+having its share of misfortunes. It is dangerous for any
+country to commit its fortunes to an exclusive occupation.
+Sugar was the most immediately lucrative of all the West
+Indian productions. Barbadoes is exceptionally well suited
+to sugar-growing. It has no mountains and no forests. The
+soil is clean and has been carefully attended to for two hundred
+and fifty years. It had been owned during the present century
+by gentlemen who for the most part lived in England on the
+profits of their properties, and left them to be managed by
+agents and attorneys. The method of management was
+expensive. Their own habits were expensive. Their incomes,
+to which they had lived up, had been cut short lately by a
+series of bad seasons. Money had been borrowed at high<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>
+interest year after year to keep the estates and their owners
+going. On the top of this came the beetroot competition
+backed up by a bounty, and the Barbadian sugar interest, I
+was told, had gone over a precipice. Even the unencumbered
+resident proprietors could barely keep their heads above water.
+The returns on three-quarters of the properties on the island
+no longer sufficed to pay the expenses of cultivation and the
+interest of the loans which had been raised upon them. There
+was impending a general bankruptcy which might break up
+entirely the present system and leave the negroes for a time
+without the wages which were the sole dependence.</p>
+
+<p>A very dark picture had thus been drawn to me of the prospects
+of the poor little island which had been once so brilliant.
+Nothing could be less like it than the bright sunny landscape
+which we saw from the deck of our vessel. The town, the
+shipping, the pretty villas, the woods, and the wide green sea
+of waving cane had no suggestion of ruin about them. If the
+ruin was coming, clearly enough it had not yet come. After
+breakfast we went on shore in a boat with a white awning over
+it, rowed by a crew of black boatmen, large, fleshy, shining on
+the skin with ample feeding and shining in the face with
+innocent happiness. They rowed well. They were amusing.
+There was a fixed tariff, and they were not extortionate. The
+temperature seemed to rise ten degrees when we landed.
+The roads were blinding white from the coral dust, the houses
+were white, the sun scorching. The streets were not the streets
+described by Labat; no splendid magazines or jewellers' shops
+like those in Paris or London; but there were lighters at the
+quays loading or unloading, carts dashing along with mule
+teams and making walking dangerous; signs in plenty of life
+and business; few white faces, but blacks and mulattoes
+swarming. The houses were substantial, though in want of
+paint. The public buildings, law courts, hall of assembly &amp;c.
+were solid and handsome, nowhere out of repair, though with
+something to be desired in point of smartness. The market
+square would have been well enough but for a statue of Lord
+Nelson which stands there, very like, but small and insignifi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>cant,
+and for some extraordinary reason they have painted it a
+bright pea-green.</p>
+
+<p>We crept along in the shade of trees and warehouses till we
+reached the principal street. Here my friends brought me to
+the Icehouse, a sort of club, with reading rooms and dining
+rooms, and sleeping accommodation for members from a
+distance who do not like colonial hotels. Before anything
+else could be thought of I was introduced to cocktail, with
+which I had to make closer acquaintance afterwards, cocktail
+being the established corrective of West Indian languor, without
+which life is impossible. It is a compound of rum, sugar,
+lime juice, Angostura bitters, and what else I know not,
+frisked into effervescence by a stick, highly agreeable to the
+taste and effective for its immediate purpose. Cocktail over,
+and walking in the heat being a thing not to be thought of, I
+sat for two hours in a balcony watching the people, who were
+thick as bees in swarming time. Nine-tenths of them were
+pure black; you rarely saw a white face, but still less would
+you see a discontented one, imperturbable good humour and
+self-satisfaction being written on the features of every one. The
+women struck me especially. They were smartly dressed in
+white calico, scrupulously clean, and tricked out with ribands
+and feathers; but their figures were so good, and they carried
+themselves so well and gracefully, that, although they might
+make themselves absurd, they could not look vulgar. Like the
+old Greek and Etruscan women, they are trained from childhood
+to carry heavy weights on their heads. They are thus
+perfectly upright, and plant their feet firmly and naturally on
+the ground. They might serve for sculptors' models, and are
+well aware of it. There were no signs of poverty. Old and
+young seemed well-fed. Some had brought in baskets of fruit,
+bananas, oranges, pine apples, and sticks of sugar cane; others
+had yams and sweet potatoes from their bits of garden in the
+country. The men were active enough driving carts, wheeling
+barrows, or selling flying fish, which are caught off the island
+in shoals and are cheaper than herrings in Yarmouth. They
+chattered like a flock of jackdaws, but there was no quarrel<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>ling;
+not a drunken man was to be seen, and all was merriment
+and good humour. My poor downtrodden black brothers and
+sisters, so far as I could judge from this first introduction,
+looked to me a very fortunate class of fellow-creatures.</p>
+
+<p>Government House, where we went to luncheon, is a large
+airy building shaded by heavy trees with a garden at the back
+of it. West Indian houses, I found afterwards, are all constructed
+on the same pattern, the object being to keep the
+sun out and let in the wind. Long verandahs or galleries run
+round them protected by green Venetian blinds which can be
+opened or closed at pleasure; the rooms within with polished
+floors, little or no carpet, and contrivances of all kinds to keep
+the air in continual circulation. In the subdued green light,
+human figures lose their solidity and look as if they were
+creatures of air also.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Charles Lees and his lady were all that was polite and
+hospitable. They invited me to make their house my home
+during my stay, and more charming host and hostess it would
+have been impossible to find or wish for. There was not the
+state which Labat described, but there was the perfection of
+courtesy, a courtesy which must have belonged to their
+natures, or it would have been overstrained long since by the
+demands made upon it. Those who have looked on at a
+skating ring will have observed an orange or some such object
+in the centre round which the evolutions are described, the
+ice artist sweeping out from it in long curves to the extreme
+circumference, returning on interior arcs till he gains the
+orange again, and then off once more on a fresh departure.
+Barbadoes to the West Indian steam navigation is like the
+skater's orange. All mails, all passengers from Europe, arrive
+at Barbadoes first. There the subsidiary steamers catch them
+up, bear them north or south to the Windward or Leeward
+Isles, and on their return bring them back to Carlisle Bay.
+Every vessel brings some person or persons to whom the
+Governor is called on to show hospitality. He must give
+dinners to the officials and gentry of the island, he must give
+balls and concerts for their ladies, he must entertain the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>
+officers of the garrison. When the West Indian squadron or
+the training squadron drop into the roadstead, admirals, commodores,
+captains must all be invited. Foreign ships of war
+go and come continually, Americans, French, Spaniards, or
+Portuguese. Presidents of South American republics, engineers
+from Darien, all sorts and conditions of men who go to
+Europe in the English mail vessels, take their departure from
+Carlisle Bay, and if they are neglected regard it as a national
+affront. Cataracts of champagne must flow if the British name
+is not to be discredited. The expense is unavoidable and is
+enormous, while the Governor's very moderate salary is found
+too large by economic politicians, and there is a cry for
+reduction of it.</p>
+
+<p>I was of course most grateful for Sir Charles's invitation to
+myself. From him, better perhaps than from anyone, I could
+learn how far the passionate complaints which I had heard
+about the state of the islands were to be listened to as accounts
+of actual fact. I found, however, that I must postpone both
+this particular pleasure and my stay in Barbadoes itself till a
+later opportunity. My purpose had been to remain there till
+I had given it all the time which I could spare, thence to go
+on to Jamaica, and from Jamaica to return at leisure round
+the Antilles. But it had been ascertained that in Jamaica
+there was small-pox. I suppose that there generally is small-pox
+there, or typhus fever, or other infectious disorder. But
+spasms of anxiety assail periodically the souls of local authorities.
+Vessels coming from Jamaica had been quarantined in
+all the islands, and I found that if I proceeded thither as I
+proposed, I should be refused permission to land afterwards
+in any one of the other colonies. In my perplexity my Trinidad
+friends invited me to accompany them at once to Port of
+Spain. Trinidad was the most thriving, or was at all events
+the least dissatisfied, of all the British possessions. I could
+have a glance at the Windward Islands on the way. I could
+afterwards return to Barbadoes, where Sir Charles assured me
+that I should still find a room waiting for me. The steamer
+to Trinidad sailed the same afternoon. I had to decide in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>
+haste, and I decided to go. Our luncheon over, we had time
+to look over the pretty gardens at Government House. There
+were great cabbage palms, cannon-ball trees, mahogany trees,
+almond trees, and many more which were wholly new acquaintances.
+There was a grotto made by climbing plants and creepers,
+with a fountain playing in the middle of it, where orchids
+hanging on wires threw out their clusters of flowers for the
+moths to fertilize, ferns waved their long fronds in the dripping
+showers, humming birds cooled their wings in the spray, and
+flashed in and out like rubies and emeralds. Gladly would I
+have lingered there, at least for a cigar, but it could not be; we
+had to call on the Commander of the Forces, Sir C. Pearson,
+the hero of Ekowe in the Zulu war. Him, too, I was to see
+again, and hear interesting stories from about our tragic enterprise
+in the Transvaal. For the moment my mind was filled
+sufficiently with new impressions. One reads books about
+places, but the images which they create are always unlike the
+real object. All that I had seen was absolutely new and unexpected.
+I was glad of an opportunity to readjust the information
+which I had brought with me. We joined our new vessel
+before sunset, and we steamed away into the twilight.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_3" id="Footnote_1_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_3"><span class="label">[4]</span></a>
+Labat seems to say that they were hung up alive in these cages, and
+left to die there. He says elsewhere, and it may be hoped that the explanation
+is the truer one, that the recently imported negroes often destroyed
+themselves, in the belief that when dead they would return to their own
+country. In the French islands as well as the English, the bodies of suicides
+were exposed in these cages, from which they could not be stolen, to convince
+the poor people of their mistake by their own eyes. He says that the contrivance
+was successful, and that after this the slaves did not destroy themselves
+any more.</p></div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>West Indian politeness&mdash;Negro morals and felicity&mdash;Island of St. Vincent&mdash;
+Grenada&mdash;The harbour&mdash;Disappearance of the whites&mdash;An island of black
+freeholders&mdash;Tobago&mdash;Dramatic art&mdash;A promising incident.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>West Indian civilisation is old-fashioned, and has none of the
+pushing manners which belong to younger and perhaps more
+thriving communities. The West Indians themselves, though
+they may be deficient in energy, are uniformly ladies and
+gentlemen, and all their arrangements take their complexion
+from the general tone of society. There is a refinement
+visible at once in the subsidiary vessels of the mail service
+which ply among the islands. They are almost as large as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>
+those which cross the Atlantic, and never on any line in the
+world have I met with officers so courteous and cultivated.
+The cabins were spacious and as cool as a temperature of 80&deg;,
+gradually rising as we went south, would permit. Punkahs
+waved over us at dinner. In our berths a single sheet was all
+that was provided for us, and this was one more than we
+needed. A sea was running when we cleared out from under
+the land. Among the cabin passengers was a coloured family
+in good circumstances moving about with nurses and children.
+The little things, who had never been at sea before, sat on
+the floor, staring out of their large helpless black eyes, not
+knowing what was the matter with them. Forward there were
+perhaps two or three hundred coloured people going from
+one island to another, singing, dancing, and chattering all
+night long, as radiant and happy as carelessness and content
+could make them. Sick or not sick made no difference.
+Nothing could disturb the imperturbable good humour and
+good spirits.</p>
+
+<p>It was too hot to sleep; we sat several of us smoking on
+deck, and I learnt the first authentic particulars of the present
+manner of life of these much misunderstood people. Evidently
+they belonged to a race far inferior to the Zulus and
+Caffres, whom I had known in South Africa. They were
+more coarsely formed in limb and feature. They would have
+been slaves in their own country if they had not been brought
+to ours, and at the worst had lost nothing by the change.
+They were good-natured, innocent, harmless, lazy perhaps, but
+not more lazy than is perfectly natural when even Europeans
+must be roused to activity by cocktail.</p>
+
+<p>In the Antilles generally, Barbadoes being the only exception,
+negro families have each their cabin, their garden
+ground, their grazing for a cow. They live surrounded by
+most of the fruits which grew in Adam's paradise&mdash;oranges
+and plantains, bread-fruit, and cocoa-nuts, though not apples.
+Their yams and cassava grow without effort, for the soil is
+easily worked and inexhaustibly fertile. The curse is taken
+off from nature, and like Adam again they are under the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>
+covenant of innocence. Morals in the technical sense they
+have none, but they cannot be said to sin, because they have
+no knowledge of a law, and therefore they can commit no
+breach of the law. They are naked and not ashamed. They
+are <i>married</i> as they call it, but not <i>parsoned</i>. The woman
+prefers a looser tie that she may be able to leave a man if he
+treats her unkindly. Yet they are not licentious. I never
+saw an immodest look in one their faces, and never heard of
+any venal profligacy. The system is strange, but it answers.
+A missionary told me that a connection rarely turns out well
+which begins with a legal marriage. The children scramble
+up anyhow, and shift for themselves like chickens as soon as
+they are able to peck. Many die in this way by eating
+unwholesome food, but also many live, and those who do live
+grow up exactly like their parents. It is a very peculiar state
+of things, not to be understood, as priest and missionary
+agree, without long acquaintance. There is immorality, but an
+immorality which is not demoralising. There is sin, but it is
+the sin of animals, without shame, because there is no sense of
+doing wrong. They eat the forbidden fruit, but it brings with it
+no knowledge of the difference between good and evil. They
+steal, but as a tradition of the time when they were themselves
+chattels, and the laws of property did not apply to them.
+They are honest about money, more honest perhaps than a
+good many whites. But food or articles of use they take
+freely, as they were allowed to do when slaves, in pure
+innocence of heart. In fact these poor children of darkness
+have escaped the consequences of the Fall, and must come of
+another stock after all.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile they are perfectly happy. In no part of the
+globe is there any peasantry whose every want is so completely
+satisfied as her Majesty's black subjects in these West Indian
+islands. They have no aspirations to make them restless.
+They have no guilt upon their consciences. They have food
+for the picking up. Clothes they need not, and lodging in
+such a climate need not be elaborate. They have perfect
+liberty, and are safe from dangers, to which if left to them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>selves
+they would be exposed, for the English rule prevents
+the strong from oppressing the weak. In their own country
+they would have remained slaves to more warlike races. In
+the West Indies their fathers underwent a bondage of a
+century or two, lighter at its worst than the easiest form of it
+in Africa; their descendants in return have nothing now to do
+save to laugh and sing and enjoy existence. Their quarrels,
+if they have any, begin and end in words. If happiness is the
+be all and end all of life, and those who have most of it have
+most completely attained the object of their being, the
+'nigger' who now basks among the ruins of the West
+Indian plantations is the supremest specimen of present
+humanity.</p>
+
+<p>We retired to our berths at last. At waking we were at
+anchor off St. Vincent, an island of volcanic mountains robed
+in forest from shore to crest. Till late in the last century it
+was the headquarters of the Caribs, who kept up a savage
+independence there, recruited by runaway slaves from Barbadoes
+or elsewhere. Brandy and Sir Ralph Abercrombie
+reduced them to obedience in 1796, and St. Vincent throve
+tolerably down to the days of free trade. Even now when I
+saw it, Kingston, the principal town, looked pretty and well to
+do, reminding me, strange to say, of towns in Norway, the
+houses stretching along the shore painted in the same tints of
+blue or yellow or pink, with the same red-tiled roofs, the trees
+coming down the hill sides to the water's edge, villas of
+modest pretensions shining through the foliage, with the
+patches of cane fields, the equivalent in the landscape of the
+brilliant Norwegian grass. The prosperity has for the last
+forty years waned and waned. There are now two thousand
+white people there, and forty thousand coloured people, and
+proportions alter annually to our disadvantage. The usual
+remedies have been tried. The constitution has been altered
+a dozen times. Just now I believe the Crown is trying to do
+without one, having found the results of the elective principle
+not encouraging, but we shall perhaps revert to it before long;
+any way, the tables show that each year the trade of the island<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>
+decreases, and will continue to decrease while the expenditure
+increases and will increase.</p>
+
+<p>I did not land, for the time was short, and as a beautiful
+picture the island was best seen from the deck. The characteristics
+of the people are the same in all the Antilles, and
+could be studied elsewhere. The bustle and confusion in the
+ship, the crowd of boats round the ladder, the clamour of
+negro men's tongues, and the blaze of colours from the negro
+women's dresses, made up together a scene sufficiently entertaining
+for the hour which we remained. In the middle of it
+the Governor, Mr. S&mdash;&mdash;, came on board with another official.
+They were going on in the steamer to Tobago, which formed
+part of his dominions.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving St. Vincent, we were all the forenoon passing the
+Grenadines, a string of small islands fitting into their proper
+place in the Antilles semicircle, but as if Nature had forgotten
+to put them together or else had broken some large island to
+pieces and scattered them along the line. Some were large
+enough to have once carried sugar plantations, and are now
+made over wholly to the blacks; others were fishing stations,
+droves of whales during certain months frequenting these
+waters; others were mere rocks, amidst which the white-sailed
+American coasting schooners were beating up against the
+north-east trade. There was a stiff breeze, and the sea was
+white with short curling waves, but we were running before it
+and the wind kept the deck fresh. At Grenada, the next
+island, we were to go on shore.</p>
+
+<p>Grenada was, like St. Vincent, the home for centuries of
+man-eating Caribs, French for a century and a half, and
+finally, after many desperate struggles for it, was ceded to
+England at the peace of Versailles. It is larger than St.
+Vincent, though in its main features it has the same character.
+There are lakes in the hills, and a volcanic crater not wholly
+quiescent; but the especial value of Grenada, which made us
+fight so hardly to win it, is the deep and landlocked harbour,
+the finest in all the Antilles.</p>
+
+<p>P&egrave;re Labat, to whose countrymen it belonged at the time<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>
+of his own visit there, says that 'if Barbadoes had such a
+harbour as Grenada it would be an island without a rival in
+the world. If Grenada belonged to the English, who knew
+how to turn to profit natural advantages, it would be a rich and
+powerful colony. In itself it was all that man could desire.
+To live there was to live in paradise.' Labat found the island
+occupied by countrymen of his own, '<i>paisans aisez</i>', he calls
+them, growing their tobacco, their indigo and scarlet rocou,
+their pigs and their poultry, and contented to be without
+sugar, without slaves, and without trade. The change of
+hands from which he expected so much had actually come
+about. Grenada did belong to the English, and had belonged
+to us ever since Rodney's peace. I was anxious to see how
+far Labat's prophecy had been fulfilled.</p>
+
+<p>St. George's, the 'capital,' stands on the neck of a peninsula
+a mile in length, which forms one side of the harbour. Of the
+houses, some look out to sea, some inwards upon the <i>carenage</i>,
+as the harbour is called. At the point there was a fort, apparently
+of some strength, on which the British flag was flying.
+We signalled that we had the Governor on board, and the fort
+replied with a puff of smoke. Sound there was none or next
+to none, but we presumed that it had come from a gun of
+some kind. We anchored outside. Mr. S&mdash;&mdash; landed in an
+official boat with two flags, a missionary in another, which had
+only one. The crews of a dozen other boats then clambered
+up the gangway to dispute possession of the rest of us, shouting,
+swearing, lying, tearing us this way and that way as if we
+were carcases and they wild beasts wanting to dine upon us.
+We engaged a boat for ourselves as we supposed; we had no
+sooner entered it than the scandalous boatman proceeded to
+take in as many more passengers as it would hold. Remonstrance
+being vain, we settled the matter by stepping into the
+boat next adjoining, and amidst howls and execrations we
+were borne triumphantly off and were pulled in to the land.</p>
+
+<p>Labat had not exaggerated the beauty of the landlocked
+basin into which we entered on rounding the point. On three
+sides wooded hills rose high till they passed into mountains;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+on the fourth was the castle with its slopes and batteries, the
+church and town beyond it, and everywhere luxuriant tropical
+forest trees overhanging the violet-coloured water. I could
+well understand the Frenchman's delight when he saw it, and
+also the satisfaction with which he would now acknowledge
+that he had been a shortsighted prophet. The English had
+obtained Grenada, and this is what they had made of it. The
+forts which had been erected by his countrymen had been
+deserted and dismantled; the castle on which we had seen
+our flag flying was a ruin; the walls were crumbling and in
+many places had fallen down. One solitary gun was left, but
+that was honeycombed and could be fired only with half a
+charge to salute with. It was true that the forts had ceased
+to be of use, but that was because there was nothing left to
+defend. The harbour is, as I said, the best in the West Indies.
+There was not a vessel in it, nor so much as a boat-yard that I
+could see where a spar could be replaced or a broken rivet
+mended. Once there had been a line of wharves, but the piles
+had been eaten by worms and the platforms had fallen through.
+Round us when we landed were unroofed warehouses, weed-choked
+courtyards, doors gone, and window frames fallen in
+or out. Such a scene of desolation and desertion I never saw
+in my life save once, a few weeks later at Jamaica. An English
+lady with her children had come to the landing place to meet
+my friends. They, too, were more like wandering ghosts than
+human beings with warm blood in them. All their thoughts
+were on going home&mdash;home out of so miserable an exile.<a name="FNanchor_1_4" id="FNanchor_1_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_4" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p>
+<p>Nature and the dark race had been simply allowed by us to
+resume possession of the island. Here, where the cannon had
+roared, and ships and armies had fought, and the enterprising
+English had entered into occupancy, under whom, as we are
+proud to fancy, the waste places of the earth grow green, and
+industry and civilisation follow as an inevitable fruit, all was
+now silence. And this was an English Crown colony, as rich
+in resources as any area of soil of equal size in the world.
+England had demanded and seized the responsibility of
+managing it&mdash;this was the result.</p>
+
+<p>A gentleman who for some purpose was a passing resident
+in the island, had asked us to dine with him. His house was
+three or four miles inland. A good road remained as a legacy
+from other times, and a pair of horses and a phaeton carried
+us swiftly to his door. The town of St. George's had once
+been populous, and even now there seemed no want of people,
+if mere numbers sufficed. We passed for half a mile through
+a straggling street, where the houses were evidently occupied
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>though unconscious for many a year of paint or repair. They
+were squalid and dilapidated, but the luxuriant bananas and
+orange trees in the gardens relieved the ugliness of their appearance.
+The road when we left the town was overshadowed
+with gigantic mangoes planted long ago, with almond trees and
+cedar trees, no relations of our almonds or our cedars, but the
+most splendid ornaments of the West Indian forest. The
+valley up which we drove was beautiful, and the house, when
+we reached it, showed taste and culture. Mr. &mdash;&mdash; had rare
+trees, rare flowers, and was taking advantage of his temporary
+residence in the tropics to make experiments in horticulture.
+He had been brought there, I believe, by some necessities
+of business. He told us that Grenada was now the ideal
+country of modern social reformers. It had become an island
+of pure peasant proprietors. The settlers, who had once been
+a thriving and wealthy community, had almost melted away.
+Some thirty English estates remained which could still be
+cultivated, and were being cultivated with remarkable success.
+But the rest had sold their estates for anything which they
+could get. The free blacks had bought them, and about
+8,000 negro families, say 40,000 black souls in all, now shared
+three-fourths of the soil between them. Each family lived
+independently, growing coffee and cocoa and oranges, and all
+were doing very well. The possession of property had brought
+a sense of its rights with it. They were as litigious as Irish
+peasants; everyone was at law with his neighbour, and the
+island was a gold mine to the Attorney-General; otherwise
+they were quiet harmless fellows, and if the politicians would
+only let them alone, they would be perfectly contented, and
+might eventually, if wisely managed, come to some good. To
+set up a constitution in such a place was a ridiculous mockery,
+and would only be another name for swindling and jobbery.
+Black the island was, and black it would remain. The conditions
+were never likely to arise which would bring back a
+European population; but a governor who was a sensible
+man, who would reside and use his natural influence, could
+manage it with perfect ease. The island belonged to England;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>
+we were responsible for what we made of it, and for the blacks'
+own sakes we ought not to try experiments upon them. They
+knew their own deficiencies and would infinitely prefer a wise
+English ruler to any constitution which could be offered them.
+If left entirely to themselves, they would in a generation or
+two relapse into savages; there were but two alternatives
+before not Grenada only, but all the English West Indies&mdash;either
+an English administration pure and simple, like the
+East Indian, or a falling eventually into a state like that
+of Hayti, where they eat the babies, and no white man can
+own a yard of land.</p>
+
+<p>It was dark night when we drove back to the port. The
+houses along the road, which had looked so miserable on the
+outside, were now lighted with paraffin lamps. I could see
+into them, and was astonished to observe signs of comfort
+and even signs of taste&mdash;arm-chairs, sofas, sideboards with cut
+glass upon them, engravings and coloured prints upon the
+walls. The old state of things is gone, but a new state of
+things is rising which may have a worth of its own. The plant
+of civilisation as yet has taken but feeble root, and is only
+beginning to grow. It may thrive yet if those who have
+troubled all the earth will consent for another century to take
+their industry elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>The ship's galley was waiting at the wharf when we reached
+it. The captain also had been dining with a friend on shore,
+and we had to wait for him. The off-shore night breeze had
+not yet risen. The harbour was smooth as a looking glass,
+and the stars shone double in the sky and on the water. The
+silence was only broken by the whistle of the lizards or the cry
+of some far-off marsh frog. The air was warmer than we ever
+feel it in the depth of an English summer, yet pure and
+delicious and charged with the perfume of a thousand flowers.
+One felt it strange that with so beautiful a possession lying at
+our doors, we should have allowed it to slide out of our
+hands. I could say for myself, like P&egrave;re Labat, the island
+was all that man could desire. 'En un mot, la vie y est
+d&eacute;licieuse.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The anchor was got up immediately that we were on board.
+In the morning we were to find ourselves at Port of Spain.
+Mr. S&mdash;&mdash;, the Windward Island governor, who had joined us
+at St. Vincent, was, as I said, going to Tobago. De Foe took
+the human part of his Robinson Crusoe from the story of
+Juan Fernandez. The locality is supposed to have been
+Tobago, and Trinidad the island from which the cannibal
+savages came. We are continually shuffling the cards, in a
+hope that a better game may be played with them. Tobago
+is now-annexed to Trinidad. Last year it was a part of
+Mr. S&mdash;&mdash;'s dominions which he periodically visited. I fell
+in with him again on his return, and he told us an incident
+which befell him there, illustrating the unexpected shapes in
+which the schoolmaster is appearing among the blacks. An
+intimation was brought to him on his arrival that, as the
+Athenian journeymen had played Pyramus and Thisbe at the
+nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta, so a party of villagers from
+the interior of Tobago would like to act before his Excellency.
+Of course he consented. They came, and went through their
+performance. To Mr. S&mdash;&mdash;'s, and probably to the reader's
+astonishment, the play which they had selected was the 'Merchant
+of Venice.' Of the rest of it he perhaps thought, like
+the queen of the Amazons, that it was 'sorry stuff;' but
+Shylock's representative, he said, showed real appreciation.
+With freedom and a peasant proprietary, the money lender is
+a necessary phenomenon, and the actor's imagination may
+have been assisted by personal recollections.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_4" id="Footnote_1_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_4"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> I have been told that this picture is overdrawn, that Grenada is the
+most prosperous of the Antilles, that its exports are increasing, that English
+owners are making large profits again, that the blacks are thriving beyond
+example, that there are twenty guns in the Fort, that the wharves and Quay
+are in perfect condition, that there are no roofless warehouses, that in my
+description of St. George's I must have been asleep or dreaming. I can
+only repeat and insist upon what I myself saw. I know very well that in
+parts of the island a few energetic English gentlemen are cultivating their
+land with remarkable success. Any enterprising Englishman with capital
+and intelligence might do the same. I know also that in no part of the
+West Indies are the blacks happier or better off. But notwithstanding the
+English interest in the Island has sunk to relatively nothing. Once Englishmen
+owned the whole of it. Now there are only thirty English estates.
+There are five thousand peasant freeholds, owned almost entirely by
+coloured men, and the effect of the change is written upon the features of
+the harbour. Not a vessel of any kind was to be seen in it. The great
+wooden jetty where cargoes used to be landed, or taken on board, was a
+wreck, the piles eaten through, the platform broken. On the Quay there
+was no sign of life, or of business, the houses along the side mean and
+insignificant, while several large and once important buildings, warehouses,
+custom houses, dwelling houses, or whatever they had been, were lying
+in ruins, tropical trees growing in the courtyards, and tropical creepers
+climbing over the masonry showing how long the decay had been going
+on. These buildings had once belonged to English merchants, and were
+evidence of English energy and enterprise, which once had been and
+now had ceased to be. As to the guns in the fort, I cannot say how much
+old iron may be left there. But I was informed that only one gun could
+be fired and that with but half a charge.
+</p><p>
+This is of little consequence or none, but unless the English population
+can be reinforced, Grenada in another generation will cease to be English
+at all, while the prosperity, the progress, even the continued civilisation
+of the blacks depends on the maintenance there of English influence and
+authority.</p></div></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Charles Kingsley at Trinidad&mdash;'Lay of the Last Buccaneer'&mdash;A French
+<i>forban</i>&mdash;Adventure at Aves&mdash;Mass on board a pirate ship&mdash;Port of
+Spain&mdash;A house in the tropics&mdash;A political meeting&mdash;Government House&mdash;The
+Botanical Gardens'&mdash;Kingsley's rooms&mdash;Sugar estates and coolies.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>I might spare myself a description of Trinidad, for the
+natural features of the place, its forests and gardens, its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+exquisite flora, the loveliness of its birds and insects, have
+been described already, with a grace of touch and a fullness of
+knowledge which I could not rival if I tried, by my dear
+friend Charles Kingsley. He was a naturalist by instinct, and
+the West Indies and all belonging to them had been the
+passion of his life. He had followed the logs and journals of
+the Elizabethan adventurers till he had made their genius part
+of himself. In Amyas Leigh, the hero of 'Westward Ho,'
+he produced a figure more completely representative of that
+extraordinary set of men than any other novelist, except
+Sir Walter, has ever done for an age remote from his
+own. He followed them down into their latest developments,
+and sang their swan song in his 'Lay of the Last Buccaneer.'
+So characteristic is this poem of the transformation of the
+West Indies of romance and adventure into the West Indies
+of sugar and legitimate trade, that I steal it to ornament my
+own prosaic pages.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">THE LAY OF THE LAST BUCCANEER.</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left:14em">
+Oh! England is a pleasant place for them that's rich and high,<br />
+But England is a cruel place for such poor folks as I;<br />
+And such a port for mariners I'll never see again<br />
+As the pleasant Isle of Aves beside the Spanish main.<br />
+<br />
+There were forty craft in Aves that were both swift and stout,<br />
+All furnished well with small arms and cannon all about;<br />
+And a thousand men in Aves made laws so fair and free<br />
+To choose their valiant captains and obey them loyally.<br />
+<br />
+Then we sailed against the Spaniard with his hoards of plate and gold,<br />
+Which he wrung with cruel tortures from Indian folks of old;<br />
+Likewise the merchant captains, with hearts as hard as stone,<br />
+Who flog men and keelhaul them and starve them to the bone.<br />
+<br />
+Oh! palms grew high in Aves, and fruits that shone like gold,<br />
+And the colibris and parrots they were gorgeous to behold,<br />
+And the negro maids to Aves from bondage fast did flee<br />
+To welcome gallant sailors a sweeping in from sea.<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span><br />
+Oh! sweet it was in Aves to hear the landward breeze,<br />
+A swing with good tobacco in a net between the trees,<br />
+With a negro lass to fan you while you listened to the roar<br />
+Of the breakers on the reef outside which never touched the shore.<br />
+<br />
+But Scripture saith an ending to all fine things must be,<br />
+So the king's ships sailed on Aves and quite put down were we.<br />
+All day we fought like bull dogs, but they burnt the booms at night,<br />
+And I fled in a piragua sore wounded from the fight.<br />
+<br />
+Nine days I floated starving, and a negro lass beside,<br />
+Till for all I tried to cheer her the poor young thing she died.<br />
+But as I lay a gasping a Bristol sail came by,<br />
+And brought me home to England here to beg until I die.<br />
+<br />
+And now I'm old and going: I'm sure I can't tell where.<br />
+One comfort is, this world's so hard I can't be worse off there.<br />
+If I might but be a sea dove, I'd fly across the main<br />
+To the pleasant Isle of Aves to look at it once again.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>By the side of this imaginative picture of a poor English
+sea rover, let me place another, an authentic one, of a French
+<i>forban</i> or pirate in the same seas. Kingsley's Aves, or Isle of
+Birds, is down on the American coast. There is another
+island of the same name, which was occasionally frequented
+by the same gentry, about a hundred miles south of Dominica.
+P&egrave;re Labat going once from Martinique to Guadaloupe had
+taken a berth with Captain Daniel, one of the most noted of
+the French corsairs of the day, for better security. People
+were not scrupulous in those times, and Labat and Daniel had
+been long good friends. They were caught in a gale off
+Dominica, blown away, and carried to Aves, where they found
+an English merchant ship lying a wreck. Two English ladies
+from Barbadoes and a dozen other people had escaped on
+shore. They had sent for help, and a large vessel came for
+them the day after Daniel's arrival. Of course he made a
+prize of it. Labat said prayers on board for him before the
+engagement, and the vessel surrendered after the first shot.
+The good humour of the party was not disturbed by this
+incident. The pirates, their prisoners, and the ladies stayed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>
+together for a fortnight at Aves, catching turtles and boucanning
+them, picnicking, and enjoying themselves. Daniel
+treated the ladies with the utmost politeness, carried them
+afterwards to St. Thomas's, dismissed them unransomed, sold
+his prizes, and wound up the whole affair to the satisfaction of
+every one. Labat relates all this with wonderful humour, and
+tells, among other things, the following story of Daniel. On
+some expedition, when he was not so fortunate as to have a
+priest on board, he was in want of provisions. Being an outlaw
+he could not furnish himself in an open port. One night
+he put into the harbour of a small island, called Los Santos,
+not far from Dominica, where only a few families resided. He
+sent a boat on shore in the darkness, took the priest and two
+or three of the chief inhabitants out of their beds, and carried
+them on board, where he held them as hostages, and then
+under pretence of compulsion requisitioned the island to send
+him what he wanted. The priest and his companions were
+treated meanwhile as guests of distinction. No violence was
+necessary, for all parties understood one another. While the
+stores were being collected, Daniel suggested that there was a
+good opportunity for his crew to hear mass. The priest of
+Los Santos agreed to say it for them. The sacred vessels &amp;c.
+were sent for from the church on shore. An awning was
+rigged over the forecastle, and an altar set up under it. The
+men chanted the prayers. The cannon answered the purpose
+of music. Broadsides were fired at the first sentence, at the
+<i>Exaudiat</i>, at the <i>Elevation</i>, at the <i>Benediction</i>, and a fifth at
+the prayer for the king. The service was wound up by a <i>Vive
+le Roi</i>! A single small accident only had disturbed the
+ceremony. One of the pirates, at the <i>Elevation</i>, being of
+a profane mind, made an indecent gesture. Daniel rebuked
+him, and, as the offence was repeated, drew a pistol and blew
+the man's brains out, saying he would do the same to any one
+who was disrespectful to the Holy Sacrament. The priest
+being a little startled, Daniel begged him not to be alarmed;
+he was only chastising a rascal to teach him his duty. At any
+rate, as Labat observed, he had effectually prevented the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>
+rascal from doing anything of the same kind again. Mass
+being over, the body was thrown overboard, and priest and
+congregation went their several ways.</p>
+
+<p>Kingsley's 'At Last' gave Trinidad an additional interest to
+me, but even he had not prepared me completely for the place
+which I was to see. It is only when one has seen any object
+with one's own eyes, that the accounts given by others become
+recognisable and instructive.</p>
+
+<p>Trinidad is the largest, after Jamaica, of the British West
+Indian Islands, and the hottest absolutely after none of them.
+It is square-shaped, and, I suppose, was once a part of South
+America. The Orinoco river and the ocean currents between
+them have cut a channel between it and the mainland, which
+has expanded into a vast shallow lake known as the Gulf of
+Paria. The two entrances by which the gulf is approached are
+narrow and are called <i>bocas</i> or mouths&mdash;one the Dragon's
+Mouth, the other the Serpent's. When the Orinoco is in flood,
+the water is brackish, and the brilliant violet blue of the
+Caribbean Sea is changed to a dirty yellow; but the harbour
+which is so formed would hold all the commercial navies of
+the world, and seems formed by nature to be the dep&ocirc;t one
+day of an enormous trade.</p>
+
+<p>Trinidad has had its period of romance. Columbus was
+the first discoverer of it. Raleigh was there afterwards on his
+expedition in search of his gold mine, and tarred his vessels
+with pitch out of the famous lake. The island was alternately
+Spanish and French till Picton took it in 1797, since which
+time it has remained English. The Carib part of the population
+has long vanished. The rest of it is a medley of English,
+French, Spaniards, negroes, and coolies. The English, chiefly
+migratory, go there to make money and go home with it. The
+old colonial families have few representatives left, but the
+island prospers, trade increases, coolies increase, cocoa and
+coffee plantations and indigo plantations increase. Port of
+Spain, the capital, grows annually; and even sugar holds its
+own in spite of low prices, for there is money at the back of
+it, and a set of people who, being speculative and commercial,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+are better on a level with the times than the old-fashioned
+planter aristocracy of the other islands. The soil is of extreme
+fertility, about a fourth of it under cultivation, the rest natural
+forest and unappropriated Crown land.</p>
+
+<p>We passed the 'Dragon's Jaws' before daylight. The sun
+had just risen when we anchored off Port of Spain. We saw
+before us the usual long line of green hills with mountains
+behind them; between the hills and the sea was a low, broad,
+alluvial plain, deposited by an arm of the Orinoco and by the
+other rivers which run into the gulf. The cocoa-nut palms
+thrive best on the water's edge. They stretched for miles on
+either side of us as a fringe to the shore. Where the water
+was shoal, there were vast swamps of mangrove, the lower
+branches covered with oysters.</p>
+
+<p>However depressed sugar might be, business could not be
+stagnant. Ships of all nations lay round us taking in or
+discharging cargo. I myself formed for the time being part
+of the cargo of my friend and host Mr. G&mdash;&mdash;, who had
+brought me to Trinidad, the accomplished son of a brilliant
+mother, himself a distinguished lawyer and member of the
+executive council of the island, a charming companion, an invaluable
+public servant, but with the temperament of a man of
+genius, half humorous, half melancholy, which does not find
+itself entirely at home in West Indian surroundings.</p>
+
+<p>On landing we found ourselves in a large foreign-looking
+town, 'Port of Spain' having been built by French and
+Spaniards according to their national tendencies, and especially
+with a view to the temperature, which is that of a forcing house
+and rarely falls below 80&deg;. The streets are broad and are
+planted with trees for shade, each house where room permits
+having a garden of its own, with palms and mangoes and
+coffee plants and creepers. Of sanitary arrangements there
+seemed to be none. There is abundance of rain, and the
+gutters which run down by the footway are flushed almost
+every day. But they are all open. Dirt of every kind lies
+about freely, to be washed into them or left to putrefy as fate
+shall direct. The smell would not be pleasant without the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+help of that natural scavenger the Johnny crow, a black
+vulture who roosts on the trees and feeds in the middle of the
+streets. We passed a dozen of these unclean but useful birds
+in a fashionable thoroughfare gobbling up chicken entrails and
+refusing to be disturbed. When gorged they perch in rows
+upon the roofs. On the ground they are the nastiest to look
+at of all winged creatures; yet on windy days they presume to
+soar like their kindred, and when far up might be taken for
+eagles.</p>
+
+<p>The town has between thirty and forty thousand people
+living in it, and the rain and Johnny crows between them keep
+off pestilence. Outside is a large savannah or park, where the
+villas are of the successful men of business. One of these
+belonged to my host, a cool airy habitation with open doors
+and windows, overhanging portico, and rooms into which all the
+winds might enter, but not the sun. A garden in front was
+shut off from the savannah by a fence of bananas. At the
+gate stood as sentinel a cabbage palm a hundred feet high; on
+the lawn mangoes, oranges, papaws, and bread-fruit trees,
+strange to look at, but luxuriantly shady. Before the door was
+a tree of good dimensions, whose name I have forgotten, the
+stem and branches of which were hung with orchids which
+G&mdash;&mdash; had collected in the woods. The borders were blazing
+with varieties of the single hibiscus, crimson, pink, and fawn
+colour, the largest that I had ever seen. The average diameter
+of each single flower was from seven to eight inches. Wind
+streamed freely through the long sitting room, loaded with the
+perfume of orange trees; on table and in bookcase the hand
+and mind visible of a gifted and cultivated man. The particular
+room assigned to myself would have been equally delightful
+but that my possession of it was disputed even in daylight
+by mosquitoes, who for bloodthirsty ferocity had a bad pre-eminence
+over the worst that I had ever met with elsewhere.
+I killed one who was at work upon me, and examined him
+through a glass. Bewick, with the inspiration of genius, had
+drawn his exact likeness as the devil&mdash;a long black stroke for
+a body, nick for neck, horns on the head, and a beak for a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>
+mouth, spindle arms, and longer spindle legs, two pointed
+wings, and a tail. Line for line there the figure was before me
+which in the unforgetable tailpiece is driving the thief under
+the gallows, and I had a melancholy satisfaction in identifying
+him. I had been warned to be on the look-out for scorpions,
+centipedes, jiggers, and land crabs, who would bite me if I
+walked slipperless over the floor in the dark. Of these I met
+with none, either there or anywhere, but the mosquito of
+Trinidad is enough by himself. For malice, mockery, and
+venom of tooth and trumpet, he is without a match in the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>From mosquitoes, however, one could seek safety in tobacco
+smoke, or hide behind the lace curtains with which every bed
+is provided. Otherwise I found every provision to make life
+pass deliciously. To walk is difficult in a damp steamy
+temperature hotter during daylight than the hottest forcing
+house in Kew. I was warned not to exert myself and to take
+cocktail freely. In the evening I might venture out with the
+bats and take a drive if I wished in the twilight. Languidly
+charming as it all was, I could not help asking myself of what
+use such a possession could be either to England or the
+English nation. We could not colonise it, could not cultivate
+it, could not draw a revenue from it. If it prospered commercially
+the prosperity would be of French and Spaniards,
+mulattoes and blacks, but scarcely, if at all, of my own
+countrymen. For here too, as elsewhere, they were growing
+fewer daily, and those who remained were looking forward to
+the day when they could be released. If it were not for the
+honour of the thing, as the Irishman said after being carried
+in a sedan chair which had no bottom, we might have spared
+ourselves so unnecessary a conquest.</p>
+
+<p>Beautiful, however, it was beyond dispute. Before sunset a
+carriage took us round the savannah. Tropical human beings,
+like tropical birds, are fond of fine colours, especially black
+human beings, and the park was as brilliant as Kensington
+Gardens on a Sunday. At nightfall the scene became yet more
+wonderful; air, grass, and trees being alight with fireflies, each<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+as brilliant as an English glowworm. The palm tree at our
+own gate stood like a ghostly sentinel clear against the starry
+sky, a single long dead frond hanging from below the coronet
+of leaves and clashing against the stem as it was blown to and
+fro by the night wind, while long-winged bats swept and
+whistled over our heads.</p>
+
+<p>The commonplace intrudes upon the imaginative. At moments
+one can fancy that the world is an enchanted place after
+all, but then comes generally an absurd awakening. On the
+first night of my arrival, before we went to bed there came an
+invitation to me to attend a political meeting which was to be
+held in a few days on the savannah. Trinidad is a purely
+Crown colony, and has escaped hitherto the introduction of
+the election virus. The newspapers and certain busy gentlemen
+in 'Port of Spain' had discovered that they were living
+under 'a degrading tyranny,' and they demanded a 'constitution.'
+They did not complain that their affairs had been ill
+managed. On the contrary, they insisted that they were the
+most prosperous of the West Indian colonies, and alone had a
+surplus in their treasury. If this was so, it seemed to me that
+they had better let well alone. The population, all told, was
+but 170,000, less by thirty thousand than that of Barbadoes.
+They were a mixed and motley assemblage of all races and
+colours, busy each with their own affairs, and never hitherto
+troubling themselves about politics. But it had pleased the
+Home Government to set up the beginning of a constitution
+again in Jamaica, no one knew why, but so it was, and Trinidad
+did not choose to be behindhand. The official appointments
+were valuable, and had been hitherto given away by the
+Crown. The local popularities very naturally wished to have
+them for themselves. This was the reality in the thing so far
+as there was a reality. It was dressed up in the phrases
+borrowed from the great English masters of the art, about
+privileges of manhood, moral dignity, the elevating influence
+of the suffrage, &amp;c., intended for home consumption among
+the believers in the orthodox Radical faith.</p>
+
+<p>For myself I could but reply to the gentlemen who had sent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>
+the invitation, that I was greatly obliged by the compliment,
+but that I knew too little of their affairs to make my presence
+of any value to them. As they were doing so well, I did not
+see myself why they wanted an alteration. Political changes
+were generally little more than turns of a kaleidoscope; you
+got a new pattern, but it was made of the same pieces, and
+things went on much as before. If they wanted political
+liberty I did not doubt that they would get it if they were
+loud and persistent enough. Only they must understand that
+at home we were now a democracy. Any constitution which
+was granted them would be on the widest basis. The blacks
+and coolies outnumbered the Europeans by four to one, and
+perhaps when they had what they asked for they might be less
+pleased than they expected.</p>
+
+<p>You rise early in the tropics. The first two hours of daylight
+are the best of the day. My friend drove me round the
+town in his buggy the next morning. My second duty was to
+pay my respects to the Governor, Sir William Robinson, who
+had kindly offered me hospitality, and for which I must present
+myself to thank him. In Sir William I found one of
+those happy men whose constitution is superior to climate,
+who can do a long day's work in his office, play cricket or
+lawn tennis in the afternoon, and entertain his miscellaneous
+subjects in the evening with sumptuous hospitality&mdash;a vigorous,
+effective, perhaps ambitious gentleman, with a clear eye
+to the views of his employers at home on whom his promotion
+depends&mdash;certain to make himself agreeable to them, likely to
+leave his mark to useful purpose on the colonies over which he
+presides or may preside hereafter. Here in Trinidad he was
+learning Spanish in addition to his other linguistic accomplishments,
+that he might show proper courtesies to Spanish
+residents and to visitors from South America.</p>
+
+<p>The 'Residence' stands in a fine situation, in large grounds
+of its own at the foot of the mountains. It has been lately
+built regardless of expense, for the colony is rich, and likes to
+do things handsomely. On the lawn, under the windows,
+stood a tree which was entirely new to me, an enormous ceiba<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>
+or silk cotton tree, umbrella shaped, fifty yards in diameter,
+the huge and buttressed trunk throwing out branches so
+massive that one wondered how any woody fibre could bear
+the strain of their weight, the boughs twisting in and out till
+they made a roof over one's head, which was hung with every
+fantastic variety of parasites.</p>
+
+<p>Vast as the ceibas were which I saw afterwards in other
+parts of the West Indies, this was the largest. The ceiba is
+the sacred tree of the negro, the temple of Jumbi the proper
+home of Obeah. To cut one down is impious. No black in
+his right mind would wound even the bark. A Jamaica police
+officer told me that if a ceiba had to be removed, the men who
+used the axe were well dosed with rum to give them courage
+to defy the devil.</p>
+
+<p>From Government House we strolled into the adjoining
+Botanical Gardens. I had long heard of the wonders of these.
+The reality went beyond description. Plants with which I
+was familiar as <i>shrubs</i> in English conservatories were here
+expanded into forest giants, with hundreds of others of which
+we cannot raise even Lilliputian imitations. Let man be what
+he will, nature in the tropics is always grand. Palms were
+growing in the greatest luxuriance, of every known species,
+from the cabbage towering up into the sky to the fan palm
+of the desert whose fronds are reservoirs of water. Of exogenous
+trees, the majority were leguminous in some shape or
+other, forming flowers like a pea or vetch and hanging their
+seed in pods; yet in shape and foliage they distanced far the
+most splendid ornaments of an English park. They had Old
+World names with characters wholly different: cedars which
+were not conifers, almonds which were no relations to peaches,
+and gum trees as unlike eucalypti as one tree can be unlike
+another. Again, you saw forms which you seemed to recognise
+till some unexpected anomaly startled you out of your
+mistake. A gigantic Portugal laurel, or what I took for such,
+was throwing out a flower direct from the stem like a cactus.
+Grandest among them all, and happily in full bloom, was the
+sacred tree of Burmah, the <i>Amherstia nobilis</i>, at a distance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>
+like a splendid horse-chestnut, with crimson blossoms in pendant
+bunches, each separate flower in the convolution of its
+parts exactly counterfeiting a large orchid, with which it has
+not the faintest affinity, the Amherstia being leguminous like
+the rest.</p>
+
+<p>Underneath, and dispersed among the imperial beauties,
+were spice trees, orange trees, coffee plants and cocoa, or
+again, shrubs with special virtues or vices. We had to be
+careful what we were about, for fruits of fairest appearance
+were tempting us all round. My companion was preparing
+to eat something to encourage me to do the same. A gardener
+stopped him in time. It was nux vomica. I was straying
+along a less frequented path, conscious of a heavy vaporous
+odour, in which I might have fainted had I remained exposed
+to it. I was close to a manchineel tree.</p>
+
+<p>Prettiest and freshest were the nutmegs, which had a glen
+all to themselves and perfumed the surrounding air. In Trinidad
+and in Grenada I believe the nutmegs are the largest that
+are known, being from thirty to forty feet high; leaves brilliant
+green, something like the leaves of an orange, but extremely
+delicate and thin, folded one over the other, the lowest
+branches sweeping to the ground till the whole tree forms a
+natural bower, which is proof against a tropical shower. The
+fragrance attracts moths and flies; not mosquitoes, who prefer
+a ranker atmosphere. I saw a pair of butterflies the match
+of which I do not remember even in any museum, dark blue
+shot with green like a peacock's neck, and the size of English
+bats. I asked a black boy to catch me one. 'That sort no let
+catchee, massa,' he said; and I was penitently glad to hear it.</p>
+
+<p>Among the wonders of the gardens are the vines as they
+call them, that is, the creepers of various kinds that climb
+about the other trees. Standing in an open space there was
+what once had been a mighty 'cedar.' It was now dead,
+only the trunk and dead branches remaining, and had been
+murdered by a 'fig' vine which had started from the root,
+twined itself like a python round the stem, strangled out the
+natural life, and spreading out in all directions had covered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>
+boughs and twigs with a foliage not their own. So far the 'vine'
+had done no worse than ivy does at home, but there was one
+feature about it which puzzled me altogether. The lowest of
+the original branches of the cedar were about twenty feet above
+our heads. From these in four or five places the parasite had
+let fall shoots, perhaps an inch in diameter, which descended
+to within a foot of the ground and then suddenly, without
+touching that or anything, formed a bight like a rope, went
+straight up again, caught hold of the branch from which they
+started, and so hung suspended exactly as an ordinary swing.
+In three distinctly perfect instances the 'vine' had executed
+this singular evolution, while at the extremity of one of the
+longest and tallest branches high up in the air it had made a
+clean leap of fifteen feet without visible help and had caught
+hold of another tree adjoining on the same level. These performances
+were so inexplicable that I conceived that they
+must have been a freak of the gardener's. I was mistaken.
+He said that at particular times in the year the fig vine threw
+out fine tendrils which hung downwards like strings. The
+strongest among them would lay hold of two or three others
+and climb up upon them, the rest would die and drop off,
+while the successful one, having found support for itself above,
+would remain swinging in the air and thicken and prosper.
+The leap he explained by the wind. I retained a suspicion
+that the wind had been assisted by some aspiring energy in
+the plant itself, so bold it was and so ambitious.</p>
+
+<p>But the wonders of the garden were thrown into the shade
+by the cottage at the extreme angle of it (the old Government
+House before the present fabric had been erected), where
+Kingsley had been the guest of Sir Arthur Gordon. It is a
+long straggling wooden building with deep verandahs lying in a
+hollow overshadowed by trees, with views opening out into the
+savannah through arches formed by clumps of tall bamboos,
+the canes growing thick in circular masses and shooting up a
+hundred feet into the air, where they meet and form frames
+for the landscape, peculiar and even picturesque when there
+are not too many of them. These bamboos were Kingsley's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>
+special delight, as he had never seen the like of them elsewhere.
+The room in which he wrote is still shown, and the
+gallery where he walked up and down with his long pipe. His
+memory is cherished in the island as of some singular and
+beautiful presence which still hovers about the scenes which so
+delighted him in the closing evening of his own life.</p>
+
+<p>It was the dry season, mid-winter, yet raining every day for
+two or three hours, and when it rains in these countries it
+means business. When the sky cleared the sun was intolerably
+hot, and distant expeditions under such conditions suited
+neither my age nor my health. With cocktail I might have
+ventured, but to cocktail I could never heartily reconcile
+myself. Trinidad has one wonder in it, a lake of bitumen
+some ninety acres in extent, which all travellers are expected
+to visit, and which few residents care to visit. A black lake is
+not so beautiful as an ordinary lake. I had no doubt that it
+existed, for the testimony was unimpeachable. Indeed I was
+shown an actual specimen of the crystallised pitch itself. I
+could believe without seeing and without undertaking a tedious
+journey. I rather sympathised with a noble lord who came to
+Port of Spain in his yacht, and like myself had the lake impressed
+upon him. As a middle course between going thither
+and appearing to slight his friends' recommendations, he said
+that he would send his steward.</p>
+
+<p>In Trinidad, as everywhere else, my own chief desire was to
+see the human inhabitants, to learn what they were doing, how
+they were living, and what they were thinking about, and this
+could best be done by drives about the town and neighbourhood.
+The cultivated land is a mere fringe round the edges
+of the forest. Three-fourths of the soil are untouched. The
+rivers running out of the mountains have carved out the usual
+long deep valleys, and spread the bottoms with rich alluvial
+soil. Here among the wooded slopes are the country houses
+of the merchants. Here are the cabins of the black peasantry
+with their cocoa and coffee and orange plantations, which as in
+Grenada they hold largely as freeholds, reproducing as near as
+possible the life in Paradise of our first parents, without the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>
+consciousness of a want which they are unable to gratify, not
+compelled to work, for the earth of her own self bears for them
+all that they need, and ignorant that there is any difference
+between moral good and evil.</p>
+
+<p>Large sugar estates, of course, there still are, and as the
+owners have not succeeded in bringing the negroes to work
+regularly for them,<a name="FNanchor_1_5" id="FNanchor_1_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_5" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> they have introduced a few thousand
+Coolies under indentures for five years. These Asiatic importations
+are very happy in Trinidad; they save money, and
+many of them do not return home when their time is out, but
+stay where they are, buy land, or go into trade. They are
+proud, however, and will not intermarry with the Africans.
+Few bring their families with them; and women being scanty
+among them, there arise inconveniences and sometimes serious
+crimes.</p>
+
+<p>It were to be wished that there was more prospect of the
+Coolie race becoming permanent than I fear there is. They
+work excellently. They are picturesque additions to the landscape,
+as they keep to the bright colours and graceful drapery
+of India. The grave dignity of their faces contrasts remarkably
+with the broad, good-humoured, but common features of the
+African. The black women look with envy at the straight hair
+of Asia, and twist their unhappy wool into knots and ropes in
+the vain hope of being mistaken for the purer race; but this is
+all. The African and the Asiatic will not mix, and the African
+being the stronger will and must prevail in Trinidad as elsewhere
+in the West Indies. Out of a total population of
+170,000, there are 25,000 whites and mulattoes, 10,000 coolies,
+the rest negroes. The English part of the Europeans shows
+no tendency to increase. The English come as birds of
+passage, and depart when they have made their fortunes.
+The French and Spaniards may hold on to Trinidad as a home.
+Our people do not make homes there, and must be looked on
+as a transient element.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_5" id="Footnote_1_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_5"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> The negroes in the interior are beginning to cultivate sugar cane in
+small patches, with common mills to break it up. If the experiment succeeds
+it may extend.</p></div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A Coolie village&mdash;Negro freeholds&mdash;Waterworks&mdash;Pythons&mdash;Slavery&mdash;Evidence
+of Lord Rodney&mdash;Future of the negroes&mdash;Necessity of English
+rule&mdash;The Blue Basin&mdash;Black boy and cray fish.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The second morning after my arrival, my host took me to a
+Coolie village three miles beyond the town. The drive was
+between spreading cane fields, beneath the shade of bamboos,
+or under rows of cocoa-nut palms, between the stems of which
+the sea was gleaming.</p>
+
+<p>Human dwelling places are rarely interesting in the tropics.
+A roof which will keep the rain out is all that is needed. The
+more free the passage given to the air under the floor and
+through the side, the more healthy the habitation; and the
+houses, when we came among them, seemed merely enlarged
+packing cases loosely nailed together and raised on stones a
+foot or two from the ground. The rest of the scene was picturesque
+enough. The Indian jewellers were sitting cross-legged
+before their charcoal pans, making silver bracelets and
+earrings. Brilliant garments, crimson and blue and orange,
+were hanging to dry on clothes lines. Men were going out to
+their work, women cooking, children (not many) playing or
+munching sugar cane, while great mango trees and ceibas
+spread a cool green roof over all. Like Rachel, the Coolies
+had brought their gods to their new home. In the centre of
+the village was a Hindoo temple, made up rudely out of
+boards with a verandah running round it. The doors were
+locked. An old man who had charge told us we could not
+enter; a crowd, suspicious and sullen, gathered about us as we
+tried to prevail upon him; so we had to content ourselves
+with the outside, which was gaudily and not unskilfully painted
+in Indian fashion. There were gods and goddesses in various
+attitudes; Vishnu fighting with the monkey god, Vishnu with
+cutlass and shield, the monkey with his tail round one tree
+while he brandished two others, one in each hand, as clubs. I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>
+suppose that we smiled, for our curiosity was resented, and we
+found it prudent to withdraw.</p>
+
+<p>The Coolies are useful creatures. Without them sugar cultivation
+in Trinidad and Demerara would cease altogether.
+They are useful and they are singularly ornamental. Unfortunately
+they have not the best character with the police. There
+is little crime among the negroes, who quarrel furiously with
+their tongues only. The Coolies have the fiercer passions of
+their Eastern blood. Their women being few are tempted
+occasionally into infidelities, and would be tempted more often
+but that a lapse in virtue is so fearfully avenged. A Coolie regards
+his wife as his property, and if she is unfaithful to him
+he kills her without the least hesitation. One of the judges
+told me that he had tried a case of this kind, and could not
+make the man understand that he had done anything wrong.
+It is a pity that a closer intermixture between them and the
+negroes seems so hopeless, for it would solve many difficulties.
+There is no jealousy. The negro does not regard the
+Coolie as a competitor and interloper who has come to
+lower his wages. The Coolie comes to work. The negro
+does not want to work, and both are satisfied. But if there is
+no jealousy there is no friendship. The two races are more
+absolutely apart than the white and the black. The Asiatic
+insists the more on his superiority in the fear perhaps that if
+he did not the white might forget it.</p>
+
+<p>Among the sights in the neighbourhood of Port of Spain are
+the waterworks, extensive basins and reservoirs a few miles off
+in the hills. We chose a cool afternoon, when the temperature
+in the shade was not above 86&deg;, and went to look at them.
+It was my first sight of the interior of the island, and my first
+distinct acquaintance with the change which had come over
+the West Indies. Trinidad is not one of our oldest possessions,
+but we had held it long enough for the old planter
+civilisation to take root and grow, and our road led us
+through jungles of flowering shrubs which were running wild
+over what had been once cultivated estates. Stranger still (for
+one associates colonial life instinctively with what is new and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+modern), we came at one place on an avenue of vast trees, at
+the end of which stood the ruins of a mansion of some great
+man of the departed order. Great man he must have been,
+for there was a gateway half crumbled away on which were his
+crest and shield in stone, with supporters on either side, like
+the Baron of Bradwardine's Bears; fallen now like them, but
+unlike them never, I fear, to be set up again. The Anglo-West
+Indians, like the English gentry in Ireland, were a fine race of
+men in their day, and perhaps the improving them off the earth
+has been a less beneficial process in either case than we are in
+the habit of supposing.</p>
+
+<p>Entering among the hills we came on their successors. In
+Trinidad there are 18,000 freeholders, most of them negroes
+and representatives of the old slaves. Their cabins are spread
+along the road on either side, overhung with bread-fruit trees,
+tamarinds, calabash trees, out of which they make their cups
+and water jugs. The luscious granadilla climbs among the
+branches; plantains throw their cool shade over the doors;
+oranges and limes and citrons perfume the air, and droop their
+boughs under the weight of their golden burdens. There were
+yams in the gardens and cows in the paddocks, and cocoa
+bushes loaded with purple or yellow pods. Children played
+about in swarms, in happy idleness and abundance, with
+schools, too, at intervals, and an occasional Catholic chapel, for
+the old religion prevails in Trinidad, never having been disturbed.
+What form could human life assume more charming
+than that which we were now looking on? Once more, the
+earth does not contain any peasantry so well off, so well cared
+for, so happy, so sleek and contented as the sons and daughters
+of the emancipated slaves in the English West Indian
+Islands. Sugar may fail the planter, but cocoa, which each
+peasant can grow with small effort for himself, does not fail
+and will not. He may 'better his condition,' if he has any
+such ambition, without stirring beyond his own ground, and so
+far, perhaps, his ambition may extend, if it is not turned off
+upon politics. Even the necessary evils of the tropics are not
+many or serious. His skin is proof against mosquitoes.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>
+There are snakes in Trinidad as there were snakes in Eden.
+'Plenty snakes,' said one of them who was at work in his
+garden, 'plenty snakes, but no bitee.' As to costume, he
+would prefer the costume of innocence if he was allowed.
+Clothes in such a climate are superfluous for warmth, and to
+the minds of the negroes, unconscious as they are of shame,
+superfluous for decency. European prejudice, however, still
+passes for something; the women have a love for finery, which
+would prevent a complete return to African simplicity; and in
+the islands which are still French, and in those like Trinidad,
+which the French originally colonised, they dress themselves
+with real taste. They hide their wool in red or yellow handkerchiefs,
+gracefully twisted; or perhaps it is not only to conceal
+the wool. Columbus found the Carib women of the
+island dressing their hair in the same fashion.<a name="FNanchor_1_6" id="FNanchor_1_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_6" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></p>
+
+<p>The waterworks, when we reached them, were even more
+beautiful than we had been taught to expect. A dam has been
+driven across a perfectly limpid mountain stream; a wide open
+area has been cleared, levelled, strengthened with masonry, and
+divided into deep basins and reservoirs, through which the current
+continually flows. Hedges of hibiscus shine with crimson
+blossoms. Innumerable humming birds glance to and fro
+among the trees and shrubs, and gardens and ponds are overhung
+by magnificent bamboos, which so astonished me by
+their size that I inquired if their height had been measured.
+One of them, I was told, had lately fallen, and was found to be
+130 feet long. A single drawback only there was to this enchanting
+spot, and it was again the snakes. There are huge
+pythons in Trinidad which are supposed to have crossed the
+straits from the continent. The cool water pools attract them,
+and they are seen occasionally coiled among the branches of
+the bamboos. Some washerwomen at work in the stream had
+been disturbed a few days before our visit by one of these
+monsters, who had come down to see what they were about.
+They are harmless, but trying to the nerves. One of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>
+men about the place shot this one, and he told me that
+he had shot another a short time before asleep in a tree. The
+keeper of the works was a retired soldier, an Irish-Scot from
+Limerick, hale, vigorous, and happy as the blacks themselves.
+He had married one of them&mdash;a remarkable exception
+to an almost universal rule. He did not introduce us,
+but the dark lady passed by us in gorgeous costume, just
+noticing our presence with a sweep which would have done
+credit to a duchess.</p>
+
+<p>We made several similar small expeditions into the settled
+parts of the neighbourhood, seeing always (whatever else we
+saw) the boundless happiness of the black race. Under the
+rule of England in these islands the two million of these poor
+brothers-in-law of ours are the most perfectly contented specimens
+of the human race to be found upon the planet. Even
+Schopenhauer, could he have known them, would have admitted
+that there were some of us who were not hopelessly
+wretched. If happiness be the satisfaction of every conscious
+desire, theirs is a condition which admits of no improvement:
+were they independent, they might quarrel among themselves,
+and the weaker become the bondmen of the stronger; under
+the beneficent despotism of the English Government, which
+knows no difference of colour and permits no oppression,
+they can sleep, lounge, and laugh away their lives as they
+please, fearing no danger. If they want money, work and
+wages are waiting for them. No one can say what may be
+before them hereafter. The powers which envy human beings
+too perfect felicity may find ways one day of disturbing the
+West Indian negro; but so long as the English rule continues,
+he may be assured of the same tranquil existence.</p>
+
+<p>As life goes he has been a lucky mortal. He was taken
+away from Dahomey and Ashantee&mdash;to be a slave indeed, but
+a slave to a less cruel master than he would have found at
+home. He had a bad time of it occasionally, and the
+plantation whip and the branding irons are not all dreams, yet
+his owner cared for him at least as much as he cared for his
+cows and his horses. Kind usage to animals is more eco<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>nomical
+than barbarity, and Englishmen in the West Indies
+were rarely inhuman. Lord Rodney says:</p>
+
+<p>'I have been often in all the West India Islands, and I have
+often made my observations on the treatment of the negro slaves,
+and can aver that I never knew the least cruelty inflicted on them,
+but that in general they lived better than the honest day-labouring
+man in England, without doing a fourth part of his work
+in a day, and I am fully convinced that the negroes in our islands
+are better provided for and live better than when in Guinea.'</p>
+
+<p>Rodney, it is true, was a man of facts and was defective in
+sentiment. Let us suppose him wrong, let us believe the
+worst horrors of the slave trade or slave usage as fluent
+tongue of missionary or demagogue has described them, yet
+nevertheless, when we consider what the lot of common
+humanity has been and is, we shall be dishonest if we deny
+that the balance has been more than redressed; and the
+negroes who were taken away out of Africa, as compared with
+those who were left at home, were as the 'elect to salvation,'
+who after a brief purgatory are secured an eternity of blessedness.
+The one condition is the maintenance of the authority
+of the English crown. The whites of the islands cannot
+equitably rule them. They have not shaken off the old
+traditions. If, for the sake of theory or to shirk responsibility,
+we force them to govern themselves, the state of Hayti stands
+as a ghastly example of the condition into which they will
+then inevitably fall. If we persist, we shall be sinning against
+light&mdash;the clearest light that was ever given in such affairs.
+The most hardened believers in the regenerating effects of
+political liberty cannot be completely blind to the ruin which
+the infliction of it would necessarily bring upon the race for
+whose interests they pretend particularly to care.</p>
+
+<p>The Pitch Lake I resisted all exhortations to visit, but the
+days in the forest were delightful&mdash;pre-eminently a day which
+we spent at the 'Blue Basin,' a pool scooped out in the course
+of ages by a river falling through a mountain gorge; blue, not
+from any colour in the water, which is purely transparent, but
+from a peculiar effect of sky reflection through an opening in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>
+the overhanging trees. As it was far off, we had to start early
+and encounter the noonday heat. We had to close the
+curtains of the carriage to escape the sun, and in losing the
+sun we shut out the wind. All was well, however, when we
+turned into the hills. Thenceforward the road followed the
+bottom of a densely wooded ravine; impenetrable foliage
+spreading over our heads, and a limpid river flashing along in
+which our horses cooled their feet and lips as we crossed
+it again and again. There were the usual cabins and gardens
+on either side of us, sometimes single, sometimes clustering
+into villages, and high above them the rocks stood out,
+broken into precipices or jutting out into projecting crags,
+with huge trees starting from the crevices, dead trunks with
+branching arms clothed scantily with creepers, or living giants
+with blue or orange-coloured flowers. Mangoes scented the
+valley with their blossom. Bananas waved their long broad
+leaves&mdash;some flat and unbroken as we know them in conservatories,
+some split into palm-like fronds which quivered in the
+breeze. The cocoa pods were ripe or ripening, those which
+had been gathered being left on the ground in heaps as we see
+apples in autumn in an English orchard.</p>
+
+<p>We passed a lady on the way who was making sketches and
+daring the mosquitoes, that were feeding at leisure upon her
+face and arms. The road failed us at last. We alighted with
+our waterproofs and luncheon basket. A couple of half-naked
+boys sprang forward to act as guides and porters&mdash;nice little
+fellows, speaking a French patois for their natural language,
+but with English enough to earn shillings and amuse the
+British tourist. With their help we scrambled along a steep
+slippery path, the river roaring below, till we came to a spot
+where, the rock being soft, a waterfall had cut out in the
+course of ages a natural hollow, of which the trees formed the
+roof, and of which the floor was the pool we had come in
+search of. The fall itself was perpendicular, and fifty or
+sixty feet high, the water issuing at the top out of a dark
+green tunnel among overhanging branches. The sides of the
+basin were draped with the fronds of gigantic ferns and wild
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>plantains, all in wild luxuriance and dripping with the spray.
+In clefts above the rocks, large cedars or gum trees had struck
+their roots and flung out their gnarled and twisted branches,
+which were hung with ferns; while at the lower end of the pool,
+where the river left it again, there grew out from among the
+rocks near the water's edge tall and exquisitely grouped
+acacias with crimson flowers for leaves.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/image0004.jpg" alt="BLUE BASIN, TRINIDAD." title="" /><br />
+<span class="caption">BLUE BASIN, TRINIDAD.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The place broke on us suddenly as we scrambled round
+a corner from below. Three young blacks were bathing in the
+pool, and as we had a lady with us, they were induced,
+though sullenly and with some difficulty, to return into
+their scanty garments and depart. Never certainly was there
+a more inviting spot to swim in, the more so from exciting
+possibilities of adventure. An English gentleman went to
+bathe there shortly before our coming. He was on a rock,
+swaying his body for a plunge, when something caught his eye
+among the shadows at the bottom. It proved to be a large
+dead python.</p>
+
+<p>We had not the luck ourselves of falling in with so interesting
+a beast. Great butterflies and perhaps a humming bird or
+two were flitting among the leaves as we came up; other signs
+of life there were none, unless we call life the motion of the
+plantain leaves, waving in the draughts of air which were
+eddying round the waterfall. We sat down on stones, or on
+the trunk of a fallen tree, the mosquitoes mercifully sparing
+us. We sketched a little, talked a little, ate our sandwiches,
+and the male part of us lighted our cigars. G&mdash;&mdash; then, to
+my surprise, produced a fly rod. In the streams in the
+Antilles, which run out of the mountains, there is a fish in
+great abundance which they call <i>mullet</i>, an inferior trout, but a
+good substitute where the real thing is not. He runs sometimes
+to five pounds weight, will take the fly, and is much
+sought after by those who try to preserve in the tropics
+the amusements and habits of home. G&mdash;&mdash; had caught
+many of them in Dominica. If in Dominica, why not in
+Trinidad?</p>
+
+<p>He put his tackle together, tied up a cast of trout flies, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
+commenced work. He tried the still water at the lower end
+of the basin. He crept round the rock and dropped his line
+into the foam at the foot of the fall. No mullet rose, nor fish
+of any kind. One of our small boys had looked on with
+evident impatience. He cried out at last, 'No mullet, but
+plenty crayfish,' pointing down into the water; and there,
+following the direction of his finger, we beheld strange grey
+creatures like cuttle-fish, moving about on the points of their
+toes, the size of small lobsters. The flies were dismounted, a
+bare hook was fitted on a fine gut trace, with a split shot or
+two to sink the line, all trim and excellent. A fresh-water
+shrimp was caught under a stone for a bait. G&mdash;&mdash; went to
+work, and the strange things took hold and let themselves be
+lifted halfway to the surface. But then, somehow, they let go
+and disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>Our small boy said nothing; but I saw a scornful smite upon
+his lips. He picked up a thin dry cane, found some twine in
+the luncheon basket which had tied up our sandwiches, found
+a pin there also, and bent it, and put a shrimp on it. With a
+pebble stone for a sinker he started in competition, and in a
+minute he had brought out upon the rock the strangest thing
+in the shape of a fish which I had ever seen in fresh water or
+salt. It was a true 'crayfish,' <i>&eacute;crevisse</i>, eight inches long,
+formed regularly with the thick powerful tail, the sharp serrated
+snout, the long antenn&aelig;, and the spider-like legs of the lobster
+tribe. As in a crayfish, the claws were represented by the
+correctly shaped but diminutive substitutes.</p>
+
+<p>When we had done wondering at the prize, we could admire
+the smile of conscious superiority in the face of the captor.
+The fine tackle had been beaten, as usual, by the proverbial
+string and crooked pin, backed by knowledge in the head of a
+small nigger boy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_6" id="Footnote_1_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_6"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Traen las cabezas atadas con unos panuelos labrados hermosos que
+parecen de lejos de seda y almazarrones.</p></div></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Home Rule in Trinidad&mdash;Political aspirations&mdash;Nature of the problem&mdash;Crown
+administration&mdash;Colonial governors&mdash;A Russian apologue&mdash;Dinner
+at Government House&mdash;'The Three Fishers'&mdash;Charles Warner&mdash;Alternative
+futures of the colony.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The political demonstration to which I had been invited came
+off the next day on the savannah. The scene was pretty
+enough. Black coats and white trousers, bright-coloured
+dresses and pink parasols, look the same at a distance whether
+the wearer has a black face or a white one, and the broad
+meadow was covered over with sparkling groups. Several
+thousand persons must have attended, not all to hear the
+oratory, for the occasion had been taken when the Governor
+was to play close by in a cricket match, and half the crowd
+had probably collected to see His Excellency at the wicket.
+Placards had been posted about the town, setting out the purpose
+of the meeting. Trinidad, as I said, is at present a Crown
+colony, the executive council and the legislature being equally
+nominated by the authorities. The popular orators, the newspaper
+writers, and some of the leading merchants in Port of
+Spain had discovered, as I said, that they were living under
+what they called 'a degrading tyranny.' They had no grievances,
+or none that they alleged, beyond the general one that
+they had no control over the finance. They very naturally
+desired that the lucrative Government appointments for which
+the colony paid should be distributed among themselves. The
+elective principle had been reintroduced in Jamaica, evidently
+as a step towards the restoration of the full constitution which
+had been surrendered and suppressed after the Gordon riots.
+Trinidad was almost as large as Jamaica, in proportion to the
+population wealthier and more prosperous, and the people were
+invited to come together in overwhelming numbers to insist
+that the 'tyranny' should end. The Home Government in
+their action about Jamaica had shown a spontaneous readiness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
+to transfer responsibility from themselves to the inhabitants.
+The promoters of the meeting at Port of Spain may have
+thought that a little pressure on their part might not be unwelcome
+as an excuse for further concessions of the same kind.
+Whether this was so I do not know. At any rate they showed
+that they were as yet novices in the art of agitation. The
+language of the placard of invitation was so violent that, in the
+opinion of the legal authorities, the printer might have been
+indicted for high treason. The speakers did their best to
+imitate the fine phrases of the apostles of liberty in Europe,
+but they succeeded only in caricaturing their absurdities. The
+proceedings were described at length in the rival newspapers.
+One gentleman's speech was said to have been so brilliant that
+every sentence was a 'gem of oratory,' the gem of gems being
+when he told his hearers that, 'if they went into the thing at
+all, they should go the entire animal.' All went off good-humouredly.
+In the Liberal journal the event of the day was
+spoken of as the most magnificent demonstration in favour of
+human freedom which had ever been seen in the West Indian
+Islands. In the Conservative journal it was called a ridiculous
+<i>fiasco</i>, and the people were said to have come together only to
+admire the Governor's batting, and to laugh at the nonsense
+which was coming from the platform. Finally, the same journal
+assured us that, beyond a handful of people who were interested
+in getting hold of the anticipated spoils of office, no one in
+the island cared about the matter.</p>
+
+<p>The result, I believe, was some petition or other which
+would go home and pass as evidence, to minds eager to
+believe, that Trinidad was rapidly ripening for responsible
+government, promising relief to an overburdened Secretary
+for the Colonies, who has more to do than he can attend to,
+and is pleased with opportunities of gratifying popular sentiment,
+or of showing off in Parliament the development of
+colonial institutions. He knows nothing, can know nothing,
+of the special conditions of our hundred dependencies. He
+accepts what his representatives in the several colonies choose
+to tell him; and his representatives, being birds of passage<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
+responsible only to their employers at home, and depending
+for their promotion on making themselves agreeable, are
+under irresistible temptations to report what it will please
+the Secretary of State to hear.</p>
+
+<p>For the Secretary of State, too, is a bird of passage as they
+are, passing through the Colonial Office on his way to other
+departments, or holding the seals as part of an administration
+whose tenure of office grows every year more precarious,
+which exists only upon popular sentiment, and cannot, and
+does not try to look forward beyond at furthest the next
+session of Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>But why, it may be asked, should not Trinidad govern
+itself as well as Tasmania or New Zealand? Why not
+Jamaica, why not all the West Indian Islands? I will answer
+by another question. Do we wish these islands to remain as
+part of the British Empire? Are they of any use to us, or
+have we responsibilities connected with them of which we are
+not entitled to divest ourselves? A government elected by
+the majority of the people (and no one would think of setting
+up constitutions on any other basis) reflects from the nature
+of things the character of the electors. All these islands tend
+to become partitioned into black peasant proprietaries. In
+Grenada the process is almost complete. In Trinidad it is
+rapidly advancing. No one can stop it. No one ought to wish
+to stop it. But the ownership of freeholds is one thing, and
+political power is another. The blacks depend for the progress
+which they may be capable of making on the presence
+of a white community among them; and although it is
+undesirable or impossible for the blacks to be ruled by the
+minority of the white residents, it is equally undesirable and
+equally impossible that the whites should be ruled by them.
+The relative numbers of the two races being what they are,
+responsible government in Trinidad means government by a
+black parliament and a black ministry. The negro voters
+might elect, to begin with, their half-caste attorneys or such
+whites (the most disreputable of their colour) as would court
+their suffrages. But the black does not love the mulatto, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>
+despises the white man who consents to be his servant. He
+has no grievances. He is not naturally a politician, and if
+left alone with his own patch of land, will never trouble
+himself to look further. But he knows what has happened in
+St. Domingo. He has heard that his race is already in full
+possession of the finest of all the islands. If he has any
+thought or any hopes about the matter, it is that it may be
+with the rest of them as it has been with St. Domingo, and if
+you force the power into his hands, you must expect him to
+use it. Under the constitution which you would set up,
+whites and blacks may be nominally equal; but from the
+enormous preponderance of numbers the equality would be
+only in name, and such English people, at least, as would be
+really of any value, would refuse to remain in a false and
+intolerable position. Already the English population of
+Trinidad is dwindling away under the uncertainties of their
+future position. Complete the work, set up a constitution
+with a black prime minister and a black legislature, and they
+will withdraw of themselves before they are compelled to go.
+Spaniards and French might be tempted by advantages of
+trade to remain in Port of Spain, as a few are still to be found
+in Hayti. They, it is possible, might in time recover and
+reassert their supremacy. Englishmen have the world open
+to them, and will prefer lands where they can live under less
+degrading conditions. In Hayti the black republic allows
+no white man to hold land in freehold. The blacks elsewhere
+with the same opportunities will develop the same
+aspirations.</p>
+
+<p>Do we, or do we not, intend to retain our West Indian
+Islands under the sovereignty of the Queen? If we are
+willing to let them go, the question is settled. But we ought
+to face the alternative. There is but one form of government
+under which we can retain these colonies with honour and
+security to ourselves and with advantage to the negroes
+whom we have placed there&mdash;the mode of government
+which succeeds with us so admirably that it is the world's
+wonder in the <i>East</i> Indies, a success so unique and so extra<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>ordinary
+that it seems the last from which we are willing to
+take example.</p>
+
+<p>In Natal, where the circumstances are analogous, and
+where report says that efforts are being also made to force
+on constitutional independence, I remember suggesting a few
+years ago that the governor should be allowed to form his own
+council, and that in selecting the members of it he should go
+round the colony, observe the farms where the land was well
+inclosed, the fields clean, the farm buildings substantial and in
+good repair; that he should call on the owners of these to be
+his advisers and assistants. In all Natal he might find a
+dozen such. They would be unwilling to leave their own
+business for so thankless a purpose; but they might be
+induced by good feeling to grant him a few weeks of their
+time. Under such an administration I imagine Natal would
+have a happier future before it than it will experience with the
+boon which is designed for it.</p>
+
+<p>In the West Indies there is indefinite wealth waiting to be
+developed by intelligence and capital; and men with such
+resources, both English and American, might be tempted still
+to settle there, and lead the blacks along with them into more
+settled manners and higher forms of civilisation. But the
+future of the blacks, and our own influence over them for
+good, depend on their being protected from themselves and
+from the schemers who would take advantage of them. However
+little may be the share to which the mass of a population
+be admitted in the government of their country, they are
+never found hard to manage where they prosper and are
+justly dealt with. The children of darkness are even easier
+of control than the children of light. Under an administration
+formed on the model of that of our Eastern Empire these
+islands would be peopled in a generation or two with dusky
+citizens, as proud as the rest of us of the flag under which
+they will have thriven, and as willing to defend it against any
+invading enemy as they are now unquestionably indifferent.
+Partially elected councils, local elected boards, &amp;c., serve only
+as contrivances to foster discontent and encourage jobbery.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>
+They open a rift which time will widen, and which will create
+for us, on a smaller scale, the conditions which have so
+troubled us in Ireland, where each concession of popular demands
+makes the maintenance of the connection more difficult.
+In the Pacific colonies self-government is a natural right; the
+colonists are part of ourselves, and have as complete a claim
+to the management of their own affairs as we have to the
+management of ours. The less we interfere with them the
+more heartily they identify themselves with us. But if we
+choose besides to indulge our ambition with an empire, if we
+determine to keep attached to our dominion countries which,
+like the East Indies, have been conquered by the sword,
+countries, like the West Indies, which, however acquired, are
+occupied by races enormously outnumbering us, many of
+whom do not speak our language, are not connected with us
+by sentiment, and not visibly connected by interest, with
+whom our own people will not intermarry or hold social intercourse,
+but keep aloof from, as superior from inferior&mdash;to
+impose on such countries forms of self-government at which
+we have ourselves but lately arrived, to put it in the power of
+these overwhelming numbers to shake us off if they please,
+and to assume that when our real motive has been only to
+save ourselves trouble they will be warmed into active loyalty
+by gratitude for the confidence which we pretend to place
+in them, is to try an experiment which we have not the
+slightest right to expect to be successful, and which if it fails
+is fatal.</p>
+
+<p>Once more, if we mean to keep the blacks as British subjects,
+we are bound to govern them, and to govern them well.
+If we cannot do it, we had better let them go altogether. And
+here is the real difficulty. It is not that men competent for
+such a task cannot be found. Among the public servants of
+Great Britain there are persons always to be found fit and
+willing for posts of honour and difficulty if a sincere effort be
+made to find them. Alas! in times past we have sent persons
+to rule our Baratarias to whom Sancho Panza was a sage&mdash;troublesome
+members of Parliament, younger brothers of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>
+powerful families, impecunious peers; favourites, with backstairs
+influence, for whom a provision was to be found; colonial
+clerks, bred in the office, who had been obsequious and useful.</p>
+
+<p>One had hoped that in the new zeal for the colonial connection
+such appointments would have become impossible for the
+future, yet a recent incident at the Mauritius has proved that
+the colonial authorities are still unregenerate. The unfit are
+still maintained in their places; and then, to prevent the
+colonies from suffering too severely under their incapacity, we
+set up the local councils, nominated or elected, to do the work,
+while the Queen's representative enjoys his salary. Instances
+of glaring impropriety like that to which I have alluded are of
+course rare, and among colonial governors there are men of
+quality so high that we would desire only to see their power
+equal to it. But so limited is the patronage, on the other
+hand, which remains to the home administrations, and so heavy
+the pressure brought to bear upon them, that there are persons
+also in these situations of whom it may be said that the less
+they do, and the less they are enabled to do, the better for the
+colony over which they preside.</p>
+
+<p>The West Indies have been sufferers from another cause.
+In the absence of other use for them they have been made to
+serve as places where governors try their 'prentice hand and
+learn their business before promotion to more important situations.
+Whether a man has done well or done ill makes, it
+seems, very little difference unless he has offended prejudices
+or interests at home: once in the service he acquires a vested
+right to continue in it. A governor who had been suspended
+for conduct which is not denied to have been most improper,
+is replaced with the explanation that if he was not sent back
+to his old post it would have been necessary to provide a
+situation for him elsewhere. Why would it? Has a captain
+of a man-of-war whose ship is taken from him for misconduct
+an immediate claim to have another? Unfortunate colonies!
+It is not their interest which is considered under this system.
+But the subject is so delicate that I must say no more about
+it. I will recommend only to the attention of the British<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>
+democracy, who are now the parties that in the last instance
+are responsible, because they are the real masters of the
+Empire, the following apologue.</p>
+
+<p>In the time of the Emperor Nicholas the censors of the
+press seized a volume which had been published by the poet
+Kriloff, on the ground that it contained treasonable matter.
+Nicholas sent for Kriloff. The censor produced the incriminated
+passage, and Kriloff was made to read it aloud. It was
+a fable. A governor of a Russian province was represented
+as arriving in the other world, and as being brought up before
+Rhadamanthus. He was accused, not of any crime, but of
+having been simply a nonentity&mdash;of having received his salary
+and spent it, and nothing more. Rhadamanthus listened, and
+when the accusing angel had done sentenced the prisoner into
+Paradise. 'Into Paradise!' said the angel, 'why, he has done
+nothing!' 'True,' said Rhadamanthus, 'but how would it have
+been if he had done anything?'</p>
+
+<p>'Write away, old fellow,' said Nicholas to Kriloff.</p>
+
+<p>Has it never happened that British colonial officials who
+have similarly done nothing have been sent into the Paradise
+of promotion because they have kept things smooth and have
+given no trouble to their employers at home?</p>
+
+<p>In the evening of the day of the political meeting we dined
+at Government House. There was a large representative
+party, English, French, Spaniards, Corsicans&mdash;ladies and
+gentlemen each speaking his or her own language. There
+were the mayors of the two chief towns of Trinidad&mdash;Port of
+Spain and San Fernando&mdash;both enthusiastic for a constitution.
+The latter was my neighbour at dinner, and insisted much on
+the fine qualities of the leading persons in the island and the
+splendid things to be expected when responsible government
+should be conceded. The training squadron had arrived from
+Barbadoes, and the commodore and two or three officers were
+present in their uniforms. There was interesting talk about
+Trinidad's troublesome neighbour, Guzman Blanco, the President
+of Venezuela. It seems that Sir Walter Raleigh's
+Eldorado has turned out to be a fact after all. On the higher<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+waters of the Orinoco actual gold mines do exist, and the
+discovery has quickened into life a long unsettled dispute
+about boundaries between British Guiana and the republic.
+Don Guzman had been encroaching, so it was alleged, and in
+other ways had been offensive and impertinent. Ships were
+going&mdash;had been actually ordered to La Guyra, to pull his
+nose for him, and to tell him to behave himself. The time is
+past when we flew our hawks at game birds. The opinion of
+most of the party was that Don Guzman knew it, and that his
+nose would not be pulled. He would regard our frigates as
+picturesque ornaments to his harbour, give the officers in command
+the politest reception, evade their demands, offer good
+words in plenty, and nothing else but words, and in the end
+would have the benefit of our indifference.<a name="FNanchor_1_7" id="FNanchor_1_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_7" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p>
+
+<p>In the late evening we had music. Our host sang well, our
+hostess was an accomplished artist. They had duets together,
+Italian and English, and the lady then sang 'The Three
+Fishers,' Kingsley being looked on as the personal property of
+Trinidad and as one of themselves. She sang it very well, as
+well as any one could do who had no direct acquaintance with
+an English sea-coast people. Her voice was beautiful, and she
+showed genuine feeling. The silence when she ended was
+more complimentary than the loudest applause. It was broken
+by a stupid member of council, who said to me, 'Is it not
+strange that a poet with such a gift of words as Mr. Kingsley
+should have ended that song with so weak a line? "The
+sooner it's over the sooner to sleep" is nothing but prose.'
+He did not see that the fault which he thought he had discovered
+is no more than the intentional 'dying away' of the
+emotion created by the story in the common lot of poor
+humanity. We drove back across the savannah in a blaze of
+fireflies. It is not till midnight that they put their lights out
+and go to sleep with the rest of the world.</p>
+
+<p>One duty remained to me before I left the island. The
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>Warners are among the oldest of West Indian families, distinguished
+through many generations, not the least in their then
+living chief and representative, Charles Warner, who in the
+highest ministerial offices had steered Trinidad through the
+trying times which followed the abolition of slavery. I had
+myself in early life been brought into relations with other
+members of his family. He himself was a very old man on
+the edge of the grave; but hearing that I was in Port of
+Spain, he had expressed a wish to see me. I found him in
+his drawing room, shrunk in stature, pale, bent double by
+weight of years, and but feebly able to lift his head to speak.
+I thought, and I judged rightly, that he could have but a few
+weeks, perhaps but a few days, to live.</p>
+
+<p>There is something peculiarly solemn in being brought to
+speak with a supremely eminent man, who is already struggling
+with the moment which is to launch him into a new existence.
+He raised himself in his chair. He gave me his withered
+hand. His eyes still gleamed with the light of an untouched
+intelligence. All else of him seemed dead. The soul, untouched
+by the decay of the frame which had been its earthly
+tenement, burnt bright as ever on the edge of its release.</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left:4em">
+When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain,<br />
+And they breathe truth who breathe their words in pain.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>He roused himself to talk, and he talked sadly, for all things
+at home and everywhere were travelling on the road which he
+well knew could lead to no good end. No statesman had
+done better practical work than he, or work which had borne
+better fruit, could it be allowed to ripen. But for him Trinidad
+would have been a wilderness, savage as when Columbus
+found the Caribs there. He belonged to the race who make
+empires, as the orators lose them, who do things and do not
+talk about them, who build and do not cast down, who reverence
+ancient habits and institutions as the organic functions of
+corporate national character; a Tory of the Tories, who
+nevertheless recognised that Toryism itself was passing away<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>
+under the universal solvent, and had ceased to be a faith which
+could be believed in as a guide to conduct.</p>
+
+<p>He no more than any one could tell what it was now wisest
+or even possible to do. He spoke like some ancient <i>seer</i>,
+whose eyes looked beyond the present time and the present
+world, and saw politics and progress and the wild whirlwind of
+change as the play of atoms dancing to and fro in the sunbeams
+of eternity. Yet he wished well to our poor earth, and
+to us who were still struggling upon it. He was sorry for the
+courses on which he saw mankind to be travelling. Spite of
+all the newspapers and the blowing of the trumpets, he well
+understood whither all that was tending. He spoke with
+horror and even loathing of the sinister leader who was drawing
+England into the fatal whirlpool. He could still hope, for he
+knew the power of the race. He knew that the English heart
+was unaffected, that we were suffering only from delirium of
+the brain. The day would yet come, he thought, when we
+should struggle back into sanity again with such wreck of our
+past greatness as might still be left to us, torn and shattered,
+but clothed and in our right mind, and cured for centuries of
+our illusions.</p>
+
+<p>My forebodings of the nearness of the end were too well
+founded. A month later I heard that Charles Warner was
+dead. To have seen and spoken with such a man was worth
+a voyage round the globe.</p>
+
+<p>On the prospects of Trinidad I have a few more words to
+add. The tendency of the island is to become what Grenada
+has become already&mdash;a community of negro freeholders, each
+living on his own homestead, and raising or gathering off the
+ground what his own family will consume. They will multiply,
+for there is ample room. Three-quarters of the soil are still
+unoccupied. The 140,000 blacks will rapidly grow into a half-million,
+and the half-million, as long as we are on the spot to
+keep the peace, will speedily double itself again. The English
+inhabitants will and must be crowded out. The geographical
+advantages of the Gulf of Paria will secure a certain amount of
+trade. There will be merchants and bankers in the town as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>
+floating passage birds, and there will be mulatto lawyers and
+shopkeepers and newspaper writers. But the blacks hate the
+mulattoes, and the mulatto breed will not maintain itself, as
+with the independence of the blacks the intimacy between
+blacks and whites diminishes and must diminish. The English
+peasant immigration which enthusiasts have believed in is a
+dream, a dream which passed through the ivory gate, a dream
+which will never turn to a waking reality; and unless under
+the Indian system, which our rulers will never try unless the
+democracy orders them to adopt it, the English interest will
+come to an end.</p>
+
+<p>The English have proved in India that they can play a great
+and useful part as rulers over recognised inferiors. Even in
+the West Indies the planters were a real something. Like the
+English in Ireland, they produced a remarkable breed of men:
+the Codringtons, the Warners, and many illustrious names
+besides. They governed cheaply on their own resources, and
+the islands under their rule were so profitable that we fought
+for them as if our Empire was at stake. All that is gone.
+The days of ruling races are supposed to be numbered. Trade
+drifts away to the nearest market&mdash;to New York or New
+Orleans&mdash;and in a money point of view the value of such possessions
+as Trinidad will soon be less than nothing to us.</p>
+
+<p>As long as the present system holds, there will be an appreciable
+addition to the sum of human (coloured human) happiness.
+Lighter-hearted creatures do not exist on the globe.
+But the continuance of it depends on the continuance of the
+English rule. The peace and order which they benefit by is
+not of their own creation. In spite of schools and missionaries,
+the dark connection still maintains itself with Satan's invisible
+world, and modern education contends in vain with Obeah
+worship. As it has been in Hayti, so it must be in Trinidad
+if the English leave the blacks to be their own masters.</p>
+
+<p>Scene after scene passes by on the magic slide. The man-eating
+Caribs first, then Columbus and his Spaniards, the
+French conquest, the English occupation, but they have left
+behind them no self-quickening seed of healthy civilisation,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>
+and the prospect darkens once more. It is a pity, for there is
+no real necessity that it should darken. The West Indian
+negro is conscious of his own defects, and responds more
+willingly than most to a guiding hand. He is faithful and
+affectionate to those who are just and kind to him, and with a
+century or two of wise administration he might prove that his
+inferiority is not inherent, and that with the same chances as
+the white he may rise to the same level. I cannot part with
+the hope that the English people may yet insist that the chance
+shall not be denied to him, and that they may yet give their
+officials to understand that they must not, shall not, shake off
+their responsibilities for this unfortunate people, by flinging
+them back upon themselves 'to manage their own affairs,' now
+that we have no further use for them.</p>
+
+<p>I was told that the keener-witted Trinidad blacks are watching
+as eagerly as we do the development of the Irish problem.
+They see the identity of the situation. They see that if the
+Radical view prevails, and in every country the majority are to
+rule, Trinidad will be theirs and the government of the English
+will be at an end. I, for myself, look upon Trinidad and the
+West Indies generally as an opportunity for the further extension
+of the influence of the English race in their special
+capacity of leaders and governors of men. We cannot with
+honour divest ourselves of our responsibility for the blacks, or
+after the eloquence we have poured out and the self-laudation
+which we have allowed ourselves for the suppression of slavery,
+leave them now to relapse into a state from which slavery itself
+was the first step of emancipation. Our world-wide dominion
+will not be of any long endurance if we consider that we have
+discharged our full duty to our fellow-subjects when we have
+set them free to follow their own devices. If that is to be all,
+the sooner it vanishes into history the better for us and for the
+world.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_7" id="Footnote_1_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_7"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> A squadron did go while I was in the West Indies. I have not heard
+that any advance has been made in consequence towards the settlement of
+the Border.</p></div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Barbadoes again&mdash;Social condition of the island&mdash;Political constitution&mdash;Effects
+of the sugar bounties&mdash;Dangers of general bankruptcy&mdash;The
+Hall of Assembly&mdash;Sir Charles Pearson&mdash;Society in Bridgetown&mdash;A
+morning drive&mdash;Church of St. John's&mdash;Sir Graham Briggs&mdash;An old
+planter's palace&mdash;The Chief Justice of Barbadoes.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Again at sea, and on the way back to Barbadoes. The commodore
+of the training squadron had offered me a berth to
+St. Vincent, but he intended to work up under sail against the
+north-east trade, which had risen to half a gale, and I preferred
+the security and speed of the mail boat. Among the passengers
+was Miss &mdash;&mdash;, the lady whom I had seen sketching
+on the way to the Blue Basin. She showed me her drawings,
+which were excellent. She showed me in her mosquito-bitten
+arms what she had endured to make them, and I admired her
+fortitude. She was English, and was on her way to join her
+father at Codrington College.</p>
+
+<p>We had a wild night, but those long vessels care little
+for winds and waves. By morning we had fought our way
+back to Grenada. In the St. Vincent roadstead, which we
+reached the same day, the ship was stormed by boatloads of
+people who were to go on with us; boys on their way to
+school at Barbadoes, ladies young and old, white, black, and
+mixed, who were bound I know not where. The night fell
+dark as pitch, the storm continued, and we were no sooner
+beyond the shelter of the land than every one save
+Miss &mdash;&mdash; and myself was prostrate. The vessel ploughed on
+upon her way indifferent to us and to them. We were at
+Bridgetown by breakfast time, and I was now to have an opportunity
+of studying more at leisure the earliest of our West
+Indian colonies.</p>
+
+<p>Barbadoes is as unlike in appearance as it is in social condition
+to Trinidad or the Antilles. There are no mountains
+in it, no forests, no rivers, and as yet no small freeholders.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>
+The blacks, who number nearly 200,000 in an island not
+larger than the Isle of Wight, are labourers, working for wages
+on the estates of large proprietors. Land of their own they
+have none, for there is none for them. Work they must, for
+they cannot live otherwise. Thus every square yard of soil is
+cultivated, and turn your eyes where you will you see houses,
+sugar canes, and sweet potatoes. Two hundred and fifty
+years of occupation have imprinted strongly an English character;
+parish churches solid and respectable, the English
+language, the English police and parochial system. However
+it may be in the other islands, England in Barbadoes is still a
+solid fact. The headquarters of the West Indian troops
+are there. There is a commander-in-chief residing in a
+'Queen's House,' so called. There is a savannah where there
+are English barracks under avenues of almond and mahogany.
+Red coats are scattered about the grass. Officers canter about
+playing polo, and naval and military uniforms glitter at the
+side of carriages, and horsemen and horsewomen take their
+evening rides, as well mounted and as well dressed as you can
+see in Rotten Row. Barbadoes is thus in pleasing contrast
+with the conquered islands which we have not taken the
+trouble to assimilate. In them remain the wrecks of the
+French civilisation which we superseded, while we have
+planted nothing of our own. Barbadoes, the European aspect
+of it at any rate, is English throughout.</p>
+
+<p>The harbour, when we arrived, was even more brilliant
+than we had left it a fortnight before. The training squadron
+had gone, but in the place of it the West Indian fleet was
+there, and there were also three American frigates, old wooden
+vessels out merely on a cruise, but heavily sparred, smart
+and well set up, with the stars and stripes floating carelessly at
+their sterns, as if in these western seas, be the nominal
+dominion British, French, or Spanish, the American has a
+voice also and intends to be heard.</p>
+
+<p>We had no sooner anchored than a well-appointed boat
+was alongside with an awning and an ensign at the stern.
+Colonel &mdash;&mdash;, the chief of the police, to whom it belonged,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>
+came on board in search of Miss &mdash;&mdash;, who was to be his
+guest in Bridgetown. She introduced me to him. He insisted
+on my accompanying him home to breakfast, and, as he was a
+person in authority, I had nothing to do but obey. Colonel &mdash;&mdash;,
+to whose politeness then and afterwards I was in many
+ways indebted, had seen life in various forms. He had been
+in the navy. He had been in the army. He had been called
+to the bar. He was now the head of the Barbadoes police,
+with this anomalous addition to his other duties, that in default
+of a chaplain he read the Church service on Sundays in the
+barracks. He had even a license from the bishop to preach
+sermons, and being a man of fine character and original sense
+he discharged this last function, I was told, remarkably well.
+His house was in the heart of the town, but shaded with
+tropical trees. The rooms were protected by deep outside
+galleries, which were overrun with Bougainvillier creepers.
+He was himself the kindest of entertainers, his Irish lady the
+kindest of hostesses, with the humorous high breeding of
+the old Sligo aristocracy, to whom she belonged. I found
+that I had been acquainted with some of her kindred there
+long ago, in the days when the Anglo-Irish rule had not
+been discovered to be a upas tree, and cultivated human life
+was still possible in Connaught. Of the breakfast, which
+consisted of all the West Indian dainties I had ever heard
+or read of, I can say nothing, nor of the pleasant talk which
+followed. I was to see more of Colonel &mdash;&mdash;, for he offered
+to drive me some day across the island, a promise which
+he punctually fulfilled. My stay with him for the present
+could be but brief, as I was expected at Government House.</p>
+
+<p>I have met with exceptional hospitality from the governors
+of British colonies in many parts of the world. They are
+not chosen like the Roman proconsuls from the ranks of
+trained statesmen who have held high administrative offices at
+home. They are appointed, as I said just now, from various
+motives, sometimes with a careful regard to fitness for their
+post, sometimes with a regard merely to routine or convenience
+or to personal influence brought to bear in their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
+favour. I have myself seen some for whom I should have
+thought other employment would have been more suitable;
+but always and everywhere those that I have fallen in with
+have been men of honour and integrity above reproach or
+suspicion, and I have met with one or two gentlemen in these
+situations whose admirable qualities it is impossible to praise
+too highly, who in their complicated responsibilities&mdash;responsibilities
+to the colonies and responsibilities to the authorities
+at home&mdash;have considered conscience and duty to be their
+safest guides, have cared only to do what they believed to be
+right to the best of their ability, and have left their interests
+to take care of themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The Governor of Barbadoes is not despotic. He controls
+the administration, but there is a constitution as old as the
+Stuarts; an Assembly of thirty-three members, nine of whom
+the Crown nominates, the rest are elected. The friction is
+not so violent as when the number of the nominated and
+elected members is equal, and as long as a property qualification
+was required for the franchise, the system may have
+worked tolerably without producing any violent mischief.
+There have been recent modifications, however, pointing in
+the same direction as those which have been made in Jamaica.
+By an ordinance from home the suffrage has been widely extended,
+obviously as a step to larger intended changes.</p>
+
+<p>Under such conditions and with an uncertain future a
+governor can do little save lead and influence, entertain
+visitors, discharge the necessary courtesies to all classes of his
+subjects, and keep his eyes open. These duties at least Sir
+Charles Lee discharges to perfection, the entertaining part of
+them on a scale so liberal that if P&egrave;re Labat came back he
+would suppose that the two hundred years which have gone
+by since his visit was a dream, and that Government House
+at least was still as he left it. In an establishment which had
+so many demands upon it, and where so many visitors of all
+kinds were going and coming, I had no claim to be admitted.
+I felt that I should be an intruder, and had I been allowed
+would have taken myself elsewhere, but Sir Charles's peremp<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>tory
+generosity admitted of no refusal. As a subject I was
+bound to submit to the Queen's representative. I cannot say I
+was sorry to be compelled. In Government House I should see
+and hear what I could neither have seen nor heard elsewhere.
+I should meet people who could tell me what I most wanted
+to know. I had understood already that owing to the sugar
+depression the state of the island was critical. Officials were
+alarmed. Bankers were alarmed. No one could see beyond
+the next year what was likely to happen. Sir Charles himself
+would have most to say. He was evidently anxious. Perhaps
+if he had a fault, he was over anxious; but with the possibility
+of social confusion before him, with nearly 200,000 peasant
+subjects, who in a few months might be out of work and so
+out of food, with the inflammable negro nature, and a suspicious
+and easily excited public opinion at home, the position of
+a Governor of Barbadoes is not an enviable one. The Government
+at home, no doubt with the best intentions, has aggravated
+any peril which there may be by enlarging the suffrage.
+The experience of Governor Eyre in Jamaica has taught the
+danger of being too active, but to be too inactive may be
+dangerous also. If there is a stir again in any part of these
+islands, and violence and massacre come of it, as it came in
+St. Domingo, the responsibility is with the governor, and the
+account will be strictly exacted of him.</p>
+
+<p>I must describe more particularly the reasons which there
+are for uneasiness. On the day on which I landed I saw an
+article in a Bridgetown paper in which my coming there was
+spoken of as perhaps the last straw which would break the
+overburdened back. I know not why I should be thought
+likely to add anything to the load of Barbadian afflictions. I
+should be a worse friend to the colonies than I have tried to
+be if I was one of those who would quench the smoking flax
+of loyalty in any West Indian heart. But loyalty, I very well
+know, is sorely tried just now. The position is painfully
+simple. The great prosperity of the island ended with
+emancipation. Barbadoes suffered less than Jamaica or the
+Antilles because the population was large and the land limited,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>
+and the blacks were obliged to work to keep themselves alive.
+The abolition of the sugar duties was the next blow. The
+price of sugar fell, and the estates yielded little more than the
+expense of cultivation. Owners of properties who were their
+own managers, and had sense and energy, continued to keep
+themselves afloat; but absenteeism had become the fashion.
+The brilliant society which is described by Labat had been
+melting for more than a century. More and more the old West
+Indian families removed to England, farmed their lands
+through agents and overseers, or sold them to speculating
+capitalists. The personal influence of the white man over the
+black, which might have been brought about by a friendly
+intercourse after slavery was abolished, was never so much as
+attempted. The higher class of gentry found the colony more
+and more distasteful to them, and they left the arrangement
+of the labour question to persons to whom the blacks were
+nothing, emancipated though they might be, except instruments
+of production. A negro can be attached to his employer at least
+as easily as a horse or a dog. The horse or dog requires kind
+treatment, or he becomes indifferent or sullen; so it is with
+the negro. But the forced equality of the races before the
+law made more difficult the growth of any kindly feeling. To
+the overseer on a plantation the black labourer was a machine
+out of which the problem was to get the maximum of work
+with the minimum of pay. In the slavery times the horse and
+dog relation was a real thing. The master and mistress
+joked and laughed with their dark bondsmen, knew C&aelig;sar
+from Pompey, knew how many children each had, gave them
+small presents, cared for them when they were sick, and
+maintained them when they were old and past work. All this
+ended with emancipation. Between whites and blacks no
+relations remained save that of employer and employed. They
+lived apart. They had no longer, save in exceptional instances,
+any personal communication with each other. The law refusing
+to recognise a difference, the social line was drawn the harder,
+which the law was unable to reach.</p>
+
+<p>In the Antilles the plantations broke up as I had seen in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
+Grenada. The whites went away, and the land was divided
+among the negroes. In Barbadoes, the estates were kept
+together. The English character and the English habits were
+stamped deeper there, and were not so easily obliterated. But
+the stars in their courses have fought against the old system.
+Once the West Indies had a monopoly of the sugar trade.
+Steam and progress have given them a hundred <i>natural</i> competitors;
+and on the back of these came the <i>unnatural</i>
+bounty-fed beetroot sugar competition. Meanwhile the expense
+of living increased in the days of inflated hope and
+'unexampled prosperity.' Free trade, whatever its immediate
+consequences, was to make everyone rich in the end. When
+the income of an estate fell short one year, it was to rise in the
+next, and the money was borrowed to make ends meet; when
+it didn't rise, more money was borrowed; and there is now
+hardly a property in the island which is not loaded to the
+sinking point. Tied to sugar-growing, Barbadoes has no
+second industry to fall back upon. The blacks, who are heedless
+and light-hearted, increase and multiply. They will not
+emigrate, they are so much attached to their homes; and the
+not distant prospect is of a general bankruptcy, which may
+throw the land for the moment out of cultivation, with a
+hungry unemployed multitude to feed without means of
+feeding them, and to control without the personal acquaintance
+and influence which alone can make control possible.</p>
+
+<p>At home there is a general knowledge that things are not
+going on well out there. But, true to our own ways of
+thinking, we regard it as their affair and not as ours. If cheap
+sugar ruins the planters, it benefits the English workman.
+The planters had their innings; it is now the consumer's turn.
+What are the West Indies to us? On the map they appear
+to belong more to the United States than to us. Let the
+United States take them and welcome. So thinks, perhaps,
+the average Englishman; and, analogous to him, the West
+Indian proprietor reflects that, if admitted into the Union, he
+would have the benefit of the American market, which would
+set him on his feet again; and that the Americans, probably<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>
+finding that they, if not we, could make some profit out of the
+islands, would be likely to settle the black question for him in
+a more satisfactory manner.</p>
+
+<p>That such a feeling as this should exist is natural and pardonable;
+and it would have gone deeper than it has gone if it
+were not that there are two parties to every bargain, and those
+in favour of such a union have met hitherto with no encouragement.
+The Americans are wise in their generation. They
+looked at Cuba; they looked at St. Domingo. They might
+have had both on easy terms, but they tell you that their constitution
+does not allow them to hold dependent states. What
+they annex they absorb, and they did not wish to absorb
+another million and a half of blacks and as many Roman
+Catholics, having enough already of both. Our English islands
+may be more tempting, but there too the black cloud hangs
+thick and grows yearly thicker, and through English indulgence
+is more charged with dangerous elements. Already, they say,
+they have every advantage which the islands can give them.
+They exercise a general protectorate, and would probably
+interfere if France or England were to attempt again to
+extend their dominions in that quarter; but they prefer to
+leave to the present owners the responsibility of managing and
+feeding the cow, while they are to have the milking of it.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the proposal of annexation, which has never gone
+beyond wishes and talk, has so far been coldly received; but
+the Americans did make their offer a short time since, at
+which the drowning Barbadians grasped as at a floating plank.
+England would give them no hand to save them from the
+effects of the beetroot bounties. The Americans were willing
+to relax their own sugar duties to admit West Indian sugar
+duty free, and give them the benefit of their own high prices.
+The colonies being unable to make treaties for themselves, the
+proposal was referred home and was rejected. The Board of
+Trade had, no doubt, excellent reasons for objecting to an
+arrangement which would have flung our whole commerce
+with the West Indies into American hands, and might have
+formed a prelude to a closer attachment. It would have been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>
+a violation also of those free-trade principles which are the
+English political gospel. Moreover, our attitude towards our
+colonies has changed in the last twenty years; we now wish to
+preserve the attachment of communities whom a generation
+back we should have told to do as they liked, and have bidden
+them God speed on their way; and this treaty may have been
+regarded as a step towards separation. But the unfortunate
+Barbadians found themselves, with the harbour in sight, driven
+out again into the free-trade hurricane. We would not help
+them ourselves; we declined to let the Americans help them;
+and help themselves they could not. They dare not resent
+our indifference to their interests, which, if they were stronger,
+would have been more visibly displayed. They must wait
+now for what the future will bring with as much composure as
+they can command, but I did hear outcries of impatience to
+which it was unpleasant to listen. Nay, it was even suggested
+as a means of inducing the Americans to forego their reluctance
+to take them into the Union, that we might relinquish
+such rights as we possessed in Canada if the Americans would
+relieve us of the West Indies, for which we appeared to care
+so little.</p>
+
+<p>If Barbadoes is driven into bankruptcy, the estates will have
+to be sold, and will probably be broken up as they have been
+in the Antilles. The first difficulty will thus be got over. But
+the change cannot be carried out in a day. If wages suddenly
+cease the negroes will starve, and will not take their starvation
+patiently. At the worst, however, means will probably be
+found to keep the land from falling out of cultivation.
+The Barbadians see their condition in the light of their
+grievances, and make the worst of it. The continental
+powers may tire of the bounty system, or something else
+may happen to make sugar rise. The prospect is not a bright
+one, but what actually happens in this world is generally the
+unexpected.</p>
+
+<p>As a visit my stay at Government House was made simply
+delightful to me. I remained there (with interruptions) for a
+fortnight, and Lady L&mdash;&mdash; did not only permit, but she insisted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>
+that I should be as if in an hotel, and come and go as I liked.
+The climate of Barbadoes, so far as I can speak of it, is as
+sparkling and invigorating as champagne. Cocktail may be
+wanted in Trinidad. In Barbadoes the air is all one asks for,
+and between night breezes and sea breezes one has plenty of
+it. Day begins with daylight, as it ought to do. You have
+slept without knowing anything about it. There are no
+venomous crawling creatures. Cockroaches are the worst,
+but they scuttle out of the way so alarmed and ashamed of
+themselves if you happen to see them, that I never could
+bring myself to hurt one. You spring out of bed as if the
+process of getting up were actually pleasant. Well-appointed
+West Indian houses are generally provided with a fresh-water
+swimming bath. Though cold by courtesy the water seldom
+falls below 65&deg;, and you float luxuriously upon it without
+dread of chill. The early coffee follows the bath, and then
+the stroll under the big trees, among strange flowers, or in the
+grotto with the ferns and humming birds. If it were part of
+one's regular life, I suppose that one would want something
+to do. Sir Charles was the most active of men, and had been
+busy in his office for an hour before I had come down to
+lounge. But for myself I discovered that it was possible, at
+least for an interval, to be perfectly idle and perfectly happy,
+surrounded by the daintiest beauties of an English hothouse,
+with palm trees waving like fans to cool one, and with sensitive
+plants, which are common as daisies, strewing themselves
+under one's feet to be trodden upon.</p>
+
+<p>After breakfast the heat would be considerable, but with an
+umbrella I could walk about the town and see what was to be
+seen. Alas! here one has something to desire. Where P&egrave;re
+Labat saw a display of splendour which reminded him of Paris
+and London, you now find only <i>stores</i> on the American pattern,
+for the most part American goods, bad in quality and
+extravagantly dear. Treaty or no treaty, it is to America that
+the trade is drifting, and we might as well concede with a
+good grace what must soon come of itself whether we like it
+or not. The streets are relieved from ugliness by the trees<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>
+and by occasional handsome buildings. Often I stood to
+admire the pea-green Nelson. Once I went into the Assembly
+where the legislature was discussing more or less unquietly the
+prospects of the island. The question of the hour was economy.
+In the opinion of patriot Barbadians, sore at the refusal of the
+treaty, the readiest way to reduce expenditure was to diminish
+the salaries of officials from the governor downwards. The
+officials, knowing that they were very moderately paid already,
+naturally demurred. The most interesting part of the thing
+to me was the <i>hall</i> in which the proceedings were going on.
+It is handsome in itself, and has a series of painted windows
+representing the English sovereigns from James I. to Queen
+Victoria. Among them in his proper place stood Oliver
+Cromwell, the only formal recognition of the great Protector
+that I know of in any part of the English dominions. Barbadoes
+had been Cavalier in its general sympathies, but has
+taken an independent view of things, and here too has had an
+opinion of its own.</p>
+
+<p>Hospitality was always a West Indian characteristic. There
+were luncheons and dinners, and distinguished persons to be
+met and talked to. Among these I had the special good fortune
+of making acquaintance with Sir Charles Pearson, now
+commanding-in-chief in those parts. Even in these days,
+crowded as they are by small incidents made large by newspapers,
+we have not yet forgotten the defence of a fort in the
+interior of Zululand where Sir Charles Pearson and his small
+garrison were cut off from their communications with Natal.
+For a week or two he was the chief object of interest in every
+English house. In obedience to orders which it was not his
+business to question, he had assisted Sir T. Shepstone in the
+memorable annexation of the Transvaal. He had seen also to
+what that annexation led, and, being a truth-speaking man, he
+did not attempt to conceal the completeness of our defeat.
+Our military establishment in the West Indies is of modest
+dimensions; but a strong English soldier, who says little and
+does his duty, and never told a lie in his life or could tell one,
+is a comforting figure to fall in with. One feels that there will<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>
+be something to retire upon when parliamentary oratory has
+finished its work of disintegration.</p>
+
+<p>The pleasantest incident of the day was the evening drive
+with Lady L&mdash;&mdash;. She would take me out shortly before
+sunset, and bring me back again when the tropical stars were
+showing faintly and the fireflies had begun to sparkle about
+the bushes, and the bats were flitting to and fro after the night
+moths like spirits of darkness chasing human souls.</p>
+
+<p>The neighbourhood of Bridgetown has little natural beauty;
+but the roads are excellent, the savannah picturesque with riding
+parties and polo players and lounging red jackets, every one
+being eager to pay his or her respect to the gracious lady of
+the Queen's representative. We called at pretty villas where
+there would be evening teas and lawn tennis in the cool. The
+society is not extensive, and here would be collected most of
+it that was worth meeting. At one of these parties I fell in
+with the officers of the American squadron, the commodore a
+very interesting and courteous gentleman whom I should have
+taken for a fellow-countryman. There are many diamonds,
+and diamonds of the first water, among the Americans as among
+ourselves; but the cutting and setting is different. Commodore
+D&mdash;&mdash; was cut and set like an Englishman. He introduced
+me to one of his brother officers who had been in Hayti.
+Spite of Sir Spenser St. John, spite of all the confirmatory
+evidence which I had heard, I was still incredulous about the
+alleged cannibalism there. To my inquiries this gentleman
+had only the same answer to give. The fact was beyond question.
+He had himself known instances of it.</p>
+
+<p>The commodore had a grievance against us illustrating West
+Indian manners. These islands are as nervous about their
+health as so many old ladies. The yellow flags float on ship
+after ship in the Bridgetown roadstead, and crews, passengers,
+and cargoes are sternly interdicted from the land. Jamaica
+was in ill name from small-pox, and, as Cuba will not drop its
+intercourse with Jamaica, Cuba falls also under the ban. The
+commodore had directed a case of cigars from Havana to meet
+him at Barbadoes. They arrived, but might not be transferred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>
+from the steamer which brought them, even on board his own
+frigate, lest he might bring infection on shore in his pocket.
+They went on to England, to reach him perhaps eventually in
+New York.</p>
+
+<p>Colonel &mdash;&mdash;'s duties, as chief of the police, obliged him to
+make occasional rounds to visit his stations. He recollected
+his promise, and he invited me one morning to accompany him.
+We were to breakfast at his house on our return, so I anticipated
+an excursion of a few miles at the utmost. He called
+for me soon after sunrise with a light carriage and a brisk pair
+of horses. We were rapidly clear of the town. The roads were
+better than the best I have seen out of England, the only fault
+in them being the white coral dust which dazzles and blinds the
+eyes. Everywhere there were signs of age and of long occupation.
+The stone steps leading up out of the road to the
+doors of the houses had been worn by human feet for hundreds
+of years. The houses themselves were old, and as if suffering
+from the universal depression&mdash;gates broken, gardens disordered,
+and woodwork black and blistered for want of paint.
+But if the habitations were neglected, there was no neglect in
+the fields. Sugar cane alternated with sweet potatoes and yams
+and other strange things the names of which I heard and forgot;
+but there was not a weed to be seen or broken fence
+where fence was needed. The soil was clean every inch of it,
+as well hoed and trenched as in a Middlesex market garden.
+Salt fish and flour, which is the chief food of the blacks, is
+imported; but vegetables enough are raised in Barbadoes to
+keep the cost of living incredibly low; and, to my uninstructed
+eyes, it seemed that even if sugar and wages did fail there
+could be no danger of any sudden famine. The people were
+thick as rabbits in a warren; women with loaded baskets on their
+heads laughing and chirruping, men driving donkey carts, four
+donkeys abreast, smoking their early pipes as if they had not a
+care in the world, as, indeed, they have not.</p>
+
+<p>On we went, the Colonel's horses stepping out twelve miles
+an hour, and I wondered privately what was to become of our
+breakfast. We were striking right across the island, along the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
+coral ridge which forms the backbone of it. We found ourselves
+at length in a grove of orange trees and shaddocks, at
+the old church of St. John's, which stands upon a perpendicular
+cliff; Codrington College on the level under our feet,
+and beyond us the open Atlantic and the everlasting breakers
+from the trade winds fringing the shore with foam. Far out
+were the white sails of the fishing smacks. The Barbadians
+are careless of weather, and the best of boat sailors. It was
+very pretty in the bright morning, and the church itself was not
+the least interesting part of the scene. The door was wide
+open. We went in, and I seemed to be in a parish church in
+England as parish churches used to be when I was a child.
+There were the old-fashioned seats, the old unadorned communion
+table, the old pulpit and reading desk and the clerk's
+desk below, with the lion and the unicorn conspicuous above
+the chancel arch. The white tablets on the wall bore familiar
+names dating back into the last century. On the floor were
+flagstones still older with armorial bearings and letters cut in
+stone, half effaced by the feet of the generations who had
+trodden up the same aisles till they, too, lay down and rested
+there. And there was this, too, to be remembered&mdash;that these
+Barbadian churches, old as they might seem, had belonged
+always to the Anglican communion. No mass had ever been
+said at that altar. It was a milestone on the high road of time,
+and was venerable to me at once for its antiquity and for the
+era at which it had begun to exist.</p>
+
+<p>At the porch was an ancient slab on which was a coat of
+arms, a crest with a hand and sword, and a motto, '<i>Sic nos,
+sic nostra tuemur.</i>' The inscription said that it was in
+memory of Michael Mahon, 'of the kingdom of Ireland,'
+erected by his children and grandchildren. Who was Michael
+Mahon? Some expatriated, so-called rebel, I suppose, whose
+sword could not defend him from being Barbados'd with so
+many other poor wretches who were sent the same road&mdash;victims
+of the tragi-comedy of the English government of
+Ireland. There were plenty of them wandering about in
+Labat's time, ready, as Labat observes, to lend a help to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>
+French, should they take a fancy to land a force in the
+island.</p>
+
+<p>The churchyard was scarcely so home-like. The graves
+were planted with tropical shrubs and flowers. Palms waved
+over the square stone monuments&mdash;stephanotis and jessamine
+crept about the iron railings. The primroses and hyacinths
+and violets, with which we dress the mounds under which our
+friends are sleeping, will not grow in the tropics. In the place
+of them are the exotics of our hot-houses. We too are,
+perhaps, exotics of another kind in these islands, and may
+not, after all, have a long abiding place in them.</p>
+
+<p>Colonel &mdash;&mdash;, who with his secular duties combined serious
+and spiritual feeling, was a friend of the clergyman of St.
+John's, and hoped to introduce me to him. This gentleman,
+however, was absent from home. Our round was still but half
+completed; we had to mount again and go another seven
+miles to inspect a police station. The police themselves were,
+of course, blacks&mdash;well-grown fine men, in a high state of
+discipline. Our visit was not expected, but all was as it should
+be; the rooms well swept and airy, the horses in good condition,
+stables clean, harness and arms polished and ready for
+use. Serious as might be the trials of the Barbadians and
+decrepit the financial condition, there were no symptoms of
+neglect either on the farms or in the social machinery.</p>
+
+<p>Altogether we drove between thirty and forty miles that
+morning. We were in time for breakfast after all, and I had
+seen half the island. It is like the Isle of Thanet, or the
+country between Calais and Boulogne. One characteristic
+feature must not be forgotten: there are no rivers and no
+waterpower; steam engines have been introduced, but the
+chief motive agent is still the never-ceasing trade wind. You
+see windmills everywhere, as it was in the time of Labat.
+The planters are reproached as being behind the age; they
+are told that with the latest improvements they might still
+defy their beetroot enemy. It may be so, but a wind which
+never rests is force which costs little, and it is possible that
+they understand their own business best.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Another morning excursion showed me the rest of the
+country, and introduced me to scenes and persons still more
+interesting. Sir Graham Briggs<a name="FNanchor_1_8" id="FNanchor_1_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_8" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> is perhaps the most distinguished
+representative of the old Barbadian families. He
+is, or was, a man of large fortune, with vast estates in this
+and other islands. A few years ago, when prospects were
+brighter, he was an advocate of the constitutional development
+so much recommended from England. The West Indian
+Islands were to be confederated into a dominion like that of
+Canada, to take over the responsibilities of government, and
+to learn to stand alone. The decline in the value of property,
+the general decay of the white interest in the islands, and the
+rapid increase of the blacks, taught those who at one time
+were ready for the change what the real nature of it would be.
+They have paused to consider; and the longer they consider
+the less they like it.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Graham had called upon me at Government House,
+and had spoken fully and freely about the offered American
+sugar treaty. As a severe sufferer he was naturally irritated at
+the rejection of it; and in the mood in which I found him, I
+should think it possible that if the Americans would hold their
+hands out with an offer of admission into the Union, he and a
+good many other gentlemen would meet them halfway. He
+did not say so&mdash;I conjecture only from natural probabilities,
+and from what I should feel myself if I were in their position.
+Happily the temptation cannot fall in their way. An American
+official laconically summed up the situation to me: 'As satellites,
+sir, as much as you please; but as parts of the primary&mdash;no,
+sir.' The Americans will not take them into the Union;
+they must remain, therefore, with their English primary and
+make the best of it; neither as satellites, for they have no
+proper motion of their own, nor as incorporated in the British
+Empire, for they derive no benefit from their connection with
+it, but as poor relations distantly acknowledged. I did not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>
+expect that Sir Graham would have more to say to me than he
+had said already: but he was a cultivated and noteworthy
+person, his house was said to be the most splendid of the old
+Barbadian merchant palaces, and I gratefully accepted an
+invitation to pay him a short visit.</p>
+
+<p>I started as before in the early morning, before the sun was
+above the trees. The road followed the line of the shore.
+Originally, I believe, Barbadoes was like the Antilles, covered
+with forest. In the interior little remains save cabbage palms
+and detached clumps of mangy-looking mahogany trees. The
+forest is gone, and human beings have taken the place of it.
+For ten miles I was driving through a string of straggling
+villages, each cottage or cabin having its small vegetable
+garden and clump of plantains. Being on the western or
+sheltered side of the island, the sea was smooth and edged
+with mangrove, through which at occasional openings we saw
+the shining water and the white coral beach, and fishing
+boats either drawn up upon it or anchored outside with their
+sails up. Trees had been planted for shade among the houses.
+There were village greens with great silk-cotton trees, banyans
+and acacias, mangoes and oranges, and shaddocks with their
+large fruit glowing among the leaves like great golden melons.
+The people swarmed, children tumbling about half naked, so
+like each other that one wondered whether their mothers
+knew their own from their neighbours'; the fishermen's wives
+selling flying fish, of which there are infinite numbers. It was
+an innocent, pretty scene. One missed green fields with cows
+upon them. Guinea grass, which is all that they have, makes
+excellent fodder, but is ugly to look at; and is cut and carried,
+not eaten where it grows. Of animal life there were innumerable
+donkeys&mdash;no black man will walk if he can find a donkey
+to carry him&mdash;infinite poultry, and pigs, familiar enough, but
+not allowed a free entry into the cabins as in Ireland. Of
+birds there was not any great variety. The humming birds
+preferred less populated quarters. There were small varieties
+of finches and sparrows and buntings, winged atoms without
+beauty of form or colour; there were a few wild pigeons;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>
+but the prevailing figure was the Barbadian crow, a little fellow
+no bigger than a blackbird, a diminutive jackdaw, who gets his
+living upon worms and insects and parasites, and so tame that
+he would perch upon a boy's head if he saw a chance of
+finding anything eatable there. The women dress ill in
+Barbadoes, for they imitate English ladies; but no dress can
+conceal the grace of their forms when they are young. It
+struck P&egrave;re Labat two centuries ago, and time and their
+supposed sufferings as slaves have made no difference. They
+work harder than the men, and are used as beasts of burden
+to fetch and carry, but they carry their loads on their heads,
+and thus from childhood have to stand upright with the neck
+straight and firm. They do not spoil their shapes with stays,
+or their walk with high-heeled shoes. They plant their feet
+firmly on the ground. Every movement is elastic and rounded,
+and the grace of body gives, or seems to give, grace also to
+the eyes and expression. Poor things! it cannot compensate
+for their colour, which now when they are free is harder
+to bear than when they were slaves. Their prettiness, such as
+it is, is short-lived. They grow old early, and an old negress
+is always hideous.</p>
+
+<p>After keeping by the sea for an hour we turned inland, and
+at the foot of a steep hill we met my host, who transferred me
+to his own carriage. We had still four or five miles to go
+through cane fields and among sugar mills. At the end of
+them we came to a grand avenue of cabbage palms, a hundred
+or a hundred and twenty feet high. How their slim stems
+with their dense coronet of leaves survive a hurricane is one
+of the West Indian marvels. They escape destruction by the
+elasticity with which they yield to it. The branches, which in
+a calm stand out symmetrically, forming a circle of which the
+stem is the exact centre, bend round before a violent wind,
+are pressed close together, and stream out horizontally like a
+horse's tail.</p>
+
+<p>The avenue led up to Sir Graham's house, which stands 800
+feet above the sea. The garden, once the wonder of the
+island, was running wild, though rare trees and shrubs survived<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>
+from its ancient splendour. Among them were two Wellingtonias
+as tall as the palms, but bent out of shape by the trade
+winds. Passing through a hall, among a litter of Carib curiosities,
+we entered the drawing-room, a magnificent saloon extending
+with various compartments over the greater part of
+the ground-floor story. It was filled with rare and curious
+things, gathered in the days when sugar was a horn of plenty,
+and selected with the finest taste; pictures, engravings, gems,
+antiquarian relics, books, maps, and manuscripts. There had
+been fine culture in the West Indies when all these treasures
+were collected. The English settlers there, like the English
+in Ireland, had the tastes of a grand race, and by-and-by we
+shall miss both of them when they are overwhelmed, as they
+are likely to be, in the revolutionary tide. Sir Graham was
+stemming it to the best of his ability, and if he was to go
+under would go under like a gentleman. A dining room almost
+as large had once been the scene of hospitalities like those
+which are celebrated by Tom Cringle. A broad staircase led
+up from the hall to long galleries, out of which bedrooms
+opened; with cool deep balconies and the universal green
+blinds. It was a palace with which Aladdin himself might
+have been satisfied, one of those which had stirred the envying
+admiration of foreign travellers in the last century, one of
+many then, now probably the last surviving representative of
+Anglo-West Indian civilisation. Like other forms of human
+life, it has had its day and could not last for ever. Something
+better may grow in the place of it, but also something worse
+may grow. The example of Hayti ought to suggest misgivings
+to the most ardent philonegro enthusiast.</p>
+
+<p>West Indian cookery was famous over the world. P&egrave;re
+Labat devotes at least a thousand pages to the dishes compounded
+of the spices and fruits of the islands, and their fish
+and fowl. Carib tradition was developed by artists from
+London and Paris. The Caribs, according to Labat, only ate
+one another for ceremony and on state occasions; their
+common diet was as excellent as it was innocent; and they
+had ascertained by careful experience the culinary and medi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>cinal
+virtues of every animal and plant around them. Tom
+Cringle is eloquent on the same subject, but with less scientific
+knowledge. My own unfortunately is less than his, and I can
+do no justice at all to Sir Graham's entertainment of me; I
+can but say that he treated me to a West Indian banquet of
+the old sort, infinite in variety, and with subtle differences of
+flavour for which no language provides names. The wine&mdash;laid
+up <i>consule Planco</i>, when Pitt was prime minister, and the
+days of liberty as yet were not&mdash;was as admirable as the dishes,
+and the fruit more exquisite than either. Such pineapples,
+such shaddocks, I had never tasted before, and shall never taste
+again.</p>
+
+<p>Hospitable, generous, splendid as was Sir Graham's reception
+of me, it was nevertheless easy to see that the prospects of the
+island sat heavy upon him. We had a long conversation when
+breakfast was over, which, if it added nothing new to what I
+had heard before, deepened and widened the impression of it.</p>
+
+<p>The English West Indies, like other parts of the world, are
+going through a silent revolution. Elsewhere the revolution,
+as we hope, is a transition state, a new birth; a passing away
+of what is old and worn out, that a fresh and healthier
+order may rise in its place. In the West Indies the most
+sanguine of mortals will find it difficult to entertain any such
+hope at all. We have been a ruling power there for two
+hundred and fifty years; the whites whom we planted as our
+representatives are drifting into helplessness, and they regard
+England and England's policy as the principal cause of it.
+The blacks whom, in a fit of virtuous benevolence, we emancipated,
+do not feel that they are particularly obliged to us.
+They think, if they think at all, that they were ill treated
+originally, and have received no more than was due to them,
+and that perhaps it was not benevolence at all on our part,
+but a desire to free ourselves from the reproach of slaveholding.
+At any rate, the tendencies now in operation are loosening
+the hold which we possess on the islands, and the longer
+they last the looser that hold will become. French influence
+is in no danger of dying out in Martinique and Guadaloupe.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>
+The Spanish race is not dying in Cuba and Puerto Rico.
+England will soon be no more than a name in Barbadoes
+and the Antilles. Having acquitted our conscience by emancipation,
+we have left our West Indian interest to sink or
+swim. Our principle has been to leave each part of our
+empire (except the East Indies) to take care of itself: we give
+the various inhabitants liberty, and what we understand by fair
+play; that we have any further moral responsibilities towards
+them we do not imagine, even in our dreams, when they have
+ceased to be of commercial importance to us; and we assume
+that the honour of being British subjects will suffice to secure
+their allegiance. It will not suffice, as we shall eventually discover.
+We have decided that if the West Indies are to
+become again prosperous they must recover by their own
+energy. Our other colonies can do without help; why not
+they? We ought to remember that they are not like the other
+colonies. We occupied them at a time when slavery was considered
+a lawful institution, profitable to ourselves and useful
+to the souls of the negroes, who were brought by it within
+reach of salvation.<a name="FNanchor_1_9" id="FNanchor_1_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_9" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> We became ourselves the chief slave
+dealers in the world. We peopled our islands with a population
+of blacks more dense by far in proportion to the whites
+than France or Spain ever ventured to do. We did not recognise,
+as the French and Spaniards did, that if our western
+colonies were permanently to belong to us, we must occupy
+them ourselves. We thought only of the immediate profit
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>which was to be gathered out of the slave gangs; and the disproportion
+of the two races&mdash;always dangerously large&mdash;has
+increased with ever-gathering velocity since the emancipation.
+It is now beyond control on the old lines. The scanty whites
+are told that they must work out their own salvation on equal
+terms with their old servants. The relation is an impossible
+one. The independent energy which we may fairly look for
+in Australia and New Zealand is not to be looked for in Jamaica
+and Barbadoes; and the problem must have a new solution.</p>
+
+<p>Confederation is to be the remedy, we are told. Let the
+islands be combined under a constitution. The whites collectively
+will then be a considerable body, and can assert themselves
+successfully. Confederation is, as I said before of the
+movement in Trinidad, but a turn of the kaleidoscope, the
+same pieces with a new pattern. A West Indian self-governed
+Dominion is possible only with a full negro vote. If the
+whites are to combine, so will the blacks. It will be a
+rule by the blacks and for the blacks. Let a generation
+or two pass by and carry away with them the old traditions,
+and an English governor-general will be found presiding over
+a black council, delivering the speeches made for him by a
+black prime minister; and how long could this endure? No
+English gentleman would consent to occupy so absurd a situation.
+The two races are not equal and will not blend. If the
+white people do not depart of themselves, black legislation
+will make it impossible for any of them to stay who would not
+be better out of the way. The Anglo-Irish Protestants will
+leave Ireland if there is an Irish Catholic parliament in College
+Green; the whites, for the same reason, will leave the West
+Indies; and in one and the other the connection with the
+British Empire will disappear along with them. It must be
+so; only politicians whose horizon does not extend beyond
+their personal future, and whose ambition is only to secure the
+immediate triumph of their party, can expect anything else.</p>
+
+<p>Before my stay at Barbadoes ended, I had an opportunity
+of meeting at dinner a negro of pure blood who has risen to
+eminence by his own talent and character. He has held the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>
+office of attorney-general. He is now chief justice of the
+island. Exceptions are supposed proverbially to prove nothing,
+or to prove the opposite of what they appear to prove. When
+a particular phenomenon occurs rarely, the probabilities are
+strong against the recurrence of it. Having heard the craniological
+and other objections to the supposed identity of the
+negro and white races, I came to the opinion long ago in
+Africa, and I have seen no reason to change it, that whether
+they are of one race or not there is no original or congenital
+difference of capacity between them, any more than there is
+between a black horse and a black dog and a white horse and
+a white dog. With the same chances and with the same treatment,
+I believe that distinguished men would be produced
+equally from both races, and Mr. &mdash;&mdash;'s well-earned success is
+an additional evidence of it. But it does not follow that what
+can be done eventually can be done immediately, and the gulf
+which divides the colours is no arbitrary prejudice, but has
+been opened by the centuries of training and discipline which
+have given us the start in the race. We set it down to slavery.
+It would be far truer to set it down to freedom. The African
+blacks have been free enough for thousands, perhaps for tens
+of thousands of years, and it has been the absence of restraint
+which has prevented them from becoming civilised. Generation
+has followed generation, and the children are as like their
+father as the successive generations of apes. The whites, it is
+likely enough, succeeded one another with the same similarity
+for a long series of ages. It is now supposed that the human
+race has been upon the planet for a hundred thousand years
+at least, and the first traces of civilisation cannot be thrown
+back at farthest beyond six thousand. During all those ages
+mankind went on treading in the same steps, century after
+century making no more advance than the birds and beasts.
+In Egypt or in India or one knows not where, accident or
+natural development quickened into life our moral and intellectual
+faculties; and these faculties have grown into what we
+now experience, not in the freedom in which the modern takes
+delight, but under the sharp rule of the strong over the weak,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
+of the wise over the unwise. Our own Anglo-Norman race
+has become capable of self-government only after a thousand
+years of civil and spiritual authority. European government,
+European instruction, continued steadily till his natural tendencies
+are superseded by a higher instinct, may shorten the
+probation period of the negro. Individual blacks of exceptional
+quality, like Frederick Douglas in America, or the Chief
+Justice of Barbadoes, will avail themselves of opportunities to
+rise, and the freest opportunities ought to be offered them.
+But it is as certain as any future event can be that if we give
+the negroes as a body the political powers which we claim for
+ourselves, they will use them only to their own injury. They
+will slide back into their old condition, and the chance will be
+gone of lifting them to the level to which we have no right to
+say that they are incapable of rising.</p>
+
+<p>Chief Justice R&mdash;&mdash; owes his elevation to his English environment
+and his English legal training. He would not
+pretend that he could have made himself what he is in Hayti
+or in Dahomey. Let English authority die away, and the
+average black nature, such as it now is, be left free to assert
+itself, and there will be no more negroes like him in Barbadoes
+or anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally, I found him profoundly interested in the late
+revelations of the state of Hayti. Sir Spenser St. John, an
+English official, after residing for twelve years in Port au
+Prince, had in a published narrative with many details and
+particulars, declared that the republic of Toussaint l'Ouverture,
+the idol of all believers in the new gospel of liberty, had, after
+ninety years of independence, become a land where cannibalism
+could be practised with impunity. The African Obeah,
+the worship of serpents and trees and stones, after smouldering
+in all the West Indies in the form of witchcraft and poisoning,
+had broken out in Hayti in all its old hideousness. Children
+were sacrificed as in the old days of Moloch and were devoured
+with horrid ceremony, salted limbs being preserved and
+sold for the benefit of those who were unable to attend the
+full solemnities.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>That a man in the position of a British resident should have
+ventured on a statement which, if untrue, would be ruinous to
+himself, appeared in a high degree improbable. Yet one had
+to set one incredibility against another. Notwithstanding the
+character of the evidence, when I went out to the West Indies
+I was still unbelieving. I could not bring myself to credit that
+in an island nominally Catholic, where the French language
+was spoken, and there were cathedrals and churches and priests
+and missionaries, so horrid a revival of devil-worship could
+have been really possible. All the inquiries which I had been
+able to make, from American and other officers who had been in
+Hayti, confirmed Sir S. St. John's story. I had hardly found
+a person who entertained a doubt of it. I was perplexed and
+uncertain, when the Chief Justice opened the subject and
+asked me what I thought. Had I been convinced I should
+have turned the conversation, but I was not convinced and I
+was not afraid to say so. I reminded him of the universal
+conviction through Europe that the Jews were habitually
+guilty of sacrificing children also. There had been detailed
+instances. Alleged offenders had been brought before courts
+of justice at any time for the last six hundred years. Witnesses
+had been found to swear to facts which had been accepted as
+conclusive. Wretched creatures in Henry III.'s time had
+been dragged by dozens at horses' tails through the streets of
+London, broken on the wheel, or torn to pieces by infuriated
+mobs. Even within the last two years, the same accusation
+had been brought forward in Russia and Germany, and had
+been established apparently by adequate proof. So far as
+popular conviction of the guilt of the Jews was an evidence
+against them, nothing could be stronger; and no charge could
+be without foundation on ordinary principles of evidence which
+revived so often and in so many places. And yet many persons,
+I said, and myself among them, believed that although
+the accusers were perfectly sincere, the guilt of the Jews was
+from end to end an hallucination of hatred. I had looked into
+the particulars of some of the trials. They were like the trials
+for witchcraft. The belief had created the fact, and accusa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>tion
+was itself evidence. I was prepared to find these stories
+of child murder in Hayti were bred similarly of anti-negro
+prejudice.</p>
+
+<p>Had the Chief Justice caught at my suggestion with any
+eagerness I should have suspected it myself. His grave diffidence
+and continued hesitation in offering an opinion confirmed
+me in my own. I told him that I was going to Hayti
+to learn what I could on the spot. I could not expect that I,
+on a flying visit, could see deeper into the truth than Sir
+Spenser St. John had seen, but at least I should not take with
+me a mind already made up, and I was not given to credulity.
+He took leave of me with an expression of passionate anxiety
+that it might be found possible to remove so black a stain from
+his unfortunate race.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_8" id="Footnote_1_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_8"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> As I correct the proofs I learn, to my great sorrow, that Sir Graham
+is dead. I have lost in him a lately made but valued friend; and the
+colony has lost the ablest of its legislators.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_9" id="Footnote_1_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_9"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> It was on this ground alone that slavery was permitted in the French
+islands. Labat says:
+</p><p>
+C'est une loi tr&egrave;s-ancienne que les terres soumises aux rois de France
+rendent libres tous ceux qui s'y peuvent retirer. C'est ce qui fit que le roi
+Louis XIII, de glorieuse m&eacute;moire, aussi pieux qu'il &eacute;toit sage, eut toutes les
+peines du monde &agrave; consentir que les premiers habitants des isles eussent
+des esclaves: et ne se rendit enfin qu'aux pressantes sollicitations qu'on luy
+faisoit de leur octroyer cette permission que parce qu'on lui remontra que
+c'&eacute;toit un moyen infaillible et l'unique qu'il y e&ucirc;t pour inspirer le culte du
+vrai Dieu aux Africains, les retirer de l'idol&acirc;trie, et les faire pers&eacute;v&eacute;rer jusqu'&agrave;
+la mort dans la religion chr&eacute;tienne qu'on leur feroit embrasser.&mdash;Vol. iv.
+p. 14.</p></div></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Leeward and Windward Islands&mdash;The Caribs of Dominica&mdash;Visit of P&egrave;re
+Labat&mdash;St. Lucia&mdash;The Pitons&mdash;The harbour at Castries&mdash;Intended
+coaling station&mdash;Visit to the administrator&mdash;The old fort and barracks&mdash;Conversation
+with an American&mdash;Constitution of Dominica&mdash;Land at
+Roseau.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Beyond all the West Indian Islands I had been curious to see
+Dominica.<a name="FNanchor_1_10" id="FNanchor_1_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_10" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> It was the scene of Rodney's great fight on April
+12. It was the most beautiful of the Antilles and the least
+known. A tribe of aboriginal Caribs still lingered in the
+forests retaining the old look and the old language, and, except
+that they no longer ate their prisoners, retaining their old
+habits. They were skilful fishermen, skilful basket makers,
+skilful in many curious arts.</p>
+
+<p>The island lies between Martinique and Guadaloupe, and is
+one of the group now called Leeward Islands, as distinguished
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>from St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Grenada, &amp;c., which form the
+Windward. The early geographers drew the line differently
+and more rationally. The main direction of the trade winds
+is from east to west. To them the Windward Islands were the
+whole chain of the Antilles, which form the eastern side of the
+Caribbean Sea. The Leeward were the great islands on the
+west of it&mdash;Cuba, St. Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica.
+The modern division corresponds to no natural phenomenon.
+The drift of the trades is rather from the north-east than from
+the south-east, and the names serve only now to describe our
+own not very successful political groupings.</p>
+
+<p>Dominica cuts in two the French West Indian possessions.
+The French took it originally from the Spaniards, occupied it,
+colonised it, planted in it their religion and their language,
+and fought desperately to maintain their possession. Lord
+Rodney, to whom we owe our own position in the West Indies,
+insisted that Dominica must belong to us to hold the French
+in check, and regarded it as the most important of all our stations
+there. Rodney made it English, and English it has ever
+since remained in spite of the furious efforts which France
+made to recover an island which she so highly valued during
+the Napoleon wars. I was anxious to learn what we had made
+of a place which we had fought so hard for.</p>
+
+<p>Though Dominica is the most mountainous of all the Antilles,
+it is split into many valleys of exquisite fertility. Through
+each there runs a full and ample river, swarming with fish, and
+yielding waterpower enough to drive all the mills which industry
+could build. In these valleys and on the rich levels along the
+shore the French had once their cane fields and orange gardens,
+their pineapple beds and indigo plantations.</p>
+
+<p>Labat, who travelled through the island at the close of the
+seventeenth century, found it at that time chiefly occupied by
+Caribs. With his hungry appetite for knowledge, he was a
+guest in their villages, acquainted himself with their characters
+and habits, and bribed out of them by lavish presents of brandy
+the secrets of their medicines and poisons. The P&egrave;re was a
+clever, curious man, with a genial human sympathy about him,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>
+and was indulgent to the faults which the poor coloured sinners
+fell into from never having known better. He tried to make
+Christians of them. They were willing to be baptised as often
+as he liked for a glass of brandy. But he was not very angry
+when he found that the Christianity went no deeper. Moral
+virtues, he concluded charitably, could no more be expected
+out of a Carib than reason and good sense out of a woman.</p>
+
+<p>At Roseau, the capital, he fell in with the then queen of
+Dominica, a Madame Ouvernard, a Carib of pure blood, who
+in her time of youth and beauty had been the mistress of an
+English governor of St. Kitts. When Labat saw her she was
+a hundred years old with a family of children and grandchildren.
+She was a grand old lady, unclothed almost absolutely,
+bent double, so that under ordinary circumstances
+nothing of her face could be seen. Labat, however, presented
+her with a couple of bottles of eau de vie, under the influence
+of which she lifted up to him a pair of still brilliant eyes and a
+fair mouthful of teeth. They did very well together, and on
+parting they exchanged presents in Homeric fashion, she loading
+him with baskets of fruit, he giving a box in return full of
+pins and needles, knives and scissors.</p>
+
+<p>Labat was a student of languages before philology had
+become a science. He discovered from the language of the
+Caribs that they were North American Indians. They called
+themselves <i>Banari</i>, which meant 'come from over sea.'
+Their dialect was almost identical with what he had heard
+spoken in Florida. They were cannibals, but of a peculiar
+kind. Human flesh was not their ordinary food; but they
+'boucanned' or dried the limbs of distinguished enemies
+whom they had killed in, battle, and handed them round to
+be gnawed at special festivals. They were a light-hearted,
+pleasant race, capital shots with bows and arrows, and ready
+to do anything he asked in return for brandy. They killed a
+hammer shark for his amusement by diving under the monster
+and stabbing him with knives. As to their religion, they had
+no objection to anything. But their real belief was in a sort
+of devil.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Soon after Labat's visit the French came in, drove the
+Caribs into the mountains, introduced negro slaves, and an
+ordered form of society. Madame Ouvernard and her court
+went to their own place. Canes were planted, and indigo and
+coffee. A cathedral was built at Roseau, and parish churches
+were scattered about the island. There were convents of
+nuns and houses of friars, and a fort at the port with a garrison
+in it. The French might have been there till now had not we
+turned them out some ninety years ago; English enterprise
+then setting in that direction under the impulse of Rodney's
+victories. I was myself about to see the improvements
+which we had introduced into an acquisition which had cost
+us so dear.</p>
+
+<p>I was to be dropped at Roseau by the mail steamer from
+Barbadoes to St. Thomas's. On our way we touched at
+St. Lucia, another once famous possession of ours. This
+island was once French also. Rodney took it in 1778. It
+was the only one of the Antilles which was left to us in the
+reverses which followed the capitulation of York Town. It
+was in the harbour at Castries, the chief port, that Rodney
+collected the fleet which fought and won the great battle with
+the Count de Grasse. At the peace of Versailles, St. Lucia
+was restored to France; but was retaken in 1796 by Sir
+Ralph Abercrombie, and, like Dominica, has ever since
+belonged to England. This, too, is a beautiful mountainous
+island, twice as large as Barbadoes, in which even at this
+late day we have suddenly discovered that we have an
+interest. The threatened Darien canal has awakened us to
+a sense that we require a fortified coaling station in those
+quarters. St. Lucia has the greatest natural advantages for
+such a purpose, and works are already in progress there,
+and the long-deserted forts and barracks which had been
+made over to snakes and lizards, are again to be occupied
+by English troops.</p>
+
+<p>We sailed one evening from Barbadoes. In the grey of
+the next morning we were in the passage between St. Lucia
+and St. Vincent just under the 'Pitons,' which were soaring<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
+grandly above us in the twilight. The Pitons are two conical
+mountains rising straight out of the sea at the southern end of
+St. Lucia, one of them 3,000 feet high, the other a few feet
+lower, symmetrical in shape like sugar loaves, and so steep as
+to be inaccessible to any one but a member of the Alpine
+Club. Tradition says that four English seamen, belonging to
+the fleet, did once set out to climb the loftier of the two.
+They were watched in their ascent through a telescope.
+When halfway up one of them was seen to drop, while three
+went on; a few hundred feet higher a second dropped, and
+afterwards a third; one had almost reached the summit, when
+he fell also. No account of what had befallen them ever
+reached their ship. They were supposed to have been bitten
+by the fer de lance, the deadliest snake in St. Lucia and
+perhaps in the world, who had resented and punished their
+intrusion into regions where they had no business. Such
+is the local legend, born probably out of the terror of a
+reptile which is no legend at all, but a living and very
+active reality.</p>
+
+<p>I had gone on deck on hearing where we were, and saw
+the twin grey peaks high above me in the sky, the last stars
+glimmering over their tops and the waves washing against
+the black precipices at their base. The night had been
+rough, and a considerable sea was running, which changed,
+however, to an absolute calm when we had passed the Pitons
+and were under the lee of the island. I could then observe
+the peculiar blue of the water which I was told that I should
+find at St. Lucia and Dominica. I have seen the sea of
+very beautiful colours in several parts of the world, but I
+never saw any which equalled this. I do not know the cause.
+The depth is very great even close to the shore. The islands
+are merely volcanic mountains with sides extremely steep.
+The coral insect has made anchorages in the bays and inlets;
+elsewhere you are out of soundings almost immediately.
+As to St. Lucia itself, if I had not seen Grenada, if I had not
+known what I was about to see in Dominica, I should have
+thought it the most exquisite place which nature had ever<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>
+made, so perfect were the forms of the forest-clothed hills,
+the glens dividing them and the high mountain ranges in the
+interior still draped in the white mist of morning. Here and
+there along the shore there were bright green spots which
+meant cane fields. Sugar cane in these countries is always
+called for brevity <i>cane</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Here, as elsewhere, the population is almost entirely negro,
+forty thousand blacks and a few hundred whites, the ratio
+altering every year to white disadvantage. The old system
+has not, however, disappeared as completely as in other
+places. There are still white planters with large estates,
+which are not encumbered as in Barbadoes. They are
+struggling along, discontented of course, but not wholly
+despondent. The chief complaint is the somewhat weary
+one of the laziness of the blacks, who they say will work only
+when they please, and are never fully awake except at dinner
+time. I do not know that they have a right to expect anything
+else from poor creatures whom the law calls human,
+but who to them are only mechanical tools, not so manageable
+as tools ought to be, with whom they have no acquaintance
+and no human relations, whose wages are but twopence
+an hour and are diminished by fines at the arbitrary pleasure
+of the overseer.</p>
+
+<p>Life and hope and energy are the qualities most needed.
+When the troops return there will be a change, and spirit
+may be put into them again. Castries, the old French town,
+lies at the head of a deep inlet which runs in among the
+mountains like a fiord. This is to be the future coaling
+station. The mouth of the bay is narrow with a high projecting
+'head' on either side of it, and can be easily and
+cheaply fortified. There is little or no tide in these seas.
+There is depth of water sufficient in the greater part of the
+harbour for line-of-battle ships to anchor and turn, and the
+few coral shoals which would be in the way are being torn
+up with dredging machines. The island has borrowed
+seventy thousand pounds on Government security to prepare
+for the dignity which awaits it and for the prosperity which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>
+is to follow. There was real work actively going on, a rare
+and perhaps unexampled phenomenon in the English West
+Indies.</p>
+
+<p>We brought up alongside of a wharf to take in coal. It was
+a strange scene; cocoa-nut palms growing incongruously out
+of coal stores, and gorgeous flowering creepers climbing over
+the workmen's sheds. Volumes of smoke rose out of the
+dredging engines and hovered over the town. We had come
+back to French costume again; we had left the white dresses
+behind at Barbadoes, and the people at Castries were bright as
+parrots in crimsons and blues and greens; but fine colours
+looked oddly out of place by the side of the grimy reproduction
+of England.</p>
+
+<p>I went on shore and fell in with the engineer of the works,
+who kindly showed me his plans of the harbour, and explained
+what was to be done. He showed me also some beautiful
+large bivalves which had been brought up in the scrapers
+out of the coral. They were new to me and new to him,
+though they may be familiar enough to more experienced
+naturalists. Among other curiosities he had a fer de lance,
+lately killed and preserved in spirits, a rat-tailed, reddish,
+powerful-looking brute, about four feet long and as thick
+as a child's wrist. Even when dead I looked at him respectfully,
+for his bite is fatal and the effect almost instantaneous.
+He is fearless, and will not, like most snakes, get out of your
+way if he hears you coming, but leaves you to get out of his.
+He has a bad habit, too, of taking his walks at night; he
+prefers a path or a road to the grass, and your house or your
+garden to the forest; while if you step upon him you will
+never do it again. They have introduced the mongoose, who
+has cleared the snakes out of Jamaica, to deal with him; but
+the mongoose knows the creature that he has to encounter,
+and as yet has made little progress in extirpating him.</p>
+
+<p>St. Lucia is under the jurisdiction of Barbadoes. It has no
+governor of its own, but only an administrator indifferently
+paid. The elective principle has not yet been introduced into
+the legislature, and perhaps will not be introduced since we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>
+have discovered the island to be of consequence to us, unless
+as part of some general confederation. The present administrator&mdash;Mr.
+Laborde, a gentleman, I suppose, of French
+descent&mdash;is an elderly official, and resides in the old quarters
+of the general of the forces, 900 feet above the sea. He
+has large responsibilities, and, having had large experience
+also, seems fully equal to the duties which attach to him. He
+cannot have the authority of a complete governor, or undertake
+independent enterprises for the benefit of the island,
+as a Rajah Brooke might do, but he walks steadily on in
+the lines assigned to him. St. Lucia is better off in this
+respect than most of the Antilles, and may revive perhaps
+into something like prosperity when the coaling station is
+finished and under the command of some eminent engineer
+officer.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Laborde had invited us to lunch with him. Horses were
+waiting for us, and we rode up the old winding track which
+led from the town to the barracks. The heat below was
+oppressive, but the air cooled as we rose. The road is so
+steep that resting places had been provided at intervals, where
+the soldiers could recover breath or shelter themselves from
+the tropical cataracts of rain which fall without notice, as
+if the string had been pulled of some celestial shower bath.
+The trees branched thickly over it, making an impenetrable
+shade, till we emerged on the plateau at the top, where we were
+on comparatively level ground, with the harbour immediately at
+our feet. The situation had been chosen by the French when
+St. Lucia was theirs. The general's house, now Mr. Laborde's
+residence, is a long airy building with a deep colonnade,
+the drawing and dining rooms occupying the entire breadth of
+the ground floor, with doors and windows on both sides for
+coolness and air. The western front overlooked the sea.
+Behind were wooded hills, green valleys, a mountain range in
+the background, and the Pitons blue in the distance. As we
+were before our time, Mr. Laborde walked me out to see the
+old barracks, magazines, and water tanks. They looked neglected
+and dilapidated, the signs of decay being partly hid<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>
+by the creepers with which the walls were overgrown. The
+soldiers' quarters were occupied for the time by a resident
+gentleman, who attended to the essential repairs and prevented
+the snakes from taking possession as they were inclined
+to do. I forget how many of the fer de lance sort he told me
+he had killed in the rooms since he had lived in them.</p>
+
+<p>In the war time we had maintained a large establishment in
+St. Lucia; with what consequences to the health of the troops
+I could not clearly make out. One informant told me that
+they had died like flies of yellow fever, and that the fields
+adjoining were as full of bodies as the Brompton cemetery;
+another that yellow fever had never been known there or
+any dangerous disorder; and that if we wanted a sanitary
+station this was the spot for it. Many thousands of pounds
+will have to be spent there before the troops can return;
+but that is our way with the colonies&mdash;to change our minds
+every ten years, to do and undo, and do again, according to
+parliamentary humours, while John Bull pays the bill patiently
+for his own irresolution.</p>
+
+<p>The fortress, once very strong, is now in ruins, but, I
+suppose, will be repaired and rearmed unless we are to trust
+to the Yankees, who are supposed to have established a <i>Pax
+Dei</i> in these waters and will permit no aggressive action there
+either by us or against us. We walked round the walls; we
+saw the hill a mile off from which Abercrombie had battered
+out the French, having dragged his guns through a roadless
+forest to a spot to which there seemed no access except on
+wings. The word 'impossible' was not known in those days.
+What Englishmen did once they may do again perhaps if
+stormy days come back. The ruins themselves were silently
+impressive. One could hear the note of the old bugles as
+they sounded the reveille and the roaring of the <i>feu de joie</i>
+when the shattered prizes were brought in from the French
+fleet. The signs of what once had been were still visible
+in the parade ground, in the large mangoes which the soldiers
+had planted, in the English grass which they had introduced
+and on which cattle were now grazing. There was a clump of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>
+guavas, hitherto only known to me in preserves. I gathered
+a blossom as a remembrance, white like a large myrtle flower,
+but heavily scented&mdash;too heavily, with an odour of death
+about it.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Laborde's conversation was instructive. His entertainment
+of us was all which our acquired West Indian
+fastidiousness could desire. The inevitable cigars followed,
+and Mr. L. gave me a beating at billiards. There were some
+lively young ladies in the party, and two or three of the ship's
+officers. The young ones played lawn tennis, and we old
+ones looked on and wished the years off our shoulders. So
+passed the day. The sun was setting when we mounted to
+ride down. So short is the twilight in these latitudes, that it
+was dark night when we reached the town, and we required
+the light of the stars to find our boat.</p>
+
+<p>When the coaling process was finished, the ship had been
+washed down in our absence and was anchored off beyond the
+reach of the dirt; but the ports were shut; the windsails had
+been taken down; the air in the cabins was stifling; so I
+stayed on deck till midnight with a clever young American,
+who was among our fellow-passengers, talking of many things.
+He was ardent, confident, self-asserting, but not disagreeably
+either one or the other. It was rather a pleasure to hear a man
+speak in these flabby uncertain days as if he were sure of anything,
+and I had to notice again, as I had often noticed
+before, how well informed casual American travellers are on
+public affairs, and how sensibly they can talk of them. He had
+been much in the West Indies and seemed to know them well.
+He said that all the whites in the islands wished at the bottom
+of their hearts to be taken into the Union; but the Union
+Government was too wise to meddle with them. The trade
+would fall to America of itself. The responsibility and trouble
+might remain where it was. I asked him about the Canadian
+fishery dispute. He thought it would settle itself in time, and
+that nothing serious would come of it. 'The Washington
+Cabinet had been a little hard on England,' he admitted; 'but
+it was six of one and half a dozen of the other.' 'Honours<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+were easy; neither party could score.' 'We had been equally
+hard on them about Alaska.'</p>
+
+<p>He was less satisfied about Ireland. The telegraph had
+brought the news of Mr. Goschen's defeat at Liverpool, and
+Home Rule, which had seemed to have been disposed of,
+was again within the range of probabilities. He was watching
+with pitying amusement, like most of his countrymen, the
+weakness of will with which England allowed herself to be
+worried by so contemptible a business; but he did seem to
+fear, and I have heard others of his countrymen say the same,
+that if we let it go on much longer the Americans may become
+involved in the thing one way or another, and trouble may
+rise about it between the two countries.</p>
+
+<p>We weighed; and I went to bed and to sleep, and so missed
+Pigeon Island, where Rodney's fleet lay before the action, and
+the rock from which, through his telescope, he watched De
+Grasse come out of Martinique, and gave his own signal to
+chase. We rolled as usual between the islands. At daylight
+we were again in shelter under Martinique, and again in classic
+regions; for close to us was Diamond Rock&mdash;once his
+Majesty's ship 'Diamond,' commissioned with crew and officers&mdash;one
+of those curious true incidents, out of which a legend
+might have grown in other times, that ship and mariners had
+been turned to stone. The rock, a lonely pyramid six hundred
+feet high, commanded the entrance to Port Royal in Martinique.
+Lord Howe took possession of it, sent guns up in
+slings to the top, and left a midshipman with a handful of men
+in charge. The gallant little fellow held his fortress for several
+months, peppered away at the French, and sent three of their
+ships of war to the bottom. He was blockaded at last by an
+overwhelming force. No relief could be spared for him.
+Escape was impossible, as he had not so much as a boat, and
+he capitulated to famine.</p>
+
+<p>We stayed two hours under Martinique. I did not land.
+It has been for centuries a special object of care on the part of
+the French Government. It is well looked after, and, considering
+the times, prosperous. It has a fine garrison, and a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>
+dockyard well furnished, with frigates in the harbours ready for
+action should occasion arise. I should infer from what I heard
+that in the event of war breaking out between England and
+France, Martinique, in the present state of preparation on both
+sides, might take possession of the rest of the Antilles with
+little difficulty. Three times we took it, and we gave it back
+again. In turn, it may one day, perhaps, take us, and the
+English of the West Indies become a tradition like the
+buccaneers.</p>
+
+<p>The mountains of Dominica are full in sight from Martinique.
+The channel which separates them is but thirty miles
+across, and the view of Dominica as you approach it is
+extremely grand. Grenada, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, Martinique
+are all volcanic, with lofty peaks and ridges; but
+Dominica was at the centre of the force which lifted the
+Antilles out of the ocean, and the features which are common
+to all are there in a magnified form. The mountains range
+from four to five thousand feet in height. Mount Diablot,
+the highest of them, rises to between five and six thousand
+feet. The mountains being the tallest in all the group, the
+rains are also the most violent, and the ravines torn out by
+the torrents are the wildest and most magnificent. The volcanic
+forces are still active there. There are sulphur springs
+and boiling water fountains, and in a central crater there is a
+boiling lake. There are strange creatures there besides: great
+snakes&mdash;harmless, but ugly to look at; the diablot&mdash;from
+which the mountain takes its name&mdash;a great bird, black as
+charcoal, half raven, half parrot, which nests in holes in the
+ground as puffins do, spends all the day in them, and flies
+down to the sea at night to fish for its food. There were once
+great numbers of these creatures, and it was a favourite amusement
+to hunt and drag them out of their hiding places.
+Labat says that they were excellent eating. They are confined
+now in reduced numbers to the inaccessible crags about
+the peak which bears their name.</p>
+
+<p>Martinique has two fine harbours. Dominica has none.
+At the north end of the island there is a bay, named after Prince<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>
+Rupert, where there is shelter from all winds but the south,
+but neither there nor anywhere is there an anchorage which
+can be depended upon in dangerous weather.</p>
+
+<p>Roseau, the principal or only town, stands midway along the
+western shore. The roadstead is open, but as the prevailing
+winds are from the east the island itself forms a breakwater.
+Except on the rarest occasions there is neither surf nor swell
+there. The land shelves off rapidly, and a gunshot from shore
+no cable can find the bottom, but there is an anchorage in
+front of the town, and coasting smacks, American schooners,
+passing steamers bring up close under the rocks or alongside of
+the jetties which are built out from the beach upon piles.</p>
+
+<p>The situation of Roseau is exceedingly beautiful. The sea
+is, if possible, a deeper azure even than at St. Lucia; the air
+more transparent; the forests of a lovelier green than I ever
+saw in any other country. Even the rain, which falls in such
+abundance, falls often out of a clear sky as if not to interrupt
+the sunshine, and a rainbow almost perpetually hangs its arch
+over the island. Roseau itself stands on a shallow promontory.
+A long terrace of tolerable-looking houses faces the
+landing place. At right angles to the terrace, straight streets
+strike backwards at intervals, palms and bananas breaking the
+lines of roof. At a little distance, you see the towers of the
+old French Catholic cathedral, a smaller but not ungraceful-looking
+Anglican church, and to the right a fort, or the ruins
+of one, now used as a police barrack, over which flies the
+English flag as the symbol of our titular dominion. Beyond
+the fort is a public garden with pretty trees in it along the
+brow of a precipitous cliff, at the foot of which, when we
+landed, lay at anchor a couple of smart Yankee schooners and
+half a dozen coasting cutters, while rounding inwards behind
+was a long shallow bay dotted over with the sails of fishing
+boats. White negro villages gleamed among the palms along
+the shore, and wooded mountains rose immediately above them.
+It seemed an attractive, innocent, sunny sort of place, very
+pleasant to spend a few days in, if the inner side of things
+corresponded to the appearance. To a looker-on at that calm<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>
+scene it was not easy to realise the desperate battles which had
+been fought for the possession of it, the gallant lives which had
+been laid down under the walls of that crumbling castle.
+These cliffs had echoed the roar of Rodney's guns on the day
+which saved the British Empire, and the island I was gazing
+at was England's Salamis.</p>
+
+<p>The organisation of the place, too, seemed, so far as I could
+gather from official books, to have been carefully attended to.
+The constitution had been touched and retouched by the home
+authorities as if no pains could be too great to make it worthy
+of a spot so sacred. There is an administrator, which is a
+longer word than governor. There is an executive council, a
+colonial secretary, an attorney-general, an auditor-general, and
+other such 'generals of great charge.' There is a legislative
+assembly of fourteen members, seven nominated by the Crown
+and seven elected by the people. And there are revenue
+officers and excise officers, inspectors of roads, and civil
+engineers, and school boards, and medical officers, and registrars,
+and magistrates. Where would political perfection be
+found if not here with such elaborate machinery?</p>
+
+<p>The results of it all, in the official reports, seemed equally
+satisfactory till you looked closely into them. The tariff of
+articles on which duties were levied, and the list of articles raised
+and exported, seemed to show that Dominica must be a beehive
+of industry and productiveness. The revenue, indeed, was a
+little startling as the result of this army of officials. Eighteen
+thousand pounds was the whole of it, scarcely enough to pay
+their salaries. The population, too, on whose good government
+so much thought had been expended, was only 30,000; of
+these 30,000 only a hundred were English. The remaining
+whites, and those in scanty numbers, were French and principally
+Catholics. The soil was as rich as the richest in the world.
+The cultivation was growing annually less. The inspector of
+roads was likely to have an easy task, for except close to the
+town there were no roads at all on which anything with wheels
+could travel, the old roads made by the French having dropped
+into horse tracks, and the horse tracks into the beds of torrents.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>
+Why in an island where the resources of modern statesmanship
+had been applied so lavishly and with the latest discoveries in
+political science, the effect should have so ill corresponded to
+the means employed, was a problem into which it would be
+curious to inquire.</p>
+
+<p>The steamer set me down upon the pier and went on upon
+its way. At the end of a fortnight it would return and pick
+me up again. Meanwhile, I was to make the best of my
+time. I had been warned beforehand that there was no hotel
+in Roseau where an Englishman with a susceptible skin and
+palate could survive more than a week; and as I had two weeks
+to provide for, I was uncertain what to do with myself. I was
+spared the trial of the hotels by the liberality of her Majesty's
+representative in the colony. Captain Churchill, the administrator
+of the island, had heard that I was coming there, and I was met
+on the landing stage by a message from him inviting me to be his
+guest during my stay. Two tall handsome black girls seized
+my bags, tossed them on their heads, and strode off with a light
+step in front of me, cutting jokes with their friends; I following,
+and my mind misgiving me that I was myself the object
+of their wit.</p>
+
+<p>I was anxious to see Captain Churchill, for I had heard much
+of him. The warmest affection had been expressed for him
+personally, and concern for the position in which he was placed.
+Notwithstanding 'the latest discoveries of political science,'
+the constitution was still imperfect. The administrator, to
+begin with, is allowed a salary of only 500<i>l.</i> a year. That is not
+much for the chief of such an army of officials; and the hospitalities
+and social civilities which smooth the way in such
+situations are beyond his means. His business is to preside at
+the council, where, the official and the elected members being
+equally balanced and almost invariably dividing one against
+the other, his duty is to give the casting vote. He cannot give
+it against his own officers, and thus the machine is contrived
+to create the largest amount of friction, and to insure the highest
+amount of unpopularity to the administrator. His situation is
+the more difficult because the European element in Roseau,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>
+small as it is at best, is more French than English. The
+priests, the sisterhoods, are French or French-speaking. A
+French patois is the language of the blacks. They are almost
+to a man Catholics, and to the French they look as their natural
+leaders. England has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to
+introduce her own civilisation; and thus Dominica is English
+only in name. Should war come, a boatload of soldiers from
+Martinique would suffice to recover it. Not a black in the
+whole island would draw a trigger in defence of English
+authority, and, except the Crown officials, not half a dozen
+Europeans. The administrator can do nothing to improve
+this state of things. He is too poor to open Government
+House to the Roseau shopkeepers and to bid for social popularity.
+He is no one. He goes in and out unnoticed, and
+flits about like a bat in the twilight. He can do no good, and
+from the nature of the system on the construction of which so
+much care was expended, no one else can do any good. The
+maximum of expense, the minimum of benefit to the island, is
+all that has come of it.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the island drifts along, without credit to borrow
+money and therefore escaping bankruptcy. The blacks there,
+as everywhere, are happy with their yams, and cocoa nuts and
+land crabs. They desire nothing better than they have, and
+do not imagine that they have any rulers unless agitated by the
+elected members. These gentlemen would like the official
+situations for themselves as in Trinidad, and they occasionally
+attempt a stir with partial success; otherwise the island goes
+on in a state of torpid content. Captain Churchill, quiet and
+gentlemanlike, gives no personal offence, but popularity he
+cannot hope for, having no means of recommending himself.
+The only really powerful Europeans are the Catholic bishop
+and the priests and sisterhoods. They are looked up to with
+genuine respect. They are reaping the harvest of the long and
+honourable efforts of the French clergy in all their West Indian
+possessions to make the blacks into Catholic Christians. In
+the Christian part of it they have succeeded but moderately;
+but such religion as exists in the island is mainly what they have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+introduced and taught, and they have a distinct influence which
+we ourselves have not tried to rival.</p>
+
+<p>But we have been too long toiling up the paved road to
+Captain Churchill's house. My girl-porter guides led me past
+the fort, where they exchanged shots with the lounging black
+police, past the English church, which stood buried in trees,
+the churchyard prettily planted with tropical flowers. The
+sun was dazzling, the heat was intense, and the path which
+led through it, if not apparently much used, looked shady and
+cool.</p>
+
+<p>A few more steps brought us to the gate of the Residence,
+where Captain Churchill had his quarters in the absence of the
+Governor-in-Chief of the Leeward Islands, whose visits were
+few and brief. In the event of the Governor's arrival he
+removed to a cottage in the hills. The house was handsome,
+the gardens well kept; a broad walk led up to the door, a hedge
+of lime trees closely clipt on one side of it, on the other a lawn
+with orange trees, oleanders, and hibiscus, palms of all varieties
+and almond trees, which in Dominica grow into giants, their
+broad leaves turning crimson before they fall, like the Virginia
+creeper. We reached the entrance of the house by wide stone
+steps, where countless lizards were lazily basking. Through
+the bars of the railings on each side of them there were intertwined
+the runners of the largest and most powerfully scented
+stephanotis which I have ever seen. Captain Churchill (one of
+the Marlborough Churchills) received me with more than
+cordiality. Society is not abundant in his Barataria, and
+perhaps as coming from England I was welcome to him in his
+solitude. His wife, an English Creole&mdash;that is, of pure English
+blood, but born in the island&mdash;was as hospitable as her husband.
+They would not let me feel that I was a stranger, and set me
+at my ease in a moment with a warmth which was evidently
+unassumed. Captain C. was lame, having hurt his foot. In a
+day or two he hoped to be able to mount his horse again, when
+we were to ride together and see the curiosities. Meanwhile,
+he talked sorrowfully enough of his own situation and the
+general helplessness of it. A man whose feet are chained and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
+whose hands are in manacles is not to be found fault with if he
+cannot use either. He is not intended to use either. The
+duty of an administrator of Dominica, it appears, is to sit still
+and do nothing, and to watch the flickering in the socket of
+the last remains of English influence and authority. Individually
+he was on good terms with everyone, with the Catholic
+bishop especially, who, to his regret and mine, was absent at
+the time of my visit.</p>
+
+<p>His establishment was remarkable; it consisted of two black
+girls&mdash;a cook and a parlourmaid&mdash;who 'did everything;' and
+'everything,' I am bound to say, was done well enough to
+please the most fastidious nicety. The cooking was excellent.
+The rooms, which were handsomely furnished, were kept as
+well and in as good order as in the Churchills' ancestral palace
+at Blenheim. Dominica has a bad name for vermin. I had
+been threatened with centipedes and scorpions in my bedroom.
+I had been warned there, as everywhere in the West Indies,
+never to walk across the floor with bare feet, lest a land crab
+should lay hold of my toe or a jigger should bite a hole in it,
+lay its eggs there, and bring me into the hands of the surgeon.
+Never while I was Captain C.'s guest did I see either centipede,
+or scorpion, or jigger, or any other unclean beast in any
+room of which these girls had charge. Even mosquitoes did
+not trouble me, so skilfully and carefully they arranged the
+curtains. They were dressed in the fashion of the French
+islands, something like the Moorish slaves whom one sees in
+pictures of Eastern palaces. They flitted about silent on their
+shoeless feet, never stumbled, or upset chairs or plates or dishes,
+but waited noiselessly like a pair of elves, and were always in
+their place when wanted. One had heard much of the idleness
+and carelessness of negro servants. In no part of the globe
+have I ever seen household work done so well by two pairs of
+hands. Of their morals I know nothing. It is usually said
+that negro girls have none. They appeared to me to be perfectly
+modest and innocent. I asked in wonder what wages
+were paid to these black fairies, believing that at no price at all
+could the match of them be found in England. I was informed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+that they had three shillings a week each, and 'found themselves,'
+i.e. found their own food and clothes. And this was
+above the usual rate, as Government House was expected to
+be liberal. The scale of wages may have something to do
+with the difficulty of obtaining labour in the West Indies. I
+could easily believe the truth of what I had been often told,
+that free labour is more economical to the employer than slave
+labour.</p>
+
+<p>The views from the drawing room windows were enchantingly
+beautiful. It is not the form only in these West Indian
+landscapes, or the colour only, but form and colour seen
+through an atmosphere of very peculiar transparency. On
+one side we looked up a mountain gorge, the slopes covered
+with forest; a bold lofty crag jutting out from them brown
+and bare, and the mountain ridge behind half buried in mist.
+From the other window we had the Botanical Gardens, the
+bay beyond them sparkling in the sunshine, and on the farther
+side of it, a few miles off, an island fortress which the Marquis
+de Bouill&eacute;, of Revolution notoriety, took from the English in
+1778. The sea stretched out blue and lovely under the fringe of
+sand, box trees, and almonds which grew along the edge of the
+cliff. The air was perfumed by white acacia flowers sweeter
+than orange blossom.</p>
+
+<p>Captain C. limped down with me into the gardens for a
+fuller look at the scene. Dusky fishermen were busy with
+their nets catching things like herrings, which come in daily
+to the shore to escape the monsters which prey upon them.
+Canoes on the old Carib pattern were slipping along outside,
+trailing lines for kingfish and bonitos. Others were setting
+baskets, like enormous lobster pots or hoop nets&mdash;such as we
+use to catch tench in English ponds&mdash;these, too, a legacy from
+the Caribs, made of strong tough cane. At the foot of the
+cliff were the smart American schooners which I had seen on
+landing&mdash;broad-beamed, shallow, low in the water with heavy
+spars, which bring Yankee 'notions' to the islands and carry
+back to New York bananas and limes and pineapples. There
+they were, models of Tom Cringle's 'Wave,' airy as English<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>
+yachts, and equal to anything from a smuggling cruise to a
+race for a cup. I could have gazed for ever, so beautiful, so
+new, so like a dream it was, had I not been brought back
+swiftly to prose and reality. Suddenly out of a clear sky,
+without notice, and without provocation, first a few drops of
+rain fell, and then a deluge which set the gutters running.
+We had to scuttle home under our umbrellas. I was told,
+and I discovered afterwards by fuller experience, that this
+was the way in Dominica, and that if I went out anywhere I
+must be prepared for it. In our retreat we encountered a
+distinguished-looking abb&eacute; with a collar and a gold cross, who
+bowed to my companion. I would gladly have been introduced
+to him, but neither he nor we had leisure for courtesies in the
+torrent which was falling upon us.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_10" id="Footnote_1_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_10"><span class="label">[11</span></a> Not to be confounded with St. Domingo, which is called after St.
+Domenic, where the Spaniards first settled, and is now divided into the
+two black republics of St. Domingo and Hayti. Dominica lies in the
+chain of the Antilles between Martinique and Guadaloupe, and was so
+named by Columbus because he discovered it on a Sunday.</p></div></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Curiosities in Dominica&mdash;Nights in the tropics&mdash;English and Catholic
+churches&mdash;The market place at Roseau&mdash;Fishing extraordinary&mdash;A
+storm&mdash;Dominican boatmen&mdash;Morning walks&mdash;Effects of the Leeward
+Islands Confederation&mdash;An estate cultivated as it ought to be&mdash;A mountain
+ride&mdash;Leave the island&mdash;Reflections.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>There was much to be seen in Dominica of the sort which
+travellers go in search of. There was the hot sulphur spring
+in the mountains; there was the hot lake; there was another
+volcanic crater, a hollow in the centre of the island now filled
+with water and surrounded with forest; there were the Caribs,
+some thirty families of them living among thickets, through
+which paths must be cut before we could reach them. We
+could undertake nothing till Captain C. could ride again.
+Distant expeditions can only be attempted on horses. They
+are bred to the work. They climb like cats, and step out
+safely where a fall or a twisted ankle would be the probable
+consequence of attempting to go on foot. Meanwhile, Roseau
+itself was to be seen and the immediate neighbourhood, and
+this I could manage for myself.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>My first night was disturbed by unfamiliar noises and strange
+imaginations. I escaped mosquitoes through the care of the
+black fairies. But mosquito curtains will not keep out sounds,
+and when the fireflies had put out their lights there began the
+singular chorus of tropical midnight. Frogs, lizards, bats,
+croaked, sang, and whistled with no intermission, careless
+whether they were in discord or harmony. The palm branches
+outside my window swayed in the land breeze, and the dry
+branches rustled crisply, as if they were plates of silver. At
+intervals came cataracts of rain, and above all the rest the
+deep boom of the cathedral bell tolling out the hours like a
+note of the Old World. The Catholic clergy had brought the
+bells with them as they had brought their faith into these new
+lands. It was pathetic, it was ominous music; for what had
+we done and what were we doing to set beside it in the century
+for which the island had been ours? Towards morning I
+heard the tinkle of the bell of the convent adjoining the garden
+calling the nuns to matins. Happily in the tropics hot nights
+do not imply an early dawn. The darkness lingers late, sleep
+comes at last and drowns our fancies in forgetfulness.</p>
+
+<p>The swimming bath was immediately under my room. I
+ventured into it with some trepidation. The basement story
+in most West Indian houses is open, to allow the air free
+passage under them. The space thus left vacant is used for
+lumber and rubbish, and, if scorpions or snakes are in the
+neighbourhood, is the place where one would look for them.
+There the bath was. I had been advised to be careful, and as
+it was dark this was not easy. The fear, however, was worse
+than the reality. Awkward encounters do happen if one is
+long in these countries; but they are rare, and seldom befall
+the accidental visitor; and the plunge into fresh water is so
+delicious that one is willing to risk the chance.</p>
+
+<p>I wandered out as soon as the sun was over the horizon.
+The cool of the morning is the time to see the people. The
+market girls were streaming into the town with their baskets
+of vegetables on their heads. The fishing boats were out
+again on the bay. Our Anglican church had its bell too as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>
+well as the cathedral. The door was open, and I went in and
+found a decent-looking clergyman preparing a flock of seven
+or eight blacks and mulattoes for the Communion. He was
+taking them through their catechism, explaining very properly,
+that religion meant doing one's duty, and that it was not
+enough to profess particular opinions. Dominica being
+Roman Catholic, and Roman Catholics not generally appreciating
+or understanding the claims of Anglicans to the
+possession of the sacraments, he pointed out where the difference
+lay. He insisted that we had priests as well as they;
+we had confession; we had absolution; only our priests did
+not claim, as the Catholics did, a direct power in themselves
+to forgive sins. Their office was to tell sinners that if they
+truly and sincerely repented and amended their lives God
+would forgive them. What he said was absolutely true; but
+I could not see in the dim faces of the catechumens that
+the distinction was particularly intelligible to them. If they
+thought at all, they probably reflected that no divinely constituted
+successor of the Apostles was needed to communicate
+a truism which every sensible person was equally able and
+entitled to tell them. Still the good earnest man meant well,
+and I wished him more success in his missionary enterprise
+than he was likely to find.</p>
+
+<p>From the Church of England to the great rival establishment
+was but a few minutes' walk. The cathedral was five times as
+large, at least, as the building which I had just left&mdash;old in
+age, old in appearance, with the usual indifferent pictures or
+coloured prints, with the usual decorated altar, but otherwise
+simple and venerable. There was no service going on, for it
+was a week-day; a few old men and women only were silently
+saying their prayers. On Sundays I was told that it was overflowing.
+The negro morals are as emancipated in Dominica
+as in the rest of the West Indies. Obeah is not forgotten;
+and along with the Catholic religion goes on an active belief
+in magic and witchcraft. But their religion is not necessarily
+a sham to them; it was the same in Europe in the ages of
+faith. Even in enlightened Protestant countries people calling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
+themselves Christians believe that the spirits of the dead can
+be called up to amuse an evening party. The blacks in this
+respect are no worse than their white kinsmen. The priests
+have a genuine human hold upon them; they baptize the
+children; they commit the dead to the cemetery with the
+promise of immortality; they are personally loved and respected:
+and when a young couple marry, as they seldom but
+occasionally do, it is to the priest that they apply to tie them
+together.</p>
+
+<p>From the cathedral I wandered through the streets of
+Roseau; they had been well laid out; the streets themselves,
+and the roads leading to them from the country, had been
+carefully paved, and spoke of a time when the town had been
+full of life and vigour. But the grass was growing between the
+stones, and the houses generally were dilapidated and dirty.
+A few massive stone buildings there were, on which time and
+rain had made no impression; but these probably were all
+French&mdash;built long ago, perhaps in the days of Labat and
+Madame Ouvernard. The English hand had struck the island
+with paralysis. The British flag was flying over the fort, but
+for once I had no pride in looking at it. The fort itself was
+falling to pieces, like the fort at Grenada. The stones on the
+slope on which it stands had run with the blood which we
+spilt in the winning of it. Dominica had then been regarded
+as the choicest jewel in the necklace of the Antilles. For the
+last half-century we have left it to desolation, as a child leaves
+a plaything that it is tired of.</p>
+
+<p>In Roseau, as in most other towns, the most interesting
+spot is the market. There you see the produce of the soil;
+there you see the people that produce it; and you see them,
+not on show, as in church on Sundays, but in their active
+working condition. The market place at Roseau is a large
+square court close to the sea, well paved, surrounded, by warehouses,
+and luxuriantly shaded by large overhanging trees.
+Under these trees were hundreds of black women, young and
+old, with their fish and fowls, and fruit and bread, their yams
+and sweet potatoes, their oranges and limes and plantains.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>
+They had walked in from the country five or ten miles before
+sunrise with their loaded baskets on their heads. They would
+walk back at night with flour or salt fish, or oil, or whatever
+they happened to want. I did not see a single sullen face
+among them. Their figures were unconscious of lacing, and
+their feet of the monstrosities which we call shoes. They
+moved with the lightness and elasticity of leopards. I thought
+that I had never seen in any drawing room in London so
+many perfectly graceful forms. They could not mend their
+faces, but even in some of these there was a swarthy beauty.
+The hair was hopeless, and they knew it, but they turn the
+defect into an ornament by the coloured handkerchief which
+they twist about their heads, leaving the ends flowing. They
+chattered like jackdaws about a church tower. Two or three
+of the best looking, seeing that I admired them a little, used
+their eyes and made some laughing remarks. They spoke in
+their French <i>patois</i>, clipping off the first and last syllables of
+the words. I but half understood them, and could not return
+their bits of wit. I can only say that if their habits were as
+loose as white people say they are, I did not see a single
+licentious expression either in face or manner. They seemed
+to me light-hearted, merry, innocent young women, as free
+from any thought of evil as the peasant girls in Brittany.</p>
+
+<p>Two middle-aged dames were in a state of violent excitement
+about some subject on which they differed in opinion.
+A ring gathered about them, and they declaimed at one
+another with fiery volubility. It did not go beyond words;
+but both were natural orators, throwing their heads back,
+waving their arms, limbs and chest quivering with emotion.
+There was no personal abuse, or disposition to claw each other.
+On both sides it was a rhetorical outpouring of emotional
+argument. One of them, a tall pure blood negress, black as if
+she had just landed from Guinea, began at last to get the best
+of it. Her gesticulations became more imposing. She shook
+her finger. <i>Mandez</i> this, she said, and <i>mandez</i> that, till she
+bore her antagonist down and sent her flying. The audience
+then melted away, and I left the conqueror standing alone
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>shooting a last volley at the retreating enemy and making
+passionate appeals to the universe. The subject of the discussion
+was a curious one. It was on the merits of race. The
+defeated champion had a taint of white blood in her. The
+black woman insisted that blacks were of pure breed, and
+whites were of pure breed. Mulattoes were mongrels, not
+creatures of God at all, but creatures of human wickedness.
+I do not suppose that the mulatto was convinced, but she
+accepted her defeat. The conqueror, it was quite clear, was
+satisfied that she had the best of the discussion, and that the
+hearers were of the same opinion.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/image0005.jpg" alt="MORNING WALK, DOMINICA." title="" /><br />
+<span class="caption">MORNING WALK, DOMINICA.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>From the market I stepped back upon the quay, where I
+had the luck to witness a novel form of fishing, the most
+singular I have ever fallen in with. I have mentioned the
+herring-sized white fish which come in upon the shores of the
+island. They travel, as most small fish do, in enormous shoals,
+and keep, I suppose, in the shallow waters to avoid the kingfish
+and bonitos, who are good judges in their way, and find these
+small creatures exceptionally excellent. The wooden pier ran
+out perhaps a hundred and fifty feet into the sea. It was a
+platform standing on piles, with openings in several places
+from which stairs led down to landing stages. The depth at
+the extremity was about five fathoms. There is little or no
+tide, the difference between high water and low being not more
+than a couple of feet. Looking down the staircases, I saw
+among the piles in the brilliantly clear water unnumbered thousands
+of the fish which I have described. The fishermen had
+carried a long net round the pier from shore to shore, completely
+inclosing it. The fish were shut in, and had no means
+of escape except at the shore end, where boys were busy
+driving them back with stones; but how the net was to be
+drawn among the piles, or what was to be done next, I was
+curious to learn. I was not left long to conjecture. A circular
+bag net was produced, made of fine strong thread, coloured a
+light green, and almost invisible in the sea. When it was
+spread, one side could be left open and could be closed at will
+by a running line from above. This net was let carefully down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>
+between the piles, and was immediately swollen out by the current
+which runs along the coast into a deep bag. Two young
+blacks then dived; one saw them swimming about under
+water like sharks, hunting the fish before them as a dog would
+hunt a flock of sheep. Their companions, who were watching
+from the platform, waited till they saw as many driven into the
+purse of the inner net as they could trust the meshes to bear
+the weight of. The cord was then drawn. The net was
+closed. Net and all that it contained were hoisted into a boat,
+carried ashore and emptied. The net itself was then brought
+back and spread again for a fresh haul. In this way I saw as
+many fish caught as would have filled a large cart. The contrivance,
+I believe, is one more inheritance from the Caribs,
+whom Labat describes as doing something of a similar kind.</p>
+
+<p>Another small incident happened a day or two after, which
+showed the capital stuff of which the Dominican boatmen and
+fishermen are made. They build their own vessels large and
+small, and sail them themselves, not afraid of the wildest
+weather, and doing the local trade with Martinique and
+Guadaloupe. Four of these smacks, cutter rigged, from ten to
+twenty tons burden, I had seen lying at anchor one evening
+with an American schooner under the gardens. In the night,
+the off-shore wind rose into one of those short violent tropical
+storms which if they lasted longer would be called hurricanes,
+but in these winter months are soon over. It came on at midnight,
+and lasted for two hours. The noise woke me, for the
+house shook, and the roar was like Niagara. It was too dark,
+however, to see anything. The tempest died away at last, and I
+slept till daybreak. My first thought on waking was for the
+smacks and the schooner Had they sunk at their moorings?
+Had they broken loose, or what had become of them? I got up
+and went down to the cliff to see. The damage to the trees had
+been less than I expected. A few torn branches lay on the lawn
+and the leaves were cast about, but the anchorage was empty.
+Every vessel of every sort and size was gone. There was still
+a moderate gale blowing. As the wind was off-shore the sea was
+tolerably smooth for a mile or two, but outside the waves were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>
+breaking violently, and the foam scuds were whirling off their
+crests. The schooner was about four miles off, beating back
+under storm canvas, making good weather of it and promising
+in a tack or two to recover the moorings. The smacks, being
+less powerful vessels, had been driven farther out to sea.
+Three of them I saw labouring heavily in the offing. The
+fourth I thought at first had disappeared altogether, but finally
+I made out a white speck on the horizon which I supposed to
+be the missing cutter. One of the first three presently
+dropped away to leeward, and I lost sight of her. The rest
+made their way back in good time. Towards the afternoon
+when the wind had gone down the two that remained came in
+after them, and before night they were all in their places again.</p>
+
+<p>The gale had struck them at about midnight. Their cables
+had parted, and they had been blown away to sea. The crews
+of the schooner and of three of the cutters were all on board.
+They got their vessels under command, and had been in no
+serious danger. In the fourth there was no one but a small
+black boy of the island. He had been asleep, and woke to find
+himself driving before the wind. In an hour or two he would
+have been beyond the shelter of the land, and in the high seas
+which were then running must have been inevitably swamped.
+The little fellow contrived in the darkness&mdash;no one could tell
+how&mdash;to set a scrap of his mainsail, get his staysail up, and in
+this condition to lie head to the wind. So handled, small cutters,
+if they have a deck over them, can ride out an ordinary
+gale in tolerable security. They drift, of course; in a hurricane
+the only safety is in yielding to it; but they make fair
+resistance, and the speed is checked. The most practical
+seaman could have done no better than this boy. He had to
+wait for help in the morning. He was not strong enough to
+set his canvas properly, and work his boat home. He would
+have been driven out at last, and as he had neither food nor
+water would have been starved had he escaped drowning. But
+his three consorts saw him. They knew how it was, and one
+of them went back to his assistance.</p>
+
+<p>I have known the fishing boys of the English Channel all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>
+my life; they are generally skilful, ready, and daring beyond
+their years; but I never knew one lad not more than thirteen
+or fourteen years old who, if woke out of his sleep by a hurricane
+in a dark night and alone, would have understood so well
+what to do, or have it done so effectually. There are plenty
+more of such black boys in Dominica, and they deserve a
+better fate than to be sent drifting before constitutional
+whirlwinds back into barbarism, because we, on whom their
+fate depends, are too ignorant or too careless to provide them
+with a tolerable government.</p>
+
+<p>The kind Captain Churchill, finding himself tied to his
+chair, and wishing to give me every assistance towards seeing
+the island, had invited a creole gentleman from the other side
+of it to stay a few days with us. Mr. F&mdash;&mdash;, a man about
+thirty, was one of the few survivors from among the planters;
+he had never been out of the West Indies, but was a man of
+honesty and intelligence, could use his eyes, and form sound
+judgments on subjects which immediately concerned him. I
+had studied Roseau for myself. With Mr. F&mdash;&mdash; for a companion,
+I made acquaintance with the environs. We started
+for our walks at daybreak, in the cool of the morning. We
+climbed cliffs, we rambled on the rich levels about the river,
+once amply cultivated, and even now the soil is luxuriant in
+neglect; a few canefields still survive, but most of them are
+turned to other uses, and you pass wherever you go the ruins
+of old mills, the massive foundations of ancient warehouses,
+huge hewn stones built and mortared well together, telling what
+once had been; the mango trees, which the owners had
+planted, waving green over the wrecks of their forgotten industry.
+Such industry as is now to be found is, as elsewhere
+in general, the industry of the black peasantry. It is the same
+as in Grenada: the whites, or the English part of them, have
+lost heart, and cease to struggle against the stream. A state
+of things more helplessly provoking was never seen. Skill and
+capital and labour have only to be brought to bear together,
+and the land might be a Garden of Eden. All precious fruits,
+and precious spices, and gums, and plants of rarest medicinal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>
+virtues will spring and grow and flourish for the asking. The
+limes are as large as lemons, and in the markets of the United
+States are considered the best in the world.</p>
+
+<p>As to natural beauty, the West Indian Islands are like
+Scott's novels, where we admire most the one which we have
+read the last. But Dominica bears the palm away from all of
+them. One morning Mr. F&mdash;&mdash; took me a walk up the Roseau
+river, an ample stream even in what is called the dry season,
+with deep pools full of eels and mullet. We entered among
+the hills which were rising steep above us. The valley grew
+deeper, or rather there were a series of valleys, gorges dense
+with forest, which had been torn out by the cataracts. The
+path was like the mule tracts of the Alps, cut in other days
+along the sides of the precipices with remnants of old conduits
+which supplied water to the mills below. Rich odorous
+acacias bent over us. The flowers, the trees, the birds, the
+insects, were a maze of perfume and loveliness. Occasionally
+some valley opposite the sun would be spanned by a rainbow
+as the rays shone through a morning shower out of the blue
+sky. We wandered on and on, wading through tributary
+brooks, stopping every minute to examine some new fern or
+plant, peasant women and children meeting us at intervals on
+their way into the town. There were trees to take shelter
+under when indispensable, which even the rain of Dominica
+could not penetrate. The levels at the bottom of the valleys
+and the lower slopes, where the soil was favourable, were carelessly
+planted with limes which were in full bearing. Small
+black boys and girls went about under the trees, gathering the
+large lemon-shaped fruit which lay on the ground thick as
+apples in a West of England orchard. Here was all this
+profusion of nature, lavish beyond example, and the enterprising
+youth of England were neglecting a colony which might
+yield them wealth beyond the treasures of the old sugar
+planters, going to Florida, to Texas, to South America, taking
+their energy and their capital to the land of the foreigner,
+leaving Dominica, which might be the garden of the world, a
+precious emerald set in the ring of their own Antilles, enriched<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>
+by the sacred memories of glorious English achievements, as
+if such a place had no existence. Dominica would surrender
+herself to-morrow with a light heart to France, to America, to
+any country which would accept the charge of her destinies.
+Why should she care any more for England, which has so
+little care for her? Beauties conscious of their charms do
+not like to be so thrown aside. There is no dislike to us
+among the blacks; they are indifferent, but even their indifference
+would be changed into loyalty if we made the slightest
+effort to recover it. The poor black was a faithful servant as
+long as he was a slave. As a freeman he is conscious of his
+inferiority at the bottom of his heart, and would attach himself
+to a rational white employer with at least as much fidelity
+as a spaniel. Like the spaniel, too, if he is denied the chance
+of developing under guidance the better qualities which are in
+him, he will drift back into a mangy cur.</p>
+
+<p>In no country ought a government to exist for which
+respect is impossible, and English rule as it exists in Dominica
+is a subject for a comedy. The Governor-General of the
+Leeward Islands resides in Antigua, and in theory ought to go
+on progress and visit in turn his subordinate dominions. His
+visits are rare as those of angels. The eminent person, who
+at present holds that high office, has been once in Nevis; and
+thrice in Dominica, but only for the briefest stay there.
+Perhaps he has held aloof in consequence of an adventure
+which befell a visiting governor some time ago on one of these
+occasions. When there is a constitution there is an opposition.
+If there are no grievances the opposition manufacture them,
+and the inhabitants of Roseau were persuaded that they were
+an oppressed people and required fuller liberties. I was
+informed that His Excellency had no sooner landed and taken
+possession of the Government House, than a mob of men and
+women gathered in the market place under the leadership of
+their elected representative. The girls that I had admired very
+likely made a part of it. They swarmed up into the gardens,
+they demonstrated under the windows, laughing, shouting, and
+petitioning. His Excellency first barricaded the doors, then<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>
+opened them and tried a speech, telling the dear creatures how
+much he loved and respected them. Probably they did not
+understand him, as few of them speak English. Producing no
+effect, he retreated again, barred the door once more, slipped
+out at a back entrance down a lane to the port, took refuge on
+board his steamer, and disappeared. So the story was told
+me&mdash;not by the administrator, who was not a man to turn
+English authority into ridicule&mdash;but by some one on the spot,
+who repeated the current report of the adventure. It may be
+exaggerated in some features, but it represents, at any rate,
+the feeling of the place towards the head representative of the
+existing government.</p>
+
+<p>I will mention another incident, said to have occurred still
+more recently to one of these great persons, very like what
+befell Sancho Panza in Barataria. This, too, may have been
+wickedly turned, but it was the subject of general talk and
+general amusement on board the steamers which make the
+round of the Antilles. Universal belief is a fact of its kind,
+and though it tends to shape itself in dramatic form more
+completely than the facts justify, there is usually some truth
+at the bottom of it. The telegrams to the West Indies pass
+through New York, and often pick up something on the way.
+A warning message reached a certain colony that a Yankee-Irish
+schooner with a Fenian crew was coming down to annex
+the island, or at least to kidnap the governor. This distinguished
+gentleman ought perhaps to have suspected that a
+joke was being played upon his fears; but he was a landlord.
+A governor-general had been threatened seriously in Canada,
+why not he in the Antilles? He was as much agitated as
+Sancho himself. All these islands were and are entirely undefended
+save by a police which cannot be depended on to
+resist a serious invasion. They were called out. Rumour
+said that in half the rifles the cartridges were found afterwards
+inverted. The next day dispelled the alarm. The schooner
+was the creation of some Irish telegraph clerk, and the scare
+ended in laughter. But under the jest lies the wretched
+certainty that the Antilles have no protection except in their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>
+own population, and so little to thank England for that
+scarcely one of the inhabitants, except the officials, would lift
+a finger to save the connection.</p>
+
+<p>Once more, I tell these stories not as if they were authenticated
+facts, but as evidence of the scornful feeling towards
+English authority. The current belief in them is a fact of a
+kind and a very serious one.</p>
+
+<p>The confederation of the Leeward Islands may have been a
+convenience to the Colonial Office, and may have allowed a
+slight diminution in the cost of administration. The whole
+West Indies might be placed under a single governor with only
+good results if he were a real one like the Governor-General at
+Calcutta. But each single island has lost from the change, so
+far, more than it has gained. Each ship of war has a captain
+of its own and officers of its own trained specially for the
+service. If the Antilles are ever to thrive, each of them also
+should have some trained and skilful man at its head, unembarrassed
+by local elected assemblies. The whites have become
+so weak that they would welcome the abolition of such assemblies.
+The blacks do not care for politics, and would be
+pleased to see them swept away to-morrow if they were
+governed wisely and fairly. Of course, in that case it would be
+necessary to appoint governors who would command confidence
+and respect. But let governors be sent who would be governors
+indeed, like those who administer the Indian presidencies, and
+the white residents would gather heart again, and English and
+American capitalists would bring their money and their enterprise,
+and the blacks would grow upwards instead of downwards.
+Let us persist in the other line, let us use the West
+Indian governments as asylums for average worthy persons
+who have to be provided for, and force on them black parliamentary
+institutions as a remedy for such persons' inefficiency,
+and these beautiful countries will become like Hayti, with
+Obeah triumphant, and children offered to the devil and salted
+and eaten, till the conscience of mankind wakes again and the
+Americans sweep them all away.</p>
+
+<p>I had an opportunity of seeing what can really be done in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>
+Dominica by an English gentleman who has gone the right way
+to work there. Dr. Nicholls came out a few years ago to
+Roseau as a medical officer. He was described to me as a man
+not only of high professional skill, but with considerable
+scientific attainments. Either by purchase or legacy (I think
+the latter) he had become possessed of a small estate on a hillside
+a mile or two from the town. He had built a house upon
+it. He was cultivating the soil on scientific principles, and had
+politely sent me an invitation to call on him and see what he
+was about. I was delighted to avail myself of such an opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know the exact extent of the property which was
+under cultivation; perhaps it was twenty-five or thirty acres.
+The chief part of it was planted with lime trees, the limes which
+I saw growing being as large as moderate-sized lemons; most
+of the rest was covered with Liberian coffee, which does not
+object to the moist climate, and was growing with profuse
+luxuriance. Each tree, each plant had been personally attended
+to, pruned when it needed pruning, supported by bamboos
+if it was overgrowing its strength, while the ground about
+the house was consecrated to botanical experiments, and
+specimens were to be seen there of every tropical flower, shrub,
+or tree, which was either remarkable for its beauty or valuable
+for its chemical properties. His limes and coffee went principally
+to New York, where they had won a reputation, and were
+in special demand; but ingenuity tries other tracks besides the
+beaten one. Dr. Nicholls had a manufactory of citric acid
+which had been found equally excellent in Europe. Everything
+which he produced was turning to gold, except donkeys,
+seven or eight of which were feeding under his windows, and
+which multiplied so fast that he could not tell what to do with
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Industries so various and so active required labour, and I
+saw many of the blacks at work on the grounds. In apparent
+contradiction to the general West Indian experience, he told me
+that he had never found a difficulty about it. He paid them
+fair wages, and paid them regularly without the overseer's fines<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>
+and drawbacks. He knew one from the other personally
+could call each by his name, remembered where he came from,
+where he lived, and how, and could joke with him about his
+wife or mistress. They in consequence clung to him with an
+innocent affection, stayed with him all the week without asking
+for holidays, and worked with interest and goodwill. Four
+years only had elapsed since Dr. Nicholls commenced his
+undertakings, and he already saw his way to clearing a thousand
+pounds a year on that one small patch of acres. I may
+mention that, being the only man in the island of really superior
+attainments, he had tried in vain to win one of the seats in the
+elective part of the legislature.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing particularly favourable in the situation of
+his land. All parts of Dominica would respond as willingly to
+similar treatment. What could be the reason, Dr. Nicholls
+asked me, why young Englishmen went planting to so many
+other countries, went even to Ceylon and Borneo, while comparatively
+at their own doors, within a fortnight's sail of Plymouth,
+there was this island immeasurably more fertile than
+either? The explanation, I suppose, is the misgiving that the
+West Indies are consigned by the tendencies of English policy
+to the black population, and that a local government created
+by representatives of the negro vote would make a residence
+there for an energetic and self-respecting European less tolerable
+than in any other part of the globe. The republic of
+Hayti not only excludes a white man from any share of the
+administration, but forbids his acquisition or possession of real
+property in any form. Far short of such extreme provisions,
+the most prosperous industry might be blighted by taxation.
+Self-government is a beautiful subject for oratorical declamation.
+If the fact corresponded to the theory and if the possession
+of a vote produced the elevating effects upon the
+character which are so noisily insisted upon, it would be the
+welcome panacea for political and social disorder. Unfortunately
+the fact does not correspond to the theory. The
+possession of a vote never improved the character of any
+human being and never will.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There are many islands in the West Indies, and an experiment
+might be ventured without any serious risk. Let the
+suffrage principle be applied in its fullness where the condition
+of the people seems best to promise success. In some one of
+them&mdash;Dominica would do as well as any other&mdash;let a man of
+ability and character with an ambition to distinguish himself be
+sent to govern with a free hand. Let him choose his own
+advisers, let him be untrammelled, unless he falls into fatal and
+inexcusable errors, with interference from home. Let him
+have time to carry out any plans which he may form, without
+fear of recall at the end of the normal period. After ten or
+fifteen years, let the results of the two systems be compared
+side by side. I imagine the objection to such a trial would be
+the same which was once made in my hearing by an Irish
+friend of mine, who was urging on an English statesman the
+conversion of Ireland into a Crown colony. 'You dare not
+try it,' he said, 'for if you did, in twenty years we would be the
+most prosperous island of the two, and you would be wanting
+to follow our example.'</p>
+
+<p>We had exhausted the neighbourhood of Roseau. After a
+few days Captain C. was again able to ride, and we could
+undertake more extended expeditions. He provided me with
+a horse or pony or something between both, a creature that
+would climb a stone staircase at an angle of forty-five, or slide
+down a clay slope soaked by a tropical shower, with the same
+indifference with which it would canter along a meadow. In
+the slave times cultivation had been carried up into the
+mountains. There were the old tracks through the forest
+engineered along the edges of precipices, torrents roaring far
+down below, and tall green trees standing in hollows underneath,
+whose top branches were on a level with our eyes. We
+had to ride with mackintosh and umbrella, prepared at any
+moment to have the floods descend upon us. The best costume
+would be none at all. While the sun is above the horizon the
+island seems to lie under the arches of perpetual rainbows.
+One gets wet and one dries again, and one is none the worse
+for the adventure. I had heard that it was dangerous. It did<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>
+no harm to me. A very particular object was to reach the crest
+of the mountain ridge which divides Dominica down the
+middle. We saw the peaks high above us, but it was useless to
+try the ascent if one could see nothing when one arrived, and
+mists and clouds hung about so persistently that we had to put
+off our expedition day after day.</p>
+
+<p>A tolerable morning came at last. We started early. A
+faithful black youth ran alongside of the horses to pick us up
+if we fell, and to carry the indispensable luncheon basket.
+We rode through the town, over the bridge and by the foot
+of Dr. Nicholls's plantations. We passed through lime and
+banana gardens rising slowly along the side of a glen above
+the river. The road had been made by the French long ago,
+and went right across the island. It had once been carefully
+paved, but wet and neglect had loosened the stones and
+tumbled them out of their places. Trees had driven their
+roots through the middle of the track. Mountain streams had
+taken advantage of convenient cuttings and scooped them into
+waterways. The road commissioner on the official staff seemed
+a merely ornamental functionary. We could only travel at a
+foot pace and in single file. Happily our horses were used to
+it. Along this road in 1805 Sir George Prevost retreated with
+the English garrison of Roseau, when attacked in force from
+Martinique; saved his men and saved the other part of the
+island till relief came and the invaders were driven out again.
+That was the last of the fighting, and we have been left since
+in undisturbed possession. Dominica was then sacred as the
+scene of Rodney's glories. Now I suppose, if the French
+came again, we should calculate the mercantile value of the
+place to us, and having found it to be nothing at all, might
+conclude that it would be better to let them keep it.</p>
+
+<p>We went up and up, winding round projecting spurs of
+mountain, here and there coming on plateaus where pioneering
+blacks were clearing patches of forest for their yams and coffee.
+We skirted the edge of a valley several miles across, on the
+far side of which we saw the steaming of the sulphur springs,
+and beyond and above it a mountain peak four thousand feet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>
+high and clothed with timber to the summit. In most countries
+the vegetation grows thin as you rise into the higher altitudes.
+Here the bush only seems to grow denser, the trees grander
+and more self-asserting, the orchids and parasites on the
+boughs more variously brilliant. There were tree ferns less
+splendid than those in New Zealand and Australia, but larger
+than any one can see in English hot-houses, wild oranges bending
+under the weight of ripe fruit which was glowing on their
+branches, wild pines, wild begonias scattered along the banks,
+and a singularly brilliant plant which they call the wild plantain,
+but it is not a plantain at all, with large broad pointed
+leaves radiating out from a centre like an aloe's, and a crimson
+flower stem rising up straight in the middle. It was startling
+to see such insolent beauty displaying itself indifferently in the
+heart of the wilderness with no human eye to look at it unless
+of some passing black or wandering Carib.</p>
+
+<p>The track had been carried across hot streams fresh from
+boiling springs, and along the edge of chasms where there was
+scarcely foothold for the horses. At length we found ourselves
+on what was apparently the highest point of the pass. We
+could not see where we were for the trees and bushes which
+surrounded us, but the path began to descend on the other
+side. Near the summit was a lake formed in an old volcanic
+crater which we had come specially to look at. We descended
+a few hundred feet into a hollow among the hills where the
+lake was said to be. Where was it, then? I asked the guide,
+for I could discover nothing that suggested a lake or anything
+like one. He pointed into the bush where it was thicker with
+tropical undergrowth than a wheatfield with ears of corn. If
+I cared to creep below the branches for two hundred yards at
+the risk of meeting snakes, scorpions, and other such charming
+creatures, I should find myself on the water's edge.</p>
+
+<p>To ride up a mountain three thousand feet high, to be near
+a wonder which I could not see after all, was not what I had
+proposed to myself. There was a traveller's rest at the point
+where we halted, a cool damp grotto carved into the sand-stone.
+We picketed our horses, cutting leafy boughs off the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>
+trees for them, and making cushions for ourselves out of the
+ferns. We were told that if we walked on for half a mile we
+should see the other side of the island, and if we were lucky
+we might catch a glimpse of the lake. Meanwhile clouds
+rolled, down off the mountains, filled the hollow where we
+stood, and so wrapped us in mist, that the question seemed
+rather how we were to return than whether we should venture
+farther.</p>
+
+<p>While we were considering what to do, we heard steps
+approaching through the fog, and a party of blacks came up
+on their way to Roseau with a sick companion whom they
+were carrying in a palanquin. We were eating our luncheon
+in the grotto, and they stopped to talk to our guide and stare
+at us. Two of them, a lad and a girl, came up closer to me
+than good manners would have allowed if they had possessed
+such things; the 'I am as good as you, and you will be good
+enough to know it,' sort of tone which belongs to these democratic
+days showing itself rather notably in the rising generation
+in parts of these islands. I defended myself with producing a
+sketch book and proceeding to take their likenesses, on which
+they fled precipitately.</p>
+
+<p>Our sandwiches finished, we were pensively consuming our
+cigars, I speculating on Sir George Prevost and his party of
+redcoats who must have bivouacked on that very spot, when
+the clouds broke and the sun came out. The interval was
+likely to be a short one, so we hurried to our feet, walked
+rapidly on, and at a turn of the path where a hurricane had
+torn a passage through the trees, we caught a sight of our lake
+as we had been told that perhaps we might do. It lay a couple
+of hundred feet beneath us deep and still, winding away round
+a promontory under the crags and woods of the opposite hills:
+they call it a crater, and I suppose it may have been one, for
+the whole island shows traces of violent volcanic disturbance,
+but in general a crater is a bowl, and this was like a reach of
+a river, which lost itself before one could see where it ended.
+They told us that in old times, when troops were in the fort,
+and the white men of the island went about and enjoyed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>
+themselves, there were boats on this lake, and parties came up
+and fished there. Now it was like the pool in the gardens of
+the palace of the sleeping princess, guarded by impenetrable
+thickets, and whether there are fish there, or enchanted
+princesses, or the huts of some tribe of Caribs, hiding in
+those fastnesses from negroes whom they hate, or from white
+men whom they do not love, no one knows or cares to know.
+I made a hurried pencil sketch, and we went on.</p>
+
+<p>A little farther and we were out of the bush, at a rocky
+terrace on the rim of the great valley which carries the rainfall
+on the eastern side of the mountains down into the Atlantic.
+We were 3,000 feet above the sea. Far away the ocean
+stretched out before us, the horizon line where sky met water
+so far distant that both had melted into mist at the point
+where they touched. Mount Diablot, where Labat spent a
+night catching the devil birds, soared up on our left hand. Below,
+above, around us, it was forest everywhere; forest, and
+only forest, a land fertile as Adam's paradise, still waiting for
+the day when 'the barren woman shall bear children.' Of
+course it was beautiful, if that be of any consequence&mdash;mountain
+peaks and crags and falling waters, and the dark green of
+the trees in the foreground, dissolving from tint to tint to grey,
+violet, and blue in the far-off distance. Even at the height
+where we stood, the temperature must have been 70&deg;. But
+the steaming damp of the woods was gone, the air was clear
+and exhilarating as champagne. What a land! And what
+were we doing with it? This fair inheritance, won by English
+hearts and hands for the use of the working men of England,
+and the English working men lying squalid in the grimy alleys
+of crowded towns, and the inheritance turned into a wilderness.
+Visions began to rise of what might be, but visions
+which were taken from me before they could shape themselves.
+The curtain of vapour fell down over us again, and all was
+gone, and of that glorious picture nothing was left but our own
+two selves and the few yards of red rock and soil on which we
+were standing.</p>
+
+<p>There was no need for haste now. We return slowly to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>
+our horses, and our horses carried us home by the way that
+we had come. Captain C. went carelessly in front through
+the fog, over boulders and watercourses and roots of fallen
+trees. I followed as I could, expecting every moment to find
+myself flying over my horse's head; stumbling, plunging,
+sliding, but getting through with it somehow. The creature
+had never seen me before, but was as careful of my safety as
+if I had been an old acquaintance and friend. Only one misadventure
+befell me, if misadventure it may be called. Shaken,
+and damp with heat, I was riding under a wild orange tree,
+the fruit within reach of my hand. I picked an orange and
+plunged my teeth into the skin, and I had to remember my
+rashness for days. The oil in the rind, pungent as aromatic
+salts, rushed on my palate, and spurted on my face and eyes.
+The smart for the moment half blinded me. I bethought me,
+however, that oranges with such a flavour would be worth
+something, and a box of them which was sent home for me
+was converted into marmalade with a finer flavour than ever
+came from Seville.</p>
+
+<p>What more can I say of Dominica? I stayed with the
+hospitable C.'s for a fortnight. At the appointed time the
+returning steamer called for me. I left Capt. C. with a warm
+hope that he might not be consigned for ever to a post which
+an English gentleman ought not to be condemned to occupy;
+that if matters could not be mended for him where he stood,
+he might find a situation where his courage and his understanding
+might be turned to useful purpose. I can never
+forget the kindness both of himself and his clever, good,
+graceful lady. I cannot forget either the two dusky damsels
+who waited upon me like spirits in a fairy tale. It was night
+when I left. The packet came alongside the wharf. We took
+leave by the gleaming of her lights. The whistle screamed,
+and Dominica, and all that I had seen, faded into a memory.
+All that I had seen, but not all that I had thought. That
+island was the scene of the most glorious of England's many
+famous actions. It had been won for us again and again by
+the gallantry of our seamen and soldiers. It had been secured<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>
+at last to the Crown by the genius of the greatest of our
+admirals. It was once prosperous. It might be prosperous
+again, for the resources of the soil are untouched and inexhaustible.
+The black population are exceptionally worthy.
+They are excellent boatmen, excellent fishermen, excellent
+mechanics, ready to undertake any work if treated with
+courtesy and kindness. Yet in our hands it is falling into
+ruin. The influence of England there is gone. It is nothing.
+Indifference has bred indifference in turn as a necessary
+consequence. Something must be wrong when among 30,000
+of our fellow-subjects not one could be found to lift a hand
+for us if the island were invaded, when a boat's crew from
+Martinique might take possession of it without a show of
+resistance.</p>
+
+<p>If I am asked the question, What use is Dominica to us?
+I decline to measure it by present or possible marketable
+value; I answer simply that it is part of the dominions of the
+Queen. If we pinch a finger, the smart is felt in the brain. If we
+neglect a wound in the least important part of our persons, it
+may poison the system. Unless the blood of an organised body
+circulates freely through the extremities, the extremities mortify
+and drop off, and the dropping off of any colony of ours will
+not be to our honour and may be to our shame. Dominica
+seems but a small thing, but our larger colonies are observing
+us, and the world is observing us, and what we do or fail to do
+works beyond the limits of its immediate operation. The
+mode of management which produces the state of things which
+I have described cannot possibly be a right one. We have
+thought it wise, with a perfectly honest intention, to leave our
+dependencies generally to work out their own salvation. We
+have excepted India, for with India we dare not run the risk.
+But we have refused to consider that others among our
+possessions may be in a condition analogous to India, and we
+have allowed them to drift on as they could. It was certainly
+excusable, and it may have been prudent, to try popular
+methods first, but we have no right to persist in the face of a
+failure so complete. We are obliged to keep these islands,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>
+for it seems that no one will relieve us of them; and if they
+are to remain ours, we are bound so to govern them that our
+name shall be respected and our sovereignty shall not be a
+mockery. Am I asked what shall be done? I have answered
+already. Among the silent thousands whose quiet work keeps
+the Empire alive, find a Rajah Brooke if you can, or a Mr.
+Smith of Scilly. If none of these are attainable, even a
+Sancho Panza would do. Send him out with no more instructions
+than the knight of La Mancha gave Sancho&mdash;to
+fear God and do his duty. Put him on his mettle. Promise
+him the respect and praise of all good men if he does well;
+and if he calls to his help intelligent persons who understand
+the cultivation of soils and the management of men, in half a
+score of years Dominica would be the brightest gem of the
+Antilles. From America, from England, from all parts of the
+world, admiring tourists would be flocking there to see what
+Government could do, and curious politicians with jealous
+eyes admitting reluctantly unwelcome conclusions.</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left:4em">
+Woman! no mortal o'er the widespread earth<br />
+Can find a fault in thee; thy good report<br />
+Doth reach the widespread heaven, as of some prince<br />
+Who, in the likeness of a god, doth rule<br />
+O'er subjects stout of heart and strong of hand;<br />
+And men speak greatly of him, and his land<br />
+Bears wheat and rye, his orchards bend with fruit,<br />
+His flocks breed surely, the sea yields her fish,<br />
+Because he guides his folk with wisdom.<br />
+In grace and manly virtue.<a name="FNanchor_1_11" id="FNanchor_1_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_11" class="fnanchor">[12]</a><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Because 'He guides with wisdom.' That is the whole
+secret. The leading of the wise few, the willing obedience of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>the many, is the beginning and the end of all right action.
+Secure this, and you secure everything. Fail to secure it, and
+be your liberties as wide as you can make them, no success is
+possible.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_11" id="Footnote_1_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_11"><span class="label">[12]</span></a>
+&#8038; &#947;&#8059;&#957;&#945;&#953;, &#959;&#8016;&#954; &#7938;&#957; &#964;&#8055;&#962; &#963;&#949; &#946;&#961;&#959;&#964;&#8182;&#957; &#7952;&#960;&#8125; &#7936;&#960;&#949;&#8055;&#961;&#959;&#957;&#945; &#947;&#945;&#8150;&#945;&#957;<br />
+&#957;&#949;&#953;&#954;&#8051;&#959;&#953;; &#7974;&#947;&#8049;&#961; &#963;&#949;&#965; &#954;&#955;&#8051;&#959;&#962; &#959;&#8016;&#961;&#945;&#957;&#8056;&#957; &#949;&#8016;&#961;&#8058;&#957; &#7985;&#954;&#8049;&#957;&#949;&#953;;<br />
+&#8037;&#963;&#964;&#949; &#964;&#949;&#965; &#7970; &#946;&#945;&#963;&#953;&#955;&#8134;&#959;&#962; &#7936;&#956;&#8059;&#956;&#959;&#957;&#959;&#962;, &#8005;&#963;&#964;&#949; &#952;&#949;&#959;&#965;&#948;&#8052;&#962;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&#7936;&#957;&#948;&#961;&#8049;&#963;&#953;&#957; &#7952;&#957; &#960;&#959;&#955;&#955;&#959;&#8150;&#963;&#953; &#954;&#945;&#8054; &#7984;&#966;&#952;&#8055;&#956;&#959;&#953;&#963;&#953;&#957; &#7936;&#957;&#8049;&#963;&#963;&#969;&#957;,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&#949;&#8016;&#948;&#953;&#954;&#8055;&#945;&#962; &#7936;&#957;&#8051;&#967;&#951;&#963;&#953;; &#966;&#8051;&#961;&#951;&#963;&#953; &#948;&#8051; &#947;&#945;&#8150;&#945; &#956;&#8051;&#955;&#945;&#953;&#957;&#945;<br />
+&#960;&#965;&#961;&#959;&#8058;&#962; &#954;&#945;&#8054; &#954;&#961;&#953;&#952;&#8049;&#962;, &#946;&#961;&#8055;&#952;&#951;&#963;&#953; &#948;&#8050; &#948;&#8051;&#957;&#948;&#961;&#949;&#945; &#954;&#945;&#961;&#960;&#8183;,<br />
+&#964;&#8055;&#954;&#964;&#949;&#953; &#948;&#8125; &#7956;&#956;&#960;&#949;&#948;&#945; &#956;&#8134;&#955;&#945;, &#952;&#8049;&#955;&#945;&#963;&#963;&#945; &#948;&#8050; &#960;&#945;&#961;&#8051;&#967;&#949;&#953; &#7984;&#967;&#952;&#8166;&#962;,<br />
+&#7952;&#958; &#949;&#8016;&#951;&#947;&#949;&#963;&#8055;&#951;&#962;; &#7936;&#961;&#949;&#964;&#8182;&#963;&#953; &#948;&#8050; &#955;&#945;&#959;&#8054; &#8017;&#960;&#8125; &#945;&#8016;&#964;&#959;&#8166;.&mdash;<i>Odyssey</i>, xix. 107.
+</p></div></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Darien canal&mdash;Jamaica mail packet&mdash;Captain W.&mdash;Retrospect of
+Jamaican history&mdash;Waterspout at sea&mdash;Hayti&mdash;Jacmel&mdash;A walk
+through the town&mdash;A Jamaican planter&mdash;First sight of the Blue
+Mountains&mdash;Port Royal&mdash;Kingston&mdash;The Colonial Secretary&mdash;Gordon
+riots&mdash;Changes in the Jamaican constitution.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Once more to Barbadoes, but merely to change there from
+steamer to steamer. My course was now across the Caribbean
+Sea to the great islands at the bottom of it. The
+English mail, after calling and throwing off its lateral branches
+at Bridgetown, pursues its direct course to Hayti and Jamaica,
+and so on to Vera Cruz and the Darien canal. This wonderful
+enterprise of M. Lesseps has set moving the loose negro
+population of the Antilles and Jamaica. Unwilling to work
+as they are supposed to be, they have swarmed down to the
+isthmus, and are still swarming thither in tens of thousands,
+tempted by the dollar or dollar and a half a day which M.
+Lesseps is furnishing. The vessel which called for us at
+Dominica was crowded with them, and we picked up more as
+we went on. Their average stay is for a year. At the end of
+a year half of them have gone to the other world. Half go
+home, made easy for life with money enough to buy a few
+acres of land and 'live happy ever after.' Heedless as school-boys
+they plunge into the enterprise, thinking of nothing but
+the harvest of dollars. They might earn as much or more at
+their own doors if there were any one to employ them, but
+quiet industry is out of joint, and Darien has seized their
+imaginations as an Eldorado.</p>
+
+<p>If half the reports which reached me are correct, in all
+the world there is not perhaps now concentrated in any
+single spot so much foul disease, such a hideous dungheap of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>
+moral and physical abomination, as in the scene of this far-famed
+undertaking of nineteenth-century engineering. By the
+scheme, as it was first propounded, six-and-twenty millions of
+English money were to unite the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans,
+to form a highway for the commerce of the globe, and enrich
+with untold wealth the happy owners of original shares. The
+thrifty French peasantry were tempted by the golden bait, and
+poured their savings into M. Lesseps's lottery box. All that
+money and more besides, I was told, had been already spent,
+and only a fifth of the work was done. Meanwhile the human
+vultures have gathered to the spoil. Speculators, adventurers,
+card sharpers, hell keepers, and doubtful ladies have carried
+their charms to this delightful market. The scene of operations
+is a damp tropical jungle, intensely hot, swarming with
+mosquitoes, snakes, alligators, scorpions, and centipedes; the
+home, even as nature made it, of yellow fever, typhus, and
+dysentery, and now made immeasurably more deadly by the
+multitudes of people who have crowded thither. Half buried
+in mud lie about the wrecks of costly machinery, consuming
+by rust, sent out under lavish orders, and found unfit for the
+work for which they were intended. Unburied altogether lie
+also skeletons of the human machines which have broken
+down there.<a name="FNanchor_1_12" id="FNanchor_1_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_12" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> Everything which imagination can conceive that
+is ghastly and loathsome seems to be gathered into that
+locality just now. I was pressed to go on and look at the
+moral surroundings of 'the greatest undertaking of our age,'
+but my curiosity was less strong than my disgust. I did not
+see the place and the description which I have given is probably
+too highly coloured. The accounts which reached me,
+however, were uniform and consistent. Not one person whom
+I met and who could speak from personal knowledge had any
+other story to tell.</p>
+
+<p>We looked again into St. Lucia on our way. The training
+squadron was lying outside, and the harbour was covered with
+boats full of blue-jackets. The big ships were rolling heavily.
+They could have eaten up Rodney's fleet. The great 'Ville
+de Paris' would have been a mouthful to the smallest of them.
+Man for man, officers and crew were as good as Rodney ever
+commanded. Yet, somehow, they produce small effect on the
+imagination of the colonists. The impression is that they
+are meant more for show than for serious use. Alas! the stars<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>
+and stripes on a Yankee trader have more to say in the
+West Indies than the white ensigns of a fleet of British iron-clads.</p>
+
+<p>At Barbadoes there was nothing more for me to do or see.
+The English mail was on the point of sailing, and I hastened
+on board. One does not realise distance on maps. Jamaica
+belongs to the West Indies, and the West Indies are a collective
+entity. Yet it is removed from the Antilles by the
+diameter of the Caribbean Sea, and is farther off than Gibraltar
+from Southampton. Thus it was a voyage of several
+days, and I looked about to see who were to be my companions.
+There were several Spaniards, one or two English
+tourists, and some ladies who never left their cabins. The
+captain was the most remarkable figure: an elderly man with
+one eye lost or injured, the other as peremptory as I have
+often seen in a human face; rough and prickly on the outside
+as a pineapple, internally very much resembling the same fruit,
+for at the bottom he was true, genuine, and kindly hearted, very
+amusing, and intimately known to all travellers on the West
+Indian line, in the service of which he had passed forty years of
+his life. In his own ship he was sovereign and recognised no
+superior. Bishops, colonial governors, presidents of South
+American republics were, so far as their office went, no more
+to him than other people, and as long as they were on board
+were chattels of which he had temporary charge. Peer and
+peasant were alike under his orders, which were absolute as
+the laws of Medes and Persians. On the other hand, his eye
+was quick to see if there was any personal merit in a man, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
+if you deserved his respect you would have it. One particular
+merit he had which I greatly approved. He kept his cabin to
+himself, and did not turn it into a smoking room, as I have
+known captains do a great deal too often.</p>
+
+<p>All my own thoughts were fixed upon Jamaica. I had
+read so much about it, that my memory was full of persons
+and scenes and adventures of which Jamaica was the stage or
+subject. Penn and Venables and the Puritan conquest, and
+Morgan and the buccaneers; Port Royal crowded with
+Spanish prizes; its busy dockyards, and English frigates
+and privateers fitting out there for glorious or desperate
+enterprises. The name of Jamaica brought them crowding
+up with incident on incident; and behind the history came
+Tom Cringle and the wild and reckless, yet wholesome and
+hearty, planter's life in Kingston; the dark figures of the
+pirates swinging above the mangroves at Gallows Point; the
+balls and parties and the beautiful quadroons, and the laughing,
+merry innocent children of darkness, with the tricks of
+the middies upon them. There was the tragic side of it, too,
+in slavery, the last ugly flash out of the cloud being not two
+decades distant in the Eyre and Gordon time. Interest
+enough there was about Jamaica, and things would be
+strangely changed in Kingston if nothing remained of the
+society which was once so brilliant. There, if anywhere,
+England and English rule were not yet a vanished quantity.
+There was a dockyard still, and a commodore in command,
+and a guardship and gunboats, and English regiments and
+West Indian regiments with English officers. Some representatives,
+too, I knew were to be found of the old Anglo-West
+Indians, men whose fathers and grandfathers were born
+in the island, and whose fortunes were bound up in it.
+Aaron Bang! what would not one have given to meet Aaron?
+The real Aaron had been gathered to his fathers, and nature
+does not make two such as he was; but I might fall in with
+something that would remind me of him. Paul Gelid and
+Pepperpot Wagtail, and Peter Mangrove, better than either
+of them&mdash;the likeness of these might be surviving, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>
+it would be delightful to meet and talk to them. They
+would give fresh flavour to the immortal 'Log.' Even
+another Tom was not impossible; some middy to develop
+hereafter into a frigate captain and to sail again into Port
+Royal with his prizes in tow.</p>
+
+<p>Nature at all events could not be changed. The white
+rollers would still be breaking on the coral reefs. The palms
+would still be waving on the sand ridge which forms the harbour,
+and the amber mist would be floating round the peaks of the
+Blue Mountains. There were English soldiers and sailors and
+English people. The English language was spoken there by
+blacks as well as whites. The religion was English. Our
+country went for something, and there would be some
+persons, at least, to whom the old land was more than a
+stepmother, and who were not sighing in their hearts for
+annexation to the American Union. The governor, Sir
+Henry Norman, of Indian fame, I was sorry to learn, was
+still absent; he had gone home on some legal business.
+Sir Henry had an Imperial reputation. He had been spoken
+of to me in Barbadoes as able, if he were allowed a chance,
+to act as Viceroy of all the islands, and to set them on their
+feet again. I could well believe that a man of less than
+Sir Henry's reputed power could do it&mdash;for in the thing
+itself there was no great difficulty&mdash;if only we at home were
+once disenchanted; though all the ability in the world would
+be thrown away as long as the enchantment continued. I
+did see Sir Henry, as it turned out, but only for a few hours.</p>
+
+<p>Our voyage was without remarkable incident; as voyages
+are apt to be in these days of powerful steamboats. One
+morning there was a tropical rain storm which was worth
+seeing. We had a strong awning over the quarter-deck, so
+I could stand and watch it. An ink-black cloud came
+suddenly up from the north which seemed to hang into the
+sea, the surface of the water below being violently agitated.
+According to popular belief, the cloud on these occasions is
+drawing up water which it afterwards discharges. Were
+this so the water discharged would be salt, which it never<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>
+is. The cause of the agitation is a cyclonic rotation of air
+or local whirlwind. The most noticeable feature was the
+blackness of the cloud itself. It became so dark that it
+would have been difficult to read any ordinary print. The
+rain, when it burst, fell not in drops but in torrents. The
+deck was flooded, and the scuttle-holes ran like jets from a
+pump. The awning was ceasing to be a shelter, for the water
+was driven bodily through it; but the downpour passed off
+as suddenly as it had risen. There was no lightning and
+no wind. The sea under our side was glassy smooth, and
+was dashed into millions of holes by the plunging of the
+rain pellets.</p>
+
+<p>The captain in his journeys to and fro had become acquainted
+with the present black President of Hayti, Mr.
+Salomon. I had heard of this gentleman as an absolute
+person, who knew how to make himself obeyed, and who
+treated opposition to his authority in a very summary
+manner. He seemed to be a favourite of the captain's.
+He had been educated in France, had met with many
+changes of fortune, and after an exile in Jamaica had
+become quasi-king of the black republic. I much wished
+to see this paradise of negro liberty; we were to touch at
+Jacmel, which is one of the principal ports, to leave the
+mails, and Captain W&mdash;&mdash; was good enough to say that, if I
+liked, I might go ashore for an hour or two with the officer
+in charge.</p>
+
+<p>Hayti, as everyone knows who has studied the black
+problem, is the western portion of Columbus's Espa&ntilde;ola, or
+St. Domingo, the largest after Cuba and the most fertile in
+natural resources of all the islands of the Caribbean Sea. It
+was the earliest of the Spanish settlements in the New World.
+The Spaniards found there a million or two of mild and innocent
+Indians, whom in their first enthusiasm they intended
+to convert to Christianity, and to offer as the first fruits of
+their discovery to the Virgin Mary and St. Domenic. The
+saint gave his name to the island, and his temperament to
+the conquerors. In carrying out their pious design, they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>
+converted the Indians off the face of the earth, working
+them to death in their mines and plantations. They filled
+their places with blacks from Africa, who proved of tougher
+constitution. They colonised, they built cities; they throve
+and prospered for nearly two hundred years; when Hayti, the
+most valuable half of the island, was taken from them by
+the buccaneers and made into a French province. The rest
+which keeps the title of St. Domingo, continued Spanish,
+and is Spanish still&mdash;a thinly inhabited, miserable, Spanish
+republic. Hayti became afterwards the theatre of the exploits
+of the ever-glorious Toussaint l'Ouverture. When the French
+Revolution broke out, and Liberty and the Rights of Man
+became the new gospel, slavery could not be allowed to
+continue in the French dominions. The blacks of the colony
+were emancipated and were received into the national brotherhood.
+In sympathy with the Jacobins of France, who burnt
+the chateaux of the nobles and guillotined the owners of
+them, the liberated slaves rose as soon as they were free, and
+massacred the whole French population, man, woman, and
+child. Napoleon sent an army to punish the murderers and
+recover the colony. Toussaint, who had no share in the
+atrocities, and whose fault was only that he had been caught
+by the prevailing political epidemic and believed in the
+evangel of freedom, surrendered and was carried to France,
+where he died or else was made an end of. The yellow fever
+avenged him, and secured for his countrymen the opportunity
+of trying out to the uttermost the experiment of negro
+self-government. The French troops perished in tens of
+thousands. They were reinforced again and again, but it was
+like pouring water into a sieve. The climate won a victory
+to the black man which he could not win for himself. They
+abandoned their enterprise at last, and Hayti was free. We
+English tried our hand to recover it afterwards, but we failed
+also, and for the same reason.</p>
+
+<p>Hayti has thus for nearly a century been a black independent
+state. The negro race have had it to themselves and have not
+been interfered with. They were equipped when they started<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+on their career of freedom with the Catholic religion, a civilised
+language, European laws and manners, and the knowledge of
+various arts and occupations which they had learnt while they
+were slaves. They speak French still; they are nominally
+Catholics still; and the tags and rags of the gold lace of
+French civilisation continue to cling about their institutions.
+But in the heart of them has revived the old idolatry of the
+Gold Coast, and in the villages of the interior, where they are
+out of sight and can follow their instincts, they sacrifice children
+in the serpent's honour after the manner of their forefathers.
+Perhaps nothing better could be expected from a
+liberty which was inaugurated by assassination and plunder.
+Political changes which prove successful do not begin in that
+way.</p>
+
+<p>The Bight of Leogane is a deep bay carved in the side of
+the island, one arm of which is a narrow ridge of high mountains
+a hundred and fifty miles long and from thirty to forty
+wide. At the head of this bay, to the north of the ridge, is
+Port au Prince, the capital of this remarkable community.
+On the south, on the immediately opposite side of the mountains
+and facing the Caribbean Sea, is Jacmel, the town next
+in importance. We arrived off it shortly after daybreak. The
+houses, which are white, looked cheerful in the sunlight.
+Harbour there was none, but an open roadstead into which the
+swell of the sea sets heavily, curling over a long coral reef which
+forms a partial shelter. The mountain range rose behind,
+sloping off into rounded woody hills. Here were the feeding
+grounds of the herds of wild cattle which tempted the buccaneers
+into the island, and from which they took their name.
+The shore was abrupt; the land broke off in cliffs of coral rock
+tinted brilliantly with various colours. One rather striking
+white-cliff, a ship's officer assured me, was chalk; adding flint
+when I looked incredulous. His geological education was imperfect.
+We brought up a mile outside the black city. The
+boat was lowered. None of the other passengers volunteered
+to go with me; the English are out of favour in Hayti just
+now; the captain discouraged landings out of mere curiosity;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>
+and, indeed, the officer with the mails had to reassure himself
+of Captain W&mdash;&mdash;'s consent before he would take me. The
+presence of Europeans in any form is barely tolerated. A few
+only are allowed to remain about the ports, just as the Irish
+say they let a few Danes remain in Dublin and Waterford after
+the battle of Clontarf, to attend to the ignoble business of
+trade.</p>
+
+<p>The country after the green of the Antilles looked brown
+and parched. In the large islands the winter months are dry.
+As we approached the reef we saw the long hills of water turn
+to emerald as they rolled up the shoal, then combing and
+breaking in cataracts of snow-white foam. The officer in
+charge took me within oar's length of the rock to try my
+nerves, and the sea, he did not fail to tell me, swarmed with
+sharks of the worst propensities. Two steamers were lying
+inside, one of which, belonging to an English company, had
+'happened a misfortune,' and was breaking up as a deserted
+wreck. A Yankee clipper schooner had just come in with salt
+fish and crackers&mdash;a singularly beautiful vessel, with immense
+beam, which would have startled the builders of the Cowes
+racers. It was precisely like the schooner which Tom Cringle
+commanded before the dockyard martinets had improved her
+into ugliness, built on the lines of the old pirate craft of the
+islands, when the lives and fortunes of men hung on the extra
+speed, or the point which they could lie closer to the wind.
+Her return cargo would be coffee and bananas.</p>
+
+<p>Englishmen move about in Jacmel as if they were ashamed
+of themselves among their dusky lords and masters. I observed
+the Yankee skipper paddling himself off in a canoe
+with his broad straw hat and his cigar in his mouth, looking as
+if all the world belonged to him, and as if all the world, and
+the Hayti blacks in particular, were aware of the fact. The
+Yankee, whether we like it or not, is the acknowledged sovereign
+in these waters.</p>
+
+<p>The landing place was, or had been, a jetty built on piles
+and boarded over. Half the piles were broken; the planks
+had rotted and fallen through. The swell was rolling home,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>
+and we had to step out quickly as the boat rose on the crest of
+the wave. A tattered crowd of negroes were loafing about
+variously dressed, none, however, entirely without clothes of
+some kind. One of them did kindly give me a hand, observing
+that I was less light of foot than once I might have been.
+The agent's office was close by. I asked the head clerk&mdash;a
+Frenchman&mdash;to find me a guide through the town. He called
+one of the bystanders whom he knew, and we started together,
+I and my black companion, to see as much as I could in the
+hour which was allowed me. The language was less hopeless
+than at Dominica. We found that we could understand each
+other&mdash;he, me, tolerably; I, him, in fragments, for his tongue
+went as fast as a shuttle. Though it was still barely eight o'clock
+the sun was scalding. The streets were filthy and the stench
+abominable. The houses were of white stone, and of some
+pretensions, but ragged and uninviting&mdash;paint nowhere, and the
+woodwork of the windows and verandahs mouldy and worm-eaten.
+The inhabitants swarmed as in a St. Giles's rookery. I
+suppose they were all out of doors. If any were left at home
+Jacmel must have been as populous as an African ants' nest.
+As I had looked for nothing better than a Kaffir kraal, the
+degree of civilisation was more than I expected. I expressed
+my admiration of the buildings; my guide was gratified, and
+pointed out to me with evident pride a new hotel or boarding
+house kept by a Madame Somebody who was the great lady of
+the place. Madame Ellem&ecirc;me was sitting in a shady balcony
+outside the first-floor windows. She was a large menacing-looking
+mulatto, like some ogress of the 'Arabian Nights,'
+capable of devouring, if she found them palatable, any number
+of salt babies. I took off my hat to this formidable dame,
+which she did not condescend to notice, and we passed on. A
+few houses in the outskirts stood in gardens with inclosures
+about them. There is some trade in the place, and there were
+evidently families, negro or European, who lived in less squalid
+style than the generality. There was a governor there, my guide
+informed me&mdash;an ornamental personage, much respected. To
+my question whether he had any soldiers, I was answered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>
+'No,' the Haytians didn't like soldiers. I was to understand,
+however, that they were not common blacks. They aspired to
+be a commonwealth with public rights and alliances. Hayti a
+republic, France a republic: France and Hayti good friends
+now. They had a French bishop and French priests and a
+French currency. In spite of their land laws, they were proud
+of their affinity with the great nation; and I heard afterwards,
+though not from my Jacmel companion, that the better part
+of the Haytians would welcome back the French dominion if
+they were not afraid that the Yankees would disapprove.</p>
+
+<p>My guide persisted in leading me outside the town, and
+as my time was limited, I tried in various ways to induce him
+to take me back into it. He maintained, however, that he had
+been told to show me whatever was most interesting, and I
+found that I was to see an American windmill-pump which
+had been just erected to supply Jacmel with fresh water. It
+was the first that had been seen in the island, and was a wonder
+of wonders. Doubtless it implied 'progress,' and would assist
+in the much-needed ablution of the streets and kennels. I
+looked at it and admired, and having thus done homage, I
+was allowed my own way.</p>
+
+<p>It was market day. The Yankee cargo had been unloaded,
+and a great open space in front of the cathedral was covered
+with stalls or else blankets stretched on poles to keep the sun
+off, where hundreds of Haytian dames were sitting or standing
+disposing of their wares&mdash;piles of salt fish, piles of coloured
+calicoes, knives, scissors, combs, and brushes. Of home produce
+there were great baskets of loaves, fruit, vegetables, and
+butcher's meat on slabs. I looked inquisitively at these last;
+but I acknowledge that I saw no joints of suspicious appearance.
+Children were running about in thousands, not the least
+as if they were in fear of being sacrificed, and babies hung upon
+their mothers as if natural affection existed in Jacmel as much
+as in other places. I asked no compromising questions, not
+wishing to be torn in pieces. Sir Spenser St. John's book has
+been heard of in Hayti, and the anger about it is considerable.
+The scene was interesting enough, but the smell was unendur<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>able.
+The wild African black is not filthy in his natural state.
+He washes much, as wild animals do, and at least tries to keep
+himself clear of vermin. The blacks in Jacmel appeared (like
+the same animals as soon as they are domesticated) to lose the
+sense which belongs to them in their wild condition. My
+prejudices, if I have any, had not blinded me to the good
+qualities of the men and women in Dominica. I do not think
+it was prejudice wholly which made me think the faces which
+I saw in Hayti the most repulsive which I had ever seen in the
+world, or Jacmel itself, taken for all in all, the foulest, dirtiest,
+and nastiest of human habitations. The dirt, however, I will
+do them the justice to say did not seem to extend to their
+churches. The cathedral stood at the upper end of the
+market place. I went in. It was airy, cool, and decent-looking.
+Some priests were saying mass, and there was a fairly
+large congregation. I wished to get a nearer sight of the altar
+and the images and pictures, imagining that in Hayti the sacred
+persons might assume a darker colour than in Europe; but I
+could not reach the chancel without disturbing people who were
+saying their prayers, and, to the disappointment of my companion,
+who beckoned me on, and would have cleared a way
+for me, I controlled my curiosity and withdrew.</p>
+
+<p>My hour's leave of absence was expired. I made my way
+back to the landing place, where the mail steamer's boat was
+waiting for me. On the steamer herself the passengers were
+waiting impatiently for breakfast, which had been put off on
+our account. We hurried on board at our best speed; but
+before breakfast could be thought of, or any other thing, I had
+to strip and plunge into a bath and wash away the odour of
+the great negro republic of the West which clung to my clothes
+and skin.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving Jacmel and its associations, we ran all day along
+the land, skirting a range of splendid mountains between seven
+and eight thousand feet high; past the Isle &agrave; Vache; past the
+bay of Cayes, once famous as the haunt of the sea-rovers;
+past Cape Tubiron, the Cape of Sharks. At evening we were
+in the channel which divides St. Domingo from Jamaica.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>
+Captain &mdash;&mdash; insisted to me that this was the scene of Rodney's
+action, and he pointed out to me the headland under
+which the British fleet had been lying. He was probably
+right in saying that it was the scene of some action of
+Rodney's, for there is hardly a corner of the West Indies
+where he did not leave behind him the print of his cannon
+shot; but it was not the scene of the great fight which saved
+the British Empire. That was below the cliffs of Dominica;
+and Captain W&mdash;&mdash;, as many others have done, was confounding
+Dominica with St. Domingo.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning we were to anchor at Port Royal. We
+had a Jamaica gentleman of some consequence on board. I
+had failed so far to make acquaintance with him, but on this
+last evening he joined me on deck, and I gladly used the
+opportunity to learn something of the present condition of
+things. I was mistaken in expecting to find a more vigorous
+or more sanguine tone of feeling than I had left at the Antilles.
+There was the same despondency, the same sense that their
+state was hopeless, and that nothing which they could themselves
+do would mend it. He himself, for instance, was the
+owner of a large sugar estate which a few years ago was worth
+60,000<i>l.</i> It was not encumbered. He was his own manager,
+and had spared no cost in providing the newest machinery.
+Yet, with the present prices and with the refusal of the
+American Commercial Treaty, it would not pay the expense
+of cultivation. He held on, for it was all that he could do.
+To sell was impossible, for no one would buy even at the price
+of the stock on the land. It was the same story which I had
+heard everywhere. The expenses of the administration, this
+gentleman said, were out of all proportion to the resources of
+the island, and were yearly increasing. The planters had
+governed in the old days as the English landlords had governed
+Ireland. They had governed cheaply and on their own resources.
+They had authority; they were respected; their
+word was law. Now their power had been taken from them,
+and made over to paid officials, and the expense was double
+what it used to be. Between the demands made on them in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
+the form of taxation and the fall in the value of their produce
+their backs were breaking, and the 'landed interest' would
+come to an end. I asked him, as I had asked many persons
+without getting a satisfactory answer, what he thought that the
+Imperial Government could do to mend matters. He seemed
+to think that it was too late to do anything. The blacks were
+increasing so fast, and the white influence was diminishing so
+fast, that Jamaica in a few years would be another Hayti.</p>
+
+<p>In this gentleman, too, I found to my sorrow that there was
+the same longing for admission to the American Union which
+I had left behind me at the Antilles. In spite of soldiers and
+the naval station, the old country was still looked upon as a
+stepmother, and of genuine loyalty there was, according to him,
+little or nothing. If the West Indies were ever to become
+prosperous again, it could only be when they were annexed to
+the United States. For the present, at least, he admitted
+that annexation was impossible. Not on account of any
+possible objection on the part of the British Government; for
+it seems to be assumed by every one that the British Government
+cares nothing what they do; nor wholly on account of
+the objections of the Americans, though he admitted that the
+Americans were unwilling to receive them; but because in the
+existing state of feeling such a change could not be carried out
+without civil war. In Jamaica, at least, the blacks and mulattoes
+would resist. There were nearly 700,000 of them, while of the
+whites there were but 15,000, and the relative numbers were
+every year becoming more unfavourable. The blacks knew
+that under England they had nothing to fear. They would
+have everything more and more their own way, and in a short
+time they expected to have the island to themselves. They
+might collect arms; they might do what they pleased, and no
+English officer dared to use rough measures with them; while,
+if they belonged to the Union, the whites would recover
+authority one way or another. The Americans were ready
+with their rifles on occasions of disorder, and their own
+countrymen did not call them to account for it as we did.
+The blacks, therefore, preferred the liberty which they had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>
+and the prospects to which they looked forward, and they and
+the mulattoes also would fight, and fight desperately, before
+they would allow themselves to be made American citizens.</p>
+
+<p>The prospect which Mr. &mdash;&mdash; laid before me was not a
+beautiful one, and was coming a step nearer at each advance
+that was made in the direction of constitutional self-government;
+for, like every other person with whom I spoke on the
+subject, he said emphatically that Europeans would not remain
+to be ruled under a black representative system; nor would
+they take any part in it when they would be so overwhelmingly
+outvoted and outnumbered. They would sooner forfeit all
+that they had in the world and go away. An effective and
+economical administration on the Indian pattern might have
+saved all a few years ago. It was too late now, and Jamaica
+was past recovery. At this rate it was a sadly altered Jamaica
+since Tom Cringle's time, though his friend Aaron even then
+had seen what was probably coming. But I could not accept
+entirely all that Mr. &mdash;&mdash; had been saying, and had to discount
+the natural irritation of a man who sees his fortune sliding out
+of his hands. Moreover, for myself, I never listen much to a
+desponding person. Even when a cause is lost utterly, and no
+rational hope remains, I would still go down, if it had to be so,
+with my spirit unbroken and my face to the enemy. Mr. &mdash;&mdash; perhaps
+would recover heart if the price of sugar mended a
+little. For my own part, I do not care much whether it mends
+or not. The economics of the islands ought not to depend
+exclusively on any single article of produce. I believe, too,
+in spite of gloomy prognostics, that a loyal and prosperous
+Jamaica is still among the possibilities of the future, if we will
+but study in earnest the character of the problem. Mr. &mdash;&mdash;,
+however, did most really convey to me the convictions of a
+large and influential body of West Indians&mdash;convictions on
+which they are already acting, and will act more and more.
+With Hayti so close, and with opinion in England indifferent
+to what becomes of them, they will clear out while they have
+something left to lose, and will not wait till ruin is upon them
+or till they are ordered off the land by a black legislature.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+There is a saying in Hayti that the white man has no rights
+which the blacks are bound to recognise.</p>
+
+<p>I walked forward after we had done talking. We had five
+hundred of the poor creatures on board on their way to the
+Darien pandemonium. The vessel was rolling with a heavy
+beam sea. I found the whole mass of them reduced into the
+condition of the pigs who used to occupy the foredeck in the
+Cork and Bristol packets. They were lying in a confused heap
+together, helpless, miserable, without consciousness apparently,
+save a sense in each that he was wretched. Unfortunate
+brothers-in-law! following the laws of political economy, and
+carrying their labour to the dearest market, where, before a
+year was out, half of them were to die. They had souls, too,
+some of them, and honest and kindly hearts. I observed one
+man who was suffering less than the rest reading aloud to a
+prostrate group a chapter of the New Testament; another was
+reading to himself a French Catholic book of devotion.</p>
+
+<p>The dawn was breaking in the east when I came on deck in
+the morning. The Blue Mountains were hanging over us on
+our right hand, the peaks buried in white mist which the unrisen
+sun was faintly tinting with orange. We had passed Morant
+Bay, the scene of Gordon's rash attempt to imitate Toussaint
+l'Ouverture. As so often in the Antilles, a level plain
+stretched between the sea and the base of the hills, formed by
+the debris washed down by the rivers in the rainy season.
+Among cane fields and cocoa-nut groves we saw houses and
+the chimneys of the sugar factories; and, as we came nearer,
+we saw men and horses going to their early work. Presently
+Kingston itself came in sight, and Up Park Camp, and the
+white barracks high up on the mountain side, of which one had
+read and heard so much. Here was actually Tom Cringle's
+Kingston, and between us and the town was the long sand spit
+which incloses the lagoon at the head of which Kingston is built.
+How this natural breakwater had been deposited I could find no
+one to tell me. It is eight miles long, rising but a few feet above
+the water-line, in places not more than thirty yards across&mdash;nowhere,
+except at the extremity, more than sixty or a hundred.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171-172]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/image0006.jpg" alt="PORT ROYAL, JAMAICA." title="" /><br />
+<span class="caption">PORT ROYAL, JAMAICA.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span></p><p>The thundering swell of the Caribbean Sea breaks upon it
+from year's end to year's end, and never washes it any thinner.
+Where the sand is dry, beyond the reach of the waves, it is
+planted thickly all along with palms, and appears from the sea
+a soft green line, over which appear the masts and spars of the
+vessels at anchor in the harbour, and the higher houses of
+Kingston itself. To reach the opening into the lagoon you
+have to run on to the end of the sandbank, where there is a
+peninsula on which is built the Port Royal so famous in West
+Indian story. Halfway down among the palms the lighthouse
+stands, from which a gun was fired as we passed, to give notice
+that the English mail was coming in. Treacherous coral reefs
+rise out of the deep water for several miles, some under water
+and visible only by the breakers over them, others forming into
+low wooded islands. Only local pilots can take a ship safely
+through these powerful natural defence works. There are but
+two channels through which the lagoon can be approached.
+The eastern passage, along which we were steaming, runs so near
+the shore that an enemy's ship would be destroyed by the
+batteries among the sandhills long before it could reach the
+mouth. The western passage is less intricate, but that also is
+commanded by powerful forts. In old times Kingston was
+unattackable, so strong had the position been made by nature
+and art combined. It could be shelled now over the spit from
+the open sea. It might be destroyed, but even so could not
+easily be taken.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know that I have ever seen any scene more interesting
+than that which broke upon my eyes as we rounded the
+point, and the lagoon opened out before me. Kingston, which
+we had passed half an hour, before, lay six miles off at the head
+of the bay, now inside the sand, ridge, blue and hazy in the distance.
+At the back were the mountains. The mist had melted
+off, standing in shadowy grey masses with the sun rising behind
+them. Immediately in front were the dockyards, forts, and
+towers of Port Royal, with the guardship, gunboats, and tenders,
+with street and terrace, roof and turret and glistening vane, all
+clearly and sharply defined in the exquisite transparency of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>
+air. The associations of the place no doubt added to the impression.
+Before the first hut was run up in Kingston, Port
+Royal was the rendezvous of all English ships which, for spoil
+or commerce, frequented the West Indian seas. Here the
+buccaneers sold their plunder and squandered their gains in
+gambling and riot. Here in the later century of legitimate
+wars, whole fleets were gathered to take in stores, or refit when
+shattered by engagements. Here Nelson had been, and
+Collingwood and Jervis, and all our other naval heroes. Here
+prizes were brought in for adjudication, and pirates to be tried
+and hanged. In this spot more than in any other, beyond
+Great Britain herself, the energy of the Empire once was
+throbbing. The 'Urgent,' an old two-decker, and three gunboats
+were all that were now floating in the once crowded water;
+the 'Urgent,' no longer equipped for active service, imperfectly
+armed, inadequately manned, but still flaunting the broad white
+ensign, and as if grandly watching over the houses which lay
+behind her. There were batteries at the point, and batteries
+on the opposite shore. The morning bugle rang out clear and
+inspiriting from the town, and white coats and gold and silver
+lace glanced in and out as men and officers were passing to
+parade. Here, at any rate, England was still alive.</p>
+
+<p>The channel at the entrance is a mile in width. The
+lagoon (the open part of it) may be seven or eight miles long
+and half as many broad. It forms the mouth of the Cobre
+river, one of the largest in Jamaica, on which, ten miles up,
+stands the original seat of government established by the
+Spaniards, and called after them Spanish Town. The fashion
+of past times, as old as the times of Thucydides, and continued
+on till the end of the last century, was to choose the sites for
+important towns in estuaries, at a distance from the sea, to be
+out of the reach of pirates. The Cobre, running down from
+Spanish Town, turns the plain through which it flows into a
+swamp. The swamp covers itself with mangroves, and the
+mangroves fringe the shore of the lagoon itself for two-thirds
+of its circuit. As Jamaica grew in wealth and population the
+trade was carried from Port Royal deeper into the bay.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>
+Another town sprang up there, called King's Town, or shortly
+'Kingston.' The administration was removed thither for
+convenience, and though fallen away from its old consequence,
+Kingston, with its extended suburbs, its churches and warehouses,
+and large mansions overhung with trees, looks at a
+distance like a place of consideration. Many ships lay along
+the wharves, or anchored a few cables' distance off. Among
+them were a couple of Spanish frigates, which remain there in
+permanence on the watch for refugees from Cuba. On the
+slopes behind the town, as far as eye could see, were the once
+splendid estates of the sugar princes of the last century. One
+of them was pointed out to me as the West Indian home of
+the author of 'Tom Cringle.'</p>
+
+<p>We had to stop for a few minutes as the officer of the port
+came alongside for the mails. We then went on at reduced
+speed. The lagoon is generally shoal. A deep water channel
+runs along the side of it which is farthest from the sea; made,
+I suppose, by the river, for as usual there is little tide or none.
+Halfway up we passed under the walls of Fort Augusta, now
+a ruin and almost deserted, but once mounting a hundred
+guns. The money which we spent on the defence of Jamaica
+in the old times was not always laid out wisely, as will be seen
+in an account which I shall have to give of this remarkable
+structure; but, at any rate, we were lavish of it.</p>
+
+<p>Of the sharks with which the water used to swarm we saw
+none. Port Royal Jack and his kindred are said to have
+disappeared, driven or frightened out by the screws of the
+steamers. But it is not a place which I should choose for
+a swim. Nor did the nigger boys seem as anxious as I had
+seen them in other spots to dive for sixpences under the
+ship's side.</p>
+
+<p>No account is made of days when you come into port after
+a voyage. Cargoes have to be landed, or coal has to be taken
+in. The donkey engines are at work, hoisting packing cases
+and luggage out of the hold. Stewards run to and fro, and
+state-room doors are opened, and busy figures are seen through
+each, stuffing their portmanteaus and preparing for departure.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>
+The church bells at Kingston, ringing for early service,
+reminded me that it was Sunday. We brought up at a jetty,
+and I cannot say that, close at hand, the town was as
+attractive as it had appeared when first I saw it. The
+enchantment was gone. The blue haze of distance gave place
+to reality. The water was so fetid under the ship's side that
+it could not be pumped into the baths. Odours, not Arabian,
+from open drains reminded me of Jacmel. The streets, up
+which I could see from the afterdeck, looked dirty and the
+houses shabby. Docks and wharves, however, are never the
+brightest part of any town, English or foreign. There were
+people enough at any rate, and white faces enough among
+them. Gangways were rigged from the ship to the shore, and
+ladies and gentlemen rushed on board to meet their friends.
+The companies' agents appeared in the captain's cabin.
+Porters were scrambling for luggage; pushing, shoving, and
+swearing. Passengers who had come out with us, and had
+never missed attendance at the breakfast table, were hurrying
+home unbreakfasted to their wives and families. My own
+plans were uncertain. I had no friends, not even an acquaintance.
+I knew nothing of the hotels and lodging houses, save
+that they had generally a doubtful reputation. I had brought
+with me a letter of introduction to Sir H. Norman, the
+governor, but Sir Henry had gone to England. On the
+whole, I thought it best to inclose the letter to Mr. Walker,
+the Colonial Secretary, who I understood was in Kingston,
+with a note asking for advice. This I sent by a messenger.
+Meanwhile I stayed on board to look about me from the deck.
+The ship was to go on the next morning to the canal works at
+Darien. Time was precious. Immediately on arriving she
+had begun to take in coal, Sunday though it might be, and a
+singular spectacle it was. The coal yard was close by, and
+some hundreds of negroes, women and men, but women, in
+four times the number, were hard at work. The entire process
+was by hand and basket, each basket holding from eighty to a
+hundred pounds weight. Two planks were laid down at a
+steep incline from the ship's deck to the yard. Swinging their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>
+loads on their heads, erect as statues, and with a step elastic
+as a racehorse's, they marched up one of the planks, emptied
+their baskets into the coal bunkers, and ran down the other.
+Round and round they went under the blazing sun all the
+morning through, and round and round they would continue
+to go all the afternoon. The men took it comparatively easy.
+The women flew along, laughing, and clamouring, as if not
+knowing what weariness was&mdash;willing beasts of burden, for they
+had the care upon them of their children; the men disclaiming
+all responsibilities on that score, after the babies have been
+once brought into the world. The poor women are content
+with the arrangement, which they prefer to what they would
+regard as legal bondage. They earn at this coaling work
+seven or eight shillings a day. If they were wives, their
+husbands would take it from them and spend it in rum. The
+companion who is not a wife can refuse and keep her earnings
+for her little ones. If black suffrage is to be the rule in
+Jamaica, I would take it away from the men and would give
+it to the superior sex. The women are the working bees of
+the hive. They would make a tolerable nation of black
+amazons, and the babies would not be offered to Jumbi.</p>
+
+<p>When I had finished my meditations on the coaling women,
+there were other black creatures to wonder at; great boobies
+or pelicans, old acquaintances of the Zoological Gardens, who
+act as scavengers in these waters. We had perhaps a couple
+of dozen of them round us as large as vultures, ponderous and
+sleepy to look at when squatting on rocks or piles, over-weighted
+by their enormous bills. On the wing they were
+astonishingly swift, wheeling in circles, till they could fix their
+prey with their eyes, then pouncing upon it with a violent
+slanting plunge. I suppose their beaks might be broken if
+they struck directly, but I never saw one miss its aim. Nor
+do they ever go below the surface, but seize always what is
+close to it. I was told&mdash;I do not know how truly&mdash;that like the
+diablots in Dominica, they nest in the mountains and only
+come down to the sea to feed.</p>
+
+<p>Hearing that I was in search of quarters, a Miss Burton,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>
+a handsome mulatto woman, came up and introduced herself
+to me. Hotels in the English West Indies are generally
+detestable. This dame had set up a boarding house on improved
+principles, or rather two boarding houses, between
+which she invited me to take my choice, one in the suburbs of
+Kingston, one on the bank of a river in a rocky gorge in the Blue
+Mountains. In either of these she promised that she would
+make me happy, and I do not doubt that she would have succeeded,
+for her fame had spread through all Jamaica, and her
+face was as merry as it was honest. As it turned out I was
+provided for elsewhere, and I lost the chance of making an
+acquaintance which I should have valued. When she spoke
+to me she seemed a very model of vigour and health. She
+died suddenly while I was in the island.</p>
+
+<p>The day was still early. When the vessel was in some order
+again, and those who were going on shore had disappeared, the
+rest of us were called down to breakfast to taste some of those
+Jamaica delicacies on which Paul Gelid was so eloquent. The
+fruit was the chief attraction: pineapples, of which one can
+eat as much as one likes in these countries with immunity from
+after suffering; oranges, more excellent than even those of
+Grenada and Dominica; shaddocks, admirable as that memorable
+one which seduced Adam; and for the first time mangoes,
+the famous Number Eleven of which I had heard such
+high report, and was now to taste. The English gardeners can
+do much, but they cannot ripen a Number Eleven, and it is
+too delicate to bear carriage. It must be eaten in the tropics
+or nowhere. The mango is the size and shape of a swan's
+egg, of a ruddy yellow colour when ripe, and in flavour like an
+exceptionally good apricot, with a very slight intimation of resin.
+The stone is disproportionately large. The flesh adheres to
+it, and one abandons as hopeless the attempt to eat mangoes
+with clean lips and fingers. The epicures insist that they
+should be eaten only in a bath.</p>
+
+<p>The heat was considerable, and the feast of fruit was the
+more welcome. Soon after the Colonial Secretary politely
+answered my note in person. In the absence of the governor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>
+of a colony, the colonial secretary, as a rule, takes his place.
+In Jamaica, and wherever we have a garrison, the commander
+of the forces becomes acting governor; I suppose because it
+is not convenient to place an officer of high military rank
+under the orders of a civilian who is not the direct representative
+of the sovereign. In the gentleman who now called on
+me I found an old acquaintance whom I had known as a boy
+many years ago. He told me that, if I had made no other
+arrangements, Colonel J&mdash;&mdash;, who was the present chief, was
+expecting me to be his guest at the 'King's House' during
+my stay in Jamaica. My reluctance to trespass on the hospitality
+of an entire stranger was not to be allowed. Soldiers
+who have distinguished themselves are, next to lawyers, the
+most agreeable people to be met with, and when I was convinced
+that I should really be welcome, I had no other objection.
+An aide-de-camp, I was told, would call for me in the
+afternoon. Meanwhile the secretary stayed with me for an
+hour or two, and I was able to learn something authentic from
+him as to the general condition of things. I had not given
+entire credit to the representations of my planter friend of the
+evening before. Mr. Walker took a more cheerful view, and,
+although the prospects were not as bright as they might be, he
+saw no reason for despondency. Sugar was down of course.
+The public debt had increased, and taxation was heavy. Many
+gentlemen in Jamaica, as in the Antilles, were selling, or trying
+to sell, their estates and go out of it. On the other hand, expenses
+of government were being reduced, and the revenue
+showed a surplus. The fruit trade with the United States
+was growing, and promised to grow still further. American
+capitalists had come into the island, and were experimenting
+on various industries. The sugar treaty with America would
+naturally have been welcome; but Jamaica was less dependent
+on its sugar crop, and the action of the British Government
+was less keenly resented. In the Antilles, the Colonial Secretary
+admitted, there might be a desire for annexation to the
+United States, and Jamaican landowners had certainly expressed
+the same wish to myself. Mr. Walker, however, assured me
+that, while the blacks would oppose it unanimously, the feeling,
+if it existed at all among the whites, was confined as yet
+to a very few persons. They had been English for 230 years,
+and the large majority of them wished to remain English.
+There had been suffering among them; but there had been
+suffering in other places besides Jamaica. Better times might
+perhaps be coming with the opening of the Darien canal, when
+Kingston might hope to become again the centre of a trade.
+Of the negroes, both men and women, Mr. Walker spoke extremely
+favourably. They were far less indolent than they
+were supposed to be; they were settling on the waste lands,
+acquiring property, growing yams and oranges, and harming no
+one; they had no grievance left; they knew it, and were perfectly
+contented.</p>
+
+<p>As Mr. Walker was an official, I did not ask him about the
+working of the recent changes in the constitution; nor could
+he have properly answered me if I had. The state of things
+is briefly this: Jamaica, after the first settlement, received a
+parliamentary form of government, modelled on that of Ireland,
+the colonial liberties being restricted by a law analogous
+to Poynings' Act. The legislature, so constructed, of course
+represented the white interest only and was entirely composed
+of whites. It remained substantially unaltered till 1853, when
+modifications were made which admitted coloured men to the
+suffrage, though with so high a franchise as to be almost exclusive.
+It became generally felt that the franchise would
+have to be extended. A popular movement, led by Mr.
+Gordon, who was a member of the legislature, developed into
+a riot, into bloodshed and panic. Gordon was hanged by a
+court-martial, and the assembly, aware that, if allowed to exist
+any longer, it could exist only with the broad admission of the
+negro vote, pronounced its own dissolution, surrendered its
+powers to the Crown, and represented formally 'that nothing
+but a strong government could prevent the island from lapsing
+into the condition of Hayti.'</p>
+
+<p>The surrender was accepted. Jamaica was administered till
+within the last four years by a governor, officials, and council
+all nominated by the Queen. No dissatisfaction had been expressed,
+and the blacks at least had enjoyed a prosperity and
+tranquillity which had been unbroken by a single disturbance.
+If the island has suffered, it has suffered from causes with
+which political dissatisfaction has had nothing to do, and
+which, therefore, political changes cannot remove. In 1884
+Mr. Gladstone's Government, for reasons which I have not
+been able to ascertain, revived suddenly the representative
+system; constructed a council composed equally of nominated
+and of elected members, and placed the franchise so low as to
+include practically every negro peasant who possessed a hut
+and a garden. So long as the Crown retains and exercises its
+power of nomination, no worse results can ensue than the inevitable
+discontent when the votes of the elected members
+are disregarded or overborne. But to have ventured so important
+an alteration with the intention of leaving it without
+further extension would have been an act of gratuitous folly,
+of which it would be impossible to imagine an English cabinet
+to have been capable. It is therefore assumed and understood
+to have been no more than an initial step towards passing over
+the management of Jamaica to the black constituencies. It
+has been so construed in the other islands, and was the occasion
+of the agitation in Trinidad which I observed when I was
+there.</p>
+
+<p>My own opinion as to the wisdom of such an experiment
+matters little: but I have a right to say that neither blacks
+nor whites have asked for it; that no one who knows anything
+of the West Indies and wishes them to remain English sincerely
+asked for it; that no one has agitated for it save a few newspaper
+writers and politicians whom it would raise into consequence.
+If tried at all, it will be tried either with a deliberate
+intention of cutting Jamaica free from us altogether, or else in
+deference to English political superstitions, which attribute
+supernatural virtues to the exercise of the franchise, and assume
+that a form of self-government which suits us tolerably at
+home will be equally beneficial in all countries and under
+all conditions.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_12" id="Footnote_1_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_12"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> This has been angrily denied. A gentleman whose veracity I cannot
+doubt assured me that he had himself seen a dead body lying unburied
+among some bushes. When he returned to the place a month after it was
+still there. The frightful mortality among the labourers, at least in the
+early years of the undertaking, is too notorious to be called in question.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The English mails&mdash;Irish agitation&mdash;Two kinds of colonies&mdash;Indian administration&mdash;How
+far applicable in the West Indies&mdash;Land at Kingston&mdash;Government
+House&mdash;Dinner party&mdash;Interesting officer&mdash;Majuba Hill&mdash;Mountain
+station&mdash;Kingston curiosities&mdash;Tobacco&mdash;Valley in the Blue
+Mountains.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>I am reminded as I write of an adventure which befell
+Archbishop Whately soon after his promotion to the see of
+Dublin. On arriving in Ireland he saw that the people were
+miserable. The cause, in his mind, was their ignorance of
+political economy, of which he had himself written what he
+regarded as an excellent manual. An Irish translation of this
+manual he conceived would be the best possible medicine, and
+he commissioned a native Scripture reader to make one. To
+insure correctness he required the reader to retranslate to him
+what he had written line by line. He observed that the man
+as he read turned sometimes two pages at a time. The text
+went on correctly, but his quick eye perceived that something
+was written on the intervening leaves. He insisted on knowing
+what it was, and at last extorted an explanation, 'Your
+Grace, me and my comrade conceived that it was mighty dry
+reading, so we have just interposed now and then a bit of a
+pawem, to help it forward, your Grace.' I am myself imitating
+the translators, and making sandwiches out of politics and
+local descriptions.</p>
+
+<p>We had brought the English mails with us. There were
+letters to read which had been in the ship with us, though out
+of our reach. There were the newspapers to read. They
+told me nothing but the weary round of Irish outrages and the
+rival remedies of Tory or Radical politicians who cared for
+Ireland less than I did, and considered only how to trim their
+sails to keep in office or to get it. How sick one is of all that!
+Half-a-dozen times at least in Anglo-Irish history things have
+come to the same point. 'All Ireland cannot govern the Earl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+of Kildare,' said someone in Henry VIII.'s privy council.
+Then answered Wolsey, in the tone of Mr. Gladstone, 'Let
+the Earl of Kildare govern all Ireland.' Elizabeth wished to
+conciliate. Shan O'Neil, Desmond, Tyrone promised in turn
+to rule Ireland in loyal union with England under Irish ideas.
+Lord Grey, who was for 'a Mahometan conquest,' was censured
+and 'girded at:' yet the end was always broken heads.
+From 1641 to 1649 an Irish parliament sat at Kilkenny, and
+Charles I. and the Tories dreamt of an alliance between Irish
+popery and English loyalism. Charles lost his head, and
+Cromwell had to make an end of Irish self-government at
+Drogheda and Wexford. Tyrconnell and James II. were to
+repeal the Act of Settlement and restore the forfeited lands to
+the old owners. The end of that came at the Boyne and at
+Aghrim. Grattan would remake the Irish nation. The English
+Liberals sent Lord Fitzwilliam to help him, and the Saxon
+mastiff and the Celtic wolf were to live as brothers evermore.
+The result has been always the same; the wretched country
+inflated with a dream of independence, and then trampled into
+mud again. So it has been. So it will be again. Ireland
+cannot be independent, for England is stronger than she, and
+cannot permit it. Yet nothing less will satisfy her. And so
+there has been always a weary round of fruitless concessions
+leading to demands which cannot be gratified, and in the end
+we are driven back upon force, which the miserable people
+lack the courage to encounter like men. Mr. Gladstone's
+experiment differs only from its antecedents because in the
+past the English friends of Irish liberty had a real hope that a
+reconciliation was possible. They believed in what they were
+trying to do. The present enterprise is the creation of parliamentary
+faction. I have never met any person acquainted
+with the minds and motives of the public men of the day who
+would not confess to me that, if it had suited the interests of
+the leaders of the present Radical party to adopt the Irish
+policy of the Long Parliament, their energy and their eloquence
+would have been equally at the service of the Protestant ascendency,
+which they have now denounced as a upas tree.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>
+They even ask you with wide eyes what else you would
+expect?</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Sexton says that if England means to govern Ireland
+she must keep an army there as large as she keeps in India.
+England could govern Ireland in perfect peace, without an
+army at all, if there was no faction in the House of Commons.
+The spirit of party will either destroy the British Empire, or
+the British nation will make an end of party government on
+its present lines. There are sounds in the air like the cracking
+of the ice of the Neva at the incoming of spring, as if a nobler
+purpose was at last awaking in us. In a few more years there
+may be no more Radicals and no more Conservatives, and the
+nation will be all in all.</p>
+
+<p>Here is the answer to the question so often asked, What is
+the use of the colonies to us? The colonies are a hundredfold
+multiplication of the area of our own limited islands. In
+taking possession of so large a portion of the globe, we have
+enabled ourselves to spread and increase, and carry our persons,
+our language and our liberties, into all climates and continents.
+We overflow at home; there are too many of us here already;
+and if no lands belonged to us but Great Britain and Ireland,
+we should become a small insignificant power beside the
+mighty nations which are forming around us. There is space
+for hundreds of millions of us in the territories of which we
+and our fathers have possessed ourselves. In Canada, Australia,
+New Zealand we add to our numbers and our resources.
+There are so many more Englishmen in the world able to hold
+their own against the mightiest of their rivals. And we have
+another function, such as the Romans had. The sections of
+men on this globe are unequally gifted. Some are strong and
+can govern themselves; some are weak and are the prey of
+foreign invaders or internal anarchy; and freedom, which all
+desire, is only attainable by weak nations when they are subject
+to the rule of others who are at once powerful and just.
+This was the duty which fell to the Latin race two thousand
+years ago. In these modern times it has fallen to ours, and
+in the discharge of it the highest features in the English<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>
+character have displayed themselves. Circumstances forced
+on us the conquest of India; we have given India in return
+internal peace undisturbed by tribal quarrels or the ambitions
+of dangerous neighbours, with a law which deals out right to
+high and low among 250,000,000 human beings.</p>
+
+<p>Never have rulers been less self-seeking than we have been
+in our Asiatic empire. No 'lex de repetundis' has been
+needed to punish avaricious proconsuls who had fattened on
+the provinces. In such positions the English show at their
+best, and do their best. India has been the training school
+of our greatest soldiers and greatest administrators. Strike off
+the Anglo-Indian names from the roll of famous Englishmen,
+and we shall lose the most illustrious of them all.</p>
+
+<p>In India the rule of England has been an unexampled
+success, glorious to ourselves and of infinite benefit to our
+subjects, because we have been upright and disinterested, and
+have tried sincerely and honourably to do our duty. In other
+countries belonging to us, where with the same methods we
+might have produced the same results, we have applied them
+with a hesitating and less clean hand. We planted Ireland as
+a colony with our own people, we gave them a parliament of
+their own, and set them to govern the native Irish for us
+instead of doing it ourselves, to save appearances and to save
+trouble. We have not failed altogether. All the good that
+has been done at all in that poor island has been done by the
+Anglo-Irish landlords. But it has not been much, as the
+present condition of things shows. In the West Indies
+similarly the first settlers carried with them their English
+institutions. They were themselves a handful. The bulk of
+the population were slaves, and as long as slavery continued
+those institutions continued to work tolerably in the interest
+of the white race. When the slaves were emancipated, the
+distinction of colour done away with, and the black multitude
+and their white employers made equal before the law and
+equally privileged, constitutional government became no longer
+adapted to the new conditions. The white minority could
+not be trusted with the exclusive possession of political power.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>
+The blacks could not be trusted with the equally dangerous
+supremacy which their numbers would insure them. Our
+duty, if we did not and do not mean to abandon them
+altogether, has been to govern both with the same equity with
+which we govern at Calcutta. If you choose to take a race
+like the Irish or like the negroes whom you have forced into
+an unwilling subjection and have not treated when in that
+condition with perfect justice&mdash;if you take such a race, strike
+the fetters off them, and arm them at once with all the powers
+and privileges of loyal citizens, you ought not to be surprised if
+they attribute your concessions to fear, and if they turn again
+and rend you. When we are brought in contact with races of
+men who are not strong enough or brave enough to defend
+their own independence, and whom our own safety cannot
+allow to fall under any other power, our right and our duty is
+to govern such races and to govern them well, or they will
+have a right in turn to cut our throats. This is our mission.
+When we have dared to act up to it we have succeeded
+magnificently; we have failed when we have paltered and
+trifled; and we shall fail again, and the great empire on which
+the sun never sets will be shattered to atoms, if we refuse to
+look facts in the face.</p>
+
+<p>From these meditations, suggested by the batch of newspapers
+which I had been studying, I was roused by the arrival
+of the promised aide-de-camp, a good-looking and good-humoured
+young officer in white uniform (they all wear white
+in the tropics), who had brought the governor's carriage for
+me. Government House, or King's House, as it is called,
+answering to a 'Queen's House' in Barbadoes, is five miles
+from Kingston, on the slope which gradually ascends from the
+sea to the mountains. We drove through the town, which did
+not improve on closer acquaintance. The houses which front
+towards the streets are generally insignificant. The better
+sort, being behind walls or overhung with trees, were imperfectly
+visible. The roads were deep in white dust, which flies everywhere
+in whirling clouds from the unceasing wind. It was the
+dry season. The rains are not constant in Jamaica, as they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>
+are in the Antilles. The fields and the sides of the mountains
+were bare and brown and parched. The blacks, however,
+were about in crowds in their Sunday finery. Being in a
+British island, we had got back into the white calicoes and
+ostrich plumes, and I missed the grace of the women at
+Dominica; but men and women seemed as if they had not a
+care in the world. We passed Up Park Camp and the
+cantonments of the West India regiments, and then through a
+'scrub' of dwarf acacia and blue flowered lignum vitae.
+Handsome villas were spread along the road with lawns and
+gardens, and the road itself was as excellent as those in
+Barbadoes. Half an hour's drive brought us to the lodge, and
+through the park to the King's House itself, which stands
+among groups of fine trees four hundred feet above the sea.</p>
+
+<p>All the large houses in Jamaica&mdash;and this was one of the
+largest of them&mdash;are like those in Barbadoes, with the type
+more completely developed, generally square, built of stone,
+standing on blocks, hollow underneath for circulation of air,
+and approached by a broad flight of steps. On the three sides
+which the sun touches, deep verandahs or balconies are thrown
+out on the first and second floors, closed in front by green
+blinds, which can be shut either completely or partially, so
+that at a distance they look like houses of cards or great green
+boxes, made pretty by the trees which shelter them or the
+creepers which climb over them. Behind the blinds run long
+airy darkened galleries, and into these the sitting rooms open
+which are of course still darker with a subdued green light, in
+which, till you are used to it, you can hardly read. The floors
+are black, smooth, and polished, with loose mats for carpets.
+The reader of 'Tom Cringle' will remember Tom's misadventure
+when he blundered into a party of pretty laughing
+girls, slipped on one of these floors with a retrospective misadventure,
+and could not rise till his creole cousin slipped
+a petticoat over his head. All the arrangements are made to
+shut out heat and light. The galleries have sofas to lounge
+upon&mdash;everybody smokes, and smokes where he pleases; the
+draught sweeping away all residuary traces. At the King's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
+House to increase the accommodation a large separate dining
+saloon has been thrown out on the north side, to which you
+descend from the drawing room by stairs, and thence along
+a covered passage. Among the mango trees behind there is a
+separate suite of rooms for the aides de-camp, and a superb
+swimming bath sixty feet long and eight feet deep. Altogether
+it was a sumptuous sort of palace where a governor with
+7,000<i>l.</i> a year might spend his term of office with considerable
+comfort were it not haunted by recollections of poor
+Eyre. He, it seems, lived in the 'King's House,' and two
+miles off, within sight of his windows, lived Gordon.</p>
+
+<p>I had a more than gracious welcome from Colonel J&mdash;&mdash;
+and his family. In him I found a high-bred soldier, who had
+served with distinction in India, who had been at the storm of
+Delhi, and who was close by when Nicholson was shot. No
+one could have looked fitter for the post which he now temporarily
+occupied. I felt uncomfortable at being thus thrust
+upon his hospitality. I had letters of introduction with me to
+the various governors of the islands, but on Colonel J&mdash;&mdash; I
+had no claim at all. I was not even aware of his existence,
+or he, very likely, of mine. If not he, at any rate the ladies
+of his establishment, might reasonably look upon me as a
+bore, and if I had been allowed I should simply have paid my
+respects and have gone on to my mulatto. But they would
+not hear of it. They were so evidently hearty in their invitation
+to me that I could only submit and do my best <i>not</i> to be
+a bore, the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.</p>
+
+<p>In the circle into which I was thrown I was unlikely to hear
+much of West Indian politics or problems. Colonel J&mdash;&mdash;
+was acting as governor by accident, and for a few months only.
+He had his professional duties to look after; his term of service
+in Jamaica had nearly expired; and he could not trouble
+himself with possibilities and tendencies with which he would
+have no personal concern. As a spectator he considered
+probably that we were not making much of the West Indies,
+and were not on the way to make much. He confirmed
+the complaint which I had heard so often, that the blacks<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>
+would not work for wages more than three days in the week,
+or regularly upon those, preferring to cultivate their own
+yams and sweet potatoes; but as it was admitted that they
+did work one way or another at home, I could not see that
+there was much to complain of. The blacks were only doing
+as we do. We, too, only work as much as we like or as we
+must, and we prefer working for ourselves to working for
+others.</p>
+
+<p>On his special subjects the Colonel was as interesting as he
+could not help being. He talked of the army and of the
+recent changes in it without insisting that it was going to the
+devil. He talked of India and the Russians, and for a wonder
+he had no Russophobia. He thought that England and
+Russia might as easily be friends as enemies, and that it
+would be better for the world if they were. As this had been
+my own fixed opinion for the last thirty years, I thought him
+a very sensible man. In the evening there was a small dinner
+party, made up chiefly of officers from the West Indian regiments
+at Kingston. The English troops are in the mountains
+at Newcastle, four or five thousand feet up and beyond common
+visiting distance. Among those whom I met on this
+occasion was an officer who struck me particularly. There
+was a mystery about his origin. He had risen from the ranks,
+but was evidently a gentleman by birth; he had seen service
+all over the world; he had been in Chili, and, among his
+other accomplishments, spoke Spanish fluently; he entered
+the English army as a private, had been in the war in the
+Transvaal, and was the only survivor of the regiment which
+was surprised and shot down by the Boers in an intricate pass
+where they could neither retreat nor defend themselves. On
+that occasion he had escaped and saved the colours, for which
+he was rewarded by a commission. He was acquainted with
+many of my friends there who had been in the thick of the
+campaign; knew Sir Owen Lanyon, Sir Morrison Barlow, and
+Colley. He had surveyed the plateau on Majuba Hill after
+the action, and had gathered the rumours which were flying
+many coloured about Colley's death. Friend and foe alike<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
+loved Colley, and his already legendary fame is an unconscious
+tribute to his memory. By whose hand he fell can never be
+known. We believe as we wish or as we fancy. Mr. &mdash;&mdash; was
+so fine an officer, so clever a man, and so reserved about his
+personal affairs, that about him too 'myths' were growing. He
+was credited in the mess room with being the then unknown
+author of 'Solomon's Mines.' Mr. Haggard will forgive a
+mistake which, if he knows Mr. &mdash;&mdash;, he will feel to be a
+compliment.</p>
+
+<p>From general conversation I gathered that the sanguine
+views of the Colonial Secretary were not widely shared. The
+English interest was still something in Jamaica; but the phenomena
+of the Antilles were present there also, if in a less
+extreme form. There were 700,000 coloured people in the
+island, with but 15,000 or 16,000 whites; and the blacks there
+also were increasing rapidly, and the whites were stationary if
+not declining. There was the same uneasy social jealousy,
+and the absence of any social relation between the two races.
+There were mulattoes in the island of wealth and consequence,
+and at Government House there are no distinctions; but the
+English residents of pure colonial blood would not associate
+with them, social exclusiveness increasing with political equality.
+The blacks disliked the mulattoes; the mulattoes despised the
+blacks, and would not intermarry with them. The impression
+was that the mulatto would die out, that the tendency of the
+whites and blacks was to a constantly sharpening separation,
+and that if things went on as they were going for another
+generation, it was easy to see which of the two colours would
+then be in the ascendant. The blacks were growing saucy,
+too; with much else of the same kind. I could but listen
+and wait to judge for myself.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile my quarters were unexceptionable, my kind
+entertainers leaving nothing undone to make my stay with
+them agreeable. In hot climates one sleeps lightly; but light
+sleep is all that one wants, and one wakes early. The swimming
+bath was waiting for me underneath my window. After
+a plunge in the clear cold water came coffee, grown and dried<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>
+and roasted on the spot, and 'made' as such coffee ought to
+be. Then came the early walk. One missed the tropical
+luxuriance of Trinidad and Dominica, for the winter months
+in Jamaica are almost rainless; but it would have been beautiful
+anywhere else, and the mango trees were in their glory.
+There was a corner given to orchids, which were hung in
+baskets and just coming into flower. Lizards swarmed in the
+sunshine, running up the tree trunks, or basking on the garden
+seats. Snakes there are none; the mongoose has cleared
+them all away so completely that there is nothing left for him
+to eat but the poultry, in which he makes havoc, and, having
+been introduced to exterminate the vermin, has become a
+vermin himself.</p>
+
+<p>To drive, to ride, to visit was the employment of the days.
+I saw the country. I saw what people were doing, and heard
+what they had to say.</p>
+
+<p>The details are mostly only worth forgetting. The senior
+aide-de-camp, Captain C&mdash;&mdash;, an officer in the Artillery, was a
+man of ability and observation. He, too, like the Colonel, was
+mainly interested in his profession, to which he was anxious to
+return; but he was watching, too, with serious interest the waning
+fortunes of the West Indies. He superintended the social part
+of the governor's business to perfection. Anything which I
+wished for had only to be mentioned to be provided. He gave
+me the benefit, though less often than I could have wished, of
+his shrewd, and not ungenial, observations. He drove me one
+morning into Kingston. I had passed through it hastily on
+the day of my landing. There were libraries, museums, public
+offices, and such like to be seen, besides the town itself. High
+up on the mountain side, more often in the clouds than out of
+them, the cantonments of the English regiments were visible
+from the park at Government House. The slope where they
+had been placed was so steep that one wondered how they
+held on. They looked like tablecloths stretched out to dry.
+I was to ride up there one day. Meanwhile, as we were
+driving through the park and saw the white spots shining up
+above us, I asked the aide-de-camp what the privates found to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>
+do in such a place. The ground was too steep for athletics;
+no cricket could be possible there, no lawn tennis, no quoits,
+no anything. There were no neighbours. Sports there were
+none. The mongoose had destroyed the winged game, and
+there was neither hare nor rabbit, pig nor deer; not a wild
+animal to be hunted and killed. With nothing to do, no one
+to speak to, and nothing to kill, what could become of them?
+Did they drink? Well, yes. They drank rum occasionally;
+but there were no public houses. They could only get it at
+the canteen, and the daily allowance was moderate. As to
+beer, it was out of reach altogether. At the foot of the mountains
+it was double the price which it was in England. At
+Newcastle the price was doubled again by the cost of carriage
+to the camp. I inquired if they did not occasionally hang
+themselves. 'Perhaps they would,' he said, 'if they had no
+choice, but they preferred to desert, and this they did in large
+numbers. They slipped down the back of the range, made
+their way to the sea, and escaped to the United States.' The
+officers&mdash;what became of them? The officers! Oh, well!
+they gardened! Did they like it? Some did and some
+didn't. They were not so ill off as the men, as occasionally
+they could come down on leave.</p>
+
+<p>One wondered what the process had been which had led the
+authorities to select such a situation. Of course it was for the
+health of the troops, but the hill country in Jamaica is wide;
+there were many other places available, less utterly detestable,
+and ennui and discontent are as mischievous as fever.
+General &mdash;&mdash;, a short time ago, went up to hold an inquiry
+into the desertions, and expressed his wonder how such things
+could be. With such air, such scenery, such views far and
+wide over the island, what could human creatures wish for
+more? 'You would desert yourself, general,' said another
+officer, 'if you were obliged to stay there a month.'</p>
+
+<p>Captain C&mdash;&mdash; undertook that I should go up myself in a
+day or two. He promised to write and make arrangements.
+Meanwhile we went on to Kingston. It was not beautiful.
+There was Rodney's statue. Rodney is venerated in Jamaica,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>
+as he ought to be; but for him it would have been a Spanish
+colony again. But there is nothing grand about the buildings,
+nothing even handsome, nothing even specially characteristic
+of England or the English mind. They were once perhaps
+business-like, and business having slackened they are now
+dingy. Shops, houses, wharves, want brightness and colour.
+We called at the office of the Colonial Secretary, the central
+point of the administration. It was an old mansion, plain,
+unambitious, sufficient perhaps for its purpose, but lifeless and
+dark. If it represented economy there would be no objection.
+The public debt has doubled since Jamaica became a Crown
+colony. In 1876 it was half a million. It is now more than a
+million and a half. The explanation is the extension of the
+railway system, and there has been no culpable extravagance.
+I do not suppose that the re-establishment of a constitution
+would mend matters. Democracies are always extravagant.
+The majority, who have little property or none, regulate
+the expenditure. They lay the taxes on the minority, who
+have to find the money, and have no interest in sparing
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Ireland when it was governed by the landowners, Jamaica in
+the days of slavery, were administered at a cost which seems
+now incredibly small. The authority of the landowners and
+of the planters was undisputed. They were feared and obeyed,
+and magistrates unpaid and local constables sufficed to maintain
+tolerable order. Their authority is gone. Their functions
+are transferred to the police, and every service has to be paid
+for. There may be fewer serious crimes, but the subordination
+is immeasurably less, the expense of administration is immeasurably
+greater. I declined to be taken over sugar mills,
+or to be shown the latest improvements. I was too ignorant
+to understand in what the improvements consisted, and could
+take them upon trust. The public bakery was more interesting.
+In tropical climates a hot oven in a small house makes an
+inconvenient addition to the temperature. The bread for
+Kingston, and for many miles around it, is manufactured at
+night by a single company and is distributed in carts in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>
+morning. We saw the museum and public library. There
+were the usual specimens of island antiquities&mdash;of local fish,
+birds, insects, reptiles, plants, geological formations, and such
+like. In the library were old editions of curious books at the
+West Indies, some of them unique, ready to yield ampler
+pictures of the romance of the old life there than we at present
+possess. I had but leisure to glance at title-pages and engravings.
+The most noticeable relic preserved there, if it be
+only genuine, is the identical bauble which Cromwell ordered
+to be taken away from the Speaker's table in the House of
+Commons. Explanations are given of the manner in which it
+came to Jamaica. The evidence, so far as I could understand
+it, did not appear conclusive.</p>
+
+<p>Among the new industries in the island in the place of sugar
+was, or ought to be, tobacco. A few years ago I asked Sir J.
+Hooker, the chief living authority in such matters, why Cuba
+was allowed the monopoly of delicate cigar tobacco&mdash;whether
+there were no other countries where it could be grown equally
+good. He said that at the very moment cigars, as fine as the
+finest Havanas, were being produced in Jamaica. He gave
+me an excellent specimen with the address of the house which
+supplied it; and for a year or two I was able to buy from it
+what, if not perfect, was more than tolerable. The house
+acquired a reputation; and then, for some reason or other,
+perhaps from weariness of the same flavour, perhaps from a
+falling off in the character of the cigars, I, and possibly others,
+began to be less satisfied. Here on the spot I wished to make
+another experiment. Captain C&mdash;&mdash; introduced me to a
+famous manufacturer, a Spaniard, with a Spanish manager
+under him who had been trained at Havana. I bespoke his
+good will by adjuring him in his own tongue not to disappoint
+me; and I believe that he gave me the best that he had. But,
+alas! it is with tobacco as with most other things. Democracy
+is king; and the greatest happiness of the greatest number is
+the rule of modern life. The average of everything is higher
+than it used to be; the high quality which rises above mediocrity
+is rare or is non-existent. We are swept away by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>
+genius of the age, and must be content with such other
+blessings as it has been pleased to bring with it.</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left:4em;">
+Why should I murmur thus and vainly moan?<br />
+The Gods will have it so&mdash;their will be done.<a name="FNanchor_1_13" id="FNanchor_1_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_13" class="fnanchor">[14]</a><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The earth is patient also, and allows the successive generations
+of human creatures to play their parts upon her surface as
+they please. She spins on upon her own course; and seas
+and skies, and crags and forests, are spiritual and beautiful as
+ever.</p>
+
+<p>Gordon's Town is a straggling village in the Blue Range
+underneath Newcastle. Colonel J&mdash;&mdash; had a villa there, and
+one afternoon he took me over to see it. You pass abruptly
+from the open country into the mountains. The way to
+Gordon's Town was by the side of the Hope river, which cuts its
+way out of them in a narrow deep ravine. The stream was
+now trickling faintly among the stones; the enormous boulders
+in the bed were round as cannon balls, and, weighing hundreds
+of tons, show what its power must be in the coming down of
+the floods. Within the limits of the torrent, which must rise
+at such times thirty feet above its winter level, the rocks were
+bare and stern, no green thing being able to grow there.
+Above the line the tropical vegetation was in all its glory:
+ferns and plantains waving in the moist air; cedars, tamarinds,
+gum trees, orange trees striking their roots among the clefts
+of the crags, and hanging out over the abysses below them.
+Aloes flung up their tall spiral stems; flowering shrubs and
+creepers covered bank and slope with green and blue and
+white and yellow, and above and over our heads, as we drove
+along, frowned the great limestone blocks which thunder
+down when loosened by the rain. Farther up the hill sides,
+where the slopes are less precipitous, the forest has been burnt
+off by the unthrifty blacks, who use fire to clear the ground
+for their yam gardens, and destroy the timber over a dozen
+acres when they intend to cultivate but a single one. The
+landscape suffers less than the soil. The effect to the eye is
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>merely that the mountains in Jamaica, as in temperate climates,
+become bare at a moderate altitude, and their outlines are
+marked more sharply against the sky.</p>
+
+<p>Introduced among scenery of this kind, we followed the
+river two or three miles, when it was crossed by a bridge,
+above which stood my friend Miss Burton's lodging house,
+where she had designed entertaining me. At Gordon's Town,
+which is again a mile farther on, the valley widens out, and
+there are cocoa and coffee plantations. Through an opening
+we saw far above our heads, like specks of snow against the
+mountain side, the homes or prisons of our unfortunate troops.
+Overlooking the village through which we were passing, and
+three hundred feet above it, was perched the Colonel's villa
+on a projecting spur where a tributary of the Hope river has
+carved out a second ravine. We drove to the door up a steep
+winding lane among coffee bushes, which scented the air with
+their jessamine-like blossom, and wild oranges on which the
+fruit hung untouched, glowing like balls of gold. We were now
+eleven hundred feet above the sea. The air was already many
+degrees cooler than at Kingston. The ground in front of the
+house was levelled for a garden. Ivy was growing about the
+trellis work, and scarlet geraniums and sweet violets and roses
+which cannot be cultivated in the lower regions, were here in
+full bloom. Elsewhere in the grounds there was a lawn
+tennis court to tempt the officers down from their eyrie in the
+clouds. The house was empty, in charge of servants. From
+the balcony in front of the drawing room we saw peak rising
+behind peak, till the highest, four thousand feet above us, was
+lost in the white mist. Below was the valley of the Hope
+river with its gardens and trees and scattered huts, with buildings
+here and there of higher pretensions. On the other side
+the tributary stream rushed down its own ravine, while the
+breeze among the trees and the sound of the falling waters
+swayed up to us in intermittent pulsations.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/image0007.jpg" alt="VALLEY IN THE BLUE MOUNTAINS, JAMAICA." title="" /><br />
+<span class="caption">VALLEY IN THE BLUE MOUNTAINS, JAMAICA.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The place had been made, I believe, in the days of plantation
+prosperity. What would become of it all, if Jamaica
+drifted after her sisters in the Antilles, as some persons
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>thought that she was drifting, and became, like Grenada, an
+island of small black proprietors? Was such a fate really
+hanging over her? Not necessarily, not by any law of nature.
+If it came, it would come from the dispiritment, the lack of
+energy and hope in the languid representatives of the English
+colonists; for the land even in the mountains will grow what
+it is asked to grow, and men do not live by sugar alone; and
+my friend Dr. Nicholl in Dominica and Colonel Duncan in
+Grenada itself were showing what English energy could do if
+it was alive and vigorous. The pale complaining beings of
+whom I saw too many, seemed as if they could not be of the
+same race as the men who ruled in the days of the slave trade.
+The question to be asked in every colony is, what sort of men
+is it rearing? If that cannot be answered satisfactorily, the
+rest is not worth caring for. The blacks do not deserve the
+ill that is spoken of them. Colonel J&mdash;&mdash;'s house is twelve
+miles from Kingston. He told me that a woman would walk in
+with a load for him, and return on the same day with another,
+for a shilling. With such material of labour wisely directed,
+whites and blacks might live and prosper together; but even
+the poor negro will not work when he is regarded only as a
+machine to bring grist to his master's mill.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_13" id="Footnote_1_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_13"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> Euripides.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Visit to Port Royal&mdash;Dockyard&mdash;Town&mdash;Church&mdash;Fort Augusta&mdash;The
+eyrie in the mountains&mdash;Ride to Newcastle&mdash;Society in Jamaica&mdash;Religious
+bodies&mdash;Liberty and authority.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>A new fort was being built at the mouth of the harbour.
+New batteries were being armed on the sandbanks at Port
+Royal. Colonel J&mdash;&mdash; had to inspect what was going on, and
+he allowed me to go with him. We were to lunch with the
+commodore of the station at the Port Royal dockyard. I
+could then see the town&mdash;or what was left of it, for the story
+went that half of it had been swallowed up by an earthquake.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>
+We ran out in a steam launch from Kingston, passing under the
+sterns of the Spanish frigates. I was told that there were always
+one or more Spanish ships of war stationed there, but no one
+knew anything about them except generally that they were on
+the look-out for Cuban conspirators. There was no exchange
+of courtesies between their officers and ours, nor even official
+communication beyond what was formally necessary. I
+thought it strange, but it was no business of mine. My surprise,
+however, was admitted to be natural. As the launch
+drew little water, we had no occasion to follow the circuitous
+channel, but went straight over the shoals. We passed close
+by Gallows Point, where the Johnny crows used to pick the
+pirates' bones. In the mangrove swamp adjoining, it was said
+that there was an old Spanish cemetery; but the swamp was
+poisonous, and no one had ever seen it. At the dockyard
+pier the commodore was waiting for us. I found that he was
+an old acquaintance whom I had met ten years before at the
+Cape. He was a brisk, smart officer, quiet and sailor-like in
+his manners, but with plenty of talent and cultivation. He
+showed us his stores and his machinery, large engines, and
+engineers to work them, ready for any work which might be
+wanted, but apparently with none to do. We went over the
+hospital, airy and clean, with scarcely a single occupant, so
+healthy has now been made a spot which was once a nest of
+yellow fever. Naval stores soon become antiquated; and
+parts of the great square were paved with the old cannon balls
+which had become useless on the introduction of rifled guns.
+The fortifications were antiquated also, but new works were
+being thrown up armed with the modern monster cannon.
+One difficulty struck me; Port Royal stood upon a sandbank.
+In such a place no spring of fresh water could be looked for.
+On the large acreage of roofs there were no shoots to catch
+the rain and carry it into cisterns. Whence did the water
+come for the people in the town? How were the fleets supplied
+which used to ride there? How was it in the old times
+when Port Royal was crowded with revelling crews of buccaneers?
+I found that every drop which is consumed in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>
+place, or which is taken on board either of merchant ship or
+man-of-war, is brought in a steam tug from a spring ten miles
+off upon the coast. Before steam came in, it was fetched in
+barges rowed by hand. Nothing could be easier than to save
+the rain which falls in abundance. Nothing could be easier
+than to lay pipes along the sand-spit to the spring. But the
+tug plies daily to and fro, and no one thinks more about the
+matter.</p>
+
+<p>A West Indian regiment is stationed at Port Royal. After
+the dockyard we went through the soldiers' quarters and then
+walked through the streets of the once famous station. It is
+now a mere hamlet of boatmen and fishermen, squalid and
+wretched, without and within. Half-naked children stared
+at us from the doors with their dark, round eyes. I found it
+hard to call up the scenes of riot, and confusion, and wild
+excitement which are alleged to have been witnessed there.
+The story that it once covered a far larger area has been,
+perhaps, invented to account for the incongruity. Old plans
+exist which seem to show that the end of the spit could never
+have been of any larger dimensions than it is at present.
+There is proof enough, however, that in the sand there lie the
+remains of many thousand English soldiers and seamen, who
+ended their lives there for one cause or other. The bones lie
+so close that they are turned up as in a country churchyard
+when a fresh grave is dug. The walls of the old church are
+inlaid thickly with monuments and monumental tablets to the
+memory of officers of either service, young and old; some
+killed by fever, some by accidents of war or sea; some
+decorated with the honours which they had won in a hundred
+fights, some carried off before they had gathered the first
+flower of fame. The costliness of many of these memorials
+was an affecting indication how precious to their families
+those now resting there once had been. One in high relief
+struck me as a characteristic specimen of Rubillac's workmanship.
+It was to a young lieutenant who had been killed by
+the bursting of a gun. Flame and vapour were rushing out of
+the breech. The youth himself was falling backwards, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>
+his arms spread out, and a vast preternatural face&mdash;death,
+judgment, eternity, or whatever it was meant to be&mdash;was
+glaring at him through the smoke. Bad art, though the
+execution was remarkable; but better, perhaps, than the
+weeping angels now grown common among ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>After luncheon the commodore showed us his curiosities,
+especially his garden, which, considering the state of his
+water supply, he had created under unfavourable conditions.
+He had a very respectable collection of tropical ferns and
+flowers, with palms and plantains to shade and shelter them.
+He was an artist besides, within the lines of his own profession.
+Drawings of ships and boats of all sorts and in all
+attitudes by his own brush or pencil were hanging on the
+walls of his working room. He was good enough to ask me
+to spend a day or two with him at Port Royal before I left
+the island, and I looked forward with special pleasure to
+becoming closer acquainted with such a genuine piece of
+fine-grained British oak.</p>
+
+<p>There were the usual ceremonies to be attended to. The
+officers of the guardship and gunboats had to be called on.
+The forts constructed, or in the course of construction, were
+duly inspected. I believe that there is a real serious intention
+to strengthen Port Royal in view of the changes which may
+come about through the opening, if that event ever takes
+place, of the Darien canal.</p>
+
+<p>Our last visit was to a fort deserted, or all but deserted&mdash;the
+once too celebrated Fort Augusta, which deserves particular
+description. It stands on the inner side of the lagoon
+commanding the deep-water channel at the point of the great
+mangrove swamp at the mouth of the Cobre river. For the
+purpose for which it was intended no better situation could
+have been chosen, had there been nothing else to be considered
+except the defence of the harbour, for a vessel trying
+to reach Kingston had to pass close in front of its hundred
+guns. It was constructed on a scale becoming its importance,
+with accommodation for two or three regiments, and the
+regiments were sent thither, and they perished, regiment after<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>
+regiment, officers and men, from the malarious exhalations of
+the morass. Whole battalions were swept away. The ranks
+were filled up by reinforcements from home, and these, too,
+went the same road. Of one regiment the only survivors,
+according to the traditions of the place, were a quartermaster
+and a corporal. Finally it occurred to the authorities at the
+Horse Guards that a regiment of Hussars would be a useful
+addition to the garrison. It was not easy to see what Hussars
+were to do there. There is not a spot where the horses could
+stand twenty yards beyond the lines; nor could they reach
+Fort Augusta at all except in barges. However, it was
+perhaps well that they were sent. Horses and men went the
+way of the rest. The loss of the men might have been
+supplied, but horses were costly, and the loss of them was
+more serious. Fort Augusta was gradually abandoned, and
+is now used only as a powder magazine. A guard is kept
+there of twenty blacks from the West Indian force, but even
+these are changed every ten days&mdash;so deadly the vapour of
+that malarious jungle is now understood to be.</p>
+
+<p>I never saw so spectral a scene as met my eyes when we
+steamed up to the landing place&mdash;ramparts broken down, and
+dismantled cannon lying at the foot of the wall overgrown by
+jungle. The sentinel who presented arms was like a corpse
+in uniform. He was not pale, for he was a negro&mdash;he was
+green, and he looked like some ghoul or afrite in a ghastly
+cemetery. The roofs of the barracks and storehouses had
+fallen in, the rafters being left standing with the light shining
+between them as through the bones of skeletons. Great piles
+of shot lay rusting, as not worth removal; among them
+conical shot, so recently, had this fatal charnel house been
+regarded as a fit location for British artillerymen.</p>
+
+<p>I breathed more freely as we turned our backs upon the
+hideous memorial of parliamentary administration, and
+steamed away into a purer air. My conservative instincts
+had undergone a shock. As we look back into the past,
+the brighter features stand out conspicuously. The mistakes
+and miseries have sunk in the shade and are forgotten. In<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>
+the present faults and merits are visible alike. The faults
+attract chief notice that they may be mended; and as there
+seem so many of them, the impulse is to conclude that the
+past was better. It is well to be sometimes reminded what
+the past really was. In Colonel J&mdash;&mdash; I found a strong
+advocate of the late army reforms. Thanks to recovering
+energy and more distinct conscientiousness, thanks to the all-seeing
+eye of the Press, such an experiment as that of Fort
+Augusta could hardly be tried again, or if tried could not be
+persisted in. Extravagance and absurdities, however, remain,
+and I was next to witness an instance of them.</p>
+
+<p>Having ceased to quarter our regiments in mangrove swamps,
+we now build a camp for them among the clouds. I mentioned
+that Captain C&mdash;&mdash; had undertaken that I should see Newcastle.
+He had written to a friend there to say that I was
+coming up, and the junior aide-de-camp kindly lent his services
+as a guide. As far as Gordon's Town we drove along
+the same road which we had followed before. There, at a
+small wayside inn, we found horses waiting which were accustomed
+to the mountain. Suspicious mists were hanging
+about aloft, but the landlord, after a glance at them, promised
+us a fine day, and we mounted and set off. My animal's
+merits were not in his appearance, but he had been up and
+down a hundred times, and might be trusted to accomplish
+his hundred and first without misfortune. For the first mile
+or so the road was tolerably level, following the bank of the
+river under the shade of the forest. It then narrowed into a
+horse path and zigzagged upwards at the side of a torrent into
+the deep pools of which we occasionally looked down over
+the edges of uncomfortable precipices. Then again there
+was a level, with a village and coffee plantations and oranges
+and bananas. After this the vegetation changed. We issued
+out upon open mountain, with English grass, English clover,
+English gorse, and other familiar acquaintances introduced to
+make the isolation less intolerable. The track was so rough
+and narrow that we could ride only in single file, and was
+often no better than a watercourse; yet by this and no other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+way every article had to be carried on donkeys' backs or
+human heads which was required for the consumption of 300
+infantry and 100 artillerymen. Artillerymen might seem to
+imply artillery, but they have only a single small field gun.
+They are there for health's sake only, and to be fit for work if
+wanted below. An hour's ride brought us to the lowest range
+of houses, which were 4,000 feet above the sea. From thence
+they rose, tier above tier, for 500 feet more. The weather so
+far had held up, and the views had been glorious, but we
+passed now into a cloud, through which we saw, dimly, groups
+of figures listlessly lounging. The hillside was bare, and the
+slope so steep that there was no standing on it, save where it
+had been flattened by the spade; and here in this extraordinary
+place were 400 young Englishmen of the common
+type of which soldiers are made, with nothing to do and
+nothing to enjoy&mdash;remaining, unless they desert or die of
+ennui, for one, two, or three years, as their chance may be.
+Every other day they can see nothing, save each other's forms
+and faces in the fog; for, fine and bright as the air may be
+below, the moisture in the air is condensed into cloud by the
+chill rock and soil of the high ranges. The officers come down
+now and then on furlough or on duty; the men rarely and
+hardly at all, and soldiers, in spite of General &mdash;&mdash;, cannot
+always be made happy by the picturesque. They are not
+educated enough to find employment for their minds, and of
+amusement there is none.</p>
+
+<p>We continued our way up, the track if anything growing
+steeper, till we reached the highest point of the camp, and
+found ourselves before a pretty cottage with creepers climbing
+about it belonging to the major in command. A few yards off
+was the officers' mess room. They expected us. They knew
+my companion, and visitors from the under-world were
+naturally welcome. The major was an active clever man, with
+a bright laughing Irish wife, whose relations in the old country
+were friends of my own. The American consul and his lady
+happened to have ridden up also the same day; so, in spite
+of fog, which grew thicker every moment, we had a good time.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>
+As to seeing, we could see nothing; but then there was nothing
+to see except views; and panoramic views from mountain
+tops, extolled as they may be, do not particularly interest
+me. The officers, so far as I could learn, are less ill off than
+the privates. Those who are married have their wives with
+them; they can read, they can draw, they can ride; they have
+gardens about their houses where they can grow English
+flowers and vegetables and try experiments. Science can be
+followed anywhere, and is everywhere a resource. Major &mdash;&mdash;
+told me that he had never known what it was to find the day
+too long. Healthy the camp is at any rate. The temperature
+never rises above 70&deg; nor sinks often below 60&deg;. They require
+charcoal fires to keep the damp out and blankets to
+sleep under; and when they see the sun it is an agreeable
+change and something to talk about. There are no large
+incidents, but small ones do instead. While I was there a
+man came to report that he had slipped by accident and set a
+stone rolling; the stone had cut a water pipe in two, and it
+had to be mended, and was an afternoon's work for somebody.
+Such officers as have no resources in themselves are, of course,
+bored to extinction. There is neither furred game to hunt nor
+feathered game to shoot; the mongoose has eaten up the
+partridges. I suggested that they should import two or three
+couple of bears from Norway; they would fatten and multiply
+among the roots and sugar canes, with a black piccaninny now
+and then for a special delicacy. One of the party extemporised
+us a speech which would be made on the occasion in Exeter
+Hall.</p>
+
+<p>We had not seen the worst of the weather. As we mounted
+to ride back the fog changed to rain, and the rain to a deluge.
+The track became a torrent. Macintoshes were a vanity, for
+the water rushed down one's neck, and every crease made
+itself into a conduit carrying the stream among one's inner
+garments. Dominica itself had not prepared me for the
+violence of these Jamaican downpourings. False had proved
+our prophet down below. There was no help for it but to go
+on; and we knew by experience that one does not melt on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>
+these occasions. At a turn of the road we met another group
+of riders, among them Lady N&mdash;&mdash;, who, during her husband's
+absence in England, was living at a country house in the hills.
+She politely stopped and would have spoken, but it was not
+weather to stand talking in; the torrent washed us apart.</p>
+
+<p>And now comes the strangest part of the story. A thousand
+feet down we passed out below the clouds into clear bright
+sunshine. Above us it was still black as ever. The vapour
+clung about the peaks and did not leave them. Underneath
+us and round us it was a lovely summer's day. The farther
+we descended the fewer the signs that any rain had fallen.
+When we reached the stables at Gordon's Town, the dust was
+on the road as we left it, and the horsekeeper congratulated us
+on the correctness of his forecast. Clothes soon dry in that
+country, and we drove down home none the worse for our
+wetting. I was glad to have seen a place of which I had heard
+so much. On the whole, I hoped that perhaps by-and-by the
+authorities may discover some camping ground for our poor
+soldiers halfway between the Inferno of Fort Augusta and the
+Caucasian cliffs to which they are chained like Prometheus.
+Malice did say that Newcastle was the property of a certain
+Sir &mdash;&mdash;, a high official of a past generation, who wished to
+part with it, and found a convenient purchaser in the Government.</p>
+
+<p>The hospitalities at Government House were well maintained
+under the J&mdash;&mdash; administration. The Colonel was gracious,
+the lady beautiful and brilliant. There were lawn parties and
+evening parties, when all that was best in the island was
+collected; the old Jamaican aristocracy, army and navy
+officers, civilians, eminent lawyers, a few men among them
+of high intelligence. The tone was old-fashioned and courteous,
+with little, perhaps too little, of the <i>go-a-headism</i> of
+younger colonies, but not the less agreeable on that account.
+As to prospects, or the present condition of things in the
+island, there were wide differences of opinion. If there was
+unanimity about anything, it was about the consequences
+likely to arise from an extension of the principle of self-govern<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>ment.
+There, at all events, lay the right road to the wrong
+place. The blacks had nothing to complain of, and the wrong
+at present was on the other side. The taxation fell heavily
+on the articles consumed by the upper classes. The duty on
+tea, for instance, was a shilling a pound, and the duties on
+other luxuries in the same proportion. It scarcely touched
+the negroes at all. They were acquiring land, and some
+thought that there ought to be a land tax. They would probably
+object and resist, and trouble would come if it was
+proposed, for the blacks object to taxes. As long as there are
+white men to pay them, they will be satisfied to get the benefit
+of the expenditure; but let not their English friends suppose
+that when they have the island for their own they will tax
+themselves for police or schools, or for any other of those
+educational institutions from which the believers in progress
+anticipate such glorious results.</p>
+
+<p>As to the planters, it seemed agreed that when an estate
+was unencumbered and the owner resided upon it and managed
+it himself, he could still keep afloat. It was agreed also that
+when the owner was an absentee the cost of management consumed
+all the profits, and thus the same impulse to sell which
+had gone so far in the Antilles was showing itself more and
+more in Jamaica also. Fine properties all about the island
+were in the market for any price which purchasers could be
+found to give. Too many even of the old English families
+were tired of the struggle, and were longing to be out of it at
+any cost.</p>
+
+<p>At one time we heard much of the colonial Church and
+the power which it was acquiring, and as it seems unlikely
+that the political authority of the white race will be allowed
+to reassert itself, it must be through their minds and through
+those other qualities which religion addresses that the black race
+will be influenced by the white, if it is ever to be influenced
+at all.</p>
+
+<p>I had marked the respect with which the Catholic clergy
+were treated in Dominica, and even the Hayti Republic still
+maintains the French episcopate and priesthood. But I could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>
+not find that the Church of England in Jamaica either was at
+present or had ever been more than the Church of the English
+in Jamaica, respected as long as the English gentry were a
+dominant power there, but with no independent charm to work
+on imagination or on superstition. Labat says, as I noted
+above, that the English clergy in his time did not baptise the
+black babies, on the curious ground that Christians could not
+lawfully be held as slaves, and the slaves therefore were not to
+be made Christians. A Jesuit Father whom I met at Government
+House told me that even now the clergy refuse to baptise
+the illegitimate children, and as, according to the official returns,
+nearly two-thirds of the children that are born in Jamaica
+come into the world thus irregularly, they are not likely to become
+more popular than they used to be. Perhaps Father &mdash;&mdash;
+was doing what a good many other people do, making a general
+practice out of a few instances. Perhaps the blacks themselves
+who wish their children to be Christians carry them to the
+minister whom they prefer, and that minister may not be the
+Anglican clergyman. Of Catholics there are not many in
+Jamaica; of the Moravians I heard on all sides the warmest
+praise. They, above all the religious bodies in the island, are
+admitted to have a practical power for good over the limited
+number of people which belong to them. But the Moravians
+are but a few. They do not rush to make converts in the
+highways and hedges, and my observations in Dominica almost
+led me to wish that, in the absence of other forms of spiritual
+authority, the Catholics might become more numerous than
+they are. The priests in Dominica were the only Europeans
+who, for their own sakes and on independent grounds, were
+looked up to with fear and respect.</p>
+
+<p>The religion of the future! That is the problem of problems
+that rises before us at the close of this waning century. The
+future of the West Indies is a small matter. Yet that, too, like
+all else, depends on the spiritual beliefs which are to rise out
+of the present confusion. Men will act well and wisely, or ill
+and foolishly, according to the form and force of their conceptions
+of duty. Once before, under the Roman Empire, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>
+conditions were not wholly dissimilar. The inherited creed
+had become unbelievable, and the scientific intellect was turning
+materialist. Christianity rose out of the chaos, confounding
+statesmen and philosophers, and became the controlling power
+among mankind for 1,800 years. But Christianity found a soil
+prepared for the seed. The masses of the inhabitants of the
+Roman world were not materialist. The masses of the people
+believed already in the supernatural and in penal retribution
+after death for their sins. Lucretius complains of the misery
+produced upon them by the terrors of the anticipated Tartarus.
+Serious and good men were rather turning away from atheism
+than welcoming it; and if they doubted the divinity of the
+Olympian gods, it was not because they doubted whether gods
+existed at all, but because the immoralities attributed to them
+were unworthy of the exalted nature of the Divine Being.
+The phenomena are different now. Who is now made wretched
+by the fear of hell? The tendency of popular thought is
+against the supernatural in any shape. Far into space as the
+telescope can search, deep as analysis can penetrate into mind
+and consciousness or the forces which govern natural things,
+popular thought finds only uniformity and connection of cause
+and effect&mdash;no sign anywhere of a personal will which is influenced
+by prayer or moral motive. When a subject is still
+obscure we are confident that it admits of scientific explanation;
+we no longer refer 'ad Deum,' whom we regard as a
+constitutional monarch taking no direct part at all. The new
+creed, however, not having crystallised as yet into a shape
+which can be openly professed, and as without any creed at
+all the flesh and the devil might become too powerful, we
+maintain the old names and forms, as we maintain the
+monarchy. We surround both with reverence and majesty,
+and the reverence, being confined to feeling, continues to
+exercise a vague but wholesome influence. We row in one
+way while we look another. In the presence of the marked
+decay of Protestantism as a positive creed, the Protestant
+powers of Europe may, perhaps, patch up some kind of reconciliation
+with the old spiritual organisation which was shattered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>
+in the sixteenth century, and has since shown no unwillingness
+to adapt itself to modern forms of thought. The Olympian
+gods survived for seven centuries after Aristophanes with the
+help of allegory and 'economy.' The Church of Rome may
+survive as long after Calvin and Luther. Carlyle mocked at
+the possibility when I ventured to say so to him. Yet Carlyle
+seemed to think that the mass was the only form of faith in
+Europe which had any sincerity remaining in it.</p>
+
+<p>A religion, at any rate, which will keep the West Indian
+blacks from falling into devil worship is still to seek. Constitutions
+and belief in progress may satisfy Europe, but will not
+answer in Jamaica. In spite of the priests, child murder and
+cannibalism have reappeared in Hayti; but without them
+things might have been worse than they are, and the preservation
+of white authority and influence in any form at all may be
+better than none.</p>
+
+<p>White authority and white influence may, however, still be
+preserved in a nobler and better way. Slavery was a survival
+from a social order which had passed away, and slavery could
+not be continued. It does not follow that <i>per se</i> it was a crime.
+The negroes who were sold to the dealers in the African factories
+were most of them either slaves already to worse masters or were
+<i>servi</i>, servants in the old meaning of the word, prisoners of war,
+or else criminals, <i>servati</i> or reserved from death. They would
+otherwise have been killed; and since the slave trade has been
+abolished are again killed in the too celebrated 'customs.'
+The slave trade was a crime when the chiefs made war on each
+other for the sake of captives whom they could turn into
+money. In many instances, perhaps in most, it was innocent
+and even beneficent. Nature has made us unequal, and Acts
+of Parliament cannot make us equal. Some must lead and
+some must follow, and the question is only of degree and kind.
+For myself, I would rather be the slave of a Shakespeare or a
+Burghley than the slave of a majority in the House of Commons
+or the slave of my own folly. Slavery is gone, with all that
+belonged to it; but it will be an ill day for mankind if no one
+is to be compelled any more to obey those who are wiser than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>
+himself, and each of us is to do only what is right in our own
+eyes. There may be authority, yet not slavery: a soldier is
+not a slave, a sailor is not a slave, a child is not a slave, a wife
+is not a slave; yet they may not live by their own wills or
+emancipate themselves at their own pleasure from positions in
+which nature has placed them, or into which they have themselves
+voluntarily entered. The negroes of the West Indies
+are children, and not yet disobedient children. They have
+their dreams, but for the present they are dreams only. If you
+enforce self-government upon them when they are not asking
+for it, you may turn the dream into a reality, and wilfully drive
+them back into the condition of their ancestors, from which the
+slave trade was the beginning of their emancipation.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Church of England in Jamaica&mdash;Drive to Castleton&mdash;Botanical Gardens&mdash;Picnic
+by the river&mdash;Black women&mdash;Ball at Government House&mdash;Mandeville&mdash;Miss
+Roy&mdash;Country society&mdash;Manners&mdash;American visitors&mdash;A
+Moravian missionary&mdash;The modern Radical creed.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>If I have spoken without enthusiasm of the working of the
+Church of England among the negroes, I have not meant to be
+disrespectful. As I lay awake at daybreak on the Sunday
+morning after my arrival, I heard the sound of church bells,
+not Catholic bells as at Dominica, but good old English chimes.
+The Church is disestablished so far as law can disestablish it,
+but, as in Barbadoes, the royal arms still stand over the arches
+of the chancel. Introduced with the English conquest, it has
+been identified with the ruling order of English gentry, respectable,
+harmless, and useful, to those immediately connected
+with it.</p>
+
+<p>The parochial system, as in Barbadoes also, was spread over
+the island. Each parish had its church, its parsonage and its
+school, its fonts where the white children were baptised&mdash;in
+spite of my Jesuit, I shall hope not whites only; and its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>
+graveyard, where in time they were laid to rest. With their
+quiet Sunday services of the old type the country districts were
+exact reproductions of English country villages. The church
+whose bells I had heard was of the more fashionable suburban
+type, standing in a central situation halfway to Kingston.
+The service was at the old English hour of eleven.
+We drove to it in the orthodox fashion, with our prayer books and Sunday
+costumes, the Colonel in uniform. The gentry of the neighbourhood
+are antiquated in their habits, and to go to church
+on Sunday is still regarded as a simple duty. A dozen
+carriages stood under the shade at the doors. The congregation
+was upper middle-class English of the best sort, and was
+large, though almost wholly white. White tablets as at Port
+Royal covered the walls, with familiar English names upon
+them. But for the heat I could have imagined myself at home.
+There were no Aaron Bangs to be seen, or Paul Gelids, with
+the rough sense, the vigour, the energy, and roystering light-heartedness
+of our grandfathers. The faces of the men were
+serious and thoughtful, with the shadow resting on them of an
+uncertain future. They are good Churchmen still, and walk
+on in the old paths, wherever those paths may lead. They are
+old-fashioned and slow to change, and are perhaps belated in
+an eddy of the great stream of progress; but they were pleasant
+to see and pleasant to talk to. After service there were the
+usual shakings of hands among friends outside; arrangements
+were made for amusements and expeditions in which I was
+invited to join&mdash;which were got up, perhaps, for my own
+entertainment. I was to be taken to the sights of the neighbourhood.
+I was to see this; I was to see that; above all, I
+must see the Peak of the Blue Mountains. The peak itself I
+could see better from below, for there it stood, never moving,
+between seven and eight thousand feet high. But I had had
+mountain riding enough and was allowed to plead my age and
+infirmities. It was arranged finally that I should be driven the
+next day to Castleton, seventeen miles off over a mountain
+pass, to see the Botanical Gardens.</p>
+
+<p>Accordingly early on the following morning we set off; two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>
+carriages full of us; Mr. M&mdash;&mdash;, a new friend lately made, but
+I hope long to be preserved, on the box of his four-in-hand.
+The road was as good as all roads are in Jamaica and
+Barbadoes, and more cannot be said in their favour. Forest
+trees made a roof over our heads as we climbed to the crest of
+the ridge. Thence we descended the side of a long valley, a
+stream running below us which gradually grew into a river.
+We passed through all varieties of cultivation. On the high
+ground there was a large sugar plantation, worked by coolies,
+the first whom I had seen in Jamaica. In the alluvial meadows
+on the river-side were tobacco fields, cleanly and carefully kept,
+belonging to my Spanish friend in Kingston, and only too rich
+in leaves. There were sago too, and ginger, and tamarinds, and
+cocoa, and coffee, and cocoa-nut palms. On the hill-sides were
+the garden farms of the blacks, which were something to see
+and remember. They receive from the Government at an
+almost nominal quit rent an acre or two of uncleared forest.
+To this as the first step they set light; at twenty different
+spots we saw their fires blazing. To clear an acre they waste
+the timber on half a dozen or a dozen. They plant their yams
+and sweet potatoes among the ashes and grow crops there till
+the soil is exhausted. Then they move on to another, which
+they treat with the same recklessness, leaving the first to go
+back to scrub. Since the Chinaman burnt his house to roast
+his pig, such waste was never seen. The male proprietors were
+lounging about smoking. Their wives, as it was market day, were
+tramping into Kingston with their baskets on their head. We
+met them literally in thousands, all merry and light-hearted,
+their little ones with little baskets trudging at their side. Of
+the lords of the creation we saw, perhaps, one to each hundred
+women, and he would be riding on mule or donkey, pipe in
+mouth and carrying nothing. He would be generally sulky
+too, while the ladies, young and old, had all a civil word
+for us and curtsied under their loads. Decidedly if there
+is to be a black constitution I would give the votes only to
+the women.</p>
+
+<p>We reached Castleton at last. It was in a hot damp valley,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>
+said to be a nest of yellow fever. The gardens slightly disappointed
+me; my expectations had been too much raised by
+Trinidad. There were lovely flowers of course, and curious
+plants and trees. Every known palm is growing there. They
+try hard to grow roses, and they say that they succeed. The
+roses were not in flower, and I could not judge. Bye the
+familiar names were all there, and others which were not
+familiar, the newest importations called after the great ladies
+of the day. I saw one labelled Mabel Morrison. To find
+the daughter of an ancient college friend and contemporary
+giving name to a plant in the New World makes one feel
+dreadfully old; but I expected to find, and I did not find,
+some useful practical horticulture going on. They ought, for
+instance, to have been trying experiments with orange trees.
+The orange in Jamaica is left to nature. They plant the seeds,
+and leave the result to chance. They neither bud nor graft,
+and go upon the hypothesis that as the seed is, so will be the
+tree which comes of it. Yet even thus, so favourable is the
+soil and climate that the oranges of Jamaica are prized above
+all others which are sold in the American market. With skill
+and knowledge and good selection they might produce the
+finest in the world. 'There are dollars in that island, sir,' as
+an American gentleman said to me, 'if they look for them in
+the right way.' Nothing of this kind was going on at Castleton;
+so much the worse, but perhaps things will mend by-and-by.
+I was consoled partly by another specimen of the <i>Amherstia
+nobilis</i>. It was not so large as those which I had seen at
+Trinidad, but it was in splendid bloom, and certainly is the
+most gorgeous flowering tree which the world contains.</p>
+
+<p>Wild nature also was luxuriantly beautiful. We picnicked
+by the river, which here is a full rushing stream with pools that
+would have held a salmon, and did hold abundant mullet.
+We found a bower formed by a twisted vine, so thick that
+neither sun nor rain could penetrate the roof. The floor was
+of shining shingle, and the air breathed cool from off the
+water. It was a spot which nymph or naiad may haunt hereafter,
+when nymphs are born again in the new era. The creatures<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>
+of imagination have fled away from modern enlightenment. But
+we were a pleasant party of human beings, lying about under
+the shade upon the pebbles. We had brought a blanket of ice
+with us, and the champagne was manufactured into cup by
+choicest West Indian skill. Figures fall unconsciously at such
+moments into attitudes which would satisfy a painter, and the
+scenes remain upon the memory like some fine finished work
+of art. We had done with the gardens, and I remember no
+more of them except that I saw a mongoose stalking a flock of
+turkeys. The young ones and their mother gathered together
+and showed fight. The old cock, after the manner of the
+male animal, seemed chiefly anxious for his own skin, though
+a little ashamed at the same time, as if conscious that more
+was expected of him. On the way back we met the returning
+stream of women and children, loaded heavily as before and
+with the same elastic step. In spite of all that is incorrect
+about them, the women are the material to work upon; and if
+they saw that we were in earnest, they would lend their help
+to make their husbands bestir themselves. A Dutch gentleman
+once boasted to me of the wonderful prosperity of Java,
+where everybody was well off and everybody was industrious.
+He so insisted upon the industry that I ask him how it was
+brought about. Were the people slaves? 'Oh,' he cried, as
+if shocked, 'God forbid that a Christian nation should be so
+wicked as to keep slaves!' 'Do they never wish to be idle?'
+I asked. 'Never, never,' he said; 'no, no: we do not permit
+anyone to be idle.'</p>
+
+<p>My stay with Colonel J&mdash;&mdash; was drawing to a close; one
+great festivity was impending, which I wished to avoid; but the
+gracious lady insisted that I must remain. There was to be a
+ball, and all the neighbourhood was invited. Pretty it was sure
+to be. Windows and doors, galleries and passages, would be
+all open. The gardens would be lighted up, and the guests
+could spread as they pleased. Brilliant it all was; more
+brilliant than you would see in our larger colonies. A ball in
+Sydney or Melbourne is like a ball in the north of England or
+in New York. There are the young men in black coats, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>
+there are brightly dressed young ladies for them to dance with.
+The chaperons sit along the walls; the elderly gentlemen
+withdraw to the card room. Here all was different. The
+black coats in the ball at Jamaica were on the backs of old or
+middle-aged men, and, except Government officials, there was
+hardly a young man present in civilian dress. The rooms
+glittered with scarlet and white and blue and gold lace. The
+officers were there from the garrison and the fleet; but of men
+of business, of professional men, merchants, planters, lawyers,
+&amp;c. there were only those who had grown up to middle age in
+the island, whose fortunes, bad or good, were bound up with it.
+When these were gone, it seemed as if there would be no one
+to succeed them. The coveted heirs of great estates were no
+longer to be found for mothers to angle after. The trades and
+professions in Kingston had ceased to offer the prospect of an
+income to younger brothers who had to make their own way.
+For 250 years generations of Englishmen had followed one
+upon another, but we seemed to have come to the last. Of
+gentlemen unconnected with the public service, under thirty-five
+or forty, there were few to be seen, they were seeking
+their fortunes elsewhere. The English interest in Jamaica is
+still a considerable thing. The English flag flies over Government
+House, and no one so far wishes to remove it. But the
+British population is scanty and refuses to grow. Ships and
+regiments come and go, and officers and State employ&eacute;s make
+what appears to be a brilliant society. But it is in appearance
+only. The station is no longer a favourite one. They are
+gone, those pleasant gentry whose country houses were the
+paradise of <i>middies</i> sixty years ago. All is changed, even to
+the officers themselves. The drawling ensign of our boyhood,
+brave as a lion in the field, and in the mess room or the
+drawing room an idiot, appears also to be dead as the
+dodo. Those that one meets now are intelligent and superior
+men&mdash;no trace of the frivolous sort left. Is it the effect of
+the abolition of purchase, and competitive examinations? Is
+it that the times themselves are growing serious, and even the
+most empty-headed feel that this is no season for levity?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I had seen what Jamaican life was like in the upper spheres,
+and I had heard the opinions that were current in them; but
+I wished to see other parts of the country. I wished to see a
+class of people who were farther from headquarters, and who
+might not all sing to the same note. I determined to start off
+on an independent cruise of my own. In the centre of the
+island, two thousand feet above the sea, it was reported to me
+that I should find a delightful village called Mandeville, after
+some Duke of Manchester who governed Jamaica a hundred
+years ago. The scenery was said to have a special charm of
+its own, the air to be exquisitely pure, the land to be well cultivated.
+Village manners were to be found there of the old-fashioned
+sort, and a lodging house and landlady of unequalled
+merit. There was a railway for the first fifty miles. The line
+at starting crosses the mangrove swamps at the mouth of the
+Cobre river. You see the trees standing in the water on each
+side of the road. Rising slowly, it hardens into level grazing
+ground, stocked with cattle and studded with mangoes and
+cedars. You pass Spanish Town, of which only the roofs of
+the old State buildings are visible from the carriages. Sugar
+estates follow, some of which are still in cultivation, while
+ruined mills and fallen aqueducts show where others once had
+been. The scenery becomes more broken as you begin to
+ascend into the hills. River beds, dry when I saw them, but
+powerful torrents in the rainy season, are crossed by picturesque
+bridges. You come to the forest, where the squatters were at
+their usual work, burning out their yam patches. Columns of
+white smoke were rising all about us, yet so abundant the
+timber and so rapid the work of restoration when the devastating
+swarm has passed, that in this direction they have as yet
+made no marked impression, and the forest stretches as far as
+eye can reach. The glens grew more narrow and the trees
+grander as the train proceeded. After two hours we arrived
+at the present terminus, an inland town with the singular
+name of Porus. No explanation is given of it in the local
+handbooks; but I find a Porus among the companions of
+Columbus, and it is probably an interesting relic of the first<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>
+Spanish occupation. The railway had brought business.
+Mule carts were going about, and waggons; omnibuses stood
+in the yards, and there were stores of various kinds. But it
+was all black. There was not a white face to be seen after
+we left the station. One of my companions in the train was a
+Cuban engineer, now employed upon the line; a refugee, I
+conjectured, belonging to the beaten party in the late rebellion,
+from the bitterness with which he spoke of the Spanish
+administration.</p>
+
+<p>Porus is many hundred feet above the sea, in a hollow
+where three valleys meet. Mandeville, to which I was bound,
+was ten miles farther on, the road ascending all the way. A
+carriage was waiting for me, but too small for my luggage. A
+black boy offered to carry up a heavy bag for a shilling, a feat
+which he faithfully and expeditiously performed. After climbing
+a steep hill, we came out upon a rich undulating plateau,
+long cleared and cultivated; green fields with cows feeding on
+them; pretty houses standing in gardens; a Wesleyan station;
+a Moravian station, with chapels and parsonages. The red
+soil was mixed with crumbling lumps of white coral, a ready-made
+and inexhaustible supply of manure. Great silk-cotton
+trees towered up in lonely magnificence, the home of the
+dreaded Jumbi&mdash;woe to the wretch who strikes an axe into
+those sacred stems! Almonds, cedars, mangoes, gum trees
+spread their shade over the road. Orange trees were everywhere;
+sometimes in orchards, sometimes growing at their
+own wild will in hedges and copse and thicket. Finally, at
+the outskirts of a perfectly English village, we brought up at
+the door of the lodging house kept by the justly celebrated
+Miss Roy. The house, or cottage, stood at the roadside, at
+the top of a steep flight of steps; a rambling one-story building,
+from which rooms, creeper-covered, had been thrown out as
+they were wanted. There was the universal green verandah
+into which they all opened; and the windows looked out on
+a large common, used of old, and perhaps now, as a race-course;
+on wooded slopes, with sunny mansions dropped here
+and there in openings among the woods; on farm buildings at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>
+intervals in the distance, surrounded by clumps of palms; and
+beyond them ranges of mountains almost as blue as the sky
+against which they were faintly visible. Miss Roy, the lady
+and mistress of the establishment, came out to meet me:
+middle-aged, with a touch of the black blood, but with a face
+in which one places instant and sure dependence, shrewd,
+quiet, sensible, and entirely good-humoured. A white-haired
+brother, somewhat infirm and older than she, glided behind
+her as her shadow. She attends to the business. His pride
+is in his garden, where he has gathered a collection of rare
+plants in admired disorder; the night-blowing cereus hanging
+carelessly over a broken paling, and a palm, unique of its kind,
+waving behind it. At the back were orange trees and plantains
+and coffee bushes, with long-tailed humming birds flitting
+about their nests among the branches. All kinds of delicacies,
+from fruit and preserves to coffee, Miss Roy grows for her
+visitors on her own soil, and prepares from the first stage to
+the last with her own cunning hands.</p>
+
+<p>Having made acquaintance with the mistress, I strolled out
+to look about me. After walking up the road for a quarter of
+a mile, I found myself in an exact reproduction of a Warwickshire
+hamlet before the days of railways and brick chimneys.
+There were no elms to be sure&mdash;there were silk cotton-trees
+and mangoes where the elms should have been; but there
+were the boys playing cricket, and a market house, and a
+modest inn, and a shop or two, and a blacksmith's forge with
+a shed where horses were standing waiting their turn to be
+shod. Across the green was the parish church, with its three
+aisles and low square tower, in which hung an old peal of bells.
+Parish stocks I did not observe, though, perhaps, I might have
+had I looked for them; but there was a schoolhouse and parsonage,
+and, withdrawn at a distance as of superior dignity,
+what had once perhaps been the squire's mansion, when squire
+and such-like had been the natural growth of the country. It
+was as if a branch of the old tree had been carried over and
+planted there ages ago, and as if it had taken root and become
+an exact resemblance of the parent stock. The people had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>
+black faces; but even they, too, had shaped their manners on
+the old English models. The men touched their hats respectfully
+(as they eminently did not in Kingston and its environs).
+The women smiled and curtsied, and the children looked shy
+when one spoke to them. The name of slavery is a horror to
+us; but there must have been something human and kindly
+about it, too, when it left upon the character the marks of
+courtesy and good breeding. I wish I could say as much for
+the effect of modern ideas. The negroes in Mandeville were,
+perhaps, as happy in their old condition as they have been
+since their glorious emancipation, and some of them to this
+day speak regretfully of a time when children did not die of
+neglect; when the sick and the aged were taken care of, and
+the strong and healthy were, at least, as well looked after as
+their owner's cattle.</p>
+
+<p>Slavery could not last; but neither can the condition last
+which has followed it. The equality between black and white
+is a forced equality and not a real one, and nature in the long
+run has her way, and readjusts in their proper relations what
+theorists and philanthropists have disturbed.</p>
+
+<p>I was not Miss Roy's only guest. An American lady and
+gentleman were staying there; he, I believe, for his health, as
+the climate of Mandeville is celebrated. Americans, whatever
+may be their faults, are always unaffected; and so are easy to
+get on with. We dined together, and talked of the place and
+its inhabitants. They had been struck like myself with the
+manners of the peasants, which were something entirely new
+to them. The lady said, and without expressing the least
+disapproval, that she had fallen in with an old slave who told
+her that, thanks to God, he had seen good times. 'He was
+bred in a good home, with a master and mistress belonging to
+him. What the master and mistress had the slaves had, and
+there was no difference; and his master used to visit at King's
+House, and his men were all proud of him. Yes, glory be to
+God, he had seen good times.'</p>
+
+<p>In the evening we sat out in the verandah in the soft sweet
+air, the husband and I smoking our cigars, and the lady not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>
+minding it. They had come to Mandeville, as we go to Italy,
+to escape the New England winter. They had meant to stay
+but a few days; they found it so charming that they had stayed
+for many weeks. We talked on till twilight became night, and
+then appeared a show of natural pyrotechnics which beat anything
+of the kind which I had ever seen or read of: fireflies as
+large as cockchafers flitting round us among the leaves of the
+creepers, with two long antenn&aelig;, at the point of each of which
+hangs out a blazing lanthorn. The unimaginative colonists call
+them gig-lamps. Had Shakespeare ever heard of them, they
+would have played round Ferdinand and Miranda in Prospero's
+cave, and would have borne a fairer name. The light is bluish-green,
+like a glowworm's, but immeasurably brighter; and we
+could trace them far away glancing like spirits over the
+meadows.</p>
+
+<p>I could not wonder that my new friends had been charmed
+with the place. The air was exquisitely pure; the temperature
+ten degrees below that of Kingston, never oppressively hot and
+never cold; the forest scenery as beautiful as at Arden; and
+Miss Roy's provision for us, rooms, beds, breakfasts, dinners,
+absolutely without fault. If ever there was an inspired coffee
+maker, Miss Roy was that person. The glory of Mandeville
+is in its oranges. The worst orange I ate in Jamaica was
+better than the best I ever ate in Europe, and the best oranges
+of Jamaica are the oranges of Mandeville. New York has
+found out their merits. One gentleman alone sent twenty
+thousand boxes to New York last year, clearing a dollar on
+each box; and this, as I said just now, when Nature is left to
+produce what she pleases, and art has not begun to help her.
+Fortunes larger than were ever made by sugar wait for any
+man, and the blessings of the world along with it, who will set
+himself to work at orange growing with skill and science in a
+place where heat will not wither the trees, nor frosts, as in
+Florida, bite off the blossoms. Yellow fever was never heard
+of there, nor any dangerous epidemic, nor snake nor other
+poisonous reptile. The droughts which parch the lowlands
+are unknown, for an even rain falls all the year and the soil is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>
+always moist. I inquired with wonder why the unfortunate
+soldiers who were perched among the crags at Newcastle were
+not at Mandeville instead. I was told that water was the
+difficulty; that there was no river or running stream there, and
+that it had to be drawn from wells or collected into cisterns.
+One must applaud the caution which the authorities have at
+last displayed; but cattle thrive at Mandeville, and sheep, and
+black men and women in luxuriant abundance. One would
+like to know that the general who sold the Newcastle estate to
+the Government was not the same person who was allowed to
+report as to the capabilities of a spot which, to the common
+observer, would seem as perfectly adapted for the purpose as
+the other is detestable.</p>
+
+<p>A few English families were scattered about the neighbourhood,
+among whom I made a passing acquaintance. They
+had a lawn-tennis club in the village, which met once a week;
+they drove in with their pony carriages; a lady made tea
+under the trees; they had amusements and pleasant society
+which cost nothing. They were not rich; but they were
+courteous, simple, frank, and cordial.</p>
+
+<p>Mandeville is the centre of a district which all resembles it in
+character and extends for many miles. It is famous for its
+cattle as well as for its fruit, and has excellent grazing grounds.
+Mr. &mdash;&mdash;, an officer of police, took me round with him one
+morning. It was the old story. Though there were still a
+few white proprietors left, they were growing fewer, and the
+blacks were multiplying upon them. The smoke of their
+clearances showed where they were at work. Many of them
+are becoming well-to-do. We met them on the roads with
+their carts and mules; the young ones armed, too, in some
+instances with good double-barrelled muzzle-loaders. There
+is no game to shoot, but to have a gun raises them in their
+own estimation, and they like to be prepared for contingencies.
+Mr. &mdash;&mdash; had a troublesome place of it. The negro peasantry
+were good-humoured, he said, but not universally honest.
+They stole cattle, and would not give evidence against each
+other. If brought into court, they held a pebble in their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>
+mouths, being under the impression that when they were so
+provided perjury did not count. Their education was only
+skin-deep, and the schools which the Government provided
+had not touched their characters at all. Mr. &mdash;&mdash;'s duties
+brought him in contact with the unfavourable specimens. I
+received a far pleasanter impression from a Moravian minister,
+who called on me with a friend who had lately taken a farm.
+I was particularly glad to see this gentleman, for of the
+Moravians everyone had spoken well to me. He was not the
+least enthusiastic about his poor black sheep, but he said that,
+if they were not better than the average English labourers, he
+did not think them worse. They were called idle. They
+would work well enough if they had fair wages, and if the
+wages were paid regularly; but what could be expected when
+women servants had but three shillings a week and 'found
+themselves,' when the men had but a shilling a day and the
+pay was kept in arrear, in order that, if they came late to work,
+or if they came irregularly, it might be kept back or cut down
+to what the employer chose to give? Under such conditions
+any man of any colour would prefer to work for himself if he
+had a garden, or would be idle if he had none. 'Living' costs
+next to nothing either to them or their families. But the
+minister said, and his friend confirmed it by his own experience,
+that these same fellows would work regularly and faithfully for
+any master whom they personally knew and could rely upon,
+and no Englishman coming to settle there need be afraid of
+failing for want of labour, if he had sense and energy, and did
+not prefer to lie down and groan. The blacks, my friends said,
+were kindly hearted, respectful, and well-disposed, but they
+were children; easily excited, easily tempted, easily misled,
+and totally unfit for self-government. If we wished to ruin
+them altogether, we should persevere in the course to which,
+they were sorry to hear, we were so inclined. The real want
+in the island was of intelligent Englishmen to employ and
+direct them, and Englishmen were going away so fast that
+they feared there would soon be none of them left. This
+was the opinion of two moderate and excellent men, whose<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>
+natural and professional prejudices were all on the black man's
+side.</p>
+
+<p>It was confirmed both in its favourable and unfavourable
+aspects by another impartial authority. My first American
+acquaintances had gone, but their rooms were occupied by
+another of their countrymen, a specimen of a class of whom
+more will be heard in Jamaica if the fates are kind. The
+English in the island cast in their lot with sugar, and if sugar
+is depressed they lose heart. Americans keep their 'eyes
+skinned,' as they call it, to look out for other openings. They
+have discovered, as I said, 'that there are dollars in Jamaica,'
+and one has come, and has set up a trade in plantains, in
+which he is making a fortune; and this gentleman has perceived
+that there were 'dollars in the bamboo,' and for
+bamboos there was no place in the world like the West Indies.
+He came to Jamaica, brought machines to clear the fibre, tried
+to make ropes of it, to make canvas, paper, and I know not
+what. I think he told me that he had spent a quarter of a
+million dollars, instead of finding any, before he hit upon a
+paying use for it. The bamboo fibre has certain elastic
+incompressible properties in which it is without a rival. He
+forms it into 'packing' for the boxes of the wheels of railway
+carriages, where it holds oil like a sponge, never hardens, and
+never wears out. He sends the packing over the world, and
+the demand grows as it is tried. He has set up a factory,
+thirty miles from Mandeville, in the valley of the Black River.
+He has a large body of the negroes working for him who are
+said to be so unmanageable. He, like Dr. Nicholls in
+Dominica, does not find them unmanageable at all. They
+never leave him; they work for him from year to year as
+regularly as if they were slaves. They have their small
+faults, but he does not magnify them into vices. They are
+attached to him with the old-fashioned affection which good
+labourers always feel for employers whom they respect, and
+dismissal is dreaded as the severest of punishments. In
+the course of time he thought that they might become
+fit for political privileges. To confer such privileges on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>
+them at present would fling Jamaica back into absolute
+barbarism.</p>
+
+<p>I said I wished that more of his countrymen would come
+and settle in Jamaica as he had done and a few others already.
+American energy would be like new blood in the veins of the
+poor island. He answered that many would probably come
+if they could be satisfied that there would be no more political
+experimenting; but they would not risk their capital if there
+was a chance of a black parliament.</p>
+
+<p>If we choose to make Jamaica into a Hayti, we need not
+look for Americans down that way.</p>
+
+<p>Let us hope that enthusiasm for constitutions will for once
+moderate its ardour. The black race has suffered enough at our
+hands. They have been sacrificed to slavery; are they to be
+sacrificed again to a dream or a doctrine? There has a new
+creed risen, while the old creed is failing. It has its priests
+and its prophets, its formulas and its articles of belief.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary
+that he hold the Radical faith.</p>
+
+<p>And the Radical faith is this: all men are equal, and the
+voice of one is as the voice of another.</p>
+
+<p>And whereas one man is wise and another foolish, and one
+is upright and another crooked, yet in this suffrage none is
+greater or less than another. The vote is equal, the dignity
+co-eternal.</p>
+
+<p>Truth is one and right is one; yet right is right because the
+majority so declare it, and justice is justice because the
+majority so declare it.</p>
+
+<p>And if the majority affirm one thing to-day, that is right;
+and if the majority affirm the opposite to-morrow, that is
+right.</p>
+
+<p>Because the will of the majority is the ground of right and
+there is no other, &amp;c. &amp;c. &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>This is the Radical faith, which, except every man do keep
+whole and undefiled, he is a Tory and an enemy of the State,
+and without doubt shall perish everlastingly.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Once the Radical was a Liberal and went for toleration and
+freedom of opinion. He has become a believer now. He is
+right and you are wrong, and if you do not agree with him you
+are a fool, and you are wicked besides. Voltaire says that
+atheism and superstition are the two poles of intellectual
+disease. Superstition he thinks the worse of the two. The
+atheist is merely mistaken, and can be cured if you show him
+that he is wrong. The fanatic can never be cured. Yet each
+alike, if he prevails, will destroy human society. What would
+Voltaire have expected for poor mankind had he seen both
+the precious qualities combined in this new <i>Symbolum
+Fidei</i>?</p>
+
+<p>A creed is not a reasoned judgment based upon experience
+and insight. It is a child of imagination and passion. Like
+an organised thing, it has its appointed period and then dies.
+You cannot argue it out of existence. It works for good; it
+works for evil; but work it will while the life is in it. Faith,
+we are told, is not contradictory to reason, but is above reason.
+Whether reason or faith sees truer, events will prove.</p>
+
+<p>One more observation this American gentleman made to me.
+He was speaking of the want of spirit and of the despondency of
+the West Indian whites. 'I never knew, sir,' he said, 'any
+good come of desponding men. If you intend to strike a
+mark, you had better believe that you can strike it. No one
+ever hit anything if he thought that he was most likely to miss
+it. You must take a cheerful view of things, or you will
+have no success in this world.'</p>
+
+<p>'Tyne heart tyne a',' the Scotch proverb says. The Anglo-West
+Indians are tyning heart, and that is the worst feature
+about them. They can get no help except in themselves, and
+they can help themselves after all if we allow them fair play.
+The Americans will not touch them politically, but they will
+trade with them; they will bring their capital and their skill
+and knowledge among them, and make the islands richer and
+more prosperous than ever they were&mdash;on one condition:
+they will risk nothing in such enterprises as long as the shadow
+hangs over them of a possible government by a black majority.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>
+Let it suffice to have created one Ireland without deliberately
+manufacturing a second.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Jamaican hospitality&mdash;Cherry Garden&mdash;George William Gordon&mdash;The
+Gordon riots&mdash;Governor Eyre&mdash;A dispute and its consequences&mdash;Jamaican
+country-house society&mdash;Modern speculation&mdash;A Spanish
+fable&mdash;Port Royal&mdash;The commodore&mdash;Naval theatricals&mdash;The modern
+sailor.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The surviving representatives of the Jamaican gentry are as
+hospitable as their fathers and grandfathers used to be. An
+English visitor who wishes to see the island is not allowed
+to take his chance at hotels&mdash;where, indeed, his chance would
+be a bad one. A single acquaintance is enough to start with.
+He is sent on with letters of introduction from one house to
+another, and is assured of a favourable reception. I was
+treated as kindly as any stranger would be, and that was as
+kindly as possible. But friends do not ask us to stay with
+them that their portraits may be drawn in the traveller's
+journals; and I mention no one who was thus good to me, unless
+some general interest attaches either to himself or his
+residence. Such interest does, however, attach to a spot
+where, after leaving Mandeville, I passed a few days. The
+present owner of it was the chief manager of the Kingston
+branch of the Colonial Bank: a clever accomplished man of
+business, who understood the financial condition of the West
+Indies better perhaps than any other man living. He was a
+botanist besides; he had a fine collection of curious plants
+which were famous in the island; and was otherwise a gentleman
+of the highest standing and reputation. His lady was
+one of the old island aristocracy&mdash;high-bred, cultivated, an accomplished
+artist; a person who would have shone anywhere
+and in any circle, and was, therefore, contented to be herself,
+and indifferent whether she shone or not. A visit in such
+a family was likely to be instructive, and was sure to be agree<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>able;
+and on these grounds alone I should have accepted
+gratefully the opportunity of knowing them better which they
+kindly made for me by an invitation to stay with them. But
+their place, which was called Cherry Garden, and which I had
+seen from the grounds at Government House, had a further
+importance of its own in having been the home of the unfortunate
+George William Gordon.</p>
+
+<p>The disturbances with which Mr. Gordon was connected,
+and for his share in which he was executed, are so recent and
+so notorious that I need give no detailed account of them,
+though, of course, I looked into the history again and listened
+to all that I could hear about it. Though I had taken no
+part in Mr. Eyre's defence, I was one of those who thought
+from the first that Mr. Eyre had been unworthily sacrificed to
+public clamour. Had the agitation in Jamaica spread, and
+taken the form which it easily might have taken, he would
+have been blamed as keenly by one half the world if he had
+done nothing to check it as he was blamed, in fact, by the
+other for too much energy. Carlyle used to say that it was as
+if, when a ship had been on fire, and the captain by skill and
+promptitude had put the fire out, his owner were to say to
+him, 'Sir, you poured too much water down the hold and
+damaged the cargo.' The captain would answer, 'Yes, sir,
+but I have saved your ship.' This was the view which I carried
+with me to Jamaica, and I have brought it back with me
+the same in essentials, though qualified by clearer perceptions
+of the real nature of the situation.</p>
+
+<p>Something of a very similar kind had happened in Natal
+just before I visited that colony in 1874. I had seen the
+whites there hardly recovering from a panic in which a
+common police case had been magnified by fear into the
+beginning of an insurrection. Langalibalele, a Caffre chief
+within the British dominions, had been insubordinate. He
+had been sent for to Maritzberg, and had invented excuses
+for disobedience to a lawful order. The whites believed at
+once that there was to be a general Caffre rebellion in which
+they would all be murdered. They resolved to be beforehand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>
+with it. They carried fire and sword through two considerable
+tribes. At first they thought that they had covered themselves
+with glory; calmer reflection taught many of them that
+perhaps they had been too hasty, and that Langalibalele had
+never intended to rebel at all. The Jamaican disturbance
+was of a similar kind. Mr. Gordon had given less provocation
+than the Caffre chief, but the circumstances were
+analogous, and the actual danger was probably greater.
+Jamaica had then constitutional, though not what is called
+responsible, government. The executive power remained
+with the Crown. There had been differences of opinion
+between the governor and the Assembly. Gordon, a man of
+colour, was a prominent member of the opposition. He had
+called public meetings of the blacks in a distant part of
+the island, and was endeavouring to bring the pressure of
+public opinion on the opposition side. Imprudent as such a
+step might have been among an ignorant and excitable population,
+where whites and blacks were so unequal in numbers,
+and where they knew so little of each other, Mr. Gordon
+was not going beyond what in constitutional theory he was
+legally entitled to do; nor was his language on the platform,
+though violent and inflammatory, any more so than what
+we listen to patiently at home. Under a popular constitution
+the people are sovereign; the members of the assemblies
+are popular delegates; and when there is a diversion of
+opinion any man has a right to call the constituencies to
+express their sentiments. If stones were thrown at the police
+and seditious cries were raised, it was no more than might
+be reasonably expected.</p>
+
+<p>We at home can be calm on such occasions because we
+know that there is no real danger, and that the law is strong
+enough to assert itself. In Jamaica a few thousand white
+people were living in the middle of negroes forty times their
+number&mdash;once their slaves, now raised to be their political
+equals&mdash;each regarding the other on the least provocation
+with resentment and suspicion. In England the massacre
+in Hayti is a half-forgotten story. Not one person in a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>
+thousand of those who clamoured for the prosecution of
+Governor Eyre had probably ever heard of it. In Jamaica it is
+ever present in the minds of the Europeans as a frightful
+evidence of what the negroes are capable when roused to
+frenzy. The French planters had done nothing particularly
+cruel to deserve their animosity, and were as well regarded
+by their slaves as ever we had been in the English islands.
+Yet in a fever of political excitement, and as a reward for the
+decree of the Paris Revolutionary Government, which declared
+them free, they allowed the liberty which was to have
+elevated them to the white man's level to turn them into
+devils; and they massacred the whole of the French inhabitants.
+It was inevitable that when the volcano in Jamaica began
+to show symptoms of similar activity the whites residing
+there should be unable to look on with the calmness which we,
+from thousands of miles away, unreasonably expected of
+them. They imagined their houses in flames, and themselves
+and their families at the mercy of a furious mob. No
+personal relation between the two races has grown up to take
+the place of slavery. The white gentry have blacks for
+labourers, blacks for domestic servants, yet as a rule (though,
+of course, there are exceptions) they have no interest in each
+other, no esteem nor confidence: therefore any symptom of
+agitation is certain to produce a panic, and panic is always
+violent.</p>
+
+<p>The blacks who attended Gordon's meetings came armed
+with guns and cutlasses; a party of white volunteers went in
+consequence to watch them, and to keep order if they showed
+signs of meaning insurrection. Stones were thrown; the Riot
+Act was read, more stones followed, and then the volunteers
+fired, and several persons were killed. Of course there was
+fury. The black mob then actually did rise. They marched
+about that particular district destroying plantations and burning
+houses. That they did so little, and that the flame did not
+spread, was a proof that there was no premeditation of rebellion,
+no prepared plan of action, no previous communication
+between the different parts of the island with a view to any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>
+common movement. There was no proof, and there was no
+reason to suppose, that Gordon had intended an armed outbreak.
+He would have been a fool if he had, when constitutional
+agitation and the weight of numbers at his back would
+have secured him all that he wanted. When inflammable materials
+are brought together, and sparks are flying, you cannot
+equitably distribute the blame or the punishment. Eyre
+was responsible for the safety of the island. He was not a
+Jamaican. The rule in the colonial service is that a governor
+remains in any colony only long enough to begin to understand
+it. He is then removed to another of which he knows
+nothing. He is therefore absolutely dependent in any difficulty
+upon local advice. When the riots began every white
+man in Jamaica was of one opinion, that unless the fire was
+stamped out promptly they would all be murdered. Being
+without experience himself, it was very difficult for Mr. Eyre
+to disregard so complete a unanimity. I suppose that a perfectly
+calm and determined man would have seen in the
+unanimity itself the evidence of alarm and imagination. He
+ought perhaps to have relied entirely on the police and the
+regular troops, and to have called in the volunteers. But here
+again was a difficulty; for the police were black, and the
+West India regiments were black, and the Sepoy rebellion
+was fresh in everybody's memory. He had no time
+to deliberate. He had to act, and to act promptly; and
+if, relying on his own judgment, he had disregarded what
+everyone round him insisted upon, and if mischief had afterwards
+come of it, the censure which would have fallen upon
+him would have been as severe as it would have been deserved.
+He assumed that the English colonists were right and that a
+general rebellion had begun. They all armed. They formed
+into companies. The disturbed district was placed under
+martial law, and these extemporised regiments, too few in
+number to be merciful, saw safety only in striking terror into
+the poor wretches. It was in Jamaica as it was in Natal afterwards;
+but we must allow for human nature and not be hasty
+to blame. If the rising at Morant Bay was but the boiling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>
+over of a pot from the orator of an excited patriot, there was
+deplorable cruelty and violence. But, again, it was all too
+natural. Men do not bear easily to see their late servants on
+their way to become their political masters, and they believe
+the worst of them because they are afraid. A model governor
+would have rather restrained their ardour than encouraged it;
+but all that can be said against Mr. Eyre (so far as regarded
+the general suppression of the insurgents) is that he acted as
+nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand would
+have acted in his place, and more ought not to be expected of
+average colonial governors.</p>
+
+<p>His treatment of Gordon, the original cause of the disturbance,
+was more questionable. Gordon had returned to his
+own house, the house where I was going, within sight of Eyre's
+windows. It would have been fair, and perhaps right, to
+arrest him, and right also to bring him to trial, if he had committed
+any offence for which he could be legally punished.
+So strong was the feeling against him that, if every white man
+in Kingston had been empannelled, there would have been a
+unanimous verdict, and they would not have looked too closely
+into niceties of legal construction. Unfortunately it was
+doubtful whether Gordon had done anything which could be
+construed into a capital crime. He had a right to call public
+meetings together. He had a right to appeal to political passions,
+and to indulge as freely as he pleased in the patriotic
+commonplaces of platforms, provided he did not himself
+advise or encourage a breach of the peace, and this it could
+not be easily proved that he had done. He was, however, the
+leader of the opposition to the Government. The opposition
+had broken into a riot, and Gordon was guilty of having excited
+the feelings which led to it. The leader could not be
+allowed to escape unpunished while his followers were being
+shot and flogged. The Kingston district where he resided
+was under the ordinary law. Eyre sent him into the district
+which was under martial law, tried him by a military court and
+hanged him.</p>
+
+<p>The Cabinet at home at first thanked their representative<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>
+for having saved the island. A clamour rose, and they sent
+out a commission to examine into what had happened. The
+commission reported unfavourably, and Eyre was dismissed
+and ruined. In Jamaica I never heard anyone express a
+doubt on the full propriety of his action. He carried away
+with him the affection and esteem of the whole of the English
+colonists, who believe that he saved them from destruction.
+In my own opinion the fault was not in Mr. Eyre, and was
+not in the unfortunate Gordon, but in those who had insisted
+on applying a constitutional form of government to a country
+where the population is so unfavourably divided. If the
+numbers of white and black were more nearly equal, the
+objection would be less, for the natural superiority of the white
+would then assert itself without difficulty, and there would be
+no panics. Where the disproportion is so enormous as it is in
+Jamaica, where intelligence and property are in a miserable
+minority, and a half-reclaimed race of savages, cannibals not
+long ago, and capable, as the state of Hayti shows, of reverting
+to cannibalism again, are living beside them as their
+political equals, such panics arise from the nature of things,
+and will themselves cause the catastrophe from the dread of
+which they spring. Mutual fear and mistrust can lead to
+nothing in the end but violent collisions. The theory of constitutional
+government is that the majority shall rule the
+minority, and as long as the qualities, moral and mental, of
+the parties are not grossly dissimilar, such an arrangement
+forms a tolerable <i>modus vivendi</i>. Where in character, in
+mental force, in energy, in cultivation, there is no equality at
+all, but an inequality which has existed for thousands of years,
+and is as plain to-day as it was in the Egypt of the Pharaohs,
+to expect that the intelligent few will submit to the unintelligent
+many is to expect what has never been found and what
+never ought to be found. The whites cannot be trusted to
+rule the blacks, but for the blacks to rule the whites is a yet
+grosser anomaly. Were England out of the way, there would
+be a war of extermination between them. England prohibits
+it, and holds the balance in forced equality. England, there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>fore,
+so long as the West Indies are English, must herself rule,
+and rule impartially, and so acquit herself of her self-chosen
+responsibilities. Let the colonies which are occupied by our
+own race rule themselves as we rule ourselves. The English
+constituencies have no rights over the constituencies of
+Canada and Australia, for the Canadians and Australians are
+as well able to manage their own affairs as we are to manage
+ours. If they prefer even to elect governors of their own, let
+them do as they please. The link between us is community
+of blood and interest, and will not part over details of administration.
+But in these other colonies which are our own we
+must accept the facts as they are. Those who will not recognise
+realities are always beaten in the end.</p>
+
+<p>The train from Porus brought us back to Kingston an hour
+before sunset. The evening was lovely, even for Jamaica.
+The sea breeze had fallen. The land breeze had not risen,
+and the dust lay harmless on road and hedge. Cherry Garden,
+to which I was bound, was but seven miles distant by the
+direct road, so I calculated on a delightful drive which would
+bring me to my destination before dark. So I calculated;
+but alas! for human expectation. I engaged a 'buggy' at
+the station, with a decent-looking conductor, who assured me
+that he knew the way to Cherry Garden as well as to his own
+door. His horse looked starved and miserable. He insisted
+that there was not another in Kingston that was more than a
+match for it. We set out, and for the first two or three miles
+we went on well enough, conversing amicably upon things in
+general. But it so happened that it was again market day.
+The road was thronged as before with women plodding along
+with their baskets on their heads, a single male on a donkey
+to each detachment of them, carrying nothing, like an officer
+with a company of soldiers. Foolish indignation rose in me,
+and I asked my friend if he was not ashamed of seeing the
+poor creatures toiling so cruelly, while their lords and masters
+amused themselves. I appealed to his feelings as a man, as
+if it was likely that he had got any. The wretch only laughed.
+'Ah, massa,' he said, with his tongue in his cheek, 'women do<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
+women's work, men do men's work&mdash;all right.' 'And what is
+men's work?' I asked. Instead of answering he went on,
+'Look at they women, massa&mdash;how they laugh&mdash;how happy
+they be! Nobody more happy than black woman, massa.'
+I would not let him off. I pricked into him, till he got excited
+too, and we argued and contradicted each other, till at last the
+horse, finding he was not attended to, went his own way and
+that was a wrong one. Between Kingston and our destination
+there is a deep sandy flat, overgrown with bush and penetrated
+in all directions with labyrinthine lanes. Into this we had
+wandered in our quarrels, and neither of us knew where we
+were. The sand was loose; our miserable beast was above his
+fetlocks in it, and was visibly dropping under his efforts to
+drag us along even at a walk. The sun went down. The
+tropic twilight is short. The evening star shone out in the
+west, and the crescent moon over our heads. My man said this
+and said that; every word was a lie, for he had lost his way and
+would not allow it. We saw a light through some trees. I
+sent him to inquire. We were directed one way and another
+way, every way except the right one. We emerged at last
+upon a hard road of some kind. The stars told me the
+general direction. We came to cottages where the name of
+Cherry Garden was known, and we were told that it was two
+miles off; but alas! again there were two roads to it; a short
+and good one, and a long and bad one, and they sent us by
+the last. There was a steep hill to climb, for the house is 800
+feet above the sea. The horse could hardly crawl, and my
+'nigger' went to work to flog him to let off his own ill humour.
+I had to stop that by force, and at last, as it grew too dark to
+see the road under the trees, I got out and walked, leaving
+him to follow at a foot's pace. The night was lovely. I began
+to think that we should have to camp out after all, and that it
+would be no great hardship.</p>
+
+<p>It was like the gloaming of a June night in England, the
+daylight in the open spots not entirely gone, and mixing softly
+with the light of moon and planet and the flashing of the
+fireflies. I plodded on mile after mile, and Cherry Garden<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>
+still receded to one mile farther. We came to a gate of some
+consequence. The outline of a large mansion was visible with
+gardens round it. I concluded that we had arrived, and was
+feeling for the latch when the forms of a lady and gentleman
+appeared against the sky who were strolling in the grounds.
+They directed me still upwards, with the mile which never
+diminished still to be travelled. Like myself, our weary
+animal had gathered hopes from the sight of the gate. He
+had again to drag on as he could. His owner was subdued
+and silent, and obeyed whatever order I gave him. The trees
+now closed over us so thick that I could see nothing. Vainly
+I repented of my unnecessary philanthropy which had been
+the cause of the mischief; what had I to do with black
+women, or white either for that matter? I had to feel the
+way with my feet and a stick. I came to a place where the
+lane again divided. I tried the nearest turn. I found a
+trench across it three feet deep, which had been cut by a
+torrent. This was altogether beyond the capacity of our
+unfortunate animal, so I took the other boldly, prepared if it
+proved wrong to bivouac till morning with my 'nigger,' and
+go on with my argument. Happily there was no need; we
+came again on a gate which led into a field. There was a
+drive across it and wire fences. Finally lights began to
+glimmer and dogs to bark: we were at the real Cherry Garden
+at last, and found the whole household alarmed for what had
+become of us. I could not punish my misleader by stinting
+his fare, for I knew that I had only myself to blame. He was
+an honest fellow after all. In the disturbance of my mind
+I left a rather valuable umbrella in his buggy. He discovered
+it after he had gone, and had grace enough to see that it was
+returned to me.</p>
+
+<p>My entertainers were much amused at the cause of the misadventure,
+perhaps unique of its kind; to address homilies to
+the black people on the treatment of their wives not being the
+fashion in these parts.</p>
+
+<p>If there are no more Aaron Bangs in Jamaica, there are very
+charming people; as I found when I turned this new leaf in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>
+my West Indian experience. Mr. M&mdash;&mdash; could not have
+taken more pains with me if I had been his earliest friend.
+The chief luxury which he allowed himself in his simple life
+was a good supply of excellent horses. His business took him
+every day to Kingston, but he left me in charge of his family,
+and I had 'a good time,' as the Americans say. The house
+was large, with fine airy rooms, a draught so constantly blowing
+through it that the candles had to be covered with bell glasses;
+but the draughts in these countries are the very breath of life.
+It had been too dark when I arrived to see anything of the
+surroundings, and the next morning I strolled out to see what
+the place was like. It lies just at the foot of the Blue Mountains,
+where the gradual slope from the sea begins to become
+steep. The plain of Kingston lay stretched before me, with
+its woods and cornfields and villas, the long straggling town,
+the ships at anchor in the harbour, the steamers passing in and
+out with their long trails of smoke, the sand-spit like a thin grey
+line lying upon the water, as the natural breakwater by which
+the harbour is formed, and beyond it the broad blue expanse
+of the Caribbean Sea. The foreground was like an English
+park, studded over with handsome forest trees and broken by
+the rains into picturesque ravines. Some acres were planted
+with oranges of the choicer sorts, as an experiment to show
+what Jamaica could do, but they were as yet young and had
+not come into bearing. Round the house were gardens where
+the treasures of our hot-houses were carelessly and lavishly
+scattered. Stephanotis trailed along the railing or climbed
+over the trellis. Oleanders white and pink waved over marble
+basins, and were sprinkled by the spray from spouting fountains.
+Crotons stood about in tubs, not small plants as we know
+them, but large shrubs; great purple or parti-coloured bushes.
+They have a fancy for crotons in the West Indies; I suppose
+as a change from the monotony of green. I cannot share it.
+A red leaf, except in autumn before it falls, is a kind of
+monster, and I am glad that Nature has made so few of them.
+In the shade of the trees behind the house was a collection of
+orchids, the most perfect, I believe, in the island.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" >
+<img src="images/image0008.jpg" alt="KINGSTON AND HARBOUR FROM CHERRY GARDEN." title="" /><br />
+<span class="caption">KINGSTON AND HARBOUR FROM CHERRY GARDEN.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>And here Gordon had lived. Here he had been arrested
+and carried away to his death; his crime being that he had
+dreamt of regenerating the negro race by baptising them in
+the Jordan of English Radicalism. He would have brought
+about nothing but confusion, and have precipitated Jamaica
+prematurely into the black anarchy into which perhaps it
+is still destined to fall. But to hang him was an extreme
+measure, and, in the present state of public opinion, a
+dangerous one.</p>
+
+<p>One does not associate the sons of darkness with keen
+perceptions of the beautiful. Yet no mortal ever selected a
+lovelier spot for a residence than did Gordon in choosing
+Cherry Garden. How often had his round dark eyes wandered
+over the scenes at which I was gazing, watched the
+early rays of the sun slanting upwards to the high peaks of
+the Blue Mountains, or the last as he sank in gold and
+crimson behind the hills at Mandeville; watched the great
+steamers entering or leaving Port Royal, and at night the
+gleam of the lighthouse from among the palm trees on the
+spit. Poor fellow! one felt very sorry for him, and sorry
+for Mr. Eyre, too. The only good that came of it all was
+the surrender of the constitution and the return to Crown
+government, and this our wonderful statesmen are beginning
+to undo.</p>
+
+<p>No one understood better than Mr. M&mdash;&mdash; the troubles
+and dangers of the colony, but he was inclined, perhaps by
+temperament, perhaps by knowledge, to take a cheerful view
+of things. For the present at least he did not think that
+there was anything serious to be feared. The finances, of
+which he had the best means of judging, were in tolerable
+condition. The debt was considerable, but more than half
+of it was represented by a railway. If sugar was languishing,
+the fruit trade with the United States was growing with the
+liveliest rapidity. Planters and merchants were not making
+fortunes, but business went on. The shares in the Colonial
+Bank were not at a high quotation, but the securities were
+sound, the shareholders got good dividends, and eight and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>
+ten per cent. was the interest charged on loans. High
+interest might be a good sign or a bad one. Anyway Mr.
+M&mdash;&mdash; could not see that there was much to be afraid of
+in Jamaica. There had been bad times before, and they
+had survived notwithstanding. He was a man of business,
+and talked himself little about politics. As it had been, so it
+would be again.</p>
+
+<p>In his absence at his work I found friends in the neighbourhood
+who were all attention and politeness. One took
+me to see my acquaintances at the camp again. Another
+drove me about, showed me the house where Scott had
+lived, the author of 'Tom Cringle.' One round in particular
+left a distinct impression. It was through a forest which
+had once been a flourishing sugar estate. Deep among the
+trees were the ruins of an aqueduct which had brought water
+to the mill, now overgrown and crumbling. The time had
+not been long as we count time in the history of nations, but
+there had been enough for the arches to fall in, the stream to
+return to its native bed, the tropical vegetation to spring up in
+its wild luxuriance and bury in shade the ruins of a past
+civilisation.</p>
+
+<p>I fell in with interesting persons who talked metaphysics
+and theology with me, though one would not have expected
+it in Jamaica. In this strange age of ours the spiritual
+atmosphere is more confused than at any period during the
+last eighteen hundred years. Men's hearts are failing them
+for fear, not knowing any longer where to rest. We look this
+way and that way, and catch at one another like drowning
+men. Go where you will, you find the same phenomena.
+Science grows, and observers are adding daily to our knowledge
+of the nature and structure of the material universe,
+but they tell us nothing, and can tell us nothing, of what we
+most want to know. They cannot tell us what our own
+nature is. They cannot tell us what God is, or what duty is.
+We had a belief once, in which, as in a boat, we floated safely
+on the unknown ocean; but the philosophers and critics
+have been boring holes in the timbers to examine the texture<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>
+of the wood, and now it leaks at every one of them. We
+have to help ourselves in the best way that we can. Some
+strike out new ideas for themselves, others go back to the
+seven sages, and lay again for themselves the old eggs, which,
+after laborious incubation, will be addled as they were addled
+before. To my metaphysical friends in Jamaica the 'Light
+of Asia' had been shining amidst German dreams, and the
+moonlight of the Vedas had been illuminating the pessimism
+of Schopenhauer. So it is all round. Mr. &mdash;&mdash; goes to
+Mount Carmel to listen for communications from Elijah;
+fashionable countesses to the shrine of Our Lady at Lourdes.
+'Are you a Buddhist?' lisps the young lady in Mayfair to
+the partner with whom she is sitting out at a ball. 'It is so
+nice,' said a gentleman to me who has been since promoted
+to high office in an unfortunate colony, 'it is so nice to talk
+of such things to pretty girls, and it always ends in one way,
+you know.' Conversations on theology, at least between
+persons of opposite sex, ought to be interdicted by law for
+everyone under forty. But there are questions on which old
+people may be permitted to ask one another what they think,
+if it only be for mutual comfort in the general vacancy. We
+are born alone, we pass alone into the great darkness. When
+the curtain falls is the play over? or is a new act to commence?
+Are we to start again in a new sphere, carrying
+with us what we have gained in the discipline of our earthly
+trials? Are we to become again as we were before we came
+into this world, when eternity had not yet splintered into
+time, or the universal being dissolved into individual existences?
+For myself, I have long ceased to speculate on these
+subjects, being convinced that they have no bottom which
+can be reasoned out by the intellect. We are in a world
+where much can be learnt which affects our own and others'
+earthly welfare, and we had better leave the rest alone. Yet
+one listens and cannot choose but sympathise when anxious
+souls open out to you what is going on within them. A
+Spanish legend, showing with whom these inquiries began and
+with what result, is not without its value.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Jupiter, having made the world, proceeded to make animals
+to live in it. The ass was the earliest created. He looked
+about him. He looked at himself; and, as the habit of asses
+is, he asked himself what it all meant; what it was to be an
+ass, where did he come from, and what he was for? Not
+being able to discover, he applied to his maker. Jupiter told
+him that he was made to be the slave of another animal to be
+called Man. He was to carry men on his back, drag loads
+for them, and be their drudge. He was to live on thistles
+and straw, and to be beaten continually with sticks and ropes'-ends.
+The ass complained. He said that he had done
+nothing to deserve so hard a fate. He had not asked to be
+born, and he would rather not have been born. He inquired
+how long this life, or whatever it was, had to continue.
+Jupiter said it had to last thirty years. The poor ass was in
+consternation. If Jupiter would reduce the thirty to ten he
+undertook to be patient, to be a good servant, and to do his
+work patiently. Jupiter reflected and consented, and the ass
+retired grateful and happy.</p>
+
+<p>The dog, who had been born meanwhile, heard what had
+passed. He, too, went to Jupiter with the same question.
+He learnt that he also was a slave to men. In the day he was
+to catch their game for them, but was not to eat it himself.
+At night he was to be chained by a ring and to lie awake to
+guard their houses. His food was to be bones and refuse.
+Like the ass he was to have had thirty years of it, but on petition
+they were similarly exchanged for ten.</p>
+
+<p>The monkey came next. His function, he was told, was
+to mimic humanity, to be led about by a string, and
+grimace and dance for men's amusement. He also
+remonstrated at the length of time, and obtained the same
+favour.</p>
+
+<p>Last came the man himself. Conscious of boundless desires
+and, as he imagined, of boundless capabilities, he did not
+inquire what he was, or what he was to do. Those questions
+had been already answered by his vanity. He did not come
+to ask for anything, but to thank Jupiter for having created so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>
+glorious a being and to ascertain for how many ages he might
+expect to endure. The god replied that thirty years was the
+term allotted to all personal existences.</p>
+
+<p>'Only thirty years!' he exclaimed. 'Only thirty years for
+such capacities as mine. Thirty years will be gone like a dream.
+Extend them! oh, extend them, gracious Jupiter, that I may
+have leisure to use the intellect which thou hast given me,
+search into the secrets of nature, do great and glorious actions,
+and serve and praise thee, O my creator! longer and more
+worthily.'</p>
+
+<p>The lip of the god curled lightly, and again he acquiesced.
+'I have some spare years to dispose of,' he said, 'of which
+others of my creatures have begged to be relieved. You shall
+have thirty years of your own. From thirty to fifty you shall
+have the ass's years, and labour and sweat for your support.
+From fifty to seventy you shall have the dog's years, and take
+care of the stuff, and snarl and growl at what younger men are
+doing. From seventy to ninety you shall have the monkey's
+years, and smirk and grin and make yourself ridiculous. After
+that you may depart.'</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I was going on to Cuba. The commodore had insisted on
+my spending my last days with him at Port Royal. He undertook
+to see me on board the steamer as it passed out of the
+harbour. I have already described his quarters. The naval
+station has no colonial character except the climate, and is
+English entirely. The officers are the servants of the
+Admiralty, not of the colonial government. Their interests
+are in their profession. They look to promotion in other
+parts of the world, and their functions are on the ocean and
+not on the land. The commodore is captain of the guardship;
+but he has a commander under him and he resides on shore.
+Everyone employed in the dockyard, even down to his own
+household, is rated on the ship's books, consequently they are all
+men. There is not a woman servant about the place, save his
+lady's ladies'-maid. His daughters learn to take care of themselves,
+and are not brought up to find everything done for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
+them. His boys are about the world in active service growing
+into useful and honourable manhood.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the whole life tastes of the element to which it belongs,
+and is salt and healthy as the ocean itself. It was not without
+its entertainments. The officers of the garrison were to give
+a ball. The young ladies of Kingston are not afraid of the
+water, cross the harbour in the steam launches, dance till the
+small hours, return in the dark, drive their eight or ten miles
+home, and think nothing of it. In that climate, night is
+pleasanter to be abroad in than day. I could not stay to be
+present, but I was in the midst of the preparations, and one
+afternoon there was a prospect of a brilliant addition to the
+party. A yacht steamed inside the Point&mdash;long, narrow,
+and swift as a torpedo boat. She carried American colours,
+and we heard that she was the famous vessel of the yet more
+famous Mr. Vanderbilt, who was on board with his family.
+Here was an excitement! The commodore was ordered to
+call the instant that she was anchored. Invitations were prepared&mdash;all
+was eagerness. Alas! she did not anchor at all.
+She learnt from the pilot that, the small-pox being in Jamaica,
+if any of her people landed there she would be quarantined in
+the other islands, and to the disappointment of everyone, even
+of myself, who would gladly have seen the great millionaire,
+she turned about and went off again to sea.</p>
+
+<p>I was very happy at the commodore's&mdash;low spirits not being
+allowed in that wholesome element. Decks were washed every
+morning as if at sea, i.e. every floor was scrubbed and scoured.
+It was an eternal washing day, lines of linen flying in the brisk
+sea breeze. The commodore was always busy making work if
+none had been found for him. He took me one day to see
+the rock spring where Rodney watered his fleet, as the great
+admiral describes in one of his letters, and from which Port
+Royal now draws its supply. The spring itself bursts full and
+clear out of the limestone rock close to the shore, four or five
+miles from Kingston. There is a natural basin, slightly
+improved by art, from which the old conduit pipes carry the
+stream to the sea. The tug comes daily, fills its tanks, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>
+returns. The commodore has tidied up the place, planted
+shrubs, and cleared away the bush; but half the water at least,
+is still allowed to leak away, and turns the hollow below into an
+unwholesome swamp. It may be a necessity, but it is also a
+misfortune, that the officers at distant stations hold their
+appointments for so short a term. By the time that they have
+learnt what can or ought to be done, they are sent elsewhere,
+and their successor has to begin over again. The water in this
+spring, part of which is now worse than wasted and the rest
+carried laboriously in a vessel to Port Royal to be sold by
+measure to the people there, might be all conducted thither by
+pipes at small cost and trouble, were the commodore to remain
+a few years longer at the Jamaica Station.</p>
+
+<p>He is his own boatman, and we had some fine sails
+about the lagoon&mdash;the breeze always fresh and the surface
+always smooth. The shallow bays swarm with small fish, and
+it was a pretty thing to watch the pelicans devouring them.
+They gather in flocks, sweep and wheel in the air, and when
+they plunge they strike the water with a violence which one
+would expect would break their wings. They do not dive,
+but seize their prey with their long, broad bills, and seem
+never to miss.</p>
+
+<p>Between the ships and the barracks, there are many single
+men in Port Royal, for whom amusement has to be found if
+they are to be kept from drink. A canteen is provided for
+them, with bowling alley, tennis court, beer in moderation, and
+a reading room, for such as like it, with reviews and magazines
+and newspapers They can fish if they want sport, and there
+are sharks in plenty a cable's length from shore; but the
+schoolmaster has been abroad, and tastes run in more refined
+directions. The blacks of Tobago acted 'The Merchant of
+Venice' before Governor S&mdash;&mdash;. The ships' companies of the
+gunboats at Port Royal gave a concert while I was there. The
+officers took no part, and left the men to manage it as they
+pleased. The commodore brought his party; the garrison,
+the crews of the other ships, and stray visitors came, and the
+large room at the canteen was completely full. The taste of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>
+the audience was curious. Dibdin was off the boards altogether,
+and favour was divided between the London popular comic song
+and the sentimental&mdash;no longer with any flavour of salt about it,
+but the sentimental spoony and sickly. 'She wore a wreath of
+roses' called out the highest enthusiasm. One of the performers
+recited a long poem of his own about Mary Stuart,
+'the lovely and unfortunate.' Then followed the buffoonery;
+and this was at least genuine rough and tumble if there was
+little wit in it. A lad capered about on a tournament horse
+which flung him every other moment. Various persons pretended
+to be drunk, and talked and staggered as drunken men
+do. Then there was a farce, how conceived and by what kind
+of author I was puzzled to make out. A connoisseur of art
+is looking for Greek antiques. He has heard that a statue
+has recently been discovered of 'Ajax quarrelling with his
+mother-in-law.' What Ajax was quarrelling about or who his
+mother-in-law might be does not appear. A couple of rogues,
+each unknown to the other, practise on the connoisseur's
+credulity. Each promises him the statue; each dresses up a
+confederate on a pedestal with a modern soldier's helmet and
+a blanket to represent a Greek hero. The two figures are
+shown to him. One of them, I forget how, contrived to pass
+as Ajax; the other had turned into Hercules doing something
+to the Stymphalides. At last they get tired of standing to be
+looked at, jump down, and together knock over the connoisseur.
+Ajax then turns on Hercules, who, of course, is ready for a
+row. They fight till they are tired, and then make it up over
+a whisky bottle.</p>
+
+<p>So entirely new an aspect of the British tar took me by
+surprise, and I speculated whether the inventors and performers
+of this astonishing drama were an advance on the
+Ben Bunting type. I was, of course, inclined to say no, but
+my tendency is to dislike changes, and I allow for it. The
+commodore said that in certain respects there really was an
+advance. The seamen fell into few scrapes, and they did not
+get drunk so often. This was a hardy assertion of the commodore,
+as a good many of them were drunk at that moment.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>
+I could see myself that they were better educated. If Ben
+Bunting had been asked who Ajax and Hercules were, he
+would have taken them to be three-deckers which were so
+named, and his knowledge would have gone no farther.
+Whether these tars of the new era are better sailors and braver
+and truer men is another question. They understand their
+rights much better, if that does any good to them. The
+officers used to be treated with respect at all times and
+seasons. This is now qualified. When they are on duty, the
+men are as respectful as they used to be; when they are off
+duty, the commodore himself is only old H&mdash;&mdash;.</p>
+
+<p>We returned to the dockyard in a boat under a full moon,
+the guardship gleaming white in the blue midnight and the
+phosphorescent water flashing under the oars. The 'Dee,'
+which was to take me to Havana, was off Port Royal on
+the following morning. The commodore put me on board
+in his gig, with the white ensign floating over the stern. I
+took leave of him with warm thanks for his own and his family's
+hospitable entertainment of me. The screw went round&mdash;we
+steamed away out of the harbour, and Jamaica and the kind
+friends whom I had found there faded out of sight. Jamaica
+was the last of the English West India Islands which I visited.
+I was to see it again, but I will here set down the impressions
+which had been left upon me by what I had seen there and
+seen in the Antilles.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Present state of Jamaica&mdash;Test of progress&mdash;Resources of the island&mdash;Political
+alternatives&mdash;Black supremacy and probable consequences&mdash;The
+West Indian problem.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>As I was stepping into the boat at Port Royal, a pamphlet
+was thrust into my hand, which I was entreated to read at my
+leisure. It was by some discontented white of the island&mdash;no
+rare phenomenon, and the subject of it was the precipitate
+decline in the value of property there. The writer, unlike the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>
+planters, insisted that the people were taxed in proportion
+to their industry. There were taxes on mules, on carts, on
+donkeys, all bearing on the small black proprietors, whose
+ability to cultivate was thus checked, and who were thus
+deliberately encouraged in idleness. He might have added,
+although he did not, that while both in Jamaica and Trinidad
+everyone is clamouring against the beetroot bounty which
+artificially lowers the price of sugar, the local councils in these
+two islands try to counteract the effect and artificially raise
+the price of sugar by an export duty on their own produce&mdash;a
+singular method of doing it which, I presume, admits of
+explanation. My pamphleteer was persuaded that all the
+world were fools, and that he and his friends were the only
+wise ones: again a not uncommon occurrence in pamphleteers.
+He demanded the suppression of absenteeism; he demanded
+free trade. In exchange for the customs duties, which were
+to be abolished, he demanded a land tax&mdash;the very mention
+of which, I had been told by others, drove the black proprietors
+whom he wished to benefit into madness. He wanted Home
+Rule. He wanted fifty things besides which I have forgotten,
+but his grand want of all was a new currency. Mankind, he
+thought, had been very mad at all periods of their history.
+The most significant illustration of their madness had been
+the selection of gold and silver as the medium of exchange.
+The true base of the currency was the land. The Government
+of Jamaica was to lend to every freeholder up to the
+mortgage value of his land in paper notes, at 5 per cent.
+interest, the current rate being at present 8 per cent. The
+notes so issued, having the land as their security, would be in
+no danger of depreciation, and they would flow over the sugar
+estates like an irrigating stream. On the produce of sugar the
+fate of the island depended.</p>
+
+<p>On the produce of sugar? And why not on the produce of
+a fine race of men? The prospects of Jamaica, the prospects
+of all countries, depend not on sugar or on any form or degree
+of material wealth, but on the characters of the men and
+women whom they are breeding and rearing. Where there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>
+are men and women of a noble nature, the rest will go well of
+itself; where these are not, there will be no true prosperity
+though the sugar hogsheads be raised from thousands into
+millions. The colonies are interesting only as offering homes
+where English people can increase and multiply; English of
+the old type with simple habits, who do not need imported
+luxuries. There is room even in the West Indies for hundreds
+of thousands of them if they can be contented to lead
+human lives, and do not go there to make fortunes which they
+are to carry home with them. The time may not be far off
+when men will be sick of making fortunes, sick of being ground
+to pattern in the commonplace mill-wheel of modern society;
+sick of a state of things which blights and kills simple and
+original feeling, which makes us think and speak and act
+under the tyranny of general opinion, which masquerades as
+liberty and means only submission to the newspapers. I can
+conceive some modern men may weary of all this, and retire
+from it like the old ascetics, not as they did into the wilderness,
+but behind their own walls and hedges, shutting out the
+world and its noises, to inquire whether after all they have
+really immortal souls, and, if they have, what ought to be done
+about them. The West India Islands, with their inimitable
+climate and soil and prickly pears <i>ad libitum</i> to make fences
+with, would be fine places for such recluses. Failing these
+ideal personages, there is work enough of the common sort to
+create wholesome prosperity. There are oranges to be grown,
+and pines and plantains, and coffee and cocoa, and rice and
+indigo and tobacco, not to speak of the dollars which my
+American friend found in the bamboos, and of the further
+dollars which other Americans will find in the untested qualities
+of thousands of other productions. Here are opportunities for
+innocent industrious families, where children can be brought
+up to be manly and simple and true and brave as their fathers
+were brought up, or as their fathers expressed it 'in the nurture
+and admonition of the Lord;' while such neighbours as their
+dark brothers-in-law might have a chance of a rise in life, in
+the only sense in which a 'rise' can be of real benefit to them.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>
+These are the objects which statesmen who have the care and
+conduct of a nation's welfare ought to set before themselves,
+and unfortunately they are the last which are remembered in
+countries which are popularly governed. There is a clamour
+for education in such countries, but education means to them
+only the sharpening of the faculties for the competitive race
+which is called progress. In democracies no one man is his
+brother's keeper. Each lives and struggles to make his own
+way and his own position. All that is insisted on is that there
+shall be a fair stage and that every lad shall learn the use of
+the weapons which will enable him to fight his own way.
+<span class="greek">&#7944;&#961;&#949;&#964;&#8052;</span>, 'manliness,' the most essential of all acquisitions and
+the hardest to cultivate, as Aristotle observed long ago, is
+assumed in democracies as a matter of course. Of <span class="greek">&#7936;&#961;&#949;&#964;&#8052;</span> a
+moderate quantity (<span class="greek">&#8001;&#960;&#959;&#963;&#959;&#957;&#959;&#8166;&#957;</span>) would do, and in Aristotle's
+opinion this was the rock on which the Greek republics
+foundered. Their <span class="greek">&#7936;&#961;&#949;&#964;&#8052;</span> did not come as a matter of course,
+and they lost it, and the Macedonians and the Romans ate
+them up.</p>
+
+<p>From this point of view political problems, and the West
+Indian among them, present unusual aspects. Looking to the
+West Indies only, we took possession of those islands when
+they were of supreme importance in our great wrestle with
+Spain and France. We were fighting then for the liberties of
+the human race. The Spaniards had destroyed the original Carib
+and Indian inhabitants. We induced thousands of our own
+fellow-countrymen to venture life and fortune in the occupation
+of our then vital conquests. For two centuries we furnished
+them with black servants whom we purchased on the African
+coast and carried over and sold there, making our own profits
+out of the trade, and the colonists prospered themselves and
+poured wealth and strength into the empire of which they
+were then an integral part. A change passed over the spirit
+of the age. Liberty assumed a new dress. We found slavery
+to be a crime; we released our bondmen; we broke their
+chains as we proudly described it to ourselves; we compensated
+the owners, so far as money could compensate, for the entire<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>
+dislocation of a state of society which we had ourselves
+created; and we trusted to the enchantment of liberty to
+create a better in its place. We had delivered our own souls;
+we had other colonies to take our emigrants. Other lands
+under our open trade would supply us with the commodities
+for which we had hitherto been dependent on the West Indies.
+They ceased to be of commercial, they ceased to be of political,
+moment to us, and we left them to their own resources. The
+modern English idea is that everyone must take care of himself.
+Individuals or aggregates of individuals have the world
+before them, to open the oyster or fail to open it according to
+their capabilities. The State is not to help them; the State
+is not to interfere with them unless for political or party
+reasons it happens to be convenient. As we treat ourselves
+we treat our colonies. Those who have gone thither have
+gone of their own free will, and must take the consequences of
+their own actions. We allow them no executional privileges
+which we do not claim for ourselves. They must stand, if
+they are to stand, by their own strength. If they cannot stand
+they must fall. This is our notion of education in 'manliness,'
+and for immediate purposes answers well enough. Individual
+enterprise, unendowed but unfettered, built the main buttresses
+of the British colonial empire. Australians and New Zealanders
+are English and Scotchmen who have settled at the antipodes
+where there is more room for them than at home. They are
+the same people as we are, and they have the same privileges
+as we have. They are parts of one and the same organic body
+as branches from the original trunk. The branch does not
+part from the trunk, but it discharges its own vital functions
+by its own energy, and we no more desire to interfere than
+London desires to interfere with Manchester.</p>
+
+<p>So it stands with us where the colonists are of our race, with
+the same character and the same objects; and, as I said, the
+system answers. Under no other relations could we continue
+a united people. But it does not answer&mdash;it has failed wherever
+we have tried it&mdash;when the majority of the inhabitants of
+countries of which for one or other reason we have possessed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>
+ourselves, and of which we keep possession, are not united to
+us by any of these natural bonds, where they have been
+annexed by violence or otherwise been forced under our flag.
+It has failed conspicuously in Ireland. We know that it would
+fail in the East Indies if we were rash enough to venture the
+experiment. Self-government in connection with the British
+Empire implies a desire or a willingness in those who are so
+left to themselves that the connection shall continue. We
+have been so sanguine as to believe that the privilege of being
+British subjects is itself sufficient to secure their allegiance;
+that the liberties which we concede will not be used for purposes
+which we are unable to tolerate; that, being left to
+govern themselves, they will govern in harmony with English
+interests and according to English principles. The privilege is not
+estimated so highly. They go their own way and not our way,
+and therefore we must look facts in the face as they are, and
+not as we wish them to be. If we extend to Ireland the
+independence which only links us closer to Australia, Ireland
+will use it to break away from us. If we extend it to Bengal
+and Madras and Bombay, we shall fling them into anarchy
+and bring our empire to an end. We cannot for our
+safety's sake part with Ireland. We do not mean to part with
+our Asiatic dominions. The reality of the relation in both
+cases is the superior force of England, and we must rely upon
+it and need not try to conceal that we do, till by the excellence
+of our administration we have converted submission into
+respect and respect into willingness for union. This may be a
+long process and a difficult one. If we choose to maintain our
+empire, however, we must pay the price for empire, and it is
+wiser, better, safer, in all cases to admit the truth and act upon
+it. Yet Englishmen so love liberty that they struggle against
+confessing what is disagreeable to them. Many of us would
+give Ireland, would give India Home Rule, and run the risk
+of what would happen, and only a probability, which reaches
+certainty, of the consequences to be expected to follow prevents
+us from unanimously agreeing. About the West Indies we
+do not care very earnestly. Nothing seriously alarming can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>
+happen there. So much, therefore, for the general policy of
+leaving them to help themselves out of their difficulties we
+have adopted completely. The corollary that they must govern
+themselves also on their own responsibilities we hesitate as yet
+to admit completely; but we do not recognise that any
+responsibility for their failing condition rests on us; and the
+inclination certainly, and perhaps the purpose, is to throw
+them entirely upon themselves at the earliest moment. Cuba
+sends representatives to the Cortes at Madrid, Martinique and
+Guadaloupe to the Assembly at Paris. In the English islands,
+being unwilling to govern without some semblance of a constitution,
+we try tentatively varieties of local boards and local
+councils, admitting the elective principle but not daring to
+trust it fully; creating hybrid constitutions, so contrived as
+to provoke ill feeling where none would exist without them,
+and to make impossible any tolerable government which could
+actively benefit the people. We cannot intend that arrangements
+the effects of which are visible so plainly in the sinking
+fortunes of our own kindred there, are to continue for ever.
+We suppose that we cannot go back in these cases. It is to
+be presumed, therefore, that we mean to go forward, and in
+doing so I venture to think myself that we shall be doing equal
+injustice both to our own race and to the blacks, and we shall
+bring the islands into a condition which will be a reproach and
+scandal to the empire of which they will remain a dishonoured
+part. The slave trade was an imperial monopoly, extorted by
+force, guaranteed by treaties, and our white West Indian
+interest was built up in connection with and in reliance upon
+it. We had a right to set the slaves free; but the payment of
+the indemnity was no full acquittance of our obligations for
+the condition of a society which we had ourselves created.
+We have no more right to make the emancipated slave his
+master's master in virtue of his numbers than we have a right
+to lay under the heel of the Catholics of Ireland the Protestant
+minority whom we planted there to assist us in controlling
+them.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said that we have no intention of doing anything<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>
+of the kind, that no one at present dreams of giving a full
+colonial constitution to the West Indian Islands. They are
+allowed such freedom as they are capable of using; they can
+be allowed more as they are better educated and more fit for
+it, &amp;c. &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>One knows all that, and one knows what it is worth in the
+half-elected, half-nominated councils. Either the nominated
+members are introduced merely as a drag upon the wheel, and
+are instructed to yield in the end to the demands of the
+representative members, or they are themselves the representatives
+of the white minority. If the first, the majority rule
+already; if the second, such constitutions are contrived ingeniously
+to create the largest amount of irritation, and to
+make impossible, as long as they last, any form of effective
+and useful government. Therefore they cannot last, and are
+not meant to last. A principle once conceded develops with
+the same certainty with which a seed grows when it is sown.
+In the English world, as it now stands, there is no middle
+alternative between self-government and government by the
+Crown, and the cause of our reluctance to undertake direct
+charge of the West Indies is because such undertaking carries
+responsibility along with it. If they are brought so close to
+us we shall be obliged to exert ourselves, and to rescue them
+from a condition which would be a reproach to us.</p>
+
+<p>The English of those islands are melting away. That is a
+fact to which it is idle to try to shut our eyes. Families who
+have been for generations on the soil are selling their estates
+everywhere and are going off. Lands once under high cultivation
+are lapsing into jungle. Professional men of ability
+and ambition carry their talents to countries where they are
+more sure of reward. Every year the census renews its
+warning. The rate may vary; sometimes for a year or two
+there may seem to be a pause in the movement, but it begins
+again and is always in the same direction. The white is
+relatively disappearing, the black is growing; that is the fact
+with which we have to deal.</p>
+
+<p>We may say if we please, 'Be it so then; we do not want<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>
+those islands; let the blacks have them, poor devils. They
+have had wrongs enough in this world; let them take their
+turn and have a good time now.' This I imagine is the
+answer which will rise to the lips of most of us, yet it will be
+an answer which will not be for our honour, nor in the long
+run for our interest. Our stronger colonies will scarcely
+attach more value to their connection with us if they hear us
+declare impatiently that because part of our possessions have
+ceased to be of money value to us, we will not or we cannot
+take the trouble to provide them with a decent government,
+and therefore cast them off. Nor in the long run will it
+benefit the blacks either. The islands will not be allowed to
+run wild again, and if we leave them some one else will take
+them who will be less tender of his coloured brother's sensibilities.
+We may think that it would not come to that. The
+islands will still be ours; the English flag will still float over
+the forts; the government, whatever it be, will be administered
+in the Queen's name. Were it worth while, one might draw a
+picture of the position of an English governor, with a black
+parliament and a black ministry, recommending by advice of
+his constitutional ministers some measure like the Haytian
+Land Law.</p>
+
+<p>No Englishman, not even a bankrupt peer, would consent
+to occupy such a position; the blacks themselves would
+despise him if he did; and if the governor is to be one of
+their own race and colour, how long could such a connection
+endure?</p>
+
+<p>No one I presume would advise that the whites of the
+island should govern. The relations between the two populations
+are too embittered, and equality once established by
+law, the exclusive privilege of colour over colour cannot be
+restored. While slavery continued the whites ruled effectively
+and economically; the blacks are now free as they; there are
+two classes in the community; their interests are opposite as
+they are now understood, and one cannot be trusted with
+control over the other. As little can the present order of
+things continue. The West India Islands, once the pride of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>
+our empire, the scene of our most brilliant achievements, are
+passing away out of our hands; the remnant of our own countrymen,
+weary of an unavailing struggle, are more and more eager
+to withdraw from the scene, because they find no sympathy and
+no encouragement from home, and are forbidden to accept
+help from America when help is offered them, while under
+their eyes their quondam slaves are multiplying, thriving,
+occupying, growing strong, and every day more conscious of
+the changed order of things. One does not grudge the black
+man his prosperity, his freedom, his opportunities of advancing
+himself; one would wish to see him as free and prosperous
+as the fates and his own exertions can make him, with more
+and more means of raising himself to the white man's level.
+But left to himself, and without the white man to lead him, he
+can never reach it, and if we are not to lose the islands
+altogether, or if they are not to remain with us to discredit
+our capacity to rule them, it is left to us only to take the same
+course which we have taken in the East Indies with such
+magnificent success, and to govern whites and blacks alike on
+the Indian system. The circumstances are precisely analogous.
+We have a population to deal with, the enormous majority of
+whom are of an inferior race. Inferior, I am obliged to call
+them, because as yet, and as a body, they have shown no
+capacity to rise above the condition of their ancestors except
+under European laws, European education, and European
+authority, to keep them from making war on one another.
+They are docile, good-tempered, excellent and faithful servants
+when they are kindly treated; but their notions of right and
+wrong are scarcely even elementary; their education, such as
+it may be, is but skin deep, and the old African superstitions
+lie undisturbed at the bottom of their souls. Give them
+independence, and in a few generations they will peel off such
+civilisation as they have learnt as easily and as willingly as
+their coats and trousers.</p>
+
+<p>Govern them as we govern India, with the same conscientious
+care, with the same sense of responsibility, with the same
+impartiality, the same disinterested attention to the well-being<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>
+of our subjects in its highest and most honourable sense, and
+we shall give the world one more evidence that while Englishmen
+can cover the waste places of it with free communities of
+their own blood, they can exert an influence no less beneficent
+as the guides and rulers of those who need their assistance,
+and whom fate and circumstances have assigned to their care.
+Our kindred far away will be more than ever proud to form
+part of a nation which has done more for freedom than any
+other nation ever did, yet is not a slave to formulas, and can
+adapt its actions to the demands of each community which
+belongs to it. The most timid among us may take courage,
+for it would cost us nothing save the sacrifice of a few official
+traditions, and an abstinence for the future from doubtful uses
+of colonial patronage. The blacks will be perfectly happy
+when they are satisfied that they have nothing to fear for their
+persons or their properties. To the whites it would be the
+opening of a new era of hope. Should they be rash enough to
+murmur, they might then be justly left to the consequences of
+their own folly.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER XVIII.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Passage to Cuba&mdash;A Canadian commissioner&mdash;Havana&mdash;The Moro&mdash;The
+city and harbour&mdash;Cuban money&mdash;American visitors&mdash;The cathedral&mdash;Tomb
+of Columbus&mdash;New friends&mdash;The late rebellion&mdash;Slave emancipation&mdash;Spain
+and progress&mdash;A bull fight.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>I had gone to the West Indies to see our own colonies, but I
+could not leave those famous seas which were the scene of our
+ocean duels with the Spaniards without a visit to the last of
+the great possessions of Philip II. which remained to his successors.
+I ought not to say the last, for Puerto Rico is Spanish
+also, but this small island is insignificant and has no important
+memories connected with it. Puerto Rico I had no leisure to
+look at and did not care about, and to see Cuba as it ought to
+be seen required more time than I could afford; but Havana
+was so interesting, both from its associations and its present
+condition, that I could not be within reach of it and pass it by.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>
+The body of Columbus lies there for one thing, unless a trick
+was played when the remains which were said to be his were
+removed from St. Domingo, and I wished to pay my orisons
+at his tomb. I wished also to see the race of men who have
+shared the New World with the Anglo-Saxons, and have given
+a language and a religion to half the American continent, in
+the oldest and most celebrated of their Transatlantic cities.</p>
+
+<p>Cuba also had an immediate and present interest. Before
+the American civil war it was on the point of being absorbed
+into the United States. The Spanish Cubans had afterwards
+a civil war of their own, of which only confused accounts had
+reached us at home. We knew that it had lasted ten years,
+but who had been the parties and what their objects had been
+was very much a mystery. No sooner was it over than, without
+reservation or compensation, the slaves had been emancipated.
+How a country was prospering which had undergone
+such a succession of shocks, and how the Spaniards were
+dealing with the trials which were bearing so hard on our own
+islands, were inquiries worth making. But beyond these it was
+the land of romance. Columbus and Las Casas, Cortez and
+Pizarro, are the demigods and heroes of the New World.
+Their names will be familiar to the end of time as the founders
+of a new era, and although the modern Spaniards sink to the
+level of the modern Greeks, their illustrious men will hold their
+place for ever in imagination and memory.</p>
+
+<p>Our own Antilles had, as I have said, in their terror of small-pox,
+placed Jamaica under an interdict. The Spaniards at
+Cuba were more generous or more careless. Havana is on the
+north side of the island, facing towards Florida; thus, in going
+to it from Port Royal, we had to round the westernmost cape,
+and had four days of sea before us. We slid along the coast
+of Jamaica in smooth water, the air, while day lasted, intensely
+hot, but the breeze after nightfall blowing cool from off the
+mountains. We had a polite captain, polite officers, and agreeable
+fellow-passengers, two or three Cubans among them,
+swarthy, dark-eyed, thick-set men&mdash;<i>Americanos</i>; Spaniards
+with a difference&mdash;with whom I cultivated a kind of intimacy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>
+In a cabin it was reported that there were again Spanish ladies
+on their way to the demonic gaieties at Darien, but they did
+not show.</p>
+
+<p>Among the rest of the party was a Canadian gentleman, a
+Mr. &mdash;&mdash;, exceptionally well-informed and intelligent. Their
+American treaty having been disallowed, the West Indies had
+proposed to negotiate a similar one with the Canadian Dominion.
+The authorities at Ottawa had sent Mr. M&mdash;&mdash; to
+see if anything could be done, and Mr. M&mdash;&mdash; was now on his
+way home, not in the best of humours with our poor relations.
+'The Jamaicans did not know what they wanted,' he said.
+'They were without spirit to help themselves; they cried out
+to others to help them, and if all they asked could not be
+granted they clamoured as if the whole world was combining to
+hurt them. There was not the least occasion for these passionate
+appeals to the universe; they could not at this moment
+perhaps "go ahead" as fast as some countries, but there was no
+necessity to be always going ahead. They had a fine country,
+soil and climate all that could be desired, they had all that was
+required for a quiet and easy life, why could they not be contented
+and make the best of things?' Unfortunate Jamaicans!
+The old mother at home acts like an unnatural parent, and
+will neither help them nor let their Cousin Jonathan help
+them. They turn for comfort to their big brother in the north,
+and the big brother being himself robust and healthy, gives
+them wholesome advice.</p>
+
+<p>Adventures do occasionally happen at sea even in this age of
+steam engines. Ships catch fire or run into each other, or go
+on rocks in fogs, or are caught in hurricanes, and Nature can
+still assume her old terrors if she pleases. Shelley describes a
+wreck on the coast of Cornwall, and the treacherous waters of the
+ocean in the English Channel, now wild in fury, now smiling</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>As on the morn
+When the exulting elements in scorn
+Satiated with destroyed destruction lay
+Sleeping in beauty on their mangled prey,
+As panthers sleep.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The wildest gale which ever blew on British shores was a mere
+summer breeze compared to a West Indian tornado. Behind
+all that beauty there lies the temper and caprice, not of a
+panther, but of a woman. But no tornadoes fell in our way,
+nor anything else worth mentioning, not even a buccaneer or
+a pirate. We saw the islands which these gentry haunted, and
+the headlands made memorable by their desperate deeds, but
+they are gone, even to the remembrance of them. What they
+were and what they did lies buried away in book mausoleums
+like Egyptian mummies, all as clean forgotten as if they had
+been honest men, they and all the wild scenes which these
+green estuaries have witnessed.</p>
+
+<p>Havana figures much in English naval history. Drake tried
+to take it and failed; Penn and Venables failed. We stormed
+the forts in 1760, and held them and held the city till the
+Seven Years' War was over. I had read descriptions of the
+place, but they had given me no clear conception of what it
+would be like, certainly none at all of what it was like. Kingston
+is the best of our West Indian towns, and Kingston has
+not one fine building in it. Havana is a city of palaces, a city
+of streets and plazas, of colonnades, and towers, and churches
+and monasteries. We English have built in those islands as if
+we were but passing visitors, wanting only tenements to be
+occupied for a time. The Spaniards built as they built in Castile;
+built with the same material, the white limestone which
+they found in the New World as in the Old. The palaces of
+the nobles in Havana, the residence of the governor, the convents,
+the cathedral, are a reproduction of Burgos or Valladolid,
+as if by some Aladdin's lamp a Castilian city had been
+taken up and set down again unaltered on the shore of the
+Caribbean Sea. And they carried with them their laws, their
+habits, their institutions and their creed, their religious orders,
+their bishops, and their Inquisition. Even now in her day of
+eclipse, when her genius is clouded by the modern spirit
+against which she fought so long and so desperately, the sons
+of Spain still build as they used to build, and the modern
+squares and market places, the castles and fortresses, which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>
+have risen in and round the ancient Havana, are constructed
+on the old massive model, and on the same lines. However
+it may be with us, and whatever the eventual fate of Cuba,
+the Spanish race has taken root there, and is visibly destined
+to remain. They have poured their own people into it. In
+Cuba alone there are ten times as many Spaniards as there
+are English and Scotch in all our West Indies together,
+and Havana is ten times the size of the largest of our West
+Indian cities. Refugees have flocked thither from the revolutions
+in the Peninsula. The Canary Islands overflow into it.
+You know the people from Teneriffe by their stature; they are
+the finest surviving specimens of the old conquering breed.
+The political future is dark; the government is unimaginably
+corrupt&mdash;so corrupt that change is inevitable, though what
+change it would be idle to prophesy. The Americans looked
+at the island which lay so temptingly near them, but they were
+wise in their generation. They reflected that to introduce into
+an Anglo-Saxon republic so insoluble an element as a million
+Spanish Roman Catholics alien in blood and creed, with half
+a million blacks to swell the dusky flood which runs too full
+among them already, would be to invite an indigestion of
+serious consequence. A few years since the Cubans born
+were on the eve of achieving their independence like their
+brothers in Mexico and South America. Perhaps they will yet
+succeed. Spanish, at any rate, they are to the bone and marrow,
+and Spanish they will continue. The magnitude of
+Havana, and the fullness of life which was going on there,
+entirely surprised me. I had thought of Cuba as a decrepit
+state, bankrupt or finance-exhausted by civil wars, and on the
+edge of social dissolution, and I found Havana at least a grand
+imposing city&mdash;a city which might compare for beauty with
+any in the world. The sanitary condition is as bad as negligence
+can make it&mdash;so bad that a Spanish gentleman told me
+that if it were not for the natural purity of the air they would
+have been all dead like flies long ago. The tideless harbour is
+foul with the accumulations of three hundred years. The administration
+is more good-for-nothing than in Spain itself. If,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>
+in spite of this, Havana still sits like a queen upon the waters,
+there are some qualities to be found among her people which
+belonged to the countrymen and subjects of Ferdinand the
+Catholic.</p>
+
+<p>The coast line from Cape Tubiron has none of the grand
+aspects of the Antilles or Jamaica. Instead of mountains and
+forests you see a series of undulating hills, cultivated with
+tolerable care, and sprinkled with farmhouses. All the more
+imposing, therefore, from the absence of marked natural forms,
+are the walls and towers of the great Moro, the fortress
+which defends the entrance of the harbour. Ten miles off it
+was already a striking object. As we ran nearer it rose above
+us stern, proud, and defiant, upon a rock right above the
+water, with high frowning bastions, the lighthouse at an angle
+of it, and the Spanish banner floating proudly from a turret
+which overlooked the whole. The Moro as a fortification is,
+I am told, indefensible against modern artillery, presenting too
+much surface as a target; but it is all the grander to look at.
+It is a fine specimen of the Vauban period, and is probably
+equal to any demands which will be made upon it. The harbour
+is something like Port Royal, a deep lagoon with a narrow
+entrance and a long natural breakwater between the lagoon
+and the ocean; but what at Port Royal is a sand-spit eight
+miles long, is at Havana a rocky peninsula on which the city
+itself is built. The opening from the sea is half a mile wide.
+On the city side there are low semicircular batteries which
+sweep completely the approaches and the passage itself. The
+Moro rises opposite at the extreme point of the entrance, and
+next to it, farther in towards the harbour on the same side, on
+the crest and slopes of a range of hills, stands the old Moro,
+the original castle which beat off Drake and Oliver's sea-generals,
+and which was captured by the English in the last
+century. The lines were probably weaker than they are at
+present, and less adequately manned. A monument is erected
+there to the officers and men who fell in the defence.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/image0009.jpg"  alt="HAVANA, FROM THE QUARRIES" title="" /><br />
+<span class="caption">HAVANA, FROM THE QUARRIES</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The city as we steamed by looked singularly beautiful, with
+its domes and steeples and marble palaces, and glimpses of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>long boulevards and trees and handsome mansions and cool
+arcades. Inside we found ourselves in a basin, perhaps of
+three miles diameter, full of shipping of all sorts and nationalities.
+The water, which outside is pure as sapphire, has
+become filthy with the pollutions of a dozen generations. The
+tide, which even at the springs has but a rise and fall of a
+couple of feet, is totally ineffective to clear it, and as long as
+they have the Virgin Mary to pray to, the pious Spaniards will
+not drive their sewage into the ocean. The hot sun rays
+stream down into the thick black liquid. Horrible smells are
+let loose from it when it is set in motion by screw or paddle,
+and ships bring up at mooring buoys lest their anchors should
+disturb the compost which lies at the bottom. Yet one forgot
+the disagreeables in the novelty and striking character of the
+scene. A hundred boats were plying to and fro among the
+various vessels, with their white sails and white awnings.
+Flags of all countries were blowing out at stern or from masthead;
+among them, of course, the stars and stripes flying
+jauntily on some splendid schooner which stood there like a
+cock upon a dunghill that might be his own if he chose to crow
+for it.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as we had brought up we were boarded by the inevitable
+hotel touters, custom-house officers, porters, and boatmen.
+Interpreters offered their services in the confusion of
+languages. Gradually there emerged out of the general noise
+two facts of importance. First, that I ought to have had a
+passport, and if I had not brought one that I was likely
+to be fined at the discretion of Spanish officials. Secondly,
+that if I trusted to my own powers of self-defence, I should be
+the victim of indefinite other extortions. Passport I had
+none&mdash;such things are not required any longer in Spain, and it
+had not occurred to me that they might still be in demand
+in a Spanish colony. As to being cheated, no one could
+or would tell me what I was to pay for anything, for there
+were American dollars, Spanish dollars, Mexican dollars,
+and Cuban dollars, all different. And there were multiples
+of dollars in gold, and single dollars in silver, and last and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>
+most important of all there was the Cuban paper dollar, which
+was 230 per cent. below the Cuban gold dollar. And in this
+last the smaller transactions of common life were carried on,
+the practical part of it to a stranger being that when you had
+to receive you received in paper, and when you had to pay
+you paid in specie.</p>
+
+<p>I escaped for the time the penalty which would have been
+inflicted on me about the passport. I had a letter of introduction
+to the Captain-General of the island, and the Captain-General&mdash;so
+the viceroy is called&mdash;was so formidable a person
+that the officials did not venture to meddle with me. For the
+rest I was told that as soon as I had chosen my hotel, the
+agent, who was on board, would see me through all obstructions,
+and would not allow me to be plundered by anyone but
+himself. To this I had to submit. I named an hotel at
+random; a polite gentleman in a few moments had a boat
+alongside for me; I had stept into it when the fair damsels
+bound for Darien, who had been concealed all this time in
+their cabin, slipped down the ladder and took their places at
+my side, to the no small entertainment of the friends whom I
+had left on board and who were watching us from the deck.</p>
+
+<p>At the wharf I was able to shake off my companions, and I
+soon forgot the misadventure, for I found myself in Old
+Castile once more, amidst Spanish faces, Spanish voices,
+Spanish smells, and Spanish scenes. On the very wharf itself
+was a church grim and stern, and so massive that it would
+stand, barring earthquakes, for a thousand years. Church,
+indeed, it was no longer; it had been turned into a custom-house.
+But this was because it had been desecrated when we
+were in Havana by having an English service performed in it.
+They had churches enough without it, and they preferred to
+leave this one with a mark upon it of the anger of the
+Almighty. Of churches, indeed, there was no lack; churches
+thick as public-houses in a Welsh town. Church beyond
+church, palace beyond palace, the narrow streets where neighbours
+on either side might shake hands out of the upper
+stories, the deep colonnades, the private houses with the win<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>dows
+grated towards the street, with glimpses through the
+street door into the court and garden within, with its cloisters,
+its palm trees, and its fountains; the massiveness of the stonework,
+the curious old-fashioned bookstalls, the dirt, the smell,
+the carriages, the swearing drivers, the black-robed priest
+gliding along the footway&mdash;it was Toledo or Valladolid again
+with the sign manual on it of Spain herself in friendly and
+familiar form. Every face that I saw was Spanish. In
+Kingston or Port of Spain you meet fifty blacks for one
+European; all the manual work is done by them. In Havana
+the proportion is reversed, you hardly see a coloured man at
+all. Boatmen, porters, cab-drivers or cart-drivers, every one
+of whom are negroes in our islands, are there Spaniards, either
+Cuban born or emigrants from home. A few black beggars
+there were&mdash;permitted, as objects of charity to pious Catholics
+and as a sign of their inferiority of race. Of poverty among
+the whites, real poverty that could be felt, I saw no sign at all.</p>
+
+<p>After driving for about a mile we emerged out of the old
+town into a large square and thence into a wide Alameda or
+boulevard with double avenues of trees, statues, fountains,
+theatres, clubhouses, and all the various equipments of modern
+luxuriousness and so-called civilised life. Beyond the Alameda
+was another still larger square, one side of which was a railway
+station and terminus. In a colonnade at right angles was the
+hotel to which I had been recommended; spacious, handsome,
+in style half Parisian half Spanish, like the Fondas in the
+Puerto del Sol at Madrid.</p>
+
+<p>Spanish was the language generally spoken; but there were
+interpreters and waiters more or less accomplished in other
+tongues, especially in English, of which they heard enough,
+for I found Havana to be the winter resort of our American
+cousins, who go, generally, to Cuba, as we go to the Riviera,
+to escape the ice and winds of the eastern and middle States.
+This particular hotel was a favourite resort, and was full to
+overflowing with them. It was large, with an interior quadrangular
+garden, into which looked tiers of windows; and
+wings had been thrown out with terraced roofs, suites of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>
+rooms opening out upon them; each floor being provided
+with airy sitting rooms and music rooms. Here were to be
+heard at least a hundred American voices discussing the
+experiences and plans of their owners. The men lounged in
+the hall or at the bar, or sat smoking on the rows of leather
+chairs under the colonnade, or were under the hands of barbers
+or haircutters in an airy open saloon devoted to these uses.
+When I retreated upstairs to collect myself, a lady was making
+the corridors ring close by as she screamed at a piano in the
+middle of an admiring and criticising crowd. Dear as the
+Americans are to me, and welcome in most places as is the
+sound of those same sweet voices, one had not come to
+Havana for this. It was necessary to escape somewhere, and
+promptly, from the discord of noises which I hoped might be
+due to some momentary accident. The mail company's agent,
+Mr. R&mdash;&mdash;, lived in the hotel. He kindly found me out,
+initiated me in the mysteries of Cuban paper money, and
+giving me a tariff of the fares, found me a cab, and sent me
+out to look about me.</p>
+
+<p>My first object was the cathedral and the tomb of Columbus.
+In Catholic cities in Europe churches stand always open; the
+passer-by can enter when he pleases, fall on his knees and say
+his silent prayers to his Master whom he sees on the altar. In
+Havana I discovered afterward that, except at special hours,
+and those as few as might be, the doors were kept locked and
+could only be opened by a golden key. It was carnival time,
+however; there were functions going on of various kinds, and
+I found the cathedral happily accessible. It was a vast building,
+little ornamented, but the general forms severe and impressive,
+in the style of the time of Philip II., when Gothic
+art had gone out in Spain and there had come in the place of
+it the implacable sternness which expresses the very genius of
+the Inquisition. A broad flight of stone steps led up to the
+great door. The afternoon was extremely hot; the curtains
+were thrown back to admit as much air as possible. There
+was some function proceeding of a peculiar kind. I know
+not what it was; something certainly in which the public had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>
+no interest, for there was not a stranger present but myself.
+But the great cathedral officials were busy at work, and liked
+to be at their ease. On the wall as you entered a box invited
+contributions, as <i>limosna por el Santo Padre</i>. The service was
+I know not what. In the middle of the nave stood twelve
+large chairs arranged in a semicircle; on these chairs sat
+twelve canons, like a row of mandarins, each with his little
+white patch like a silver dollar on the crown of his black head.
+Five or six minor dignitaries, deacons, precentors, or something
+of that sort, were droning out monotonous recitations
+like the buzzing of so many humble-bees in the warm summer
+air. The dean or provost sat in the central biggest chair of
+all. His face was rosy, and he wiped it from time to time
+with a red handkerchief; his chin was double or perhaps
+treble; he had evidently dined, and would or might have
+slept but for a pile of snuff on his chair arm, with continual
+refreshments from which he kept his faculties alive. I sat
+patiently till it was over, and the twelve holy men rose and
+went their way. I could then stroll about at leisure. The
+pictures were of the usual paltry kind. On the chancel arch
+stood the royal arms of Spain, as the lion and the unicorn
+used to stand in our parish churches till the High Church
+clergy mistook them for Erastian wild beasts. At the right
+side of the altar was the monument which I had come in
+search of; a marble tablet fixed against the wall, and on it a
+poorly executed figure in high relief, with a ruff about its neck
+and features which might be meant for anyone and for no one
+in particular. Somewhere near me there were lying I believed
+and could hope the mortal remains of the discoverer of the
+New World. An inscription said so. There was written:</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left:4em">
+O Restos y Imagen del grande Colon<br />
+Mil siglos durad guardados en la Urna<br />
+Y en remembranza de nuestra Nacion.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The court poet, or whoever wrote the lines, was as poor an
+artist in verse as the sculptor in stone. The image of the
+grande Colon is certainly not 'guarded in the urn,' since you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>
+see it on the wall before your eyes. The urn, if urn there be,
+with the 'relics' in it, must be under the floor. Columbus
+and his brother Diego were originally buried to the right and
+left of the altar in the cathedral of St. Domingo. When
+St. Domingo was abandoned, a commission was appointed to
+remove the body of Christophe to Havana. They did remove
+<i>a</i> body, but St. Domingo insists that it was Diego that was
+taken away, that Christophe remains where he was, and that
+if Spain wants him Spain must pay for him. I followed the
+canons into the sacristy where they were unrobing. I did not
+venture to address either of themselves, but I asked an acolyte
+if he could throw any light upon the matter. He assured me
+that there neither was nor could have been any mistake. They
+had the right body and were in no doubt about it. In more
+pious ages disputes of this sort were settled by an appeal to
+miracles. Rival pretenders for the possession of the same
+bones came, however, at last to be able to produce authentic
+proofs of miracles which had been worked at more than one
+of the pretended shrines; so that it was concluded that saints'
+relics were like the loaves and fishes, capable of multiplication
+without losing their identity, and of having the property of
+being in several places at the same moment. The same thing
+has been alleged of the Holy Coat of Tr&egrave;ves and of the wood
+of the true cross. Havana and St. Domingo may perhaps
+eventually find a similar solution of their disagreement over
+the resting place of Columbus.</p>
+
+<p>I walked back to my hotel up a narrow shady street like a
+long arcade. Here were the principal shops; several libraries
+among them, into which I strayed to gossip and to look over
+the shelves. That so many persons could get a living by
+bookselling implied a reading population, but the books themselves
+did not indicate any present literary productiveness.
+They were chiefly old, and from the Old World, and belonged
+probably to persons who had been concerned in the late
+rebellion and whose property had been confiscated. They
+were absurdly cheap; I bought a copy of Guzman de Alfarache
+for a few pence.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I had brought letters of introduction to several distinguished
+people in Havana; to one especially, Don G&mdash;&mdash;, a member
+of a noble Peninsular family, once an officer in the Spanish
+navy, now chairman of a railway company and head of an
+important commercial house. His elder brother, the Marques
+de &mdash;&mdash;, called on me on the evening of the day of my
+arrival; a distinguished-looking man of forty or thereabouts,
+with courteous high-bred manners, rapid, prompt, and incisive,
+with the air of a soldier, which in early life he had been. He
+had travelled, spoke various languages, and spoke to me in
+admirable English. Don G&mdash;&mdash;, who might be a year or two
+younger, came later and stayed an hour and a half with me.
+Let me acknowledge here, and in as warm language as I can
+express it, the obligations under which I stand to him, not for
+the personal attentions only which he showed me during my
+stay in Havana, but for giving me an opportunity of becoming
+acquainted with a real specimen of Plato's superior men, who
+were now and then, so Plato said, to be met with in foreign
+travel. It is to him that I owe any knowledge which I
+brought away with me of the present state of Cuba. He had
+seen much, thought much, read much. He was on a level
+with the latest phases of philosophical and spiritual speculation,
+could talk of Darwin and Spencer, of Schopenhauer, of
+Strauss, and of Renan, aware of what they had done, aware of
+the inconvenient truths which they had forced into light, but
+aware also that they had left the most important questions
+pretty much where they found them. He had taken no part
+in the political troubles of the late years in Cuba, but he had
+observed everything. No one knew better the defects of the
+present system of government; no one was less ready to rush
+into hasty schemes for violently mending it.</p>
+
+<p>The ten years' rebellion, of which I had heard so much
+and knew so little, he first made intelligible to me. Cuba had
+been governed as a province of Spain, and Spain, like other
+mother countries, had thought more of drawing a revenue out
+of it for herself than of the interests of the colony. Spanish
+officials had been avaricious, and Spanish fiscal policy oppres<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>sive
+and ruinous. The resources of the island in metals, in
+minerals, in agriculture were as yet hardly scratched, yet every
+attempt to develop them was paralysed by fresh taxation.
+The rebellion had been an effort of the Cuban Spaniards,
+precisely analogous to the revolt of our own North American
+colonies, to shake off the authority of the court of Madrid and
+to make themselves independent. They had fought desperately
+and had for several years been masters of half the
+island. They had counted on help from the United States,
+and at one time they seemed likely to get it. But the
+Americans could not see their way to admitting Cuba into
+the Union, and without such a prospect did not care to quarrel
+with Spain on their account. Finding that they were to be
+left to themselves, the insurgents came to terms and Spanish
+authority was re-established. Families had been divided, sons
+taking one side and fathers the other, as in our English Wars
+of the Roses, perhaps for the same reason, to save the family
+estates whichever side came out victorious. The blacks had
+been indifferent, the rebellion having no interest for them at
+all. They had remained by their masters, and they had been
+rewarded after the peace by complete emancipation. There
+was not a slave now in Cuba. No indemnity had been granted
+to their owners, nor had any been asked for, and the business
+on the plantations had gone on without interruption. Those
+who had been slaves continued to work at the same locations,
+receiving wages instead of food and maintenance; all were
+satisfied at the change, and this remarkable revolution had
+been carried out with an ease and completeness which found
+no parallel in any other slave-owning country.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of rebellion, in spite of the breaking up and reconstruction
+of the social system, in spite of the indifferent
+administration of justice, in spite of taxation, and the inexplicable
+appropriation of the revenue, Cuba was still moderately
+prosperous, and that it could flourish at all after trials so severe
+was the best evidence of the greatness of its natural wealth.
+The party of insurrection was dissolved, and would revive
+again only under the unlikely contingency of encouragement<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>
+from the United States. There was a party, however, which
+desired for Cuba a constitution like the Canadian&mdash;Home
+Rule and the management of its own affairs&mdash;and as the black
+element was far outnumbered and under control, such a constitution
+would not be politically dangerous.</p>
+
+<p>If the Spanish Government does not mend its ways,
+concessions of this kind may eventually have to be made,
+though the improvement to be expected from it is doubtful.
+Official corruption is engrained in the character and habits
+of the Spanish people. Judges allowed their decisions to
+be 'influenced' under Philip III. as much as to-day in the
+colonies of Queen Christina; and when a fault is the habit of
+a people, it survives political reforms and any number of
+turnings of the kaleidoscope.</p>
+
+<p>The encouraging feature is the success of emancipation.
+There is no jealousy, no race animosity, no supercilious
+contempt of whites for 'niggers.' The Spaniards have inherited
+a tinge of colour themselves from their African
+ancestors, and thus they are all friends together. The
+liberated slave can acquire and own land if he wishes for it,
+but as a rule he prefers to work for wages. These happy
+conditions arise in part from the Spanish temperament, but
+chiefly from the numerical preponderance of the white
+element, which, as in the United States, is too secure to be
+uneasy. The black is not encouraged in insubordination by
+a sense that he could win in a contest of strength, and the
+aspect of things is far more promising for the future than in
+our own islands. The Spaniards, however inferior we may
+think them to ourselves, have filled their colonies with their
+own people and are reaping the reward of it. We have so
+contrived that such English as had settled in the West Indies
+on their own account are leaving them.</p>
+
+<p>Spain, four centuries ago, was the greatest of European
+nations, the first in art, or second only to Italy, the first in
+arms, the first in the men whom she produced. She has
+been swept along in the current of time. She fought against
+the stream of tendency, and the stream proved too strong for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span>
+her, great as she was. The modern spirit, which she would
+not have when it came in the shape of the Reformation, has
+flowed over her borders as revolution, not to her benefit, for
+she is unable to assimilate the new ideas. The old Spain of
+the Inquisition is gone; the Spain of to-day is divided
+between Liberalism and Catholic belief. She is sick in the
+process of the change, and neither she nor her colonies stand
+any longer in the front lines in the race of civilisation; yet
+the print of her foot is stamped on the New World in
+characters which will not be effaced, and may be found to
+be as enduring as our own.</p>
+
+<p>The colony is perhaps in advance of the mother country.
+The Catholic Church, Don G&mdash;&mdash; said, has little influence
+in Cuba; 'she has had no rival,' he explained, 'and so has
+grown lazy.' I judged the same from my own observations.
+The churches on Sundays were thinly attended, and men
+smiled when I asked them about 'confession.' I inquired
+about famous preachers. I was told that there was no
+preaching in Havana, famous or otherwise. I might if I
+was lucky and chose to go there in the early morning, hear
+a sermon in the church of the Jesuits; that was all. I went;
+I heard my Jesuit, who was fluent, eloquent, and gesticulating,
+but he was pouring out his passionate rhetoric to about fifty
+women with scarcely a man amongst them. It was piteous
+to look at him. The Catholic Church, whether it be for want
+of rivals, or merely from force of time, has fallen from its
+high estate. It can burn no more heretics, for it has lost the
+art to raise conviction to sufficient intensity. The power to
+burn was the measure of the real belief, which people had in
+the Church and its doctrines. The power has departed with
+the waning of faith; and religion in Havana, as in Madrid, is
+but 'use and wont;' not 'belief' but opinion, and opinion
+which is half insincere. Nothing else can take its place.
+The day is too late for Protestantism, which has developed
+into wider forms, and in the matter of satisfied and complete
+religious conviction Protestants are hardly better off than
+Catholics.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Don G&mdash;&mdash; had been much in Spain; he was acquainted
+with many of the descendants of the old aristocracy, who
+lingered there in faded grandeur. He had studied the history
+of his own country. He compared the Spain and England
+of the sixteenth century with the Spain and England of
+the present; and, like most of us, he knew where the yoke
+galled his own neck. But economical and political prosperity
+is no exhaustive measure of human progress. The
+Rome of Trajan was immeasurably more splendid than the
+Rome of the Scipios; yet the progress had been downwards
+nevertheless. If the object of our existence on this planet
+is the development of character, if the culminating point in
+any nation's history be that at which it produces its noblest
+and bravest men, facts do not tend to assure us that the
+triumphant march of the last hundred years is accomplishing
+much in that direction. I found myself arguing with Don
+G&mdash;&mdash; that if Charles V. and Philip II. were to come back to
+this world, and to see whither the movement had brought us
+of which they had worked so hard to suppress the beginning,
+they would still say that they had done right in trying to
+strangle it. The Reformation called itself a protest against
+lies, and the advocates of it imagined that when the lies, or
+what they called such, were cleared away, the pure metal of
+Christianity would remain unsullied. The great men who
+fought against the movement, Charles V. in his cabinet and
+Erasmus in his closet, had seen that it could not rest there;
+that it was the cradle of a revolution in which the whole
+spiritual and political organisation of Europe would be flung
+into the crucible. Under that organisation human nature
+had ascended to altitudes of chivalry, of self-sacrifice, which
+it had never before reached. The sixteenth century was the
+blossoming time of the Old World, and no such men had
+appeared since as then came to the front, either in Spain or
+Italy, or Germany or France or England. The actual leaders
+of the Reformation had been bred in the system which they
+destroyed. Puritanism and Calvinism produced men of
+powerful character, but they were limited and incapable of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>
+continuance; and now the liberty which was demanded had
+become what the instinct of the great Emperor had told him
+from the first must be the final shape of it, a revolution
+which would tolerate no inequalities of culture or position,
+which insisted that no man was better than another, which
+was to exalt the low and bring down the high till all mankind
+should stand upon a common level&mdash;a level, not of baseness
+or badness, but a level of good-humoured, smart, vulgar and
+vulgarising mediocrity, with melodrama for tragedy, farce for
+comedy, sounding speech for statesmanlike wisdom; and for
+a creed, when our fathers thought that we had been made a
+little lower than the angels, the more modest knowledge that
+we were only a little higher than the apes. This was the
+aspect in which the world of the nineteenth century would
+appear to Sir Thomas More or the Duke of Alva. From the
+Grand Captain to Se&ntilde;or Castelar, from Lord Burghley to
+Mr. Gladstone, from Leonardo da Vinci or Velasquez to
+Gustave Dor&eacute;, from Cervantes and Shakespeare to 'Pickwick'
+and the 'Innocents at Home;' from the faith which built
+the cathedrals to evolution and the survival of the fittest;
+from the carving and architecture of the Middle Ages to the
+workmanship of the modern contractor; the change in the
+spiritual department of things had been the same along the
+whole line. Charles V. after seeing all that has been
+achieved, the railways, the steam engines, the telegraphs,
+the Yankee and his United States, which are the embodiment
+of the highest aspirations of the modern era, after
+attending a session of the British Association itself, and
+seeing the bishops holding out their hands to science which
+had done such great things for them, might fairly claim that
+it was a doubtful point whether the change had been really
+for the better.</p>
+
+<p>It may be answered, and answered truly, that the old thing
+was dead. The Catholic faith, where it was left standing and
+where it still stands, produces now nothing higher, nothing
+better than the Protestant. Human systems grow as trees
+grow. The seed shoots up, the trunk forms, the branches<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>
+spread; leaves and flowers and fruit come out year after year
+as if they were able to renew themselves for ever. But that
+which has a beginning has an end, that which has
+life must die when the vital force is exhausted. The
+faith of More, as well as the faith of Ken or Wilson, were
+elevating and ennobling as long as they were sincerely believed,
+but the time came when they became clouded with uncertainty;
+and confused, perplexed, and honestly anxious, humanity
+struggles on as well as it can, all things considered, respectably
+enough, in its chrysalis condition, the old wings gone, the new
+wings that are to be (if we are ever to have another set) as yet
+imprisoned in their sheath.</p>
+
+<p>The same Sunday morning when I went in search of
+my sermon, the hotel was alive as bees at swarming time.
+There was to be a bull fight in honour of the carnival, and such
+a bull fight as had never been seen in Havana. Placards on
+the wall announced that a lady from Spain, Gloriana they
+called her, was to meet and slay a bull in single combat, and
+everyone must go and see the wonderful sight. I myself,
+having seen the real thing in Madrid many years ago, felt no
+more curiosity, and that a woman should be an actress in such
+a scene did not revive it. To those who went the performance
+was a disappointment. The bull provided turned out to be a
+calf of tender years. The spectators insisted that they would
+have a mature beast of strength and ferocity, and Gloriana
+when brought to the point declined the adventure.</p>
+
+<p>There was a prettier scene in the evening. In the cool
+after nightfall the beauty and fashion of Havana turns out
+to stroll in the illuminated Alameda. As it was now a high
+festival the band was to play, and the crowd was as dense
+as on Exhibition nights at South Kensington. The music
+was equally good, and the women as graceful and well dressed.
+I sat for an hour or two listening under the statue of poor
+Queen Isabella. The image of her still stands where it was
+placed, though revolution has long shaken her from her throne.
+All is forgotten now except that she was once a Spanish sovereign,
+and time and distance have deodorised her memory.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Hotels in Havana&mdash;Sights in the city&mdash;Cigar manufactories&mdash;West Indian
+industries&mdash;The Captain-General&mdash;The Jesuit college&mdash;Father Vi&ntilde;ez&mdash;Clubs
+in Havana&mdash;Spanish aristocracy&mdash;Sea lodging house.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>There was much to be seen in Havana, and much to think
+about. I regretted only that I had not been better advised in
+my choice of an hotel The dining saloon rang with American
+voices in their shrillest tones. Every table was occupied by
+groups of them, nor was there a sound in the room of any
+language but theirs. In the whole company I had not a single
+acquaintance. I have liked well almost every individual
+American that I have fallen in with and come to know. They
+are frank, friendly, open, and absolutely unaffected, and, like
+my friend at Miss Roy's in Jamaica, they take cheerful views
+of life, which is the highest of all recommendations. The
+distinctness and sharpness of utterance is tolerable and even
+agreeable in conversation with a single person. When a large
+number of them are together, all talking in a high tone, it tries
+the nerves and sets the teeth on edge. Nor could I escape
+from them in any part of the building. The gentlemen were
+talking politics in the hall, or lounging under the colonnade.
+One of them, an absolute stranger, who perhaps knew who I
+was, asked me abruptly for my opinion of Cardinal Newman.
+The ladies filled the sitting rooms; their pianos and their duets
+pierced the walls of my bedroom, and only ceased an hour after
+midnight. At five in the morning the engines began to scream
+at the adjoining railway station. The church bells woke at the
+same hour with their superfluous summons to matins which no
+one attended. Sleep was next to an impossibility under these
+hard conditions, and I wanted more and not less of it when I
+had the duties upon me of sightseeing. Sleep or no sleep,
+however, I determined that I would see what I could as long
+as I could keep going.</p>
+
+<p>A few hundred yards off was one of the most famous of the
+Havana cigar manufactories. A courteous message from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>
+manager, Se&ntilde;or Bances, had informed me that he would be
+happy to show me over it on any morning before the sun was
+above the roofs of the houses. I found the se&ntilde;or a handsome
+elderly gentleman, tall and lean, with Castilian dignity of
+manner, free and frank in all his communications, with no
+reserve, concealments, or insincerities. I told him that in my
+experience cigars were not what they had been, that the last good
+one which I had smoked I had bought twenty years ago from a
+<i>contrabandista</i> at Madrid. I had come to Havana to see
+whether I could find another equally good at the fountain head.
+He said that he was not at all surprised. It was the same story
+as at Jamaica; the consumption of cigars had increased with
+extreme rapidity; the area on which the finest tobacco had been
+grown was limited, and the expense of growing it was very
+great. Only a small quantity of the best cigars was now made
+for the market. In general the plants were heavily manured,
+and the flavour suffered. Leaf of coarse fibre was used for the
+core of the cigars, with only a fold or two wrapped round it of
+more delicate quality. He took me into the different rooms
+where the manufacture was going on. In the first were perhaps
+a hundred or a hundred and fifty sallow-faced young men
+engaged in rolling. They were all Cubans or Spaniards with
+the exception of a single negro; and all, I should think, under
+thirty. On each of the tables was one of the names with which
+we have grown familiar in modern cigar shops, Reynas,
+Regalias, Principes, and I know not how many else. The
+difference of material could not be great, but there was a real
+difference in the fineness of the make, and in the quality of the
+exterior leaf. The workmen were of unequal capacity and were
+unequally paid. The se&ntilde;or employed in all about 1,400; at
+least so I understood him.</p>
+
+<p>The black field hands had eighteenpence a day. The
+rollers were paid by quality and quantity; a good workman
+doing his best could earn sixty dollars a week, an idle and
+indifferent one about twelve. They smoked as they rolled,
+and there was no check upon the consumption, the loss in
+this way being estimated at 40,000 dollars a year. The pay<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>
+was high; but there was another side to it&mdash;the occupation
+was dangerous. If there were no boys in the room, there were
+no old men. Those who undertook it died often in two or
+three years. Doubtless with precaution the mortality might
+be diminished; but, like the needle and the scissor grinders
+in England, the men themselves do not wish it to be diminished.
+The risk enters into the wages, and they prefer a
+short life and a merry one.</p>
+
+<p>The cigarettes, of which the varieties are as many as there
+are of cigars, were made exclusively by Chinese. The second
+room which we entered was full of them, their curious yellow
+faces mildly bending over their tobacco heaps. Of these there
+may have been a hundred. Of the general expenses of the
+establishment I do not venture to say anything, bewildered as
+I was in the labyrinthine complication of the currency, but it
+must certainly be enormous, and this house, the Partagas, was
+but one of many equally extensive in Havana alone.</p>
+
+<p>The se&ntilde;or was most liberal. He filled my pockets with
+packets of excellent cigarettes; he gave me a bundle of cigars.
+I cannot say whether they were equal to what I bought from
+my <i>contrabandista</i>, for these may have been idealised by a
+grateful memory, but they were so incomparably better than
+any which I have been able to get in London that I was
+tempted to deal with him, and so far I have had no reason to
+repent. The boxes with which he provided me bettered the
+sample, and the price, duty at home included, was a third
+below what I should have paid in London for an article which
+I would rather leave unconsumed. A broker whom I fell in
+with insisted to me that the best cigars all went to London,
+that my preference for what I got from my se&ntilde;or was mere
+fancy and vanity, and that I could buy better in any shop in
+Regent Street. I said that he might but I couldn't, and so
+we left it.</p>
+
+<p>I tell all this, not with the affectation of supposing that
+tobacco or my own taste about it can have any interest, but
+as an illustration of what can be done in the West Indies, and
+to show how immense a form of industry waits to be de<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>veloped
+in our own islands, if people with capital and
+knowledge choose to set about it. Tobacco as good as the
+best in Cuba has been grown and can be grown in Jamaica, in
+St. Domingo, and probably in every one of the Antilles.
+'There are dollars in those islands,' as my Yankee said, and
+many a buried treasure will be brought to light there when
+capitalists can feel assured that they will not be at the mercy
+of black constitutional governments.</p>
+
+<p>My letter of introduction to the Captain-General was still
+undelivered, and as I had made use of it on landing I thought
+it right at least to pay my respects to the great man. The
+Marques M&mdash;&mdash; kindly consented to go with me and help me
+through the interview, being of course acquainted with him.
+He was at his country house, a mile out of the town. The
+buildings are all good in Havana. It was what it called itself,
+not a palace but a handsome country residence in the middle
+of a large well-kept garden. The viceroyalty has a fair but
+not extravagant income attached to it. The Captain-General
+receives about 8,000<i>l.</i> a year besides allowances. Were the
+balls and dinners expected of him which our poor governors
+are obliged to entertain their subjects with, he would not be
+able to make much out of it. The large fortunes which used
+to be brought back by the fortunate Captains-General who
+could connive at the slave trade were no longer attainable;
+those good days are gone. Public opinion therefore permits
+them to save their incomes. The Spaniards are not a hospitable
+people, or rather their notion of hospitality differs in form
+from ours. They are ready to dine with you themselves as
+often as you will ask them. Nothing in the shape of dinners is
+looked for from the Captain-General, and when I as a stranger
+suggested the possibility of such a thing as an invitation happening
+to me, my companion assured me that I need not be in the
+least alarmed. We were introduced into a well-proportioned
+hall, with a few marble busts in it and casts of Greek and
+Roman statues. Aides-de-camp and general officers were
+lounging about, with whom we exchanged distant civilities.
+After waiting for a quarter of an hour we were summoned by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>
+an official into an adjoining room and found ourselves in his
+Excellency's presence. He was a small gentlemanlike-looking
+man, out of uniform, in plain morning dress with a silk sash.
+He received us with natural politeness; cordiality was uncalled
+for, but he was perfectly gracious. He expressed his pleasure
+at seeing me in the island; he hoped that I should enjoy
+myself, and on his part would do everything in his power to
+make my stay agreeable. He spoke of the emancipation of
+the slaves and of the social state of the island with pardonable
+satisfaction, enquired about our own West Indies, &amp;c., and
+finally asked me to tell him in what way he could be of
+service to me. I told him that I had found such kind friends
+in Havana already, that I could think of little. One thing
+only he could do if he pleased. I had omitted to bring a
+passport with me, not knowing that it would be required. My
+position was irregular and might be inconvenient. I was
+indebted to my letter of introduction to his Excellency for
+admission into his dominions. Perhaps he would write a few
+words which would enable me to remain in them and go out
+of them when my visit was over. His Excellency said that he
+would instruct the Gobierno Civil to see to it, an instruction
+the meaning of which I too sadly understood. I was not to
+be allowed to escape the fine. A fresh shower followed of
+polite words, and with these we took ourselves away.</p>
+
+<p>The afternoon was spent more instructively, perhaps more
+agreeably, in a different scene. The Marques M&mdash;&mdash; had
+been a pupil of the Jesuits. He had personal friends in the
+Jesuit college at Havana, especially one, Father Vi&ntilde;ez, whose
+name is familiar to students of meteorological science, and
+who has supplemented and corrected the accepted law of
+storms by careful observation of West Indian hurricanes.
+The Jesuits were as well spoken of in Havana as the Moravians
+in Jamaica. Everyone had a good word for them. They
+alone, as I have said, took the trouble to provide the good
+people there with a sermon on Sundays. They alone among
+the Catholic clergy, though they live poorly and have no
+endowment, exert themselves to provide a tolerable education<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>
+for the middle and upper classes. The Marques undertook
+that if we called we should be graciously received, and I was
+curious and interested. Their college had been an enormous
+monastery. Wherever the Spaniards went they took an army
+of monks with them of all the orders. The monks contrived
+always to house themselves handsomely. While soldiers
+fought and settlers planted, the monks' duty was to pray. In
+process of time it came to be doubted whether the monks'
+prayers were worth what they cost, or whether, in fact, they
+had ever had much effect of any kind. They have been suppressed
+in Spain; they have been clipped short in all the
+Spanish dominions, and in Havana there are now left only a
+handful of Dominicans, a few nuns, and these Jesuits, who
+have taken possession of the largest of the convents, much as
+a soldier-crab becomes the vigorous tenant of the shell of
+some lazy sea-snail. They have a college there where there are
+four hundred lads and young men who pay for their
+education; some hundreds more are taken out of charity.
+The Jesuits conduct the whole, and do it all unaided, on their
+own resources. And this is far from all that they do. They
+keep on a level with the age; they are men of learning; they
+are men of science; they are the Royal Society of Cuba.
+They have an observatory in the college, and the Father Vi&ntilde;ez
+of whom I have spoken is in charge of it. Father Vi&ntilde;ez was
+our particular object. The porter's lodge opened into a
+courtyard like the quadrangle of a college at Oxford. From
+the courtyard we turned into a narrow staircase, up which we
+climbed till we reached the roof, on and under which the
+Father had his lodgings and his observing machinery. We
+entered a small room, plainly furnished with a table and a few
+uncushioned chairs; tables and chairs, all save the Father's,
+littered with books and papers. Cases stood round the wall,
+containing self-registering instruments of the most advanced
+modern type, each with its paper barrel unrolling slowly under
+clockwork, while a pencil noted upon it the temperature of
+the air, the atmospheric pressure, the degree of moisture, the
+ozone, the electricity. In the middle, surrounded by his tools<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>
+and his ticking clocks, sat the Father, middle-aged, lean and
+dry, with shrivelled skin and brown threadbare frock. He
+received my companion with a warm affectionate smile. The
+Marques told him that I was an Englishman who was curious
+about the work in which he was engaged, and he spoke to me
+at once with the politeness of a man of sense. After a few
+questions asked and answered, he took us out to a shed among
+the roof-tiles, where he kept his large telescope, his equatorial,
+and his transit instruments&mdash;not on the great scale of State-supported
+observatories, but with everything which was really
+essential. He had a laboratory, too, and a workshop, with all
+the recent appliances. He was a practical optician and
+mechanic. He managed and repaired his own machinery,
+observed, made his notes, and wrote his reports to the
+societies with which he was in correspondence, all by himself.
+The outfit of such an establishment, even on a moderate scale,
+is expensive. I said I supposed that the Government gave
+him a grant. 'So far from it,' he said, 'that we have to pay
+a duty on every instrument which we import.' 'Who, then, pays
+for it all?' I asked. 'The order,' he answered, quite simply.</p>
+
+<p>The house, I believe, <i>was</i> a gift, though it cost the State
+nothing, having been simply seized when the monks were
+expelled. The order now maintains it, and more than repays
+the Government for their single act of generosity. At my
+companion's suggestion Father Vi&ntilde;ez gave me a copy of his
+book on hurricanes. It contains a record of laborious journeys
+which he made to the scene of the devastations of
+the last ten years. The scientific value of the Father's work
+is recognised by the highest authorities, though I cannot venture
+even to attempt to explain what he has done. He
+then conducted us over the building, and showed us the
+libraries, dormitories, playgrounds, and the other arrangements
+which were made for the students. Of these we saw none,
+they were all out, but the long tables in the refectory
+were laid for afternoon tea. There was a cup of milk for
+each lad, with a plate of honey and a roll of bread; and
+supper would follow in the evening. The sleeping gallery<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>
+was divided into cells, open at the top for ventilation, with
+bed, table, chest of drawers, and washing apparatus&mdash;all
+scrupulously clean. So far as I could judge, the Fathers
+cared more for the boys' comfort than for their own. Through
+an open door our conductor faintly indicated the apartment
+which belonged to himself. Four bare walls, a bare tiled
+floor, a plain pallet, with a crucifix above the pillow, was all
+that it contained. There was no parade of ecclesiasticism.
+The libraries were well furnished, but the books were chiefly
+secular and scientific. The chapel was unornamented; there
+were a few pictures, but they were simple and inoffensive.
+Everything was good of its kind, down to the gymnastic
+courts and swimming bath. The holiness was kept in the
+back ground. It was in the spirit and not in the body. The
+cost of the whole establishment was defrayed out of the payments
+of the richer students managed economically for the
+benefit of the rest, with complete indifference on the part
+of the Fathers to indulgence and pleasures of their own. As
+we took leave the Marques kissed his old master's brown
+hand. I rather envied him the privilege.</p>
+
+<p>Something I saw of Havana society in the received sense of
+the word. There are many clubs there, and high play in most
+of them, for the Cubans are given to the roulette tables. The
+Union club which is the most distinguished among them, invites
+occasional strangers staying in the city to temporary membership
+as we do at the Athen&aelig;um. Here you meet Spanish
+<i>grandes</i>, who have come to Cuba to be out of reach of revolution,
+proud as ever and not as poor as you might expect;
+and when you ask who they are you hear the great familiar
+names of Spanish history. I was introduced to the president&mdash;young,
+handsome, and accomplished. I was startled to
+learn that he was the head of the old house of Sandoval.
+The house of Columbus ought to be there also, for there is
+still a Christophe Colon, the direct linear representative of the
+discoverer, disguised under the title of the Duque de Veragua.
+A perpetual pension of 20,000 dollars a year was granted to
+the great Christophe and his heirs for ever as a charge on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>
+the Cuban revenue. It has been paid to the family through
+all changes of dynasty and forms of government, and is paid
+to them still. But the Duque resides in Spain, and the
+present occupation of him, I was informed, is the breeding and
+raising bulls for the Plaza de Toros at Seville.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, every way, my stay was made agreeable to me.
+There were breakfasts and dinners and introductions. Don
+G&mdash;&mdash; and his brother were not fine gentlemen only, but
+were men of business and deeply engaged in the active life of
+the place. The American consul was a conspicuous figure
+at these entertainments. America may not find it her
+interest to annex these islands, but since she ordered the
+French out of Mexico, and the French obeyed, she is universally
+felt on that side of the Atlantic to be the supreme
+arbiter of all their fates. Her consuls are thus persons of
+consequence. The Cubans like the Americans well. The
+commercial treaty which was offered to our islands by the
+United States would have been accepted eagerly by the
+Spaniards. To them, the Americans have, as yet, not been
+equally liberal, but an arrangement will soon be completed.
+They say that they have hills of solid iron in the island and
+mountains of copper with fifty per cent. of virgin ore in
+them waiting for the Americans to develop. The present administration
+would swallow up in taxation the profits of the
+most promising enterprise that ever was undertaken, but the
+metals are there, and will come one day into working. The
+consul was a swift peremptory man who knew his own mind at
+any rate. Between his 'Yes, sir,' and his 'No, sir,' you were
+at no loss for his meaning. He told me a story of a 'nigger'
+officer with whom he had once got into conversation at Hayti.
+He had inquired why they let so fine an island run to waste?
+Why did they not cultivate it? The dusky soldier laid his
+hand upon his breast and waved his hand. 'Ah,' he said,
+'that might do for English or Germans or Americans; we of
+the Latin race have higher things to occupy us.'</p>
+
+<p>I liked the consul well. I could not say as much for his
+countrymen and countrywomen at my hotel. Individually<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>
+I dare say they would have been charming; collectively they
+drove me to distraction. Space and time had no existence
+for them; they and their voices were heard in all places and
+at all hours. The midnight bravuras at the pianos mixed
+wildly in my broken dreams. The Marques M&mdash;&mdash; wished to
+take me with him to his country seat and show me his sugar
+plantations. Nothing could have been more delightful, but with
+want of sleep and the constant racket I found myself becoming
+unwell. In youth and strength one can defy the foul
+fiend and bid him do his worst; in age one finds it wiser to
+get out of the way.</p>
+
+<p>On the sea, seven miles from Havana, and connected with
+it by a convenient railway, at a place called Vedado, I found
+a lodging house kept by a Frenchman (the best cook in Cuba)
+with a German wife. The situation was so attractive, and the
+owners of it so attentive, that quiet people went often into
+'retreat' there. There were delicious rooms, airy and solitary
+as I could wish. The sea washed the coral rock under the
+windows. There were walks wild as if there was no city within
+a thousand miles&mdash;up the banks of lonely rivers, over open
+moors, or among inclosures where there were large farming
+establishments with cattle and horses and extensive stables
+and sheds. There was a village and a harbour where fishing
+people kept their boats and went out daily with their nets and
+lines&mdash;blacks and whites living and working side by side. I
+could go where I pleased without fear of interference or
+question. Only I was warned to be careful of the dogs, large
+and dangerous, descendants of the famous Cuban bloodhounds,
+which are kept everywhere to guard the yards and houses.
+These beasts were really dangerous, and had to be avoided.
+The shore was of inexhaustible interest. It was a level shelf of
+coral rock extending for many miles and littered over with
+shells and coral branches which had been flung up by the surf.
+I had hoped for bathing. In the open water it is not to be
+thought of on account of the sharks, but baths have been cut
+in the rock all along that part of the coast at intervals of half
+a mile; deep square basins with tunnels connecting them with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>
+the sea, up which the waves run clear and foaming. They are
+within inclosures, roofed over to keep out the sun, and with
+attendants regularly present. Art and nature combined never
+made more charming pools; the water clear as sapphire,
+aerated by the constant inrush of the foaming breakers, and
+so warm that you could lie in it without a chill for hours.
+Alas! that I could but look at them and execrate the precious
+Government which forbade me their use. So severe a tax is
+laid on these bathing establishments that the owners can only
+afford to keep them open during the three hottest months in
+the year, when the demand is greatest.</p>
+
+<p>In the evenings people from Havana would occasionally
+come down to dine as we go to Greenwich, being attracted
+partly by the air and partly by my host's reputation. There
+was a long verandah under which tables were laid out, and
+there were few nights on which one or more parties were not
+to be seen there. Thus I encountered several curious specimens
+of Cuban humanity, and on one of my runs up to Havana
+I met again the cigar broker who had so roughly challenged
+my judgment. He was an original and rather diverting man;
+I should think a Jew. Whatever he was he fell upon me again
+and asked me scornfully whether I supposed that the cigars
+which I had bought of Se&ntilde;or Bances were anything out of the
+way. I said that they suited my taste and that was enough.
+'Ah,' he replied, '<i>Cada loco con su tema.</i> Every fool had his
+opinion.' 'I am the <i>loco</i> (idiot), then,' said I, 'but that again
+is matter of opinion.' He spoke of Cuba and professed to
+know all about it. 'Can you tell me, then,' said I, 'why the
+Cubans hate the Spaniards?' 'Why do the Irish hate the
+English?' he answered. I said it was not an analogous case.
+Cubans and Spaniards were of the same breed and of the same
+creed. 'That is nothing,' he replied; 'the Americans will
+have both Cuba and Ireland before long.' I said I thought
+the Americans were too wise to meddle with either. If they
+did, however, I imagined that on our own side of the Atlantic
+we should have something to say on the subject before Ireland
+was taken from us. He laughed good-humouredly. 'Is it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>
+possible, sir,' he said, 'that you live in England and are so
+absolutely ignorant?' I laughed too. He was a strange
+creature, and would have made an excellent character in a
+novel.</p>
+
+<p>Don G&mdash;&mdash; or his brother came down occasionally to see
+how I was getting on and to talk philosophy and history.
+Other gentlemen came, and the favourite subject of conversation
+was Spanish administration. One of them told me this
+story as an illustration of it. His father was the chief partner
+in a bank; a clerk absconded, taking 50,000 dollars with
+him; he had been himself sent in pursuit of the man, overtook
+him with the money still in his possession, and recovered
+it. With this he ought to have been contented, but he tried
+to have the offender punished. The clerk replied to the
+criminal charge by a counter-charge against the house. It
+was absurd in itself, but he found that a suit would grow out
+of it which would swallow more than the 50,000 dollars, and
+finally he bribed the judge to allow him to drop the prosecution.
+<i>Cosas de Espa&ntilde;a</i>; it lies in the breed. Guzman de
+Alfarache was robbed of his baggage by a friend. The facts
+were clear, the thief was caught with Guzman's clothes on his
+back; but he had influential friends&mdash;he was acquitted. He
+prosecuted Guzman for a false accusation, got a judgment and
+ruined him.</p>
+
+<p>The question was, whether if the Cubans could make themselves
+independent there would be much improvement. The
+want in Cuba just now, as in a good many other places, is the
+want of some practical religion which insists on moral duty.
+A learned English judge was trying a case one day, when there
+seemed some doubt about the religious condition of one of
+the witnesses. The clerk of the court retired with him to ascertain
+what it really was, and returned radiant almost immediately,
+saying, 'All right, my lord. Knows he'll be damned&mdash;competent
+witness&mdash;knows he'll be damned.' That is really
+the whole of the matter. If a man is convinced that if he
+does wrong he will infallibly be punished for it he has then 'a
+saving faith.' This, unfortunately, is precisely the conviction<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>
+which modern forms of religion produce hardly anywhere.
+The Cubans are Catholics, and hear mass and go to confession;
+but confession and the mass between them are enough
+for the consciences of most of them, and those who think are
+under the influence of the modern spirit, to which all things
+are doubtful. Some find comfort in Mr. Herbert Spencer.
+Some regard Christianity as a myth or poem, which had passed
+in unconscious good faith into the mind of mankind, and there
+might have remained undisturbed as a beneficent superstition
+had not Protestantism sprung up and insisted on flinging away
+everything which was not literal and historical fact. Historical
+fact had really no more to do with it than with the stories of
+Prometheus or the siege of Troy. The end was that no
+bottom of fact could be found, and we were all set drifting.</p>
+
+<p>Notably too I observed among serious people there, what
+I have observed in other places, the visible relief with which
+they begin to look forward to extinction after death. When
+the authority is shaken on which the belief in a future life
+rests, the question inevitably recurs. Men used to pretend
+that the idea of annihilation was horrible to them; now they
+regard the probability of it with calmness, if not with actual
+satisfaction. One very interesting Cuban gentleman said to me
+that life would be very tolerable if one was certain that death
+would be the end of it. The theological alternatives were
+equally unattractive; Tartarus was an eternity of misery, and
+the Elysian Fields an eternity of ennui.</p>
+
+<p>There is affectation in the talk of men, and one never knows
+from what they say exactly what is in their mind. I have
+often thought that the real character of a people shows itself
+nowhere with more unconscious completeness than in their
+cemeteries. Philosophise as we may, few of us are deliberately
+insincere in the presence of death; and in the arrangements
+which we make for the reception of those who have been dear
+to us, and in the lines which we inscribe upon their monuments,
+we show what we are in ourselves perhaps more than
+what they were whom we commemorate. The parish churchyard
+is an emblem and epitome of English country life;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>
+London reflects itself in Brompton and Kensal Green, and
+Paris in P&egrave;re la Chaise. One day as I was walking I found
+myself at the gate of the great suburban cemetery of Havana.
+It was enclosed within high walls; the gateway was a vast arch
+of brown marble, beautiful and elaborately carved. Within
+there was a garden simply and gracefully laid out with trees
+and shrubs and flowers in borders. The whole space inclosed
+may have been ten acres, of which half was assigned to those
+who were contented with a mere mound of earth to mark
+where they lay; the rest was divided into family vaults
+covered with large white marble slabs, separate headstones
+marking individuals for whom a particular record was required,
+and each group bearing the name of the family the members
+of which were sleeping there. The peculiarity of the place
+was the absence of inscriptions. There was a name and date,
+with E.P.D.&mdash;'en paz descansa'<a name="FNanchor_1_14" id="FNanchor_1_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_14" class="fnanchor">[15]</a>&mdash;or E.G.E.&mdash;'en gracia
+est&aacute;'<a name="FNanchor_2_15" id="FNanchor_2_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_15" class="fnanchor">[16]</a>&mdash;and that seemed all that was needed. The virtues of
+the departed and the grief of the survivors were taken for
+granted in all but two instances. There may have been more,
+but I could find only these.</p>
+
+<p>One was in Latin:</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+AD COELITES EVOCAT&AElig; UXORI EXIM&AElig; IGNATIUS.<br />
+<i>Ignatius to his admirable wife who has been called up to heaven.</i><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The other was in Spanish verse, and struck me as a graceful
+imitation of the old manner of Cervantes and Lope de Vega.
+The design on the monument was of a girl hanging an
+immortelle upon a cross. The tomb was of a Caridad del
+Monte, and the lines were:</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left:4em">
+Bendita Caridad, las que piadosa<br />
+Su mano vierte en la fun&eacute;rea losa<br />
+Son flores recogidas en el suelo,<br />
+Mas con su olor perfumai&aacute;n el cielo.<br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p>It is dangerous for anyone to whom a language is only
+moderately familiar to attempt an appreciation of elegiac poetry,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>the effect of which, like the fragrance of a violet, must rather
+be perceived than accounted for. He may imagine what is
+not there, for a single word ill placed or ill chosen may spoil
+the charm, and of this a foreigner can never entirely judge.
+He may know what each word means, but he cannot know the
+associations of it. Here, however, is a translation in which
+the sense is preserved, though the aroma is gone.</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left:4em">
+The flowers which thou, oh Blessed Charity,<br />
+With pious hand hast twined in funeral wreath,<br />
+Although on earthly soil they gathered be,<br />
+Will sweeten heaven with their perfumed breath.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The flowers, I suppose, were the actions of Caridad's own
+innocent life, which she was offering on the cross of Christ;
+but one never can be sure that one has caught the exact sentiment
+of emotional verse in a foreign language. The beauty lies
+in an undefinable sweetness which rises from the melody of
+the words, and in a translation disappears altogether. Who or
+what Caridad del Monte was, whether a young girl whom somebody
+had loved, or an allegoric and emblematic figure, I had
+no one to tell me.</p>
+
+<p>I must not omit one acquaintance which I was fortunate
+enough to make while staying at my seaside lodging. There
+appeared there one day, driven out of Havana like myself by
+the noise, an American ecclesiastic with a friend who addressed
+him as 'My lord.' By the ring and purple, as well as by the
+title, I perceived that he was a bishop. His friend was his
+chaplain, and from their voices I gathered that they were both
+by extraction Irish. The bishop had what is called a 'clergy-man's
+throat,' and had come from the States in search of a
+warmer climate. They kept entirely to themselves, but from
+the laughter and good-humour they were evidently excellent
+company for one another, and wanted no other. I rather
+wished than hoped that accident might introduce me to them.
+Even in Cuba the weather is uncertain. One day there came
+a high wind from the sea; the waves roared superbly upon the
+rocks, flying over them in rolling cataracts. I never saw foam<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span>
+so purely white or waves so transparent. As a spectacle it was
+beautiful, and the shore became a museum of coralline curiosities.
+Indoors the effect was less agreeable. Windows rattled
+and shutters broke from their fastenings and flew to and fro.
+The weathercock on the house-top creaked as he was whirled
+about, and the verandahs had to be closed, and the noise was
+like a prolonged thunder peal. The second day the wind
+became a cyclone, and chilly as if it came from the pole.
+None of us could stir out. The bishop suffered even more
+than I did; he walked up and down on the sheltered side of
+the house wrapped in a huge episcopalian cloak. I think he
+saw that I was sorry for him, as I really was. He spoke to me;
+he said he had felt the cold less in America when the thermometer
+marked 25&deg; below zero. It was not much, but the
+silence was broken. Common suffering made a kind of link
+between us. After this he dropped an occasional gracious
+word as he passed, and one morning he came and sat by me
+and began to talk on subjects of extreme interest. Chiefly he
+insisted on the rights of conscience and the tenderness for
+liberty of thought which had always been shown by the Church
+of Rome. He had been led to speak of it by the education
+question which has now become a burning one in the American
+Union. The Church, he said, never had interfered, and never
+could or would interfere, with any man's conscientious scruples.
+Its own scruples, therefore, ought to be respected. The
+American State schools were irreligious, and Catholic parents
+were unwilling to allow their children to attend them. They
+had established schools of their own, and they supported them
+by subscriptions among themselves. In these schools the boys
+and girls learnt everything which they could learn in the State
+schools, and they learnt to be virtuous besides. They were
+thus discharging to the full every duty which the State could
+claim of them, and the State had no right to tax them in
+addition for the maintenance of institutions of which they
+made no use, and of the principles of which they disapproved.
+There were now eight millions of Catholics in the Union. In
+more than one state they had an actual majority; and they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>
+intended to insist that as long as their children came up to
+the present educational standard, they should no longer be
+compelled to pay a second education tax to the Government.
+The struggle, he admitted, would be a severe one, but the
+Catholics had justice on their side, and would fight on till they
+won.</p>
+
+<p>In democracies the majority is to prevail, and if the control
+of education falls within the province of each separate state
+government, it is not easy to see on what ground the Americans
+will be able to resist, or how there can be a struggle at all where
+the Catholic vote is really the largest. The presence of the
+Catholic Church in a democracy is the real anomaly. The
+principle of the Church is authority resting on a divine commission;
+the principle of democracy is the will of the people;
+and the Church in the long run will have as hard a battle to
+fight with the divine right of the majority of numbers as she
+had with the divine right of the Hohenstauffens and the Plantagenets.
+She is adroit in adapting herself to circumstances,
+and, like her emblem the fish, she changes her colour with
+that of the element in which she swims. No doubt she has a
+strong position in this demand and will know how to use it.</p>
+
+<p>But I was surprised to hear even a Catholic bishop insist
+that his Church had always paid so much respect to the rights
+of conscience. I had been taught to believe that in the days
+of its power the Church had not been particularly tender
+towards differences of opinion. Fire and sword had been
+used freely enough as long as fire and sword were available.
+I hinted my astonishment. The bishop said the Church had
+been slandered; the Church had never in a single instance
+punished any man merely for conscientious error. Protestants
+had falsified history. Protestants read their histories, Catholics
+read theirs, and the Catholic version was the true one. The
+separate governments of Europe had no doubt been cruel. In
+France, Spain, the Low Countries, even in England, heretics
+had been harshly dealt with, but it was the governments that
+had burnt and massacred all those people, not the Church.
+The governments were afraid of heresy because it led to revo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>lution.
+The Church had never shed any blood at all; the
+Church could not, for she was forbidden to do so by her own
+canons. If she found a man obstinate in unbelief, she cut him
+off from the communion and handed him over to the secular
+arm. If the secular arm thought fit to kill him, the Church's
+hands were clear of it.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/image0010.jpg"  alt="PORT AU PRINCE, HAYTI." title="" /><br />
+<span class="caption">PORT AU PRINCE, HAYTI.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>So Pilate washed his hands; so the judge might say he
+never hanged a murderer; the execution was the work of the
+hangman. The bishop defied me to produce an instance in
+which in Rome, when the temporal power was with the pope
+and the civil magistrates were churchmen, there had ever
+been an execution for heresy. I mentioned Giordano Bruno,
+whom the bishop had forgotten; but we agreed not to quarrel,
+and I could not admire sufficiently the hardihood and the
+ingenuity of his argument. The English bishops and abbots
+passed through parliament the Act <i>de h&aelig;retico comburendo</i>,
+but they were acting as politicians, not as churchmen. The
+Spanish Inquisition burnt freely and successfully. The inquisitors
+were archbishops and bishops, but the Holy Office was a
+function of the State. When Gregory XIII. struck his medal
+in commemoration of the massacre of St. Bartholomew he was
+then only the secular ruler of Rome, and therefore fallible and
+subject to sin like other mortals. The Church has many parts
+to play; her stage wardrobe is well furnished, and her actors
+so well instructed in their parts that they believe themselves
+in all that they say. The bishop was speaking no more than
+his exact conviction. He told me that in the Middle Ages
+secular princes were bound by their coronation oath to accept
+the pope as the arbiter of all quarrels between them. I asked
+where this oath was, or what were the terms of it? The
+words, he said, were unimportant. The fact was certain, and
+down to the fatal schism of the sixteenth century the pope
+had always been allowed to arbitrate, and quarrels had been
+prevented. I could but listen and wonder. He admitted
+that he had read one set of books and I another, as it was
+clear that he must have done.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of our differences we found we had many<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>
+points of agreement. We agreed that the breaking down of
+Church authority at the Reformation had been a fatal disaster;
+that without a sense of responsibility to a supernatural power,
+human beings would sink into ingenious apes, that human
+society would become no more than a congregation of apes,
+and that with differences of opinion and belief, that sense was
+becoming more and more obscured. So long as all serious
+men held the same convictions, and those convictions were
+embodied in the law, religion could speak with authority.
+The authority being denied or shaken, the fact itself became
+uncertain. The notion that everybody had a right to think as
+he pleased was felt to be absurd in common things. In every
+practical art or science the ignorant submitted to be guided
+by those who were better instructed than themselves. Why
+should they be left to their private judgment on subjects
+where to go wrong was the more dangerous. All this was plain
+sailing. The corollary that if it is to retain its influence the
+Church must not teach doctrines which outrage the common
+sense of mankind as Luther led half Europe to believe that
+the Church was doing in the sixteenth century, we agreed that
+we would not dispute about. But I was interested to see that
+the leopard had not changed its spots, that it merely readjusted
+its attitudes to suit the modern taste, and that if it ever recovered
+its power it would claw and scratch in the old way.
+Rome, like Pilate, may protest its innocence of the blood
+which was spilt in its name and in its interests. Did that
+tender and merciful court ever suggest to those prelates who
+passed the Act in England for the burning of heretics that
+they were transgressing the sacred rights of conscience? Did
+it reprove the Inquisition or send a mild remonstrance to
+Philip II.? The eyes of those who are willing to be blinded
+will see only what they desire to see.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_14" id="Footnote_1_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_14"><span class="label">[15]</span></a>
+He rests in peace.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_15" id="Footnote_2_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_15"><span class="label">[16]</span></a>
+He is now in grace.</p></div></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER XX.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Return to Havana&mdash;The Spaniards in Cuba&mdash;Prospects&mdash;American influence&mdash;Future
+of the West Indies&mdash;English rumours&mdash;Leave Cuba&mdash;The
+harbour at night&mdash;The Bahama Channel&mdash;Hayti&mdash;Port au Prince&mdash;The
+black republic&mdash;West Indian history.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The air and quiet of Vedado (so my retreat was called) soon
+set me up again, and I was able to face once more my hotel
+and its Americans. I did not attempt to travel in Cuba, nor
+was it necessary for my purpose. I stayed a few days longer
+at Havana. I went to operas and churches; I sailed about
+the harbour in boats, the boatmen, all of them, not negroes, as
+in the Antilles, but emigrants from the old country, chiefly
+Gallicians. I met people of all sorts, among the rest a Spanish
+officer&mdash;a major of engineers&mdash;who, if he lives, may come to
+something. Major D&mdash;&mdash; took me over the fortifications,
+showed me the interior lines of the Moro, and their latest
+specimens of modern artillery. The garrison are, of course,
+Spanish regiments made of home-bred Castilians, as I could
+not fail to recognise when I heard any of them speak. There
+are certain words of common use in Spain powerful as the
+magic formulas of enchanters over the souls of men. You hear
+them everywhere in the Peninsula; at cafe's, at tables d'h&ocirc;te,
+and in private conversation. They are a part of the national
+intellectual equipment. Either from prudery or because they
+are superior to old-world superstitions, the Cubans have washed
+these expressions out of their language; but the national
+characteristics are preserved in the army, and the spell does
+not lose its efficacy because the islanders disbelieve in it. I
+have known a closed post office in Madrid, where the clerk
+was deaf to polite entreaty, blown open by an oath as by a
+bomb shell. A squad of recruits in the Moro, who were lying
+in the shade under a tree, neglected to rise as an officer went
+by. 'Saludad, C&mdash;&mdash;o!' he thundered out, and they bounded
+to their feet as if electrified.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>On the whole Havana was something to have seen. It is
+the focus and epitome of Spanish dominion in those seas, and
+I was forced to conclude that it was well for Cuba that the
+English attempts to take possession of it had failed. Be the
+faults of their administration as heavy as they are alleged to be,
+the Spaniards have done more to Europeanise their islands
+than we have done with ours. They have made Cuba Spanish&mdash;Trinidad,
+Dominica, St. Lucia, Grenada have never been
+English at all, and Jamaica and Barbadoes are ceasing to be
+English. Cuba is a second home to the Spaniards, a permanent
+addition to their soil. We are as birds of passage, temporary
+residents for transient purposes, with no home in our
+islands at all. Once we thought them worth fighting for, and
+as long as it was a question of ships and cannon we made ourselves
+supreme rulers of the Caribbean Sea; yet the French
+and Spaniards will probably outlive us there. They will remain
+perhaps as satellites of the United States, or in some other
+confederacy, or in recovered strength of their own; we, in a
+generation or two, if the causes now in operation continue to
+work as they are now working, shall have disappeared from
+the scene. In Cuba there is a great Spanish population;
+Martinique and Guadaloupe are parts of France; to us it
+seems a matter of indifference whether we keep our islands or
+abandon them, and we leave the remnants of our once precious
+settlements to float or drown as they can. Australia and
+Canada take care of themselves; we expect our West Indies
+to do the same, careless of the difference of circumstance.
+We no longer talk of cutting our colonies adrift; the tone of
+public opinion is changed, and no one dares to advocate openly
+the desertion of the least important of them. But the neglect
+and indifference continue. We will not govern them effectively
+ourselves: our policy, so far as we have any policy, is to extend
+among them the principles of self-government, and
+self-government can only precipitate our extinction there as
+completely as we know that it would do in India if we were
+wild enough to venture the plunge. There is no enchantment
+in self-government which will make people love each other when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span>
+they are indifferent or estranged. It can only force them into
+sharper collision.</p>
+
+<p>The opinion in Cuba was, and is, that America is the residuary
+legatee of all the islands, Spanish and English equally, and
+that she will be forced to take charge of them in the end
+whether she likes it or not. Spain governs unjustly and
+corruptly; the Cubans will not rest till they are free from her,
+and if once independent they will throw themselves on
+American protection.</p>
+
+<p>We will not govern our islands at all, but leave them to drift.
+Jamaica and the Antilles, given over to the negro majorities,
+can only become like Hayti and St. Domingo; and the nature
+of things will hardly permit so fair a part of the earth which
+has been once civilised and under white control to fall back
+into barbarism.</p>
+
+<p>To England the loss of the West Indies would not itself be
+serious; but in the life of nations discreditable failures are not
+measured by their immediate material consequences. To
+allow a group of colonies to slide out of our hands because we
+could not or would not provide them with a tolerable government
+would be nothing less than a public disgrace. It would
+be an intimation to all the world that we were unable to maintain
+any longer the position which our fathers had made for
+us; and when the unravelling of the knitted fabric of the
+Empire has once begun the process will be a rapid one.</p>
+
+<p>'But what would you do?' I am asked impatiently. 'We
+send out peers or gentlemen against whose character no direct
+objection can be raised; we assist them with local councils
+partly chosen by the people themselves. We send out bishops,
+we send out missionaries, we open schools. What can we do
+more? We cannot alter the climate, we cannot make planters
+prosper when sugar will not pay, we cannot convert black men
+into whites, we cannot force the blacks to work for the whites
+when they do not wish to work for them. "Governing," as
+you call it, will not change the natural conditions of things.
+You can suggest no remedy, and mere fault-finding is foolish
+and mischievous.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I might answer a good many things. Government cannot
+do everything, but it can do something, and there is a difference
+between governors against whom there is nothing to object
+and men of special and marked capacity. There is a difference
+between governors whose hands are tied by local councils
+and whose feet are tied by instructions from home, and a
+governor with a free hand and a wise head left to take his own
+measures on the spot. I presume that no one can seriously
+expect that an orderly organised nation can be made out of the
+blacks, when, in spite of your schools and missionaries, sixty
+per cent. of the children now born among them are illegitimate.
+You can do for the West Indies, I repeat over and over again,
+what you do for the East; you can establish a firm authoritative
+government which will protect the blacks in their civil
+rights and protect the whites in theirs. You cannot alter the
+climate, it is true, or make the soil more fertile. Already it is
+fertile as any in the earth, and the climate is admirable for the
+purposes for which it is needed. But you can restore confidence
+in the stability of your tenure, you can give courage to
+the whites who are on the spot to remain there, and you can
+tempt capital and enterprise to venture there which now seek
+investments elsewhere. By keeping the rule in your own
+hands you will restore the white population to their legitimate
+influence; the blacks will again look up to them and respect
+them as they ought to do. This you can do, and it will cost
+you nothing save a little more pains in the selection of the
+persons whom you are to trust with powers analogous to those
+which you grant to your provincial governors in the Indian
+peninsula.</p>
+
+<p>A preliminary condition of this, as of all other real improvements,
+is one, however, which will hardly be fulfilled.
+Before a beginning can be made, a conviction is wanted that
+life has other objects besides present interest and convenience;
+and very few of us indeed have at the bottom of our hearts any
+such conviction at all. We can talk about it in fine language&mdash;no
+age ever talked more or better&mdash;but we don't believe in
+it; we believe only in professing to believe, which soothes our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>
+vanity and does not interfere with our actions. From fine
+words no harvests grow. The negroes are well disposed to
+follow and obey any white who will be kind and just to them,
+and in such following and obedience their only hope of improvement
+lies. The problem is to create a state of things
+under which Englishmen of vigour and character will make
+their homes among them. Annexation to the United States
+would lead probably to their extermination at no very distant
+time. The Antilles are small, and the fate of the negroes there
+might be no better than the fate of the Caribs. The Americans
+are not a people who can be trifled with; no one knows
+it better than the negroes. They fear them. They prefer infinitely
+the mild rule of England, and under such a government
+as we might provide if we cared to try, the whole of our
+islands might become like the Moravian settlement in Jamaica,
+and the black nature, which has rather degenerated than improved
+in these late days of licence, might be put again in the
+way of regeneration. The process would be slow&mdash;your seedlings
+in a plantation hang stationary year after year, but they
+do move at last. We cannot disown our responsibility for these
+poor adopted brothers of ours. We send missionaries into
+Africa to convert them to a better form of religion; why
+should the attempt seem chimerical to convert them practically
+to a higher purpose in our own colonies?</p>
+
+<p>The reader will be weary of a sermon the points of which
+have been reiterated so often. I might say that he requires to
+have the lesson impressed upon him&mdash;that it is for his good
+that I insist upon it, and not for my own. But this is the
+common language of all preachers, and it is not found to make
+the hearers more attentive. I will not promise to say no more
+upon the subject, for it was forced upon me at every moment
+and point of my journey. I am arriving near the end, however,
+and if he has followed so far, he will perhaps go on with me
+to the conclusion. I had three weeks to give to Havana;
+they were fast running out, and it was time for me to be going.
+Strange stories, too, came from England, which made me uneasy
+till I knew how they were set in circulation. One day<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span>
+Mr. Gladstone was said to have gone mad, and the Queen the
+next. The Russians were about to annex Afghanistan. Our
+troops had been cut to pieces in Burmah. Something was
+going wrong with us every day in one corner of the world or
+another. I found at last that the telegraphic intelligence was
+supplied to the Cuban newspapers from New York, that the
+telegraph clerks there were generally Irish, and their facts were
+the creation of their wishes. I was to return to Jamaica in
+the same vessel which had brought me from it. She had been
+down to the isthmus, and was to call at Havana on her way
+back. The captain's most English face was a welcome sight
+to me when he appeared one evening at dinner. He had come
+to tell me that he was to sail early on the following morning,
+and I arranged to go on board with him the same night. The
+Captain-General had not forgotten to instruct the Gobierno
+Civil to grant me an <i>exeat regno</i>. I do not know that I
+gained much by his intercession, for without it I should hardly
+have been detained indefinitely, and as it was I had to pay
+more dollars than I liked to part with. The necessary documents,
+however, had been sent through the British consul, and
+I was free to leave when I pleased. I paid my bill at the
+hotel, which was not after all an extravagant one, cleared my
+pocket-book of the remainder of the soiled and tattered paper
+which is called money, and does duty for it down to a half-penny,
+and with my distinguished friend Don G&mdash;&mdash;, the real
+acquisition which I had made in coming to his country, and
+who would not leave me till I was in the boat, I drove away to
+the wharf.</p>
+
+<p>It was a still, lovely, starlight night. The moon had risen
+over the hills, and was shining brightly on the roofs and towers
+of the city, and on the masts and spars of the vessels which
+were riding in the harbour. There was not a ripple on the
+water, and stars and city, towers and ships, stood inverted on
+the surface pointing downward as into a second infinity. The
+charm was unfortunately interfered with by odours worse than
+Coleridge found at Cologne and cursed in rhyme. The drains
+of Havana, like orange blossom, give off their most fragrant<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>
+vapours in the dark hours. I could well believe Don G&mdash;&mdash;'s
+saying, that but for the natural healthiness of the place, they
+would all die of it like poisoned flies. We had to cut our
+adieus short, for the mouth of some horrid sewer was close to
+us. In the boat I did not escape; the water smelt horribly as
+it was stirred by the oars, charged as it was with three centuries
+of pollution, and the phosphorescent light shone with a sickly,
+sulphur-like brilliance. One could have fancied that one was
+in Charon's boat and was crossing Acheron. When I reached
+the steamer I watched from the deck the same ghost-like phenomenon
+which is described by Tom Cringle. A fathom deep,
+in the ship's shadow, some shark or other monster sailed slowly
+by in an envelope of spectral lustre. When he stopped his
+figure disappeared, when he moved on again it was like the
+movement of a streak of blue flame. Such a creature did not
+seem as if it could belong to our familiar sunlit ocean.</p>
+
+<p>The state of the harbour is not creditable to the Spanish
+Government, and I suppose will not be improved till there is
+some change of dynasty. All that can be said for it is that it
+is not the worst in these seas. Our ship had just come from
+the Canal, and had brought the latest news from thence.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>But the miscalculations of the work to be done and of the expense
+of doing it are now notorious to all the world. The
+alternatives are to abandon an enterprise so splendid in
+conception, so disastrous in the execution, or to raise and
+spend fresh tens of millions to follow those that are gone with
+no certain prospect of success after all. The saddest part of
+the story will be soonest forgotten&mdash;the frightful consumption
+of human life in those damp and pestilential jungles. M.
+Lesseps having made his name immortal at Suez, aspired at
+eclipsing his first achievement, by a second yet more splendidly
+ambitious, at a time of life when common men are content to
+retire upon their laurels. He deserves and will receive an unstinted
+admiration for his energy and his enthusiasm. But his
+countrymen who have so zealously supported him will be
+rewarded with no dividend upon their shares, even if the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>
+two oceans are eventually united, and no final success can be
+looked for in the bold projector's life time.</p>
+
+<p>At dawn we swept out under the Moro, and away once more
+into the free fresh open sea. We had come down on the south
+side of the island, we returned by the north up the old Bahama
+Channel where Drake died on his way home from his last unsuccessful
+expedition&mdash;Lope de Vega singing a p&aelig;an over the
+end of the great 'dragon.' Fresh passengers brought fresh
+talk. There was a clever young Jamaican on board returning
+from a holiday; he had the spirits of youth about him, and
+would have pleased my American who never knew good come
+of despondency. He had hopes for his country, but they
+rested, like those of every sensible man that I met, on an
+inability to believe that there would be further advances in the
+direction of political liberty. A revised constitution, he said,
+could issue only in fresh Gordon riots and fresh calamities.
+He had been travelling in the Southern States. He had seen
+the state of Mississippi deserted by the whites, and falling back
+into a black wilderness. He had seen South Carolina, which
+had narrowly escaped ruin under a black and carpet-bagger
+legislature, and had recovered itself under the steady determination
+of the Americans that the civil war was not to mean the
+domination of negro over white. The danger was greater in
+the English islands than in either of these states, from the
+enormous disproportion of numbers. The experiment could be
+ventured only under a high census and a restricted franchise.
+But the experience of all countries showed that these limited
+franchises were invidious and could not be maintained, the
+end was involved in the beginning, and he trusted that prudent
+counsels would prevail. We had gone too far already.</p>
+
+<p>On board also there was a traveller from a Manchester house
+of business, who gave me a more flourishing account than I
+expected of the state of our trade, not so much with the
+English islands as with the Spaniards in Cuba and on the
+mainland. His own house, he said, had a large business with
+Havana; twenty firms in the north of England were competing
+there, and all were doing well. The Spanish Americans<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>
+on the west side of the continent were good customers, with
+the exception of the Mexicans, who were energetic and industrious,
+and manufactured for their own consumption. These
+modern Aztecs were skilful workmen, nimble-fingered and inventive.
+Wages were low, but they were contented with them.
+Mexico, I was surprised to hear from him, was rising fast into
+prosperity. Whether human life was any safer then than it
+was a few years ago, he did not tell me.</p>
+
+<p>Amidst talk and chess and occasional whist after nightfall
+when reading became difficult, we ran along with smooth seas,
+land sometimes in sight, with shoals on either side of us.</p>
+
+<p>We were to have one more glimpse of Hayti; we were to
+touch at Port au Prince, the seat of government of the successors
+of Toussaint. If beauty of situation could mould
+human character, the inhabitants of Port au Prince might
+claim to be the first of mankind. St. Domingo or Espa&ntilde;ola,
+of which Hayti is the largest division, was the earliest island
+discovered by Columbus and the finest in the Caribbean Ocean.
+It remained Spanish, as I have already said, for 200 years, when
+Hayti was taken by the French buccaneers, and made over by
+them to Louis XIV. The French kept it till the Revolution.
+They built towns; they laid out farms and sugar fields; they
+planted coffee all over the island, where it now grows wild.'
+Vast herds of cattle roamed over the mountains; splendid
+houses rose over the rich savannahs. The French Church put
+out its strength; there were churches and priests in every
+parish; there were monasteries and nunneries for the religious
+orders. So firm was the hold that they had gained that Hayti,
+like Cuba, seemed to have been made a part of the old world,
+and as civilised as France itself. But French civilisation became
+itself electric. The Revolution came, and the reign of
+Liberty. The blacks took arms; they surprised the plantations;
+they made a clean sweep of the whole French population.
+Yellow fever swept away the armies which were sent to avenge
+the massacre, and France being engaged in annexing Europe
+had no leisure to despatch more. The island being thus
+derelict, Spain and England both tried their hand to recover<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span>
+it, but failed from the same cause, and a black nation, with a
+republican constitution and a population perhaps of about a
+million and a half of pure-blood negroes, has since been in
+unchallenged possession, and has arrived at the condition
+which has been described to us by Sir Spenser St. John. Republics
+which begin with murder and plunder do not come to
+much good in this world. Hayti has passed through many
+revolutions, and is no nearer than at first to stability. The
+present president, M. Salomon, who was long a refugee in
+Jamaica, came into power a few years back by a turn of the
+wheel. He was described to me as a peremptory gentleman
+who made quick work with his political opponents. His term
+of office having nearly expired, he had re-elected himself
+shortly before for another seven years and was prepared to
+maintain his right by any measures which he might think expedient.
+He had a few regiments of soldiers, who, I was
+told, were devoted to him, and a fleet consisting of two gunboats
+commanded by an American officer, to whom he chiefly
+owed his security.</p>
+
+<p>We had steamed along the Hayti coast all one afternoon,
+underneath a high range of hills which used to be the hunting
+ground of the buccaneers. We had passed their famous
+Tortugas<a name="FNanchor_1_16" id="FNanchor_1_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_16" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> without seeing them. Towards evening we entered
+the long channel between Gonaive island and the mainland,
+going slowly that we might not arrive at Port au Prince before
+daylight. It was six in the morning when the anchor rattled
+down, and I went on deck to look about me. We were at the
+head of a fiord rather broader than those in Norway, but very
+like them&mdash;wooded mountains rising on either side of us, an
+open valley in front, and on the rich level soil washed down by
+the rains and deposited along the shore, the old French and
+now President Salomon's capital. Palms and oranges and
+other trees were growing everywhere among the houses giving
+the impression of graceful civilisation. Directly before us were
+three or four wooded islets which form a natural breakwater,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>and above them were seen the masts of the vessels which were
+lying in the harbour behind. Close to where we were brought
+up lay the 'Canada,' an English frigate, and about a quarter
+of a mile from her an American frigate of about the same size,
+with the stars and stripes conspicuously flying. We have had
+some differences of late with the Hayti authorities, and the
+satisfaction which we asked for having been refused or delayed,
+a man-of-war had been sent to ask redress in more peremptory
+terms. The town lay under her guns; the president's ships,
+which she might perhaps have seized as a security, had been
+taken out of sight into shallow water, where she could not
+follow them. The Americans have no particular rights in
+Hayti, and are as little liked as we are, but they are feared,
+and they do not allow any business of a serious kind to go on
+in those waters without knowing what it is about. Perhaps
+the president's admiral of the station being an American may
+have had something to do with their presence. Anyway, there
+the two ships were lying when I came up from below, their
+hulks and spars outlined picturesquely against the steep wooded
+shores. The air was hot and steamy; fishing vessels with
+white sails were drifting slowly about the glassy water. Except
+for the heat and a black officer of the customs in uniform, and
+his boat and black crew alongside, I could have believed myself
+off M&ouml;lde or some similar Norwegian town, so like everything
+seemed, even to the colour of the houses.</p>
+
+<p>We were to stay some hours. After breakfast we landed.
+I had seen Jacmel, and therefore thought myself prepared for
+the worst which I should find. Jacmel was an outlying symptom;
+Port au Prince was the central ulcer. Long before we
+came to shore there came off whiffs, not of drains as at Havana,
+but of active dirt fermenting in the sunlight. Calling our
+handkerchiefs to our help and looking to our feet carefully,
+we stepped up upon the quay and walked forward as judiciously
+as we could. With the help of stones we crossed a shallow
+ditch, where rotten fish, vegetables, and other articles were
+lying about promiscuously, and we came on what did duty for
+a grand parade.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We were in a Paris of the gutter, with boulevards and
+<i>places</i>, <i>fiacres</i> and crimson parasols. The boulevards were
+littered with the refuse of the houses and were foul as pigsties,
+and the ladies under the parasols were picking their
+way along them in Parisian boots and silk dresses. I saw a
+<i>fiacre</i> broken down in a black pool out of which a blacker
+ladyship was scrambling. Fever breeds so prodigally in that
+pestilential squalor that 40,000 people were estimated to have
+died of it in a single year. There were shops and stores and
+streets, men and women in tawdry European costume, and
+officers on horseback with a tatter of lace and gilding. We
+passed up the principal avenue, which opened on the market
+place. Above the market was the cathedral, more hideous
+than even the Mormon temple at Salt Lake. It was full
+of ladies; the rank, beauty, and fashion of Port au Prince were
+at their morning mass, for they are Catholics with African
+beliefs underneath. They have a French clergy, an archbishop
+and bishop, paid miserably but still subsisting; subsisting
+not as objects of reverence at all, as they are at Dominica,
+but as the humble servants and ministers of black society.
+We English are in bad favour just now; no wonder, with the
+guns of the 'Canada' pointed at the city; but the chief complaint
+is on account of Sir Spenser St. John's book, which they
+cry out against with a degree of anger which is the surest
+evidence of its truth. It would be unfair even to hint at the
+names or stations of various persons who gave me information
+about the condition of the place and people. Enough that
+those who knew well what they were speaking about assured
+me that Hayti was the most ridiculous caricature of civilisation
+in the whole world. Doubtless the whites there are not
+disinterested witnesses; for they are treated as they once
+treated the blacks. They can own no freehold property, and
+exist only on tolerance. They are called 'white trash.' Black
+dukes and marquises drive over them in the street and swear
+at them, and they consider it an invasion of the natural order
+of things. If this was the worst, or even if the dirt and the
+disease was the worst, it might be borne with, for the whites<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>
+might go away if they pleased, and they pay the penalty themselves
+for choosing to be there. But this is not the worst.
+Immorality is so universal that it almost ceases to be a fault,
+for a fault implies an exception, and in Hayti it is the rule.
+Young people make experiment of one another before they
+will enter into any closer connection. So far they are no
+worse than in our own English islands, where the custom is
+equally general; but behind the immorality, behind the religiosity,
+there lies active and alive the horrible revival of the
+West African superstitions; the serpent worship, and the child
+sacrifice, and the cannibalism. There is no room to doubt it.
+A missionary assured me that an instance of it occurred only
+a year ago within his own personal knowledge. The facts are
+notorious; a full account was published in one of the local
+newspapers, and the only result was that the president imprisoned
+the editor for exposing his country. A few years ago
+persons guilty of these infamies were tried and punished; now
+they are left alone, because to prosecute and convict them
+would be to acknowledge the truth of the indictment.</p>
+
+<p>In this, as in all other communities, there is a better side as
+well as a worse. The better part is ashamed of the condition
+into which the country has fallen; rational and well-disposed
+Haytians would welcome back the French but for an impression,
+whether well founded or ill I know not, that the
+Americans would not suffer any European nation to reacquire
+or recover any new territory on their side of the Atlantic.
+They make the most they can of their French connection.
+They send their children to Paris to be educated, and many
+of them go thither themselves. There is money among them,
+though industry there is none. The Hayti coffee which bears
+so high a reputation is simply gathered under the bushes which
+the French planters left behind them, and is half as excellent
+as it ought to be because it is so carelessly cleaned. Yet so rich
+is the island in these and other natural productions that they
+cannot entirely ruin it. They have a revenue from their
+customs of 5,000,000 dollars to be the prey of political
+schemers. They have a constitution, of course, with a legis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span>lature&mdash;two
+houses of a legislature&mdash;universal suffrage, &amp;c.,
+but it does not save them from revolutions, which recurred
+every two or three years till the time of the present president.
+He being of stronger metal than the rest, takes care that the
+votes are given as he pleases, shoots down recusants, and
+knows how to make himself feared. He is a giant, they say&mdash;I
+did not see him&mdash;six feet some inches in height and broad
+in proportion. When in Jamaica he was a friend of Gordon,
+and the intimacy between them is worth noting, as throwing
+light on Gordon's political aspirations.</p>
+
+<p>I stayed no longer than the ship's business detained the
+captain, and I breathed more freely when I had left that
+miserable cross-birth of ferocity and philanthropic sentiment.
+No one can foretell the future fate of the black republic, but
+the present order of things cannot last in an island so close
+under the American shores. If the Americans forbid any
+other power to interfere, they will have to interfere themselves.
+If they find Mormonism an intolerable blot upon
+their escutcheon, they will have to put a stop in some way or
+other to cannibalism and devil-worship. Meanwhile, the
+ninety years of negro self-government have had their use in
+showing what it really means, and if English statesmen, either
+to save themselves trouble or to please the prevailing uninstructed
+sentiment, insist on extending it, they will be found
+when the accounts are made up to have been no better
+friends to the unlucky negro than their slave-trading forefathers.</p>
+
+<p>From the head of the bay on which Port au Prince stands
+there reaches out on the west the long arm or peninsula which
+is so peculiar a feature in the geography of the island. The
+arm bone is a continuous ridge of mountains rising to a height
+of 8,000 feet and stretching for 160 miles. At the back
+towards the ocean is Jacmel, on the other side is the bight of
+Leogane, over which and along the land our course lay after
+leaving President Salomon's city. The day was unusually
+hot, and we sat under an awning on deck watching the
+changes in the landscape as ravines opened and closed again,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>
+and tall peaks changed their shapes and angles. Clouds came
+down upon the mountain tops and passed off again, whole
+galleries of pictures swept by, and nature never made more
+lovely ones. The peculiarity of tropical mountain scenery is
+that the high summits are clothed with trees. The outlines
+are thus softened and rounded, save where the rock is broken
+into precipices. Along the sea and for several miles inland
+are the Basses Terres as they used to be called, level alluvial
+plains, cut and watered at intervals by rivers, once covered
+with thriving plantations and now a jungle. There are no
+wild beasts there save an occasional man, few snakes, and
+those not dangerous. The acres of richest soil which are
+waiting there till reasonable beings can return and cultivate
+them, must be hundreds of thousands. In the valleys and on
+the slopes there are all gradations of climate, abundant water,
+grass lands that might be black with cattle, or on the loftier
+ranges white with sheep.</p>
+
+<p>It is strange to think how chequered a history these islands
+have had, how far they are even yet from any condition which
+promises permanence. Not one of them has arrived at any
+stable independence. Spaniards, English and French, Dutch
+and Danes scrambled for them, fought for them, occupied
+them more or less with their own people, but it was not to
+found new nations, but to get gold or get something which
+could be changed for gold. Only occasionally, and as it were
+by accident, they became the theatre of any grander game.
+The war of the Reformation was carried thither, and heroic
+deeds were done there, but it was by adventurers who were in
+search of plunder for themselves. France and England fought
+among the Antilles, and their names are connected with many
+a gallant action; but they fought for the sovereignty of the
+seas, not for the rights and liberties of the French or English
+inhabitants of the islands. Instead of occupying them with
+free inhabitants, the European nations filled them with slave
+gangs. They were valued only for the wealth which they
+yielded, and society there has never assumed any particularly
+noble aspect. There has been splendour and luxurious living,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>
+and there have been crimes and horrors, and revolts and
+massacres. There has been romance, but it has been the
+romance of pirates and outlaws. The natural graces of human
+life do not show themselves under such conditions. There has
+been no saint in the West Indies since Las Casas, no hero,
+unless philonegro enthusiasm can make one out of Toussaint.
+There are no people there in the true sense of the word, with
+a character and purpose of their own, unless to some extent
+in Cuba, and therefore when the wind has changed and the
+wealth for which the islands were alone desired is no longer to
+be made among them, and slavery is no longer possible and
+would not pay if it were, there is nothing to fall back upon.
+The palaces of the English planters and merchants fall to
+decay; their wines and their furniture, their books and their
+pictures, are sold or dispersed. Their existence is a struggle
+to keep afloat, and one by one they go under in the waves.</p>
+
+<p>The blacks as long as they were slaves were docile and
+partially civilised. They have behaved on the whole well in
+our islands since their emancipation, for though they were
+personally free the whites were still their rulers, and they looked
+up to them with respect. They have acquired land and notions
+of property, some of them can read, many of them are tolerable
+workmen and some excellent, but in character the movement
+is backwards, not forwards. Even in Hayti, after the
+first outburst of ferocity, a tolerable government was possible
+for a generation or two. Orderly habits are not immediately
+lost, but the effect of leaving the negro nature to itself is
+apparent at last. In the English islands they are innocently
+happy in the unconsciousness of the obligations of morality.
+They eat, drink, sleep, and smoke, and do the least in the way
+of work that they can. They have no ideas of duty, and
+therefore are not made uneasy by neglecting it. One or other
+of them occasionally rises in the legal or other profession, but
+there is no sign, not the slightest, that the generality of the
+race are improving either in intelligence or moral habits; all
+the evidence is the other way. No Uncle Tom, no Aunt Chloe
+need be looked for in a negro's cabin in the West Indies. If<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>
+such specimens of black humanity are to be found anywhere,
+it will be where they have continued under the old influences
+as servants in white men's houses. The generality are mere
+good-natured animals, who in service had learnt certain accomplishments,
+and had developed certain qualities of a higher
+kind. Left to themselves they fall back upon the superstitions
+and habits of their ancestors. The key to the character of any
+people is to be found in the local customs which have spontaneously
+grown or are growing among them. The customs
+of Dahomey have not yet shown themselves in the English
+West Indies and never can while the English authority is
+maintained; but no custom of any kind will be found in a negro
+hut or village from which his most sanguine friend can derive
+a hope that he is on the way to mending himself.</p>
+
+<p>Roses do not grow on thorn trees, nor figs on thistles. A
+healthy human civilisation was not perhaps to be looked for in
+countries which have been alternately the prey of avarice,
+ambition, and sentimentalism. We visit foreign countries to
+see varieties of life and character, to learn languages that we
+may gain an insight into various literatures, to see manners
+unlike our own springing naturally out of different soils and
+climates, to see beautiful works of art, to see places associated
+with great men and great actions, and subsidiary to these, to
+see lakes and mountains, and strange skies and seas. But the
+localities of great events and the homes of the actors in them
+are only saddening when the spiritual results are disappointing,
+and scenery loses its charm unless the grace of humanity is in
+the heart of it. To the man of science the West Indies may
+be delightful and instructive. Rocks and trees and flowers
+remain as they always were, and Nature is constant to herself.
+But the traveller whose heart is with his kind, and who cares
+only to see his brother mortals making their corner of this
+planet into an orderly and rational home, had better choose
+some other object for his pilgrimage.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_16" id="Footnote_1_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_16"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> Tortoise Islands; the buccaneers' head quarters.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER XXI.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Return to Jamaica&mdash;Cherry Garden again&mdash;Black servants&mdash;Social conditions&mdash;Sir
+Henry Norman&mdash;King's House once more&mdash;Negro suffrage&mdash;The
+will of the people&mdash;The Irish python&mdash;Conditions of colonial union&mdash;Oratory
+and statesmanship.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>I had to return to Jamaica from Cuba to meet the mail to
+England. My second stay could be but brief. For the short
+time that was allowed me I went back to my hospitable
+friends at Cherry Garden, which is an oasis in the wilderness.
+In the heads of the family there was cultivation and simplicity
+and sense. There was a home life with its quiet occupations
+and enjoyments&mdash;serious when seriousness was needed, light
+and bright in the ordinary routine of existence. The black
+domestics, far unlike the children of liberty whom I had left
+at Port au Prince, had caught their tone from their master and
+mistress, and were low-voiced, humorous, and pleasant to talk
+with. So perfect were they in their several capacities, that,
+like the girls at Government House at Dominica, I would have
+liked to pack them in my portmanteau and carry them home.
+The black butler received me on my arrival as an old friend.
+He brought me a pair of boots which I had left behind me on
+my first visit; he told me 'the female' had found them. The
+lady of the house took me out for a drive with her. The coachman
+half-upset us into a ditch, and we narrowly escaped being
+pitched into a ravine. The dusky creature insisted pathetically
+that it was not his fault, nor the horse's fault. His ebony wife
+had left him for a week's visit to a friend, and his wits had
+gone after her. Of course he was forgiven. Cherry Garden
+was a genuine homestead, a very menagerie of domestic animals
+of all sorts and breeds. Horses loitered under the shade of
+the mangoes; cows, asses, dogs, turkeys, cocks and hens, geese,
+guinea fowl and pea fowl lounged and strutted about the paddocks.
+In the grey of the morning they held their concerts; the asses
+brayed, the dogs barked, the turkeys gobbled, and the pea fowl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>
+screamed. It was enough to waken the seven sleepers, but
+the noises seemed so home-like and natural that they mixed
+pleasantly in one's dreams. One morning, after they had been
+holding a special jubilee, the butler apologised for them when
+he came to call me, and laughed as at the best of jokes when
+I said they did not mean any harm. The great feature of the
+day was five cats, with blue eyes and spotlessly white, who
+walked in regularly at breakfast, ranged themselves on their
+tails round their mistress's chair, and ate their porridge and
+milk like reasonable creatures. Within and without all was
+orderly. The gardens were in perfect condition; fields were
+being inclosed and planted; the work of the place went on of
+itself, with the eye of the mistress on it, and her voice,
+if necessary, heard in command; but black and white were all
+friends together. What could man ask for, more than to live
+all his days in such a climate and with such surroundings?
+Why should a realised ideal like this pass away? Why may it
+not extend itself till it has transformed the features of all our
+West Indian possessions? Thousand of English families might
+be living in similar scenes, happy in themselves and spreading
+round them a happy, wholesome English atmosphere. Why
+not indeed? Only because we are enchanted. Because in
+Jamaica and Barbadoes the white planters had a constitution
+granted them two hundred years ago, therefore their emancipated
+slaves must now have a constitution also. Wonderful
+logic of formulas, powerful as a witches' cauldron for mischief
+as long as it is believed in. The colonies and the Empire! If
+the colonies were part indeed of the Empire, if they were taken
+into partnership as the Americans take theirs, and were
+members of an organised body, if an injury to each single limb
+would be felt as an injury to the whole, we should not be playing
+with their vital interests to catch votes at home. Alas!
+at home we are split in two, and party is more than the nation,
+and famous statesmen, thinly disguising their motives under a
+mask of policy, condemn to-day what they approved of yesterday,
+and catch at power by projects which they would be the first
+to denounce if suggested by their adversaries. Till this tyranny<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>
+be overpast, to bring into one the scattered portions of the
+Empire is the idlest of dreams, and the most that is to be hoped
+for is to arrest any active mischief. Happy Americans,
+who have a Supreme Court with a code of fundamental laws
+to control the vagaries of politicians and check the passions of
+fluctuating electoral majorities! What the Supreme Court is
+to them, the Crown ought to be for us; but the Crown is
+powerless and must remain powerless, and therefore we are as
+we are, and our national existence is made the shuttlecock of
+party contention.</p>
+
+<p>Time passed so pleasantly with me in these concluding
+days that I could have wished it to be the nothing which
+metaphysicians say that it is, and that when one was happy
+it would leave one alone. We wandered in the shade in the
+mornings, we made expeditions in the evenings, called at
+friends' houses, and listened to the gossip of the island. It
+turned usually on the one absorbing subject&mdash;black servants
+and the difficulty of dealing with them. An American lady
+from Pennsylvania declared emphatically as her opinion that
+emancipation had been a piece of folly, and that things would
+never mend till they were slaves again.</p>
+
+<p>One of my own chief hopes in going originally to Jamaica
+had been to see and learn the views of the distinguished
+Governor there. Sir Henry Norman had been one of the
+most eminent of the soldier civilians in India. He had
+brought with him a brilliant reputation; he had won the
+confidence in the West Indies of all classes and all colours.
+He, if anyone, would understand the problem, and from the
+high vantage ground of experience would know what could or
+could not be done to restore the influence of England and
+the prosperity of the colonies. Unfortunately, Sir Henry had
+been called to London, as I mentioned before, on a question
+of the conduct of some official, and I was afraid that I should
+miss him altogether. He returned, however, the day before
+I was to sail. He was kind enough to ask me to spend an
+evening with him, and I was again on my last night a guest at
+King's House.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A dinner party offers small opportunity for serious conversation,
+nor, indeed, could I expect a great person in Sir
+Henry's position to enter upon subjects of consequence with
+a stranger like myself. I could see, however, that I had
+nothing to correct in the impression of his character which
+his reputation had led me to form about him, and I wished
+more than ever that the system of government of which he
+had been so admirable a servant in India could be applied to
+his present position, and that he or such as he could have the
+administration of it. We had common friends in the Indian
+service to talk about; one especially, Reynell Taylor, now
+dead, who had been the earliest of my boy companions.
+Taylor had been one of the handful of English who held the
+Punjaub in the first revolt of the Sikhs. With a woman's
+modesty he had the spirit of a knight-errant. Sir Henry
+described him as the 'very soul of chivalry,' and seemed
+himself to be a man of the same pure and noble nature,
+perhaps liable, from the generosity of his temperament, to
+believe more than I could do in modern notions and in
+modern political heroes, but certainly not inclining of his own
+will to recommend any rash innovations. I perceived that
+like myself he felt no regret that so much of the soil of
+Jamaica was passing to peasant black proprietors. He thought
+well of their natural disposition; he believed them capable of
+improvement. He thought that the possession of land of
+their own would bring them into voluntary industry, and
+lead them gradually to the adoption of civilised habits. He
+spoke with reserve, and perhaps I may not have understood
+him fully, but he did not seem to me to think much of their
+political capacity. The local boards which have been established
+as an education for higher functions have not been a
+success. They had been described to me in all parts of the
+island as inflammable centres of peculation and mismanagement.
+Sir Henry said nothing from which I could gather
+his own opinion. I inferred, however (he will pardon me if
+I misrepresent him), that he had no great belief in a federation
+of the islands, in 'responsible government,' and such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span>
+like, as within the bounds of present possibilities. Nor did
+he think that responsible statesmen at home had any such
+arrangement in view.</p>
+
+<p>That such an arrangement was in contemplation a few
+years ago, I knew from competent authority. Perhaps the
+unexpected interest which the English people have lately
+shown in the colonies has modified opinion in those high
+circles, and has taught politicians that they must advance
+more cautiously. But the wind still sits in the old quarter.
+Three years ago, the self-suppressed constitution in Jamaica
+was partially re-established. A franchise was conceded both
+there and in Barbadoes which gave every black householder
+a vote. Even in poor Dominica, an extended suffrage was
+hung out as a remedy for its wretchedness. If nothing
+further is intended, these concessions have been gratuitously
+mischievous. It has roused the hopes of political agitators,
+not in Jamaica only, but all over the Antilles. It has taught
+the people, who have no grievances at all, who in their
+present state are better protected than any peasantry in the
+world except the Irish, to look to political changes as a road
+to an impossible millennium. It has rekindled hopes which
+had been long extinguished, that, like their brothers in Hayti,
+they were on the way to have the islands to themselves. It
+has alienated the English colonists, filled them with the worst
+apprehensions, and taught them to look wistfully from their
+own country to a union with America. A few elected
+members in a council where they may be counterbalanced by
+an equal number of official members seems a small thing in
+itself. So long as the equality was maintained, my Yankee
+friend was still willing to risk his capital in Jamaican enterprises.
+But the principle has been allowed. The existing
+arrangement is a half-measure which satisfies none and irritates
+all, and collisions between the representatives of the people
+and the nominees of the Government are only avoided by
+leaving a sufficient number of official seats unfilled. To
+have re-entered upon a road where you cannot stand still,
+where retreat is impossible, and where to go forward can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span>
+only be recommended on the hypothesis that to give a man a
+vote will itself qualify him for the use of it, has been one of
+the minor achievements of the last Government of Mr.
+Gladstone, and is likely to be as successful as his larger
+exploits nearer home have as yet proved to be. A supreme
+court, were we happy enough to possess such a thing, would
+forbid these venturous experiments of sanguine statesmen
+who may happen, for a moment, to command a trifling
+majority in the House of Commons.</p>
+
+<p>I could not say what I felt completely to Sir Henry, who,
+perhaps, had been in personal relations with Mr. Gladstone's
+Government. Perhaps, too, he was one of those numerous
+persons of tried ability and intelligence who have only a faint
+belief that the connection between Great Britain and the
+colonies can be of long continuance. The public may amuse
+themselves with the vision of an imperial union; practical
+statesmen who are aware of the tendencies of self-governed
+communities to follow lines of their own in which the mother
+country cannot support them may believe that they know it to
+be impossible.</p>
+
+<p>As to the West Indies there are but two genuine alternatives:
+one to leave them to themselves to shape their own
+destinies, as we leave Australia; the other to govern them as
+if they were a part of Great Britain with the same scrupulous
+care of the people and their interests with which we govern
+Bengal, Madras, and Bombay. England is responsible
+for the social condition of those islands. She filled them
+with negroes when it was her interest to maintain slavery, she
+emancipated those negroes when popular opinion at home demanded
+that slavery should end. It appears to me that
+England ought to bear the consequences of her own actions,
+and assume to herself the responsibilities of a state of things
+which she has herself created. We are partly unwilling to
+take the trouble, partly we cling to the popular belief that to
+trust all countries with the care of their own concerns is the
+way to raise the character of the inhabitants and to make
+them happy and contented. We dimly perceive that the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>
+population of the West Indies is not a natural growth of
+internal tendencies and circumstances, and we therefore hesitate
+before we plunge completely and entirely into the downward
+course; but we play with it, we drift towards it, we advance
+as far as we dare, giving them the evils of both systems
+and the advantages of neither. At the same moment we
+extend the suffrage to the blacks with one hand, while with
+the other we refuse to our own people the benefit of a treaty
+which would have rescued them from imminent ruin and
+brought them into relations with their powerful kindred close
+at hand&mdash;relations which might save them from the most
+dangerous consequences of a negro political supremacy&mdash;and
+the result is that the English in those islands are melting
+away and will soon be crowded out, or will have departed of
+themselves in disgust. A policy so far-reaching, and affecting
+so seriously the condition of the oldest of our colonial possessions,
+ought not to have been adopted on their own
+authority, by doctrinaire statesmen in a cabinet, without fully
+and frankly consulting the English nation; and no further step
+ought to be taken in that direction until the nation has had the
+circumstances of the islands laid before it, and has pronounced
+one way or the other its own sovereign pleasure. Does
+or does not England desire that her own people shall be
+enabled to live and thrive in the West Indies? If she decides
+that her hands are too full, that she is over-empired and cannot
+attend to them&mdash;<i>caditqu&aelig;stio</i>&mdash;there is no more to be said. But
+if this is her resolution the hands of the West Indians ought
+to be untied. They ought to be allowed to make their sugar
+treaties, to make any treaties, to enter into the closest relations
+with America which the Americans will accept, as the
+only chance which will be left them.</p>
+
+<p>Such abandonment, however, will bring us no honour. It
+will not further that federation of the British Empire which so
+many of us now profess to desire. If we wish Australia
+and Canada to draw into closer union with us, it will not be
+by showing that we are unable to manage a group of colonies
+which are almost at our doors. Englishmen all round the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span>
+globe have rejoiced together in this year which is passing by
+us over the greatness of their inheritance, and have celebrated
+with enthusiasm the half-century during which our lady-mistress
+has reigned over the English world. Unity and federation
+are on our lips, and we have our leagues and our institutes, and
+in the eagerness of our wishes we dream that we see the fulfilment
+of them. Neither the kingdom of heaven nor any
+other kingdom 'comes with observation.' It comes not with
+after-dinner speeches however eloquent, or with flowing sentiments
+however for the moment sincere. The spirit which
+made the Empire can alone hold it together. The American
+Union was not saved by oratory. It was saved by the determination
+of the bravest of the people; it was cemented by
+the blood which dyed the slopes of Gettysburg. The union
+of the British Empire, if it is to be more than a dream,
+can continue only while the attracting force of the primary
+commands the willing attendance of the distant satellites.
+Let the magnet lose its power, let the confidence of the
+colonies in the strength and resolution of their central orb be
+once shaken, and the centrifugal force will sweep them away
+into orbits of their own.</p>
+
+<p>The race of men who now inhabit this island of ours show
+no signs of degeneracy. The bow of Ulysses is sound as
+ever; moths and worms have not injured either cord or horn;
+but it is unstrung, and the arrows which are shot from it
+drop feebly to the ground. The Irish python rises again out
+of its swamp, and Ph&oelig;bus Apollo launches no shaft
+against the scaly sides of it. Ph&oelig;bus Apollo attempts
+the milder methods of concession and persuasion. 'Python,'
+he says, 'in days when I was ignorant and unjust I struck
+you down and bound you. I left officers and men with you
+of my own race to watch you, to teach you, to rule you; to
+force you, if your own nature could not be changed, to
+leave your venomous ways. You have refused to be
+taught, you twist in your chains, you bite and tear, and
+when you can you steal and murder. I see that I was
+wrong from the first. Every creature has a right to live<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span>
+according to its own disposition. I was a tyrant, and you
+did well to resist; I ask you to forgive and forget. I set you
+free; I hand you over my own representatives as a pledge of
+my goodwill, that you may devour them at your leisure. They
+have been the instruments of my oppression; consume them,
+destroy them, do what you will with them; and henceforward
+I hope that we shall live together as friends, and that you will
+show yourself worthy of my generosity and of the freedom
+which you have so gloriously won.'</p>
+
+<p>A sun-god who thus addressed a disobedient satellite might
+have the eloquence of a Demosthenes and the finest of the
+fine intentions which pave the road to the wrong place, but he
+would not be a divinity who would command the willing confidence
+of a high-spirited kindred. Great Britain will make
+the tie which holds the colonies to her a real one when she
+shows them and shows the world that she is still equal to her
+great place, that her arm is not shortened and her heart has
+not grown faint.</p>
+
+<p>Men speak of the sacredness of liberty. They talk as if the
+will of everyone ought to be his only guide, that allegiance is
+due only to majorities, that allegiance of any other kind is
+base and a relic of servitude. The Americans are the freest
+people in the world; but in their freedom they have to obey
+the fundamental laws of the Union. Again and again in the
+West Indies Mr. Motley's words came back to me. To be
+taken into the American Union is to be adopted into a partnership.
+To belong as a Crown colony to the British Empire, as
+things stand, is no partnership at all. It is to belong to a
+power which sacrifices, as it has always sacrificed, the interest
+of its dependencies to its own. The blood runs freely through
+every vein and artery of the American body corporate. Every
+single citizen feels his share in the life of his nation. Great
+Britain leaves her Crown colonies to take care of themselves,
+refuses what they ask, and forces on them what they had
+rather be without. If I were a West Indian I should feel that
+under the stars and stripes I should be safer than I was at
+present from political experimenting. I should have a market<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span>
+in which to sell my produce where I should be treated as a
+friend; I should have a power behind me and protecting me,
+and I should have a future to which I could look forward with
+confidence. America would restore me to home and life;
+Great Britain allows me to sink, contenting herself with advising
+me to be patient. Why should I continue loyal when my
+loyalty was so contemptuously valued?</p>
+
+<p>But I will not believe that it will come to this. An Englishman
+may be heavily tempted, but in evil fortune as in good
+his heart is in the old place. The administration of our affairs
+is taken for the present from prudent statesmen, and is made
+over to those who know how best to flatter the people with
+fine-sounding sentiments and idle adulation. All sovereigns
+have been undone by flatterers. The people are sovereign
+now, and, being new to power, listen to those who feed their
+vanity. The popular orator has been the ruin of every
+country which has trusted to him. He never speaks an unwelcome
+truth, for his existence depends on pleasing, and he
+cares only to tickle the ears of his audience. His element is
+anarchy; his function is to undo what better men have done.
+In wind he lives and moves and has his being. When the
+gods are angry, he can raise it to a hurricane and lay waste
+whole nations in ruin and revolution. It was said long ago, a
+man full of words shall not prosper upon the earth. Times
+have changed, for in these days no one prospers so well. Can
+he make a speech? is the first question which the constituencies
+ask when a candidate is offered to their suffrages.
+When the Roman commonwealth developed from an aristocratic
+republic into a democracy, and, as now with us, the
+sovereignty was in the mass of the people, the oratorical
+faculty came to the front in the same way. The finest speaker
+was esteemed the fittest man to be made a consul or a pr&aelig;tor
+of, and there were schools of rhetoric where aspirants for office
+had to go to learn gesture and intonation before they could
+present themselves at the hustings. The sovereign people and
+their orators could do much, but they could not alter facts,
+or make that which was not, to be, or that which was, not to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span>
+be. The orators could perorate and the people could decree,
+but facts remained and facts proved the strongest, and the end
+of that was that after a short supremacy the empire which they
+had brought to the edge of ruin was saved at the last extremity;
+the sovereign people lost their liberties, and the
+tongues of political orators were silenced for centuries. Illusion
+at last takes the form of broken heads, and the most
+obstinate credulity is not proof against that form of argument.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER XXII.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Going home&mdash;Retrospect&mdash;Alternative courses&mdash;Future of the Empire&mdash;Sovereignty
+of the sea&mdash;The Greeks&mdash;The rights of man&mdash;Plato&mdash;The
+voice of the people&mdash;Imperial federation&mdash;Hereditary colonial policy&mdash;New
+Irelands&mdash;Effects of party government.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Once more upon the sea on our homeward way, carrying, as
+Emerson said, 'the bag of &AElig;olus in the boiler of our boat,'
+careless whether there be wind or calm. Our old naval heroes
+passed and repassed upon the same waters under harder conditions.
+They had to struggle against tempests, to fight with
+enemy's cruisers, to battle for their lives with nature as with
+man&mdash;and they were victorious over them all. They won for
+Britannia the sceptre of the sea, and built up the Empire on
+which the sun never sets. To us, their successors, they
+handed down the splendid inheritance, and we in turn have
+invented steam ships and telegraphs, and thrown bridges over
+the ocean, and made our far-off possessions as easy of access
+as the next parish. The attractive force of the primary ought
+to have increased in the same ratio, but we do not find that it
+has, and the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies of our
+satellites are year by year becoming more nicely balanced.
+These beautiful West Indian Islands were intended to be
+homes for the overflowing numbers of our own race, and the
+few that have gone there are being crowded out by the blacks
+from Jamaica and the Antilles. Our poor helots at home drag<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span>
+on their lives in the lanes and alleys of our choking cities, and
+of those who gather heart to break off on their own account
+and seek elsewhere for a land of promise, the large majority
+are weary of the flag under which they have only known
+suffering, and prefer America to the English colonies. They
+are waking now to understand the opportunities which are
+slipping through their hands. Has the awakening come too
+late? We have ourselves mixed the cup; must we now drink
+it the dregs?</p>
+
+<p>It is too late to enable us to make homes in the West
+Indies for the swarms who are thrown off by our own towns
+and villages. We might have done it. Englishmen would
+have thriven as well in Jamaica and the Antilles as the
+Spaniards have thriven in Cuba. But the islands are now
+peopled by men of another colour. The whites there are as
+units among hundreds, and the proportion cannot be altered.
+But it is not too late to redeem our own responsibilities. We
+brought the blacks there; we have as yet not done much for
+their improvement, when their notions of morality are still so
+elementary that more than half of their children are born out
+of marriage. The English planters were encouraged to settle
+there when it suited our convenience to maintain the islands
+for Imperial purposes; like the landlords in Ireland, they
+were our English garrison; and as with the landlords in
+Ireland, when we imagine that they have served their purpose
+and can be no longer of use to us, we calmly change the
+conditions of society. We disclaim obligations to help
+them in the confusion which we have introduced; we tell
+them to help themselves, and they cannot help themselves
+in such an element as that in which they are now struggling,
+unless they know that they may count on the sympathy
+and the support of their countrymen at home. Nothing
+is demanded of the English exchequer; the resources of
+the islands are practically boundless; there is a robust
+population conscious at the bottom of their native inferiority,
+and docile and willing to work if anyone will
+direct them and set them to it. There will be capital enough<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span>
+forthcoming, and energetic men enough and intelligence
+enough, if we on our part will provide one thing, the easiest of
+all if we really set our minds to it&mdash;an effective and authoritative
+government. It is not safe even for ourselves to leave a
+wound unattended to, though it be in the least significant part
+of our bodies. The West Indies are a small limb in the great
+body corporate of the British Empire, but there is no great
+and no small in the life of nations. The avoidable decay of
+the smallest member is an injury to the whole. Let it be
+once known and felt that England regards the West Indies as
+essentially one with herself, and the English in the islands will
+resume their natural position, and respect and order will come
+back, and those once thriving colonies will again advance with
+the rest on the high road of civilisation and prosperity. Let
+it be known that England considers only her immediate
+interests and will not exert herself, and the other colonies will
+know what they have to count upon, and the British Empire
+will dwindle down before long into a single insignificant island
+in the North Sea.</p>
+
+<p>So end the reflections which I formed there from what I
+saw and what I heard. I have written as an outside observer
+unconnected with practical politics, with no motive except a
+loyal pride in the greatness of my own country, and a conviction,
+which I will not believe to be a dream, that the destinies have
+still in store for her a yet grander future. The units of us
+come and go; the British Empire, the globe itself and all that
+it inherits, will pass away as a vision.</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left:16em">
+<span class="greek">&#7956;&#963;&#963;&#949;&#964;&#945;&#953; &#7968;&#956;&#945;&#961; &#8005;&#964;&#945;&#957; &#960;&#959;&#964;&#8125; &#8000;&#955;&#8061;&#955;&#951; &#7997;&#955;&#953;&#959;&#962; &#7985;&#961;&#8052;<br />
+&#954;&#945;&#8054; &#928;&#961;&#8055;&#945;&#956;&#959;&#962; &#954;&#945;&#8054; &#955;&#945;&#8056;&#962; &#7952;&#965;&#956;&#956;&#949;&#955;&#8055;&#969; &#928;&#961;&#953;&#8049;&#956;&#959;&#953;&#959;</span>.<br />
+<br />
+The day will be when Ilium's towers may fall,<br />
+And large-limbed<a name="FNanchor_1_17" id="FNanchor_1_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_17" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> Priam, and his people all.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But that day cannot be yet. Out of the now half-organic
+fragments may yet be formed one living Imperial power, with
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span>a new era of beneficence and usefulness to mankind. The
+English people are spread far and wide. The sea is their
+dominion, and their land is the finest portion of the globe.
+It is theirs now, it will be theirs for ages to come if they
+remain themselves unchanged and keep the heart and temper
+of their forefathers.</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+Naught shall make us rue,<br />
+If England to herself do rest but true.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The days pass, and our ship flies fast upon her way.</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left:18em">
+<span class="greek">&#947;&#955;&#945;&#965;&#954;&#8056;&#957; &#8017;&#960;&#8050;&#961; &#959;&#8150;&#948;&#956;&#945; &#954;&#965;&#945;&#957;&#8057;&#967;&#961;&#959;&#8049; &#964;&#949; &#954;&#965;&#956;&#8049;&#964;&#969;&#957;<br />
+&#8165;&#8057;&#952;&#953;&#945; &#960;&#959;&#955;&#953;&#8048; &#952;&#945;&#955;&#8049;&#963;&#963;&#945;&#962;</span>.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>How perfect the description! How exactly in those eight
+words Euripides draws the picture of the ocean; the long
+grey heaving swell, the darker steel-grey on the shadowed
+slope of the surface waves, and the foam on their breaking
+crests. Our thoughts flow back as we gaze to the times long
+ago, when the earth belonged to other races as it now belongs
+to us. The ocean is the same as it was. Their eyes saw it
+as we see it:</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+Time writes no wrinkle on that azure brow.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Nor is the ocean alone the same. Human nature is still
+vexed with the same problems, mocked with the same hopes,
+wandering after the same illusions. The sea affected the
+Greeks as it affects us, and was equally dear to them. It was
+a Greek who said, 'The sea washes off all the ills of men;' the
+'stainless one' as &AElig;schylus called it&mdash;the eternally pure.
+On long voyages I take Greeks as my best companions. I
+had Plato with me on my way home from the West Indies.
+He lived and wrote in an age like ours, when religion had
+become a debatable subject on which every one had his
+opinion, and democracy was master of the civilised world, and
+the Mediterranean states were running wild after liberty,
+preparatory to the bursting of the bubble. Looking out on
+such a world Plato left thoughts behind him the very language<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span>
+of which is as full of application to our own larger world as if
+it was written yesterday. It throws light on small things as
+well as large, and interprets alike the condition of the islands
+which I had left, the condition of England, the condition of
+all civilised countries in this modern epoch.</p>
+
+<p>The chief characteristic of this age, as it was the chief
+characteristic of Plato's, is the struggle for what we call the
+'rights of man.' In other times the thing insisted on was
+that men should do what was 'right' as something due to a
+higher authority. Now the demand is for what is called their
+'rights' as something due to themselves, and among these
+rights is a right to liberty; liberty meaning the utmost possible
+freedom of every man consistent with the freedom of others,
+and the abolition of every kind of authority of one man over
+another. It is with this view that we have introduced popular
+suffrage, that we give everyone a vote, or aim at giving it, as
+the highest political perfection.</p>
+
+<p>We turn to Plato and we find: 'In a healthy community
+there ought to be some authority over every single man and
+woman. No person&mdash;not one&mdash;ought to act on his or her
+judgment alone even in the smallest trifle. The soldier on a
+campaign obeys his commander in little things as well as
+great. The safety of the army requires it. But it is in peace
+as it is in war, and there is no difference. Every person
+should be trained from childhood to rule and to be ruled. So
+only can the life of man, and the life of all creatures dependent
+on him, be delivered from anarchy.'</p>
+
+<p>It is worth while to observe how diametrically opposite to
+our notions on this subject were the notions of a man of the
+finest intellect, with the fullest opportunities of observation,
+and every one of whose estimates of things was confirmed by
+the event. Such a discipline as he recommends never existed
+in any community of men except perhaps among the religious
+orders in the enthusiasm of their first institution, nor would a
+society be long tolerable in which it was tried. Communities,
+however, have existed where people have thought more of their
+obligations than of their 'rights,' more of the welfare of their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>
+country, or of the success of a cause to which they have
+devoted themselves, than of their personal pleasure or interest&mdash;have
+preferred the wise leading of superior men to their
+own wills and wishes. Nay, perhaps no community has ever
+continued long, or has made a mark in the world of serious
+significance, where society has not been graduated in degrees,
+and there have not been deeper and stronger bands of coherence
+than the fluctuating votes of majorities.</p>
+
+<p>Times are changed we are told. We live in a new era,
+when public opinion is king, and no other rule is possible;
+public opinion, as expressed in the press and on the platform,
+and by the deliberately chosen representatives of the people.
+Every question can be discussed and argued, all sides of it
+can be heard, and the nation makes up its mind. The collective
+judgment of all is wiser than the wisest single man&mdash;<i>securus
+judicat orbis</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Give the public time, and I believe this to be true; general
+opinion does in the long run form a right estimate of most
+persons and of most things. As surely its immediate impulses
+are almost invariably in directions which it afterwards regrets
+and repudiates, and therefore constitutions which have no
+surer basis than the popular judgment, as it shifts from year
+to year or parliament to parliament, are built on foundations
+looser than sand.</p>
+
+<p>In concluding this book I have a few more words to say on
+the subject, so ardently canvassed, of Imperial federation.
+It seems so easy. You have only to form a new parliament
+in which the colonies shall be represented according to
+numbers, while each colony will retain its own for its own
+local purposes. Local administration is demanded everywhere;
+England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, can each have
+theirs, and the vexed question of Home Rule can be disposed
+of in the reconstruction of the whole. A central parliament
+can then be formed in which the parts can all be represented
+in proportion to their number; and a cabinet can be selected
+out of this for the management of Imperial concerns.
+Nothing more is necessary; the thing will be done.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>So in a hundred forms, but all on the same principle,
+schemes of Imperial union have fallen under my eye. I
+should myself judge from experience of what democratically
+elected parliaments are growing into, that at the first session
+of such a body the satellites would fly off into space, shattered
+perhaps themselves in the process. We have parliaments
+enough already, and if no better device can be found than by
+adding another to the number, the rash spirit of innovation
+has not yet gone far enough to fling our ancient constitution
+into the crucible on so wild a chance.</p>
+
+<p>Imperial federation, as it is called, is far away, if ever it is
+to be realised at all. If it is to come it will come of itself,
+brought about by circumstances and silent impulses working
+continuously through many years unseen and unspoken of.
+It is conceivable that Great Britain and her scattered offspring,
+under the pressure of danger from without, or
+impelled by some general purpose, might agree to place
+themselves for a time under a single administrative head.
+It is conceivable that out of a combination so formed, if it
+led to a successful immediate result, some union of a closer
+kind might eventually emerge. It is not only conceivable,
+but it is entirely certain, that attempts made when no such
+occasion has arisen, by politicians ambitious of distinguishing
+themselves, will fail, and in failing will make the object that
+is aimed at more confessedly unattainable than it is now.</p>
+
+<p>The present relation between the mother country and her
+self-governed colonies is partly that of parent and children
+who have grown to maturity and are taking care of themselves,
+partly of independent nations in friendly alliance, partly as
+common subjects of the same sovereign, whose authority is
+exercised in each by ministers of its own. Neither of these
+analogies is exact, for the position alters from year to year.
+So much the better. The relation which now exists cannot
+be more than provisional; let us not try to shape it artificially,
+after a closet-made pattern. The threads of interest and
+kindred must be left to spin themselves in their own way.
+Meanwhile we can work together heartily and with good will<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span>
+where we need each other's co-operation. Difficulties will
+rise, perhaps, from time to time, but we can meet them as
+they come, and we need not anticipate them. If we are to
+be politically one, the organic fibres which connect us are as
+yet too immature to bear a strain. All that we can do, and
+all that at present we ought to try, is to act generously whenever
+our assistance can be of use. The disposition of English
+statesmen to draw closer to the colonies is of recent growth.
+They cannot tell, and we cannot tell, how far it indicates a
+real change of attitude or is merely a passing mood. One
+thing, however, we ought to bear in mind, that the colonies
+sympathise one with another, and that wrong or neglect in
+any part of the Empire does not escape notice. The larger
+colonies desire to know what the recent professions of interest
+are worth, and they look keenly at our treatment of their
+younger brothers who are still in our power. They are
+practical, they attend to results, they guard jealously their
+own privileges, but they are not so enamoured of constitutional
+theory that they will patiently see their fellow-countrymen
+in less favoured situations swamped under the votes of
+the coloured races. Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders,
+will not be found enthusiastic for the extension of self-government
+in the West Indies, when they know that it means the
+extinction of their own white brothers who have settled there.
+The placing English colonists at the mercy of coloured majorities
+they will resent as an injury to themselves; they will
+not look upon it as an extension of a generous principle, but
+as an act of airy virtue which costs us nothing, and at the
+bottom is but carelessness and indifference.</p>
+
+<p>We imagine that we have seen the errors of our old
+colonial policy, and that we are in no danger of repeating
+them. Yet in the West Indies we are treading over again
+the too familiar road. The Anglo-Irish colonists in 1705
+petitioned for a union with Great Britain. A union would
+have involved a share in British trade; it was refused therefore,
+and we gave them the penal laws instead. They set
+up manufactures, built ships, and tried to raise a commerce<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span>
+of their own. We laid them under disabilities which ruined
+their enterprises, and when they were resentful and became
+troublesome we turned round to the native Irish and made
+a virtue of protecting them against our own people whom we
+had injured. When the penal laws ceased to be useful to
+us, we did not allow them to be executed. We played off
+Catholic against Protestant while we were sacrificing both
+to our own jealousy. Having made the government of the
+island impossible for those whom we had planted there to
+govern it, we emancipate the governed, and to conciliate them
+we allow them to appropriate the possessions of their late
+masters. And we have not conciliated the native Irish; it
+was impossible that we should; we have simply armed them
+with the only weapons which enable them to revenge their
+wrongs upon us.</p>
+
+<p>The history of the West Indies is a precise parallel. The
+islands were necessary to our safety in our struggle with France
+and Spain. The colonists held them chiefly for us as a
+garrison, and we in turn gave the colonists their slaves. The
+white settlers ruled as in Ireland, the slaves obeyed, and all
+went swimmingly. Times changed at home. Slavery became
+unpopular; it was abolished; and, with a generosity for which
+we never ceased to applaud ourselves, we voted an indemnity
+of twenty millions to the owners. We imagined that we had
+acquitted our consciences, but such debts are not discharged
+by payments of money. We had introduced the slaves into
+the islands for our own advantage; in setting them free we
+revolutionised society. We remained still responsible for the
+social consequences, and we did not choose to remember it.
+The planters were guilty only, like the Irish landlords, of
+having ceased to be necessary to us. We practised our virtues
+vicariously at their expense: we had the praise and honour,
+they had the suffering. They begged that the emancipation
+might be gradual; our impatience to clear our reputation
+refused to wait. Their system of cultivation being deranged,
+they petitioned for protection against the competition of
+countries where slavery continued. The request was natural,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span>
+but could not be listened to because to grant it might raise
+infinitesimally the cost of the British workman's breakfast.
+They struggled on, and even when a new rival rose in the beetroot
+sugar they refused to be beaten. The European powers,
+to save their beetroot, went on to support it with a bounty.
+Against the purse of foreign governments the sturdiest individuals
+cannot compete. Defeated in a fight which had become
+unfair, the planters looked, and looked in vain, to their own
+government for help. Finding none, they turned to their
+kindred in the United States; and there, at last, they found a
+hand held out to them. The Americans were willing, though
+at a loss of two millions and a half of revenue, to admit the
+poor West Indians to their own market. But a commercial
+treaty was necessary; and a treaty could not be made without
+the sanction of the English Government. The English Government,
+on some fine-drawn crotchet, refused to colonies which
+were weak and helpless what they would have granted without
+a word if demanded by Victoria or New South Wales, whose
+resentment they feared. And when the West Indians, harassed,
+desperate, and half ruined, cried out against the enormous injustice,
+in the fear that their indignation might affect their
+allegiance and lead them to seek admission into the American
+Union, we extend the franchise among the blacks, on whose
+hostility to such a measure we know that we can rely.</p>
+
+<p>There is no occasion to suspect responsible English politicians
+of any sinister purpose in what they have done or not
+done, or suspect them, indeed, of any purpose at all. They
+act from day to day under the pressure of each exigency as it
+rises, and they choose the course which is least directly
+inconvenient. But the result is to have created in the Antilles
+and Jamaica so many fresh Irelands, and I believe that British
+colonists the world over will feel together in these questions.
+They will not approve; rather they will combine to condemn
+the betrayal of their own fellow-countrymen. If England
+desires her colonies to rally round her, she must deserve their
+affection and deserve their respect. She will find neither one
+nor the other if she carelessly sacrifices her own people in any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span>
+part of the world to fear or convenience. The magnetism
+which will bind them to her must be found in herself or nowhere.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps nowhere! Perhaps if we look to the real origin of
+all that has gone wrong with us, of the policy which has flung
+Ireland back into anarchy, which has weakened our influence
+abroad, which has ruined the oldest of our colonies, and has
+made the continuance under our flag of the great communities
+of our countrymen who are forming new nations in the Pacific
+a question of doubt and uncertainty, we shall find it in our
+own distractions, in the form of government which is fast
+developing into a civil war under the semblance of peace,
+where party is more than country, and a victory at the hustings
+over a candidate of opposite principles more glorious than a
+victory in the field over a foreign foe. Society in republican
+Rome was so much interested in the faction fights of Clodius
+and Milo that it could hear with apathy of the destruction of
+Crassus and a Roman army. The senate would have sold
+C&aelig;sar to the Celtic chiefs in Gaul, and the modern English
+enthusiast would disintegrate the British Islands to purchase
+the Irish vote. Till we can rise into some nobler sphere of
+thought and conduct we may lay aside the vision of a confederated
+empire.</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left:14em">
+Oh, England, model to thy inward greatness,<br />
+Like little body with a mighty heart,<br />
+What might'st thou do that honour would thee do<br />
+Were all thy children kind and natural!<br />
+</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_17" id="Footnote_1_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_17"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> I believe this to be the true meaning of
+&#7952;&#965;&#956;&#956;&#949;&#955;&#8055;&#951;&#962;. It is usually
+rendered, 'armed with a stout spear.'</p></div></div>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Kelly &amp; Co.</span>, Printers, Gate Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, W.C.; and Kingston-on-Thames.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The English in the West Indies, by 
+James Anthony Froude
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+Project Gutenberg's The English in the West Indies, by James Anthony Froude
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The English in the West Indies
+       or, The Bow of Ulysses
+
+Author: James Anthony Froude
+
+Release Date: June 7, 2010 [EBook #32728]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENGLISH IN THE WEST INDIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Jane Hyland and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: MOUNTAIN CRATER, DOMINICA.]
+
+
+
+
+THE ENGLISH
+
+IN
+
+THE WEST INDIES
+
+OR
+
+THE BOW OF ULYSSES
+
+BY
+
+JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS ENGRAVED ON WOOD BY G. PEARSON
+AFTER DRAWINGS BY THE AUTHOR
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+NEW EDITION
+
+
+LONDON
+
+LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
+
+1888
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+    Fuersten praegen so oft auf kaum versilbertes Kupfer
+    Ihr bedeutendes Bild: lange betruegt sich das Volk
+    Schwaermer praegen den Stempel des Geist's auf Luegen und Unsinn:
+    Wem der Probirstein fehlt, haelt sie fuer redliches Gold.
+
+    GOETHE.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION.
+
+My purpose in writing this book is so fully explained in the book itself
+that a Preface is unnecessary. I visited the West India Islands in order
+to increase my acquaintance with the condition of the British Colonies.
+I have related what I saw and what I heard, with the general impressions
+which I was led to form.
+
+In a few instances, when opinions were conveyed to me which were
+important in themselves, but which it might be undesirable to assign to
+the persons from whom I heard them, I have altered initials and
+disguised localities and circumstances.
+
+The illustrations are from sketches of my own, which, except so far as
+they are tolerably like the scenes which they represent, are without
+value. They have been made producible by the skill and care of the
+engraver, Mr. Pearson, to whom my warmest thanks are due.
+
+    J.A.F.
+
+    ONSLOW GARDENS: _November 15, 1887_.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+    CHAPTER I.
+
+                                                                  PAGE
+
+    Colonial policy--Union or separation--Self-government--Varieties of
+    condition--The Pacific colonies--The West Indies--Proposals
+    for a West Indian federation--Nature of the population--American
+    union and British plantations--Original conquest of
+    the West Indies                                                  1
+
+
+    CHAPTER II.
+
+    In the train for Southampton--Morning papers--The new 'Locksley
+    Hall'--Past and present--The 'Moselle'--Heavy weather--The
+    Petrel--The Azores                                              10
+
+
+    CHAPTER III.
+
+    The tropics--Passengers on board--Account of the Darien
+    canal--Planters' complaints--West Indian history--The Spanish
+    conquest--Drake and Hawkins--The buccaneers--The pirates--French
+    and English--Rodney--Battle of April 12--Peace with honour--Doers
+    and talkers                                                     20
+
+
+    CHAPTER IV.
+
+    First sight of Barbadoes--Origin of the name--Pere Labat--Bridgetown
+    two hundred years ago--Slavery and Christianity--Economic
+    crisis--Sugar bounties--Aspect of the streets--Government
+    House and its occupants--Duties of a governor of Barbadoes      32
+
+
+    CHAPTER V.
+
+    West Indian politeness--Negro morals and felicity--Island of St.
+    Vincent--Grenada--The harbour--Disappearance of the whites--An
+    island of black freeholders--Tobago--Dramatic art--A
+    promising incident                                              41
+
+
+    CHAPTER VI.
+
+    Charles Kingsley at Trinidad--'Lay of the Last Buccaneer'--A
+    French _forban_--Adventure at Aves--Mass on board a pirate ship--Port
+    of Spain--A house in the tropics--A political meeting--Government
+    House--The Botanical Gardens--Kingsley's rooms--Sugar
+    estates and coolies                                             51
+
+
+    CHAPTER VII.
+
+    A coolie village--Negro freeholds--Waterworks--Snakes--Slavery--
+    Evidence of Lord Rodney--Future of the negroes--Necessity of
+    English rule--The Blue Basin--Black boy and crayfish            66
+
+
+    CHAPTER VIII.
+
+    Home Rule in Trinidad--Political aspirations--Nature of the
+    problem--Crown administration--Colonial governors--A Russian
+    apologue--Dinner at Government House--'The Three Fishers'--Charles
+    Warner--Alternative futures of the colony                       75
+
+
+    CHAPTER IX.
+
+    Barbadoes again--Social condition of the island--Political
+    constitution--Effects of the sugar bounties--Dangers of general
+    bankruptcy--The Hall of Assembly--Sir Charles Pearson--Society
+    in Bridgetown--A morning drive--Church of St. John's--Sir
+    Graham Briggs--An old planter's palace--The Chief Justice of
+    Barbadoes                                                       88
+
+
+    CHAPTER X.
+
+    Leeward and Windward Islands--The Caribs of Dominica--Visit of
+    Pere Labat--St. Lucia--The Pitons--The harbour at Castries--Intended
+    coaling station--Visit to the administrator--The old
+    fort and barracks--Conversation with an American--Constitution
+    of Dominica--Land at Roseau                                    113
+
+
+    CHAPTER XI.
+
+    Curiosities in Dominica--Nights in the tropics--English and Catholic
+    churches--The market place at Roseau--Fishing extraordinary--A
+    storm--Dominican boatmen--Morning walks--Effects of the
+    Leeward Islands Confederation--An estate cultivated as it ought
+    to be--A mountain ride--Leave the island--Reflections          132
+
+
+    CHAPTER XII.
+
+    The Darien canal--Jamaican mail packet--Captain W.--Retrospect
+    of Jamaican history--Waterspout at sea--Hayti--Jacmel--A
+    walk through the town--A Jamaican planter--First sight of the
+    Blue Mountains--Port Royal--Kingston--The Colonial Secretary--Gordon
+    riots--Changes in the Jamaican constitution                    155
+
+
+    CHAPTER XIII.
+
+    The English mails--Irish agitation--Two kinds of colonies--Indian
+    administration--How far applicable in the West Indies--Land at
+    Kingston--Government House--Dinner party--Interesting
+    officer--Majuba Hill--Mountain station--Kingston
+    curiosities--Tobacco--Valley in the Blue Mountains             180
+
+
+    CHAPTER XIV.
+
+    Visit to Port Royal--Dockyard--Town--Church--Fort Augusta--The
+    eyrie in the mountains--Ride to Newcastle--Society in
+    Jamaica--Religious bodies--Liberty and authority               195
+
+
+    CHAPTER XV.
+
+    The Church of England in Jamaica--Drive to Castleton--Botanical
+    Gardens--Picnic by the river--Black women--Ball at Government
+    House--Mandeville--Miss Roy--Country society--Manners--American
+    visitors--A Moravian missionary--The modern
+    Radical creed                                                  208
+
+
+    CHAPTER XVI.
+
+    Jamaican hospitality--Cherry Garden--George William Gordon--The
+    Gordon riots--Governor Eyre--A dispute and its consequences--Jamaican
+    country-house society--Modern speculation--A
+    Spanish fable--Port Royal--The commodore--Naval theatricals--The
+    modern sailor                                                  224
+
+
+    CHAPTER XVII.
+
+    Present state of Jamaica--Test of progress--Resources of the
+    island--Political alternatives--Black supremacy and probable
+    consequences--The West Indian problem                          243
+
+
+    CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+    Passage to Cuba--A Canadian commissioner--Havana--The Moro--The
+    city and harbour--Cuban money--American visitors--The
+    cathedral--Tomb of Columbus--New friends--The late rebellion--Slave
+    emancipation--Spain and progress--A bull fight                 253
+
+
+    CHAPTER XIX.
+
+    Hotels in Havana--Sights in the city--Cigar manufactories--West
+    Indian industries--The Captain-General--The Jesuit college--Father
+    Vinez--Clubs in Havana--Spanish aristocracy--Sea
+    lodging house                                                  272
+
+
+    CHAPTER XX.
+
+    Return to Havana--The Spaniards in Cuba--Prospects--American
+    influence--Future of the West Indies--English rumours--Leave
+    Cuba--The harbour at night--The Bahama Channel--Hayti--Port
+    au Prince--The black republic--West Indian history             291
+
+
+    CHAPTER XXI.
+
+    Return to Jamaica--Cherry Garden again--Black servants--Social
+    conditions--Sir Henry Norman--King's House once more--Negro
+    suffrage--The will of the people--The Irish python--Conditions
+    of colonial union--Oratory and statesmanship                   308
+
+    CHAPTER XXII.
+
+    Going home--Retrospect--Alternative courses--Future of the
+    Empire--Sovereignty of the sea--The Greeks--The rights of
+    man--Plato--The voice of the people--Imperial federation--Hereditary
+    colonial policy--New Irelands--Effects of party government     318
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+    Mountain Crater, Dominica                        _Frontispiece_
+    Silk Cotton Tree, Jamaica                         _Title page_
+    Blue Basin, Trinidad                             _To face page_ 72
+    Morning Walk, Dominica                                         136
+    Port Royal, Jamaica                                            171
+    Valley in the Blue Mountains, Jamaica                          194
+    Kingston and Harbour, from Cherry Gardens                      234
+    Havana, from the Quarries                                      258
+    Port au Prince, Hayti                                          288
+
+
+
+
+THE ENGLISH IN THE WEST INDIES.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+    Colonial policy--Union or separation--Self-government--Varieties of
+    condition--The Pacific colonies--The West Indies--Proposals for a
+    West Indian federation--Nature of the population--American union and
+    British plantations--Original conquest of the West Indies.
+
+
+The Colonial Exhibition has come and gone. Delegates from our great
+self-governed dependencies have met and consulted together, and have
+determined upon a common course of action for Imperial defence. The
+British race dispersed over the world have celebrated the Jubilee of the
+Queen with an enthusiasm evidently intended to bear a special and
+peculiar meaning. The people of these islands and their sons and
+brothers and friends and kinsfolk in Canada, in Australia, and in New
+Zealand have declared with a general voice, scarcely disturbed by a
+discord, that they are fellow-subjects of a single sovereign, that they
+are united in feeling, united in loyalty, united in interest, and that
+they wish and mean to preserve unbroken the integrity of the British
+Empire. This is the answer which the democracy has given to the
+advocates of the doctrine of separation. The desire for union while it
+lasts is its own realisation. As long as we have no wish to part we
+shall not part, and the wish can never rise if when there is occasion we
+can meet and deliberate together with the same regard for each other's
+welfare which has been shown in the late conference in London.
+
+Events mock at human foresight, and nothing is certain but the
+unforeseen. Constitutional government and an independent executive were
+conferred upon our larger colonies, with the express and scarcely veiled
+intention that at the earliest moment they were to relieve the mother
+country of responsibility for them. They were regarded as fledgelings
+who are fed only by the parent birds till their feathers are grown, and
+are then expected to shift for themselves. They were provided with the
+full plumage of parliamentary institutions on the home pattern and
+model, and the expectation of experienced politicians was that they
+would each at the earliest moment go off on their separate accounts, and
+would bid us a friendly farewell. The irony of fate has turned to folly
+the wisdom of the wise. The wise themselves, the same political party
+which were most anxious twenty years ago to see the colonies
+independent, and contrived constitutions for them which they conceived
+must inevitably lead to separation, appeal now to the effect of those
+very constitutions in drawing the Empire closer together, as a reason
+why a similar method should be immediately adopted to heal the
+differences between Great Britain and Ireland. New converts to any
+belief, political or theological, are proverbially zealous, and perhaps
+in this instance they are over-hasty. It does not follow that because
+people of the same race and character are drawn together by equality and
+liberty, people of different races and different characters, who have
+quarrelled for centuries, will be similarly attracted to one another.
+Yet so far as our own colonies are concerned it is clear that the
+abandonment by the mother country of all pretence to interfere in their
+internal management has removed the only cause which could possibly have
+created a desire for independence. We cannot, even if we wish it
+ourselves, shake off connections who cost us nothing and themselves
+refuse to be divided. Politicians may quarrel; the democracies have
+refused to quarrel; and the result of the wide extension of the suffrage
+throughout the Empire has been to show that being one the British people
+everywhere intend to remain one. With the same blood, the same
+language, the same habits, the same traditions, they do not mean to be
+shattered into dishonoured fragments. All of us, wherever we are, can
+best manage our own affairs within our own limits; yet local spheres of
+self-management can revolve round a common centre while there is a
+centripetal power sufficient to hold them; and so long as England 'to
+herself is true' and continues worthy of her ancient reputation, there
+are no causes working visibly above the political horizon which are
+likely to induce our self-governed colonies to take wing and leave us.
+The strain will come with the next great war. During peace these
+colonies have only experienced the advantage of union with us. They will
+then have to share our dangers, and may ask why they are to be involved
+in quarrels which are not of their own making. How they will act then
+only experience can tell; and that there is any doubt about it is a
+sufficient answer to those rapid statesmen who would rush at once into
+the application of the same principle to countries whose continuance
+with us is vital to our own safety, whom we cannot part with though they
+were to demand it at the cannon's mouth.
+
+But the result of the experiment is an encouragement as far as it has
+gone to those who would extend self-government through the whole of our
+colonial system. It seems to lead as a direct road into the 'Imperial
+Federation' which has fascinated the general imagination. It removes
+friction. We relieve ourselves of responsibilities. If federation is to
+come about at all as a definite and effective organisation, the
+spontaneous action of the different members of the Empire in a position
+in which they are free to stay with us or to leave us as they please,
+appears the readiest and perhaps the only means by which it can be
+brought to pass. So plausible is the theory, so obviously right would it
+be were the problem as simple and the population of all our colonies as
+homogeneous as in Australia, that one cannot wonder at the ambition of
+politicians to win themselves a name and achieve a great result by the
+immediate adoption of it. Great results generally imply effort and
+sacrifice. Here effort is unnecessary and sacrifice is not demanded.
+Everybody is to have what he wishes, and the effect is to come about of
+itself. When we think of India, when we think of Ireland, prudence tells
+us to hesitate. Steps once taken in this direction cannot be undone,
+even if found to lead to the wrong place. But undoubtedly, wherever it
+is possible, the principle of self-government ought to be applied in our
+colonies and will be applied, and the danger now is that it will be
+tried in haste in countries either as yet unripe for it or from the
+nature of things unfit for it. The liberties which we grant freely to
+those whom we trust and who do not require to be restrained, we bring
+into disrepute if we concede them as readily to perversity or
+disaffection or to those who, like most Asiatics, do not desire liberty,
+and prosper best when they are led and guided.
+
+In this complex empire of ours the problem presents itself in many
+shapes, and each must be studied and dealt with according to its
+character. There is the broad distinction between colonies and conquered
+countries. Colonists are part of ourselves. Foreigners attached by force
+to our dominions may submit to be ruled by us, but will not always
+consent to rule themselves in accordance with our views or interests, or
+remain attached to us if we enable them to leave us when they please.
+The Crown, therefore, as in India, rules directly by the police and the
+army. And there are colonies which are neither one nor the other, where
+our own people have been settled and have been granted the land in
+possession with the control of an insubordinate population, themselves
+claiming political privileges which had to be refused to the rest. This
+was the position of Ireland, and the result of meddling theoretically
+with it ought to have taught us caution. Again, there are colonies like
+the West Indies, either occupied originally by ourselves, as Barbadoes,
+or taken by force from France or Spain, where the mass of the population
+were slaves who have been since made free, but where the extent to which
+the coloured people can be admitted to share in the administration is
+still an unsettled question. To throw countries so variously
+circumstanced under an identical system would be a wild experiment.
+Whether we ought to try such an experiment at all, or even wish to try
+it and prepare the way for it, depends perhaps on whether we have
+determined that under all circumstances the retention of them under our
+own flag is indispensable to our safety.
+
+I had visited our great Pacific colonies. Circumstances led me
+afterwards to attend more particularly to the West ladies. They were the
+earliest, and once the most prized, of all our distant possessions. They
+had been won by the most desperate struggles, and had been the scene of
+our greatest naval glories. In the recent discussion on the possibility
+of an organised colonial federation, various schemes came under my
+notice, in every one of which the union of the West Indian Islands under
+a free parliamentary constitution was regarded as a necessary
+preliminary. I was reminded of a conversation which I had held seventeen
+years ago with a high colonial official specially connected with the
+West Indian department, in which the federation of the islands under
+such a constitution was spoken of as a measure already determined on,
+though with a view to an end exactly the opposite of that which was now
+desired. The colonies universally were then regarded in such quarters as
+a burden upon our resources, of which we were to relieve ourselves at
+the earliest moment. They were no longer of special value to us; the
+whole world had become our market; and whether they were nominally
+attached to the Empire, or were independent, or joined themselves to
+some other power, was of no commercial moment to us. It was felt,
+however, that as long as any tie remained, we should be obliged to
+defend them in time of war; while they, in consequence of their
+connection, would be liable to attack. The sooner, therefore, the
+connection was ended, the better for them and for us.
+
+By the constitutions which had been conferred upon them, Australia and
+Canada, New Zealand and the Cape, were assumed to be practically gone.
+The same measures were to be taken with the West Indies. They were not
+prosperous. They formed no outlet for British emigration; the white
+population was diminishing; they were dissatisfied; they lay close to
+the great American republic, to which geographically they more properly
+belonged. Representative assemblies under the Crown had failed to
+produce the content expected from them or to give an impulse to
+industry. The free negroes could not long be excluded from the
+franchise. The black and white races had not amalgamated and were not
+inclining to amalgamate. The then recent Gordon riots had been followed
+by the suicide of the old Jamaican constitution. The government of
+Jamaica had been flung back upon the Crown, and the Crown was impatient
+of the addition to its obligations. The official of whom I speak
+informed me that a decision had been irrevocably taken. The troops were
+to be withdrawn from the islands, and Jamaica, Trinidad, and the English
+Antilles were to be masters of their own destiny, either to form into
+free communities like the Spanish American republics, or to join the
+United States, or to do what they pleased, with the sole understanding
+that we were to have no more responsibilities.
+
+I do not know how far the scheme was matured. To an outside spectator it
+seemed too hazardous to have been seriously meditated. Yet I was told
+that it had not been meditated only but positively determined upon, and
+that further discussion of a settled question would be fruitless and
+needlessly irritating.
+
+Politicians with a favourite scheme are naturally sanguine. It seemed to
+me that in a West Indian Federation the black race would necessarily be
+admitted to their full rights as citizens. Their numbers enormously
+preponderated, and the late scenes in Jamaica were signs that the two
+colours would not blend into one, that there might be, and even
+inevitably would be, collisions between them which would lead to actions
+which we could not tolerate. The white residents and the negroes had not
+been drawn together by the abolition of slavery, but were further apart
+than ever. The whites, if by superior intelligence they could gain the
+upper hand, would not be allowed to keep it. As little would they submit
+to be ruled by a race whom they despised; and I thought it quite certain
+that something would happen which would compel the British Government to
+interfere again, whether we liked it or not. Liberty in Hayti had been
+followed by a massacre of the French inhabitants, and the French
+settlers had done no worse than we had done to deserve the ill will of
+their slaves. Fortunately opinion changed in England before the
+experiment could be tried. The colonial policy of the doctrinaire
+statesmen was no sooner understood than it was universally condemned,
+and they could not press proposals on the West Indies which the West
+Indians showed so little readiness to meet.
+
+So things drifted on, remaining to appearance as they were. The troops
+were not recalled. A minor confederation was formed in the Leeward
+Antilles. The Windward group was placed under Barbadoes, and islands
+which before had governors of their own passed under subordinate
+administrators. Local councils continued under various conditions, the
+popular element being cautiously and silently introduced. The blacks
+settled into a condition of easy-going peasant proprietors. But so far
+as the white or English interest was concerned, two causes which
+undermined West Indian prosperity continued to operate. So long as sugar
+maintained its price the planters with the help of coolie labour were
+able to struggle on; but the beetroot bounties came to cut from under
+them the industry in which they had placed their main dependence; the
+reports were continually darker of distress and rapidly approaching
+ruin; petitions for protection were not or could not be granted. They
+were losing heart--the worst loss of all; while the Home Government, no
+longer with a view to separation, but with the hope that it might
+produce the same effect which it produced elsewhere, were still looking
+to their old remedy of the extension of the principle of
+self-government. One serious step was taken very recently towards the
+re-establishment of a constitution in Jamaica. It was assumed that it
+had failed before because the blacks were not properly represented. The
+council was again made partially elective, and the black vote was
+admitted on the widest basis. A power was retained by the Crown of
+increasing in case of necessity the nominated official members to a
+number which would counterbalance the elected members; but the power had
+not been acted on and was not perhaps designed to continue, and a
+restless hope was said to have revived among the negroes that the day
+was not far off when Jamaica would be as Hayti and they would have the
+island to themselves.
+
+To a person like myself, to whom the preservation of the British Empire
+appeared to be the only public cause in which just now it was possible
+to feel concern, the problem was extremely interesting. I had no
+prejudice against self-government. I had seen the Australian colonies
+growing under it in health and strength with a rapidity which rivalled
+the progress of the American Union itself. I had observed in South
+Africa that the confusions and perplexities there diminished exactly in
+proportion as the Home Government ceased to interfere. I could not hope
+that as an outsider I could see my way through difficulties where
+practised eyes were at a loss. But it was clear that the West Indies
+were suffering, be the cause what it might. I learnt that a party had
+risen there at last which was actually in favour of a union with
+America, and I wished to find an answer to a question which I had long
+asked myself to no purpose. My old friend Mr. Motley was once speaking
+to me of the probable accession of Canada to the American republic. I
+asked him if he was sure that Canada would like it. 'Like it?' he
+replied. 'Would I like the house of Baring to take me into partnership?'
+To be a partner in the British Empire appeared to me to be at least as
+great a thing as to be a State under the stars and stripes. What was it
+that Canada, what was it that any other colony, would gain by exchanging
+British citizenship for American citizenship? What did America offer to
+those who joined her which we refused to give or neglected to give? Was
+it that Great Britain did not take her colonies into partnership at all?
+was it that while in the United States the blood circulated freely from
+the heart to the extremities, so that 'if one member suffered all the
+body suffered with it,' our colonies were simply (as they used to be
+called) 'plantations,' offshoots from the old stock set down as
+circumstances had dictated in various parts of the globe, but vitally
+detached and left to grow or to wither according to their own inherent
+strength?
+
+At one time the West Indian colonies had been more to us than such
+casual seedlings. They had been precious regarded as jewels, which
+hundreds of thousands of English lives had been sacrificed to tear from
+France and Spain. The Caribbean Sea was the cradle of the Naval Empire
+of Great Britain. There Drake and Hawkins intercepted the golden stream
+which flowed from Panama into the exchequer at Madrid, and furnished
+Philip with the means to carry on his war with the Reformation. The Pope
+had claimed to be lord of the new world as well as of the old, and had
+declared that Spaniards, and only Spaniards, should own territory or
+carry on trade there within the tropics. The seamen of England took up
+the challenge and replied with cannon shot. It was not the Crown, it was
+not the Government, which fought that battle: it was the people of
+England who fought it with their own hands and their own resources.
+Adventurers, buccaneers, corsairs, privateers, call them by what name we
+will, stand as extraordinary, but characteristic figures on the stage of
+history, disowned or acknowledged by their sovereign as suited
+diplomatic convenience. The outlawed pirate of one year was promoted the
+next to be a governor and his country's representative. In those waters,
+the men were formed and trained who drove the Armada through the Channel
+into wreck and ruin. In those waters, in the centuries which followed,
+France and England fought for the ocean empire, and England won it--won
+it on the day when her own politicians' hearts had failed them, and all
+the powers of the world had combined to humiliate her, and Rodney
+shattered the French fleet, saved Gibraltar, and avenged York Town. If
+ever the naval exploits of this country are done into an epic poem--and
+since the Iliad there has been no subject better fitted for such
+treatment or better deserving it--the West Indies will be the scene of
+the most brilliant cantos. For England to allow them to drift away from
+her because they have no immediate marketable value would be a sign that
+she had lost the feelings with which great nations always treasure the
+heroic traditions of their fathers. When those traditions come to be
+regarded as something which concerns them no longer, their greatness is
+already on the wane.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+    In the train for Southampton--Morning papers--The new 'Locksley
+    Hall'--Past and present--The 'Moselle'--Heavy weather--The
+    petrel--The Azores.
+
+
+The last week in December, when the year 1886 was waning to its close, I
+left Waterloo station to join a West Indian mail steamer at Southampton.
+The air was frosty; the fog lay thick over city and river; the Houses of
+Parliament themselves were scarcely visible as I drove across
+Westminster Bridge in the heavy London vapour--a symbol of the cloud
+which was hanging over the immediate political future. The morning
+papers were occupied with Lord Tennyson's new 'Locksley Hall' and Mr.
+Gladstone's remarks upon it. I had read neither; but from the criticisms
+it appeared that Lord Tennyson fancied himself to have seen a change
+pass over England since his boyhood, and a change which was not to his
+mind. The fruit of the new ideas which were then rising from the ground
+had ripened, and the taste was disagreeable to him. The day which had
+followed that 'august sunrise' had not been 'august' at all; and 'the
+beautiful bold brow of Freedom' had proved to have something of brass
+upon it. The 'use and wont' England, the England out of which had risen
+the men who had won her great position for her, was losing its old
+characteristics. Things which in his eager youth Lord Tennyson had
+despised he saw now that he had been mistaken in despising; and the new
+notions which were to remake the world were not remaking it in a shape
+that pleased him. Like Goethe, perhaps he felt that he was stumbling
+over the roots of the tree which he had helped to plant.
+
+The contrast in Mr. Gladstone's article was certainly remarkable. Lord
+Tennyson saw in institutions which were passing away the decay of what
+in its time had been great and noble, and he saw little rising in the
+place of them which humanly could be called improvement. To Mr.
+Gladstone these revolutionary years had been years of the sweeping off
+of long intolerable abuses, and of awaking to higher and truer
+perceptions of duty. Never, according to him, in any period of her
+history had England made more glorious progress, never had stood higher
+than at the present moment in material power and moral excellence. How
+could it be otherwise when they were the years of his own ascendency?
+
+Metaphysicians tell us that we do not know anything as it really is.
+What we call outward objects are but impressions generated upon our
+sense by forces of the actual nature of which we are totally ignorant.
+We imagine that we hear a sound, and that the sound is something real
+which is outside us; but the sound is in the ear and is made by the ear,
+and the thing outside is but a vibration of air. If no animal existed
+with organs of hearing, the vibrations might be as before, but there
+would be no such thing as sound; and all our opinions on all subjects
+whatsoever are equally subjective. Lord Tennyson's opinions and Mr.
+Gladstone's opinions reveal to us only the nature and texture of their
+own minds, which have been affected in this way or that way. The scale
+has not been made in which we can weigh the periods in a nation's life,
+or measure them one against the other. The past is gone, and nothing but
+the bones of it can be recalled. We but half understand the present, for
+each age is a chrysalis, and we are ignorant into what it may develop.
+We do not even try to understand it honestly, for we shut our eyes
+against what we do not wish to see. I will not despond with Lord
+Tennyson. To take a gloomy view of things will not mend them, and modern
+enlightenment may have excellent gifts in store for us which will come
+by-and-by. But I will not say that they have come as yet. I will not say
+that public life is improved when party spirit has degenerated into an
+organised civil war, and a civil war which can never end, for it renews
+its life like the giant of fable at every fresh election. I will not say
+that men are more honest and more law-abiding when debts are repudiated
+and law is defied in half the country, and Mr. Gladstone himself
+applauds or refuses to condemn acts of open dishonesty. We are to
+congratulate ourselves that duelling has ceased, but I do not know that
+men act more honourably because they can be called less sharply to
+account. 'Smuggling,' we are told, has disappeared also, but the wrecker
+scuttles his ship or runs it ashore to cheat the insurance office. The
+Church may perhaps be improved in the arrangement of the services and in
+the professional demonstrativeness of the clergy, but I am not sure that
+the clergy have more influence over the minds of men than they had fifty
+years ago, or that the doctrines which the Church teaches are more
+powerful over public opinion. One would not gather that our morality was
+so superior from the reports which we see in the newspapers, and girls
+now talk over novels which the ladies' maids of their grandmothers might
+have read in secret but would have blushed while reading. Each age would
+do better if it studied its own faults and endeavoured to mend them,
+instead of comparing itself with others to its own advantage.
+
+This only was clear to me in thinking over what Mr. Gladstone was
+reported to have said, and in thinking of his own achievements and
+career, that there are two classes of men who have played and still play
+a prominent part in the world--those who accomplish great things, and
+those who talk and make speeches about them. The doers of things are for
+the most part silent. Those who build up empires or discover secrets of
+science, those who paint great pictures or write great poems, are not
+often to be found spouting upon platforms. The silent men do the work.
+The talking men cry out at what is done because it is not done as they
+would have had it, and afterwards take possession of it as if it was
+their own property. Warren Hastings wins India for us; the eloquent
+Burke desires and passionately tries to hang him for it. At the supreme
+crisis in our history when America had revolted and Ireland was defiant,
+when the great powers of Europe had coalesced to crush us, and we were
+staggering under the disaster at York Town, Rodney struck a blow in the
+West Indies which sounded over the world and saved for Britain her ocean
+sceptre. Just in time, for the popular leaders had persuaded the House
+of Commons that Rodney ought to be recalled and peace made on any terms.
+Even in politics the names of oratorical statesmen are rarely associated
+with the organic growth of enduring institutions. The most distinguished
+of them have been conspicuous only as instruments of destruction.
+Institutions are the slow growths of centuries. The orator cuts them
+down in a day. The tree falls, and the hand that wields the axe is
+admired and applauded. The speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero pass into
+literature, and are studied as models of language. But Demosthenes and
+Cicero did not understand the facts of their time; their language might
+be beautiful, and their sentiments noble, but with their fine words and
+sentiments they only misled their countrymen. The periods where the
+orator is supreme are marked always by confusion and disintegration.
+Goethe could say of Luther that he had thrown back for centuries the
+spiritual cultivation of mankind, by calling the passions of the
+multitude to judge of matters which should have been left to the
+thinkers. We ourselves are just now in one of those uneasy periods, and
+we have decided that orators are the fittest people to rule over us. The
+constituencies choose their members according to the fluency of their
+tongues. Can he make a speech? is the one test of competency for a
+legislator, and the most persuasive of the whole we make prime minister.
+We admire the man for his gifts, and we accept what he says for the
+manner in which it is uttered. He may contradict to-day what he asserted
+yesterday. No matter. He can persuade others wherever he is persuaded
+himself. And such is the nature of him that he can convince himself of
+anything which it is his interest to believe. These are the persons who
+are now regarded as our wisest. It was not always so. It is not so now
+with nations who are in a sound state of health. The Americans, when
+they choose a President or a Secretary of State or any functionary from
+whom they require wise action, do not select these famous speech-makers.
+Such periods do not last, for the condition which they bring about
+becomes always intolerable. I do not believe in the degeneracy of our
+race. I believe the present generation of Englishmen to be capable of
+all that their fathers were and possibly of more; but we are just now in
+a moulting state, and are sick while the process is going on. Or to take
+another metaphor. The bow of Ulysses is unstrung. The worms have not
+eaten into the horn or the moths injured the string, but the owner of
+the house is away and the suitors of Penelope Britannia consume her
+substance, rivals one of another, each caring only for himself, but with
+a common heart in evil. They cannot string the bow. Only the true lord
+and master can string it, and in due time he comes, and the cord is
+stretched once more upon the notch, singing to the touch of the finger
+with the sharp note of the swallow; and the arrows fly to their mark in
+the breasts of the pretenders, while Pallas Athene looks on approving
+from her coign of vantage.
+
+Random meditations of this kind were sent flying through me by the
+newspaper articles on Tennyson and Mr. Gladstone. The air cleared, and
+my mind also, as we ran beyond the smoke. The fields were covered deep
+with snow; a white vapour clung along the ground, the winter sky shining
+through it soft and blue. The ponds and canals were hard frozen, and men
+were skating and boys were sliding, and all was brilliant and beautiful.
+The ladies of the forest, the birch trees beside the line about
+Farnborough, were hung with jewels of ice, and glittered like a fretwork
+of purple and silver. It was like escaping out of a nightmare into happy
+healthy England once more. In the carriage with me were several
+gentlemen; officers going out to join their regiments; planters who had
+been at home on business; young sportsmen with rifles and cartridge
+cases who were hoping to shoot alligators, &c., all bound like myself
+for the West Indian mail steamer. The elders talked of sugar and of
+bounties, and of the financial ruin of the islands. I had heard of this
+before I started, and I learnt little from them which I had not known
+already; but I had misgivings whether I was not wandering off after all
+on a fool's errand. I did not want to shoot alligators, I did not
+understand cane growing or want to understand it, nor was I likely to
+find a remedy for encumbered and bankrupt landowners. I was at an age
+too when men grow unfit for roaming, and are expected to stay quietly at
+home. Plato says that to travel to any profit one should go between
+fifty and sixty; not sooner because one has one's duties to attend to as
+a citizen; not after because the mind becomes hebetated. The chief
+object of going abroad, in Plato's opinion, is to converse with [Greek:
+theioi andres] inspired men, whom Providence scatters about the globe,
+and from whom alone wisdom can be learnt. And I, alas! was long past the
+limit, and [Greek: theioi andres] are not to be met with in these times.
+But if not with inspired men, I might fall in at any rate with sensible
+men who would talk on things which I wanted to know. Winter and spring
+in a warm climate were pleasanter than a winter and spring at home; and
+as there is compensation in all things, old people can see some objects
+more clearly than young people can see them. They have no interest of
+their own to mislead their perception. They have lived too long to
+believe in any formulas or theories. 'Old age,' the Greek poet says, 'is
+not wholly a misfortune. Experience teaches things which the young know
+not.'[1] Old men at any rate like to think so.
+
+The 'Moselle,' in which I had taken my passage, was a large steamer of
+4,000 tons, one of the best where all are good--on the West Indian mail
+line. Her long straight sides and rounded bottom promised that she would
+roll, and I may say that the promise was faithfully kept; but except to
+the stomachs of the inexperienced rolling is no disadvantage. A vessel
+takes less water on board in a beam sea when she yields to the wave than
+when she stands up stiff and straight against it. The deck when I went
+on board was slippery with ice. There was the usual crowd and confusion
+before departure, those who were going out being undistinguishable, till
+the bell rang to clear the ship, from the friends who had accompanied
+them to take leave. I discovered, however, to my satisfaction that our
+party in the cabin would not be a large one. The West Indians who had
+come over for the Colonial Exhibition were most of them already gone.
+They, along with the rest, had taken back with them a consciousness that
+their visit had not been wholly in vain, and that the interest of the
+old country in her distant possessions seemed quickening into life once
+more. The commissioners from all our dependencies had been feted in the
+great towns, and the people had come to Kensington in millions to admire
+the productions which bore witness to the boundless resources of British
+territory. Had it been only a passing emotion of wonder and pride, or
+was it a prelude to a more energetic policy and active resolution?
+Anyway it was something to be glad of. Receptions and public dinners and
+loyal speeches will not solve political problems, but they create the
+feeling of good will which underlies the useful consideration of them.
+The Exhibition had served the purpose which it was intended for. The
+conference of delegates grew out of it which has discussed in the
+happiest temper the elements of our future relations.
+
+But the Exhibition doors were now closed, and the multitude of admirers
+or contributors were dispersed or dispersing to their homes. In the
+'Moselle' we had only the latest lingerers or the ordinary passengers
+who went to and fro on business or pleasure. I observed them with the
+curiosity with which one studies persons with whom one is to be shut up
+for weeks in involuntary intimacy. One young Demerara planter attracted
+my notice, as he had with him a newly married and beautiful wife whose
+fresh complexion would so soon fade, as it always does in those lands
+where nature is brilliant with colour and English cheeks grow pale. I
+found also to my surprise and pleasure a daughter of one of my oldest
+and dearest friends, who was going out to join her husband in Trinidad.
+This was a happy accident to start with. An announcement printed in
+Spanish in large letters in a conspicuous position intimated that I must
+be prepared for habits in some of our companions of a less agreeable
+kind.
+
+'Se suplica a los senores pasajeros de no escupir sobre la cubierta de
+popa.'
+
+I may as well leave the words untranslated, but the 'supplication' is
+not unnecessary. The Spanish colonists, like their countrymen at home,
+smoke everywhere with the usual consequences. The captain of one of our
+mail boats found it necessary to read one of them who disregarded it a
+lesson which he would remember. He sent for the quartermaster with a
+bucket and a mop, and ordered him to stay by this gentleman and clean up
+till he had done.
+
+The wind when we started was light and keen from the north. The
+afternoon sky was clear and frosty. Southampton Water was still as oil,
+and the sun went down crimson behind the brown woods of the New Forest.
+Of the 'Moselle's' speed we had instant evidence, for a fast Government
+launch raced us for a mile or two, and off Netley gave up the chase. We
+went leisurely along, doing thirteen knots without effort, swept by
+Calshot into the Solent, and had cleared the Needles before the last
+daylight had left us. In a few days the ice would be gone, and we should
+lie in the soft air of perennial summer.
+
+    Singula de nobis anni praedantur euntes:
+    Eripuere jocos, Venerem, convivia, ludum--
+
+But the flying years had not stolen from me the delight of finding
+myself once more upon the sea; the sea which is eternally young, and
+gives one back one's own youth and buoyancy.
+
+Down the Channel the north wind still blew, and the water was still
+smooth. We set our canvas at the Needles, and flew on for three days
+straight upon our course with a steady breeze. We crossed 'the Bay'
+without the fiddles on the dinner table; we were congratulating
+ourselves that, mid-winter as it was, we should reach the tropics and
+never need them. I meanwhile made acquaintances among my West Indian
+fellow-passengers, and listened to their tale of grievances. The
+Exhibition had been well enough in its way, but Exhibitions would not
+fill an empty exchequer or restore ruined plantations. The mother
+country I found was still regarded as a stepmother, and from more than
+one quarter I heard a more than muttered wish that they could be 'taken
+into partnership' by the Americans. They were wasting away under Free
+Trade and the sugar bounties. The mother country gave them fine words,
+but words were all. If they belonged to the United States they would
+have the benefit of a close market in a country where there were
+60,000,000 sugar drinkers. Energetic Americans would come among them and
+establish new industries, and would control the unmanageable negroes.
+From the most loyal I heard the despairing cry of the Britons, 'the
+barbarians drive us into the sea and the sea drives us back upon the
+barbarians.' They could bear Free Trade which was fair all round, but
+not Free Trade which was made into a mockery by bounties. And it seemed
+that their masters in Downing Street answered them as the Romans
+answered our forefathers. 'We have many colonies, and we shall not miss
+Britain. Britain is far off, and must take care of herself. She brings
+us responsibility, and she brings us no revenue; we cannot tax Italy for
+the sake of Britons. We have given them our arms and our civilisation.
+We have done enough. Let them do now what they can or please.' Virtually
+this is what England says to the West Indians, or would say if despair
+made them actively troublesome, notwithstanding Exhibitions and
+expansive sentiments. The answer from Rome we can now see was the voice
+of dying greatness, which was no longer worthy of the place in the world
+which it had made for itself in the days of its strength; but it
+doubtless seemed reasonable enough at the time, and indeed was the only
+answer which the Rome of Honorius could give.
+
+A change in the weather cut short our conversations, and drove half the
+company to their berths. On the fourth morning the wind chopped back to
+the north-west. A beam sea set in, and the 'Moselle' justified my
+conjectures about her. She rolled gunwale under, rolled at least forty
+degrees each way, and unshipped a boat out of her davits to windward.
+The waves were not as high as I have known the Atlantic produce when in
+the humour for it, but they were short, steep, and curling. Tons of
+water poured over the deck. The few of us who ventured below to dinner
+were hit by the dumb waiters which swung over our heads; and the living
+waiters staggered about with the dishes and upset the soup into our
+laps. Everybody was grumbling and miserable. Driven to my cabin I was
+dozing on a sofa when I was jerked off and dropped upon the floor. The
+noise down below on these occasions is considerable. The steering chains
+clank, unfastened doors slam to and fro, plates and dishes and glass
+fall crashing at some lurch which is heavier than usual, with the roar
+of the sea underneath as a constant accompaniment.
+
+When a wave strikes the ship full on the quarter and she staggers from
+stem to stern, one wonders how any construction of wood and iron can
+endure such blows without being shattered to fragments. And it would be
+shattered, as I heard an engineer once say, if the sea was not such a
+gentle creature after all. I crept up to the deck house to watch through
+the lee door the wild magnificence of the storm. Down came a great green
+wave, rushed in a flood over everything, and swept me drenched to the
+skin down the stairs into the cabin. I crawled to bed to escape cold,
+and slid up and down my berth like a shuttle at every roll of the ship
+till I fell into the unconsciousness which is a substitute for sleep,
+slept at last really, and woke at seven in the morning to find the sun
+shining, and the surface of the ocean still undulating but glassy calm.
+The only signs left of the tempest were the swallow-like petrels
+skimming to and fro in our wake, picking up the scraps of food and the
+plate washings which the cook's mate had thrown overboard; smallest and
+beautifullest of all the gull tribe, called petrel by our ancestors, who
+went to their Bibles more often than we do for their images, in memory
+of St. Peter, because they seem for a moment to stand upon the water
+when they stoop upon any floating object.[2] In the afternoon we passed
+the Azores, rising blue and fairy-like out of the ocean; unconscious
+they of the bloody battles which once went on under their shadows. There
+it was that Grenville, in the 'Revenge,' fought through a long summer
+day alone against a host of enemies, and died there and won immortal
+honour. The Azores themselves are Grenville's monument, and in the
+memory of Englishmen are associated for ever with his glorious story.
+Behind these islands, too, lay Grenville's comrades, the English
+privateers, year after year waiting for Philip's plate fleet. Behind
+these islands lay French squadrons waiting for the English sugar ships.
+They are calm and silent now, and are never likely to echo any more to
+battle thunder. Men come and go and play out their little dramas, epic
+or tragic, and it matters nothing to nature. Their wild pranks leave no
+scars, and the decks are swept clean for the next comers.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] [Greek: ho teknon ouch hapanta tho gera kaka
+                                he empeiria
+            echei ti lexai thon neon sophoteron.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+    The tropics--Passengers on board--Account of the Darien
+    Canal--Planters' complaints--West Indian history--The Spanish
+    conquest--Drake and Hawkins--The buccaneers--The pirates--French and
+    English--Rodney--Battle of April 12--Peace with honour--Doers and
+    talkers.
+
+
+Another two days and we were in the tropics. The north-east trade blew
+behind us, and our own speed being taken off from the speed of the wind
+there was scarcely air enough to fill our sails. The waves went down and
+the ports were opened, and we had passed suddenly from winter into
+perpetual summer, as Jean Paul says it will be with us in death. Sleep
+came back soft and sweet, and the water was warm in our morning bath,
+and the worries and annoyances of life vanished in these sweet
+surroundings like nightmares when we wake. How well the Greeks
+understood the spiritual beauty of the sea! [Greek: thalassa klyzei
+panta tanthropon kaka], says Euripides. 'The sea washes off all the woes
+of men.' The passengers lay about the decks in their chairs reading
+story books. The young ones played Bull. The officers flirted mildly
+with the pretty young ladies. For a brief interval care and anxiety had
+spread their wings and flown away, and existence itself became
+delightful.
+
+There was a young scientific man on board who interested me much. He had
+been sent out from Kew to take charge of the Botanical Gardens in
+Jamaica--was quiet, modest, and unaffected, understood his own subjects
+well, and could make others understand them; with him I had much
+agreeable conversation. And there was another singular person who
+attracted me even more. I took him at first for an American. He was a
+Dane I found, an engineer by profession, and was on his way to some
+South American republic. He was a long lean man with grey eyes, red
+hair, and a laugh as if he so enjoyed the thing that amused him that he
+wished to keep it all to himself, laughing inwardly till he choked and
+shook with it. His chief amusement seemed to have lain in watching the
+performances of Liberal politicians in various parts of the world. He
+told me of an opposition leader in some parliament whom his rival in
+office had disposed of by shutting him up in the caboose. 'In the
+caboose,' he repeated, screaming with enjoyment at the thought of it,
+and evidently wishing that all the parliamentary orators on the globe
+were in the same place. In his wanderings he had been lately at the
+Darien Canal, and gave me a wonderful account of the condition of things
+there. The original estimate of the probable cost had been twenty-six
+millions of our (English) money. All these millions had been spent
+already, and only a fifth of the whole had as yet been executed. The
+entire cost would not be less, under the existing management, than one
+hundred millions, and he evidently doubted whether the canal would ever
+be completed at all, though professionally he would not confess to such
+an opinion. The waste and plunder had been incalculable. The works and
+the gold that were set moving by them made a feast for unclean harpies
+of both sexes from every nation in the four continents. I liked
+everything about Mr. ----. Tom Cringle's _Obed_ might have been
+something like him, had not _Obed's_ evil genius driven him into more
+dangerous ways.
+
+There was a small black boy among us, evidently of pure blood, for his
+hair was wool and his colour black as ink. His parents must have been
+well-to-do, for the boy had been in Europe to be educated. The officers
+on board and some of the ladies played with him as they would play with
+a monkey. He had little more sense than a monkey, perhaps less, and the
+gestures of him grinning behind gratings and pushing out his long thin
+arms between the bars were curiously suggestive of the original from
+whom we are told now that all of us came. The worst of it was that,
+being lifted above his own people, he had been taught to despise them.
+He was spoilt as a black and could not be made into a white, and this I
+found afterwards was the invariable and dangerous consequence whenever a
+superior negro contrived to raise himself. He might do well enough
+himself, but his family feel their blood as a degradation. His children
+will not marry among their own people, and not only will no white girl
+marry a negro, but hardly any dowry can be large enough to tempt a West
+Indian white to make a wife of a black lady. This is one of the most
+sinister features in the present state of social life there.
+
+Small personalities cropped up now and then. We had representatives of
+all professions among us except the Church of England clergy. Of them we
+had not one. The captain, as usual, read us the service on Sundays on a
+cushion for a desk, with the union jack spread over it. On board ship
+the captain, like a sovereign, is supreme, and in spiritual matters as
+in secular. Drake was the first commander who carried the theory into
+practice when he excommunicated his chaplain. It is the law now, and the
+tradition has gone on unbroken. In default of clergy we had a
+missionary, who for the most part kept his lips closed. He did open them
+once, and at my expense. Apropos of nothing he said to me, 'I wonder,
+sir, whether you ever read the remarks upon you in the newspapers. If
+all the attacks upon your writings which I have seen were collected
+together they would make an interesting volume.' This was all. He had
+delivered his soul and relapsed into silence.
+
+From a Puerto Rico merchant I learnt that, if the English colonies were
+in a bad way, the Spanish colonies were in a worse. His own island, he
+said, was a nest of squalor, misery, vice, and disease. Blacks and
+whites were equally immoral; and so far as habits went, the whites were
+the filthier of the two. The complaints of the English West Indians were
+less sweeping, and, as to immorality between whites and blacks, neither
+from my companions in the 'Moselle' nor anywhere afterward did I hear or
+see a sign of it. The profligacy of planter life passed away with
+slavery, and the changed condition of the two races makes impossible any
+return to the old habits. But they had wrongs of their own, and were
+eloquent in their exposition of them. We had taken the islands from
+France and Spain at an enormous expense, and we were throwing them aside
+like a worn-out child's toy. We did nothing for them. We allowed them no
+advantage as British subjects, and when they tried to do something for
+themselves, we interposed with an Imperial veto. The United States,
+seeing the West Indian trade gravitating towards New York, had offered
+them a commercial treaty, being willing to admit their sugar duty free,
+in consideration of the islands admitting in return their salt fish and
+flour and notions. A treaty was in process of negotiation between the
+United States and the Spanish islands. A similar treaty had been freely
+offered to them, which might have saved them from ruin, and the Imperial
+Government had disallowed it. How, under such treatment, could we
+expect them to be loyal to the British connection?
+
+It was a relief to turn back from these lamentations to the brilliant
+period of past West Indian history. With the planters of the present it
+was all _sugar_--sugar and the lazy blacks who were England's darlings
+and would not work for them. The handbooks were equally barren. In them
+I found nothing but modern statistics pointing to dreary conclusions,
+and in the place of any human interest, long stories of constitutions,
+suffrages, representative assemblies, powers of elected members, and
+powers reserved to the Crown. Such things, important as they might be,
+did not touch my imagination; and to an Englishman, proud of his
+country, the West Indies had a far higher interest. Strange scenes
+streamed across my memory, and a shadowy procession of great figures who
+have printed their names in history. Columbus and Cortez, Vasco Nunez,
+and Las Casas; the millions of innocent Indians who, according to Las
+Casas, were destroyed out of the islands, the Spanish grinding them to
+death in their gold mines; the black swarms who were poured in to take
+their place, and the frightful story of the slave trade. Behind it all
+was the European drama of the sixteenth century--Charles V. and Philip
+fighting against the genius of the new era, and feeding their armies
+with the ingots of the new world. The convulsion spread across the
+Atlantic. The English Protestants and the French Huguenots took to sea
+like water dogs, and challenged their enemies in their own special
+domain. To the popes and the Spaniards the new world was the property of
+the Church and of those who had discovered it. A papal bull bestowed on
+Spain all the countries which lay within the tropics west of the
+Atlantic--a form of Monroe doctrine, not unreasonable as long as there
+was force to maintain it, but the force was indispensable, and the
+Protestant adventurers tried the question with them at the cannon's
+mouth. They were of the reformed faith all of them, these sea rovers of
+the early days, and, like their enemies, they were of a very mixed
+complexion. The Spaniards, gorged with plunder and wading in blood,
+were at the same time, and in their own eyes, crusading soldiers of the
+faith, missionaries of the Holy Church, and defenders of the doctrines
+which were impiously assailed in Europe. The privateers from Plymouth
+and Rochelle paid also for the cost of their expeditions with the
+pillage of ships and towns and the profits of the slave trade; and they
+too were the unlicensed champions of spiritual freedom in their own
+estimate of themselves. The gold which was meant for Alva's troops in
+Flanders found its way into the treasure houses of the London companies.
+The logs of the voyages of the Elizabethan navigators represent them
+faithfully as they were, freebooters of the ocean in one aspect of them;
+in another, the sea warriors of the Reformation--uncommissioned,
+unrecognised, fighting on their own responsibility, liable to be
+disowned when they failed, while the Queen herself would privately be a
+shareholder in the adventure. It was a wild anarchic scene, fit cradle
+of the spiritual freedom of a new age, when the nations of the earth
+were breaking the chains in which king and priest had bound them.
+
+To the Spaniards, Drake and his comrades were _corsarios_, robbers,
+enemies of the human race, to be treated to a short shrift whenever
+found and caught. British seamen who fell into their hands were carried
+before the Inquisition at Lima or Carthagena and burnt at the stake as
+heretics. Four of Drake's crew were unfortunately taken once at Vera
+Cruz. Drake sent a message to the governor-general that if a hair of
+their heads was singed he would hang ten Spaniards for each one of them.
+(This curious note is at Simancas, where I saw it.) So great an object
+of terror at Madrid was El Draque that he was looked on as an
+incarnation of the old serpent, and when he failed in his last
+enterprise and news came that he was dead, Lope de Vega sang a hymn of
+triumph in an epic poem which he called the 'Dragontea.'
+
+When Elizabeth died and peace was made with Spain, the adventurers lost
+something of the indirect countenance which had so far been extended to
+them; the execution of Raleigh being one among other marks of the change
+of mind. But they continued under other names, and no active effort was
+made to suppress them. The Spanish Government did in 1627 agree to leave
+England in possession of Barbadoes, but the pretensions to an exclusive
+right to trade continued to be maintained, and the English and French
+refused to recognise it. The French privateers seized Tortuga, an island
+off St. Domingo, and they and their English friends swarmed in the
+Caribbean Sea as buccaneers or flibustiers. They exchanged names,
+perhaps as a symbol of their alliance. 'Flibustier' was English and a
+corruption of freebooter. 'Buccaneer' came from the boucan, or dried
+beef, of the wild cattle which the French hunters shot in Espanola, and
+which formed the chief of their sea stores. Boucan became a French verb,
+and, according to Labat, was itself the Carib name for the cashew nut.
+
+War breaking out again in Cromwell's time, Penn and Venables took
+Jamaica. The flibustiers from the Tortugas drove the Spaniards out of
+Hayti, which was annexed to the French crown. The comradeship in
+religious enthusiasm which had originally drawn the two nations together
+cooled by degrees, as French Catholics as well as Protestants took to
+the trade. Port Royal became the headquarters of the English
+buccaneers--the last and greatest of them being Henry Morgan, who took
+and plundered Panama, was knighted for his services, and was afterwards
+made vice-governor of Jamaica. From the time when the Spaniards threw
+open their trade, and English seamen ceased to be delivered over to the
+Inquisition, the English buccaneers ceased to be respectable characters
+and gradually drifted into the pirates of later history, when under
+their new conditions they produced their more questionable heroes, the
+Kidds and Blackbeards. The French flibustiers continued long after--far
+into the eighteenth century--some of them with commissions as
+privateers, others as _forbans_ or unlicensed rovers, but still connived
+at in Martinique.
+
+Adventurers, buccaneers, pirates pass across the stage--the curtain
+falls on them, and rises on a more glorious scene. Jamaica had become
+the depot of the trade of England with the western world, and golden
+streams had poured into Port Royal. Barbadoes was unoccupied when
+England took possession of it, and never passed out of our hands; but
+the Antilles--the Anterior Isles--which stand like a string of emeralds
+round the neck of the Caribbean Sea, had been most of them colonised and
+occupied by the French, and during the wars of the last century were the
+objects of a never ceasing conflict between their fleets and ours. The
+French had planted their language there, they had planted their religion
+there, and the blacks of these islands generally still speak the French
+patois and call themselves Catholics; but it was deemed essential to our
+interests that the Antilles should be not French but English, and
+Antigua, Martinique, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Grenada were taken and
+retaken and taken again in a struggle perpetually renewed. When the
+American colonies revolted, the West Indies became involved in the
+revolutionary hurricane. France, Spain, and Holland--our three ocean
+rivals--combined in a supreme effort to tear from us our Imperial power.
+The opportunity was seized by Irish patriots to clamour for Irish
+nationality, and by the English Radicals to demand liberty and the
+rights of man. It was the most critical moment in later English history.
+If we had yielded to peace on the terms which our enemies offered, and
+the English Liberals wished us to accept, the star of Great Britain
+would have set for ever.
+
+The West Indies were then under the charge of Rodney, whose brilliant
+successes had already made his name famous. He had done his country more
+than yeoman's service. He had torn the Leeward Islands from the French.
+He had punished the Hollanders for joining the coalition by taking the
+island of St. Eustachius and three millions' worth of stores and money.
+The patriot party at home led by Fox and Burke were ill pleased with
+these victories, for they wished us to be driven into surrender. Burke
+denounced Rodney as he denounced Warren Hastings, and Rodney was called
+home to answer for himself. In his absence Demerara, the Leeward
+Islands, St. Eustachius itself, were captured or recovered by the enemy.
+The French fleet, now supreme in the western waters, blockaded Lord
+Cornwallis at York Town and forced him to capitulate. The Spaniards had
+fitted out a fleet at Havannah, and the Count de Grasse, the French
+admiral, fresh from the victorious thunder of the American cannon,
+hastened back to refurnish himself at Martinique, intending to join the
+Spaniards, tear Jamaica from us, and drive us finally and completely out
+of the West Indies. One chance remained. Rodney was ordered back to his
+station, and he went at his best speed, taking all the ships with him
+which could then be spared. It was mid-winter. He forced his way to
+Barbadoes in five weeks spite of equinoctial storms. The Whig orators
+were indignant. They insisted that we were beaten; there had been
+bloodshed enough, and we must sit down in our humiliation. The
+Government yielded, and a peremptory order followed on Rodney's track,
+'Strike your flag and come home.' Had that fatal command reached him
+Gibraltar would have fallen and Hastings's Indian Empire would have
+melted into air. But Rodney knew that his time was short, and he had
+been prompt to use it. Before the order came, the severest naval battle
+in English annals had been fought and won. De Grasse was a prisoner, and
+the French fleet was scattered into wreck and ruin.
+
+De Grasse had refitted in the Martinique dockyards. He himself and every
+officer in the fleet was confident that England was at last done for,
+and that nothing was left but to gather the fruits of the victory which
+was theirs already. Not Xerxes, when he broke through Thermopylae and
+watched from the shore his thousand galleys streaming down to the Gulf
+of Salamis, was more assured that his prize was in his hands than De
+Grasse on the deck of the 'Ville de Paris,' the finest ship then
+floating on the seas, when he heard that Rodney was at St. Lucia and
+intended to engage him. He did not even believe that the English after
+so many reverses would venture to meddle with a fleet superior in force
+and inspirited with victory. All the Antilles except St. Lucia were his
+own. Tobago, Grenada, the Grenadines, St. Vincent, Martinique, Dominica,
+Guadaloupe, Montserrat, Nevis, Antigua, and St. Kitts, he held them all
+in proud possession, a string of gems, each island large as or larger
+than the Isle of Man, rising up with high volcanic peaks clothed from
+base to crest with forest, carved into deep ravines, and fringed with
+luxuriant plains. In St. Lucia alone, lying between St. Vincent and
+Dominica, the English flag still flew, and Rodney lay there in the
+harbour at Castries. On April 8, 1782, the signal came from the north
+end of the island that the French fleet had sailed. Martinique is in
+sight of St. Lucia, and the rock is still shown from which Rodney had
+watched day by day for signs that they were moving. They were out at
+last, and he instantly weighed and followed. The air was light, and De
+Grasse was under the high lands of Dominica before Rodney came up with
+him. Both fleets were becalmed, and the English were scattered and
+divided by a current which runs between the islands. A breeze at last
+blew off the land. The French were the first to feel it, and were able
+to attack at advantage the leading English division. Had De Grasse 'come
+down as he ought,' Rodney thought that the consequences might have been
+serious. In careless imagination of superiority they let the chance go
+by. They kept at a distance, firing long shots, which as it was did
+considerable damage. The two following days the fleets manoeuvred in
+sight of each other. On the night of the eleventh Rodney made signal for
+the whole fleet to go south under press of sail. The French thought he
+was flying. He tacked at two in the morning, and at daybreak found
+himself where he wished to be, with the French fleet on his lee
+quarter. The French looking for nothing but again a distant cannonade,
+continued leisurely along under the north highlands of Dominica towards
+the channel which separates that island from Guadaloupe. In number of
+ships the fleets were equal; in size and complement of crew the French
+were immensely superior; and besides the ordinary ships' companies they
+had twenty thousand soldiers on board who were to be used in the
+conquest of Jamaica. Knowing well that a defeat at that moment would be
+to England irreparable ruin, they did not dream that Rodney would be
+allowed, even if he wished it, to risk a close and decisive engagement.
+The English admiral was aware also that his country's fate was in his
+hands. It was one of those supreme moments which great men dare to use
+and small men tremble at. He had the advantage of the wind, and could
+force a battle or decline it, as he pleased. With clear daylight the
+signal to engage was flying from the masthead of the 'Formidable,'
+Rodney's ship. At seven in the morning, April 12, 1782, the whole fleet
+bore down obliquely on the French line, cutting it directly in two.
+Rodney led in person. Having passed through and broken up their order he
+tacked again, still keeping the wind. The French, thrown into confusion,
+were unable to reform, and the battle resolved itself into a number of
+separate engagements in which the English had the choice of position.
+
+Rodney in passing through the enemy's lines the first time had exchanged
+broadsides with the 'Glorieux,' a seventy-four, at close range. He had
+shot away her masts and bowsprit, and left her a bare hull; her flag,
+however, still flying, being nailed to a splintered spar. So he left her
+unable to stir; and after he had gone about came himself yardarm to
+yardarm with the superb 'Ville de Paris,' the pride of France, the
+largest ship in the then world, where De Grasse commanded in person. All
+day long the cannon roared. Rodney had on board a favourite bantam cock,
+which stood perched upon the poop of the 'Formidable' through the whole
+action, its shrill voice heard crowing through the thunder of the
+broadsides. One by one the French ships struck their flags or fought on
+till they foundered and went down. The carnage on board them was
+terrible, crowded as they were with the troops for Jamaica. Fourteen
+thousand were reckoned to have been killed, besides the prisoners. The
+'Ville de Paris' surrendered last, fighting desperately after hope was
+gone till her masts were so shattered that they could not bear a sail,
+and her decks above and below were littered over with mangled limbs. De
+Grasse gave up his sword to Rodney on the 'Formidable's' quarter-deck.
+The gallant 'Glorieux,' unable to fly, and seeing the battle lost,
+hauled down her flag, but not till the undisabled remnants of her crew
+were too few to throw the dead into the sea. Other ships took fire and
+blew up. Half the French fleet were either taken or sunk; the rest
+crawled away for the time, most of them to be picked up afterwards like
+crippled birds.
+
+So on that memorable day was the English Empire saved. Peace followed,
+but it was 'peace with honour.' The American colonies were lost; but
+England kept her West Indies; her flag still floated over Gibraltar; the
+hostile strength of Europe all combined had failed to twist Britannia's
+ocean sceptre from her: she sat down maimed and bleeding, but the wreath
+had not been torn from her brow, she was still sovereign of the seas.
+
+The bow of Ulysses was strung in those days. The order of recall arrived
+when the work was done. It was proudly obeyed; and even the great Burke
+admitted that no honour could be bestowed upon Rodney which he had not
+deserved at his country's hands. If the British Empire is still to have
+a prolonged career before it, the men who make empires are the men who
+can hold them together. Oratorical reformers can overthrow what deserves
+to be overthrown. Institutions, even the best of them, wear out, and
+must give place to others, and the fine political speakers are the
+instruments of their overthrow. But the fine speakers produce nothing of
+their own, and as constructive statesmen their paths are strewed with
+failures. The worthies of England are the men who cleared and tilled her
+fields, formed her laws, built her colleges and cathedrals, founded her
+colonies, fought her battles, covered the ocean with commerce, and
+spread our race over the planet to leave a mark upon it which time will
+not efface. These men are seen in their work, and are not heard of in
+Parliament. When the account is wound up, where by the side of them will
+stand our famous orators? What will any one of these have left behind
+him save the wreck of institutions which had done their work and had
+ceased to serve a useful purpose? That was their business in this world,
+and they did it and do it; but it is no very glorious work, not a work
+over which it is possible to feel any 'fine enthusiasm.' To chop down a
+tree is easier than to make it grow. When the business of destruction is
+once completed, they and their fame and glory will disappear together.
+Our true great ones will again be visible, and thenceforward will be
+visible alone.
+
+Is there a single instance in our own or any other history of a great
+political speaker who has added anything to human knowledge or to human
+worth? Lord Chatham may stand as a lonely exception. But except Chatham
+who is there? Not one that I know of. Oratory is the spendthrift sister
+of the arts, which decks itself like a strumpet with the tags and
+ornaments which it steals from real superiority. The object of it is not
+truth, but anything which it can make appear truth; anything which it
+can persuade people to believe by calling in their passions to obscure
+their intelligence.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] This is the explanation of the name which is given by Dampier.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+    First sight of Barbadoes--Origin of the name--Pere Labat--Bridgetown
+    two hundred years ago--Slavery and Christianity--Economic
+    crisis--Sugar bounties--Aspect of the streets--Government House and
+    its occupants--Duties of a governor of Barbadoes.
+
+
+England was covered with snow when we left it on December 30. At sunrise
+on January 12 we were anchored in the roadstead at Bridgetown, and the
+island of Barbadoes lay before us shining in the haze of a hot summer
+morning. It is about the size of the Isle of Wight, cultivated so far as
+eye could see with the completeness of a garden; no mountains in it,
+scarcely even high hills, but a surface pleasantly undulating, the
+prevailing colour a vivid green from the cane fields; houses in town and
+country white from the coral rock of which they are built, but the glare
+from them relieved by heavy clumps of trees. What the trees were I had
+yet to discover. You could see at a glance that the island was as
+thickly peopled as an ant-hill. Not an inch of soil seemed to be allowed
+to run to waste. Two hundred thousand is, I believe, the present number
+of Barbadians, of whom nine-tenths are blacks. They refuse to emigrate.
+They cling to their home with innocent vanity as though it was the
+finest country in the world, and multiply at a rate so rapid that no one
+likes to think about it. Labour at any rate is abundant and cheap. In
+Barbadoes the negro is willing enough to work, for he has no other means
+of living. Little land is here allowed him to grow his yams upon. Almost
+the whole of it is still held by the whites in large estates, cultivated
+by labourers on the old system, and, it is to be admitted, cultivated
+most admirably. If the West Indies are going to ruin, Barbadoes, at any
+rate, is being ruined with a smiling face. The roadstead was crowded
+with shipping--large barques, steamers, and brigs, schooners of all
+shapes and sorts. The training squadron had come into the bay for a day
+or two on their way to Trinidad, four fine ships, conspicuous by their
+white ensigns, a squareness of yards, and generally imposing presence.
+Boats were flying to and fro under sail or with oars, officials coming
+off in white calico dress, with awnings over the stern sheets and
+chattering crews of negroes. Notwithstanding these exotic symptoms, it
+was all thoroughly English; we were under the guns of our own
+men-of-war. The language of the Anglo-Barbadians was pure English, the
+voices without the smallest transatlantic intonation. On no one of our
+foreign possessions is the print of England's foot more strongly
+impressed than on Barbadoes. It has been ours for two centuries and
+three-quarters, and was organised from the first on English traditional
+lines, with its constitution, its parishes and parish churches and
+churchwardens, and schools and parsons, all on the old model; which the
+unprogressive inhabitants have been wise enough to leave undisturbed.
+
+Little is known of the island before we took possession of it--so little
+that the origin of the name is still uncertain. Barbadoes, if not a
+corruption of some older word, is Spanish or Portuguese, and means
+'bearded.' The local opinion is that the word refers to a banyan or fig
+tree which is common there, and which sends down from its branches long
+hairs or fibres supposed to resemble beards. I disbelieve in this
+derivation. Every Spaniard whom I have consulted confirms my own
+impression that 'barbados' standing alone could no more refer to trees
+than 'barbati' standing alone could refer to trees in Latin. The name is
+a century older than the English occupation, for I have seen it in a
+Spanish chart of 1525. The question is of some interest, since it
+perhaps implies that at the first discovery there was a race of bearded
+Caribs there. However this may be, Barbadoes, after we became masters of
+the island, enjoyed a period of unbroken prosperity for two hundred
+years. Before the conquest of Jamaica, it was the principal mart of our
+West Indian trade; and even after that conquest, when all Europe drew
+its new luxury of sugar from these islands, the wealth and splendour of
+the English residents at Bridgetown astonished and stirred the envy of
+every passing visitor. Absenteeism as yet was not. The owners lived on
+their estates, governed the island as magistrates unpaid for their
+services, and equally unpaid, took on themselves the defences of the
+island. Pere Labat, a French missionary, paid a visit to Barbadoes at
+the beginning of the eighteenth century. He was a clever, sarcastic kind
+of man, with fine literary skill, and describes what he saw with a
+jealous appreciation which he intended to act upon his own countrymen.
+The island, according to him, was running over with wealth, and was very
+imperfectly fortified. The jewellers' and silversmiths' shops in
+Bridgetown were brilliant as on the Paris boulevards. The port was full
+of ships, the wharves and warehouses crammed with merchandise from all
+parts of the globe. The streets were handsome, and thronged with men of
+business, who were piling up fortunes. To the Father these sumptuous
+gentlemen were all most civil. The governor, an English milor, asked him
+to dinner, and talked such excellent French that Labat forgave him his
+nationality. The governor, he said, resided in a fine palace. He had a
+well-furnished library, was dignified, courteous, intelligent, and
+lived in state like a prince. A review was held for the French priest's
+special entertainment, of the Bridgetown cavalry. Five hundred gentlemen
+turned out from this one district admirably mounted and armed.
+Altogether in the island he says that there were 3,000 horse and 2,000
+foot, every one of them of course white and English. The officers struck
+him particularly. He met one who had been five years a prisoner in the
+Bastille, and had spent his time there in learning mathematics. The
+planters opened their houses to him. Dinners then as now were the
+received form of English hospitality. They lived well, Labat says. They
+had all the luxuries of the tropics, and they had imported the
+partridges which they were so fond of from England. They had the
+costliest and choicest wines, and knew how to enjoy them. They dined at
+two o'clock, and their dinner lasted four hours. Their mansions were
+superbly furnished, and gold and silver plate, he observed with an eye
+to business, was so abundant that the plunder of it would pay the cost
+of an expedition for the reduction of the island.
+
+There was another side to all this magnificence which also might be
+turned to account by an enterprising enemy. There were some thousands of
+wretched Irish, who had been transplanted thither after the last
+rebellion, and were bound under articles to labour. These might be
+counted on to rise if an invading force appeared; and there were 60,000
+slaves, who would rebel also if they saw a hope of success. They were
+ill fed and hard driven. On the least symptom of insubordination they
+were killed without mercy: sometimes they were burnt alive, or were hung
+up in iron cages to die.[3] In the French and Spanish islands care was
+taken of the souls of the poor creatures. They were taught their
+catechism, they were baptised, and attended mass regularly. The Anglican
+clergy, Labat said with professional malice, neither baptised them nor
+taught them anything, but regarded them as mere animals. To keep
+Christians in slavery they held would be wrong and indefensible, and
+they therefore met the difficulty by not making their slaves into
+Christians. That baptism made any essential difference, however, he does
+not insist. By the side of Christianity, in the Catholic islands, devil
+worship and witchcraft went on among the same persons. No instance had
+ever come to his knowledge of a converted black who returned to his
+country who did not throw away his Christianity just as he would throw
+away his clothes; and as to cruelty and immorality, he admits that the
+English at Barbadoes were no worse than his own people at Martinique.
+
+In the collapse of West Indian prosperity which followed on
+emancipation, Barbadoes escaped the misfortunes of the other islands.
+The black population being so dense, and the place itself being so
+small, the squatting system could not be tried; there was plenty of
+labour always, and the planters being relieved of the charge of their
+workmen when they were sick or worn out, had rather gained than lost by
+the change. Barbadoes, however, was not to escape for ever, and was now
+having its share of misfortunes. It is dangerous for any country to
+commit its fortunes to an exclusive occupation. Sugar was the most
+immediately lucrative of all the West Indian productions. Barbadoes is
+exceptionally well suited to sugar-growing. It has no mountains and no
+forests. The soil is clean and has been carefully attended to for two
+hundred and fifty years. It had been owned during the present century by
+gentlemen who for the most part lived in England on the profits of their
+properties, and left them to be managed by agents and attorneys. The
+method of management was expensive. Their own habits were expensive.
+Their incomes, to which they had lived up, had been cut short lately by
+a series of bad seasons. Money had been borrowed at high interest year
+after year to keep the estates and their owners going. On the top of
+this came the beetroot competition backed up by a bounty, and the
+Barbadian sugar interest, I was told, had gone over a precipice. Even
+the unencumbered resident proprietors could barely keep their heads
+above water. The returns on three-quarters of the properties on the
+island no longer sufficed to pay the expenses of cultivation and the
+interest of the loans which had been raised upon them. There was
+impending a general bankruptcy which might break up entirely the present
+system and leave the negroes for a time without the wages which were the
+sole dependence.
+
+A very dark picture had thus been drawn to me of the prospects of the
+poor little island which had been once so brilliant. Nothing could be
+less like it than the bright sunny landscape which we saw from the deck
+of our vessel. The town, the shipping, the pretty villas, the woods, and
+the wide green sea of waving cane had no suggestion of ruin about them.
+If the ruin was coming, clearly enough it had not yet come. After
+breakfast we went on shore in a boat with a white awning over it, rowed
+by a crew of black boatmen, large, fleshy, shining on the skin with
+ample feeding and shining in the face with innocent happiness. They
+rowed well. They were amusing. There was a fixed tariff, and they were
+not extortionate. The temperature seemed to rise ten degrees when we
+landed. The roads were blinding white from the coral dust, the houses
+were white, the sun scorching. The streets were not the streets
+described by Labat; no splendid magazines or jewellers' shops like those
+in Paris or London; but there were lighters at the quays loading or
+unloading, carts dashing along with mule teams and making walking
+dangerous; signs in plenty of life and business; few white faces, but
+blacks and mulattoes swarming. The houses were substantial, though in
+want of paint. The public buildings, law courts, hall of assembly &c.
+were solid and handsome, nowhere out of repair, though with something to
+be desired in point of smartness. The market square would have been well
+enough but for a statue of Lord Nelson which stands there, very like,
+but small and insignificant, and for some extraordinary reason they
+have painted it a bright pea-green.
+
+We crept along in the shade of trees and warehouses till we reached the
+principal street. Here my friends brought me to the Icehouse, a sort of
+club, with reading rooms and dining rooms, and sleeping accommodation
+for members from a distance who do not like colonial hotels. Before
+anything else could be thought of I was introduced to cocktail, with
+which I had to make closer acquaintance afterwards, cocktail being the
+established corrective of West Indian languor, without which life is
+impossible. It is a compound of rum, sugar, lime juice, Angostura
+bitters, and what else I know not, frisked into effervescence by a
+stick, highly agreeable to the taste and effective for its immediate
+purpose. Cocktail over, and walking in the heat being a thing not to be
+thought of, I sat for two hours in a balcony watching the people, who
+were thick as bees in swarming time. Nine-tenths of them were pure
+black; you rarely saw a white face, but still less would you see a
+discontented one, imperturbable good humour and self-satisfaction being
+written on the features of every one. The women struck me especially.
+They were smartly dressed in white calico, scrupulously clean, and
+tricked out with ribands and feathers; but their figures were so good,
+and they carried themselves so well and gracefully, that, although they
+might make themselves absurd, they could not look vulgar. Like the old
+Greek and Etruscan women, they are trained from childhood to carry heavy
+weights on their heads. They are thus perfectly upright, and plant their
+feet firmly and naturally on the ground. They might serve for sculptors'
+models, and are well aware of it. There were no signs of poverty. Old
+and young seemed well-fed. Some had brought in baskets of fruit,
+bananas, oranges, pine apples, and sticks of sugar cane; others had yams
+and sweet potatoes from their bits of garden in the country. The men
+were active enough driving carts, wheeling barrows, or selling flying
+fish, which are caught off the island in shoals and are cheaper than
+herrings in Yarmouth. They chattered like a flock of jackdaws, but there
+was no quarrelling; not a drunken man was to be seen, and all was
+merriment and good humour. My poor downtrodden black brothers and
+sisters, so far as I could judge from this first introduction, looked to
+me a very fortunate class of fellow-creatures.
+
+Government House, where we went to luncheon, is a large airy building
+shaded by heavy trees with a garden at the back of it. West Indian
+houses, I found afterwards, are all constructed on the same pattern, the
+object being to keep the sun out and let in the wind. Long verandahs or
+galleries run round them protected by green Venetian blinds which can be
+opened or closed at pleasure; the rooms within with polished floors,
+little or no carpet, and contrivances of all kinds to keep the air in
+continual circulation. In the subdued green light, human figures lose
+their solidity and look as if they were creatures of air also.
+
+Sir Charles Lees and his lady were all that was polite and hospitable.
+They invited me to make their house my home during my stay, and more
+charming host and hostess it would have been impossible to find or wish
+for. There was not the state which Labat described, but there was the
+perfection of courtesy, a courtesy which must have belonged to their
+natures, or it would have been overstrained long since by the demands
+made upon it. Those who have looked on at a skating ring will have
+observed an orange or some such object in the centre round which the
+evolutions are described, the ice artist sweeping out from it in long
+curves to the extreme circumference, returning on interior arcs till he
+gains the orange again, and then off once more on a fresh departure.
+Barbadoes to the West Indian steam navigation is like the skater's
+orange. All mails, all passengers from Europe, arrive at Barbadoes
+first. There the subsidiary steamers catch them up, bear them north or
+south to the Windward or Leeward Isles, and on their return bring them
+back to Carlisle Bay. Every vessel brings some person or persons to whom
+the Governor is called on to show hospitality. He must give dinners to
+the officials and gentry of the island, he must give balls and concerts
+for their ladies, he must entertain the officers of the garrison. When
+the West Indian squadron or the training squadron drop into the
+roadstead, admirals, commodores, captains must all be invited. Foreign
+ships of war go and come continually, Americans, French, Spaniards, or
+Portuguese. Presidents of South American republics, engineers from
+Darien, all sorts and conditions of men who go to Europe in the English
+mail vessels, take their departure from Carlisle Bay, and if they are
+neglected regard it as a national affront. Cataracts of champagne must
+flow if the British name is not to be discredited. The expense is
+unavoidable and is enormous, while the Governor's very moderate salary
+is found too large by economic politicians, and there is a cry for
+reduction of it.
+
+I was of course most grateful for Sir Charles's invitation to myself.
+From him, better perhaps than from anyone, I could learn how far the
+passionate complaints which I had heard about the state of the islands
+were to be listened to as accounts of actual fact. I found, however,
+that I must postpone both this particular pleasure and my stay in
+Barbadoes itself till a later opportunity. My purpose had been to remain
+there till I had given it all the time which I could spare, thence to go
+on to Jamaica, and from Jamaica to return at leisure round the Antilles.
+But it had been ascertained that in Jamaica there was small-pox. I
+suppose that there generally is small-pox there, or typhus fever, or
+other infectious disorder. But spasms of anxiety assail periodically the
+souls of local authorities. Vessels coming from Jamaica had been
+quarantined in all the islands, and I found that if I proceeded thither
+as I proposed, I should be refused permission to land afterwards in any
+one of the other colonies. In my perplexity my Trinidad friends invited
+me to accompany them at once to Port of Spain. Trinidad was the most
+thriving, or was at all events the least dissatisfied, of all the
+British possessions. I could have a glance at the Windward Islands on
+the way. I could afterwards return to Barbadoes, where Sir Charles
+assured me that I should still find a room waiting for me. The steamer
+to Trinidad sailed the same afternoon. I had to decide in haste, and I
+decided to go. Our luncheon over, we had time to look over the pretty
+gardens at Government House. There were great cabbage palms, cannon-ball
+trees, mahogany trees, almond trees, and many more which were wholly new
+acquaintances. There was a grotto made by climbing plants and creepers,
+with a fountain playing in the middle of it, where orchids hanging on
+wires threw out their clusters of flowers for the moths to fertilize,
+ferns waved their long fronds in the dripping showers, humming birds
+cooled their wings in the spray, and flashed in and out like rubies and
+emeralds. Gladly would I have lingered there, at least for a cigar, but
+it could not be; we had to call on the Commander of the Forces, Sir C.
+Pearson, the hero of Ekowe in the Zulu war. Him, too, I was to see
+again, and hear interesting stories from about our tragic enterprise in
+the Transvaal. For the moment my mind was filled sufficiently with new
+impressions. One reads books about places, but the images which they
+create are always unlike the real object. All that I had seen was
+absolutely new and unexpected. I was glad of an opportunity to readjust
+the information which I had brought with me. We joined our new vessel
+before sunset, and we steamed away into the twilight.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[3] Labat seems to say that they were hung up alive in these cages, and
+left to die there. He says elsewhere, and it may be hoped that the
+explanation is the truer one, that the recently imported negroes often
+destroyed themselves, in the belief that when dead they would return to
+their own country. In the French islands as well as the English, the
+bodies of suicides were exposed in these cages, from which they could
+not be stolen, to convince the poor people of their mistake by their own
+eyes. He says that the contrivance was successful, and that after this
+the slaves did not destroy themselves any more.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+    West Indian politeness--Negro morals and felicity--Island of St.
+    Vincent--Grenada--The harbour--Disappearance of the whites--An
+    island of black freeholders--Tobago--Dramatic art--A promising
+    incident.
+
+
+West Indian civilisation is old-fashioned, and has none of the pushing
+manners which belong to younger and perhaps more thriving communities.
+The West Indians themselves, though they may be deficient in energy, are
+uniformly ladies and gentlemen, and all their arrangements take their
+complexion from the general tone of society. There is a refinement
+visible at once in the subsidiary vessels of the mail service which ply
+among the islands. They are almost as large as those which cross the
+Atlantic, and never on any line in the world have I met with officers so
+courteous and cultivated. The cabins were spacious and as cool as a
+temperature of 80 deg., gradually rising as we went south, would permit.
+Punkahs waved over us at dinner. In our berths a single sheet was all
+that was provided for us, and this was one more than we needed. A sea
+was running when we cleared out from under the land. Among the cabin
+passengers was a coloured family in good circumstances moving about with
+nurses and children. The little things, who had never been at sea
+before, sat on the floor, staring out of their large helpless black
+eyes, not knowing what was the matter with them. Forward there were
+perhaps two or three hundred coloured people going from one island to
+another, singing, dancing, and chattering all night long, as radiant and
+happy as carelessness and content could make them. Sick or not sick made
+no difference. Nothing could disturb the imperturbable good humour and
+good spirits.
+
+It was too hot to sleep; we sat several of us smoking on deck, and I
+learnt the first authentic particulars of the present manner of life of
+these much misunderstood people. Evidently they belonged to a race far
+inferior to the Zulus and Caffres, whom I had known in South Africa.
+They were more coarsely formed in limb and feature. They would have been
+slaves in their own country if they had not been brought to ours, and at
+the worst had lost nothing by the change. They were good-natured,
+innocent, harmless, lazy perhaps, but not more lazy than is perfectly
+natural when even Europeans must be roused to activity by cocktail.
+
+In the Antilles generally, Barbadoes being the only exception, negro
+families have each their cabin, their garden ground, their grazing for a
+cow. They live surrounded by most of the fruits which grew in Adam's
+paradise--oranges and plantains, bread-fruit, and cocoa-nuts, though not
+apples. Their yams and cassava grow without effort, for the soil is
+easily worked and inexhaustibly fertile. The curse is taken off from
+nature, and like Adam again they are under the covenant of innocence.
+Morals in the technical sense they have none, but they cannot be said to
+sin, because they have no knowledge of a law, and therefore they can
+commit no breach of the law. They are naked and not ashamed. They are
+_married_ as they call it, but not _parsoned_. The woman prefers a
+looser tie that she may be able to leave a man if he treats her
+unkindly. Yet they are not licentious. I never saw an immodest look in
+one their faces, and never heard of any venal profligacy. The system is
+strange, but it answers. A missionary told me that a connection rarely
+turns out well which begins with a legal marriage. The children scramble
+up anyhow, and shift for themselves like chickens as soon as they are
+able to peck. Many die in this way by eating unwholesome food, but also
+many live, and those who do live grow up exactly like their parents. It
+is a very peculiar state of things, not to be understood, as priest and
+missionary agree, without long acquaintance. There is immorality, but an
+immorality which is not demoralising. There is sin, but it is the sin of
+animals, without shame, because there is no sense of doing wrong. They
+eat the forbidden fruit, but it brings with it no knowledge of the
+difference between good and evil. They steal, but as a tradition of the
+time when they were themselves chattels, and the laws of property did
+not apply to them. They are honest about money, more honest perhaps than
+a good many whites. But food or articles of use they take freely, as
+they were allowed to do when slaves, in pure innocence of heart. In fact
+these poor children of darkness have escaped the consequences of the
+Fall, and must come of another stock after all.
+
+Meanwhile they are perfectly happy. In no part of the globe is there any
+peasantry whose every want is so completely satisfied as her Majesty's
+black subjects in these West Indian islands. They have no aspirations to
+make them restless. They have no guilt upon their consciences. They have
+food for the picking up. Clothes they need not, and lodging in such a
+climate need not be elaborate. They have perfect liberty, and are safe
+from dangers, to which if left to themselves they would be exposed, for
+the English rule prevents the strong from oppressing the weak. In their
+own country they would have remained slaves to more warlike races. In
+the West Indies their fathers underwent a bondage of a century or two,
+lighter at its worst than the easiest form of it in Africa; their
+descendants in return have nothing now to do save to laugh and sing and
+enjoy existence. Their quarrels, if they have any, begin and end in
+words. If happiness is the be all and end all of life, and those who
+have most of it have most completely attained the object of their being,
+the 'nigger' who now basks among the ruins of the West Indian
+plantations is the supremest specimen of present humanity.
+
+We retired to our berths at last. At waking we were at anchor off St.
+Vincent, an island of volcanic mountains robed in forest from shore to
+crest. Till late in the last century it was the headquarters of the
+Caribs, who kept up a savage independence there, recruited by runaway
+slaves from Barbadoes or elsewhere. Brandy and Sir Ralph Abercrombie
+reduced them to obedience in 1796, and St. Vincent throve tolerably down
+to the days of free trade. Even now when I saw it, Kingston, the
+principal town, looked pretty and well to do, reminding me, strange to
+say, of towns in Norway, the houses stretching along the shore painted
+in the same tints of blue or yellow or pink, with the same red-tiled
+roofs, the trees coming down the hill sides to the water's edge, villas
+of modest pretensions shining through the foliage, with the patches of
+cane fields, the equivalent in the landscape of the brilliant Norwegian
+grass. The prosperity has for the last forty years waned and waned.
+There are now two thousand white people there, and forty thousand
+coloured people, and proportions alter annually to our disadvantage. The
+usual remedies have been tried. The constitution has been altered a
+dozen times. Just now I believe the Crown is trying to do without one,
+having found the results of the elective principle not encouraging, but
+we shall perhaps revert to it before long; any way, the tables show that
+each year the trade of the island decreases, and will continue to
+decrease while the expenditure increases and will increase.
+
+I did not land, for the time was short, and as a beautiful picture the
+island was best seen from the deck. The characteristics of the people
+are the same in all the Antilles, and could be studied elsewhere. The
+bustle and confusion in the ship, the crowd of boats round the ladder,
+the clamour of negro men's tongues, and the blaze of colours from the
+negro women's dresses, made up together a scene sufficiently
+entertaining for the hour which we remained. In the middle of it the
+Governor, Mr. S----, came on board with another official. They were
+going on in the steamer to Tobago, which formed part of his dominions.
+
+Leaving St. Vincent, we were all the forenoon passing the Grenadines, a
+string of small islands fitting into their proper place in the Antilles
+semicircle, but as if Nature had forgotten to put them together or else
+had broken some large island to pieces and scattered them along the
+line. Some were large enough to have once carried sugar plantations, and
+are now made over wholly to the blacks; others were fishing stations,
+droves of whales during certain months frequenting these waters; others
+were mere rocks, amidst which the white-sailed American coasting
+schooners were beating up against the north-east trade. There was a
+stiff breeze, and the sea was white with short curling waves, but we
+were running before it and the wind kept the deck fresh. At Grenada, the
+next island, we were to go on shore.
+
+Grenada was, like St. Vincent, the home for centuries of man-eating
+Caribs, French for a century and a half, and finally, after many
+desperate struggles for it, was ceded to England at the peace of
+Versailles. It is larger than St. Vincent, though in its main features
+it has the same character. There are lakes in the hills, and a volcanic
+crater not wholly quiescent; but the especial value of Grenada, which
+made us fight so hardly to win it, is the deep and landlocked harbour,
+the finest in all the Antilles.
+
+Pere Labat, to whose countrymen it belonged at the time of his own
+visit there, says that 'if Barbadoes had such a harbour as Grenada it
+would be an island without a rival in the world. If Grenada belonged to
+the English, who knew how to turn to profit natural advantages, it would
+be a rich and powerful colony. In itself it was all that man could
+desire. To live there was to live in paradise.' Labat found the island
+occupied by countrymen of his own, '_paisans aisez_', he calls them,
+growing their tobacco, their indigo and scarlet rocou, their pigs and
+their poultry, and contented to be without sugar, without slaves, and
+without trade. The change of hands from which he expected so much had
+actually come about. Grenada did belong to the English, and had belonged
+to us ever since Rodney's peace. I was anxious to see how far Labat's
+prophecy had been fulfilled.
+
+St. George's, the 'capital,' stands on the neck of a peninsula a mile in
+length, which forms one side of the harbour. Of the houses, some look
+out to sea, some inwards upon the _carenage_, as the harbour is called.
+At the point there was a fort, apparently of some strength, on which the
+British flag was flying. We signalled that we had the Governor on board,
+and the fort replied with a puff of smoke. Sound there was none or next
+to none, but we presumed that it had come from a gun of some kind. We
+anchored outside. Mr. S---- landed in an official boat with two flags, a
+missionary in another, which had only one. The crews of a dozen other
+boats then clambered up the gangway to dispute possession of the rest of
+us, shouting, swearing, lying, tearing us this way and that way as if we
+were carcases and they wild beasts wanting to dine upon us. We engaged a
+boat for ourselves as we supposed; we had no sooner entered it than the
+scandalous boatman proceeded to take in as many more passengers as it
+would hold. Remonstrance being vain, we settled the matter by stepping
+into the boat next adjoining, and amidst howls and execrations we were
+borne triumphantly off and were pulled in to the land.
+
+Labat had not exaggerated the beauty of the landlocked basin into which
+we entered on rounding the point. On three sides wooded hills rose high
+till they passed into mountains; on the fourth was the castle with its
+slopes and batteries, the church and town beyond it, and everywhere
+luxuriant tropical forest trees overhanging the violet-coloured water. I
+could well understand the Frenchman's delight when he saw it, and also
+the satisfaction with which he would now acknowledge that he had been a
+shortsighted prophet. The English had obtained Grenada, and this is what
+they had made of it. The forts which had been erected by his countrymen
+had been deserted and dismantled; the castle on which we had seen our
+flag flying was a ruin; the walls were crumbling and in many places had
+fallen down. One solitary gun was left, but that was honeycombed and
+could be fired only with half a charge to salute with. It was true that
+the forts had ceased to be of use, but that was because there was
+nothing left to defend. The harbour is, as I said, the best in the West
+Indies. There was not a vessel in it, nor so much as a boat-yard that I
+could see where a spar could be replaced or a broken rivet mended. Once
+there had been a line of wharves, but the piles had been eaten by worms
+and the platforms had fallen through. Round us when we landed were
+unroofed warehouses, weed-choked courtyards, doors gone, and window
+frames fallen in or out. Such a scene of desolation and desertion I
+never saw in my life save once, a few weeks later at Jamaica. An English
+lady with her children had come to the landing place to meet my friends.
+They, too, were more like wandering ghosts than human beings with warm
+blood in them. All their thoughts were on going home--home out of so
+miserable an exile.[4]
+
+Nature and the dark race had been simply allowed by us to resume
+possession of the island. Here, where the cannon had roared, and ships
+and armies had fought, and the enterprising English had entered into
+occupancy, under whom, as we are proud to fancy, the waste places of the
+earth grow green, and industry and civilisation follow as an inevitable
+fruit, all was now silence. And this was an English Crown colony, as
+rich in resources as any area of soil of equal size in the world.
+England had demanded and seized the responsibility of managing it--this
+was the result.
+
+A gentleman who for some purpose was a passing resident in the island,
+had asked us to dine with him. His house was three or four miles inland.
+A good road remained as a legacy from other times, and a pair of horses
+and a phaeton carried us swiftly to his door. The town of St. George's
+had once been populous, and even now there seemed no want of people, if
+mere numbers sufficed. We passed for half a mile through a straggling
+street, where the houses were evidently occupied though unconscious for
+many a year of paint or repair. They were squalid and dilapidated, but
+the luxuriant bananas and orange trees in the gardens relieved the
+ugliness of their appearance. The road when we left the town was
+overshadowed with gigantic mangoes planted long ago, with almond trees
+and cedar trees, no relations of our almonds or our cedars, but the most
+splendid ornaments of the West Indian forest. The valley up which we
+drove was beautiful, and the house, when we reached it, showed taste and
+culture. Mr. ---- had rare trees, rare flowers, and was taking advantage
+of his temporary residence in the tropics to make experiments in
+horticulture. He had been brought there, I believe, by some necessities
+of business. He told us that Grenada was now the ideal country of modern
+social reformers. It had become an island of pure peasant proprietors.
+The settlers, who had once been a thriving and wealthy community, had
+almost melted away. Some thirty English estates remained which could
+still be cultivated, and were being cultivated with remarkable success.
+But the rest had sold their estates for anything which they could get.
+The free blacks had bought them, and about 8,000 negro families, say
+40,000 black souls in all, now shared three-fourths of the soil between
+them. Each family lived independently, growing coffee and cocoa and
+oranges, and all were doing very well. The possession of property had
+brought a sense of its rights with it. They were as litigious as Irish
+peasants; everyone was at law with his neighbour, and the island was a
+gold mine to the Attorney-General; otherwise they were quiet harmless
+fellows, and if the politicians would only let them alone, they would be
+perfectly contented, and might eventually, if wisely managed, come to
+some good. To set up a constitution in such a place was a ridiculous
+mockery, and would only be another name for swindling and jobbery. Black
+the island was, and black it would remain. The conditions were never
+likely to arise which would bring back a European population; but a
+governor who was a sensible man, who would reside and use his natural
+influence, could manage it with perfect ease. The island belonged to
+England; we were responsible for what we made of it, and for the
+blacks' own sakes we ought not to try experiments upon them. They knew
+their own deficiencies and would infinitely prefer a wise English ruler
+to any constitution which could be offered them. If left entirely to
+themselves, they would in a generation or two relapse into savages;
+there were but two alternatives before not Grenada only, but all the
+English West Indies--either an English administration pure and simple,
+like the East Indian, or a falling eventually into a state like that of
+Hayti, where they eat the babies, and no white man can own a yard of
+land.
+
+It was dark night when we drove back to the port. The houses along the
+road, which had looked so miserable on the outside, were now lighted
+with paraffin lamps. I could see into them, and was astonished to
+observe signs of comfort and even signs of taste--arm-chairs, sofas,
+sideboards with cut glass upon them, engravings and coloured prints upon
+the walls. The old state of things is gone, but a new state of things is
+rising which may have a worth of its own. The plant of civilisation as
+yet has taken but feeble root, and is only beginning to grow. It may
+thrive yet if those who have troubled all the earth will consent for
+another century to take their industry elsewhere.
+
+The ship's galley was waiting at the wharf when we reached it. The
+captain also had been dining with a friend on shore, and we had to wait
+for him. The off-shore night breeze had not yet risen. The harbour was
+smooth as a looking glass, and the stars shone double in the sky and on
+the water. The silence was only broken by the whistle of the lizards or
+the cry of some far-off marsh frog. The air was warmer than we ever feel
+it in the depth of an English summer, yet pure and delicious and charged
+with the perfume of a thousand flowers. One felt it strange that with so
+beautiful a possession lying at our doors, we should have allowed it to
+slide out of our hands. I could say for myself, like Pere Labat, the
+island was all that man could desire. 'En un mot, la vie y est
+delicieuse.'
+
+The anchor was got up immediately that we were on board. In the morning
+we were to find ourselves at Port of Spain. Mr. S----, the Windward
+Island governor, who had joined us at St. Vincent, was, as I said, going
+to Tobago. De Foe took the human part of his Robinson Crusoe from the
+story of Juan Fernandez. The locality is supposed to have been Tobago,
+and Trinidad the island from which the cannibal savages came. We are
+continually shuffling the cards, in a hope that a better game may be
+played with them. Tobago is now-annexed to Trinidad. Last year it was a
+part of Mr. S----'s dominions which he periodically visited. I fell in
+with him again on his return, and he told us an incident which befell
+him there, illustrating the unexpected shapes in which the schoolmaster
+is appearing among the blacks. An intimation was brought to him on his
+arrival that, as the Athenian journeymen had played Pyramus and Thisbe
+at the nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta, so a party of villagers from
+the interior of Tobago would like to act before his Excellency. Of
+course he consented. They came, and went through their performance. To
+Mr. S----'s, and probably to the reader's astonishment, the play which
+they had selected was the 'Merchant of Venice.' Of the rest of it he
+perhaps thought, like the queen of the Amazons, that it was 'sorry
+stuff;' but Shylock's representative, he said, showed real appreciation.
+With freedom and a peasant proprietary, the money lender is a necessary
+phenomenon, and the actor's imagination may have been assisted by
+personal recollections.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[4] I have been told that this picture is overdrawn, that Grenada is the
+most prosperous of the Antilles, that its exports are increasing, that
+English owners are making large profits again, that the blacks are
+thriving beyond example, that there are twenty guns in the Fort, that
+the wharves and Quay are in perfect condition, that there are no
+roofless warehouses, that in my description of St. George's I must have
+been asleep or dreaming. I can only repeat and insist upon what I myself
+saw. I know very well that in parts of the island a few energetic
+English gentlemen are cultivating their land with remarkable success.
+Any enterprising Englishman with capital and intelligence might do the
+same. I know also that in no part of the West Indies are the blacks
+happier or better off. But notwithstanding the English interest in the
+Island has sunk to relatively nothing. Once Englishmen owned the whole
+of it. Now there are only thirty English estates. There are five
+thousand peasant freeholds, owned almost entirely by coloured men, and
+the effect of the change is written upon the features of the harbour.
+Not a vessel of any kind was to be seen in it. The great wooden jetty
+where cargoes used to be landed, or taken on board, was a wreck, the
+piles eaten through, the platform broken. On the Quay there was no sign
+of life, or of business, the houses along the side mean and
+insignificant, while several large and once important buildings,
+warehouses, custom houses, dwelling houses, or whatever they had been,
+were lying in ruins, tropical trees growing in the courtyards, and
+tropical creepers climbing over the masonry showing how long the decay
+had been going on. These buildings had once belonged to English
+merchants, and were evidence of English energy and enterprise, which
+once had been and now had ceased to be. As to the guns in the fort, I
+cannot say how much old iron may be left there. But I was informed that
+only one gun could be fired and that with but half a charge.
+
+This is of little consequence or none, but unless the English population
+can be reinforced, Grenada in another generation will cease to be
+English at all, while the prosperity, the progress, even the continued
+civilisation of the blacks depends on the maintenance there of English
+influence and authority.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+    Charles Kingsley at Trinidad--'Lay of the Last Buccaneer'--A French
+    _forban_--Adventure at Aves--Mass on board a pirate ship--Port of
+    Spain--A house in the tropics--A political meeting--Government
+    House--The Botanical Gardens'--Kingsley's rooms--Sugar estates and
+    coolies.
+
+
+I might spare myself a description of Trinidad, for the natural features
+of the place, its forests and gardens, its exquisite flora, the
+loveliness of its birds and insects, have been described already, with a
+grace of touch and a fullness of knowledge which I could not rival if I
+tried, by my dear friend Charles Kingsley. He was a naturalist by
+instinct, and the West Indies and all belonging to them had been the
+passion of his life. He had followed the logs and journals of the
+Elizabethan adventurers till he had made their genius part of himself.
+In Amyas Leigh, the hero of 'Westward Ho,' he produced a figure more
+completely representative of that extraordinary set of men than any
+other novelist, except Sir Walter, has ever done for an age remote from
+his own. He followed them down into their latest developments, and sang
+their swan song in his 'Lay of the Last Buccaneer.' So characteristic is
+this poem of the transformation of the West Indies of romance and
+adventure into the West Indies of sugar and legitimate trade, that I
+steal it to ornament my own prosaic pages.
+
+THE LAY OF THE LAST BUCCANEER.
+
+    Oh! England is a pleasant place for them that's rich and high,
+    But England is a cruel place for such poor folks as I;
+    And such a port for mariners I'll never see again
+    As the pleasant Isle of Aves beside the Spanish main.
+
+    There were forty craft in Aves that were both swift and stout,
+    All furnished well with small arms and cannon all about;
+    And a thousand men in Aves made laws so fair and free
+    To choose their valiant captains and obey them loyally.
+
+    Then we sailed against the Spaniard with his hoards of plate and gold,
+    Which he wrung with cruel tortures from Indian folks of old;
+    Likewise the merchant captains, with hearts as hard as stone,
+    Who flog men and keelhaul them and starve them to the bone.
+
+    Oh! palms grew high in Aves, and fruits that shone like gold,
+    And the colibris and parrots they were gorgeous to behold,
+    And the negro maids to Aves from bondage fast did flee
+    To welcome gallant sailors a sweeping in from sea.
+
+    Oh! sweet it was in Aves to hear the landward breeze,
+    A swing with good tobacco in a net between the trees,
+    With a negro lass to fan you while you listened to the roar
+    Of the breakers on the reef outside which never touched the shore.
+
+    But Scripture saith an ending to all fine things must be,
+    So the king's ships sailed on Aves and quite put down were we.
+    All day we fought like bull dogs, but they burnt the booms at night,
+    And I fled in a piragua sore wounded from the fight.
+
+    Nine days I floated starving, and a negro lass beside,
+    Till for all I tried to cheer her the poor young thing she died.
+    But as I lay a gasping a Bristol sail came by,
+    And brought me home to England here to beg until I die.
+
+    And now I'm old and going: I'm sure I can't tell where.
+    One comfort is, this world's so hard I can't be worse off there.
+    If I might but be a sea dove, I'd fly across the main
+    To the pleasant Isle of Aves to look at it once again.
+
+By the side of this imaginative picture of a poor English sea rover, let
+me place another, an authentic one, of a French _forban_ or pirate in
+the same seas. Kingsley's Aves, or Isle of Birds, is down on the
+American coast. There is another island of the same name, which was
+occasionally frequented by the same gentry, about a hundred miles south
+of Dominica. Pere Labat going once from Martinique to Guadaloupe had
+taken a berth with Captain Daniel, one of the most noted of the French
+corsairs of the day, for better security. People were not scrupulous in
+those times, and Labat and Daniel had been long good friends. They were
+caught in a gale off Dominica, blown away, and carried to Aves, where
+they found an English merchant ship lying a wreck. Two English ladies
+from Barbadoes and a dozen other people had escaped on shore. They had
+sent for help, and a large vessel came for them the day after Daniel's
+arrival. Of course he made a prize of it. Labat said prayers on board
+for him before the engagement, and the vessel surrendered after the
+first shot. The good humour of the party was not disturbed by this
+incident. The pirates, their prisoners, and the ladies stayed together
+for a fortnight at Aves, catching turtles and boucanning them,
+picnicking, and enjoying themselves. Daniel treated the ladies with the
+utmost politeness, carried them afterwards to St. Thomas's, dismissed
+them unransomed, sold his prizes, and wound up the whole affair to the
+satisfaction of every one. Labat relates all this with wonderful humour,
+and tells, among other things, the following story of Daniel. On some
+expedition, when he was not so fortunate as to have a priest on board,
+he was in want of provisions. Being an outlaw he could not furnish
+himself in an open port. One night he put into the harbour of a small
+island, called Los Santos, not far from Dominica, where only a few
+families resided. He sent a boat on shore in the darkness, took the
+priest and two or three of the chief inhabitants out of their beds, and
+carried them on board, where he held them as hostages, and then under
+pretence of compulsion requisitioned the island to send him what he
+wanted. The priest and his companions were treated meanwhile as guests
+of distinction. No violence was necessary, for all parties understood
+one another. While the stores were being collected, Daniel suggested
+that there was a good opportunity for his crew to hear mass. The priest
+of Los Santos agreed to say it for them. The sacred vessels &c. were
+sent for from the church on shore. An awning was rigged over the
+forecastle, and an altar set up under it. The men chanted the prayers.
+The cannon answered the purpose of music. Broadsides were fired at the
+first sentence, at the _Exaudiat_, at the _Elevation_, at the
+_Benediction_, and a fifth at the prayer for the king. The service was
+wound up by a _Vive le Roi_! A single small accident only had disturbed
+the ceremony. One of the pirates, at the _Elevation_, being of a profane
+mind, made an indecent gesture. Daniel rebuked him, and, as the offence
+was repeated, drew a pistol and blew the man's brains out, saying he
+would do the same to any one who was disrespectful to the Holy
+Sacrament. The priest being a little startled, Daniel begged him not to
+be alarmed; he was only chastising a rascal to teach him his duty. At
+any rate, as Labat observed, he had effectually prevented the rascal
+from doing anything of the same kind again. Mass being over, the body
+was thrown overboard, and priest and congregation went their several
+ways.
+
+Kingsley's 'At Last' gave Trinidad an additional interest to me, but
+even he had not prepared me completely for the place which I was to see.
+It is only when one has seen any object with one's own eyes, that the
+accounts given by others become recognisable and instructive.
+
+Trinidad is the largest, after Jamaica, of the British West Indian
+Islands, and the hottest absolutely after none of them. It is
+square-shaped, and, I suppose, was once a part of South America. The
+Orinoco river and the ocean currents between them have cut a channel
+between it and the mainland, which has expanded into a vast shallow lake
+known as the Gulf of Paria. The two entrances by which the gulf is
+approached are narrow and are called _bocas_ or mouths--one the Dragon's
+Mouth, the other the Serpent's. When the Orinoco is in flood, the water
+is brackish, and the brilliant violet blue of the Caribbean Sea is
+changed to a dirty yellow; but the harbour which is so formed would hold
+all the commercial navies of the world, and seems formed by nature to be
+the depot one day of an enormous trade.
+
+Trinidad has had its period of romance. Columbus was the first
+discoverer of it. Raleigh was there afterwards on his expedition in
+search of his gold mine, and tarred his vessels with pitch out of the
+famous lake. The island was alternately Spanish and French till Picton
+took it in 1797, since which time it has remained English. The Carib
+part of the population has long vanished. The rest of it is a medley of
+English, French, Spaniards, negroes, and coolies. The English, chiefly
+migratory, go there to make money and go home with it. The old colonial
+families have few representatives left, but the island prospers, trade
+increases, coolies increase, cocoa and coffee plantations and indigo
+plantations increase. Port of Spain, the capital, grows annually; and
+even sugar holds its own in spite of low prices, for there is money at
+the back of it, and a set of people who, being speculative and
+commercial, are better on a level with the times than the old-fashioned
+planter aristocracy of the other islands. The soil is of extreme
+fertility, about a fourth of it under cultivation, the rest natural
+forest and unappropriated Crown land.
+
+We passed the 'Dragon's Jaws' before daylight. The sun had just risen
+when we anchored off Port of Spain. We saw before us the usual long line
+of green hills with mountains behind them; between the hills and the sea
+was a low, broad, alluvial plain, deposited by an arm of the Orinoco and
+by the other rivers which run into the gulf. The cocoa-nut palms thrive
+best on the water's edge. They stretched for miles on either side of us
+as a fringe to the shore. Where the water was shoal, there were vast
+swamps of mangrove, the lower branches covered with oysters.
+
+However depressed sugar might be, business could not be stagnant. Ships
+of all nations lay round us taking in or discharging cargo. I myself
+formed for the time being part of the cargo of my friend and host Mr.
+G----, who had brought me to Trinidad, the accomplished son of a
+brilliant mother, himself a distinguished lawyer and member of the
+executive council of the island, a charming companion, an invaluable
+public servant, but with the temperament of a man of genius, half
+humorous, half melancholy, which does not find itself entirely at home
+in West Indian surroundings.
+
+On landing we found ourselves in a large foreign-looking town, 'Port of
+Spain' having been built by French and Spaniards according to their
+national tendencies, and especially with a view to the temperature,
+which is that of a forcing house and rarely falls below 80 deg.. The streets
+are broad and are planted with trees for shade, each house where room
+permits having a garden of its own, with palms and mangoes and coffee
+plants and creepers. Of sanitary arrangements there seemed to be none.
+There is abundance of rain, and the gutters which run down by the
+footway are flushed almost every day. But they are all open. Dirt of
+every kind lies about freely, to be washed into them or left to putrefy
+as fate shall direct. The smell would not be pleasant without the help
+of that natural scavenger the Johnny crow, a black vulture who roosts on
+the trees and feeds in the middle of the streets. We passed a dozen of
+these unclean but useful birds in a fashionable thoroughfare gobbling up
+chicken entrails and refusing to be disturbed. When gorged they perch in
+rows upon the roofs. On the ground they are the nastiest to look at of
+all winged creatures; yet on windy days they presume to soar like their
+kindred, and when far up might be taken for eagles.
+
+The town has between thirty and forty thousand people living in it, and
+the rain and Johnny crows between them keep off pestilence. Outside is a
+large savannah or park, where the villas are of the successful men of
+business. One of these belonged to my host, a cool airy habitation with
+open doors and windows, overhanging portico, and rooms into which all
+the winds might enter, but not the sun. A garden in front was shut off
+from the savannah by a fence of bananas. At the gate stood as sentinel a
+cabbage palm a hundred feet high; on the lawn mangoes, oranges, papaws,
+and bread-fruit trees, strange to look at, but luxuriantly shady. Before
+the door was a tree of good dimensions, whose name I have forgotten, the
+stem and branches of which were hung with orchids which G---- had
+collected in the woods. The borders were blazing with varieties of the
+single hibiscus, crimson, pink, and fawn colour, the largest that I had
+ever seen. The average diameter of each single flower was from seven to
+eight inches. Wind streamed freely through the long sitting room, loaded
+with the perfume of orange trees; on table and in bookcase the hand and
+mind visible of a gifted and cultivated man. The particular room
+assigned to myself would have been equally delightful but that my
+possession of it was disputed even in daylight by mosquitoes, who for
+bloodthirsty ferocity had a bad pre-eminence over the worst that I had
+ever met with elsewhere. I killed one who was at work upon me, and
+examined him through a glass. Bewick, with the inspiration of genius,
+had drawn his exact likeness as the devil--a long black stroke for a
+body, nick for neck, horns on the head, and a beak for a mouth, spindle
+arms, and longer spindle legs, two pointed wings, and a tail. Line for
+line there the figure was before me which in the unforgetable tailpiece
+is driving the thief under the gallows, and I had a melancholy
+satisfaction in identifying him. I had been warned to be on the look-out
+for scorpions, centipedes, jiggers, and land crabs, who would bite me if
+I walked slipperless over the floor in the dark. Of these I met with
+none, either there or anywhere, but the mosquito of Trinidad is enough
+by himself. For malice, mockery, and venom of tooth and trumpet, he is
+without a match in the world.
+
+From mosquitoes, however, one could seek safety in tobacco smoke, or
+hide behind the lace curtains with which every bed is provided.
+Otherwise I found every provision to make life pass deliciously. To walk
+is difficult in a damp steamy temperature hotter during daylight than
+the hottest forcing house in Kew. I was warned not to exert myself and
+to take cocktail freely. In the evening I might venture out with the
+bats and take a drive if I wished in the twilight. Languidly charming as
+it all was, I could not help asking myself of what use such a possession
+could be either to England or the English nation. We could not colonise
+it, could not cultivate it, could not draw a revenue from it. If it
+prospered commercially the prosperity would be of French and Spaniards,
+mulattoes and blacks, but scarcely, if at all, of my own countrymen. For
+here too, as elsewhere, they were growing fewer daily, and those who
+remained were looking forward to the day when they could be released. If
+it were not for the honour of the thing, as the Irishman said after
+being carried in a sedan chair which had no bottom, we might have spared
+ourselves so unnecessary a conquest.
+
+Beautiful, however, it was beyond dispute. Before sunset a carriage took
+us round the savannah. Tropical human beings, like tropical birds, are
+fond of fine colours, especially black human beings, and the park was as
+brilliant as Kensington Gardens on a Sunday. At nightfall the scene
+became yet more wonderful; air, grass, and trees being alight with
+fireflies, each as brilliant as an English glowworm. The palm tree at
+our own gate stood like a ghostly sentinel clear against the starry sky,
+a single long dead frond hanging from below the coronet of leaves and
+clashing against the stem as it was blown to and fro by the night wind,
+while long-winged bats swept and whistled over our heads.
+
+The commonplace intrudes upon the imaginative. At moments one can fancy
+that the world is an enchanted place after all, but then comes generally
+an absurd awakening. On the first night of my arrival, before we went to
+bed there came an invitation to me to attend a political meeting which
+was to be held in a few days on the savannah. Trinidad is a purely Crown
+colony, and has escaped hitherto the introduction of the election virus.
+The newspapers and certain busy gentlemen in 'Port of Spain' had
+discovered that they were living under 'a degrading tyranny,' and they
+demanded a 'constitution.' They did not complain that their affairs had
+been ill managed. On the contrary, they insisted that they were the most
+prosperous of the West Indian colonies, and alone had a surplus in their
+treasury. If this was so, it seemed to me that they had better let well
+alone. The population, all told, was but 170,000, less by thirty
+thousand than that of Barbadoes. They were a mixed and motley assemblage
+of all races and colours, busy each with their own affairs, and never
+hitherto troubling themselves about politics. But it had pleased the
+Home Government to set up the beginning of a constitution again in
+Jamaica, no one knew why, but so it was, and Trinidad did not choose to
+be behindhand. The official appointments were valuable, and had been
+hitherto given away by the Crown. The local popularities very naturally
+wished to have them for themselves. This was the reality in the thing so
+far as there was a reality. It was dressed up in the phrases borrowed
+from the great English masters of the art, about privileges of manhood,
+moral dignity, the elevating influence of the suffrage, &c., intended
+for home consumption among the believers in the orthodox Radical faith.
+
+For myself I could but reply to the gentlemen who had sent the
+invitation, that I was greatly obliged by the compliment, but that I
+knew too little of their affairs to make my presence of any value to
+them. As they were doing so well, I did not see myself why they wanted
+an alteration. Political changes were generally little more than turns
+of a kaleidoscope; you got a new pattern, but it was made of the same
+pieces, and things went on much as before. If they wanted political
+liberty I did not doubt that they would get it if they were loud and
+persistent enough. Only they must understand that at home we were now a
+democracy. Any constitution which was granted them would be on the
+widest basis. The blacks and coolies outnumbered the Europeans by four
+to one, and perhaps when they had what they asked for they might be less
+pleased than they expected.
+
+You rise early in the tropics. The first two hours of daylight are the
+best of the day. My friend drove me round the town in his buggy the next
+morning. My second duty was to pay my respects to the Governor, Sir
+William Robinson, who had kindly offered me hospitality, and for which I
+must present myself to thank him. In Sir William I found one of those
+happy men whose constitution is superior to climate, who can do a long
+day's work in his office, play cricket or lawn tennis in the afternoon,
+and entertain his miscellaneous subjects in the evening with sumptuous
+hospitality--a vigorous, effective, perhaps ambitious gentleman, with a
+clear eye to the views of his employers at home on whom his promotion
+depends--certain to make himself agreeable to them, likely to leave his
+mark to useful purpose on the colonies over which he presides or may
+preside hereafter. Here in Trinidad he was learning Spanish in addition
+to his other linguistic accomplishments, that he might show proper
+courtesies to Spanish residents and to visitors from South America.
+
+The 'Residence' stands in a fine situation, in large grounds of its own
+at the foot of the mountains. It has been lately built regardless of
+expense, for the colony is rich, and likes to do things handsomely. On
+the lawn, under the windows, stood a tree which was entirely new to me,
+an enormous ceiba or silk cotton tree, umbrella shaped, fifty yards in
+diameter, the huge and buttressed trunk throwing out branches so massive
+that one wondered how any woody fibre could bear the strain of their
+weight, the boughs twisting in and out till they made a roof over one's
+head, which was hung with every fantastic variety of parasites.
+
+Vast as the ceibas were which I saw afterwards in other parts of the
+West Indies, this was the largest. The ceiba is the sacred tree of the
+negro, the temple of Jumbi the proper home of Obeah. To cut one down is
+impious. No black in his right mind would wound even the bark. A Jamaica
+police officer told me that if a ceiba had to be removed, the men who
+used the axe were well dosed with rum to give them courage to defy the
+devil.
+
+From Government House we strolled into the adjoining Botanical Gardens.
+I had long heard of the wonders of these. The reality went beyond
+description. Plants with which I was familiar as _shrubs_ in English
+conservatories were here expanded into forest giants, with hundreds of
+others of which we cannot raise even Lilliputian imitations. Let man be
+what he will, nature in the tropics is always grand. Palms were growing
+in the greatest luxuriance, of every known species, from the cabbage
+towering up into the sky to the fan palm of the desert whose fronds are
+reservoirs of water. Of exogenous trees, the majority were leguminous in
+some shape or other, forming flowers like a pea or vetch and hanging
+their seed in pods; yet in shape and foliage they distanced far the most
+splendid ornaments of an English park. They had Old World names with
+characters wholly different: cedars which were not conifers, almonds
+which were no relations to peaches, and gum trees as unlike eucalypti as
+one tree can be unlike another. Again, you saw forms which you seemed to
+recognise till some unexpected anomaly startled you out of your mistake.
+A gigantic Portugal laurel, or what I took for such, was throwing out a
+flower direct from the stem like a cactus. Grandest among them all, and
+happily in full bloom, was the sacred tree of Burmah, the _Amherstia
+nobilis_, at a distance like a splendid horse-chestnut, with crimson
+blossoms in pendant bunches, each separate flower in the convolution of
+its parts exactly counterfeiting a large orchid, with which it has not
+the faintest affinity, the Amherstia being leguminous like the rest.
+
+Underneath, and dispersed among the imperial beauties, were spice trees,
+orange trees, coffee plants and cocoa, or again, shrubs with special
+virtues or vices. We had to be careful what we were about, for fruits of
+fairest appearance were tempting us all round. My companion was
+preparing to eat something to encourage me to do the same. A gardener
+stopped him in time. It was nux vomica. I was straying along a less
+frequented path, conscious of a heavy vaporous odour, in which I might
+have fainted had I remained exposed to it. I was close to a manchineel
+tree.
+
+Prettiest and freshest were the nutmegs, which had a glen all to
+themselves and perfumed the surrounding air. In Trinidad and in Grenada
+I believe the nutmegs are the largest that are known, being from thirty
+to forty feet high; leaves brilliant green, something like the leaves of
+an orange, but extremely delicate and thin, folded one over the other,
+the lowest branches sweeping to the ground till the whole tree forms a
+natural bower, which is proof against a tropical shower. The fragrance
+attracts moths and flies; not mosquitoes, who prefer a ranker
+atmosphere. I saw a pair of butterflies the match of which I do not
+remember even in any museum, dark blue shot with green like a peacock's
+neck, and the size of English bats. I asked a black boy to catch me one.
+'That sort no let catchee, massa,' he said; and I was penitently glad to
+hear it.
+
+Among the wonders of the gardens are the vines as they call them, that
+is, the creepers of various kinds that climb about the other trees.
+Standing in an open space there was what once had been a mighty 'cedar.'
+It was now dead, only the trunk and dead branches remaining, and had
+been murdered by a 'fig' vine which had started from the root, twined
+itself like a python round the stem, strangled out the natural life, and
+spreading out in all directions had covered boughs and twigs with a
+foliage not their own. So far the 'vine' had done no worse than ivy does
+at home, but there was one feature about it which puzzled me altogether.
+The lowest of the original branches of the cedar were about twenty feet
+above our heads. From these in four or five places the parasite had let
+fall shoots, perhaps an inch in diameter, which descended to within a
+foot of the ground and then suddenly, without touching that or anything,
+formed a bight like a rope, went straight up again, caught hold of the
+branch from which they started, and so hung suspended exactly as an
+ordinary swing. In three distinctly perfect instances the 'vine' had
+executed this singular evolution, while at the extremity of one of the
+longest and tallest branches high up in the air it had made a clean leap
+of fifteen feet without visible help and had caught hold of another tree
+adjoining on the same level. These performances were so inexplicable
+that I conceived that they must have been a freak of the gardener's. I
+was mistaken. He said that at particular times in the year the fig vine
+threw out fine tendrils which hung downwards like strings. The strongest
+among them would lay hold of two or three others and climb up upon them,
+the rest would die and drop off, while the successful one, having found
+support for itself above, would remain swinging in the air and thicken
+and prosper. The leap he explained by the wind. I retained a suspicion
+that the wind had been assisted by some aspiring energy in the plant
+itself, so bold it was and so ambitious.
+
+But the wonders of the garden were thrown into the shade by the cottage
+at the extreme angle of it (the old Government House before the present
+fabric had been erected), where Kingsley had been the guest of Sir
+Arthur Gordon. It is a long straggling wooden building with deep
+verandahs lying in a hollow overshadowed by trees, with views opening
+out into the savannah through arches formed by clumps of tall bamboos,
+the canes growing thick in circular masses and shooting up a hundred
+feet into the air, where they meet and form frames for the landscape,
+peculiar and even picturesque when there are not too many of them. These
+bamboos were Kingsley's special delight, as he had never seen the like
+of them elsewhere. The room in which he wrote is still shown, and the
+gallery where he walked up and down with his long pipe. His memory is
+cherished in the island as of some singular and beautiful presence which
+still hovers about the scenes which so delighted him in the closing
+evening of his own life.
+
+It was the dry season, mid-winter, yet raining every day for two or
+three hours, and when it rains in these countries it means business.
+When the sky cleared the sun was intolerably hot, and distant
+expeditions under such conditions suited neither my age nor my health.
+With cocktail I might have ventured, but to cocktail I could never
+heartily reconcile myself. Trinidad has one wonder in it, a lake of
+bitumen some ninety acres in extent, which all travellers are expected
+to visit, and which few residents care to visit. A black lake is not so
+beautiful as an ordinary lake. I had no doubt that it existed, for the
+testimony was unimpeachable. Indeed I was shown an actual specimen of
+the crystallised pitch itself. I could believe without seeing and
+without undertaking a tedious journey. I rather sympathised with a noble
+lord who came to Port of Spain in his yacht, and like myself had the
+lake impressed upon him. As a middle course between going thither and
+appearing to slight his friends' recommendations, he said that he would
+send his steward.
+
+In Trinidad, as everywhere else, my own chief desire was to see the
+human inhabitants, to learn what they were doing, how they were living,
+and what they were thinking about, and this could best be done by drives
+about the town and neighbourhood. The cultivated land is a mere fringe
+round the edges of the forest. Three-fourths of the soil are untouched.
+The rivers running out of the mountains have carved out the usual long
+deep valleys, and spread the bottoms with rich alluvial soil. Here among
+the wooded slopes are the country houses of the merchants. Here are the
+cabins of the black peasantry with their cocoa and coffee and orange
+plantations, which as in Grenada they hold largely as freeholds,
+reproducing as near as possible the life in Paradise of our first
+parents, without the consciousness of a want which they are unable to
+gratify, not compelled to work, for the earth of her own self bears for
+them all that they need, and ignorant that there is any difference
+between moral good and evil.
+
+Large sugar estates, of course, there still are, and as the owners have
+not succeeded in bringing the negroes to work regularly for them,[5]
+they have introduced a few thousand Coolies under indentures for five
+years. These Asiatic importations are very happy in Trinidad; they save
+money, and many of them do not return home when their time is out, but
+stay where they are, buy land, or go into trade. They are proud,
+however, and will not intermarry with the Africans. Few bring their
+families with them; and women being scanty among them, there arise
+inconveniences and sometimes serious crimes.
+
+It were to be wished that there was more prospect of the Coolie race
+becoming permanent than I fear there is. They work excellently. They are
+picturesque additions to the landscape, as they keep to the bright
+colours and graceful drapery of India. The grave dignity of their faces
+contrasts remarkably with the broad, good-humoured, but common features
+of the African. The black women look with envy at the straight hair of
+Asia, and twist their unhappy wool into knots and ropes in the vain hope
+of being mistaken for the purer race; but this is all. The African and
+the Asiatic will not mix, and the African being the stronger will and
+must prevail in Trinidad as elsewhere in the West Indies. Out of a total
+population of 170,000, there are 25,000 whites and mulattoes, 10,000
+coolies, the rest negroes. The English part of the Europeans shows no
+tendency to increase. The English come as birds of passage, and depart
+when they have made their fortunes. The French and Spaniards may hold on
+to Trinidad as a home. Our people do not make homes there, and must be
+looked on as a transient element.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] The negroes in the interior are beginning to cultivate sugar cane in
+small patches, with common mills to break it up. If the experiment
+succeeds it may extend.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+    A Coolie village--Negro
+    freeholds--Waterworks--Pythons--Slavery--Evidence of Lord
+    Rodney--Future of the negroes--Necessity of English rule--The Blue
+    Basin--Black boy and cray fish.
+
+
+The second morning after my arrival, my host took me to a Coolie village
+three miles beyond the town. The drive was between spreading cane
+fields, beneath the shade of bamboos, or under rows of cocoa-nut palms,
+between the stems of which the sea was gleaming.
+
+Human dwelling places are rarely interesting in the tropics. A roof
+which will keep the rain out is all that is needed. The more free the
+passage given to the air under the floor and through the side, the more
+healthy the habitation; and the houses, when we came among them, seemed
+merely enlarged packing cases loosely nailed together and raised on
+stones a foot or two from the ground. The rest of the scene was
+picturesque enough. The Indian jewellers were sitting cross-legged
+before their charcoal pans, making silver bracelets and earrings.
+Brilliant garments, crimson and blue and orange, were hanging to dry on
+clothes lines. Men were going out to their work, women cooking, children
+(not many) playing or munching sugar cane, while great mango trees and
+ceibas spread a cool green roof over all. Like Rachel, the Coolies had
+brought their gods to their new home. In the centre of the village was a
+Hindoo temple, made up rudely out of boards with a verandah running
+round it. The doors were locked. An old man who had charge told us we
+could not enter; a crowd, suspicious and sullen, gathered about us as we
+tried to prevail upon him; so we had to content ourselves with the
+outside, which was gaudily and not unskilfully painted in Indian
+fashion. There were gods and goddesses in various attitudes; Vishnu
+fighting with the monkey god, Vishnu with cutlass and shield, the monkey
+with his tail round one tree while he brandished two others, one in each
+hand, as clubs. I suppose that we smiled, for our curiosity was
+resented, and we found it prudent to withdraw.
+
+The Coolies are useful creatures. Without them sugar cultivation in
+Trinidad and Demerara would cease altogether. They are useful and they
+are singularly ornamental. Unfortunately they have not the best
+character with the police. There is little crime among the negroes, who
+quarrel furiously with their tongues only. The Coolies have the fiercer
+passions of their Eastern blood. Their women being few are tempted
+occasionally into infidelities, and would be tempted more often but that
+a lapse in virtue is so fearfully avenged. A Coolie regards his wife as
+his property, and if she is unfaithful to him he kills her without the
+least hesitation. One of the judges told me that he had tried a case of
+this kind, and could not make the man understand that he had done
+anything wrong. It is a pity that a closer intermixture between them and
+the negroes seems so hopeless, for it would solve many difficulties.
+There is no jealousy. The negro does not regard the Coolie as a
+competitor and interloper who has come to lower his wages. The Coolie
+comes to work. The negro does not want to work, and both are satisfied.
+But if there is no jealousy there is no friendship. The two races are
+more absolutely apart than the white and the black. The Asiatic insists
+the more on his superiority in the fear perhaps that if he did not the
+white might forget it.
+
+Among the sights in the neighbourhood of Port of Spain are the
+waterworks, extensive basins and reservoirs a few miles off in the
+hills. We chose a cool afternoon, when the temperature in the shade was
+not above 86 deg., and went to look at them. It was my first sight of the
+interior of the island, and my first distinct acquaintance with the
+change which had come over the West Indies. Trinidad is not one of our
+oldest possessions, but we had held it long enough for the old planter
+civilisation to take root and grow, and our road led us through jungles
+of flowering shrubs which were running wild over what had been once
+cultivated estates. Stranger still (for one associates colonial life
+instinctively with what is new and modern), we came at one place on an
+avenue of vast trees, at the end of which stood the ruins of a mansion
+of some great man of the departed order. Great man he must have been,
+for there was a gateway half crumbled away on which were his crest and
+shield in stone, with supporters on either side, like the Baron of
+Bradwardine's Bears; fallen now like them, but unlike them never, I
+fear, to be set up again. The Anglo-West Indians, like the English
+gentry in Ireland, were a fine race of men in their day, and perhaps the
+improving them off the earth has been a less beneficial process in
+either case than we are in the habit of supposing.
+
+Entering among the hills we came on their successors. In Trinidad there
+are 18,000 freeholders, most of them negroes and representatives of the
+old slaves. Their cabins are spread along the road on either side,
+overhung with bread-fruit trees, tamarinds, calabash trees, out of which
+they make their cups and water jugs. The luscious granadilla climbs
+among the branches; plantains throw their cool shade over the doors;
+oranges and limes and citrons perfume the air, and droop their boughs
+under the weight of their golden burdens. There were yams in the gardens
+and cows in the paddocks, and cocoa bushes loaded with purple or yellow
+pods. Children played about in swarms, in happy idleness and abundance,
+with schools, too, at intervals, and an occasional Catholic chapel, for
+the old religion prevails in Trinidad, never having been disturbed. What
+form could human life assume more charming than that which we were now
+looking on? Once more, the earth does not contain any peasantry so well
+off, so well cared for, so happy, so sleek and contented as the sons and
+daughters of the emancipated slaves in the English West Indian Islands.
+Sugar may fail the planter, but cocoa, which each peasant can grow with
+small effort for himself, does not fail and will not. He may 'better his
+condition,' if he has any such ambition, without stirring beyond his own
+ground, and so far, perhaps, his ambition may extend, if it is not
+turned off upon politics. Even the necessary evils of the tropics are
+not many or serious. His skin is proof against mosquitoes. There are
+snakes in Trinidad as there were snakes in Eden. 'Plenty snakes,' said
+one of them who was at work in his garden, 'plenty snakes, but no
+bitee.' As to costume, he would prefer the costume of innocence if he
+was allowed. Clothes in such a climate are superfluous for warmth, and
+to the minds of the negroes, unconscious as they are of shame,
+superfluous for decency. European prejudice, however, still passes for
+something; the women have a love for finery, which would prevent a
+complete return to African simplicity; and in the islands which are
+still French, and in those like Trinidad, which the French originally
+colonised, they dress themselves with real taste. They hide their wool
+in red or yellow handkerchiefs, gracefully twisted; or perhaps it is not
+only to conceal the wool. Columbus found the Carib women of the island
+dressing their hair in the same fashion.[6]
+
+The waterworks, when we reached them, were even more beautiful than we
+had been taught to expect. A dam has been driven across a perfectly
+limpid mountain stream; a wide open area has been cleared, levelled,
+strengthened with masonry, and divided into deep basins and reservoirs,
+through which the current continually flows. Hedges of hibiscus shine
+with crimson blossoms. Innumerable humming birds glance to and fro among
+the trees and shrubs, and gardens and ponds are overhung by magnificent
+bamboos, which so astonished me by their size that I inquired if their
+height had been measured. One of them, I was told, had lately fallen,
+and was found to be 130 feet long. A single drawback only there was to
+this enchanting spot, and it was again the snakes. There are huge
+pythons in Trinidad which are supposed to have crossed the straits from
+the continent. The cool water pools attract them, and they are seen
+occasionally coiled among the branches of the bamboos. Some washerwomen
+at work in the stream had been disturbed a few days before our visit by
+one of these monsters, who had come down to see what they were about.
+They are harmless, but trying to the nerves. One of the men about the
+place shot this one, and he told me that he had shot another a short
+time before asleep in a tree. The keeper of the works was a retired
+soldier, an Irish-Scot from Limerick, hale, vigorous, and happy as the
+blacks themselves. He had married one of them--a remarkable exception to
+an almost universal rule. He did not introduce us, but the dark lady
+passed by us in gorgeous costume, just noticing our presence with a
+sweep which would have done credit to a duchess.
+
+We made several similar small expeditions into the settled parts of the
+neighbourhood, seeing always (whatever else we saw) the boundless
+happiness of the black race. Under the rule of England in these islands
+the two million of these poor brothers-in-law of ours are the most
+perfectly contented specimens of the human race to be found upon the
+planet. Even Schopenhauer, could he have known them, would have admitted
+that there were some of us who were not hopelessly wretched. If
+happiness be the satisfaction of every conscious desire, theirs is a
+condition which admits of no improvement: were they independent, they
+might quarrel among themselves, and the weaker become the bondmen of the
+stronger; under the beneficent despotism of the English Government,
+which knows no difference of colour and permits no oppression, they can
+sleep, lounge, and laugh away their lives as they please, fearing no
+danger. If they want money, work and wages are waiting for them. No one
+can say what may be before them hereafter. The powers which envy human
+beings too perfect felicity may find ways one day of disturbing the West
+Indian negro; but so long as the English rule continues, he may be
+assured of the same tranquil existence.
+
+As life goes he has been a lucky mortal. He was taken away from Dahomey
+and Ashantee--to be a slave indeed, but a slave to a less cruel master
+than he would have found at home. He had a bad time of it occasionally,
+and the plantation whip and the branding irons are not all dreams, yet
+his owner cared for him at least as much as he cared for his cows and
+his horses. Kind usage to animals is more economical than barbarity,
+and Englishmen in the West Indies were rarely inhuman. Lord Rodney says:
+
+'I have been often in all the West India Islands, and I have often made
+my observations on the treatment of the negro slaves, and can aver that
+I never knew the least cruelty inflicted on them, but that in general
+they lived better than the honest day-labouring man in England, without
+doing a fourth part of his work in a day, and I am fully convinced that
+the negroes in our islands are better provided for and live better than
+when in Guinea.'
+
+Rodney, it is true, was a man of facts and was defective in sentiment.
+Let us suppose him wrong, let us believe the worst horrors of the slave
+trade or slave usage as fluent tongue of missionary or demagogue has
+described them, yet nevertheless, when we consider what the lot of
+common humanity has been and is, we shall be dishonest if we deny that
+the balance has been more than redressed; and the negroes who were taken
+away out of Africa, as compared with those who were left at home, were
+as the 'elect to salvation,' who after a brief purgatory are secured an
+eternity of blessedness. The one condition is the maintenance of the
+authority of the English crown. The whites of the islands cannot
+equitably rule them. They have not shaken off the old traditions. If,
+for the sake of theory or to shirk responsibility, we force them to
+govern themselves, the state of Hayti stands as a ghastly example of the
+condition into which they will then inevitably fall. If we persist, we
+shall be sinning against light--the clearest light that was ever given
+in such affairs. The most hardened believers in the regenerating effects
+of political liberty cannot be completely blind to the ruin which the
+infliction of it would necessarily bring upon the race for whose
+interests they pretend particularly to care.
+
+The Pitch Lake I resisted all exhortations to visit, but the days in the
+forest were delightful--pre-eminently a day which we spent at the 'Blue
+Basin,' a pool scooped out in the course of ages by a river falling
+through a mountain gorge; blue, not from any colour in the water, which
+is purely transparent, but from a peculiar effect of sky reflection
+through an opening in the overhanging trees. As it was far off, we had
+to start early and encounter the noonday heat. We had to close the
+curtains of the carriage to escape the sun, and in losing the sun we
+shut out the wind. All was well, however, when we turned into the hills.
+Thenceforward the road followed the bottom of a densely wooded ravine;
+impenetrable foliage spreading over our heads, and a limpid river
+flashing along in which our horses cooled their feet and lips as we
+crossed it again and again. There were the usual cabins and gardens on
+either side of us, sometimes single, sometimes clustering into villages,
+and high above them the rocks stood out, broken into precipices or
+jutting out into projecting crags, with huge trees starting from the
+crevices, dead trunks with branching arms clothed scantily with
+creepers, or living giants with blue or orange-coloured flowers. Mangoes
+scented the valley with their blossom. Bananas waved their long broad
+leaves--some flat and unbroken as we know them in conservatories, some
+split into palm-like fronds which quivered in the breeze. The cocoa pods
+were ripe or ripening, those which had been gathered being left on the
+ground in heaps as we see apples in autumn in an English orchard.
+
+We passed a lady on the way who was making sketches and daring the
+mosquitoes, that were feeding at leisure upon her face and arms. The
+road failed us at last. We alighted with our waterproofs and luncheon
+basket. A couple of half-naked boys sprang forward to act as guides and
+porters--nice little fellows, speaking a French patois for their natural
+language, but with English enough to earn shillings and amuse the
+British tourist. With their help we scrambled along a steep slippery
+path, the river roaring below, till we came to a spot where, the rock
+being soft, a waterfall had cut out in the course of ages a natural
+hollow, of which the trees formed the roof, and of which the floor was
+the pool we had come in search of. The fall itself was perpendicular,
+and fifty or sixty feet high, the water issuing at the top out of a dark
+green tunnel among overhanging branches. The sides of the basin were
+draped with the fronds of gigantic ferns and wild plantains, all in
+wild luxuriance and dripping with the spray. In clefts above the rocks,
+large cedars or gum trees had struck their roots and flung out their
+gnarled and twisted branches, which were hung with ferns; while at the
+lower end of the pool, where the river left it again, there grew out
+from among the rocks near the water's edge tall and exquisitely grouped
+acacias with crimson flowers for leaves.
+
+[Illustration: BLUE BASIN, TRINIDAD.]
+
+The place broke on us suddenly as we scrambled round a corner from
+below. Three young blacks were bathing in the pool, and as we had a lady
+with us, they were induced, though sullenly and with some difficulty, to
+return into their scanty garments and depart. Never certainly was there
+a more inviting spot to swim in, the more so from exciting possibilities
+of adventure. An English gentleman went to bathe there shortly before
+our coming. He was on a rock, swaying his body for a plunge, when
+something caught his eye among the shadows at the bottom. It proved to
+be a large dead python.
+
+We had not the luck ourselves of falling in with so interesting a beast.
+Great butterflies and perhaps a humming bird or two were flitting among
+the leaves as we came up; other signs of life there were none, unless we
+call life the motion of the plantain leaves, waving in the draughts of
+air which were eddying round the waterfall. We sat down on stones, or on
+the trunk of a fallen tree, the mosquitoes mercifully sparing us. We
+sketched a little, talked a little, ate our sandwiches, and the male
+part of us lighted our cigars. G---- then, to my surprise, produced a
+fly rod. In the streams in the Antilles, which run out of the mountains,
+there is a fish in great abundance which they call _mullet_, an inferior
+trout, but a good substitute where the real thing is not. He runs
+sometimes to five pounds weight, will take the fly, and is much sought
+after by those who try to preserve in the tropics the amusements and
+habits of home. G---- had caught many of them in Dominica. If in
+Dominica, why not in Trinidad?
+
+He put his tackle together, tied up a cast of trout flies, and
+commenced work. He tried the still water at the lower end of the basin.
+He crept round the rock and dropped his line into the foam at the foot
+of the fall. No mullet rose, nor fish of any kind. One of our small boys
+had looked on with evident impatience. He cried out at last, 'No mullet,
+but plenty crayfish,' pointing down into the water; and there, following
+the direction of his finger, we beheld strange grey creatures like
+cuttle-fish, moving about on the points of their toes, the size of small
+lobsters. The flies were dismounted, a bare hook was fitted on a fine
+gut trace, with a split shot or two to sink the line, all trim and
+excellent. A fresh-water shrimp was caught under a stone for a bait.
+G---- went to work, and the strange things took hold and let themselves
+be lifted halfway to the surface. But then, somehow, they let go and
+disappeared.
+
+Our small boy said nothing; but I saw a scornful smite upon his lips. He
+picked up a thin dry cane, found some twine in the luncheon basket which
+had tied up our sandwiches, found a pin there also, and bent it, and put
+a shrimp on it. With a pebble stone for a sinker he started in
+competition, and in a minute he had brought out upon the rock the
+strangest thing in the shape of a fish which I had ever seen in fresh
+water or salt. It was a true 'crayfish,' _ecrevisse_, eight inches long,
+formed regularly with the thick powerful tail, the sharp serrated snout,
+the long antennae, and the spider-like legs of the lobster tribe. As in a
+crayfish, the claws were represented by the correctly shaped but
+diminutive substitutes.
+
+When we had done wondering at the prize, we could admire the smile of
+conscious superiority in the face of the captor. The fine tackle had
+been beaten, as usual, by the proverbial string and crooked pin, backed
+by knowledge in the head of a small nigger boy.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[6] Traen las cabezas atadas con unos panuelos labrados hermosos que
+parecen de lejos de seda y almazarrones.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+    Home Rule in Trinidad--Political aspirations--Nature of the
+    problem--Crown administration--Colonial governors--A Russian
+    apologue--Dinner at Government House--'The Three Fishers'--Charles
+    Warner--Alternative futures of the colony.
+
+
+The political demonstration to which I had been invited came off the
+next day on the savannah. The scene was pretty enough. Black coats and
+white trousers, bright-coloured dresses and pink parasols, look the same
+at a distance whether the wearer has a black face or a white one, and
+the broad meadow was covered over with sparkling groups. Several
+thousand persons must have attended, not all to hear the oratory, for
+the occasion had been taken when the Governor was to play close by in a
+cricket match, and half the crowd had probably collected to see His
+Excellency at the wicket. Placards had been posted about the town,
+setting out the purpose of the meeting. Trinidad, as I said, is at
+present a Crown colony, the executive council and the legislature being
+equally nominated by the authorities. The popular orators, the newspaper
+writers, and some of the leading merchants in Port of Spain had
+discovered, as I said, that they were living under what they called 'a
+degrading tyranny.' They had no grievances, or none that they alleged,
+beyond the general one that they had no control over the finance. They
+very naturally desired that the lucrative Government appointments for
+which the colony paid should be distributed among themselves. The
+elective principle had been reintroduced in Jamaica, evidently as a step
+towards the restoration of the full constitution which had been
+surrendered and suppressed after the Gordon riots. Trinidad was almost
+as large as Jamaica, in proportion to the population wealthier and more
+prosperous, and the people were invited to come together in overwhelming
+numbers to insist that the 'tyranny' should end. The Home Government in
+their action about Jamaica had shown a spontaneous readiness to
+transfer responsibility from themselves to the inhabitants. The
+promoters of the meeting at Port of Spain may have thought that a little
+pressure on their part might not be unwelcome as an excuse for further
+concessions of the same kind. Whether this was so I do not know. At any
+rate they showed that they were as yet novices in the art of agitation.
+The language of the placard of invitation was so violent that, in the
+opinion of the legal authorities, the printer might have been indicted
+for high treason. The speakers did their best to imitate the fine
+phrases of the apostles of liberty in Europe, but they succeeded only in
+caricaturing their absurdities. The proceedings were described at length
+in the rival newspapers. One gentleman's speech was said to have been so
+brilliant that every sentence was a 'gem of oratory,' the gem of gems
+being when he told his hearers that, 'if they went into the thing at
+all, they should go the entire animal.' All went off good-humouredly. In
+the Liberal journal the event of the day was spoken of as the most
+magnificent demonstration in favour of human freedom which had ever been
+seen in the West Indian Islands. In the Conservative journal it was
+called a ridiculous _fiasco_, and the people were said to have come
+together only to admire the Governor's batting, and to laugh at the
+nonsense which was coming from the platform. Finally, the same journal
+assured us that, beyond a handful of people who were interested in
+getting hold of the anticipated spoils of office, no one in the island
+cared about the matter.
+
+The result, I believe, was some petition or other which would go home
+and pass as evidence, to minds eager to believe, that Trinidad was
+rapidly ripening for responsible government, promising relief to an
+overburdened Secretary for the Colonies, who has more to do than he can
+attend to, and is pleased with opportunities of gratifying popular
+sentiment, or of showing off in Parliament the development of colonial
+institutions. He knows nothing, can know nothing, of the special
+conditions of our hundred dependencies. He accepts what his
+representatives in the several colonies choose to tell him; and his
+representatives, being birds of passage responsible only to their
+employers at home, and depending for their promotion on making
+themselves agreeable, are under irresistible temptations to report what
+it will please the Secretary of State to hear.
+
+For the Secretary of State, too, is a bird of passage as they are,
+passing through the Colonial Office on his way to other departments, or
+holding the seals as part of an administration whose tenure of office
+grows every year more precarious, which exists only upon popular
+sentiment, and cannot, and does not try to look forward beyond at
+furthest the next session of Parliament.
+
+But why, it may be asked, should not Trinidad govern itself as well as
+Tasmania or New Zealand? Why not Jamaica, why not all the West Indian
+Islands? I will answer by another question. Do we wish these islands to
+remain as part of the British Empire? Are they of any use to us, or have
+we responsibilities connected with them of which we are not entitled to
+divest ourselves? A government elected by the majority of the people
+(and no one would think of setting up constitutions on any other basis)
+reflects from the nature of things the character of the electors. All
+these islands tend to become partitioned into black peasant
+proprietaries. In Grenada the process is almost complete. In Trinidad it
+is rapidly advancing. No one can stop it. No one ought to wish to stop
+it. But the ownership of freeholds is one thing, and political power is
+another. The blacks depend for the progress which they may be capable of
+making on the presence of a white community among them; and although it
+is undesirable or impossible for the blacks to be ruled by the minority
+of the white residents, it is equally undesirable and equally impossible
+that the whites should be ruled by them. The relative numbers of the two
+races being what they are, responsible government in Trinidad means
+government by a black parliament and a black ministry. The negro voters
+might elect, to begin with, their half-caste attorneys or such whites
+(the most disreputable of their colour) as would court their suffrages.
+But the black does not love the mulatto, and despises the white man who
+consents to be his servant. He has no grievances. He is not naturally a
+politician, and if left alone with his own patch of land, will never
+trouble himself to look further. But he knows what has happened in St.
+Domingo. He has heard that his race is already in full possession of the
+finest of all the islands. If he has any thought or any hopes about the
+matter, it is that it may be with the rest of them as it has been with
+St. Domingo, and if you force the power into his hands, you must expect
+him to use it. Under the constitution which you would set up, whites and
+blacks may be nominally equal; but from the enormous preponderance of
+numbers the equality would be only in name, and such English people, at
+least, as would be really of any value, would refuse to remain in a
+false and intolerable position. Already the English population of
+Trinidad is dwindling away under the uncertainties of their future
+position. Complete the work, set up a constitution with a black prime
+minister and a black legislature, and they will withdraw of themselves
+before they are compelled to go. Spaniards and French might be tempted
+by advantages of trade to remain in Port of Spain, as a few are still to
+be found in Hayti. They, it is possible, might in time recover and
+reassert their supremacy. Englishmen have the world open to them, and
+will prefer lands where they can live under less degrading conditions.
+In Hayti the black republic allows no white man to hold land in
+freehold. The blacks elsewhere with the same opportunities will develop
+the same aspirations.
+
+Do we, or do we not, intend to retain our West Indian Islands under the
+sovereignty of the Queen? If we are willing to let them go, the question
+is settled. But we ought to face the alternative. There is but one form
+of government under which we can retain these colonies with honour and
+security to ourselves and with advantage to the negroes whom we have
+placed there--the mode of government which succeeds with us so admirably
+that it is the world's wonder in the _East_ Indies, a success so unique
+and so extraordinary that it seems the last from which we are willing
+to take example.
+
+In Natal, where the circumstances are analogous, and where report says
+that efforts are being also made to force on constitutional
+independence, I remember suggesting a few years ago that the governor
+should be allowed to form his own council, and that in selecting the
+members of it he should go round the colony, observe the farms where the
+land was well inclosed, the fields clean, the farm buildings substantial
+and in good repair; that he should call on the owners of these to be his
+advisers and assistants. In all Natal he might find a dozen such. They
+would be unwilling to leave their own business for so thankless a
+purpose; but they might be induced by good feeling to grant him a few
+weeks of their time. Under such an administration I imagine Natal would
+have a happier future before it than it will experience with the boon
+which is designed for it.
+
+In the West Indies there is indefinite wealth waiting to be developed by
+intelligence and capital; and men with such resources, both English and
+American, might be tempted still to settle there, and lead the blacks
+along with them into more settled manners and higher forms of
+civilisation. But the future of the blacks, and our own influence over
+them for good, depend on their being protected from themselves and from
+the schemers who would take advantage of them. However little may be the
+share to which the mass of a population be admitted in the government of
+their country, they are never found hard to manage where they prosper
+and are justly dealt with. The children of darkness are even easier of
+control than the children of light. Under an administration formed on
+the model of that of our Eastern Empire these islands would be peopled
+in a generation or two with dusky citizens, as proud as the rest of us
+of the flag under which they will have thriven, and as willing to defend
+it against any invading enemy as they are now unquestionably
+indifferent. Partially elected councils, local elected boards, &c.,
+serve only as contrivances to foster discontent and encourage jobbery.
+They open a rift which time will widen, and which will create for us, on
+a smaller scale, the conditions which have so troubled us in Ireland,
+where each concession of popular demands makes the maintenance of the
+connection more difficult. In the Pacific colonies self-government is a
+natural right; the colonists are part of ourselves, and have as complete
+a claim to the management of their own affairs as we have to the
+management of ours. The less we interfere with them the more heartily
+they identify themselves with us. But if we choose besides to indulge
+our ambition with an empire, if we determine to keep attached to our
+dominion countries which, like the East Indies, have been conquered by
+the sword, countries, like the West Indies, which, however acquired, are
+occupied by races enormously outnumbering us, many of whom do not speak
+our language, are not connected with us by sentiment, and not visibly
+connected by interest, with whom our own people will not intermarry or
+hold social intercourse, but keep aloof from, as superior from
+inferior--to impose on such countries forms of self-government at which
+we have ourselves but lately arrived, to put it in the power of these
+overwhelming numbers to shake us off if they please, and to assume that
+when our real motive has been only to save ourselves trouble they will
+be warmed into active loyalty by gratitude for the confidence which we
+pretend to place in them, is to try an experiment which we have not the
+slightest right to expect to be successful, and which if it fails is
+fatal.
+
+Once more, if we mean to keep the blacks as British subjects, we are
+bound to govern them, and to govern them well. If we cannot do it, we
+had better let them go altogether. And here is the real difficulty. It
+is not that men competent for such a task cannot be found. Among the
+public servants of Great Britain there are persons always to be found
+fit and willing for posts of honour and difficulty if a sincere effort
+be made to find them. Alas! in times past we have sent persons to rule
+our Baratarias to whom Sancho Panza was a sage--troublesome members of
+Parliament, younger brothers of powerful families, impecunious peers;
+favourites, with backstairs influence, for whom a provision was to be
+found; colonial clerks, bred in the office, who had been obsequious and
+useful.
+
+One had hoped that in the new zeal for the colonial connection such
+appointments would have become impossible for the future, yet a recent
+incident at the Mauritius has proved that the colonial authorities are
+still unregenerate. The unfit are still maintained in their places; and
+then, to prevent the colonies from suffering too severely under their
+incapacity, we set up the local councils, nominated or elected, to do
+the work, while the Queen's representative enjoys his salary. Instances
+of glaring impropriety like that to which I have alluded are of course
+rare, and among colonial governors there are men of quality so high that
+we would desire only to see their power equal to it. But so limited is
+the patronage, on the other hand, which remains to the home
+administrations, and so heavy the pressure brought to bear upon them,
+that there are persons also in these situations of whom it may be said
+that the less they do, and the less they are enabled to do, the better
+for the colony over which they preside.
+
+The West Indies have been sufferers from another cause. In the absence
+of other use for them they have been made to serve as places where
+governors try their 'prentice hand and learn their business before
+promotion to more important situations. Whether a man has done well or
+done ill makes, it seems, very little difference unless he has offended
+prejudices or interests at home: once in the service he acquires a
+vested right to continue in it. A governor who had been suspended for
+conduct which is not denied to have been most improper, is replaced with
+the explanation that if he was not sent back to his old post it would
+have been necessary to provide a situation for him elsewhere. Why would
+it? Has a captain of a man-of-war whose ship is taken from him for
+misconduct an immediate claim to have another? Unfortunate colonies! It
+is not their interest which is considered under this system. But the
+subject is so delicate that I must say no more about it. I will
+recommend only to the attention of the British democracy, who are now
+the parties that in the last instance are responsible, because they are
+the real masters of the Empire, the following apologue.
+
+In the time of the Emperor Nicholas the censors of the press seized a
+volume which had been published by the poet Kriloff, on the ground that
+it contained treasonable matter. Nicholas sent for Kriloff. The censor
+produced the incriminated passage, and Kriloff was made to read it
+aloud. It was a fable. A governor of a Russian province was represented
+as arriving in the other world, and as being brought up before
+Rhadamanthus. He was accused, not of any crime, but of having been
+simply a nonentity--of having received his salary and spent it, and
+nothing more. Rhadamanthus listened, and when the accusing angel had
+done sentenced the prisoner into Paradise. 'Into Paradise!' said the
+angel, 'why, he has done nothing!' 'True,' said Rhadamanthus, 'but how
+would it have been if he had done anything?'
+
+'Write away, old fellow,' said Nicholas to Kriloff.
+
+Has it never happened that British colonial officials who have similarly
+done nothing have been sent into the Paradise of promotion because they
+have kept things smooth and have given no trouble to their employers at
+home?
+
+In the evening of the day of the political meeting we dined at
+Government House. There was a large representative party, English,
+French, Spaniards, Corsicans--ladies and gentlemen each speaking his or
+her own language. There were the mayors of the two chief towns of
+Trinidad--Port of Spain and San Fernando--both enthusiastic for a
+constitution. The latter was my neighbour at dinner, and insisted much
+on the fine qualities of the leading persons in the island and the
+splendid things to be expected when responsible government should be
+conceded. The training squadron had arrived from Barbadoes, and the
+commodore and two or three officers were present in their uniforms.
+There was interesting talk about Trinidad's troublesome neighbour,
+Guzman Blanco, the President of Venezuela. It seems that Sir Walter
+Raleigh's Eldorado has turned out to be a fact after all. On the higher
+waters of the Orinoco actual gold mines do exist, and the discovery has
+quickened into life a long unsettled dispute about boundaries between
+British Guiana and the republic. Don Guzman had been encroaching, so it
+was alleged, and in other ways had been offensive and impertinent. Ships
+were going--had been actually ordered to La Guyra, to pull his nose for
+him, and to tell him to behave himself. The time is past when we flew
+our hawks at game birds. The opinion of most of the party was that Don
+Guzman knew it, and that his nose would not be pulled. He would regard
+our frigates as picturesque ornaments to his harbour, give the officers
+in command the politest reception, evade their demands, offer good words
+in plenty, and nothing else but words, and in the end would have the
+benefit of our indifference.[7]
+
+In the late evening we had music. Our host sang well, our hostess was an
+accomplished artist. They had duets together, Italian and English, and
+the lady then sang 'The Three Fishers,' Kingsley being looked on as the
+personal property of Trinidad and as one of themselves. She sang it very
+well, as well as any one could do who had no direct acquaintance with an
+English sea-coast people. Her voice was beautiful, and she showed
+genuine feeling. The silence when she ended was more complimentary than
+the loudest applause. It was broken by a stupid member of council, who
+said to me, 'Is it not strange that a poet with such a gift of words as
+Mr. Kingsley should have ended that song with so weak a line? "The
+sooner it's over the sooner to sleep" is nothing but prose.' He did not
+see that the fault which he thought he had discovered is no more than
+the intentional 'dying away' of the emotion created by the story in the
+common lot of poor humanity. We drove back across the savannah in a
+blaze of fireflies. It is not till midnight that they put their lights
+out and go to sleep with the rest of the world.
+
+One duty remained to me before I left the island. The Warners are among
+the oldest of West Indian families, distinguished through many
+generations, not the least in their then living chief and
+representative, Charles Warner, who in the highest ministerial offices
+had steered Trinidad through the trying times which followed the
+abolition of slavery. I had myself in early life been brought into
+relations with other members of his family. He himself was a very old
+man on the edge of the grave; but hearing that I was in Port of Spain,
+he had expressed a wish to see me. I found him in his drawing room,
+shrunk in stature, pale, bent double by weight of years, and but feebly
+able to lift his head to speak. I thought, and I judged rightly, that he
+could have but a few weeks, perhaps but a few days, to live.
+
+There is something peculiarly solemn in being brought to speak with a
+supremely eminent man, who is already struggling with the moment which
+is to launch him into a new existence. He raised himself in his chair.
+He gave me his withered hand. His eyes still gleamed with the light of
+an untouched intelligence. All else of him seemed dead. The soul,
+untouched by the decay of the frame which had been its earthly tenement,
+burnt bright as ever on the edge of its release.
+
+    When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain,
+    And they breathe truth who breathe their words in pain.
+
+He roused himself to talk, and he talked sadly, for all things at home
+and everywhere were travelling on the road which he well knew could lead
+to no good end. No statesman had done better practical work than he, or
+work which had borne better fruit, could it be allowed to ripen. But for
+him Trinidad would have been a wilderness, savage as when Columbus found
+the Caribs there. He belonged to the race who make empires, as the
+orators lose them, who do things and do not talk about them, who build
+and do not cast down, who reverence ancient habits and institutions as
+the organic functions of corporate national character; a Tory of the
+Tories, who nevertheless recognised that Toryism itself was passing
+away under the universal solvent, and had ceased to be a faith which
+could be believed in as a guide to conduct.
+
+He no more than any one could tell what it was now wisest or even
+possible to do. He spoke like some ancient _seer_, whose eyes looked
+beyond the present time and the present world, and saw politics and
+progress and the wild whirlwind of change as the play of atoms dancing
+to and fro in the sunbeams of eternity. Yet he wished well to our poor
+earth, and to us who were still struggling upon it. He was sorry for the
+courses on which he saw mankind to be travelling. Spite of all the
+newspapers and the blowing of the trumpets, he well understood whither
+all that was tending. He spoke with horror and even loathing of the
+sinister leader who was drawing England into the fatal whirlpool. He
+could still hope, for he knew the power of the race. He knew that the
+English heart was unaffected, that we were suffering only from delirium
+of the brain. The day would yet come, he thought, when we should
+struggle back into sanity again with such wreck of our past greatness as
+might still be left to us, torn and shattered, but clothed and in our
+right mind, and cured for centuries of our illusions.
+
+My forebodings of the nearness of the end were too well founded. A month
+later I heard that Charles Warner was dead. To have seen and spoken with
+such a man was worth a voyage round the globe.
+
+On the prospects of Trinidad I have a few more words to add. The
+tendency of the island is to become what Grenada has become already--a
+community of negro freeholders, each living on his own homestead, and
+raising or gathering off the ground what his own family will consume.
+They will multiply, for there is ample room. Three-quarters of the soil
+are still unoccupied. The 140,000 blacks will rapidly grow into a
+half-million, and the half-million, as long as we are on the spot to
+keep the peace, will speedily double itself again. The English
+inhabitants will and must be crowded out. The geographical advantages of
+the Gulf of Paria will secure a certain amount of trade. There will be
+merchants and bankers in the town as floating passage birds, and there
+will be mulatto lawyers and shopkeepers and newspaper writers. But the
+blacks hate the mulattoes, and the mulatto breed will not maintain
+itself, as with the independence of the blacks the intimacy between
+blacks and whites diminishes and must diminish. The English peasant
+immigration which enthusiasts have believed in is a dream, a dream which
+passed through the ivory gate, a dream which will never turn to a waking
+reality; and unless under the Indian system, which our rulers will never
+try unless the democracy orders them to adopt it, the English interest
+will come to an end.
+
+The English have proved in India that they can play a great and useful
+part as rulers over recognised inferiors. Even in the West Indies the
+planters were a real something. Like the English in Ireland, they
+produced a remarkable breed of men: the Codringtons, the Warners, and
+many illustrious names besides. They governed cheaply on their own
+resources, and the islands under their rule were so profitable that we
+fought for them as if our Empire was at stake. All that is gone. The
+days of ruling races are supposed to be numbered. Trade drifts away to
+the nearest market--to New York or New Orleans--and in a money point of
+view the value of such possessions as Trinidad will soon be less than
+nothing to us.
+
+As long as the present system holds, there will be an appreciable
+addition to the sum of human (coloured human) happiness. Lighter-hearted
+creatures do not exist on the globe. But the continuance of it depends
+on the continuance of the English rule. The peace and order which they
+benefit by is not of their own creation. In spite of schools and
+missionaries, the dark connection still maintains itself with Satan's
+invisible world, and modern education contends in vain with Obeah
+worship. As it has been in Hayti, so it must be in Trinidad if the
+English leave the blacks to be their own masters.
+
+Scene after scene passes by on the magic slide. The man-eating Caribs
+first, then Columbus and his Spaniards, the French conquest, the English
+occupation, but they have left behind them no self-quickening seed of
+healthy civilisation, and the prospect darkens once more. It is a pity,
+for there is no real necessity that it should darken. The West Indian
+negro is conscious of his own defects, and responds more willingly than
+most to a guiding hand. He is faithful and affectionate to those who are
+just and kind to him, and with a century or two of wise administration
+he might prove that his inferiority is not inherent, and that with the
+same chances as the white he may rise to the same level. I cannot part
+with the hope that the English people may yet insist that the chance
+shall not be denied to him, and that they may yet give their officials
+to understand that they must not, shall not, shake off their
+responsibilities for this unfortunate people, by flinging them back upon
+themselves 'to manage their own affairs,' now that we have no further
+use for them.
+
+I was told that the keener-witted Trinidad blacks are watching as
+eagerly as we do the development of the Irish problem. They see the
+identity of the situation. They see that if the Radical view prevails,
+and in every country the majority are to rule, Trinidad will be theirs
+and the government of the English will be at an end. I, for myself, look
+upon Trinidad and the West Indies generally as an opportunity for the
+further extension of the influence of the English race in their special
+capacity of leaders and governors of men. We cannot with honour divest
+ourselves of our responsibility for the blacks, or after the eloquence
+we have poured out and the self-laudation which we have allowed
+ourselves for the suppression of slavery, leave them now to relapse into
+a state from which slavery itself was the first step of emancipation.
+Our world-wide dominion will not be of any long endurance if we consider
+that we have discharged our full duty to our fellow-subjects when we
+have set them free to follow their own devices. If that is to be all,
+the sooner it vanishes into history the better for us and for the
+world.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[7] A squadron did go while I was in the West Indies. I have not heard
+that any advance has been made in consequence towards the settlement of
+the Border.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+    Barbadoes again--Social condition of the island--Political
+    constitution--Effects of the sugar bounties--Dangers of general
+    bankruptcy--The Hall of Assembly--Sir Charles Pearson--Society in
+    Bridgetown--A morning drive--Church of St. John's--Sir Graham
+    Briggs--An old planter's palace--The Chief Justice of Barbadoes.
+
+
+Again at sea, and on the way back to Barbadoes. The commodore of the
+training squadron had offered me a berth to St. Vincent, but he intended
+to work up under sail against the north-east trade, which had risen to
+half a gale, and I preferred the security and speed of the mail boat.
+Among the passengers was Miss ----, the lady whom I had seen sketching
+on the way to the Blue Basin. She showed me her drawings, which were
+excellent. She showed me in her mosquito-bitten arms what she had
+endured to make them, and I admired her fortitude. She was English, and
+was on her way to join her father at Codrington College.
+
+We had a wild night, but those long vessels care little for winds and
+waves. By morning we had fought our way back to Grenada. In the St.
+Vincent roadstead, which we reached the same day, the ship was stormed
+by boatloads of people who were to go on with us; boys on their way to
+school at Barbadoes, ladies young and old, white, black, and mixed, who
+were bound I know not where. The night fell dark as pitch, the storm
+continued, and we were no sooner beyond the shelter of the land than
+every one save Miss ---- and myself was prostrate. The vessel ploughed
+on upon her way indifferent to us and to them. We were at Bridgetown by
+breakfast time, and I was now to have an opportunity of studying more at
+leisure the earliest of our West Indian colonies.
+
+Barbadoes is as unlike in appearance as it is in social condition to
+Trinidad or the Antilles. There are no mountains in it, no forests, no
+rivers, and as yet no small freeholders. The blacks, who number nearly
+200,000 in an island not larger than the Isle of Wight, are labourers,
+working for wages on the estates of large proprietors. Land of their own
+they have none, for there is none for them. Work they must, for they
+cannot live otherwise. Thus every square yard of soil is cultivated, and
+turn your eyes where you will you see houses, sugar canes, and sweet
+potatoes. Two hundred and fifty years of occupation have imprinted
+strongly an English character; parish churches solid and respectable,
+the English language, the English police and parochial system. However
+it may be in the other islands, England in Barbadoes is still a solid
+fact. The headquarters of the West Indian troops are there. There is a
+commander-in-chief residing in a 'Queen's House,' so called. There is a
+savannah where there are English barracks under avenues of almond and
+mahogany. Red coats are scattered about the grass. Officers canter about
+playing polo, and naval and military uniforms glitter at the side of
+carriages, and horsemen and horsewomen take their evening rides, as well
+mounted and as well dressed as you can see in Rotten Row. Barbadoes is
+thus in pleasing contrast with the conquered islands which we have not
+taken the trouble to assimilate. In them remain the wrecks of the French
+civilisation which we superseded, while we have planted nothing of our
+own. Barbadoes, the European aspect of it at any rate, is English
+throughout.
+
+The harbour, when we arrived, was even more brilliant than we had left
+it a fortnight before. The training squadron had gone, but in the place
+of it the West Indian fleet was there, and there were also three
+American frigates, old wooden vessels out merely on a cruise, but
+heavily sparred, smart and well set up, with the stars and stripes
+floating carelessly at their sterns, as if in these western seas, be the
+nominal dominion British, French, or Spanish, the American has a voice
+also and intends to be heard.
+
+We had no sooner anchored than a well-appointed boat was alongside with
+an awning and an ensign at the stern. Colonel ----, the chief of the
+police, to whom it belonged, came on board in search of Miss ----, who
+was to be his guest in Bridgetown. She introduced me to him. He insisted
+on my accompanying him home to breakfast, and, as he was a person in
+authority, I had nothing to do but obey. Colonel ----, to whose
+politeness then and afterwards I was in many ways indebted, had seen
+life in various forms. He had been in the navy. He had been in the army.
+He had been called to the bar. He was now the head of the Barbadoes
+police, with this anomalous addition to his other duties, that in
+default of a chaplain he read the Church service on Sundays in the
+barracks. He had even a license from the bishop to preach sermons, and
+being a man of fine character and original sense he discharged this last
+function, I was told, remarkably well. His house was in the heart of the
+town, but shaded with tropical trees. The rooms were protected by deep
+outside galleries, which were overrun with Bougainvillier creepers. He
+was himself the kindest of entertainers, his Irish lady the kindest of
+hostesses, with the humorous high breeding of the old Sligo aristocracy,
+to whom she belonged. I found that I had been acquainted with some of
+her kindred there long ago, in the days when the Anglo-Irish rule had
+not been discovered to be a upas tree, and cultivated human life was
+still possible in Connaught. Of the breakfast, which consisted of all
+the West Indian dainties I had ever heard or read of, I can say nothing,
+nor of the pleasant talk which followed. I was to see more of Colonel
+----, for he offered to drive me some day across the island, a promise
+which he punctually fulfilled. My stay with him for the present could be
+but brief, as I was expected at Government House.
+
+I have met with exceptional hospitality from the governors of British
+colonies in many parts of the world. They are not chosen like the Roman
+proconsuls from the ranks of trained statesmen who have held high
+administrative offices at home. They are appointed, as I said just now,
+from various motives, sometimes with a careful regard to fitness for
+their post, sometimes with a regard merely to routine or convenience or
+to personal influence brought to bear in their favour. I have myself
+seen some for whom I should have thought other employment would have
+been more suitable; but always and everywhere those that I have fallen
+in with have been men of honour and integrity above reproach or
+suspicion, and I have met with one or two gentlemen in these situations
+whose admirable qualities it is impossible to praise too highly, who in
+their complicated responsibilities--responsibilities to the colonies and
+responsibilities to the authorities at home--have considered conscience
+and duty to be their safest guides, have cared only to do what they
+believed to be right to the best of their ability, and have left their
+interests to take care of themselves.
+
+The Governor of Barbadoes is not despotic. He controls the
+administration, but there is a constitution as old as the Stuarts; an
+Assembly of thirty-three members, nine of whom the Crown nominates, the
+rest are elected. The friction is not so violent as when the number of
+the nominated and elected members is equal, and as long as a property
+qualification was required for the franchise, the system may have worked
+tolerably without producing any violent mischief. There have been recent
+modifications, however, pointing in the same direction as those which
+have been made in Jamaica. By an ordinance from home the suffrage has
+been widely extended, obviously as a step to larger intended changes.
+
+Under such conditions and with an uncertain future a governor can do
+little save lead and influence, entertain visitors, discharge the
+necessary courtesies to all classes of his subjects, and keep his eyes
+open. These duties at least Sir Charles Lee discharges to perfection,
+the entertaining part of them on a scale so liberal that if Pere Labat
+came back he would suppose that the two hundred years which have gone by
+since his visit was a dream, and that Government House at least was
+still as he left it. In an establishment which had so many demands upon
+it, and where so many visitors of all kinds were going and coming, I had
+no claim to be admitted. I felt that I should be an intruder, and had I
+been allowed would have taken myself elsewhere, but Sir Charles's
+peremptory generosity admitted of no refusal. As a subject I was bound
+to submit to the Queen's representative. I cannot say I was sorry to be
+compelled. In Government House I should see and hear what I could
+neither have seen nor heard elsewhere. I should meet people who could
+tell me what I most wanted to know. I had understood already that owing
+to the sugar depression the state of the island was critical. Officials
+were alarmed. Bankers were alarmed. No one could see beyond the next
+year what was likely to happen. Sir Charles himself would have most to
+say. He was evidently anxious. Perhaps if he had a fault, he was over
+anxious; but with the possibility of social confusion before him, with
+nearly 200,000 peasant subjects, who in a few months might be out of
+work and so out of food, with the inflammable negro nature, and a
+suspicious and easily excited public opinion at home, the position of a
+Governor of Barbadoes is not an enviable one. The Government at home, no
+doubt with the best intentions, has aggravated any peril which there may
+be by enlarging the suffrage. The experience of Governor Eyre in Jamaica
+has taught the danger of being too active, but to be too inactive may be
+dangerous also. If there is a stir again in any part of these islands,
+and violence and massacre come of it, as it came in St. Domingo, the
+responsibility is with the governor, and the account will be strictly
+exacted of him.
+
+I must describe more particularly the reasons which there are for
+uneasiness. On the day on which I landed I saw an article in a
+Bridgetown paper in which my coming there was spoken of as perhaps the
+last straw which would break the overburdened back. I know not why I
+should be thought likely to add anything to the load of Barbadian
+afflictions. I should be a worse friend to the colonies than I have
+tried to be if I was one of those who would quench the smoking flax of
+loyalty in any West Indian heart. But loyalty, I very well know, is
+sorely tried just now. The position is painfully simple. The great
+prosperity of the island ended with emancipation. Barbadoes suffered
+less than Jamaica or the Antilles because the population was large and
+the land limited, and the blacks were obliged to work to keep
+themselves alive. The abolition of the sugar duties was the next blow.
+The price of sugar fell, and the estates yielded little more than the
+expense of cultivation. Owners of properties who were their own
+managers, and had sense and energy, continued to keep themselves afloat;
+but absenteeism had become the fashion. The brilliant society which is
+described by Labat had been melting for more than a century. More and
+more the old West Indian families removed to England, farmed their lands
+through agents and overseers, or sold them to speculating capitalists.
+The personal influence of the white man over the black, which might have
+been brought about by a friendly intercourse after slavery was
+abolished, was never so much as attempted. The higher class of gentry
+found the colony more and more distasteful to them, and they left the
+arrangement of the labour question to persons to whom the blacks were
+nothing, emancipated though they might be, except instruments of
+production. A negro can be attached to his employer at least as easily
+as a horse or a dog. The horse or dog requires kind treatment, or he
+becomes indifferent or sullen; so it is with the negro. But the forced
+equality of the races before the law made more difficult the growth of
+any kindly feeling. To the overseer on a plantation the black labourer
+was a machine out of which the problem was to get the maximum of work
+with the minimum of pay. In the slavery times the horse and dog relation
+was a real thing. The master and mistress joked and laughed with their
+dark bondsmen, knew Caesar from Pompey, knew how many children each had,
+gave them small presents, cared for them when they were sick, and
+maintained them when they were old and past work. All this ended with
+emancipation. Between whites and blacks no relations remained save that
+of employer and employed. They lived apart. They had no longer, save in
+exceptional instances, any personal communication with each other. The
+law refusing to recognise a difference, the social line was drawn the
+harder, which the law was unable to reach.
+
+In the Antilles the plantations broke up as I had seen in Grenada. The
+whites went away, and the land was divided among the negroes. In
+Barbadoes, the estates were kept together. The English character and the
+English habits were stamped deeper there, and were not so easily
+obliterated. But the stars in their courses have fought against the old
+system. Once the West Indies had a monopoly of the sugar trade. Steam
+and progress have given them a hundred _natural_ competitors; and on the
+back of these came the _unnatural_ bounty-fed beetroot sugar
+competition. Meanwhile the expense of living increased in the days of
+inflated hope and 'unexampled prosperity.' Free trade, whatever its
+immediate consequences, was to make everyone rich in the end. When the
+income of an estate fell short one year, it was to rise in the next, and
+the money was borrowed to make ends meet; when it didn't rise, more
+money was borrowed; and there is now hardly a property in the island
+which is not loaded to the sinking point. Tied to sugar-growing,
+Barbadoes has no second industry to fall back upon. The blacks, who are
+heedless and light-hearted, increase and multiply. They will not
+emigrate, they are so much attached to their homes; and the not distant
+prospect is of a general bankruptcy, which may throw the land for the
+moment out of cultivation, with a hungry unemployed multitude to feed
+without means of feeding them, and to control without the personal
+acquaintance and influence which alone can make control possible.
+
+At home there is a general knowledge that things are not going on well
+out there. But, true to our own ways of thinking, we regard it as their
+affair and not as ours. If cheap sugar ruins the planters, it benefits
+the English workman. The planters had their innings; it is now the
+consumer's turn. What are the West Indies to us? On the map they appear
+to belong more to the United States than to us. Let the United States
+take them and welcome. So thinks, perhaps, the average Englishman; and,
+analogous to him, the West Indian proprietor reflects that, if admitted
+into the Union, he would have the benefit of the American market, which
+would set him on his feet again; and that the Americans, probably
+finding that they, if not we, could make some profit out of the islands,
+would be likely to settle the black question for him in a more
+satisfactory manner.
+
+That such a feeling as this should exist is natural and pardonable; and
+it would have gone deeper than it has gone if it were not that there are
+two parties to every bargain, and those in favour of such a union have
+met hitherto with no encouragement. The Americans are wise in their
+generation. They looked at Cuba; they looked at St. Domingo. They might
+have had both on easy terms, but they tell you that their constitution
+does not allow them to hold dependent states. What they annex they
+absorb, and they did not wish to absorb another million and a half of
+blacks and as many Roman Catholics, having enough already of both. Our
+English islands may be more tempting, but there too the black cloud
+hangs thick and grows yearly thicker, and through English indulgence is
+more charged with dangerous elements. Already, they say, they have every
+advantage which the islands can give them. They exercise a general
+protectorate, and would probably interfere if France or England were to
+attempt again to extend their dominions in that quarter; but they prefer
+to leave to the present owners the responsibility of managing and
+feeding the cow, while they are to have the milking of it.
+
+Thus the proposal of annexation, which has never gone beyond wishes and
+talk, has so far been coldly received; but the Americans did make their
+offer a short time since, at which the drowning Barbadians grasped as at
+a floating plank. England would give them no hand to save them from the
+effects of the beetroot bounties. The Americans were willing to relax
+their own sugar duties to admit West Indian sugar duty free, and give
+them the benefit of their own high prices. The colonies being unable to
+make treaties for themselves, the proposal was referred home and was
+rejected. The Board of Trade had, no doubt, excellent reasons for
+objecting to an arrangement which would have flung our whole commerce
+with the West Indies into American hands, and might have formed a
+prelude to a closer attachment. It would have been a violation also of
+those free-trade principles which are the English political gospel.
+Moreover, our attitude towards our colonies has changed in the last
+twenty years; we now wish to preserve the attachment of communities whom
+a generation back we should have told to do as they liked, and have
+bidden them God speed on their way; and this treaty may have been
+regarded as a step towards separation. But the unfortunate Barbadians
+found themselves, with the harbour in sight, driven out again into the
+free-trade hurricane. We would not help them ourselves; we declined to
+let the Americans help them; and help themselves they could not. They
+dare not resent our indifference to their interests, which, if they were
+stronger, would have been more visibly displayed. They must wait now for
+what the future will bring with as much composure as they can command,
+but I did hear outcries of impatience to which it was unpleasant to
+listen. Nay, it was even suggested as a means of inducing the Americans
+to forego their reluctance to take them into the Union, that we might
+relinquish such rights as we possessed in Canada if the Americans would
+relieve us of the West Indies, for which we appeared to care so little.
+
+If Barbadoes is driven into bankruptcy, the estates will have to be
+sold, and will probably be broken up as they have been in the Antilles.
+The first difficulty will thus be got over. But the change cannot be
+carried out in a day. If wages suddenly cease the negroes will starve,
+and will not take their starvation patiently. At the worst, however,
+means will probably be found to keep the land from falling out of
+cultivation. The Barbadians see their condition in the light of their
+grievances, and make the worst of it. The continental powers may tire of
+the bounty system, or something else may happen to make sugar rise. The
+prospect is not a bright one, but what actually happens in this world is
+generally the unexpected.
+
+As a visit my stay at Government House was made simply delightful to me.
+I remained there (with interruptions) for a fortnight, and Lady L----
+did not only permit, but she insisted that I should be as if in an
+hotel, and come and go as I liked. The climate of Barbadoes, so far as I
+can speak of it, is as sparkling and invigorating as champagne. Cocktail
+may be wanted in Trinidad. In Barbadoes the air is all one asks for, and
+between night breezes and sea breezes one has plenty of it. Day begins
+with daylight, as it ought to do. You have slept without knowing
+anything about it. There are no venomous crawling creatures. Cockroaches
+are the worst, but they scuttle out of the way so alarmed and ashamed of
+themselves if you happen to see them, that I never could bring myself to
+hurt one. You spring out of bed as if the process of getting up were
+actually pleasant. Well-appointed West Indian houses are generally
+provided with a fresh-water swimming bath. Though cold by courtesy the
+water seldom falls below 65 deg., and you float luxuriously upon it without
+dread of chill. The early coffee follows the bath, and then the stroll
+under the big trees, among strange flowers, or in the grotto with the
+ferns and humming birds. If it were part of one's regular life, I
+suppose that one would want something to do. Sir Charles was the most
+active of men, and had been busy in his office for an hour before I had
+come down to lounge. But for myself I discovered that it was possible,
+at least for an interval, to be perfectly idle and perfectly happy,
+surrounded by the daintiest beauties of an English hothouse, with palm
+trees waving like fans to cool one, and with sensitive plants, which are
+common as daisies, strewing themselves under one's feet to be trodden
+upon.
+
+After breakfast the heat would be considerable, but with an umbrella I
+could walk about the town and see what was to be seen. Alas! here one
+has something to desire. Where Pere Labat saw a display of splendour
+which reminded him of Paris and London, you now find only _stores_ on
+the American pattern, for the most part American goods, bad in quality
+and extravagantly dear. Treaty or no treaty, it is to America that the
+trade is drifting, and we might as well concede with a good grace what
+must soon come of itself whether we like it or not. The streets are
+relieved from ugliness by the trees and by occasional handsome
+buildings. Often I stood to admire the pea-green Nelson. Once I went
+into the Assembly where the legislature was discussing more or less
+unquietly the prospects of the island. The question of the hour was
+economy. In the opinion of patriot Barbadians, sore at the refusal of
+the treaty, the readiest way to reduce expenditure was to diminish the
+salaries of officials from the governor downwards. The officials,
+knowing that they were very moderately paid already, naturally demurred.
+The most interesting part of the thing to me was the _hall_ in which the
+proceedings were going on. It is handsome in itself, and has a series of
+painted windows representing the English sovereigns from James I. to
+Queen Victoria. Among them in his proper place stood Oliver Cromwell,
+the only formal recognition of the great Protector that I know of in any
+part of the English dominions. Barbadoes had been Cavalier in its
+general sympathies, but has taken an independent view of things, and
+here too has had an opinion of its own.
+
+Hospitality was always a West Indian characteristic. There were
+luncheons and dinners, and distinguished persons to be met and talked
+to. Among these I had the special good fortune of making acquaintance
+with Sir Charles Pearson, now commanding-in-chief in those parts. Even
+in these days, crowded as they are by small incidents made large by
+newspapers, we have not yet forgotten the defence of a fort in the
+interior of Zululand where Sir Charles Pearson and his small garrison
+were cut off from their communications with Natal. For a week or two he
+was the chief object of interest in every English house. In obedience to
+orders which it was not his business to question, he had assisted Sir T.
+Shepstone in the memorable annexation of the Transvaal. He had seen also
+to what that annexation led, and, being a truth-speaking man, he did not
+attempt to conceal the completeness of our defeat. Our military
+establishment in the West Indies is of modest dimensions; but a strong
+English soldier, who says little and does his duty, and never told a lie
+in his life or could tell one, is a comforting figure to fall in with.
+One feels that there will be something to retire upon when
+parliamentary oratory has finished its work of disintegration.
+
+The pleasantest incident of the day was the evening drive with Lady
+L----. She would take me out shortly before sunset, and bring me back
+again when the tropical stars were showing faintly and the fireflies had
+begun to sparkle about the bushes, and the bats were flitting to and fro
+after the night moths like spirits of darkness chasing human souls.
+
+The neighbourhood of Bridgetown has little natural beauty; but the roads
+are excellent, the savannah picturesque with riding parties and polo
+players and lounging red jackets, every one being eager to pay his or
+her respect to the gracious lady of the Queen's representative. We
+called at pretty villas where there would be evening teas and lawn
+tennis in the cool. The society is not extensive, and here would be
+collected most of it that was worth meeting. At one of these parties I
+fell in with the officers of the American squadron, the commodore a very
+interesting and courteous gentleman whom I should have taken for a
+fellow-countryman. There are many diamonds, and diamonds of the first
+water, among the Americans as among ourselves; but the cutting and
+setting is different. Commodore D---- was cut and set like an
+Englishman. He introduced me to one of his brother officers who had been
+in Hayti. Spite of Sir Spenser St. John, spite of all the confirmatory
+evidence which I had heard, I was still incredulous about the alleged
+cannibalism there. To my inquiries this gentleman had only the same
+answer to give. The fact was beyond question. He had himself known
+instances of it.
+
+The commodore had a grievance against us illustrating West Indian
+manners. These islands are as nervous about their health as so many old
+ladies. The yellow flags float on ship after ship in the Bridgetown
+roadstead, and crews, passengers, and cargoes are sternly interdicted
+from the land. Jamaica was in ill name from small-pox, and, as Cuba will
+not drop its intercourse with Jamaica, Cuba falls also under the ban.
+The commodore had directed a case of cigars from Havana to meet him at
+Barbadoes. They arrived, but might not be transferred from the steamer
+which brought them, even on board his own frigate, lest he might bring
+infection on shore in his pocket. They went on to England, to reach him
+perhaps eventually in New York.
+
+Colonel ----'s duties, as chief of the police, obliged him to make
+occasional rounds to visit his stations. He recollected his promise, and
+he invited me one morning to accompany him. We were to breakfast at his
+house on our return, so I anticipated an excursion of a few miles at the
+utmost. He called for me soon after sunrise with a light carriage and a
+brisk pair of horses. We were rapidly clear of the town. The roads were
+better than the best I have seen out of England, the only fault in them
+being the white coral dust which dazzles and blinds the eyes. Everywhere
+there were signs of age and of long occupation. The stone steps leading
+up out of the road to the doors of the houses had been worn by human
+feet for hundreds of years. The houses themselves were old, and as if
+suffering from the universal depression--gates broken, gardens
+disordered, and woodwork black and blistered for want of paint. But if
+the habitations were neglected, there was no neglect in the fields.
+Sugar cane alternated with sweet potatoes and yams and other strange
+things the names of which I heard and forgot; but there was not a weed
+to be seen or broken fence where fence was needed. The soil was clean
+every inch of it, as well hoed and trenched as in a Middlesex market
+garden. Salt fish and flour, which is the chief food of the blacks, is
+imported; but vegetables enough are raised in Barbadoes to keep the cost
+of living incredibly low; and, to my uninstructed eyes, it seemed that
+even if sugar and wages did fail there could be no danger of any sudden
+famine. The people were thick as rabbits in a warren; women with loaded
+baskets on their heads laughing and chirruping, men driving donkey
+carts, four donkeys abreast, smoking their early pipes as if they had
+not a care in the world, as, indeed, they have not.
+
+On we went, the Colonel's horses stepping out twelve miles an hour, and
+I wondered privately what was to become of our breakfast. We were
+striking right across the island, along the coral ridge which forms the
+backbone of it. We found ourselves at length in a grove of orange trees
+and shaddocks, at the old church of St. John's, which stands upon a
+perpendicular cliff; Codrington College on the level under our feet, and
+beyond us the open Atlantic and the everlasting breakers from the trade
+winds fringing the shore with foam. Far out were the white sails of the
+fishing smacks. The Barbadians are careless of weather, and the best of
+boat sailors. It was very pretty in the bright morning, and the church
+itself was not the least interesting part of the scene. The door was
+wide open. We went in, and I seemed to be in a parish church in England
+as parish churches used to be when I was a child. There were the
+old-fashioned seats, the old unadorned communion table, the old pulpit
+and reading desk and the clerk's desk below, with the lion and the
+unicorn conspicuous above the chancel arch. The white tablets on the
+wall bore familiar names dating back into the last century. On the floor
+were flagstones still older with armorial bearings and letters cut in
+stone, half effaced by the feet of the generations who had trodden up
+the same aisles till they, too, lay down and rested there. And there was
+this, too, to be remembered--that these Barbadian churches, old as they
+might seem, had belonged always to the Anglican communion. No mass had
+ever been said at that altar. It was a milestone on the high road of
+time, and was venerable to me at once for its antiquity and for the era
+at which it had begun to exist.
+
+At the porch was an ancient slab on which was a coat of arms, a crest
+with a hand and sword, and a motto, '_Sic nos, sic nostra tuemur._' The
+inscription said that it was in memory of Michael Mahon, 'of the kingdom
+of Ireland,' erected by his children and grandchildren. Who was Michael
+Mahon? Some expatriated, so-called rebel, I suppose, whose sword could
+not defend him from being Barbados'd with so many other poor wretches
+who were sent the same road--victims of the tragi-comedy of the English
+government of Ireland. There were plenty of them wandering about in
+Labat's time, ready, as Labat observes, to lend a help to the French,
+should they take a fancy to land a force in the island.
+
+The churchyard was scarcely so home-like. The graves were planted with
+tropical shrubs and flowers. Palms waved over the square stone
+monuments--stephanotis and jessamine crept about the iron railings. The
+primroses and hyacinths and violets, with which we dress the mounds
+under which our friends are sleeping, will not grow in the tropics. In
+the place of them are the exotics of our hot-houses. We too are,
+perhaps, exotics of another kind in these islands, and may not, after
+all, have a long abiding place in them.
+
+Colonel ----, who with his secular duties combined serious and spiritual
+feeling, was a friend of the clergyman of St. John's, and hoped to
+introduce me to him. This gentleman, however, was absent from home. Our
+round was still but half completed; we had to mount again and go another
+seven miles to inspect a police station. The police themselves were, of
+course, blacks--well-grown fine men, in a high state of discipline. Our
+visit was not expected, but all was as it should be; the rooms well
+swept and airy, the horses in good condition, stables clean, harness and
+arms polished and ready for use. Serious as might be the trials of the
+Barbadians and decrepit the financial condition, there were no symptoms
+of neglect either on the farms or in the social machinery.
+
+Altogether we drove between thirty and forty miles that morning. We were
+in time for breakfast after all, and I had seen half the island. It is
+like the Isle of Thanet, or the country between Calais and Boulogne. One
+characteristic feature must not be forgotten: there are no rivers and no
+waterpower; steam engines have been introduced, but the chief motive
+agent is still the never-ceasing trade wind. You see windmills
+everywhere, as it was in the time of Labat. The planters are reproached
+as being behind the age; they are told that with the latest improvements
+they might still defy their beetroot enemy. It may be so, but a wind
+which never rests is force which costs little, and it is possible that
+they understand their own business best.
+
+Another morning excursion showed me the rest of the country, and
+introduced me to scenes and persons still more interesting. Sir Graham
+Briggs[8] is perhaps the most distinguished representative of the old
+Barbadian families. He is, or was, a man of large fortune, with vast
+estates in this and other islands. A few years ago, when prospects were
+brighter, he was an advocate of the constitutional development so much
+recommended from England. The West Indian Islands were to be
+confederated into a dominion like that of Canada, to take over the
+responsibilities of government, and to learn to stand alone. The decline
+in the value of property, the general decay of the white interest in the
+islands, and the rapid increase of the blacks, taught those who at one
+time were ready for the change what the real nature of it would be. They
+have paused to consider; and the longer they consider the less they like
+it.
+
+Sir Graham had called upon me at Government House, and had spoken fully
+and freely about the offered American sugar treaty. As a severe sufferer
+he was naturally irritated at the rejection of it; and in the mood in
+which I found him, I should think it possible that if the Americans
+would hold their hands out with an offer of admission into the Union, he
+and a good many other gentlemen would meet them halfway. He did not say
+so--I conjecture only from natural probabilities, and from what I should
+feel myself if I were in their position. Happily the temptation cannot
+fall in their way. An American official laconically summed up the
+situation to me: 'As satellites, sir, as much as you please; but as
+parts of the primary--no, sir.' The Americans will not take them into
+the Union; they must remain, therefore, with their English primary and
+make the best of it; neither as satellites, for they have no proper
+motion of their own, nor as incorporated in the British Empire, for they
+derive no benefit from their connection with it, but as poor relations
+distantly acknowledged. I did not expect that Sir Graham would have
+more to say to me than he had said already: but he was a cultivated and
+noteworthy person, his house was said to be the most splendid of the old
+Barbadian merchant palaces, and I gratefully accepted an invitation to
+pay him a short visit.
+
+I started as before in the early morning, before the sun was above the
+trees. The road followed the line of the shore. Originally, I believe,
+Barbadoes was like the Antilles, covered with forest. In the interior
+little remains save cabbage palms and detached clumps of mangy-looking
+mahogany trees. The forest is gone, and human beings have taken the
+place of it. For ten miles I was driving through a string of straggling
+villages, each cottage or cabin having its small vegetable garden and
+clump of plantains. Being on the western or sheltered side of the
+island, the sea was smooth and edged with mangrove, through which at
+occasional openings we saw the shining water and the white coral beach,
+and fishing boats either drawn up upon it or anchored outside with their
+sails up. Trees had been planted for shade among the houses. There were
+village greens with great silk-cotton trees, banyans and acacias,
+mangoes and oranges, and shaddocks with their large fruit glowing among
+the leaves like great golden melons. The people swarmed, children
+tumbling about half naked, so like each other that one wondered whether
+their mothers knew their own from their neighbours'; the fishermen's
+wives selling flying fish, of which there are infinite numbers. It was
+an innocent, pretty scene. One missed green fields with cows upon them.
+Guinea grass, which is all that they have, makes excellent fodder, but
+is ugly to look at; and is cut and carried, not eaten where it grows. Of
+animal life there were innumerable donkeys--no black man will walk if he
+can find a donkey to carry him--infinite poultry, and pigs, familiar
+enough, but not allowed a free entry into the cabins as in Ireland. Of
+birds there was not any great variety. The humming birds preferred less
+populated quarters. There were small varieties of finches and sparrows
+and buntings, winged atoms without beauty of form or colour; there were
+a few wild pigeons; but the prevailing figure was the Barbadian crow, a
+little fellow no bigger than a blackbird, a diminutive jackdaw, who gets
+his living upon worms and insects and parasites, and so tame that he
+would perch upon a boy's head if he saw a chance of finding anything
+eatable there. The women dress ill in Barbadoes, for they imitate
+English ladies; but no dress can conceal the grace of their forms when
+they are young. It struck Pere Labat two centuries ago, and time and
+their supposed sufferings as slaves have made no difference. They work
+harder than the men, and are used as beasts of burden to fetch and
+carry, but they carry their loads on their heads, and thus from
+childhood have to stand upright with the neck straight and firm. They do
+not spoil their shapes with stays, or their walk with high-heeled shoes.
+They plant their feet firmly on the ground. Every movement is elastic
+and rounded, and the grace of body gives, or seems to give, grace also
+to the eyes and expression. Poor things! it cannot compensate for their
+colour, which now when they are free is harder to bear than when they
+were slaves. Their prettiness, such as it is, is short-lived. They grow
+old early, and an old negress is always hideous.
+
+After keeping by the sea for an hour we turned inland, and at the foot
+of a steep hill we met my host, who transferred me to his own carriage.
+We had still four or five miles to go through cane fields and among
+sugar mills. At the end of them we came to a grand avenue of cabbage
+palms, a hundred or a hundred and twenty feet high. How their slim stems
+with their dense coronet of leaves survive a hurricane is one of the
+West Indian marvels. They escape destruction by the elasticity with
+which they yield to it. The branches, which in a calm stand out
+symmetrically, forming a circle of which the stem is the exact centre,
+bend round before a violent wind, are pressed close together, and stream
+out horizontally like a horse's tail.
+
+The avenue led up to Sir Graham's house, which stands 800 feet above the
+sea. The garden, once the wonder of the island, was running wild, though
+rare trees and shrubs survived from its ancient splendour. Among them
+were two Wellingtonias as tall as the palms, but bent out of shape by
+the trade winds. Passing through a hall, among a litter of Carib
+curiosities, we entered the drawing-room, a magnificent saloon extending
+with various compartments over the greater part of the ground-floor
+story. It was filled with rare and curious things, gathered in the days
+when sugar was a horn of plenty, and selected with the finest taste;
+pictures, engravings, gems, antiquarian relics, books, maps, and
+manuscripts. There had been fine culture in the West Indies when all
+these treasures were collected. The English settlers there, like the
+English in Ireland, had the tastes of a grand race, and by-and-by we
+shall miss both of them when they are overwhelmed, as they are likely to
+be, in the revolutionary tide. Sir Graham was stemming it to the best of
+his ability, and if he was to go under would go under like a gentleman.
+A dining room almost as large had once been the scene of hospitalities
+like those which are celebrated by Tom Cringle. A broad staircase led up
+from the hall to long galleries, out of which bedrooms opened; with cool
+deep balconies and the universal green blinds. It was a palace with
+which Aladdin himself might have been satisfied, one of those which had
+stirred the envying admiration of foreign travellers in the last
+century, one of many then, now probably the last surviving
+representative of Anglo-West Indian civilisation. Like other forms of
+human life, it has had its day and could not last for ever. Something
+better may grow in the place of it, but also something worse may grow.
+The example of Hayti ought to suggest misgivings to the most ardent
+philonegro enthusiast.
+
+West Indian cookery was famous over the world. Pere Labat devotes at
+least a thousand pages to the dishes compounded of the spices and fruits
+of the islands, and their fish and fowl. Carib tradition was developed
+by artists from London and Paris. The Caribs, according to Labat, only
+ate one another for ceremony and on state occasions; their common diet
+was as excellent as it was innocent; and they had ascertained by careful
+experience the culinary and medicinal virtues of every animal and plant
+around them. Tom Cringle is eloquent on the same subject, but with less
+scientific knowledge. My own unfortunately is less than his, and I can
+do no justice at all to Sir Graham's entertainment of me; I can but say
+that he treated me to a West Indian banquet of the old sort, infinite in
+variety, and with subtle differences of flavour for which no language
+provides names. The wine--laid up _consule Planco_, when Pitt was prime
+minister, and the days of liberty as yet were not--was as admirable as
+the dishes, and the fruit more exquisite than either. Such pineapples,
+such shaddocks, I had never tasted before, and shall never taste again.
+
+Hospitable, generous, splendid as was Sir Graham's reception of me, it
+was nevertheless easy to see that the prospects of the island sat heavy
+upon him. We had a long conversation when breakfast was over, which, if
+it added nothing new to what I had heard before, deepened and widened
+the impression of it.
+
+The English West Indies, like other parts of the world, are going
+through a silent revolution. Elsewhere the revolution, as we hope, is a
+transition state, a new birth; a passing away of what is old and worn
+out, that a fresh and healthier order may rise in its place. In the West
+Indies the most sanguine of mortals will find it difficult to entertain
+any such hope at all. We have been a ruling power there for two hundred
+and fifty years; the whites whom we planted as our representatives are
+drifting into helplessness, and they regard England and England's policy
+as the principal cause of it. The blacks whom, in a fit of virtuous
+benevolence, we emancipated, do not feel that they are particularly
+obliged to us. They think, if they think at all, that they were ill
+treated originally, and have received no more than was due to them, and
+that perhaps it was not benevolence at all on our part, but a desire to
+free ourselves from the reproach of slaveholding. At any rate, the
+tendencies now in operation are loosening the hold which we possess on
+the islands, and the longer they last the looser that hold will become.
+French influence is in no danger of dying out in Martinique and
+Guadaloupe. The Spanish race is not dying in Cuba and Puerto Rico.
+England will soon be no more than a name in Barbadoes and the Antilles.
+Having acquitted our conscience by emancipation, we have left our West
+Indian interest to sink or swim. Our principle has been to leave each
+part of our empire (except the East Indies) to take care of itself: we
+give the various inhabitants liberty, and what we understand by fair
+play; that we have any further moral responsibilities towards them we do
+not imagine, even in our dreams, when they have ceased to be of
+commercial importance to us; and we assume that the honour of being
+British subjects will suffice to secure their allegiance. It will not
+suffice, as we shall eventually discover. We have decided that if the
+West Indies are to become again prosperous they must recover by their
+own energy. Our other colonies can do without help; why not they? We
+ought to remember that they are not like the other colonies. We occupied
+them at a time when slavery was considered a lawful institution,
+profitable to ourselves and useful to the souls of the negroes, who were
+brought by it within reach of salvation.[9] We became ourselves the
+chief slave dealers in the world. We peopled our islands with a
+population of blacks more dense by far in proportion to the whites than
+France or Spain ever ventured to do. We did not recognise, as the French
+and Spaniards did, that if our western colonies were permanently to
+belong to us, we must occupy them ourselves. We thought only of the
+immediate profit which was to be gathered out of the slave gangs; and
+the disproportion of the two races--always dangerously large--has
+increased with ever-gathering velocity since the emancipation. It is now
+beyond control on the old lines. The scanty whites are told that they
+must work out their own salvation on equal terms with their old
+servants. The relation is an impossible one. The independent energy
+which we may fairly look for in Australia and New Zealand is not to be
+looked for in Jamaica and Barbadoes; and the problem must have a new
+solution.
+
+Confederation is to be the remedy, we are told. Let the islands be
+combined under a constitution. The whites collectively will then be a
+considerable body, and can assert themselves successfully. Confederation
+is, as I said before of the movement in Trinidad, but a turn of the
+kaleidoscope, the same pieces with a new pattern. A West Indian
+self-governed Dominion is possible only with a full negro vote. If the
+whites are to combine, so will the blacks. It will be a rule by the
+blacks and for the blacks. Let a generation or two pass by and carry
+away with them the old traditions, and an English governor-general will
+be found presiding over a black council, delivering the speeches made
+for him by a black prime minister; and how long could this endure? No
+English gentleman would consent to occupy so absurd a situation. The two
+races are not equal and will not blend. If the white people do not
+depart of themselves, black legislation will make it impossible for any
+of them to stay who would not be better out of the way. The Anglo-Irish
+Protestants will leave Ireland if there is an Irish Catholic parliament
+in College Green; the whites, for the same reason, will leave the West
+Indies; and in one and the other the connection with the British Empire
+will disappear along with them. It must be so; only politicians whose
+horizon does not extend beyond their personal future, and whose ambition
+is only to secure the immediate triumph of their party, can expect
+anything else.
+
+Before my stay at Barbadoes ended, I had an opportunity of meeting at
+dinner a negro of pure blood who has risen to eminence by his own talent
+and character. He has held the office of attorney-general. He is now
+chief justice of the island. Exceptions are supposed proverbially to
+prove nothing, or to prove the opposite of what they appear to prove.
+When a particular phenomenon occurs rarely, the probabilities are strong
+against the recurrence of it. Having heard the craniological and other
+objections to the supposed identity of the negro and white races, I came
+to the opinion long ago in Africa, and I have seen no reason to change
+it, that whether they are of one race or not there is no original or
+congenital difference of capacity between them, any more than there is
+between a black horse and a black dog and a white horse and a white dog.
+With the same chances and with the same treatment, I believe that
+distinguished men would be produced equally from both races, and Mr.
+----'s well-earned success is an additional evidence of it. But it does
+not follow that what can be done eventually can be done immediately, and
+the gulf which divides the colours is no arbitrary prejudice, but has
+been opened by the centuries of training and discipline which have given
+us the start in the race. We set it down to slavery. It would be far
+truer to set it down to freedom. The African blacks have been free
+enough for thousands, perhaps for tens of thousands of years, and it has
+been the absence of restraint which has prevented them from becoming
+civilised. Generation has followed generation, and the children are as
+like their father as the successive generations of apes. The whites, it
+is likely enough, succeeded one another with the same similarity for a
+long series of ages. It is now supposed that the human race has been
+upon the planet for a hundred thousand years at least, and the first
+traces of civilisation cannot be thrown back at farthest beyond six
+thousand. During all those ages mankind went on treading in the same
+steps, century after century making no more advance than the birds and
+beasts. In Egypt or in India or one knows not where, accident or natural
+development quickened into life our moral and intellectual faculties;
+and these faculties have grown into what we now experience, not in the
+freedom in which the modern takes delight, but under the sharp rule of
+the strong over the weak, of the wise over the unwise. Our own
+Anglo-Norman race has become capable of self-government only after a
+thousand years of civil and spiritual authority. European government,
+European instruction, continued steadily till his natural tendencies are
+superseded by a higher instinct, may shorten the probation period of the
+negro. Individual blacks of exceptional quality, like Frederick Douglas
+in America, or the Chief Justice of Barbadoes, will avail themselves of
+opportunities to rise, and the freest opportunities ought to be offered
+them. But it is as certain as any future event can be that if we give
+the negroes as a body the political powers which we claim for ourselves,
+they will use them only to their own injury. They will slide back into
+their old condition, and the chance will be gone of lifting them to the
+level to which we have no right to say that they are incapable of
+rising.
+
+Chief Justice R---- owes his elevation to his English environment and
+his English legal training. He would not pretend that he could have made
+himself what he is in Hayti or in Dahomey. Let English authority die
+away, and the average black nature, such as it now is, be left free to
+assert itself, and there will be no more negroes like him in Barbadoes
+or anywhere.
+
+Naturally, I found him profoundly interested in the late revelations of
+the state of Hayti. Sir Spenser St. John, an English official, after
+residing for twelve years in Port au Prince, had in a published
+narrative with many details and particulars, declared that the republic
+of Toussaint l'Ouverture, the idol of all believers in the new gospel of
+liberty, had, after ninety years of independence, become a land where
+cannibalism could be practised with impunity. The African Obeah, the
+worship of serpents and trees and stones, after smouldering in all the
+West Indies in the form of witchcraft and poisoning, had broken out in
+Hayti in all its old hideousness. Children were sacrificed as in the old
+days of Moloch and were devoured with horrid ceremony, salted limbs
+being preserved and sold for the benefit of those who were unable to
+attend the full solemnities.
+
+That a man in the position of a British resident should have ventured on
+a statement which, if untrue, would be ruinous to himself, appeared in a
+high degree improbable. Yet one had to set one incredibility against
+another. Notwithstanding the character of the evidence, when I went out
+to the West Indies I was still unbelieving. I could not bring myself to
+credit that in an island nominally Catholic, where the French language
+was spoken, and there were cathedrals and churches and priests and
+missionaries, so horrid a revival of devil-worship could have been
+really possible. All the inquiries which I had been able to make, from
+American and other officers who had been in Hayti, confirmed Sir S. St.
+John's story. I had hardly found a person who entertained a doubt of it.
+I was perplexed and uncertain, when the Chief Justice opened the subject
+and asked me what I thought. Had I been convinced I should have turned
+the conversation, but I was not convinced and I was not afraid to say
+so. I reminded him of the universal conviction through Europe that the
+Jews were habitually guilty of sacrificing children also. There had been
+detailed instances. Alleged offenders had been brought before courts of
+justice at any time for the last six hundred years. Witnesses had been
+found to swear to facts which had been accepted as conclusive. Wretched
+creatures in Henry III.'s time had been dragged by dozens at horses'
+tails through the streets of London, broken on the wheel, or torn to
+pieces by infuriated mobs. Even within the last two years, the same
+accusation had been brought forward in Russia and Germany, and had been
+established apparently by adequate proof. So far as popular conviction
+of the guilt of the Jews was an evidence against them, nothing could be
+stronger; and no charge could be without foundation on ordinary
+principles of evidence which revived so often and in so many places. And
+yet many persons, I said, and myself among them, believed that although
+the accusers were perfectly sincere, the guilt of the Jews was from end
+to end an hallucination of hatred. I had looked into the particulars of
+some of the trials. They were like the trials for witchcraft. The belief
+had created the fact, and accusation was itself evidence. I was
+prepared to find these stories of child murder in Hayti were bred
+similarly of anti-negro prejudice.
+
+Had the Chief Justice caught at my suggestion with any eagerness I
+should have suspected it myself. His grave diffidence and continued
+hesitation in offering an opinion confirmed me in my own. I told him
+that I was going to Hayti to learn what I could on the spot. I could not
+expect that I, on a flying visit, could see deeper into the truth than
+Sir Spenser St. John had seen, but at least I should not take with me a
+mind already made up, and I was not given to credulity. He took leave of
+me with an expression of passionate anxiety that it might be found
+possible to remove so black a stain from his unfortunate race.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[8] As I correct the proofs I learn, to my great sorrow, that Sir Graham
+is dead. I have lost in him a lately made but valued friend; and the
+colony has lost the ablest of its legislators.
+
+[9] It was on this ground alone that slavery was permitted in the French
+islands. Labat says:
+
+C'est une loi tres-ancienne que les terres soumises aux rois de France
+rendent libres tous ceux qui s'y peuvent retirer. C'est ce qui fit que
+le roi Louis XIII, de glorieuse memoire, aussi pieux qu'il etoit sage,
+eut toutes les peines du monde a consentir que les premiers habitants
+des isles eussent des esclaves: et ne se rendit enfin qu'aux pressantes
+sollicitations qu'on luy faisoit de leur octroyer cette permission que
+parce qu'on lui remontra que c'etoit un moyen infaillible et l'unique
+qu'il y eut pour inspirer le culte du vrai Dieu aux Africains, les
+retirer de l'idolatrie, et les faire perseverer jusqu'a la mort dans la
+religion chretienne qu'on leur feroit embrasser.--Vol. iv. p. 14.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+    Leeward and Windward Islands--The Caribs of Dominica--Visit of Pere
+    Labat--St. Lucia--The Pitons--The harbour at Castries--Intended
+    coaling station--Visit to the administrator--The old fort and
+    barracks--Conversation with an American--Constitution of
+    Dominica--Land at Roseau.
+
+
+Beyond all the West Indian Islands I had been curious to see
+Dominica.[10] It was the scene of Rodney's great fight on April 12. It
+was the most beautiful of the Antilles and the least known. A tribe of
+aboriginal Caribs still lingered in the forests retaining the old look
+and the old language, and, except that they no longer ate their
+prisoners, retaining their old habits. They were skilful fishermen,
+skilful basket makers, skilful in many curious arts.
+
+The island lies between Martinique and Guadaloupe, and is one of the
+group now called Leeward Islands, as distinguished from St. Lucia, St.
+Vincent, Grenada, &c., which form the Windward. The early geographers
+drew the line differently and more rationally. The main direction of the
+trade winds is from east to west. To them the Windward Islands were the
+whole chain of the Antilles, which form the eastern side of the
+Caribbean Sea. The Leeward were the great islands on the west of
+it--Cuba, St. Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. The modern division
+corresponds to no natural phenomenon. The drift of the trades is rather
+from the north-east than from the south-east, and the names serve only
+now to describe our own not very successful political groupings.
+
+Dominica cuts in two the French West Indian possessions. The French took
+it originally from the Spaniards, occupied it, colonised it, planted in
+it their religion and their language, and fought desperately to maintain
+their possession. Lord Rodney, to whom we owe our own position in the
+West Indies, insisted that Dominica must belong to us to hold the French
+in check, and regarded it as the most important of all our stations
+there. Rodney made it English, and English it has ever since remained in
+spite of the furious efforts which France made to recover an island
+which she so highly valued during the Napoleon wars. I was anxious to
+learn what we had made of a place which we had fought so hard for.
+
+Though Dominica is the most mountainous of all the Antilles, it is split
+into many valleys of exquisite fertility. Through each there runs a full
+and ample river, swarming with fish, and yielding waterpower enough to
+drive all the mills which industry could build. In these valleys and on
+the rich levels along the shore the French had once their cane fields
+and orange gardens, their pineapple beds and indigo plantations.
+
+Labat, who travelled through the island at the close of the seventeenth
+century, found it at that time chiefly occupied by Caribs. With his
+hungry appetite for knowledge, he was a guest in their villages,
+acquainted himself with their characters and habits, and bribed out of
+them by lavish presents of brandy the secrets of their medicines and
+poisons. The Pere was a clever, curious man, with a genial human
+sympathy about him, and was indulgent to the faults which the poor
+coloured sinners fell into from never having known better. He tried to
+make Christians of them. They were willing to be baptised as often as he
+liked for a glass of brandy. But he was not very angry when he found
+that the Christianity went no deeper. Moral virtues, he concluded
+charitably, could no more be expected out of a Carib than reason and
+good sense out of a woman.
+
+At Roseau, the capital, he fell in with the then queen of Dominica, a
+Madame Ouvernard, a Carib of pure blood, who in her time of youth and
+beauty had been the mistress of an English governor of St. Kitts. When
+Labat saw her she was a hundred years old with a family of children and
+grandchildren. She was a grand old lady, unclothed almost absolutely,
+bent double, so that under ordinary circumstances nothing of her face
+could be seen. Labat, however, presented her with a couple of bottles of
+eau de vie, under the influence of which she lifted up to him a pair of
+still brilliant eyes and a fair mouthful of teeth. They did very well
+together, and on parting they exchanged presents in Homeric fashion, she
+loading him with baskets of fruit, he giving a box in return full of
+pins and needles, knives and scissors.
+
+Labat was a student of languages before philology had become a science.
+He discovered from the language of the Caribs that they were North
+American Indians. They called themselves _Banari_, which meant 'come
+from over sea.' Their dialect was almost identical with what he had
+heard spoken in Florida. They were cannibals, but of a peculiar kind.
+Human flesh was not their ordinary food; but they 'boucanned' or dried
+the limbs of distinguished enemies whom they had killed in, battle, and
+handed them round to be gnawed at special festivals. They were a
+light-hearted, pleasant race, capital shots with bows and arrows, and
+ready to do anything he asked in return for brandy. They killed a hammer
+shark for his amusement by diving under the monster and stabbing him
+with knives. As to their religion, they had no objection to anything.
+But their real belief was in a sort of devil.
+
+Soon after Labat's visit the French came in, drove the Caribs into the
+mountains, introduced negro slaves, and an ordered form of society.
+Madame Ouvernard and her court went to their own place. Canes were
+planted, and indigo and coffee. A cathedral was built at Roseau, and
+parish churches were scattered about the island. There were convents of
+nuns and houses of friars, and a fort at the port with a garrison in it.
+The French might have been there till now had not we turned them out
+some ninety years ago; English enterprise then setting in that direction
+under the impulse of Rodney's victories. I was myself about to see the
+improvements which we had introduced into an acquisition which had cost
+us so dear.
+
+I was to be dropped at Roseau by the mail steamer from Barbadoes to St.
+Thomas's. On our way we touched at St. Lucia, another once famous
+possession of ours. This island was once French also. Rodney took it in
+1778. It was the only one of the Antilles which was left to us in the
+reverses which followed the capitulation of York Town. It was in the
+harbour at Castries, the chief port, that Rodney collected the fleet
+which fought and won the great battle with the Count de Grasse. At the
+peace of Versailles, St. Lucia was restored to France; but was retaken
+in 1796 by Sir Ralph Abercrombie, and, like Dominica, has ever since
+belonged to England. This, too, is a beautiful mountainous island, twice
+as large as Barbadoes, in which even at this late day we have suddenly
+discovered that we have an interest. The threatened Darien canal has
+awakened us to a sense that we require a fortified coaling station in
+those quarters. St. Lucia has the greatest natural advantages for such a
+purpose, and works are already in progress there, and the long-deserted
+forts and barracks which had been made over to snakes and lizards, are
+again to be occupied by English troops.
+
+We sailed one evening from Barbadoes. In the grey of the next morning we
+were in the passage between St. Lucia and St. Vincent just under the
+'Pitons,' which were soaring grandly above us in the twilight. The
+Pitons are two conical mountains rising straight out of the sea at the
+southern end of St. Lucia, one of them 3,000 feet high, the other a few
+feet lower, symmetrical in shape like sugar loaves, and so steep as to
+be inaccessible to any one but a member of the Alpine Club. Tradition
+says that four English seamen, belonging to the fleet, did once set out
+to climb the loftier of the two. They were watched in their ascent
+through a telescope. When halfway up one of them was seen to drop, while
+three went on; a few hundred feet higher a second dropped, and
+afterwards a third; one had almost reached the summit, when he fell
+also. No account of what had befallen them ever reached their ship. They
+were supposed to have been bitten by the fer de lance, the deadliest
+snake in St. Lucia and perhaps in the world, who had resented and
+punished their intrusion into regions where they had no business. Such
+is the local legend, born probably out of the terror of a reptile which
+is no legend at all, but a living and very active reality.
+
+I had gone on deck on hearing where we were, and saw the twin grey peaks
+high above me in the sky, the last stars glimmering over their tops and
+the waves washing against the black precipices at their base. The night
+had been rough, and a considerable sea was running, which changed,
+however, to an absolute calm when we had passed the Pitons and were
+under the lee of the island. I could then observe the peculiar blue of
+the water which I was told that I should find at St. Lucia and Dominica.
+I have seen the sea of very beautiful colours in several parts of the
+world, but I never saw any which equalled this. I do not know the cause.
+The depth is very great even close to the shore. The islands are merely
+volcanic mountains with sides extremely steep. The coral insect has made
+anchorages in the bays and inlets; elsewhere you are out of soundings
+almost immediately. As to St. Lucia itself, if I had not seen Grenada,
+if I had not known what I was about to see in Dominica, I should have
+thought it the most exquisite place which nature had ever made, so
+perfect were the forms of the forest-clothed hills, the glens dividing
+them and the high mountain ranges in the interior still draped in the
+white mist of morning. Here and there along the shore there were bright
+green spots which meant cane fields. Sugar cane in these countries is
+always called for brevity _cane_.
+
+Here, as elsewhere, the population is almost entirely negro, forty
+thousand blacks and a few hundred whites, the ratio altering every year
+to white disadvantage. The old system has not, however, disappeared as
+completely as in other places. There are still white planters with large
+estates, which are not encumbered as in Barbadoes. They are struggling
+along, discontented of course, but not wholly despondent. The chief
+complaint is the somewhat weary one of the laziness of the blacks, who
+they say will work only when they please, and are never fully awake
+except at dinner time. I do not know that they have a right to expect
+anything else from poor creatures whom the law calls human, but who to
+them are only mechanical tools, not so manageable as tools ought to be,
+with whom they have no acquaintance and no human relations, whose wages
+are but twopence an hour and are diminished by fines at the arbitrary
+pleasure of the overseer.
+
+Life and hope and energy are the qualities most needed. When the troops
+return there will be a change, and spirit may be put into them again.
+Castries, the old French town, lies at the head of a deep inlet which
+runs in among the mountains like a fiord. This is to be the future
+coaling station. The mouth of the bay is narrow with a high projecting
+'head' on either side of it, and can be easily and cheaply fortified.
+There is little or no tide in these seas. There is depth of water
+sufficient in the greater part of the harbour for line-of-battle ships
+to anchor and turn, and the few coral shoals which would be in the way
+are being torn up with dredging machines. The island has borrowed
+seventy thousand pounds on Government security to prepare for the
+dignity which awaits it and for the prosperity which is to follow.
+There was real work actively going on, a rare and perhaps unexampled
+phenomenon in the English West Indies.
+
+We brought up alongside of a wharf to take in coal. It was a strange
+scene; cocoa-nut palms growing incongruously out of coal stores, and
+gorgeous flowering creepers climbing over the workmen's sheds. Volumes
+of smoke rose out of the dredging engines and hovered over the town. We
+had come back to French costume again; we had left the white dresses
+behind at Barbadoes, and the people at Castries were bright as parrots
+in crimsons and blues and greens; but fine colours looked oddly out of
+place by the side of the grimy reproduction of England.
+
+I went on shore and fell in with the engineer of the works, who kindly
+showed me his plans of the harbour, and explained what was to be done.
+He showed me also some beautiful large bivalves which had been brought
+up in the scrapers out of the coral. They were new to me and new to him,
+though they may be familiar enough to more experienced naturalists.
+Among other curiosities he had a fer de lance, lately killed and
+preserved in spirits, a rat-tailed, reddish, powerful-looking brute,
+about four feet long and as thick as a child's wrist. Even when dead I
+looked at him respectfully, for his bite is fatal and the effect almost
+instantaneous. He is fearless, and will not, like most snakes, get out
+of your way if he hears you coming, but leaves you to get out of his. He
+has a bad habit, too, of taking his walks at night; he prefers a path or
+a road to the grass, and your house or your garden to the forest; while
+if you step upon him you will never do it again. They have introduced
+the mongoose, who has cleared the snakes out of Jamaica, to deal with
+him; but the mongoose knows the creature that he has to encounter, and
+as yet has made little progress in extirpating him.
+
+St. Lucia is under the jurisdiction of Barbadoes. It has no governor of
+its own, but only an administrator indifferently paid. The elective
+principle has not yet been introduced into the legislature, and perhaps
+will not be introduced since we have discovered the island to be of
+consequence to us, unless as part of some general confederation. The
+present administrator--Mr. Laborde, a gentleman, I suppose, of French
+descent--is an elderly official, and resides in the old quarters of the
+general of the forces, 900 feet above the sea. He has large
+responsibilities, and, having had large experience also, seems fully
+equal to the duties which attach to him. He cannot have the authority of
+a complete governor, or undertake independent enterprises for the
+benefit of the island, as a Rajah Brooke might do, but he walks steadily
+on in the lines assigned to him. St. Lucia is better off in this respect
+than most of the Antilles, and may revive perhaps into something like
+prosperity when the coaling station is finished and under the command of
+some eminent engineer officer.
+
+Mr. Laborde had invited us to lunch with him. Horses were waiting for
+us, and we rode up the old winding track which led from the town to the
+barracks. The heat below was oppressive, but the air cooled as we rose.
+The road is so steep that resting places had been provided at intervals,
+where the soldiers could recover breath or shelter themselves from the
+tropical cataracts of rain which fall without notice, as if the string
+had been pulled of some celestial shower bath. The trees branched
+thickly over it, making an impenetrable shade, till we emerged on the
+plateau at the top, where we were on comparatively level ground, with
+the harbour immediately at our feet. The situation had been chosen by
+the French when St. Lucia was theirs. The general's house, now Mr.
+Laborde's residence, is a long airy building with a deep colonnade, the
+drawing and dining rooms occupying the entire breadth of the ground
+floor, with doors and windows on both sides for coolness and air. The
+western front overlooked the sea. Behind were wooded hills, green
+valleys, a mountain range in the background, and the Pitons blue in the
+distance. As we were before our time, Mr. Laborde walked me out to see
+the old barracks, magazines, and water tanks. They looked neglected and
+dilapidated, the signs of decay being partly hid by the creepers with
+which the walls were overgrown. The soldiers' quarters were occupied for
+the time by a resident gentleman, who attended to the essential repairs
+and prevented the snakes from taking possession as they were inclined to
+do. I forget how many of the fer de lance sort he told me he had killed
+in the rooms since he had lived in them.
+
+In the war time we had maintained a large establishment in St. Lucia;
+with what consequences to the health of the troops I could not clearly
+make out. One informant told me that they had died like flies of yellow
+fever, and that the fields adjoining were as full of bodies as the
+Brompton cemetery; another that yellow fever had never been known there
+or any dangerous disorder; and that if we wanted a sanitary station this
+was the spot for it. Many thousands of pounds will have to be spent
+there before the troops can return; but that is our way with the
+colonies--to change our minds every ten years, to do and undo, and do
+again, according to parliamentary humours, while John Bull pays the bill
+patiently for his own irresolution.
+
+The fortress, once very strong, is now in ruins, but, I suppose, will be
+repaired and rearmed unless we are to trust to the Yankees, who are
+supposed to have established a _Pax Dei_ in these waters and will permit
+no aggressive action there either by us or against us. We walked round
+the walls; we saw the hill a mile off from which Abercrombie had
+battered out the French, having dragged his guns through a roadless
+forest to a spot to which there seemed no access except on wings. The
+word 'impossible' was not known in those days. What Englishmen did once
+they may do again perhaps if stormy days come back. The ruins themselves
+were silently impressive. One could hear the note of the old bugles as
+they sounded the reveille and the roaring of the _feu de joie_ when the
+shattered prizes were brought in from the French fleet. The signs of
+what once had been were still visible in the parade ground, in the large
+mangoes which the soldiers had planted, in the English grass which they
+had introduced and on which cattle were now grazing. There was a clump
+of guavas, hitherto only known to me in preserves. I gathered a blossom
+as a remembrance, white like a large myrtle flower, but heavily
+scented--too heavily, with an odour of death about it.
+
+Mr. Laborde's conversation was instructive. His entertainment of us was
+all which our acquired West Indian fastidiousness could desire. The
+inevitable cigars followed, and Mr. L. gave me a beating at billiards.
+There were some lively young ladies in the party, and two or three of
+the ship's officers. The young ones played lawn tennis, and we old ones
+looked on and wished the years off our shoulders. So passed the day. The
+sun was setting when we mounted to ride down. So short is the twilight
+in these latitudes, that it was dark night when we reached the town, and
+we required the light of the stars to find our boat.
+
+When the coaling process was finished, the ship had been washed down in
+our absence and was anchored off beyond the reach of the dirt; but the
+ports were shut; the windsails had been taken down; the air in the
+cabins was stifling; so I stayed on deck till midnight with a clever
+young American, who was among our fellow-passengers, talking of many
+things. He was ardent, confident, self-asserting, but not disagreeably
+either one or the other. It was rather a pleasure to hear a man speak in
+these flabby uncertain days as if he were sure of anything, and I had to
+notice again, as I had often noticed before, how well informed casual
+American travellers are on public affairs, and how sensibly they can
+talk of them. He had been much in the West Indies and seemed to know
+them well. He said that all the whites in the islands wished at the
+bottom of their hearts to be taken into the Union; but the Union
+Government was too wise to meddle with them. The trade would fall to
+America of itself. The responsibility and trouble might remain where it
+was. I asked him about the Canadian fishery dispute. He thought it would
+settle itself in time, and that nothing serious would come of it. 'The
+Washington Cabinet had been a little hard on England,' he admitted; 'but
+it was six of one and half a dozen of the other.' 'Honours were easy;
+neither party could score.' 'We had been equally hard on them about
+Alaska.'
+
+He was less satisfied about Ireland. The telegraph had brought the news
+of Mr. Goschen's defeat at Liverpool, and Home Rule, which had seemed to
+have been disposed of, was again within the range of probabilities. He
+was watching with pitying amusement, like most of his countrymen, the
+weakness of will with which England allowed herself to be worried by so
+contemptible a business; but he did seem to fear, and I have heard
+others of his countrymen say the same, that if we let it go on much
+longer the Americans may become involved in the thing one way or
+another, and trouble may rise about it between the two countries.
+
+We weighed; and I went to bed and to sleep, and so missed Pigeon Island,
+where Rodney's fleet lay before the action, and the rock from which,
+through his telescope, he watched De Grasse come out of Martinique, and
+gave his own signal to chase. We rolled as usual between the islands. At
+daylight we were again in shelter under Martinique, and again in classic
+regions; for close to us was Diamond Rock--once his Majesty's ship
+'Diamond,' commissioned with crew and officers--one of those curious
+true incidents, out of which a legend might have grown in other times,
+that ship and mariners had been turned to stone. The rock, a lonely
+pyramid six hundred feet high, commanded the entrance to Port Royal in
+Martinique. Lord Howe took possession of it, sent guns up in slings to
+the top, and left a midshipman with a handful of men in charge. The
+gallant little fellow held his fortress for several months, peppered
+away at the French, and sent three of their ships of war to the bottom.
+He was blockaded at last by an overwhelming force. No relief could be
+spared for him. Escape was impossible, as he had not so much as a boat,
+and he capitulated to famine.
+
+We stayed two hours under Martinique. I did not land. It has been for
+centuries a special object of care on the part of the French Government.
+It is well looked after, and, considering the times, prosperous. It has
+a fine garrison, and a dockyard well furnished, with frigates in the
+harbours ready for action should occasion arise. I should infer from
+what I heard that in the event of war breaking out between England and
+France, Martinique, in the present state of preparation on both sides,
+might take possession of the rest of the Antilles with little
+difficulty. Three times we took it, and we gave it back again. In turn,
+it may one day, perhaps, take us, and the English of the West Indies
+become a tradition like the buccaneers.
+
+The mountains of Dominica are full in sight from Martinique. The channel
+which separates them is but thirty miles across, and the view of
+Dominica as you approach it is extremely grand. Grenada, St. Vincent,
+St. Lucia, Martinique are all volcanic, with lofty peaks and ridges; but
+Dominica was at the centre of the force which lifted the Antilles out of
+the ocean, and the features which are common to all are there in a
+magnified form. The mountains range from four to five thousand feet in
+height. Mount Diablot, the highest of them, rises to between five and
+six thousand feet. The mountains being the tallest in all the group, the
+rains are also the most violent, and the ravines torn out by the
+torrents are the wildest and most magnificent. The volcanic forces are
+still active there. There are sulphur springs and boiling water
+fountains, and in a central crater there is a boiling lake. There are
+strange creatures there besides: great snakes--harmless, but ugly to
+look at; the diablot--from which the mountain takes its name--a great
+bird, black as charcoal, half raven, half parrot, which nests in holes
+in the ground as puffins do, spends all the day in them, and flies down
+to the sea at night to fish for its food. There were once great numbers
+of these creatures, and it was a favourite amusement to hunt and drag
+them out of their hiding places. Labat says that they were excellent
+eating. They are confined now in reduced numbers to the inaccessible
+crags about the peak which bears their name.
+
+Martinique has two fine harbours. Dominica has none. At the north end of
+the island there is a bay, named after Prince Rupert, where there is
+shelter from all winds but the south, but neither there nor anywhere is
+there an anchorage which can be depended upon in dangerous weather.
+
+Roseau, the principal or only town, stands midway along the western
+shore. The roadstead is open, but as the prevailing winds are from the
+east the island itself forms a breakwater. Except on the rarest
+occasions there is neither surf nor swell there. The land shelves off
+rapidly, and a gunshot from shore no cable can find the bottom, but
+there is an anchorage in front of the town, and coasting smacks,
+American schooners, passing steamers bring up close under the rocks or
+alongside of the jetties which are built out from the beach upon piles.
+
+The situation of Roseau is exceedingly beautiful. The sea is, if
+possible, a deeper azure even than at St. Lucia; the air more
+transparent; the forests of a lovelier green than I ever saw in any
+other country. Even the rain, which falls in such abundance, falls often
+out of a clear sky as if not to interrupt the sunshine, and a rainbow
+almost perpetually hangs its arch over the island. Roseau itself stands
+on a shallow promontory. A long terrace of tolerable-looking houses
+faces the landing place. At right angles to the terrace, straight
+streets strike backwards at intervals, palms and bananas breaking the
+lines of roof. At a little distance, you see the towers of the old
+French Catholic cathedral, a smaller but not ungraceful-looking Anglican
+church, and to the right a fort, or the ruins of one, now used as a
+police barrack, over which flies the English flag as the symbol of our
+titular dominion. Beyond the fort is a public garden with pretty trees
+in it along the brow of a precipitous cliff, at the foot of which, when
+we landed, lay at anchor a couple of smart Yankee schooners and half a
+dozen coasting cutters, while rounding inwards behind was a long shallow
+bay dotted over with the sails of fishing boats. White negro villages
+gleamed among the palms along the shore, and wooded mountains rose
+immediately above them. It seemed an attractive, innocent, sunny sort of
+place, very pleasant to spend a few days in, if the inner side of things
+corresponded to the appearance. To a looker-on at that calm scene it
+was not easy to realise the desperate battles which had been fought for
+the possession of it, the gallant lives which had been laid down under
+the walls of that crumbling castle. These cliffs had echoed the roar of
+Rodney's guns on the day which saved the British Empire, and the island
+I was gazing at was England's Salamis.
+
+The organisation of the place, too, seemed, so far as I could gather
+from official books, to have been carefully attended to. The
+constitution had been touched and retouched by the home authorities as
+if no pains could be too great to make it worthy of a spot so sacred.
+There is an administrator, which is a longer word than governor. There
+is an executive council, a colonial secretary, an attorney-general, an
+auditor-general, and other such 'generals of great charge.' There is a
+legislative assembly of fourteen members, seven nominated by the Crown
+and seven elected by the people. And there are revenue officers and
+excise officers, inspectors of roads, and civil engineers, and school
+boards, and medical officers, and registrars, and magistrates. Where
+would political perfection be found if not here with such elaborate
+machinery?
+
+The results of it all, in the official reports, seemed equally
+satisfactory till you looked closely into them. The tariff of articles
+on which duties were levied, and the list of articles raised and
+exported, seemed to show that Dominica must be a beehive of industry and
+productiveness. The revenue, indeed, was a little startling as the
+result of this army of officials. Eighteen thousand pounds was the whole
+of it, scarcely enough to pay their salaries. The population, too, on
+whose good government so much thought had been expended, was only
+30,000; of these 30,000 only a hundred were English. The remaining
+whites, and those in scanty numbers, were French and principally
+Catholics. The soil was as rich as the richest in the world. The
+cultivation was growing annually less. The inspector of roads was likely
+to have an easy task, for except close to the town there were no roads
+at all on which anything with wheels could travel, the old roads made by
+the French having dropped into horse tracks, and the horse tracks into
+the beds of torrents. Why in an island where the resources of modern
+statesmanship had been applied so lavishly and with the latest
+discoveries in political science, the effect should have so ill
+corresponded to the means employed, was a problem into which it would be
+curious to inquire.
+
+The steamer set me down upon the pier and went on upon its way. At the
+end of a fortnight it would return and pick me up again. Meanwhile, I
+was to make the best of my time. I had been warned beforehand that there
+was no hotel in Roseau where an Englishman with a susceptible skin and
+palate could survive more than a week; and as I had two weeks to provide
+for, I was uncertain what to do with myself. I was spared the trial of
+the hotels by the liberality of her Majesty's representative in the
+colony. Captain Churchill, the administrator of the island, had heard
+that I was coming there, and I was met on the landing stage by a message
+from him inviting me to be his guest during my stay. Two tall handsome
+black girls seized my bags, tossed them on their heads, and strode off
+with a light step in front of me, cutting jokes with their friends; I
+following, and my mind misgiving me that I was myself the object of
+their wit.
+
+I was anxious to see Captain Churchill, for I had heard much of him. The
+warmest affection had been expressed for him personally, and concern for
+the position in which he was placed. Notwithstanding 'the latest
+discoveries of political science,' the constitution was still imperfect.
+The administrator, to begin with, is allowed a salary of only 500_l._ a
+year. That is not much for the chief of such an army of officials; and
+the hospitalities and social civilities which smooth the way in such
+situations are beyond his means. His business is to preside at the
+council, where, the official and the elected members being equally
+balanced and almost invariably dividing one against the other, his duty
+is to give the casting vote. He cannot give it against his own officers,
+and thus the machine is contrived to create the largest amount of
+friction, and to insure the highest amount of unpopularity to the
+administrator. His situation is the more difficult because the European
+element in Roseau, small as it is at best, is more French than English.
+The priests, the sisterhoods, are French or French-speaking. A French
+patois is the language of the blacks. They are almost to a man
+Catholics, and to the French they look as their natural leaders. England
+has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to introduce her own civilisation;
+and thus Dominica is English only in name. Should war come, a boatload
+of soldiers from Martinique would suffice to recover it. Not a black in
+the whole island would draw a trigger in defence of English authority,
+and, except the Crown officials, not half a dozen Europeans. The
+administrator can do nothing to improve this state of things. He is too
+poor to open Government House to the Roseau shopkeepers and to bid for
+social popularity. He is no one. He goes in and out unnoticed, and flits
+about like a bat in the twilight. He can do no good, and from the nature
+of the system on the construction of which so much care was expended, no
+one else can do any good. The maximum of expense, the minimum of benefit
+to the island, is all that has come of it.
+
+Meanwhile the island drifts along, without credit to borrow money and
+therefore escaping bankruptcy. The blacks there, as everywhere, are
+happy with their yams, and cocoa nuts and land crabs. They desire
+nothing better than they have, and do not imagine that they have any
+rulers unless agitated by the elected members. These gentlemen would
+like the official situations for themselves as in Trinidad, and they
+occasionally attempt a stir with partial success; otherwise the island
+goes on in a state of torpid content. Captain Churchill, quiet and
+gentlemanlike, gives no personal offence, but popularity he cannot hope
+for, having no means of recommending himself. The only really powerful
+Europeans are the Catholic bishop and the priests and sisterhoods. They
+are looked up to with genuine respect. They are reaping the harvest of
+the long and honourable efforts of the French clergy in all their West
+Indian possessions to make the blacks into Catholic Christians. In the
+Christian part of it they have succeeded but moderately; but such
+religion as exists in the island is mainly what they have introduced
+and taught, and they have a distinct influence which we ourselves have
+not tried to rival.
+
+But we have been too long toiling up the paved road to Captain
+Churchill's house. My girl-porter guides led me past the fort, where
+they exchanged shots with the lounging black police, past the English
+church, which stood buried in trees, the churchyard prettily planted
+with tropical flowers. The sun was dazzling, the heat was intense, and
+the path which led through it, if not apparently much used, looked shady
+and cool.
+
+A few more steps brought us to the gate of the Residence, where Captain
+Churchill had his quarters in the absence of the Governor-in-Chief of
+the Leeward Islands, whose visits were few and brief. In the event of
+the Governor's arrival he removed to a cottage in the hills. The house
+was handsome, the gardens well kept; a broad walk led up to the door, a
+hedge of lime trees closely clipt on one side of it, on the other a lawn
+with orange trees, oleanders, and hibiscus, palms of all varieties and
+almond trees, which in Dominica grow into giants, their broad leaves
+turning crimson before they fall, like the Virginia creeper. We reached
+the entrance of the house by wide stone steps, where countless lizards
+were lazily basking. Through the bars of the railings on each side of
+them there were intertwined the runners of the largest and most
+powerfully scented stephanotis which I have ever seen. Captain Churchill
+(one of the Marlborough Churchills) received me with more than
+cordiality. Society is not abundant in his Barataria, and perhaps as
+coming from England I was welcome to him in his solitude. His wife, an
+English Creole--that is, of pure English blood, but born in the
+island--was as hospitable as her husband. They would not let me feel
+that I was a stranger, and set me at my ease in a moment with a warmth
+which was evidently unassumed. Captain C. was lame, having hurt his
+foot. In a day or two he hoped to be able to mount his horse again, when
+we were to ride together and see the curiosities. Meanwhile, he talked
+sorrowfully enough of his own situation and the general helplessness of
+it. A man whose feet are chained and whose hands are in manacles is not
+to be found fault with if he cannot use either. He is not intended to
+use either. The duty of an administrator of Dominica, it appears, is to
+sit still and do nothing, and to watch the flickering in the socket of
+the last remains of English influence and authority. Individually he was
+on good terms with everyone, with the Catholic bishop especially, who,
+to his regret and mine, was absent at the time of my visit.
+
+His establishment was remarkable; it consisted of two black girls--a
+cook and a parlourmaid--who 'did everything;' and 'everything,' I am
+bound to say, was done well enough to please the most fastidious nicety.
+The cooking was excellent. The rooms, which were handsomely furnished,
+were kept as well and in as good order as in the Churchills' ancestral
+palace at Blenheim. Dominica has a bad name for vermin. I had been
+threatened with centipedes and scorpions in my bedroom. I had been
+warned there, as everywhere in the West Indies, never to walk across the
+floor with bare feet, lest a land crab should lay hold of my toe or a
+jigger should bite a hole in it, lay its eggs there, and bring me into
+the hands of the surgeon. Never while I was Captain C.'s guest did I see
+either centipede, or scorpion, or jigger, or any other unclean beast in
+any room of which these girls had charge. Even mosquitoes did not
+trouble me, so skilfully and carefully they arranged the curtains. They
+were dressed in the fashion of the French islands, something like the
+Moorish slaves whom one sees in pictures of Eastern palaces. They
+flitted about silent on their shoeless feet, never stumbled, or upset
+chairs or plates or dishes, but waited noiselessly like a pair of elves,
+and were always in their place when wanted. One had heard much of the
+idleness and carelessness of negro servants. In no part of the globe
+have I ever seen household work done so well by two pairs of hands. Of
+their morals I know nothing. It is usually said that negro girls have
+none. They appeared to me to be perfectly modest and innocent. I asked
+in wonder what wages were paid to these black fairies, believing that at
+no price at all could the match of them be found in England. I was
+informed that they had three shillings a week each, and 'found
+themselves,' i.e. found their own food and clothes. And this was above
+the usual rate, as Government House was expected to be liberal. The
+scale of wages may have something to do with the difficulty of obtaining
+labour in the West Indies. I could easily believe the truth of what I
+had been often told, that free labour is more economical to the employer
+than slave labour.
+
+The views from the drawing room windows were enchantingly beautiful. It
+is not the form only in these West Indian landscapes, or the colour
+only, but form and colour seen through an atmosphere of very peculiar
+transparency. On one side we looked up a mountain gorge, the slopes
+covered with forest; a bold lofty crag jutting out from them brown and
+bare, and the mountain ridge behind half buried in mist. From the other
+window we had the Botanical Gardens, the bay beyond them sparkling in
+the sunshine, and on the farther side of it, a few miles off, an island
+fortress which the Marquis de Bouille, of Revolution notoriety, took
+from the English in 1778. The sea stretched out blue and lovely under
+the fringe of sand, box trees, and almonds which grew along the edge of
+the cliff. The air was perfumed by white acacia flowers sweeter than
+orange blossom.
+
+Captain C. limped down with me into the gardens for a fuller look at the
+scene. Dusky fishermen were busy with their nets catching things like
+herrings, which come in daily to the shore to escape the monsters which
+prey upon them. Canoes on the old Carib pattern were slipping along
+outside, trailing lines for kingfish and bonitos. Others were setting
+baskets, like enormous lobster pots or hoop nets--such as we use to
+catch tench in English ponds--these, too, a legacy from the Caribs, made
+of strong tough cane. At the foot of the cliff were the smart American
+schooners which I had seen on landing--broad-beamed, shallow, low in the
+water with heavy spars, which bring Yankee 'notions' to the islands and
+carry back to New York bananas and limes and pineapples. There they
+were, models of Tom Cringle's 'Wave,' airy as English yachts, and equal
+to anything from a smuggling cruise to a race for a cup. I could have
+gazed for ever, so beautiful, so new, so like a dream it was, had I not
+been brought back swiftly to prose and reality. Suddenly out of a clear
+sky, without notice, and without provocation, first a few drops of rain
+fell, and then a deluge which set the gutters running. We had to scuttle
+home under our umbrellas. I was told, and I discovered afterwards by
+fuller experience, that this was the way in Dominica, and that if I went
+out anywhere I must be prepared for it. In our retreat we encountered a
+distinguished-looking abbe with a collar and a gold cross, who bowed to
+my companion. I would gladly have been introduced to him, but neither he
+nor we had leisure for courtesies in the torrent which was falling upon
+us.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[10] Not to be confounded with St. Domingo, which is called after St.
+Domenic, where the Spaniards first settled, and is now divided into the
+two black republics of St. Domingo and Hayti. Dominica lies in the chain
+of the Antilles between Martinique and Guadaloupe, and was so named by
+Columbus because he discovered it on a Sunday.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+    Curiosities in Dominica--Nights in the tropics--English and Catholic
+    churches--The market place at Roseau--Fishing extraordinary--A
+    storm--Dominican boatmen--Morning walks--Effects of the Leeward
+    Islands Confederation--An estate cultivated as it ought to be--A
+    mountain ride--Leave the island--Reflections.
+
+
+There was much to be seen in Dominica of the sort which travellers go in
+search of. There was the hot sulphur spring in the mountains; there was
+the hot lake; there was another volcanic crater, a hollow in the centre
+of the island now filled with water and surrounded with forest; there
+were the Caribs, some thirty families of them living among thickets,
+through which paths must be cut before we could reach them. We could
+undertake nothing till Captain C. could ride again. Distant expeditions
+can only be attempted on horses. They are bred to the work. They climb
+like cats, and step out safely where a fall or a twisted ankle would be
+the probable consequence of attempting to go on foot. Meanwhile, Roseau
+itself was to be seen and the immediate neighbourhood, and this I could
+manage for myself.
+
+My first night was disturbed by unfamiliar noises and strange
+imaginations. I escaped mosquitoes through the care of the black
+fairies. But mosquito curtains will not keep out sounds, and when the
+fireflies had put out their lights there began the singular chorus of
+tropical midnight. Frogs, lizards, bats, croaked, sang, and whistled
+with no intermission, careless whether they were in discord or harmony.
+The palm branches outside my window swayed in the land breeze, and the
+dry branches rustled crisply, as if they were plates of silver. At
+intervals came cataracts of rain, and above all the rest the deep boom
+of the cathedral bell tolling out the hours like a note of the Old
+World. The Catholic clergy had brought the bells with them as they had
+brought their faith into these new lands. It was pathetic, it was
+ominous music; for what had we done and what were we doing to set beside
+it in the century for which the island had been ours? Towards morning I
+heard the tinkle of the bell of the convent adjoining the garden calling
+the nuns to matins. Happily in the tropics hot nights do not imply an
+early dawn. The darkness lingers late, sleep comes at last and drowns
+our fancies in forgetfulness.
+
+The swimming bath was immediately under my room. I ventured into it with
+some trepidation. The basement story in most West Indian houses is open,
+to allow the air free passage under them. The space thus left vacant is
+used for lumber and rubbish, and, if scorpions or snakes are in the
+neighbourhood, is the place where one would look for them. There the
+bath was. I had been advised to be careful, and as it was dark this was
+not easy. The fear, however, was worse than the reality. Awkward
+encounters do happen if one is long in these countries; but they are
+rare, and seldom befall the accidental visitor; and the plunge into
+fresh water is so delicious that one is willing to risk the chance.
+
+I wandered out as soon as the sun was over the horizon. The cool of the
+morning is the time to see the people. The market girls were streaming
+into the town with their baskets of vegetables on their heads. The
+fishing boats were out again on the bay. Our Anglican church had its
+bell too as well as the cathedral. The door was open, and I went in and
+found a decent-looking clergyman preparing a flock of seven or eight
+blacks and mulattoes for the Communion. He was taking them through their
+catechism, explaining very properly, that religion meant doing one's
+duty, and that it was not enough to profess particular opinions.
+Dominica being Roman Catholic, and Roman Catholics not generally
+appreciating or understanding the claims of Anglicans to the possession
+of the sacraments, he pointed out where the difference lay. He insisted
+that we had priests as well as they; we had confession; we had
+absolution; only our priests did not claim, as the Catholics did, a
+direct power in themselves to forgive sins. Their office was to tell
+sinners that if they truly and sincerely repented and amended their
+lives God would forgive them. What he said was absolutely true; but I
+could not see in the dim faces of the catechumens that the distinction
+was particularly intelligible to them. If they thought at all, they
+probably reflected that no divinely constituted successor of the
+Apostles was needed to communicate a truism which every sensible person
+was equally able and entitled to tell them. Still the good earnest man
+meant well, and I wished him more success in his missionary enterprise
+than he was likely to find.
+
+From the Church of England to the great rival establishment was but a
+few minutes' walk. The cathedral was five times as large, at least, as
+the building which I had just left--old in age, old in appearance, with
+the usual indifferent pictures or coloured prints, with the usual
+decorated altar, but otherwise simple and venerable. There was no
+service going on, for it was a week-day; a few old men and women only
+were silently saying their prayers. On Sundays I was told that it was
+overflowing. The negro morals are as emancipated in Dominica as in the
+rest of the West Indies. Obeah is not forgotten; and along with the
+Catholic religion goes on an active belief in magic and witchcraft. But
+their religion is not necessarily a sham to them; it was the same in
+Europe in the ages of faith. Even in enlightened Protestant countries
+people calling themselves Christians believe that the spirits of the
+dead can be called up to amuse an evening party. The blacks in this
+respect are no worse than their white kinsmen. The priests have a
+genuine human hold upon them; they baptize the children; they commit the
+dead to the cemetery with the promise of immortality; they are
+personally loved and respected: and when a young couple marry, as they
+seldom but occasionally do, it is to the priest that they apply to tie
+them together.
+
+From the cathedral I wandered through the streets of Roseau; they had
+been well laid out; the streets themselves, and the roads leading to
+them from the country, had been carefully paved, and spoke of a time
+when the town had been full of life and vigour. But the grass was
+growing between the stones, and the houses generally were dilapidated
+and dirty. A few massive stone buildings there were, on which time and
+rain had made no impression; but these probably were all French--built
+long ago, perhaps in the days of Labat and Madame Ouvernard. The English
+hand had struck the island with paralysis. The British flag was flying
+over the fort, but for once I had no pride in looking at it. The fort
+itself was falling to pieces, like the fort at Grenada. The stones on
+the slope on which it stands had run with the blood which we spilt in
+the winning of it. Dominica had then been regarded as the choicest jewel
+in the necklace of the Antilles. For the last half-century we have left
+it to desolation, as a child leaves a plaything that it is tired of.
+
+In Roseau, as in most other towns, the most interesting spot is the
+market. There you see the produce of the soil; there you see the people
+that produce it; and you see them, not on show, as in church on Sundays,
+but in their active working condition. The market place at Roseau is a
+large square court close to the sea, well paved, surrounded, by
+warehouses, and luxuriantly shaded by large overhanging trees. Under
+these trees were hundreds of black women, young and old, with their fish
+and fowls, and fruit and bread, their yams and sweet potatoes, their
+oranges and limes and plantains. They had walked in from the country
+five or ten miles before sunrise with their loaded baskets on their
+heads. They would walk back at night with flour or salt fish, or oil, or
+whatever they happened to want. I did not see a single sullen face among
+them. Their figures were unconscious of lacing, and their feet of the
+monstrosities which we call shoes. They moved with the lightness and
+elasticity of leopards. I thought that I had never seen in any drawing
+room in London so many perfectly graceful forms. They could not mend
+their faces, but even in some of these there was a swarthy beauty. The
+hair was hopeless, and they knew it, but they turn the defect into an
+ornament by the coloured handkerchief which they twist about their
+heads, leaving the ends flowing. They chattered like jackdaws about a
+church tower. Two or three of the best looking, seeing that I admired
+them a little, used their eyes and made some laughing remarks. They
+spoke in their French _patois_, clipping off the first and last
+syllables of the words. I but half understood them, and could not return
+their bits of wit. I can only say that if their habits were as loose as
+white people say they are, I did not see a single licentious expression
+either in face or manner. They seemed to me light-hearted, merry,
+innocent young women, as free from any thought of evil as the peasant
+girls in Brittany.
+
+Two middle-aged dames were in a state of violent excitement about some
+subject on which they differed in opinion. A ring gathered about them,
+and they declaimed at one another with fiery volubility. It did not go
+beyond words; but both were natural orators, throwing their heads back,
+waving their arms, limbs and chest quivering with emotion. There was no
+personal abuse, or disposition to claw each other. On both sides it was
+a rhetorical outpouring of emotional argument. One of them, a tall pure
+blood negress, black as if she had just landed from Guinea, began at
+last to get the best of it. Her gesticulations became more imposing. She
+shook her finger. _Mandez_ this, she said, and _mandez_ that, till she
+bore her antagonist down and sent her flying. The audience then melted
+away, and I left the conqueror standing alone shooting a last volley
+at the retreating enemy and making passionate appeals to the universe.
+The subject of the discussion was a curious one. It was on the merits of
+race. The defeated champion had a taint of white blood in her. The black
+woman insisted that blacks were of pure breed, and whites were of pure
+breed. Mulattoes were mongrels, not creatures of God at all, but
+creatures of human wickedness. I do not suppose that the mulatto was
+convinced, but she accepted her defeat. The conqueror, it was quite
+clear, was satisfied that she had the best of the discussion, and that
+the hearers were of the same opinion.
+
+[Illustration: MORNING WALK, DOMINICA.]
+
+From the market I stepped back upon the quay, where I had the luck to
+witness a novel form of fishing, the most singular I have ever fallen in
+with. I have mentioned the herring-sized white fish which come in upon
+the shores of the island. They travel, as most small fish do, in
+enormous shoals, and keep, I suppose, in the shallow waters to avoid the
+kingfish and bonitos, who are good judges in their way, and find these
+small creatures exceptionally excellent. The wooden pier ran out perhaps
+a hundred and fifty feet into the sea. It was a platform standing on
+piles, with openings in several places from which stairs led down to
+landing stages. The depth at the extremity was about five fathoms. There
+is little or no tide, the difference between high water and low being
+not more than a couple of feet. Looking down the staircases, I saw among
+the piles in the brilliantly clear water unnumbered thousands of the
+fish which I have described. The fishermen had carried a long net round
+the pier from shore to shore, completely inclosing it. The fish were
+shut in, and had no means of escape except at the shore end, where boys
+were busy driving them back with stones; but how the net was to be drawn
+among the piles, or what was to be done next, I was curious to learn. I
+was not left long to conjecture. A circular bag net was produced, made
+of fine strong thread, coloured a light green, and almost invisible in
+the sea. When it was spread, one side could be left open and could be
+closed at will by a running line from above. This net was let carefully
+down between the piles, and was immediately swollen out by the current
+which runs along the coast into a deep bag. Two young blacks then dived;
+one saw them swimming about under water like sharks, hunting the fish
+before them as a dog would hunt a flock of sheep. Their companions, who
+were watching from the platform, waited till they saw as many driven
+into the purse of the inner net as they could trust the meshes to bear
+the weight of. The cord was then drawn. The net was closed. Net and all
+that it contained were hoisted into a boat, carried ashore and emptied.
+The net itself was then brought back and spread again for a fresh haul.
+In this way I saw as many fish caught as would have filled a large cart.
+The contrivance, I believe, is one more inheritance from the Caribs,
+whom Labat describes as doing something of a similar kind.
+
+Another small incident happened a day or two after, which showed the
+capital stuff of which the Dominican boatmen and fishermen are made.
+They build their own vessels large and small, and sail them themselves,
+not afraid of the wildest weather, and doing the local trade with
+Martinique and Guadaloupe. Four of these smacks, cutter rigged, from ten
+to twenty tons burden, I had seen lying at anchor one evening with an
+American schooner under the gardens. In the night, the off-shore wind
+rose into one of those short violent tropical storms which if they
+lasted longer would be called hurricanes, but in these winter months are
+soon over. It came on at midnight, and lasted for two hours. The noise
+woke me, for the house shook, and the roar was like Niagara. It was too
+dark, however, to see anything. The tempest died away at last, and I
+slept till daybreak. My first thought on waking was for the smacks and
+the schooner Had they sunk at their moorings? Had they broken loose, or
+what had become of them? I got up and went down to the cliff to see. The
+damage to the trees had been less than I expected. A few torn branches
+lay on the lawn and the leaves were cast about, but the anchorage was
+empty. Every vessel of every sort and size was gone. There was still a
+moderate gale blowing. As the wind was off-shore the sea was tolerably
+smooth for a mile or two, but outside the waves were breaking
+violently, and the foam scuds were whirling off their crests. The
+schooner was about four miles off, beating back under storm canvas,
+making good weather of it and promising in a tack or two to recover the
+moorings. The smacks, being less powerful vessels, had been driven
+farther out to sea. Three of them I saw labouring heavily in the offing.
+The fourth I thought at first had disappeared altogether, but finally I
+made out a white speck on the horizon which I supposed to be the missing
+cutter. One of the first three presently dropped away to leeward, and I
+lost sight of her. The rest made their way back in good time. Towards
+the afternoon when the wind had gone down the two that remained came in
+after them, and before night they were all in their places again.
+
+The gale had struck them at about midnight. Their cables had parted, and
+they had been blown away to sea. The crews of the schooner and of three
+of the cutters were all on board. They got their vessels under command,
+and had been in no serious danger. In the fourth there was no one but a
+small black boy of the island. He had been asleep, and woke to find
+himself driving before the wind. In an hour or two he would have been
+beyond the shelter of the land, and in the high seas which were then
+running must have been inevitably swamped. The little fellow contrived
+in the darkness--no one could tell how--to set a scrap of his mainsail,
+get his staysail up, and in this condition to lie head to the wind. So
+handled, small cutters, if they have a deck over them, can ride out an
+ordinary gale in tolerable security. They drift, of course; in a
+hurricane the only safety is in yielding to it; but they make fair
+resistance, and the speed is checked. The most practical seaman could
+have done no better than this boy. He had to wait for help in the
+morning. He was not strong enough to set his canvas properly, and work
+his boat home. He would have been driven out at last, and as he had
+neither food nor water would have been starved had he escaped drowning.
+But his three consorts saw him. They knew how it was, and one of them
+went back to his assistance.
+
+I have known the fishing boys of the English Channel all my life; they
+are generally skilful, ready, and daring beyond their years; but I never
+knew one lad not more than thirteen or fourteen years old who, if woke
+out of his sleep by a hurricane in a dark night and alone, would have
+understood so well what to do, or have it done so effectually. There are
+plenty more of such black boys in Dominica, and they deserve a better
+fate than to be sent drifting before constitutional whirlwinds back into
+barbarism, because we, on whom their fate depends, are too ignorant or
+too careless to provide them with a tolerable government.
+
+The kind Captain Churchill, finding himself tied to his chair, and
+wishing to give me every assistance towards seeing the island, had
+invited a creole gentleman from the other side of it to stay a few days
+with us. Mr. F----, a man about thirty, was one of the few survivors
+from among the planters; he had never been out of the West Indies, but
+was a man of honesty and intelligence, could use his eyes, and form
+sound judgments on subjects which immediately concerned him. I had
+studied Roseau for myself. With Mr. F---- for a companion, I made
+acquaintance with the environs. We started for our walks at daybreak, in
+the cool of the morning. We climbed cliffs, we rambled on the rich
+levels about the river, once amply cultivated, and even now the soil is
+luxuriant in neglect; a few canefields still survive, but most of them
+are turned to other uses, and you pass wherever you go the ruins of old
+mills, the massive foundations of ancient warehouses, huge hewn stones
+built and mortared well together, telling what once had been; the mango
+trees, which the owners had planted, waving green over the wrecks of
+their forgotten industry. Such industry as is now to be found is, as
+elsewhere in general, the industry of the black peasantry. It is the
+same as in Grenada: the whites, or the English part of them, have lost
+heart, and cease to struggle against the stream. A state of things more
+helplessly provoking was never seen. Skill and capital and labour have
+only to be brought to bear together, and the land might be a Garden of
+Eden. All precious fruits, and precious spices, and gums, and plants of
+rarest medicinal virtues will spring and grow and flourish for the
+asking. The limes are as large as lemons, and in the markets of the
+United States are considered the best in the world.
+
+As to natural beauty, the West Indian Islands are like Scott's novels,
+where we admire most the one which we have read the last. But Dominica
+bears the palm away from all of them. One morning Mr. F---- took me a
+walk up the Roseau river, an ample stream even in what is called the dry
+season, with deep pools full of eels and mullet. We entered among the
+hills which were rising steep above us. The valley grew deeper, or
+rather there were a series of valleys, gorges dense with forest, which
+had been torn out by the cataracts. The path was like the mule tracts of
+the Alps, cut in other days along the sides of the precipices with
+remnants of old conduits which supplied water to the mills below. Rich
+odorous acacias bent over us. The flowers, the trees, the birds, the
+insects, were a maze of perfume and loveliness. Occasionally some valley
+opposite the sun would be spanned by a rainbow as the rays shone through
+a morning shower out of the blue sky. We wandered on and on, wading
+through tributary brooks, stopping every minute to examine some new fern
+or plant, peasant women and children meeting us at intervals on their
+way into the town. There were trees to take shelter under when
+indispensable, which even the rain of Dominica could not penetrate. The
+levels at the bottom of the valleys and the lower slopes, where the soil
+was favourable, were carelessly planted with limes which were in full
+bearing. Small black boys and girls went about under the trees,
+gathering the large lemon-shaped fruit which lay on the ground thick as
+apples in a West of England orchard. Here was all this profusion of
+nature, lavish beyond example, and the enterprising youth of England
+were neglecting a colony which might yield them wealth beyond the
+treasures of the old sugar planters, going to Florida, to Texas, to
+South America, taking their energy and their capital to the land of the
+foreigner, leaving Dominica, which might be the garden of the world, a
+precious emerald set in the ring of their own Antilles, enriched by the
+sacred memories of glorious English achievements, as if such a place had
+no existence. Dominica would surrender herself to-morrow with a light
+heart to France, to America, to any country which would accept the
+charge of her destinies. Why should she care any more for England, which
+has so little care for her? Beauties conscious of their charms do not
+like to be so thrown aside. There is no dislike to us among the blacks;
+they are indifferent, but even their indifference would be changed into
+loyalty if we made the slightest effort to recover it. The poor black
+was a faithful servant as long as he was a slave. As a freeman he is
+conscious of his inferiority at the bottom of his heart, and would
+attach himself to a rational white employer with at least as much
+fidelity as a spaniel. Like the spaniel, too, if he is denied the chance
+of developing under guidance the better qualities which are in him, he
+will drift back into a mangy cur.
+
+In no country ought a government to exist for which respect is
+impossible, and English rule as it exists in Dominica is a subject for a
+comedy. The Governor-General of the Leeward Islands resides in Antigua,
+and in theory ought to go on progress and visit in turn his subordinate
+dominions. His visits are rare as those of angels. The eminent person,
+who at present holds that high office, has been once in Nevis; and
+thrice in Dominica, but only for the briefest stay there. Perhaps he has
+held aloof in consequence of an adventure which befell a visiting
+governor some time ago on one of these occasions. When there is a
+constitution there is an opposition. If there are no grievances the
+opposition manufacture them, and the inhabitants of Roseau were
+persuaded that they were an oppressed people and required fuller
+liberties. I was informed that His Excellency had no sooner landed and
+taken possession of the Government House, than a mob of men and women
+gathered in the market place under the leadership of their elected
+representative. The girls that I had admired very likely made a part of
+it. They swarmed up into the gardens, they demonstrated under the
+windows, laughing, shouting, and petitioning. His Excellency first
+barricaded the doors, then opened them and tried a speech, telling the
+dear creatures how much he loved and respected them. Probably they did
+not understand him, as few of them speak English. Producing no effect,
+he retreated again, barred the door once more, slipped out at a back
+entrance down a lane to the port, took refuge on board his steamer, and
+disappeared. So the story was told me--not by the administrator, who was
+not a man to turn English authority into ridicule--but by some one on
+the spot, who repeated the current report of the adventure. It may be
+exaggerated in some features, but it represents, at any rate, the
+feeling of the place towards the head representative of the existing
+government.
+
+I will mention another incident, said to have occurred still more
+recently to one of these great persons, very like what befell Sancho
+Panza in Barataria. This, too, may have been wickedly turned, but it was
+the subject of general talk and general amusement on board the steamers
+which make the round of the Antilles. Universal belief is a fact of its
+kind, and though it tends to shape itself in dramatic form more
+completely than the facts justify, there is usually some truth at the
+bottom of it. The telegrams to the West Indies pass through New York,
+and often pick up something on the way. A warning message reached a
+certain colony that a Yankee-Irish schooner with a Fenian crew was
+coming down to annex the island, or at least to kidnap the governor.
+This distinguished gentleman ought perhaps to have suspected that a joke
+was being played upon his fears; but he was a landlord. A
+governor-general had been threatened seriously in Canada, why not he in
+the Antilles? He was as much agitated as Sancho himself. All these
+islands were and are entirely undefended save by a police which cannot
+be depended on to resist a serious invasion. They were called out.
+Rumour said that in half the rifles the cartridges were found afterwards
+inverted. The next day dispelled the alarm. The schooner was the
+creation of some Irish telegraph clerk, and the scare ended in laughter.
+But under the jest lies the wretched certainty that the Antilles have no
+protection except in their own population, and so little to thank
+England for that scarcely one of the inhabitants, except the officials,
+would lift a finger to save the connection.
+
+Once more, I tell these stories not as if they were authenticated facts,
+but as evidence of the scornful feeling towards English authority. The
+current belief in them is a fact of a kind and a very serious one.
+
+The confederation of the Leeward Islands may have been a convenience to
+the Colonial Office, and may have allowed a slight diminution in the
+cost of administration. The whole West Indies might be placed under a
+single governor with only good results if he were a real one like the
+Governor-General at Calcutta. But each single island has lost from the
+change, so far, more than it has gained. Each ship of war has a captain
+of its own and officers of its own trained specially for the service. If
+the Antilles are ever to thrive, each of them also should have some
+trained and skilful man at its head, unembarrassed by local elected
+assemblies. The whites have become so weak that they would welcome the
+abolition of such assemblies. The blacks do not care for politics, and
+would be pleased to see them swept away to-morrow if they were governed
+wisely and fairly. Of course, in that case it would be necessary to
+appoint governors who would command confidence and respect. But let
+governors be sent who would be governors indeed, like those who
+administer the Indian presidencies, and the white residents would gather
+heart again, and English and American capitalists would bring their
+money and their enterprise, and the blacks would grow upwards instead of
+downwards. Let us persist in the other line, let us use the West Indian
+governments as asylums for average worthy persons who have to be
+provided for, and force on them black parliamentary institutions as a
+remedy for such persons' inefficiency, and these beautiful countries
+will become like Hayti, with Obeah triumphant, and children offered to
+the devil and salted and eaten, till the conscience of mankind wakes
+again and the Americans sweep them all away.
+
+I had an opportunity of seeing what can really be done in Dominica by
+an English gentleman who has gone the right way to work there. Dr.
+Nicholls came out a few years ago to Roseau as a medical officer. He was
+described to me as a man not only of high professional skill, but with
+considerable scientific attainments. Either by purchase or legacy (I
+think the latter) he had become possessed of a small estate on a
+hillside a mile or two from the town. He had built a house upon it. He
+was cultivating the soil on scientific principles, and had politely sent
+me an invitation to call on him and see what he was about. I was
+delighted to avail myself of such an opportunity.
+
+I do not know the exact extent of the property which was under
+cultivation; perhaps it was twenty-five or thirty acres. The chief part
+of it was planted with lime trees, the limes which I saw growing being
+as large as moderate-sized lemons; most of the rest was covered with
+Liberian coffee, which does not object to the moist climate, and was
+growing with profuse luxuriance. Each tree, each plant had been
+personally attended to, pruned when it needed pruning, supported by
+bamboos if it was overgrowing its strength, while the ground about the
+house was consecrated to botanical experiments, and specimens were to be
+seen there of every tropical flower, shrub, or tree, which was either
+remarkable for its beauty or valuable for its chemical properties. His
+limes and coffee went principally to New York, where they had won a
+reputation, and were in special demand; but ingenuity tries other tracks
+besides the beaten one. Dr. Nicholls had a manufactory of citric acid
+which had been found equally excellent in Europe. Everything which he
+produced was turning to gold, except donkeys, seven or eight of which
+were feeding under his windows, and which multiplied so fast that he
+could not tell what to do with them.
+
+Industries so various and so active required labour, and I saw many of
+the blacks at work on the grounds. In apparent contradiction to the
+general West Indian experience, he told me that he had never found a
+difficulty about it. He paid them fair wages, and paid them regularly
+without the overseer's fines and drawbacks. He knew one from the other
+personally could call each by his name, remembered where he came from,
+where he lived, and how, and could joke with him about his wife or
+mistress. They in consequence clung to him with an innocent affection,
+stayed with him all the week without asking for holidays, and worked
+with interest and goodwill. Four years only had elapsed since Dr.
+Nicholls commenced his undertakings, and he already saw his way to
+clearing a thousand pounds a year on that one small patch of acres. I
+may mention that, being the only man in the island of really superior
+attainments, he had tried in vain to win one of the seats in the
+elective part of the legislature.
+
+There was nothing particularly favourable in the situation of his land.
+All parts of Dominica would respond as willingly to similar treatment.
+What could be the reason, Dr. Nicholls asked me, why young Englishmen
+went planting to so many other countries, went even to Ceylon and
+Borneo, while comparatively at their own doors, within a fortnight's
+sail of Plymouth, there was this island immeasurably more fertile than
+either? The explanation, I suppose, is the misgiving that the West
+Indies are consigned by the tendencies of English policy to the black
+population, and that a local government created by representatives of
+the negro vote would make a residence there for an energetic and
+self-respecting European less tolerable than in any other part of the
+globe. The republic of Hayti not only excludes a white man from any
+share of the administration, but forbids his acquisition or possession
+of real property in any form. Far short of such extreme provisions, the
+most prosperous industry might be blighted by taxation. Self-government
+is a beautiful subject for oratorical declamation. If the fact
+corresponded to the theory and if the possession of a vote produced the
+elevating effects upon the character which are so noisily insisted upon,
+it would be the welcome panacea for political and social disorder.
+Unfortunately the fact does not correspond to the theory. The possession
+of a vote never improved the character of any human being and never
+will.
+
+There are many islands in the West Indies, and an experiment might be
+ventured without any serious risk. Let the suffrage principle be applied
+in its fullness where the condition of the people seems best to promise
+success. In some one of them--Dominica would do as well as any
+other--let a man of ability and character with an ambition to
+distinguish himself be sent to govern with a free hand. Let him choose
+his own advisers, let him be untrammelled, unless he falls into fatal
+and inexcusable errors, with interference from home. Let him have time
+to carry out any plans which he may form, without fear of recall at the
+end of the normal period. After ten or fifteen years, let the results of
+the two systems be compared side by side. I imagine the objection to
+such a trial would be the same which was once made in my hearing by an
+Irish friend of mine, who was urging on an English statesman the
+conversion of Ireland into a Crown colony. 'You dare not try it,' he
+said, 'for if you did, in twenty years we would be the most prosperous
+island of the two, and you would be wanting to follow our example.'
+
+We had exhausted the neighbourhood of Roseau. After a few days Captain
+C. was again able to ride, and we could undertake more extended
+expeditions. He provided me with a horse or pony or something between
+both, a creature that would climb a stone staircase at an angle of
+forty-five, or slide down a clay slope soaked by a tropical shower, with
+the same indifference with which it would canter along a meadow. In the
+slave times cultivation had been carried up into the mountains. There
+were the old tracks through the forest engineered along the edges of
+precipices, torrents roaring far down below, and tall green trees
+standing in hollows underneath, whose top branches were on a level with
+our eyes. We had to ride with mackintosh and umbrella, prepared at any
+moment to have the floods descend upon us. The best costume would be
+none at all. While the sun is above the horizon the island seems to lie
+under the arches of perpetual rainbows. One gets wet and one dries
+again, and one is none the worse for the adventure. I had heard that it
+was dangerous. It did no harm to me. A very particular object was to
+reach the crest of the mountain ridge which divides Dominica down the
+middle. We saw the peaks high above us, but it was useless to try the
+ascent if one could see nothing when one arrived, and mists and clouds
+hung about so persistently that we had to put off our expedition day
+after day.
+
+A tolerable morning came at last. We started early. A faithful black
+youth ran alongside of the horses to pick us up if we fell, and to carry
+the indispensable luncheon basket. We rode through the town, over the
+bridge and by the foot of Dr. Nicholls's plantations. We passed through
+lime and banana gardens rising slowly along the side of a glen above the
+river. The road had been made by the French long ago, and went right
+across the island. It had once been carefully paved, but wet and neglect
+had loosened the stones and tumbled them out of their places. Trees had
+driven their roots through the middle of the track. Mountain streams had
+taken advantage of convenient cuttings and scooped them into waterways.
+The road commissioner on the official staff seemed a merely ornamental
+functionary. We could only travel at a foot pace and in single file.
+Happily our horses were used to it. Along this road in 1805 Sir George
+Prevost retreated with the English garrison of Roseau, when attacked in
+force from Martinique; saved his men and saved the other part of the
+island till relief came and the invaders were driven out again. That was
+the last of the fighting, and we have been left since in undisturbed
+possession. Dominica was then sacred as the scene of Rodney's glories.
+Now I suppose, if the French came again, we should calculate the
+mercantile value of the place to us, and having found it to be nothing
+at all, might conclude that it would be better to let them keep it.
+
+We went up and up, winding round projecting spurs of mountain, here and
+there coming on plateaus where pioneering blacks were clearing patches
+of forest for their yams and coffee. We skirted the edge of a valley
+several miles across, on the far side of which we saw the steaming of
+the sulphur springs, and beyond and above it a mountain peak four
+thousand feet high and clothed with timber to the summit. In most
+countries the vegetation grows thin as you rise into the higher
+altitudes. Here the bush only seems to grow denser, the trees grander
+and more self-asserting, the orchids and parasites on the boughs more
+variously brilliant. There were tree ferns less splendid than those in
+New Zealand and Australia, but larger than any one can see in English
+hot-houses, wild oranges bending under the weight of ripe fruit which
+was glowing on their branches, wild pines, wild begonias scattered along
+the banks, and a singularly brilliant plant which they call the wild
+plantain, but it is not a plantain at all, with large broad pointed
+leaves radiating out from a centre like an aloe's, and a crimson flower
+stem rising up straight in the middle. It was startling to see such
+insolent beauty displaying itself indifferently in the heart of the
+wilderness with no human eye to look at it unless of some passing black
+or wandering Carib.
+
+The track had been carried across hot streams fresh from boiling
+springs, and along the edge of chasms where there was scarcely foothold
+for the horses. At length we found ourselves on what was apparently the
+highest point of the pass. We could not see where we were for the trees
+and bushes which surrounded us, but the path began to descend on the
+other side. Near the summit was a lake formed in an old volcanic crater
+which we had come specially to look at. We descended a few hundred feet
+into a hollow among the hills where the lake was said to be. Where was
+it, then? I asked the guide, for I could discover nothing that suggested
+a lake or anything like one. He pointed into the bush where it was
+thicker with tropical undergrowth than a wheatfield with ears of corn.
+If I cared to creep below the branches for two hundred yards at the risk
+of meeting snakes, scorpions, and other such charming creatures, I
+should find myself on the water's edge.
+
+To ride up a mountain three thousand feet high, to be near a wonder
+which I could not see after all, was not what I had proposed to myself.
+There was a traveller's rest at the point where we halted, a cool damp
+grotto carved into the sand-stone. We picketed our horses, cutting leafy
+boughs off the trees for them, and making cushions for ourselves out of
+the ferns. We were told that if we walked on for half a mile we should
+see the other side of the island, and if we were lucky we might catch a
+glimpse of the lake. Meanwhile clouds rolled, down off the mountains,
+filled the hollow where we stood, and so wrapped us in mist, that the
+question seemed rather how we were to return than whether we should
+venture farther.
+
+While we were considering what to do, we heard steps approaching through
+the fog, and a party of blacks came up on their way to Roseau with a
+sick companion whom they were carrying in a palanquin. We were eating
+our luncheon in the grotto, and they stopped to talk to our guide and
+stare at us. Two of them, a lad and a girl, came up closer to me than
+good manners would have allowed if they had possessed such things; the
+'I am as good as you, and you will be good enough to know it,' sort of
+tone which belongs to these democratic days showing itself rather
+notably in the rising generation in parts of these islands. I defended
+myself with producing a sketch book and proceeding to take their
+likenesses, on which they fled precipitately.
+
+Our sandwiches finished, we were pensively consuming our cigars, I
+speculating on Sir George Prevost and his party of redcoats who must
+have bivouacked on that very spot, when the clouds broke and the sun
+came out. The interval was likely to be a short one, so we hurried to
+our feet, walked rapidly on, and at a turn of the path where a hurricane
+had torn a passage through the trees, we caught a sight of our lake as
+we had been told that perhaps we might do. It lay a couple of hundred
+feet beneath us deep and still, winding away round a promontory under
+the crags and woods of the opposite hills: they call it a crater, and I
+suppose it may have been one, for the whole island shows traces of
+violent volcanic disturbance, but in general a crater is a bowl, and
+this was like a reach of a river, which lost itself before one could see
+where it ended. They told us that in old times, when troops were in the
+fort, and the white men of the island went about and enjoyed
+themselves, there were boats on this lake, and parties came up and
+fished there. Now it was like the pool in the gardens of the palace of
+the sleeping princess, guarded by impenetrable thickets, and whether
+there are fish there, or enchanted princesses, or the huts of some tribe
+of Caribs, hiding in those fastnesses from negroes whom they hate, or
+from white men whom they do not love, no one knows or cares to know. I
+made a hurried pencil sketch, and we went on.
+
+A little farther and we were out of the bush, at a rocky terrace on the
+rim of the great valley which carries the rainfall on the eastern side
+of the mountains down into the Atlantic. We were 3,000 feet above the
+sea. Far away the ocean stretched out before us, the horizon line where
+sky met water so far distant that both had melted into mist at the point
+where they touched. Mount Diablot, where Labat spent a night catching
+the devil birds, soared up on our left hand. Below, above, around us, it
+was forest everywhere; forest, and only forest, a land fertile as Adam's
+paradise, still waiting for the day when 'the barren woman shall bear
+children.' Of course it was beautiful, if that be of any
+consequence--mountain peaks and crags and falling waters, and the dark
+green of the trees in the foreground, dissolving from tint to tint to
+grey, violet, and blue in the far-off distance. Even at the height where
+we stood, the temperature must have been 70 deg.. But the steaming damp of
+the woods was gone, the air was clear and exhilarating as champagne.
+What a land! And what were we doing with it? This fair inheritance, won
+by English hearts and hands for the use of the working men of England,
+and the English working men lying squalid in the grimy alleys of crowded
+towns, and the inheritance turned into a wilderness. Visions began to
+rise of what might be, but visions which were taken from me before they
+could shape themselves. The curtain of vapour fell down over us again,
+and all was gone, and of that glorious picture nothing was left but our
+own two selves and the few yards of red rock and soil on which we were
+standing.
+
+There was no need for haste now. We return slowly to our horses, and
+our horses carried us home by the way that we had come. Captain C. went
+carelessly in front through the fog, over boulders and watercourses and
+roots of fallen trees. I followed as I could, expecting every moment to
+find myself flying over my horse's head; stumbling, plunging, sliding,
+but getting through with it somehow. The creature had never seen me
+before, but was as careful of my safety as if I had been an old
+acquaintance and friend. Only one misadventure befell me, if
+misadventure it may be called. Shaken, and damp with heat, I was riding
+under a wild orange tree, the fruit within reach of my hand. I picked an
+orange and plunged my teeth into the skin, and I had to remember my
+rashness for days. The oil in the rind, pungent as aromatic salts,
+rushed on my palate, and spurted on my face and eyes. The smart for the
+moment half blinded me. I bethought me, however, that oranges with such
+a flavour would be worth something, and a box of them which was sent
+home for me was converted into marmalade with a finer flavour than ever
+came from Seville.
+
+What more can I say of Dominica? I stayed with the hospitable C.'s for a
+fortnight. At the appointed time the returning steamer called for me. I
+left Capt. C. with a warm hope that he might not be consigned for ever
+to a post which an English gentleman ought not to be condemned to
+occupy; that if matters could not be mended for him where he stood, he
+might find a situation where his courage and his understanding might be
+turned to useful purpose. I can never forget the kindness both of
+himself and his clever, good, graceful lady. I cannot forget either the
+two dusky damsels who waited upon me like spirits in a fairy tale. It
+was night when I left. The packet came alongside the wharf. We took
+leave by the gleaming of her lights. The whistle screamed, and Dominica,
+and all that I had seen, faded into a memory. All that I had seen, but
+not all that I had thought. That island was the scene of the most
+glorious of England's many famous actions. It had been won for us again
+and again by the gallantry of our seamen and soldiers. It had been
+secured at last to the Crown by the genius of the greatest of our
+admirals. It was once prosperous. It might be prosperous again, for the
+resources of the soil are untouched and inexhaustible. The black
+population are exceptionally worthy. They are excellent boatmen,
+excellent fishermen, excellent mechanics, ready to undertake any work if
+treated with courtesy and kindness. Yet in our hands it is falling into
+ruin. The influence of England there is gone. It is nothing.
+Indifference has bred indifference in turn as a necessary consequence.
+Something must be wrong when among 30,000 of our fellow-subjects not one
+could be found to lift a hand for us if the island were invaded, when a
+boat's crew from Martinique might take possession of it without a show
+of resistance.
+
+If I am asked the question, What use is Dominica to us? I decline to
+measure it by present or possible marketable value; I answer simply that
+it is part of the dominions of the Queen. If we pinch a finger, the
+smart is felt in the brain. If we neglect a wound in the least important
+part of our persons, it may poison the system. Unless the blood of an
+organised body circulates freely through the extremities, the
+extremities mortify and drop off, and the dropping off of any colony of
+ours will not be to our honour and may be to our shame. Dominica seems
+but a small thing, but our larger colonies are observing us, and the
+world is observing us, and what we do or fail to do works beyond the
+limits of its immediate operation. The mode of management which produces
+the state of things which I have described cannot possibly be a right
+one. We have thought it wise, with a perfectly honest intention, to
+leave our dependencies generally to work out their own salvation. We
+have excepted India, for with India we dare not run the risk. But we
+have refused to consider that others among our possessions may be in a
+condition analogous to India, and we have allowed them to drift on as
+they could. It was certainly excusable, and it may have been prudent, to
+try popular methods first, but we have no right to persist in the face
+of a failure so complete. We are obliged to keep these islands, for it
+seems that no one will relieve us of them; and if they are to remain
+ours, we are bound so to govern them that our name shall be respected
+and our sovereignty shall not be a mockery. Am I asked what shall be
+done? I have answered already. Among the silent thousands whose quiet
+work keeps the Empire alive, find a Rajah Brooke if you can, or a Mr.
+Smith of Scilly. If none of these are attainable, even a Sancho Panza
+would do. Send him out with no more instructions than the knight of La
+Mancha gave Sancho--to fear God and do his duty. Put him on his mettle.
+Promise him the respect and praise of all good men if he does well; and
+if he calls to his help intelligent persons who understand the
+cultivation of soils and the management of men, in half a score of years
+Dominica would be the brightest gem of the Antilles. From America, from
+England, from all parts of the world, admiring tourists would be
+flocking there to see what Government could do, and curious politicians
+with jealous eyes admitting reluctantly unwelcome conclusions.
+
+    Woman! no mortal o'er the widespread earth
+    Can find a fault in thee; thy good report
+    Doth reach the widespread heaven, as of some prince
+    Who, in the likeness of a god, doth rule
+    O'er subjects stout of heart and strong of hand;
+    And men speak greatly of him, and his land
+    Bears wheat and rye, his orchards bend with fruit,
+    His flocks breed surely, the sea yields her fish,
+    Because he guides his folk with wisdom.
+    In grace and manly virtue.[11]
+
+Because 'He guides with wisdom.' That is the whole secret. The
+leading of the wise few, the willing obedience of the many, is the
+beginning and the end of all right action. Secure this, and you secure
+everything. Fail to secure it, and be your liberties as wide as you can
+make them, no success is possible.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[11] [Greek: o gynai ouk an tis se broton ep' apeirona gaian
+             neikeoi; e gar seu kleos ouranon euryn hikanei;
+             hoste teu e basileost amymonos, hoste theoudes
+             andrasin en polloisi kai iphthimoisin anasson,
+             eudikias anechesi; pheresi de gaia melaina
+             purous kai krithas, brithesi de dendrea karpoi
+             tiktei de empeda mela, thalassa de parechei ichthys,
+             ex euegesies; aretosi de laoi hupo autou.--_Odyssey_,
+             xix. 107.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+    The Darien canal--Jamaica mail packet--Captain W.--Retrospect of
+    Jamaican history--Waterspout at sea--Hayti--Jacmel--A walk through
+    the town--A Jamaican planter--First sight of the Blue
+    Mountains--Port Royal--Kingston--The Colonial Secretary--Gordon
+    riots--Changes in the Jamaican constitution.
+
+
+Once more to Barbadoes, but merely to change there from steamer to
+steamer. My course was now across the Caribbean Sea to the great islands
+at the bottom of it. The English mail, after calling and throwing off
+its lateral branches at Bridgetown, pursues its direct course to Hayti
+and Jamaica, and so on to Vera Cruz and the Darien canal. This wonderful
+enterprise of M. Lesseps has set moving the loose negro population of
+the Antilles and Jamaica. Unwilling to work as they are supposed to be,
+they have swarmed down to the isthmus, and are still swarming thither in
+tens of thousands, tempted by the dollar or dollar and a half a day
+which M. Lesseps is furnishing. The vessel which called for us at
+Dominica was crowded with them, and we picked up more as we went on.
+Their average stay is for a year. At the end of a year half of them have
+gone to the other world. Half go home, made easy for life with money
+enough to buy a few acres of land and 'live happy ever after.' Heedless
+as school-boys they plunge into the enterprise, thinking of nothing but
+the harvest of dollars. They might earn as much or more at their own
+doors if there were any one to employ them, but quiet industry is out of
+joint, and Darien has seized their imaginations as an Eldorado.
+
+If half the reports which reached me are correct, in all the world there
+is not perhaps now concentrated in any single spot so much foul disease,
+such a hideous dungheap of moral and physical abomination, as in the
+scene of this far-famed undertaking of nineteenth-century engineering.
+By the scheme, as it was first propounded, six-and-twenty millions of
+English money were to unite the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to form a
+highway for the commerce of the globe, and enrich with untold wealth the
+happy owners of original shares. The thrifty French peasantry were
+tempted by the golden bait, and poured their savings into M. Lesseps's
+lottery box. All that money and more besides, I was told, had been
+already spent, and only a fifth of the work was done. Meanwhile the
+human vultures have gathered to the spoil. Speculators, adventurers,
+card sharpers, hell keepers, and doubtful ladies have carried their
+charms to this delightful market. The scene of operations is a damp
+tropical jungle, intensely hot, swarming with mosquitoes, snakes,
+alligators, scorpions, and centipedes; the home, even as nature made it,
+of yellow fever, typhus, and dysentery, and now made immeasurably more
+deadly by the multitudes of people who have crowded thither. Half buried
+in mud lie about the wrecks of costly machinery, consuming by rust, sent
+out under lavish orders, and found unfit for the work for which they
+were intended. Unburied altogether lie also skeletons of the human
+machines which have broken down there.[12] Everything which imagination
+can conceive that is ghastly and loathsome seems to be gathered into
+that locality just now. I was pressed to go on and look at the moral
+surroundings of 'the greatest undertaking of our age,' but my curiosity
+was less strong than my disgust. I did not see the place and the
+description which I have given is probably too highly coloured. The
+accounts which reached me, however, were uniform and consistent. Not one
+person whom I met and who could speak from personal knowledge had any
+other story to tell.
+
+We looked again into St. Lucia on our way. The training squadron was
+lying outside, and the harbour was covered with boats full of
+blue-jackets. The big ships were rolling heavily. They could have eaten
+up Rodney's fleet. The great 'Ville de Paris' would have been a mouthful
+to the smallest of them. Man for man, officers and crew were as good as
+Rodney ever commanded. Yet, somehow, they produce small effect on the
+imagination of the colonists. The impression is that they are meant more
+for show than for serious use. Alas! the stars and stripes on a Yankee
+trader have more to say in the West Indies than the white ensigns of a
+fleet of British iron-clads.
+
+At Barbadoes there was nothing more for me to do or see. The English
+mail was on the point of sailing, and I hastened on board. One does not
+realise distance on maps. Jamaica belongs to the West Indies, and the
+West Indies are a collective entity. Yet it is removed from the Antilles
+by the diameter of the Caribbean Sea, and is farther off than Gibraltar
+from Southampton. Thus it was a voyage of several days, and I looked
+about to see who were to be my companions. There were several Spaniards,
+one or two English tourists, and some ladies who never left their
+cabins. The captain was the most remarkable figure: an elderly man with
+one eye lost or injured, the other as peremptory as I have often seen in
+a human face; rough and prickly on the outside as a pineapple,
+internally very much resembling the same fruit, for at the bottom he was
+true, genuine, and kindly hearted, very amusing, and intimately known to
+all travellers on the West Indian line, in the service of which he had
+passed forty years of his life. In his own ship he was sovereign and
+recognised no superior. Bishops, colonial governors, presidents of South
+American republics were, so far as their office went, no more to him
+than other people, and as long as they were on board were chattels of
+which he had temporary charge. Peer and peasant were alike under his
+orders, which were absolute as the laws of Medes and Persians. On the
+other hand, his eye was quick to see if there was any personal merit in
+a man, and if you deserved his respect you would have it. One
+particular merit he had which I greatly approved. He kept his cabin to
+himself, and did not turn it into a smoking room, as I have known
+captains do a great deal too often.
+
+All my own thoughts were fixed upon Jamaica. I had read so much about
+it, that my memory was full of persons and scenes and adventures of
+which Jamaica was the stage or subject. Penn and Venables and the
+Puritan conquest, and Morgan and the buccaneers; Port Royal crowded with
+Spanish prizes; its busy dockyards, and English frigates and privateers
+fitting out there for glorious or desperate enterprises. The name of
+Jamaica brought them crowding up with incident on incident; and behind
+the history came Tom Cringle and the wild and reckless, yet wholesome
+and hearty, planter's life in Kingston; the dark figures of the pirates
+swinging above the mangroves at Gallows Point; the balls and parties and
+the beautiful quadroons, and the laughing, merry innocent children of
+darkness, with the tricks of the middies upon them. There was the tragic
+side of it, too, in slavery, the last ugly flash out of the cloud being
+not two decades distant in the Eyre and Gordon time. Interest enough
+there was about Jamaica, and things would be strangely changed in
+Kingston if nothing remained of the society which was once so brilliant.
+There, if anywhere, England and English rule were not yet a vanished
+quantity. There was a dockyard still, and a commodore in command, and a
+guardship and gunboats, and English regiments and West Indian regiments
+with English officers. Some representatives, too, I knew were to be
+found of the old Anglo-West Indians, men whose fathers and grandfathers
+were born in the island, and whose fortunes were bound up in it. Aaron
+Bang! what would not one have given to meet Aaron? The real Aaron had
+been gathered to his fathers, and nature does not make two such as he
+was; but I might fall in with something that would remind me of him.
+Paul Gelid and Pepperpot Wagtail, and Peter Mangrove, better than either
+of them--the likeness of these might be surviving, and it would be
+delightful to meet and talk to them. They would give fresh flavour to
+the immortal 'Log.' Even another Tom was not impossible; some middy to
+develop hereafter into a frigate captain and to sail again into Port
+Royal with his prizes in tow.
+
+Nature at all events could not be changed. The white rollers would still
+be breaking on the coral reefs. The palms would still be waving on the
+sand ridge which forms the harbour, and the amber mist would be floating
+round the peaks of the Blue Mountains. There were English soldiers and
+sailors and English people. The English language was spoken there by
+blacks as well as whites. The religion was English. Our country went for
+something, and there would be some persons, at least, to whom the old
+land was more than a stepmother, and who were not sighing in their
+hearts for annexation to the American Union. The governor, Sir Henry
+Norman, of Indian fame, I was sorry to learn, was still absent; he had
+gone home on some legal business. Sir Henry had an Imperial reputation.
+He had been spoken of to me in Barbadoes as able, if he were allowed a
+chance, to act as Viceroy of all the islands, and to set them on their
+feet again. I could well believe that a man of less than Sir Henry's
+reputed power could do it--for in the thing itself there was no great
+difficulty--if only we at home were once disenchanted; though all the
+ability in the world would be thrown away as long as the enchantment
+continued. I did see Sir Henry, as it turned out, but only for a few
+hours.
+
+Our voyage was without remarkable incident; as voyages are apt to be in
+these days of powerful steamboats. One morning there was a tropical rain
+storm which was worth seeing. We had a strong awning over the
+quarter-deck, so I could stand and watch it. An ink-black cloud came
+suddenly up from the north which seemed to hang into the sea, the
+surface of the water below being violently agitated. According to
+popular belief, the cloud on these occasions is drawing up water which
+it afterwards discharges. Were this so the water discharged would be
+salt, which it never is. The cause of the agitation is a cyclonic
+rotation of air or local whirlwind. The most noticeable feature was the
+blackness of the cloud itself. It became so dark that it would have been
+difficult to read any ordinary print. The rain, when it burst, fell not
+in drops but in torrents. The deck was flooded, and the scuttle-holes
+ran like jets from a pump. The awning was ceasing to be a shelter, for
+the water was driven bodily through it; but the downpour passed off as
+suddenly as it had risen. There was no lightning and no wind. The sea
+under our side was glassy smooth, and was dashed into millions of holes
+by the plunging of the rain pellets.
+
+The captain in his journeys to and fro had become acquainted with the
+present black President of Hayti, Mr. Salomon. I had heard of this
+gentleman as an absolute person, who knew how to make himself obeyed,
+and who treated opposition to his authority in a very summary manner. He
+seemed to be a favourite of the captain's. He had been educated in
+France, had met with many changes of fortune, and after an exile in
+Jamaica had become quasi-king of the black republic. I much wished to
+see this paradise of negro liberty; we were to touch at Jacmel, which is
+one of the principal ports, to leave the mails, and Captain W---- was
+good enough to say that, if I liked, I might go ashore for an hour or
+two with the officer in charge.
+
+Hayti, as everyone knows who has studied the black problem, is the
+western portion of Columbus's Espanola, or St. Domingo, the largest
+after Cuba and the most fertile in natural resources of all the islands
+of the Caribbean Sea. It was the earliest of the Spanish settlements in
+the New World. The Spaniards found there a million or two of mild and
+innocent Indians, whom in their first enthusiasm they intended to
+convert to Christianity, and to offer as the first fruits of their
+discovery to the Virgin Mary and St. Domenic. The saint gave his name to
+the island, and his temperament to the conquerors. In carrying out their
+pious design, they converted the Indians off the face of the earth,
+working them to death in their mines and plantations. They filled their
+places with blacks from Africa, who proved of tougher constitution. They
+colonised, they built cities; they throve and prospered for nearly two
+hundred years; when Hayti, the most valuable half of the island, was
+taken from them by the buccaneers and made into a French province. The
+rest which keeps the title of St. Domingo, continued Spanish, and is
+Spanish still--a thinly inhabited, miserable, Spanish republic. Hayti
+became afterwards the theatre of the exploits of the ever-glorious
+Toussaint l'Ouverture. When the French Revolution broke out, and Liberty
+and the Rights of Man became the new gospel, slavery could not be
+allowed to continue in the French dominions. The blacks of the colony
+were emancipated and were received into the national brotherhood. In
+sympathy with the Jacobins of France, who burnt the chateaux of the
+nobles and guillotined the owners of them, the liberated slaves rose as
+soon as they were free, and massacred the whole French population, man,
+woman, and child. Napoleon sent an army to punish the murderers and
+recover the colony. Toussaint, who had no share in the atrocities, and
+whose fault was only that he had been caught by the prevailing political
+epidemic and believed in the evangel of freedom, surrendered and was
+carried to France, where he died or else was made an end of. The yellow
+fever avenged him, and secured for his countrymen the opportunity of
+trying out to the uttermost the experiment of negro self-government. The
+French troops perished in tens of thousands. They were reinforced again
+and again, but it was like pouring water into a sieve. The climate won a
+victory to the black man which he could not win for himself. They
+abandoned their enterprise at last, and Hayti was free. We English tried
+our hand to recover it afterwards, but we failed also, and for the same
+reason.
+
+Hayti has thus for nearly a century been a black independent state. The
+negro race have had it to themselves and have not been interfered with.
+They were equipped when they started on their career of freedom with
+the Catholic religion, a civilised language, European laws and manners,
+and the knowledge of various arts and occupations which they had learnt
+while they were slaves. They speak French still; they are nominally
+Catholics still; and the tags and rags of the gold lace of French
+civilisation continue to cling about their institutions. But in the
+heart of them has revived the old idolatry of the Gold Coast, and in the
+villages of the interior, where they are out of sight and can follow
+their instincts, they sacrifice children in the serpent's honour after
+the manner of their forefathers. Perhaps nothing better could be
+expected from a liberty which was inaugurated by assassination and
+plunder. Political changes which prove successful do not begin in that
+way.
+
+The Bight of Leogane is a deep bay carved in the side of the island, one
+arm of which is a narrow ridge of high mountains a hundred and fifty
+miles long and from thirty to forty wide. At the head of this bay, to
+the north of the ridge, is Port au Prince, the capital of this
+remarkable community. On the south, on the immediately opposite side of
+the mountains and facing the Caribbean Sea, is Jacmel, the town next in
+importance. We arrived off it shortly after daybreak. The houses, which
+are white, looked cheerful in the sunlight. Harbour there was none, but
+an open roadstead into which the swell of the sea sets heavily, curling
+over a long coral reef which forms a partial shelter. The mountain range
+rose behind, sloping off into rounded woody hills. Here were the feeding
+grounds of the herds of wild cattle which tempted the buccaneers into
+the island, and from which they took their name. The shore was abrupt;
+the land broke off in cliffs of coral rock tinted brilliantly with
+various colours. One rather striking white-cliff, a ship's officer
+assured me, was chalk; adding flint when I looked incredulous. His
+geological education was imperfect. We brought up a mile outside the
+black city. The boat was lowered. None of the other passengers
+volunteered to go with me; the English are out of favour in Hayti just
+now; the captain discouraged landings out of mere curiosity; and,
+indeed, the officer with the mails had to reassure himself of Captain
+W----'s consent before he would take me. The presence of Europeans in
+any form is barely tolerated. A few only are allowed to remain about the
+ports, just as the Irish say they let a few Danes remain in Dublin and
+Waterford after the battle of Clontarf, to attend to the ignoble
+business of trade.
+
+The country after the green of the Antilles looked brown and parched. In
+the large islands the winter months are dry. As we approached the reef
+we saw the long hills of water turn to emerald as they rolled up the
+shoal, then combing and breaking in cataracts of snow-white foam. The
+officer in charge took me within oar's length of the rock to try my
+nerves, and the sea, he did not fail to tell me, swarmed with sharks of
+the worst propensities. Two steamers were lying inside, one of which,
+belonging to an English company, had 'happened a misfortune,' and was
+breaking up as a deserted wreck. A Yankee clipper schooner had just come
+in with salt fish and crackers--a singularly beautiful vessel, with
+immense beam, which would have startled the builders of the Cowes
+racers. It was precisely like the schooner which Tom Cringle commanded
+before the dockyard martinets had improved her into ugliness, built on
+the lines of the old pirate craft of the islands, when the lives and
+fortunes of men hung on the extra speed, or the point which they could
+lie closer to the wind. Her return cargo would be coffee and bananas.
+
+Englishmen move about in Jacmel as if they were ashamed of themselves
+among their dusky lords and masters. I observed the Yankee skipper
+paddling himself off in a canoe with his broad straw hat and his cigar
+in his mouth, looking as if all the world belonged to him, and as if all
+the world, and the Hayti blacks in particular, were aware of the fact.
+The Yankee, whether we like it or not, is the acknowledged sovereign in
+these waters.
+
+The landing place was, or had been, a jetty built on piles and boarded
+over. Half the piles were broken; the planks had rotted and fallen
+through. The swell was rolling home, and we had to step out quickly as
+the boat rose on the crest of the wave. A tattered crowd of negroes were
+loafing about variously dressed, none, however, entirely without clothes
+of some kind. One of them did kindly give me a hand, observing that I
+was less light of foot than once I might have been. The agent's office
+was close by. I asked the head clerk--a Frenchman--to find me a guide
+through the town. He called one of the bystanders whom he knew, and we
+started together, I and my black companion, to see as much as I could in
+the hour which was allowed me. The language was less hopeless than at
+Dominica. We found that we could understand each other--he, me,
+tolerably; I, him, in fragments, for his tongue went as fast as a
+shuttle. Though it was still barely eight o'clock the sun was scalding.
+The streets were filthy and the stench abominable. The houses were of
+white stone, and of some pretensions, but ragged and uninviting--paint
+nowhere, and the woodwork of the windows and verandahs mouldy and
+worm-eaten. The inhabitants swarmed as in a St. Giles's rookery. I
+suppose they were all out of doors. If any were left at home Jacmel must
+have been as populous as an African ants' nest. As I had looked for
+nothing better than a Kaffir kraal, the degree of civilisation was more
+than I expected. I expressed my admiration of the buildings; my guide
+was gratified, and pointed out to me with evident pride a new hotel or
+boarding house kept by a Madame Somebody who was the great lady of the
+place. Madame Ellememe was sitting in a shady balcony outside the
+first-floor windows. She was a large menacing-looking mulatto, like some
+ogress of the 'Arabian Nights,' capable of devouring, if she found them
+palatable, any number of salt babies. I took off my hat to this
+formidable dame, which she did not condescend to notice, and we passed
+on. A few houses in the outskirts stood in gardens with inclosures about
+them. There is some trade in the place, and there were evidently
+families, negro or European, who lived in less squalid style than the
+generality. There was a governor there, my guide informed me--an
+ornamental personage, much respected. To my question whether he had any
+soldiers, I was answered 'No,' the Haytians didn't like soldiers. I was
+to understand, however, that they were not common blacks. They aspired
+to be a commonwealth with public rights and alliances. Hayti a republic,
+France a republic: France and Hayti good friends now. They had a French
+bishop and French priests and a French currency. In spite of their land
+laws, they were proud of their affinity with the great nation; and I
+heard afterwards, though not from my Jacmel companion, that the better
+part of the Haytians would welcome back the French dominion if they were
+not afraid that the Yankees would disapprove.
+
+My guide persisted in leading me outside the town, and as my time was
+limited, I tried in various ways to induce him to take me back into it.
+He maintained, however, that he had been told to show me whatever was
+most interesting, and I found that I was to see an American
+windmill-pump which had been just erected to supply Jacmel with fresh
+water. It was the first that had been seen in the island, and was a
+wonder of wonders. Doubtless it implied 'progress,' and would assist in
+the much-needed ablution of the streets and kennels. I looked at it and
+admired, and having thus done homage, I was allowed my own way.
+
+It was market day. The Yankee cargo had been unloaded, and a great open
+space in front of the cathedral was covered with stalls or else blankets
+stretched on poles to keep the sun off, where hundreds of Haytian dames
+were sitting or standing disposing of their wares--piles of salt fish,
+piles of coloured calicoes, knives, scissors, combs, and brushes. Of
+home produce there were great baskets of loaves, fruit, vegetables, and
+butcher's meat on slabs. I looked inquisitively at these last; but I
+acknowledge that I saw no joints of suspicious appearance. Children were
+running about in thousands, not the least as if they were in fear of
+being sacrificed, and babies hung upon their mothers as if natural
+affection existed in Jacmel as much as in other places. I asked no
+compromising questions, not wishing to be torn in pieces. Sir Spenser
+St. John's book has been heard of in Hayti, and the anger about it is
+considerable. The scene was interesting enough, but the smell was
+unendurable. The wild African black is not filthy in his natural state.
+He washes much, as wild animals do, and at least tries to keep himself
+clear of vermin. The blacks in Jacmel appeared (like the same animals as
+soon as they are domesticated) to lose the sense which belongs to them
+in their wild condition. My prejudices, if I have any, had not blinded
+me to the good qualities of the men and women in Dominica. I do not
+think it was prejudice wholly which made me think the faces which I saw
+in Hayti the most repulsive which I had ever seen in the world, or
+Jacmel itself, taken for all in all, the foulest, dirtiest, and nastiest
+of human habitations. The dirt, however, I will do them the justice to
+say did not seem to extend to their churches. The cathedral stood at the
+upper end of the market place. I went in. It was airy, cool, and
+decent-looking. Some priests were saying mass, and there was a fairly
+large congregation. I wished to get a nearer sight of the altar and the
+images and pictures, imagining that in Hayti the sacred persons might
+assume a darker colour than in Europe; but I could not reach the chancel
+without disturbing people who were saying their prayers, and, to the
+disappointment of my companion, who beckoned me on, and would have
+cleared a way for me, I controlled my curiosity and withdrew.
+
+My hour's leave of absence was expired. I made my way back to the
+landing place, where the mail steamer's boat was waiting for me. On the
+steamer herself the passengers were waiting impatiently for breakfast,
+which had been put off on our account. We hurried on board at our best
+speed; but before breakfast could be thought of, or any other thing, I
+had to strip and plunge into a bath and wash away the odour of the great
+negro republic of the West which clung to my clothes and skin.
+
+Leaving Jacmel and its associations, we ran all day along the land,
+skirting a range of splendid mountains between seven and eight thousand
+feet high; past the Isle a Vache; past the bay of Cayes, once famous as
+the haunt of the sea-rovers; past Cape Tubiron, the Cape of Sharks. At
+evening we were in the channel which divides St. Domingo from Jamaica.
+Captain ---- insisted to me that this was the scene of Rodney's action,
+and he pointed out to me the headland under which the British fleet had
+been lying. He was probably right in saying that it was the scene of
+some action of Rodney's, for there is hardly a corner of the West Indies
+where he did not leave behind him the print of his cannon shot; but it
+was not the scene of the great fight which saved the British Empire.
+That was below the cliffs of Dominica; and Captain W----, as many others
+have done, was confounding Dominica with St. Domingo.
+
+The next morning we were to anchor at Port Royal. We had a Jamaica
+gentleman of some consequence on board. I had failed so far to make
+acquaintance with him, but on this last evening he joined me on deck,
+and I gladly used the opportunity to learn something of the present
+condition of things. I was mistaken in expecting to find a more vigorous
+or more sanguine tone of feeling than I had left at the Antilles. There
+was the same despondency, the same sense that their state was hopeless,
+and that nothing which they could themselves do would mend it. He
+himself, for instance, was the owner of a large sugar estate which a few
+years ago was worth 60,000_l._ It was not encumbered. He was his own
+manager, and had spared no cost in providing the newest machinery. Yet,
+with the present prices and with the refusal of the American Commercial
+Treaty, it would not pay the expense of cultivation. He held on, for it
+was all that he could do. To sell was impossible, for no one would buy
+even at the price of the stock on the land. It was the same story which
+I had heard everywhere. The expenses of the administration, this
+gentleman said, were out of all proportion to the resources of the
+island, and were yearly increasing. The planters had governed in the old
+days as the English landlords had governed Ireland. They had governed
+cheaply and on their own resources. They had authority; they were
+respected; their word was law. Now their power had been taken from them,
+and made over to paid officials, and the expense was double what it used
+to be. Between the demands made on them in the form of taxation and the
+fall in the value of their produce their backs were breaking, and the
+'landed interest' would come to an end. I asked him, as I had asked many
+persons without getting a satisfactory answer, what he thought that the
+Imperial Government could do to mend matters. He seemed to think that it
+was too late to do anything. The blacks were increasing so fast, and the
+white influence was diminishing so fast, that Jamaica in a few years
+would be another Hayti.
+
+In this gentleman, too, I found to my sorrow that there was the same
+longing for admission to the American Union which I had left behind me
+at the Antilles. In spite of soldiers and the naval station, the old
+country was still looked upon as a stepmother, and of genuine loyalty
+there was, according to him, little or nothing. If the West Indies were
+ever to become prosperous again, it could only be when they were annexed
+to the United States. For the present, at least, he admitted that
+annexation was impossible. Not on account of any possible objection on
+the part of the British Government; for it seems to be assumed by every
+one that the British Government cares nothing what they do; nor wholly
+on account of the objections of the Americans, though he admitted that
+the Americans were unwilling to receive them; but because in the
+existing state of feeling such a change could not be carried out without
+civil war. In Jamaica, at least, the blacks and mulattoes would resist.
+There were nearly 700,000 of them, while of the whites there were but
+15,000, and the relative numbers were every year becoming more
+unfavourable. The blacks knew that under England they had nothing to
+fear. They would have everything more and more their own way, and in a
+short time they expected to have the island to themselves. They might
+collect arms; they might do what they pleased, and no English officer
+dared to use rough measures with them; while, if they belonged to the
+Union, the whites would recover authority one way or another. The
+Americans were ready with their rifles on occasions of disorder, and
+their own countrymen did not call them to account for it as we did. The
+blacks, therefore, preferred the liberty which they had and the
+prospects to which they looked forward, and they and the mulattoes also
+would fight, and fight desperately, before they would allow themselves
+to be made American citizens.
+
+The prospect which Mr. ---- laid before me was not a beautiful one, and
+was coming a step nearer at each advance that was made in the direction
+of constitutional self-government; for, like every other person with
+whom I spoke on the subject, he said emphatically that Europeans would
+not remain to be ruled under a black representative system; nor would
+they take any part in it when they would be so overwhelmingly outvoted
+and outnumbered. They would sooner forfeit all that they had in the
+world and go away. An effective and economical administration on the
+Indian pattern might have saved all a few years ago. It was too late
+now, and Jamaica was past recovery. At this rate it was a sadly altered
+Jamaica since Tom Cringle's time, though his friend Aaron even then had
+seen what was probably coming. But I could not accept entirely all that
+Mr. ---- had been saying, and had to discount the natural irritation of
+a man who sees his fortune sliding out of his hands. Moreover, for
+myself, I never listen much to a desponding person. Even when a cause is
+lost utterly, and no rational hope remains, I would still go down, if it
+had to be so, with my spirit unbroken and my face to the enemy. Mr. ----
+perhaps would recover heart if the price of sugar mended a little. For
+my own part, I do not care much whether it mends or not. The economics
+of the islands ought not to depend exclusively on any single article of
+produce. I believe, too, in spite of gloomy prognostics, that a loyal
+and prosperous Jamaica is still among the possibilities of the future,
+if we will but study in earnest the character of the problem. Mr. ----,
+however, did most really convey to me the convictions of a large and
+influential body of West Indians--convictions on which they are already
+acting, and will act more and more. With Hayti so close, and with
+opinion in England indifferent to what becomes of them, they will clear
+out while they have something left to lose, and will not wait till ruin
+is upon them or till they are ordered off the land by a black
+legislature. There is a saying in Hayti that the white man has no
+rights which the blacks are bound to recognise.
+
+I walked forward after we had done talking. We had five hundred of the
+poor creatures on board on their way to the Darien pandemonium. The
+vessel was rolling with a heavy beam sea. I found the whole mass of them
+reduced into the condition of the pigs who used to occupy the foredeck
+in the Cork and Bristol packets. They were lying in a confused heap
+together, helpless, miserable, without consciousness apparently, save a
+sense in each that he was wretched. Unfortunate brothers-in-law!
+following the laws of political economy, and carrying their labour to
+the dearest market, where, before a year was out, half of them were to
+die. They had souls, too, some of them, and honest and kindly hearts. I
+observed one man who was suffering less than the rest reading aloud to a
+prostrate group a chapter of the New Testament; another was reading to
+himself a French Catholic book of devotion.
+
+The dawn was breaking in the east when I came on deck in the morning.
+The Blue Mountains were hanging over us on our right hand, the peaks
+buried in white mist which the unrisen sun was faintly tinting with
+orange. We had passed Morant Bay, the scene of Gordon's rash attempt to
+imitate Toussaint l'Ouverture. As so often in the Antilles, a level
+plain stretched between the sea and the base of the hills, formed by the
+debris washed down by the rivers in the rainy season. Among cane fields
+and cocoa-nut groves we saw houses and the chimneys of the sugar
+factories; and, as we came nearer, we saw men and horses going to their
+early work. Presently Kingston itself came in sight, and Up Park Camp,
+and the white barracks high up on the mountain side, of which one had
+read and heard so much. Here was actually Tom Cringle's Kingston, and
+between us and the town was the long sand spit which incloses the lagoon
+at the head of which Kingston is built. How this natural breakwater had
+been deposited I could find no one to tell me. It is eight miles long,
+rising but a few feet above the water-line, in places not more than
+thirty yards across--nowhere, except at the extremity, more than sixty
+or a hundred.
+
+[Illustration: PORT ROYAL, JAMAICA.]
+
+The thundering swell of the Caribbean Sea breaks upon it from year's
+end to year's end, and never washes it any thinner. Where the sand is
+dry, beyond the reach of the waves, it is planted thickly all along with
+palms, and appears from the sea a soft green line, over which appear the
+masts and spars of the vessels at anchor in the harbour, and the higher
+houses of Kingston itself. To reach the opening into the lagoon you have
+to run on to the end of the sandbank, where there is a peninsula on
+which is built the Port Royal so famous in West Indian story. Halfway
+down among the palms the lighthouse stands, from which a gun was fired
+as we passed, to give notice that the English mail was coming in.
+Treacherous coral reefs rise out of the deep water for several miles,
+some under water and visible only by the breakers over them, others
+forming into low wooded islands. Only local pilots can take a ship
+safely through these powerful natural defence works. There are but two
+channels through which the lagoon can be approached. The eastern
+passage, along which we were steaming, runs so near the shore that an
+enemy's ship would be destroyed by the batteries among the sandhills
+long before it could reach the mouth. The western passage is less
+intricate, but that also is commanded by powerful forts. In old times
+Kingston was unattackable, so strong had the position been made by
+nature and art combined. It could be shelled now over the spit from the
+open sea. It might be destroyed, but even so could not easily be taken.
+
+I do not know that I have ever seen any scene more interesting than that
+which broke upon my eyes as we rounded the point, and the lagoon opened
+out before me. Kingston, which we had passed half an hour, before, lay
+six miles off at the head of the bay, now inside the sand, ridge, blue
+and hazy in the distance. At the back were the mountains. The mist had
+melted off, standing in shadowy grey masses with the sun rising behind
+them. Immediately in front were the dockyards, forts, and towers of Port
+Royal, with the guardship, gunboats, and tenders, with street and
+terrace, roof and turret and glistening vane, all clearly and sharply
+defined in the exquisite transparency of the air. The associations of
+the place no doubt added to the impression. Before the first hut was run
+up in Kingston, Port Royal was the rendezvous of all English ships
+which, for spoil or commerce, frequented the West Indian seas. Here the
+buccaneers sold their plunder and squandered their gains in gambling and
+riot. Here in the later century of legitimate wars, whole fleets were
+gathered to take in stores, or refit when shattered by engagements. Here
+Nelson had been, and Collingwood and Jervis, and all our other naval
+heroes. Here prizes were brought in for adjudication, and pirates to be
+tried and hanged. In this spot more than in any other, beyond Great
+Britain herself, the energy of the Empire once was throbbing. The
+'Urgent,' an old two-decker, and three gunboats were all that were now
+floating in the once crowded water; the 'Urgent,' no longer equipped for
+active service, imperfectly armed, inadequately manned, but still
+flaunting the broad white ensign, and as if grandly watching over the
+houses which lay behind her. There were batteries at the point, and
+batteries on the opposite shore. The morning bugle rang out clear and
+inspiriting from the town, and white coats and gold and silver lace
+glanced in and out as men and officers were passing to parade. Here, at
+any rate, England was still alive.
+
+The channel at the entrance is a mile in width. The lagoon (the open
+part of it) may be seven or eight miles long and half as many broad. It
+forms the mouth of the Cobre river, one of the largest in Jamaica, on
+which, ten miles up, stands the original seat of government established
+by the Spaniards, and called after them Spanish Town. The fashion of
+past times, as old as the times of Thucydides, and continued on till the
+end of the last century, was to choose the sites for important towns in
+estuaries, at a distance from the sea, to be out of the reach of
+pirates. The Cobre, running down from Spanish Town, turns the plain
+through which it flows into a swamp. The swamp covers itself with
+mangroves, and the mangroves fringe the shore of the lagoon itself for
+two-thirds of its circuit. As Jamaica grew in wealth and population the
+trade was carried from Port Royal deeper into the bay. Another town
+sprang up there, called King's Town, or shortly 'Kingston.' The
+administration was removed thither for convenience, and though fallen
+away from its old consequence, Kingston, with its extended suburbs, its
+churches and warehouses, and large mansions overhung with trees, looks
+at a distance like a place of consideration. Many ships lay along the
+wharves, or anchored a few cables' distance off. Among them were a
+couple of Spanish frigates, which remain there in permanence on the
+watch for refugees from Cuba. On the slopes behind the town, as far as
+eye could see, were the once splendid estates of the sugar princes of
+the last century. One of them was pointed out to me as the West Indian
+home of the author of 'Tom Cringle.'
+
+We had to stop for a few minutes as the officer of the port came
+alongside for the mails. We then went on at reduced speed. The lagoon is
+generally shoal. A deep water channel runs along the side of it which is
+farthest from the sea; made, I suppose, by the river, for as usual there
+is little tide or none. Halfway up we passed under the walls of Fort
+Augusta, now a ruin and almost deserted, but once mounting a hundred
+guns. The money which we spent on the defence of Jamaica in the old
+times was not always laid out wisely, as will be seen in an account
+which I shall have to give of this remarkable structure; but, at any
+rate, we were lavish of it.
+
+Of the sharks with which the water used to swarm we saw none. Port Royal
+Jack and his kindred are said to have disappeared, driven or frightened
+out by the screws of the steamers. But it is not a place which I should
+choose for a swim. Nor did the nigger boys seem as anxious as I had seen
+them in other spots to dive for sixpences under the ship's side.
+
+No account is made of days when you come into port after a voyage.
+Cargoes have to be landed, or coal has to be taken in. The donkey
+engines are at work, hoisting packing cases and luggage out of the hold.
+Stewards run to and fro, and state-room doors are opened, and busy
+figures are seen through each, stuffing their portmanteaus and preparing
+for departure. The church bells at Kingston, ringing for early service,
+reminded me that it was Sunday. We brought up at a jetty, and I cannot
+say that, close at hand, the town was as attractive as it had appeared
+when first I saw it. The enchantment was gone. The blue haze of distance
+gave place to reality. The water was so fetid under the ship's side that
+it could not be pumped into the baths. Odours, not Arabian, from open
+drains reminded me of Jacmel. The streets, up which I could see from the
+afterdeck, looked dirty and the houses shabby. Docks and wharves,
+however, are never the brightest part of any town, English or foreign.
+There were people enough at any rate, and white faces enough among them.
+Gangways were rigged from the ship to the shore, and ladies and
+gentlemen rushed on board to meet their friends. The companies' agents
+appeared in the captain's cabin. Porters were scrambling for luggage;
+pushing, shoving, and swearing. Passengers who had come out with us, and
+had never missed attendance at the breakfast table, were hurrying home
+unbreakfasted to their wives and families. My own plans were uncertain.
+I had no friends, not even an acquaintance. I knew nothing of the hotels
+and lodging houses, save that they had generally a doubtful reputation.
+I had brought with me a letter of introduction to Sir H. Norman, the
+governor, but Sir Henry had gone to England. On the whole, I thought it
+best to inclose the letter to Mr. Walker, the Colonial Secretary, who I
+understood was in Kingston, with a note asking for advice. This I sent
+by a messenger. Meanwhile I stayed on board to look about me from the
+deck. The ship was to go on the next morning to the canal works at
+Darien. Time was precious. Immediately on arriving she had begun to take
+in coal, Sunday though it might be, and a singular spectacle it was. The
+coal yard was close by, and some hundreds of negroes, women and men, but
+women, in four times the number, were hard at work. The entire process
+was by hand and basket, each basket holding from eighty to a hundred
+pounds weight. Two planks were laid down at a steep incline from the
+ship's deck to the yard. Swinging their loads on their heads, erect as
+statues, and with a step elastic as a racehorse's, they marched up one
+of the planks, emptied their baskets into the coal bunkers, and ran down
+the other. Round and round they went under the blazing sun all the
+morning through, and round and round they would continue to go all the
+afternoon. The men took it comparatively easy. The women flew along,
+laughing, and clamouring, as if not knowing what weariness was--willing
+beasts of burden, for they had the care upon them of their children; the
+men disclaiming all responsibilities on that score, after the babies
+have been once brought into the world. The poor women are content with
+the arrangement, which they prefer to what they would regard as legal
+bondage. They earn at this coaling work seven or eight shillings a day.
+If they were wives, their husbands would take it from them and spend it
+in rum. The companion who is not a wife can refuse and keep her earnings
+for her little ones. If black suffrage is to be the rule in Jamaica, I
+would take it away from the men and would give it to the superior sex.
+The women are the working bees of the hive. They would make a tolerable
+nation of black amazons, and the babies would not be offered to Jumbi.
+
+When I had finished my meditations on the coaling women, there were
+other black creatures to wonder at; great boobies or pelicans, old
+acquaintances of the Zoological Gardens, who act as scavengers in these
+waters. We had perhaps a couple of dozen of them round us as large as
+vultures, ponderous and sleepy to look at when squatting on rocks or
+piles, over-weighted by their enormous bills. On the wing they were
+astonishingly swift, wheeling in circles, till they could fix their prey
+with their eyes, then pouncing upon it with a violent slanting plunge. I
+suppose their beaks might be broken if they struck directly, but I never
+saw one miss its aim. Nor do they ever go below the surface, but seize
+always what is close to it. I was told--I do not know how truly--that
+like the diablots in Dominica, they nest in the mountains and only come
+down to the sea to feed.
+
+Hearing that I was in search of quarters, a Miss Burton, a handsome
+mulatto woman, came up and introduced herself to me. Hotels in the
+English West Indies are generally detestable. This dame had set up a
+boarding house on improved principles, or rather two boarding houses,
+between which she invited me to take my choice, one in the suburbs of
+Kingston, one on the bank of a river in a rocky gorge in the Blue
+Mountains. In either of these she promised that she would make me happy,
+and I do not doubt that she would have succeeded, for her fame had
+spread through all Jamaica, and her face was as merry as it was honest.
+As it turned out I was provided for elsewhere, and I lost the chance of
+making an acquaintance which I should have valued. When she spoke to me
+she seemed a very model of vigour and health. She died suddenly while I
+was in the island.
+
+The day was still early. When the vessel was in some order again, and
+those who were going on shore had disappeared, the rest of us were
+called down to breakfast to taste some of those Jamaica delicacies on
+which Paul Gelid was so eloquent. The fruit was the chief attraction:
+pineapples, of which one can eat as much as one likes in these countries
+with immunity from after suffering; oranges, more excellent than even
+those of Grenada and Dominica; shaddocks, admirable as that memorable
+one which seduced Adam; and for the first time mangoes, the famous
+Number Eleven of which I had heard such high report, and was now to
+taste. The English gardeners can do much, but they cannot ripen a Number
+Eleven, and it is too delicate to bear carriage. It must be eaten in the
+tropics or nowhere. The mango is the size and shape of a swan's egg, of
+a ruddy yellow colour when ripe, and in flavour like an exceptionally
+good apricot, with a very slight intimation of resin. The stone is
+disproportionately large. The flesh adheres to it, and one abandons as
+hopeless the attempt to eat mangoes with clean lips and fingers. The
+epicures insist that they should be eaten only in a bath.
+
+The heat was considerable, and the feast of fruit was the more welcome.
+Soon after the Colonial Secretary politely answered my note in person.
+In the absence of the governor of a colony, the colonial secretary, as
+a rule, takes his place. In Jamaica, and wherever we have a garrison,
+the commander of the forces becomes acting governor; I suppose because
+it is not convenient to place an officer of high military rank under the
+orders of a civilian who is not the direct representative of the
+sovereign. In the gentleman who now called on me I found an old
+acquaintance whom I had known as a boy many years ago. He told me that,
+if I had made no other arrangements, Colonel J----, who was the present
+chief, was expecting me to be his guest at the 'King's House' during my
+stay in Jamaica. My reluctance to trespass on the hospitality of an
+entire stranger was not to be allowed. Soldiers who have distinguished
+themselves are, next to lawyers, the most agreeable people to be met
+with, and when I was convinced that I should really be welcome, I had no
+other objection. An aide-de-camp, I was told, would call for me in the
+afternoon. Meanwhile the secretary stayed with me for an hour or two,
+and I was able to learn something authentic from him as to the general
+condition of things. I had not given entire credit to the
+representations of my planter friend of the evening before. Mr. Walker
+took a more cheerful view, and, although the prospects were not as
+bright as they might be, he saw no reason for despondency. Sugar was
+down of course. The public debt had increased, and taxation was heavy.
+Many gentlemen in Jamaica, as in the Antilles, were selling, or trying
+to sell, their estates and go out of it. On the other hand, expenses of
+government were being reduced, and the revenue showed a surplus. The
+fruit trade with the United States was growing, and promised to grow
+still further. American capitalists had come into the island, and were
+experimenting on various industries. The sugar treaty with America would
+naturally have been welcome; but Jamaica was less dependent on its sugar
+crop, and the action of the British Government was less keenly resented.
+In the Antilles, the Colonial Secretary admitted, there might be a
+desire for annexation to the United States, and Jamaican landowners had
+certainly expressed the same wish to myself. Mr. Walker, however,
+assured me that, while the blacks would oppose it unanimously, the
+feeling, if it existed at all among the whites, was confined as yet to a
+very few persons. They had been English for 230 years, and the large
+majority of them wished to remain English. There had been suffering
+among them; but there had been suffering in other places besides
+Jamaica. Better times might perhaps be coming with the opening of the
+Darien canal, when Kingston might hope to become again the centre of a
+trade. Of the negroes, both men and women, Mr. Walker spoke extremely
+favourably. They were far less indolent than they were supposed to be;
+they were settling on the waste lands, acquiring property, growing yams
+and oranges, and harming no one; they had no grievance left; they knew
+it, and were perfectly contented.
+
+As Mr. Walker was an official, I did not ask him about the working of
+the recent changes in the constitution; nor could he have properly
+answered me if I had. The state of things is briefly this: Jamaica,
+after the first settlement, received a parliamentary form of government,
+modelled on that of Ireland, the colonial liberties being restricted by
+a law analogous to Poynings' Act. The legislature, so constructed, of
+course represented the white interest only and was entirely composed of
+whites. It remained substantially unaltered till 1853, when
+modifications were made which admitted coloured men to the suffrage,
+though with so high a franchise as to be almost exclusive. It became
+generally felt that the franchise would have to be extended. A popular
+movement, led by Mr. Gordon, who was a member of the legislature,
+developed into a riot, into bloodshed and panic. Gordon was hanged by a
+court-martial, and the assembly, aware that, if allowed to exist any
+longer, it could exist only with the broad admission of the negro vote,
+pronounced its own dissolution, surrendered its powers to the Crown, and
+represented formally 'that nothing but a strong government could prevent
+the island from lapsing into the condition of Hayti.'
+
+The surrender was accepted. Jamaica was administered till within the
+last four years by a governor, officials, and council all nominated by
+the Queen. No dissatisfaction had been expressed, and the blacks at
+least had enjoyed a prosperity and tranquillity which had been unbroken
+by a single disturbance. If the island has suffered, it has suffered
+from causes with which political dissatisfaction has had nothing to do,
+and which, therefore, political changes cannot remove. In 1884 Mr.
+Gladstone's Government, for reasons which I have not been able to
+ascertain, revived suddenly the representative system; constructed a
+council composed equally of nominated and of elected members, and placed
+the franchise so low as to include practically every negro peasant who
+possessed a hut and a garden. So long as the Crown retains and exercises
+its power of nomination, no worse results can ensue than the inevitable
+discontent when the votes of the elected members are disregarded or
+overborne. But to have ventured so important an alteration with the
+intention of leaving it without further extension would have been an act
+of gratuitous folly, of which it would be impossible to imagine an
+English cabinet to have been capable. It is therefore assumed and
+understood to have been no more than an initial step towards passing
+over the management of Jamaica to the black constituencies. It has been
+so construed in the other islands, and was the occasion of the agitation
+in Trinidad which I observed when I was there.
+
+My own opinion as to the wisdom of such an experiment matters little:
+but I have a right to say that neither blacks nor whites have asked for
+it; that no one who knows anything of the West Indies and wishes them to
+remain English sincerely asked for it; that no one has agitated for it
+save a few newspaper writers and politicians whom it would raise into
+consequence. If tried at all, it will be tried either with a deliberate
+intention of cutting Jamaica free from us altogether, or else in
+deference to English political superstitions, which attribute
+supernatural virtues to the exercise of the franchise, and assume that a
+form of self-government which suits us tolerably at home will be equally
+beneficial in all countries and under all conditions.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[12] This has been angrily denied. A gentleman whose veracity I cannot
+doubt assured me that he had himself seen a dead body lying unburied
+among some bushes. When he returned to the place a month after it was
+still there. The frightful mortality among the labourers, at least in
+the early years of the undertaking, is too notorious to be called in
+question.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+    The English mails--Irish agitation--Two kinds of colonies--Indian
+    administration--How far applicable in the West Indies--Land at
+    Kingston--Government House--Dinner party--Interesting
+    officer--Majuba Hill--Mountain station--Kingston
+    curiosities--Tobacco--Valley in the Blue Mountains.
+
+
+I am reminded as I write of an adventure which befell Archbishop Whately
+soon after his promotion to the see of Dublin. On arriving in Ireland he
+saw that the people were miserable. The cause, in his mind, was their
+ignorance of political economy, of which he had himself written what he
+regarded as an excellent manual. An Irish translation of this manual he
+conceived would be the best possible medicine, and he commissioned a
+native Scripture reader to make one. To insure correctness he required
+the reader to retranslate to him what he had written line by line. He
+observed that the man as he read turned sometimes two pages at a time.
+The text went on correctly, but his quick eye perceived that something
+was written on the intervening leaves. He insisted on knowing what it
+was, and at last extorted an explanation, 'Your Grace, me and my comrade
+conceived that it was mighty dry reading, so we have just interposed now
+and then a bit of a pawem, to help it forward, your Grace.' I am myself
+imitating the translators, and making sandwiches out of politics and
+local descriptions.
+
+We had brought the English mails with us. There were letters to read
+which had been in the ship with us, though out of our reach. There were
+the newspapers to read. They told me nothing but the weary round of
+Irish outrages and the rival remedies of Tory or Radical politicians who
+cared for Ireland less than I did, and considered only how to trim their
+sails to keep in office or to get it. How sick one is of all that!
+Half-a-dozen times at least in Anglo-Irish history things have come to
+the same point. 'All Ireland cannot govern the Earl of Kildare,' said
+someone in Henry VIII.'s privy council. Then answered Wolsey, in the
+tone of Mr. Gladstone, 'Let the Earl of Kildare govern all Ireland.'
+Elizabeth wished to conciliate. Shan O'Neil, Desmond, Tyrone promised in
+turn to rule Ireland in loyal union with England under Irish ideas. Lord
+Grey, who was for 'a Mahometan conquest,' was censured and 'girded at:'
+yet the end was always broken heads. From 1641 to 1649 an Irish
+parliament sat at Kilkenny, and Charles I. and the Tories dreamt of an
+alliance between Irish popery and English loyalism. Charles lost his
+head, and Cromwell had to make an end of Irish self-government at
+Drogheda and Wexford. Tyrconnell and James II. were to repeal the Act of
+Settlement and restore the forfeited lands to the old owners. The end of
+that came at the Boyne and at Aghrim. Grattan would remake the Irish
+nation. The English Liberals sent Lord Fitzwilliam to help him, and the
+Saxon mastiff and the Celtic wolf were to live as brothers evermore. The
+result has been always the same; the wretched country inflated with a
+dream of independence, and then trampled into mud again. So it has been.
+So it will be again. Ireland cannot be independent, for England is
+stronger than she, and cannot permit it. Yet nothing less will satisfy
+her. And so there has been always a weary round of fruitless concessions
+leading to demands which cannot be gratified, and in the end we are
+driven back upon force, which the miserable people lack the courage to
+encounter like men. Mr. Gladstone's experiment differs only from its
+antecedents because in the past the English friends of Irish liberty had
+a real hope that a reconciliation was possible. They believed in what
+they were trying to do. The present enterprise is the creation of
+parliamentary faction. I have never met any person acquainted with the
+minds and motives of the public men of the day who would not confess to
+me that, if it had suited the interests of the leaders of the present
+Radical party to adopt the Irish policy of the Long Parliament, their
+energy and their eloquence would have been equally at the service of the
+Protestant ascendency, which they have now denounced as a upas tree.
+They even ask you with wide eyes what else you would expect?
+
+Mr. Sexton says that if England means to govern Ireland she must keep an
+army there as large as she keeps in India. England could govern Ireland
+in perfect peace, without an army at all, if there was no faction in the
+House of Commons. The spirit of party will either destroy the British
+Empire, or the British nation will make an end of party government on
+its present lines. There are sounds in the air like the cracking of the
+ice of the Neva at the incoming of spring, as if a nobler purpose was at
+last awaking in us. In a few more years there may be no more Radicals
+and no more Conservatives, and the nation will be all in all.
+
+Here is the answer to the question so often asked, What is the use of
+the colonies to us? The colonies are a hundredfold multiplication of the
+area of our own limited islands. In taking possession of so large a
+portion of the globe, we have enabled ourselves to spread and increase,
+and carry our persons, our language and our liberties, into all climates
+and continents. We overflow at home; there are too many of us here
+already; and if no lands belonged to us but Great Britain and Ireland,
+we should become a small insignificant power beside the mighty nations
+which are forming around us. There is space for hundreds of millions of
+us in the territories of which we and our fathers have possessed
+ourselves. In Canada, Australia, New Zealand we add to our numbers and
+our resources. There are so many more Englishmen in the world able to
+hold their own against the mightiest of their rivals. And we have
+another function, such as the Romans had. The sections of men on this
+globe are unequally gifted. Some are strong and can govern themselves;
+some are weak and are the prey of foreign invaders or internal anarchy;
+and freedom, which all desire, is only attainable by weak nations when
+they are subject to the rule of others who are at once powerful and
+just. This was the duty which fell to the Latin race two thousand years
+ago. In these modern times it has fallen to ours, and in the discharge
+of it the highest features in the English character have displayed
+themselves. Circumstances forced on us the conquest of India; we have
+given India in return internal peace undisturbed by tribal quarrels or
+the ambitions of dangerous neighbours, with a law which deals out right
+to high and low among 250,000,000 human beings.
+
+Never have rulers been less self-seeking than we have been in our
+Asiatic empire. No 'lex de repetundis' has been needed to punish
+avaricious proconsuls who had fattened on the provinces. In such
+positions the English show at their best, and do their best. India has
+been the training school of our greatest soldiers and greatest
+administrators. Strike off the Anglo-Indian names from the roll of
+famous Englishmen, and we shall lose the most illustrious of them all.
+
+In India the rule of England has been an unexampled success, glorious to
+ourselves and of infinite benefit to our subjects, because we have been
+upright and disinterested, and have tried sincerely and honourably to do
+our duty. In other countries belonging to us, where with the same
+methods we might have produced the same results, we have applied them
+with a hesitating and less clean hand. We planted Ireland as a colony
+with our own people, we gave them a parliament of their own, and set
+them to govern the native Irish for us instead of doing it ourselves, to
+save appearances and to save trouble. We have not failed altogether. All
+the good that has been done at all in that poor island has been done by
+the Anglo-Irish landlords. But it has not been much, as the present
+condition of things shows. In the West Indies similarly the first
+settlers carried with them their English institutions. They were
+themselves a handful. The bulk of the population were slaves, and as
+long as slavery continued those institutions continued to work tolerably
+in the interest of the white race. When the slaves were emancipated, the
+distinction of colour done away with, and the black multitude and their
+white employers made equal before the law and equally privileged,
+constitutional government became no longer adapted to the new
+conditions. The white minority could not be trusted with the exclusive
+possession of political power. The blacks could not be trusted with the
+equally dangerous supremacy which their numbers would insure them. Our
+duty, if we did not and do not mean to abandon them altogether, has been
+to govern both with the same equity with which we govern at Calcutta. If
+you choose to take a race like the Irish or like the negroes whom you
+have forced into an unwilling subjection and have not treated when in
+that condition with perfect justice--if you take such a race, strike the
+fetters off them, and arm them at once with all the powers and
+privileges of loyal citizens, you ought not to be surprised if they
+attribute your concessions to fear, and if they turn again and rend you.
+When we are brought in contact with races of men who are not strong
+enough or brave enough to defend their own independence, and whom our
+own safety cannot allow to fall under any other power, our right and our
+duty is to govern such races and to govern them well, or they will have
+a right in turn to cut our throats. This is our mission. When we have
+dared to act up to it we have succeeded magnificently; we have failed
+when we have paltered and trifled; and we shall fail again, and the
+great empire on which the sun never sets will be shattered to atoms, if
+we refuse to look facts in the face.
+
+From these meditations, suggested by the batch of newspapers which I had
+been studying, I was roused by the arrival of the promised aide-de-camp,
+a good-looking and good-humoured young officer in white uniform (they
+all wear white in the tropics), who had brought the governor's carriage
+for me. Government House, or King's House, as it is called, answering to
+a 'Queen's House' in Barbadoes, is five miles from Kingston, on the
+slope which gradually ascends from the sea to the mountains. We drove
+through the town, which did not improve on closer acquaintance. The
+houses which front towards the streets are generally insignificant. The
+better sort, being behind walls or overhung with trees, were imperfectly
+visible. The roads were deep in white dust, which flies everywhere in
+whirling clouds from the unceasing wind. It was the dry season. The
+rains are not constant in Jamaica, as they are in the Antilles. The
+fields and the sides of the mountains were bare and brown and parched.
+The blacks, however, were about in crowds in their Sunday finery. Being
+in a British island, we had got back into the white calicoes and ostrich
+plumes, and I missed the grace of the women at Dominica; but men and
+women seemed as if they had not a care in the world. We passed Up Park
+Camp and the cantonments of the West India regiments, and then through a
+'scrub' of dwarf acacia and blue flowered lignum vitae. Handsome villas
+were spread along the road with lawns and gardens, and the road itself
+was as excellent as those in Barbadoes. Half an hour's drive brought us
+to the lodge, and through the park to the King's House itself, which
+stands among groups of fine trees four hundred feet above the sea.
+
+All the large houses in Jamaica--and this was one of the largest of
+them--are like those in Barbadoes, with the type more completely
+developed, generally square, built of stone, standing on blocks, hollow
+underneath for circulation of air, and approached by a broad flight of
+steps. On the three sides which the sun touches, deep verandahs or
+balconies are thrown out on the first and second floors, closed in front
+by green blinds, which can be shut either completely or partially, so
+that at a distance they look like houses of cards or great green boxes,
+made pretty by the trees which shelter them or the creepers which climb
+over them. Behind the blinds run long airy darkened galleries, and into
+these the sitting rooms open which are of course still darker with a
+subdued green light, in which, till you are used to it, you can hardly
+read. The floors are black, smooth, and polished, with loose mats for
+carpets. The reader of 'Tom Cringle' will remember Tom's misadventure
+when he blundered into a party of pretty laughing girls, slipped on one
+of these floors with a retrospective misadventure, and could not rise
+till his creole cousin slipped a petticoat over his head. All the
+arrangements are made to shut out heat and light. The galleries have
+sofas to lounge upon--everybody smokes, and smokes where he pleases; the
+draught sweeping away all residuary traces. At the King's House to
+increase the accommodation a large separate dining saloon has been
+thrown out on the north side, to which you descend from the drawing room
+by stairs, and thence along a covered passage. Among the mango trees
+behind there is a separate suite of rooms for the aides de-camp, and a
+superb swimming bath sixty feet long and eight feet deep. Altogether it
+was a sumptuous sort of palace where a governor with 7,000_l._ a year
+might spend his term of office with considerable comfort were it not
+haunted by recollections of poor Eyre. He, it seems, lived in the
+'King's House,' and two miles off, within sight of his windows, lived
+Gordon.
+
+I had a more than gracious welcome from Colonel J----and his family. In
+him I found a high-bred soldier, who had served with distinction in
+India, who had been at the storm of Delhi, and who was close by when
+Nicholson was shot. No one could have looked fitter for the post which
+he now temporarily occupied. I felt uncomfortable at being thus thrust
+upon his hospitality. I had letters of introduction with me to the
+various governors of the islands, but on Colonel J---- I had no claim at
+all. I was not even aware of his existence, or he, very likely, of mine.
+If not he, at any rate the ladies of his establishment, might reasonably
+look upon me as a bore, and if I had been allowed I should simply have
+paid my respects and have gone on to my mulatto. But they would not hear
+of it. They were so evidently hearty in their invitation to me that I
+could only submit and do my best _not_ to be a bore, the one sin for
+which there is no forgiveness.
+
+In the circle into which I was thrown I was unlikely to hear much of
+West Indian politics or problems. Colonel J----was acting as governor by
+accident, and for a few months only. He had his professional duties to
+look after; his term of service in Jamaica had nearly expired; and he
+could not trouble himself with possibilities and tendencies with which
+he would have no personal concern. As a spectator he considered probably
+that we were not making much of the West Indies, and were not on the way
+to make much. He confirmed the complaint which I had heard so often,
+that the blacks would not work for wages more than three days in the
+week, or regularly upon those, preferring to cultivate their own yams
+and sweet potatoes; but as it was admitted that they did work one way or
+another at home, I could not see that there was much to complain of. The
+blacks were only doing as we do. We, too, only work as much as we like
+or as we must, and we prefer working for ourselves to working for
+others.
+
+On his special subjects the Colonel was as interesting as he could not
+help being. He talked of the army and of the recent changes in it
+without insisting that it was going to the devil. He talked of India and
+the Russians, and for a wonder he had no Russophobia. He thought that
+England and Russia might as easily be friends as enemies, and that it
+would be better for the world if they were. As this had been my own
+fixed opinion for the last thirty years, I thought him a very sensible
+man. In the evening there was a small dinner party, made up chiefly of
+officers from the West Indian regiments at Kingston. The English troops
+are in the mountains at Newcastle, four or five thousand feet up and
+beyond common visiting distance. Among those whom I met on this occasion
+was an officer who struck me particularly. There was a mystery about his
+origin. He had risen from the ranks, but was evidently a gentleman by
+birth; he had seen service all over the world; he had been in Chili,
+and, among his other accomplishments, spoke Spanish fluently; he entered
+the English army as a private, had been in the war in the Transvaal, and
+was the only survivor of the regiment which was surprised and shot down
+by the Boers in an intricate pass where they could neither retreat nor
+defend themselves. On that occasion he had escaped and saved the
+colours, for which he was rewarded by a commission. He was acquainted
+with many of my friends there who had been in the thick of the campaign;
+knew Sir Owen Lanyon, Sir Morrison Barlow, and Colley. He had surveyed
+the plateau on Majuba Hill after the action, and had gathered the
+rumours which were flying many coloured about Colley's death. Friend and
+foe alike loved Colley, and his already legendary fame is an
+unconscious tribute to his memory. By whose hand he fell can never be
+known. We believe as we wish or as we fancy. Mr. ---- was so fine an
+officer, so clever a man, and so reserved about his personal affairs,
+that about him too 'myths' were growing. He was credited in the mess
+room with being the then unknown author of 'Solomon's Mines.' Mr.
+Haggard will forgive a mistake which, if he knows Mr. ----, he will feel
+to be a compliment.
+
+From general conversation I gathered that the sanguine views of the
+Colonial Secretary were not widely shared. The English interest was
+still something in Jamaica; but the phenomena of the Antilles were
+present there also, if in a less extreme form. There were 700,000
+coloured people in the island, with but 15,000 or 16,000 whites; and the
+blacks there also were increasing rapidly, and the whites were
+stationary if not declining. There was the same uneasy social jealousy,
+and the absence of any social relation between the two races. There were
+mulattoes in the island of wealth and consequence, and at Government
+House there are no distinctions; but the English residents of pure
+colonial blood would not associate with them, social exclusiveness
+increasing with political equality. The blacks disliked the mulattoes;
+the mulattoes despised the blacks, and would not intermarry with them.
+The impression was that the mulatto would die out, that the tendency of
+the whites and blacks was to a constantly sharpening separation, and
+that if things went on as they were going for another generation, it was
+easy to see which of the two colours would then be in the ascendant. The
+blacks were growing saucy, too; with much else of the same kind. I could
+but listen and wait to judge for myself.
+
+Meanwhile my quarters were unexceptionable, my kind entertainers leaving
+nothing undone to make my stay with them agreeable. In hot climates one
+sleeps lightly; but light sleep is all that one wants, and one wakes
+early. The swimming bath was waiting for me underneath my window. After
+a plunge in the clear cold water came coffee, grown and dried and
+roasted on the spot, and 'made' as such coffee ought to be. Then came
+the early walk. One missed the tropical luxuriance of Trinidad and
+Dominica, for the winter months in Jamaica are almost rainless; but it
+would have been beautiful anywhere else, and the mango trees were in
+their glory. There was a corner given to orchids, which were hung in
+baskets and just coming into flower. Lizards swarmed in the sunshine,
+running up the tree trunks, or basking on the garden seats. Snakes there
+are none; the mongoose has cleared them all away so completely that
+there is nothing left for him to eat but the poultry, in which he makes
+havoc, and, having been introduced to exterminate the vermin, has become
+a vermin himself.
+
+To drive, to ride, to visit was the employment of the days. I saw the
+country. I saw what people were doing, and heard what they had to say.
+
+The details are mostly only worth forgetting. The senior aide-de-camp,
+Captain C----, an officer in the Artillery, was a man of ability and
+observation. He, too, like the Colonel, was mainly interested in his
+profession, to which he was anxious to return; but he was watching, too,
+with serious interest the waning fortunes of the West Indies. He
+superintended the social part of the governor's business to perfection.
+Anything which I wished for had only to be mentioned to be provided. He
+gave me the benefit, though less often than I could have wished, of his
+shrewd, and not ungenial, observations. He drove me one morning into
+Kingston. I had passed through it hastily on the day of my landing.
+There were libraries, museums, public offices, and such like to be seen,
+besides the town itself. High up on the mountain side, more often in the
+clouds than out of them, the cantonments of the English regiments were
+visible from the park at Government House. The slope where they had been
+placed was so steep that one wondered how they held on. They looked like
+tablecloths stretched out to dry. I was to ride up there one day.
+Meanwhile, as we were driving through the park and saw the white spots
+shining up above us, I asked the aide-de-camp what the privates found
+to do in such a place. The ground was too steep for athletics; no
+cricket could be possible there, no lawn tennis, no quoits, no anything.
+There were no neighbours. Sports there were none. The mongoose had
+destroyed the winged game, and there was neither hare nor rabbit, pig
+nor deer; not a wild animal to be hunted and killed. With nothing to do,
+no one to speak to, and nothing to kill, what could become of them? Did
+they drink? Well, yes. They drank rum occasionally; but there were no
+public houses. They could only get it at the canteen, and the daily
+allowance was moderate. As to beer, it was out of reach altogether. At
+the foot of the mountains it was double the price which it was in
+England. At Newcastle the price was doubled again by the cost of
+carriage to the camp. I inquired if they did not occasionally hang
+themselves. 'Perhaps they would,' he said, 'if they had no choice, but
+they preferred to desert, and this they did in large numbers. They
+slipped down the back of the range, made their way to the sea, and
+escaped to the United States.' The officers--what became of them? The
+officers! Oh, well! they gardened! Did they like it? Some did and some
+didn't. They were not so ill off as the men, as occasionally they could
+come down on leave.
+
+One wondered what the process had been which had led the authorities to
+select such a situation. Of course it was for the health of the troops,
+but the hill country in Jamaica is wide; there were many other places
+available, less utterly detestable, and ennui and discontent are as
+mischievous as fever. General ----, a short time ago, went up to hold an
+inquiry into the desertions, and expressed his wonder how such things
+could be. With such air, such scenery, such views far and wide over the
+island, what could human creatures wish for more? 'You would desert
+yourself, general,' said another officer, 'if you were obliged to stay
+there a month.'
+
+Captain C---- undertook that I should go up myself in a day or two. He
+promised to write and make arrangements. Meanwhile we went on to
+Kingston. It was not beautiful. There was Rodney's statue. Rodney is
+venerated in Jamaica, as he ought to be; but for him it would have been
+a Spanish colony again. But there is nothing grand about the buildings,
+nothing even handsome, nothing even specially characteristic of England
+or the English mind. They were once perhaps business-like, and business
+having slackened they are now dingy. Shops, houses, wharves, want
+brightness and colour. We called at the office of the Colonial
+Secretary, the central point of the administration. It was an old
+mansion, plain, unambitious, sufficient perhaps for its purpose, but
+lifeless and dark. If it represented economy there would be no
+objection. The public debt has doubled since Jamaica became a Crown
+colony. In 1876 it was half a million. It is now more than a million and
+a half. The explanation is the extension of the railway system, and
+there has been no culpable extravagance. I do not suppose that the
+re-establishment of a constitution would mend matters. Democracies are
+always extravagant. The majority, who have little property or none,
+regulate the expenditure. They lay the taxes on the minority, who have
+to find the money, and have no interest in sparing them.
+
+Ireland when it was governed by the landowners, Jamaica in the days of
+slavery, were administered at a cost which seems now incredibly small.
+The authority of the landowners and of the planters was undisputed. They
+were feared and obeyed, and magistrates unpaid and local constables
+sufficed to maintain tolerable order. Their authority is gone. Their
+functions are transferred to the police, and every service has to be
+paid for. There may be fewer serious crimes, but the subordination is
+immeasurably less, the expense of administration is immeasurably
+greater. I declined to be taken over sugar mills, or to be shown the
+latest improvements. I was too ignorant to understand in what the
+improvements consisted, and could take them upon trust. The public
+bakery was more interesting. In tropical climates a hot oven in a small
+house makes an inconvenient addition to the temperature. The bread for
+Kingston, and for many miles around it, is manufactured at night by a
+single company and is distributed in carts in the morning. We saw the
+museum and public library. There were the usual specimens of island
+antiquities--of local fish, birds, insects, reptiles, plants, geological
+formations, and such like. In the library were old editions of curious
+books at the West Indies, some of them unique, ready to yield ampler
+pictures of the romance of the old life there than we at present
+possess. I had but leisure to glance at title-pages and engravings. The
+most noticeable relic preserved there, if it be only genuine, is the
+identical bauble which Cromwell ordered to be taken away from the
+Speaker's table in the House of Commons. Explanations are given of the
+manner in which it came to Jamaica. The evidence, so far as I could
+understand it, did not appear conclusive.
+
+Among the new industries in the island in the place of sugar was, or
+ought to be, tobacco. A few years ago I asked Sir J. Hooker, the chief
+living authority in such matters, why Cuba was allowed the monopoly of
+delicate cigar tobacco--whether there were no other countries where it
+could be grown equally good. He said that at the very moment cigars, as
+fine as the finest Havanas, were being produced in Jamaica. He gave me
+an excellent specimen with the address of the house which supplied it;
+and for a year or two I was able to buy from it what, if not perfect,
+was more than tolerable. The house acquired a reputation; and then, for
+some reason or other, perhaps from weariness of the same flavour,
+perhaps from a falling off in the character of the cigars, I, and
+possibly others, began to be less satisfied. Here on the spot I wished
+to make another experiment. Captain C---- introduced me to a famous
+manufacturer, a Spaniard, with a Spanish manager under him who had been
+trained at Havana. I bespoke his good will by adjuring him in his own
+tongue not to disappoint me; and I believe that he gave me the best that
+he had. But, alas! it is with tobacco as with most other things.
+Democracy is king; and the greatest happiness of the greatest number is
+the rule of modern life. The average of everything is higher than it
+used to be; the high quality which rises above mediocrity is rare or is
+non-existent. We are swept away by the genius of the age, and must be
+content with such other blessings as it has been pleased to bring with
+it.
+
+    Why should I murmur thus and vainly moan?
+    The Gods will have it so--their will be done.[13]
+
+The earth is patient also, and allows the successive generations of
+human creatures to play their parts upon her surface as they please. She
+spins on upon her own course; and seas and skies, and crags and forests,
+are spiritual and beautiful as ever.
+
+Gordon's Town is a straggling village in the Blue Range underneath
+Newcastle. Colonel J---- had a villa there, and one afternoon he took me
+over to see it. You pass abruptly from the open country into the
+mountains. The way to Gordon's Town was by the side of the Hope river,
+which cuts its way out of them in a narrow deep ravine. The stream was
+now trickling faintly among the stones; the enormous boulders in the bed
+were round as cannon balls, and, weighing hundreds of tons, show what
+its power must be in the coming down of the floods. Within the limits of
+the torrent, which must rise at such times thirty feet above its winter
+level, the rocks were bare and stern, no green thing being able to grow
+there. Above the line the tropical vegetation was in all its glory:
+ferns and plantains waving in the moist air; cedars, tamarinds, gum
+trees, orange trees striking their roots among the clefts of the crags,
+and hanging out over the abysses below them. Aloes flung up their tall
+spiral stems; flowering shrubs and creepers covered bank and slope with
+green and blue and white and yellow, and above and over our heads, as we
+drove along, frowned the great limestone blocks which thunder down when
+loosened by the rain. Farther up the hill sides, where the slopes are
+less precipitous, the forest has been burnt off by the unthrifty blacks,
+who use fire to clear the ground for their yam gardens, and destroy the
+timber over a dozen acres when they intend to cultivate but a single
+one. The landscape suffers less than the soil. The effect to the eye is
+merely that the mountains in Jamaica, as in temperate climates, become
+bare at a moderate altitude, and their outlines are marked more sharply
+against the sky.
+
+Introduced among scenery of this kind, we followed the river two or
+three miles, when it was crossed by a bridge, above which stood my
+friend Miss Burton's lodging house, where she had designed entertaining
+me. At Gordon's Town, which is again a mile farther on, the valley
+widens out, and there are cocoa and coffee plantations. Through an
+opening we saw far above our heads, like specks of snow against the
+mountain side, the homes or prisons of our unfortunate troops.
+Overlooking the village through which we were passing, and three hundred
+feet above it, was perched the Colonel's villa on a projecting spur
+where a tributary of the Hope river has carved out a second ravine. We
+drove to the door up a steep winding lane among coffee bushes, which
+scented the air with their jessamine-like blossom, and wild oranges on
+which the fruit hung untouched, glowing like balls of gold. We were now
+eleven hundred feet above the sea. The air was already many degrees
+cooler than at Kingston. The ground in front of the house was levelled
+for a garden. Ivy was growing about the trellis work, and scarlet
+geraniums and sweet violets and roses which cannot be cultivated in the
+lower regions, were here in full bloom. Elsewhere in the grounds there
+was a lawn tennis court to tempt the officers down from their eyrie in
+the clouds. The house was empty, in charge of servants. From the balcony
+in front of the drawing room we saw peak rising behind peak, till the
+highest, four thousand feet above us, was lost in the white mist. Below
+was the valley of the Hope river with its gardens and trees and
+scattered huts, with buildings here and there of higher pretensions. On
+the other side the tributary stream rushed down its own ravine, while
+the breeze among the trees and the sound of the falling waters swayed up
+to us in intermittent pulsations.
+
+[ILLUSTRATION: VALLEY IN THE BLUE MOUNTAINS, JAMAICA.]
+
+The place had been made, I believe, in the days of plantation
+prosperity. What would become of it all, if Jamaica drifted after her
+sisters in the Antilles, as some persons thought that she was
+drifting, and became, like Grenada, an island of small black
+proprietors? Was such a fate really hanging over her? Not necessarily,
+not by any law of nature. If it came, it would come from the
+dispiritment, the lack of energy and hope in the languid representatives
+of the English colonists; for the land even in the mountains will grow
+what it is asked to grow, and men do not live by sugar alone; and my
+friend Dr. Nicholl in Dominica and Colonel Duncan in Grenada itself were
+showing what English energy could do if it was alive and vigorous. The
+pale complaining beings of whom I saw too many, seemed as if they could
+not be of the same race as the men who ruled in the days of the slave
+trade. The question to be asked in every colony is, what sort of men is
+it rearing? If that cannot be answered satisfactorily, the rest is not
+worth caring for. The blacks do not deserve the ill that is spoken of
+them. Colonel J----'s house is twelve miles from Kingston. He told me
+that a woman would walk in with a load for him, and return on the same
+day with another, for a shilling. With such material of labour wisely
+directed, whites and blacks might live and prosper together; but even
+the poor negro will not work when he is regarded only as a machine to
+bring grist to his master's mill.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[13] Euripides.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+    Visit to Port Royal--Dockyard--Town--Church--Fort Augusta--The eyrie
+    in the mountains--Ride to Newcastle--Society in Jamaica--Religious
+    bodies--Liberty and authority.
+
+
+A new fort was being built at the mouth of the harbour. New batteries
+were being armed on the sandbanks at Port Royal. Colonel J---- had to
+inspect what was going on, and he allowed me to go with him. We were to
+lunch with the commodore of the station at the Port Royal dockyard. I
+could then see the town--or what was left of it, for the story went that
+half of it had been swallowed up by an earthquake. We ran out in a
+steam launch from Kingston, passing under the sterns of the Spanish
+frigates. I was told that there were always one or more Spanish ships of
+war stationed there, but no one knew anything about them except
+generally that they were on the look-out for Cuban conspirators. There
+was no exchange of courtesies between their officers and ours, nor even
+official communication beyond what was formally necessary. I thought it
+strange, but it was no business of mine. My surprise, however, was
+admitted to be natural. As the launch drew little water, we had no
+occasion to follow the circuitous channel, but went straight over the
+shoals. We passed close by Gallows Point, where the Johnny crows used to
+pick the pirates' bones. In the mangrove swamp adjoining, it was said
+that there was an old Spanish cemetery; but the swamp was poisonous, and
+no one had ever seen it. At the dockyard pier the commodore was waiting
+for us. I found that he was an old acquaintance whom I had met ten years
+before at the Cape. He was a brisk, smart officer, quiet and sailor-like
+in his manners, but with plenty of talent and cultivation. He showed us
+his stores and his machinery, large engines, and engineers to work them,
+ready for any work which might be wanted, but apparently with none to
+do. We went over the hospital, airy and clean, with scarcely a single
+occupant, so healthy has now been made a spot which was once a nest of
+yellow fever. Naval stores soon become antiquated; and parts of the
+great square were paved with the old cannon balls which had become
+useless on the introduction of rifled guns. The fortifications were
+antiquated also, but new works were being thrown up armed with the
+modern monster cannon. One difficulty struck me; Port Royal stood upon a
+sandbank. In such a place no spring of fresh water could be looked for.
+On the large acreage of roofs there were no shoots to catch the rain and
+carry it into cisterns. Whence did the water come for the people in the
+town? How were the fleets supplied which used to ride there? How was it
+in the old times when Port Royal was crowded with revelling crews of
+buccaneers? I found that every drop which is consumed in the place, or
+which is taken on board either of merchant ship or man-of-war, is
+brought in a steam tug from a spring ten miles off upon the coast.
+Before steam came in, it was fetched in barges rowed by hand. Nothing
+could be easier than to save the rain which falls in abundance. Nothing
+could be easier than to lay pipes along the sand-spit to the spring. But
+the tug plies daily to and fro, and no one thinks more about the matter.
+
+A West Indian regiment is stationed at Port Royal. After the dockyard we
+went through the soldiers' quarters and then walked through the streets
+of the once famous station. It is now a mere hamlet of boatmen and
+fishermen, squalid and wretched, without and within. Half-naked children
+stared at us from the doors with their dark, round eyes. I found it hard
+to call up the scenes of riot, and confusion, and wild excitement which
+are alleged to have been witnessed there. The story that it once covered
+a far larger area has been, perhaps, invented to account for the
+incongruity. Old plans exist which seem to show that the end of the spit
+could never have been of any larger dimensions than it is at present.
+There is proof enough, however, that in the sand there lie the remains
+of many thousand English soldiers and seamen, who ended their lives
+there for one cause or other. The bones lie so close that they are
+turned up as in a country churchyard when a fresh grave is dug. The
+walls of the old church are inlaid thickly with monuments and monumental
+tablets to the memory of officers of either service, young and old; some
+killed by fever, some by accidents of war or sea; some decorated with
+the honours which they had won in a hundred fights, some carried off
+before they had gathered the first flower of fame. The costliness of
+many of these memorials was an affecting indication how precious to
+their families those now resting there once had been. One in high relief
+struck me as a characteristic specimen of Rubillac's workmanship. It was
+to a young lieutenant who had been killed by the bursting of a gun.
+Flame and vapour were rushing out of the breech. The youth himself was
+falling backwards, with his arms spread out, and a vast preternatural
+face--death, judgment, eternity, or whatever it was meant to be--was
+glaring at him through the smoke. Bad art, though the execution was
+remarkable; but better, perhaps, than the weeping angels now grown
+common among ourselves.
+
+After luncheon the commodore showed us his curiosities, especially his
+garden, which, considering the state of his water supply, he had created
+under unfavourable conditions. He had a very respectable collection of
+tropical ferns and flowers, with palms and plantains to shade and
+shelter them. He was an artist besides, within the lines of his own
+profession. Drawings of ships and boats of all sorts and in all
+attitudes by his own brush or pencil were hanging on the walls of his
+working room. He was good enough to ask me to spend a day or two with
+him at Port Royal before I left the island, and I looked forward with
+special pleasure to becoming closer acquainted with such a genuine piece
+of fine-grained British oak.
+
+There were the usual ceremonies to be attended to. The officers of the
+guardship and gunboats had to be called on. The forts constructed, or in
+the course of construction, were duly inspected. I believe that there is
+a real serious intention to strengthen Port Royal in view of the changes
+which may come about through the opening, if that event ever takes
+place, of the Darien canal.
+
+Our last visit was to a fort deserted, or all but deserted--the once too
+celebrated Fort Augusta, which deserves particular description. It
+stands on the inner side of the lagoon commanding the deep-water channel
+at the point of the great mangrove swamp at the mouth of the Cobre
+river. For the purpose for which it was intended no better situation
+could have been chosen, had there been nothing else to be considered
+except the defence of the harbour, for a vessel trying to reach Kingston
+had to pass close in front of its hundred guns. It was constructed on a
+scale becoming its importance, with accommodation for two or three
+regiments, and the regiments were sent thither, and they perished,
+regiment after regiment, officers and men, from the malarious
+exhalations of the morass. Whole battalions were swept away. The ranks
+were filled up by reinforcements from home, and these, too, went the
+same road. Of one regiment the only survivors, according to the
+traditions of the place, were a quartermaster and a corporal. Finally it
+occurred to the authorities at the Horse Guards that a regiment of
+Hussars would be a useful addition to the garrison. It was not easy to
+see what Hussars were to do there. There is not a spot where the horses
+could stand twenty yards beyond the lines; nor could they reach Fort
+Augusta at all except in barges. However, it was perhaps well that they
+were sent. Horses and men went the way of the rest. The loss of the men
+might have been supplied, but horses were costly, and the loss of them
+was more serious. Fort Augusta was gradually abandoned, and is now used
+only as a powder magazine. A guard is kept there of twenty blacks from
+the West Indian force, but even these are changed every ten days--so
+deadly the vapour of that malarious jungle is now understood to be.
+
+I never saw so spectral a scene as met my eyes when we steamed up to the
+landing place--ramparts broken down, and dismantled cannon lying at the
+foot of the wall overgrown by jungle. The sentinel who presented arms
+was like a corpse in uniform. He was not pale, for he was a negro--he
+was green, and he looked like some ghoul or afrite in a ghastly
+cemetery. The roofs of the barracks and storehouses had fallen in, the
+rafters being left standing with the light shining between them as
+through the bones of skeletons. Great piles of shot lay rusting, as not
+worth removal; among them conical shot, so recently, had this fatal
+charnel house been regarded as a fit location for British artillerymen.
+
+I breathed more freely as we turned our backs upon the hideous memorial
+of parliamentary administration, and steamed away into a purer air. My
+conservative instincts had undergone a shock. As we look back into the
+past, the brighter features stand out conspicuously. The mistakes and
+miseries have sunk in the shade and are forgotten. In the present
+faults and merits are visible alike. The faults attract chief notice
+that they may be mended; and as there seem so many of them, the impulse
+is to conclude that the past was better. It is well to be sometimes
+reminded what the past really was. In Colonel J---- I found a strong
+advocate of the late army reforms. Thanks to recovering energy and more
+distinct conscientiousness, thanks to the all-seeing eye of the Press,
+such an experiment as that of Fort Augusta could hardly be tried again,
+or if tried could not be persisted in. Extravagance and absurdities,
+however, remain, and I was next to witness an instance of them.
+
+Having ceased to quarter our regiments in mangrove swamps, we now build
+a camp for them among the clouds. I mentioned that Captain C---- had
+undertaken that I should see Newcastle. He had written to a friend there
+to say that I was coming up, and the junior aide-de-camp kindly lent his
+services as a guide. As far as Gordon's Town we drove along the same
+road which we had followed before. There, at a small wayside inn, we
+found horses waiting which were accustomed to the mountain. Suspicious
+mists were hanging about aloft, but the landlord, after a glance at
+them, promised us a fine day, and we mounted and set off. My animal's
+merits were not in his appearance, but he had been up and down a hundred
+times, and might be trusted to accomplish his hundred and first without
+misfortune. For the first mile or so the road was tolerably level,
+following the bank of the river under the shade of the forest. It then
+narrowed into a horse path and zigzagged upwards at the side of a
+torrent into the deep pools of which we occasionally looked down over
+the edges of uncomfortable precipices. Then again there was a level,
+with a village and coffee plantations and oranges and bananas. After
+this the vegetation changed. We issued out upon open mountain, with
+English grass, English clover, English gorse, and other familiar
+acquaintances introduced to make the isolation less intolerable. The
+track was so rough and narrow that we could ride only in single file,
+and was often no better than a watercourse; yet by this and no other
+way every article had to be carried on donkeys' backs or human heads
+which was required for the consumption of 300 infantry and 100
+artillerymen. Artillerymen might seem to imply artillery, but they have
+only a single small field gun. They are there for health's sake only,
+and to be fit for work if wanted below. An hour's ride brought us to the
+lowest range of houses, which were 4,000 feet above the sea. From thence
+they rose, tier above tier, for 500 feet more. The weather so far had
+held up, and the views had been glorious, but we passed now into a
+cloud, through which we saw, dimly, groups of figures listlessly
+lounging. The hillside was bare, and the slope so steep that there was
+no standing on it, save where it had been flattened by the spade; and
+here in this extraordinary place were 400 young Englishmen of the common
+type of which soldiers are made, with nothing to do and nothing to
+enjoy--remaining, unless they desert or die of ennui, for one, two, or
+three years, as their chance may be. Every other day they can see
+nothing, save each other's forms and faces in the fog; for, fine and
+bright as the air may be below, the moisture in the air is condensed
+into cloud by the chill rock and soil of the high ranges. The officers
+come down now and then on furlough or on duty; the men rarely and hardly
+at all, and soldiers, in spite of General ----, cannot always be made
+happy by the picturesque. They are not educated enough to find
+employment for their minds, and of amusement there is none.
+
+We continued our way up, the track if anything growing steeper, till we
+reached the highest point of the camp, and found ourselves before a
+pretty cottage with creepers climbing about it belonging to the major in
+command. A few yards off was the officers' mess room. They expected us.
+They knew my companion, and visitors from the under-world were naturally
+welcome. The major was an active clever man, with a bright laughing
+Irish wife, whose relations in the old country were friends of my own.
+The American consul and his lady happened to have ridden up also the
+same day; so, in spite of fog, which grew thicker every moment, we had a
+good time. As to seeing, we could see nothing; but then there was
+nothing to see except views; and panoramic views from mountain tops,
+extolled as they may be, do not particularly interest me. The officers,
+so far as I could learn, are less ill off than the privates. Those who
+are married have their wives with them; they can read, they can draw,
+they can ride; they have gardens about their houses where they can grow
+English flowers and vegetables and try experiments. Science can be
+followed anywhere, and is everywhere a resource. Major ----told me that
+he had never known what it was to find the day too long. Healthy the
+camp is at any rate. The temperature never rises above 70 deg. nor sinks
+often below 60 deg.. They require charcoal fires to keep the damp out and
+blankets to sleep under; and when they see the sun it is an agreeable
+change and something to talk about. There are no large incidents, but
+small ones do instead. While I was there a man came to report that he
+had slipped by accident and set a stone rolling; the stone had cut a
+water pipe in two, and it had to be mended, and was an afternoon's work
+for somebody. Such officers as have no resources in themselves are, of
+course, bored to extinction. There is neither furred game to hunt nor
+feathered game to shoot; the mongoose has eaten up the partridges. I
+suggested that they should import two or three couple of bears from
+Norway; they would fatten and multiply among the roots and sugar canes,
+with a black piccaninny now and then for a special delicacy. One of the
+party extemporised us a speech which would be made on the occasion in
+Exeter Hall.
+
+We had not seen the worst of the weather. As we mounted to ride back the
+fog changed to rain, and the rain to a deluge. The track became a
+torrent. Macintoshes were a vanity, for the water rushed down one's
+neck, and every crease made itself into a conduit carrying the stream
+among one's inner garments. Dominica itself had not prepared me for the
+violence of these Jamaican downpourings. False had proved our prophet
+down below. There was no help for it but to go on; and we knew by
+experience that one does not melt on these occasions. At a turn of the
+road we met another group of riders, among them Lady N----, who, during
+her husband's absence in England, was living at a country house in the
+hills. She politely stopped and would have spoken, but it was not
+weather to stand talking in; the torrent washed us apart.
+
+And now comes the strangest part of the story. A thousand feet down we
+passed out below the clouds into clear bright sunshine. Above us it was
+still black as ever. The vapour clung about the peaks and did not leave
+them. Underneath us and round us it was a lovely summer's day. The
+farther we descended the fewer the signs that any rain had fallen. When
+we reached the stables at Gordon's Town, the dust was on the road as we
+left it, and the horsekeeper congratulated us on the correctness of his
+forecast. Clothes soon dry in that country, and we drove down home none
+the worse for our wetting. I was glad to have seen a place of which I
+had heard so much. On the whole, I hoped that perhaps by-and-by the
+authorities may discover some camping ground for our poor soldiers
+halfway between the Inferno of Fort Augusta and the Caucasian cliffs to
+which they are chained like Prometheus. Malice did say that Newcastle
+was the property of a certain Sir ----, a high official of a past
+generation, who wished to part with it, and found a convenient purchaser
+in the Government.
+
+The hospitalities at Government House were well maintained under the
+J---- administration. The Colonel was gracious, the lady beautiful and
+brilliant. There were lawn parties and evening parties, when all that
+was best in the island was collected; the old Jamaican aristocracy, army
+and navy officers, civilians, eminent lawyers, a few men among them of
+high intelligence. The tone was old-fashioned and courteous, with
+little, perhaps too little, of the _go-a-headism_ of younger colonies,
+but not the less agreeable on that account. As to prospects, or the
+present condition of things in the island, there were wide differences
+of opinion. If there was unanimity about anything, it was about the
+consequences likely to arise from an extension of the principle of
+self-government. There, at all events, lay the right road to the wrong
+place. The blacks had nothing to complain of, and the wrong at present
+was on the other side. The taxation fell heavily on the articles
+consumed by the upper classes. The duty on tea, for instance, was a
+shilling a pound, and the duties on other luxuries in the same
+proportion. It scarcely touched the negroes at all. They were acquiring
+land, and some thought that there ought to be a land tax. They would
+probably object and resist, and trouble would come if it was proposed,
+for the blacks object to taxes. As long as there are white men to pay
+them, they will be satisfied to get the benefit of the expenditure; but
+let not their English friends suppose that when they have the island for
+their own they will tax themselves for police or schools, or for any
+other of those educational institutions from which the believers in
+progress anticipate such glorious results.
+
+As to the planters, it seemed agreed that when an estate was
+unencumbered and the owner resided upon it and managed it himself, he
+could still keep afloat. It was agreed also that when the owner was an
+absentee the cost of management consumed all the profits, and thus the
+same impulse to sell which had gone so far in the Antilles was showing
+itself more and more in Jamaica also. Fine properties all about the
+island were in the market for any price which purchasers could be found
+to give. Too many even of the old English families were tired of the
+struggle, and were longing to be out of it at any cost.
+
+At one time we heard much of the colonial Church and the power which it
+was acquiring, and as it seems unlikely that the political authority of
+the white race will be allowed to reassert itself, it must be through
+their minds and through those other qualities which religion addresses
+that the black race will be influenced by the white, if it is ever to be
+influenced at all.
+
+I had marked the respect with which the Catholic clergy were treated in
+Dominica, and even the Hayti Republic still maintains the French
+episcopate and priesthood. But I could not find that the Church of
+England in Jamaica either was at present or had ever been more than the
+Church of the English in Jamaica, respected as long as the English
+gentry were a dominant power there, but with no independent charm to
+work on imagination or on superstition. Labat says, as I noted above,
+that the English clergy in his time did not baptise the black babies, on
+the curious ground that Christians could not lawfully be held as slaves,
+and the slaves therefore were not to be made Christians. A Jesuit Father
+whom I met at Government House told me that even now the clergy refuse
+to baptise the illegitimate children, and as, according to the official
+returns, nearly two-thirds of the children that are born in Jamaica come
+into the world thus irregularly, they are not likely to become more
+popular than they used to be. Perhaps Father ----was doing what a good
+many other people do, making a general practice out of a few instances.
+Perhaps the blacks themselves who wish their children to be Christians
+carry them to the minister whom they prefer, and that minister may not
+be the Anglican clergyman. Of Catholics there are not many in Jamaica;
+of the Moravians I heard on all sides the warmest praise. They, above
+all the religious bodies in the island, are admitted to have a practical
+power for good over the limited number of people which belong to them.
+But the Moravians are but a few. They do not rush to make converts in
+the highways and hedges, and my observations in Dominica almost led me
+to wish that, in the absence of other forms of spiritual authority, the
+Catholics might become more numerous than they are. The priests in
+Dominica were the only Europeans who, for their own sakes and on
+independent grounds, were looked up to with fear and respect.
+
+The religion of the future! That is the problem of problems that rises
+before us at the close of this waning century. The future of the West
+Indies is a small matter. Yet that, too, like all else, depends on the
+spiritual beliefs which are to rise out of the present confusion. Men
+will act well and wisely, or ill and foolishly, according to the form
+and force of their conceptions of duty. Once before, under the Roman
+Empire, the conditions were not wholly dissimilar. The inherited creed
+had become unbelievable, and the scientific intellect was turning
+materialist. Christianity rose out of the chaos, confounding statesmen
+and philosophers, and became the controlling power among mankind for
+1,800 years. But Christianity found a soil prepared for the seed. The
+masses of the inhabitants of the Roman world were not materialist. The
+masses of the people believed already in the supernatural and in penal
+retribution after death for their sins. Lucretius complains of the
+misery produced upon them by the terrors of the anticipated Tartarus.
+Serious and good men were rather turning away from atheism than
+welcoming it; and if they doubted the divinity of the Olympian gods, it
+was not because they doubted whether gods existed at all, but because
+the immoralities attributed to them were unworthy of the exalted nature
+of the Divine Being. The phenomena are different now. Who is now made
+wretched by the fear of hell? The tendency of popular thought is against
+the supernatural in any shape. Far into space as the telescope can
+search, deep as analysis can penetrate into mind and consciousness or
+the forces which govern natural things, popular thought finds only
+uniformity and connection of cause and effect--no sign anywhere of a
+personal will which is influenced by prayer or moral motive. When a
+subject is still obscure we are confident that it admits of scientific
+explanation; we no longer refer 'ad Deum,' whom we regard as a
+constitutional monarch taking no direct part at all. The new creed,
+however, not having crystallised as yet into a shape which can be openly
+professed, and as without any creed at all the flesh and the devil might
+become too powerful, we maintain the old names and forms, as we maintain
+the monarchy. We surround both with reverence and majesty, and the
+reverence, being confined to feeling, continues to exercise a vague but
+wholesome influence. We row in one way while we look another. In the
+presence of the marked decay of Protestantism as a positive creed, the
+Protestant powers of Europe may, perhaps, patch up some kind of
+reconciliation with the old spiritual organisation which was shattered
+in the sixteenth century, and has since shown no unwillingness to adapt
+itself to modern forms of thought. The Olympian gods survived for seven
+centuries after Aristophanes with the help of allegory and 'economy.'
+The Church of Rome may survive as long after Calvin and Luther. Carlyle
+mocked at the possibility when I ventured to say so to him. Yet Carlyle
+seemed to think that the mass was the only form of faith in Europe which
+had any sincerity remaining in it.
+
+A religion, at any rate, which will keep the West Indian blacks from
+falling into devil worship is still to seek. Constitutions and belief in
+progress may satisfy Europe, but will not answer in Jamaica. In spite of
+the priests, child murder and cannibalism have reappeared in Hayti; but
+without them things might have been worse than they are, and the
+preservation of white authority and influence in any form at all may be
+better than none.
+
+White authority and white influence may, however, still be preserved in
+a nobler and better way. Slavery was a survival from a social order
+which had passed away, and slavery could not be continued. It does not
+follow that _per se_ it was a crime. The negroes who were sold to the
+dealers in the African factories were most of them either slaves already
+to worse masters or were _servi_, servants in the old meaning of the
+word, prisoners of war, or else criminals, _servati_ or reserved from
+death. They would otherwise have been killed; and since the slave trade
+has been abolished are again killed in the too celebrated 'customs.' The
+slave trade was a crime when the chiefs made war on each other for the
+sake of captives whom they could turn into money. In many instances,
+perhaps in most, it was innocent and even beneficent. Nature has made us
+unequal, and Acts of Parliament cannot make us equal. Some must lead and
+some must follow, and the question is only of degree and kind. For
+myself, I would rather be the slave of a Shakespeare or a Burghley than
+the slave of a majority in the House of Commons or the slave of my own
+folly. Slavery is gone, with all that belonged to it; but it will be an
+ill day for mankind if no one is to be compelled any more to obey those
+who are wiser than himself, and each of us is to do only what is right
+in our own eyes. There may be authority, yet not slavery: a soldier is
+not a slave, a sailor is not a slave, a child is not a slave, a wife is
+not a slave; yet they may not live by their own wills or emancipate
+themselves at their own pleasure from positions in which nature has
+placed them, or into which they have themselves voluntarily entered. The
+negroes of the West Indies are children, and not yet disobedient
+children. They have their dreams, but for the present they are dreams
+only. If you enforce self-government upon them when they are not asking
+for it, you may turn the dream into a reality, and wilfully drive them
+back into the condition of their ancestors, from which the slave trade
+was the beginning of their emancipation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+    The Church of England in Jamaica--Drive to Castleton--Botanical
+    Gardens--Picnic by the river--Black women--Ball at Government
+    House--Mandeville--Miss Roy--Country society--Manners--American
+    visitors--A Moravian missionary--The modern Radical creed.
+
+
+If I have spoken without enthusiasm of the working of the Church of
+England among the negroes, I have not meant to be disrespectful. As I
+lay awake at daybreak on the Sunday morning after my arrival, I heard
+the sound of church bells, not Catholic bells as at Dominica, but good
+old English chimes. The Church is disestablished so far as law can
+disestablish it, but, as in Barbadoes, the royal arms still stand over
+the arches of the chancel. Introduced with the English conquest, it has
+been identified with the ruling order of English gentry, respectable,
+harmless, and useful, to those immediately connected with it.
+
+The parochial system, as in Barbadoes also, was spread over the island.
+Each parish had its church, its parsonage and its school, its fonts
+where the white children were baptised--in spite of my Jesuit, I shall
+hope not whites only; and its graveyard, where in time they were laid
+to rest. With their quiet Sunday services of the old type the country
+districts were exact reproductions of English country villages. The
+church whose bells I had heard was of the more fashionable suburban
+type, standing in a central situation halfway to Kingston. The service
+was at the old English hour of eleven. We drove to it in the orthodox
+fashion, with our prayer books and Sunday costumes, the Colonel in
+uniform. The gentry of the neighbourhood are antiquated in their habits,
+and to go to church on Sunday is still regarded as a simple duty. A
+dozen carriages stood under the shade at the doors. The congregation was
+upper middle-class English of the best sort, and was large, though
+almost wholly white. White tablets as at Port Royal covered the walls,
+with familiar English names upon them. But for the heat I could have
+imagined myself at home. There were no Aaron Bangs to be seen, or Paul
+Gelids, with the rough sense, the vigour, the energy, and roystering
+light-heartedness of our grandfathers. The faces of the men were serious
+and thoughtful, with the shadow resting on them of an uncertain future.
+They are good Churchmen still, and walk on in the old paths, wherever
+those paths may lead. They are old-fashioned and slow to change, and are
+perhaps belated in an eddy of the great stream of progress; but they
+were pleasant to see and pleasant to talk to. After service there were
+the usual shakings of hands among friends outside; arrangements were
+made for amusements and expeditions in which I was invited to
+join--which were got up, perhaps, for my own entertainment. I was to be
+taken to the sights of the neighbourhood. I was to see this; I was to
+see that; above all, I must see the Peak of the Blue Mountains. The peak
+itself I could see better from below, for there it stood, never moving,
+between seven and eight thousand feet high. But I had had mountain
+riding enough and was allowed to plead my age and infirmities. It was
+arranged finally that I should be driven the next day to Castleton,
+seventeen miles off over a mountain pass, to see the Botanical Gardens.
+
+Accordingly early on the following morning we set off; two carriages
+full of us; Mr. M----, a new friend lately made, but I hope long to be
+preserved, on the box of his four-in-hand. The road was as good as all
+roads are in Jamaica and Barbadoes, and more cannot be said in their
+favour. Forest trees made a roof over our heads as we climbed to the
+crest of the ridge. Thence we descended the side of a long valley, a
+stream running below us which gradually grew into a river. We passed
+through all varieties of cultivation. On the high ground there was a
+large sugar plantation, worked by coolies, the first whom I had seen in
+Jamaica. In the alluvial meadows on the river-side were tobacco fields,
+cleanly and carefully kept, belonging to my Spanish friend in Kingston,
+and only too rich in leaves. There were sago too, and ginger, and
+tamarinds, and cocoa, and coffee, and cocoa-nut palms. On the hill-sides
+were the garden farms of the blacks, which were something to see and
+remember. They receive from the Government at an almost nominal quit
+rent an acre or two of uncleared forest. To this as the first step they
+set light; at twenty different spots we saw their fires blazing. To
+clear an acre they waste the timber on half a dozen or a dozen. They
+plant their yams and sweet potatoes among the ashes and grow crops there
+till the soil is exhausted. Then they move on to another, which they
+treat with the same recklessness, leaving the first to go back to scrub.
+Since the Chinaman burnt his house to roast his pig, such waste was
+never seen. The male proprietors were lounging about smoking. Their
+wives, as it was market day, were tramping into Kingston with their
+baskets on their head. We met them literally in thousands, all merry and
+light-hearted, their little ones with little baskets trudging at their
+side. Of the lords of the creation we saw, perhaps, one to each hundred
+women, and he would be riding on mule or donkey, pipe in mouth and
+carrying nothing. He would be generally sulky too, while the ladies,
+young and old, had all a civil word for us and curtsied under their
+loads. Decidedly if there is to be a black constitution I would give the
+votes only to the women.
+
+We reached Castleton at last. It was in a hot damp valley, said to be a
+nest of yellow fever. The gardens slightly disappointed me; my
+expectations had been too much raised by Trinidad. There were lovely
+flowers of course, and curious plants and trees. Every known palm is
+growing there. They try hard to grow roses, and they say that they
+succeed. The roses were not in flower, and I could not judge. Bye the
+familiar names were all there, and others which were not familiar, the
+newest importations called after the great ladies of the day. I saw one
+labelled Mabel Morrison. To find the daughter of an ancient college
+friend and contemporary giving name to a plant in the New World makes
+one feel dreadfully old; but I expected to find, and I did not find,
+some useful practical horticulture going on. They ought, for instance,
+to have been trying experiments with orange trees. The orange in Jamaica
+is left to nature. They plant the seeds, and leave the result to chance.
+They neither bud nor graft, and go upon the hypothesis that as the seed
+is, so will be the tree which comes of it. Yet even thus, so favourable
+is the soil and climate that the oranges of Jamaica are prized above all
+others which are sold in the American market. With skill and knowledge
+and good selection they might produce the finest in the world. 'There
+are dollars in that island, sir,' as an American gentleman said to me,
+'if they look for them in the right way.' Nothing of this kind was going
+on at Castleton; so much the worse, but perhaps things will mend
+by-and-by. I was consoled partly by another specimen of the _Amherstia
+nobilis_. It was not so large as those which I had seen at Trinidad, but
+it was in splendid bloom, and certainly is the most gorgeous flowering
+tree which the world contains.
+
+Wild nature also was luxuriantly beautiful. We picnicked by the river,
+which here is a full rushing stream with pools that would have held a
+salmon, and did hold abundant mullet. We found a bower formed by a
+twisted vine, so thick that neither sun nor rain could penetrate the
+roof. The floor was of shining shingle, and the air breathed cool from
+off the water. It was a spot which nymph or naiad may haunt hereafter,
+when nymphs are born again in the new era. The creatures of imagination
+have fled away from modern enlightenment. But we were a pleasant party
+of human beings, lying about under the shade upon the pebbles. We had
+brought a blanket of ice with us, and the champagne was manufactured
+into cup by choicest West Indian skill. Figures fall unconsciously at
+such moments into attitudes which would satisfy a painter, and the
+scenes remain upon the memory like some fine finished work of art. We
+had done with the gardens, and I remember no more of them except that I
+saw a mongoose stalking a flock of turkeys. The young ones and their
+mother gathered together and showed fight. The old cock, after the
+manner of the male animal, seemed chiefly anxious for his own skin,
+though a little ashamed at the same time, as if conscious that more was
+expected of him. On the way back we met the returning stream of women
+and children, loaded heavily as before and with the same elastic step.
+In spite of all that is incorrect about them, the women are the material
+to work upon; and if they saw that we were in earnest, they would lend
+their help to make their husbands bestir themselves. A Dutch gentleman
+once boasted to me of the wonderful prosperity of Java, where everybody
+was well off and everybody was industrious. He so insisted upon the
+industry that I ask him how it was brought about. Were the people
+slaves? 'Oh,' he cried, as if shocked, 'God forbid that a Christian
+nation should be so wicked as to keep slaves!' 'Do they never wish to be
+idle?' I asked. 'Never, never,' he said; 'no, no: we do not permit
+anyone to be idle.'
+
+My stay with Colonel J---- was drawing to a close; one great festivity
+was impending, which I wished to avoid; but the gracious lady insisted
+that I must remain. There was to be a ball, and all the neighbourhood
+was invited. Pretty it was sure to be. Windows and doors, galleries and
+passages, would be all open. The gardens would be lighted up, and the
+guests could spread as they pleased. Brilliant it all was; more
+brilliant than you would see in our larger colonies. A ball in Sydney or
+Melbourne is like a ball in the north of England or in New York. There
+are the young men in black coats, and there are brightly dressed young
+ladies for them to dance with. The chaperons sit along the walls; the
+elderly gentlemen withdraw to the card room. Here all was different. The
+black coats in the ball at Jamaica were on the backs of old or
+middle-aged men, and, except Government officials, there was hardly a
+young man present in civilian dress. The rooms glittered with scarlet
+and white and blue and gold lace. The officers were there from the
+garrison and the fleet; but of men of business, of professional men,
+merchants, planters, lawyers, &c. there were only those who had grown up
+to middle age in the island, whose fortunes, bad or good, were bound up
+with it. When these were gone, it seemed as if there would be no one to
+succeed them. The coveted heirs of great estates were no longer to be
+found for mothers to angle after. The trades and professions in Kingston
+had ceased to offer the prospect of an income to younger brothers who
+had to make their own way. For 250 years generations of Englishmen had
+followed one upon another, but we seemed to have come to the last. Of
+gentlemen unconnected with the public service, under thirty-five or
+forty, there were few to be seen, they were seeking their fortunes
+elsewhere. The English interest in Jamaica is still a considerable
+thing. The English flag flies over Government House, and no one so far
+wishes to remove it. But the British population is scanty and refuses to
+grow. Ships and regiments come and go, and officers and State employes
+make what appears to be a brilliant society. But it is in appearance
+only. The station is no longer a favourite one. They are gone, those
+pleasant gentry whose country houses were the paradise of _middies_
+sixty years ago. All is changed, even to the officers themselves. The
+drawling ensign of our boyhood, brave as a lion in the field, and in the
+mess room or the drawing room an idiot, appears also to be dead as the
+dodo. Those that one meets now are intelligent and superior men--no
+trace of the frivolous sort left. Is it the effect of the abolition of
+purchase, and competitive examinations? Is it that the times themselves
+are growing serious, and even the most empty-headed feel that this is no
+season for levity?
+
+I had seen what Jamaican life was like in the upper spheres, and I had
+heard the opinions that were current in them; but I wished to see other
+parts of the country. I wished to see a class of people who were farther
+from headquarters, and who might not all sing to the same note. I
+determined to start off on an independent cruise of my own. In the
+centre of the island, two thousand feet above the sea, it was reported
+to me that I should find a delightful village called Mandeville, after
+some Duke of Manchester who governed Jamaica a hundred years ago. The
+scenery was said to have a special charm of its own, the air to be
+exquisitely pure, the land to be well cultivated. Village manners were
+to be found there of the old-fashioned sort, and a lodging house and
+landlady of unequalled merit. There was a railway for the first fifty
+miles. The line at starting crosses the mangrove swamps at the mouth of
+the Cobre river. You see the trees standing in the water on each side of
+the road. Rising slowly, it hardens into level grazing ground, stocked
+with cattle and studded with mangoes and cedars. You pass Spanish Town,
+of which only the roofs of the old State buildings are visible from the
+carriages. Sugar estates follow, some of which are still in cultivation,
+while ruined mills and fallen aqueducts show where others once had been.
+The scenery becomes more broken as you begin to ascend into the hills.
+River beds, dry when I saw them, but powerful torrents in the rainy
+season, are crossed by picturesque bridges. You come to the forest,
+where the squatters were at their usual work, burning out their yam
+patches. Columns of white smoke were rising all about us, yet so
+abundant the timber and so rapid the work of restoration when the
+devastating swarm has passed, that in this direction they have as yet
+made no marked impression, and the forest stretches as far as eye can
+reach. The glens grew more narrow and the trees grander as the train
+proceeded. After two hours we arrived at the present terminus, an inland
+town with the singular name of Porus. No explanation is given of it in
+the local handbooks; but I find a Porus among the companions of
+Columbus, and it is probably an interesting relic of the first Spanish
+occupation. The railway had brought business. Mule carts were going
+about, and waggons; omnibuses stood in the yards, and there were stores
+of various kinds. But it was all black. There was not a white face to be
+seen after we left the station. One of my companions in the train was a
+Cuban engineer, now employed upon the line; a refugee, I conjectured,
+belonging to the beaten party in the late rebellion, from the bitterness
+with which he spoke of the Spanish administration.
+
+Porus is many hundred feet above the sea, in a hollow where three
+valleys meet. Mandeville, to which I was bound, was ten miles farther
+on, the road ascending all the way. A carriage was waiting for me, but
+too small for my luggage. A black boy offered to carry up a heavy bag
+for a shilling, a feat which he faithfully and expeditiously performed.
+After climbing a steep hill, we came out upon a rich undulating plateau,
+long cleared and cultivated; green fields with cows feeding on them;
+pretty houses standing in gardens; a Wesleyan station; a Moravian
+station, with chapels and parsonages. The red soil was mixed with
+crumbling lumps of white coral, a ready-made and inexhaustible supply of
+manure. Great silk-cotton trees towered up in lonely magnificence, the
+home of the dreaded Jumbi--woe to the wretch who strikes an axe into
+those sacred stems! Almonds, cedars, mangoes, gum trees spread their
+shade over the road. Orange trees were everywhere; sometimes in
+orchards, sometimes growing at their own wild will in hedges and copse
+and thicket. Finally, at the outskirts of a perfectly English village,
+we brought up at the door of the lodging house kept by the justly
+celebrated Miss Roy. The house, or cottage, stood at the roadside, at
+the top of a steep flight of steps; a rambling one-story building, from
+which rooms, creeper-covered, had been thrown out as they were wanted.
+There was the universal green verandah into which they all opened; and
+the windows looked out on a large common, used of old, and perhaps now,
+as a race-course; on wooded slopes, with sunny mansions dropped here and
+there in openings among the woods; on farm buildings at intervals in
+the distance, surrounded by clumps of palms; and beyond them ranges of
+mountains almost as blue as the sky against which they were faintly
+visible. Miss Roy, the lady and mistress of the establishment, came out
+to meet me: middle-aged, with a touch of the black blood, but with a
+face in which one places instant and sure dependence, shrewd, quiet,
+sensible, and entirely good-humoured. A white-haired brother, somewhat
+infirm and older than she, glided behind her as her shadow. She attends
+to the business. His pride is in his garden, where he has gathered a
+collection of rare plants in admired disorder; the night-blowing cereus
+hanging carelessly over a broken paling, and a palm, unique of its kind,
+waving behind it. At the back were orange trees and plantains and coffee
+bushes, with long-tailed humming birds flitting about their nests among
+the branches. All kinds of delicacies, from fruit and preserves to
+coffee, Miss Roy grows for her visitors on her own soil, and prepares
+from the first stage to the last with her own cunning hands.
+
+Having made acquaintance with the mistress, I strolled out to look about
+me. After walking up the road for a quarter of a mile, I found myself in
+an exact reproduction of a Warwickshire hamlet before the days of
+railways and brick chimneys. There were no elms to be sure--there were
+silk cotton-trees and mangoes where the elms should have been; but there
+were the boys playing cricket, and a market house, and a modest inn, and
+a shop or two, and a blacksmith's forge with a shed where horses were
+standing waiting their turn to be shod. Across the green was the parish
+church, with its three aisles and low square tower, in which hung an old
+peal of bells. Parish stocks I did not observe, though, perhaps, I might
+have had I looked for them; but there was a schoolhouse and parsonage,
+and, withdrawn at a distance as of superior dignity, what had once
+perhaps been the squire's mansion, when squire and such-like had been
+the natural growth of the country. It was as if a branch of the old tree
+had been carried over and planted there ages ago, and as if it had taken
+root and become an exact resemblance of the parent stock. The people
+had black faces; but even they, too, had shaped their manners on the
+old English models. The men touched their hats respectfully (as they
+eminently did not in Kingston and its environs). The women smiled and
+curtsied, and the children looked shy when one spoke to them. The name
+of slavery is a horror to us; but there must have been something human
+and kindly about it, too, when it left upon the character the marks of
+courtesy and good breeding. I wish I could say as much for the effect of
+modern ideas. The negroes in Mandeville were, perhaps, as happy in their
+old condition as they have been since their glorious emancipation, and
+some of them to this day speak regretfully of a time when children did
+not die of neglect; when the sick and the aged were taken care of, and
+the strong and healthy were, at least, as well looked after as their
+owner's cattle.
+
+Slavery could not last; but neither can the condition last which has
+followed it. The equality between black and white is a forced equality
+and not a real one, and nature in the long run has her way, and
+readjusts in their proper relations what theorists and philanthropists
+have disturbed.
+
+I was not Miss Roy's only guest. An American lady and gentleman were
+staying there; he, I believe, for his health, as the climate of
+Mandeville is celebrated. Americans, whatever may be their faults, are
+always unaffected; and so are easy to get on with. We dined together,
+and talked of the place and its inhabitants. They had been struck like
+myself with the manners of the peasants, which were something entirely
+new to them. The lady said, and without expressing the least
+disapproval, that she had fallen in with an old slave who told her that,
+thanks to God, he had seen good times. 'He was bred in a good home, with
+a master and mistress belonging to him. What the master and mistress had
+the slaves had, and there was no difference; and his master used to
+visit at King's House, and his men were all proud of him. Yes, glory be
+to God, he had seen good times.'
+
+In the evening we sat out in the verandah in the soft sweet air, the
+husband and I smoking our cigars, and the lady not minding it. They had
+come to Mandeville, as we go to Italy, to escape the New England winter.
+They had meant to stay but a few days; they found it so charming that
+they had stayed for many weeks. We talked on till twilight became night,
+and then appeared a show of natural pyrotechnics which beat anything of
+the kind which I had ever seen or read of: fireflies as large as
+cockchafers flitting round us among the leaves of the creepers, with two
+long antennae, at the point of each of which hangs out a blazing
+lanthorn. The unimaginative colonists call them gig-lamps. Had
+Shakespeare ever heard of them, they would have played round Ferdinand
+and Miranda in Prospero's cave, and would have borne a fairer name. The
+light is bluish-green, like a glowworm's, but immeasurably brighter; and
+we could trace them far away glancing like spirits over the meadows.
+
+I could not wonder that my new friends had been charmed with the place.
+The air was exquisitely pure; the temperature ten degrees below that of
+Kingston, never oppressively hot and never cold; the forest scenery as
+beautiful as at Arden; and Miss Roy's provision for us, rooms, beds,
+breakfasts, dinners, absolutely without fault. If ever there was an
+inspired coffee maker, Miss Roy was that person. The glory of Mandeville
+is in its oranges. The worst orange I ate in Jamaica was better than the
+best I ever ate in Europe, and the best oranges of Jamaica are the
+oranges of Mandeville. New York has found out their merits. One
+gentleman alone sent twenty thousand boxes to New York last year,
+clearing a dollar on each box; and this, as I said just now, when Nature
+is left to produce what she pleases, and art has not begun to help her.
+Fortunes larger than were ever made by sugar wait for any man, and the
+blessings of the world along with it, who will set himself to work at
+orange growing with skill and science in a place where heat will not
+wither the trees, nor frosts, as in Florida, bite off the blossoms.
+Yellow fever was never heard of there, nor any dangerous epidemic, nor
+snake nor other poisonous reptile. The droughts which parch the lowlands
+are unknown, for an even rain falls all the year and the soil is always
+moist. I inquired with wonder why the unfortunate soldiers who were
+perched among the crags at Newcastle were not at Mandeville instead. I
+was told that water was the difficulty; that there was no river or
+running stream there, and that it had to be drawn from wells or
+collected into cisterns. One must applaud the caution which the
+authorities have at last displayed; but cattle thrive at Mandeville, and
+sheep, and black men and women in luxuriant abundance. One would like to
+know that the general who sold the Newcastle estate to the Government
+was not the same person who was allowed to report as to the capabilities
+of a spot which, to the common observer, would seem as perfectly adapted
+for the purpose as the other is detestable.
+
+A few English families were scattered about the neighbourhood, among
+whom I made a passing acquaintance. They had a lawn-tennis club in the
+village, which met once a week; they drove in with their pony carriages;
+a lady made tea under the trees; they had amusements and pleasant
+society which cost nothing. They were not rich; but they were courteous,
+simple, frank, and cordial.
+
+Mandeville is the centre of a district which all resembles it in
+character and extends for many miles. It is famous for its cattle as
+well as for its fruit, and has excellent grazing grounds. Mr. ----, an
+officer of police, took me round with him one morning. It was the old
+story. Though there were still a few white proprietors left, they were
+growing fewer, and the blacks were multiplying upon them. The smoke of
+their clearances showed where they were at work. Many of them are
+becoming well-to-do. We met them on the roads with their carts and
+mules; the young ones armed, too, in some instances with good
+double-barrelled muzzle-loaders. There is no game to shoot, but to have
+a gun raises them in their own estimation, and they like to be prepared
+for contingencies. Mr. ---- had a troublesome place of it. The negro
+peasantry were good-humoured, he said, but not universally honest. They
+stole cattle, and would not give evidence against each other. If brought
+into court, they held a pebble in their mouths, being under the
+impression that when they were so provided perjury did not count. Their
+education was only skin-deep, and the schools which the Government
+provided had not touched their characters at all. Mr. ----'s duties
+brought him in contact with the unfavourable specimens. I received a far
+pleasanter impression from a Moravian minister, who called on me with a
+friend who had lately taken a farm. I was particularly glad to see this
+gentleman, for of the Moravians everyone had spoken well to me. He was
+not the least enthusiastic about his poor black sheep, but he said that,
+if they were not better than the average English labourers, he did not
+think them worse. They were called idle. They would work well enough if
+they had fair wages, and if the wages were paid regularly; but what
+could be expected when women servants had but three shillings a week and
+'found themselves,' when the men had but a shilling a day and the pay
+was kept in arrear, in order that, if they came late to work, or if they
+came irregularly, it might be kept back or cut down to what the employer
+chose to give? Under such conditions any man of any colour would prefer
+to work for himself if he had a garden, or would be idle if he had none.
+'Living' costs next to nothing either to them or their families. But the
+minister said, and his friend confirmed it by his own experience, that
+these same fellows would work regularly and faithfully for any master
+whom they personally knew and could rely upon, and no Englishman coming
+to settle there need be afraid of failing for want of labour, if he had
+sense and energy, and did not prefer to lie down and groan. The blacks,
+my friends said, were kindly hearted, respectful, and well-disposed, but
+they were children; easily excited, easily tempted, easily misled, and
+totally unfit for self-government. If we wished to ruin them altogether,
+we should persevere in the course to which, they were sorry to hear, we
+were so inclined. The real want in the island was of intelligent
+Englishmen to employ and direct them, and Englishmen were going away so
+fast that they feared there would soon be none of them left. This was
+the opinion of two moderate and excellent men, whose natural and
+professional prejudices were all on the black man's side.
+
+It was confirmed both in its favourable and unfavourable aspects by
+another impartial authority. My first American acquaintances had gone,
+but their rooms were occupied by another of their countrymen, a specimen
+of a class of whom more will be heard in Jamaica if the fates are kind.
+The English in the island cast in their lot with sugar, and if sugar is
+depressed they lose heart. Americans keep their 'eyes skinned,' as they
+call it, to look out for other openings. They have discovered, as I
+said, 'that there are dollars in Jamaica,' and one has come, and has set
+up a trade in plantains, in which he is making a fortune; and this
+gentleman has perceived that there were 'dollars in the bamboo,' and for
+bamboos there was no place in the world like the West Indies. He came to
+Jamaica, brought machines to clear the fibre, tried to make ropes of it,
+to make canvas, paper, and I know not what. I think he told me that he
+had spent a quarter of a million dollars, instead of finding any, before
+he hit upon a paying use for it. The bamboo fibre has certain elastic
+incompressible properties in which it is without a rival. He forms it
+into 'packing' for the boxes of the wheels of railway carriages, where
+it holds oil like a sponge, never hardens, and never wears out. He sends
+the packing over the world, and the demand grows as it is tried. He has
+set up a factory, thirty miles from Mandeville, in the valley of the
+Black River. He has a large body of the negroes working for him who are
+said to be so unmanageable. He, like Dr. Nicholls in Dominica, does not
+find them unmanageable at all. They never leave him; they work for him
+from year to year as regularly as if they were slaves. They have their
+small faults, but he does not magnify them into vices. They are attached
+to him with the old-fashioned affection which good labourers always feel
+for employers whom they respect, and dismissal is dreaded as the
+severest of punishments. In the course of time he thought that they
+might become fit for political privileges. To confer such privileges on
+them at present would fling Jamaica back into absolute barbarism.
+
+I said I wished that more of his countrymen would come and settle in
+Jamaica as he had done and a few others already. American energy would
+be like new blood in the veins of the poor island. He answered that many
+would probably come if they could be satisfied that there would be no
+more political experimenting; but they would not risk their capital if
+there was a chance of a black parliament.
+
+If we choose to make Jamaica into a Hayti, we need not look for
+Americans down that way.
+
+Let us hope that enthusiasm for constitutions will for once moderate its
+ardour. The black race has suffered enough at our hands. They have been
+sacrificed to slavery; are they to be sacrificed again to a dream or a
+doctrine? There has a new creed risen, while the old creed is failing.
+It has its priests and its prophets, its formulas and its articles of
+belief.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold
+the Radical faith.
+
+And the Radical faith is this: all men are equal, and the voice of one
+is as the voice of another.
+
+And whereas one man is wise and another foolish, and one is upright and
+another crooked, yet in this suffrage none is greater or less than
+another. The vote is equal, the dignity co-eternal.
+
+Truth is one and right is one; yet right is right because the majority
+so declare it, and justice is justice because the majority so declare
+it.
+
+And if the majority affirm one thing to-day, that is right; and if the
+majority affirm the opposite to-morrow, that is right.
+
+Because the will of the majority is the ground of right and there is no
+other, &c. &c. &c.
+
+This is the Radical faith, which, except every man do keep whole and
+undefiled, he is a Tory and an enemy of the State, and without doubt
+shall perish everlastingly.
+
+Once the Radical was a Liberal and went for toleration and freedom of
+opinion. He has become a believer now. He is right and you are wrong,
+and if you do not agree with him you are a fool, and you are wicked
+besides. Voltaire says that atheism and superstition are the two poles
+of intellectual disease. Superstition he thinks the worse of the two.
+The atheist is merely mistaken, and can be cured if you show him that he
+is wrong. The fanatic can never be cured. Yet each alike, if he
+prevails, will destroy human society. What would Voltaire have expected
+for poor mankind had he seen both the precious qualities combined in
+this new _Symbolum Fidei_?
+
+A creed is not a reasoned judgment based upon experience and insight. It
+is a child of imagination and passion. Like an organised thing, it has
+its appointed period and then dies. You cannot argue it out of
+existence. It works for good; it works for evil; but work it will while
+the life is in it. Faith, we are told, is not contradictory to reason,
+but is above reason. Whether reason or faith sees truer, events will
+prove.
+
+One more observation this American gentleman made to me. He was speaking
+of the want of spirit and of the despondency of the West Indian whites.
+'I never knew, sir,' he said, 'any good come of desponding men. If you
+intend to strike a mark, you had better believe that you can strike it.
+No one ever hit anything if he thought that he was most likely to miss
+it. You must take a cheerful view of things, or you will have no success
+in this world.'
+
+'Tyne heart tyne a',' the Scotch proverb says. The Anglo-West Indians
+are tyning heart, and that is the worst feature about them. They can get
+no help except in themselves, and they can help themselves after all if
+we allow them fair play. The Americans will not touch them politically,
+but they will trade with them; they will bring their capital and their
+skill and knowledge among them, and make the islands richer and more
+prosperous than ever they were--on one condition: they will risk nothing
+in such enterprises as long as the shadow hangs over them of a possible
+government by a black majority. Let it suffice to have created one
+Ireland without deliberately manufacturing a second.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+    Jamaican hospitality--Cherry Garden--George William Gordon--The
+    Gordon riots--Governor Eyre--A dispute and its
+    consequences--Jamaican country-house society--Modern speculation--A
+    Spanish fable--Port Royal--The commodore--Naval theatricals--The
+    modern sailor.
+
+
+The surviving representatives of the Jamaican gentry are as hospitable
+as their fathers and grandfathers used to be. An English visitor who
+wishes to see the island is not allowed to take his chance at
+hotels--where, indeed, his chance would be a bad one. A single
+acquaintance is enough to start with. He is sent on with letters of
+introduction from one house to another, and is assured of a favourable
+reception. I was treated as kindly as any stranger would be, and that
+was as kindly as possible. But friends do not ask us to stay with them
+that their portraits may be drawn in the traveller's journals; and I
+mention no one who was thus good to me, unless some general interest
+attaches either to himself or his residence. Such interest does,
+however, attach to a spot where, after leaving Mandeville, I passed a
+few days. The present owner of it was the chief manager of the Kingston
+branch of the Colonial Bank: a clever accomplished man of business, who
+understood the financial condition of the West Indies better perhaps
+than any other man living. He was a botanist besides; he had a fine
+collection of curious plants which were famous in the island; and was
+otherwise a gentleman of the highest standing and reputation. His lady
+was one of the old island aristocracy--high-bred, cultivated, an
+accomplished artist; a person who would have shone anywhere and in any
+circle, and was, therefore, contented to be herself, and indifferent
+whether she shone or not. A visit in such a family was likely to be
+instructive, and was sure to be agreeable; and on these grounds alone I
+should have accepted gratefully the opportunity of knowing them better
+which they kindly made for me by an invitation to stay with them. But
+their place, which was called Cherry Garden, and which I had seen from
+the grounds at Government House, had a further importance of its own in
+having been the home of the unfortunate George William Gordon.
+
+The disturbances with which Mr. Gordon was connected, and for his share
+in which he was executed, are so recent and so notorious that I need
+give no detailed account of them, though, of course, I looked into the
+history again and listened to all that I could hear about it. Though I
+had taken no part in Mr. Eyre's defence, I was one of those who thought
+from the first that Mr. Eyre had been unworthily sacrificed to public
+clamour. Had the agitation in Jamaica spread, and taken the form which
+it easily might have taken, he would have been blamed as keenly by one
+half the world if he had done nothing to check it as he was blamed, in
+fact, by the other for too much energy. Carlyle used to say that it was
+as if, when a ship had been on fire, and the captain by skill and
+promptitude had put the fire out, his owner were to say to him, 'Sir,
+you poured too much water down the hold and damaged the cargo.' The
+captain would answer, 'Yes, sir, but I have saved your ship.' This was
+the view which I carried with me to Jamaica, and I have brought it back
+with me the same in essentials, though qualified by clearer perceptions
+of the real nature of the situation.
+
+Something of a very similar kind had happened in Natal just before I
+visited that colony in 1874. I had seen the whites there hardly
+recovering from a panic in which a common police case had been magnified
+by fear into the beginning of an insurrection. Langalibalele, a Caffre
+chief within the British dominions, had been insubordinate. He had been
+sent for to Maritzberg, and had invented excuses for disobedience to a
+lawful order. The whites believed at once that there was to be a general
+Caffre rebellion in which they would all be murdered. They resolved to
+be beforehand with it. They carried fire and sword through two
+considerable tribes. At first they thought that they had covered
+themselves with glory; calmer reflection taught many of them that
+perhaps they had been too hasty, and that Langalibalele had never
+intended to rebel at all. The Jamaican disturbance was of a similar
+kind. Mr. Gordon had given less provocation than the Caffre chief, but
+the circumstances were analogous, and the actual danger was probably
+greater. Jamaica had then constitutional, though not what is called
+responsible, government. The executive power remained with the Crown.
+There had been differences of opinion between the governor and the
+Assembly. Gordon, a man of colour, was a prominent member of the
+opposition. He had called public meetings of the blacks in a distant
+part of the island, and was endeavouring to bring the pressure of public
+opinion on the opposition side. Imprudent as such a step might have been
+among an ignorant and excitable population, where whites and blacks were
+so unequal in numbers, and where they knew so little of each other, Mr.
+Gordon was not going beyond what in constitutional theory he was legally
+entitled to do; nor was his language on the platform, though violent and
+inflammatory, any more so than what we listen to patiently at home.
+Under a popular constitution the people are sovereign; the members of
+the assemblies are popular delegates; and when there is a diversion of
+opinion any man has a right to call the constituencies to express their
+sentiments. If stones were thrown at the police and seditious cries were
+raised, it was no more than might be reasonably expected.
+
+We at home can be calm on such occasions because we know that there is
+no real danger, and that the law is strong enough to assert itself. In
+Jamaica a few thousand white people were living in the middle of negroes
+forty times their number--once their slaves, now raised to be their
+political equals--each regarding the other on the least provocation with
+resentment and suspicion. In England the massacre in Hayti is a
+half-forgotten story. Not one person in a thousand of those who
+clamoured for the prosecution of Governor Eyre had probably ever heard
+of it. In Jamaica it is ever present in the minds of the Europeans as a
+frightful evidence of what the negroes are capable when roused to
+frenzy. The French planters had done nothing particularly cruel to
+deserve their animosity, and were as well regarded by their slaves as
+ever we had been in the English islands. Yet in a fever of political
+excitement, and as a reward for the decree of the Paris Revolutionary
+Government, which declared them free, they allowed the liberty which was
+to have elevated them to the white man's level to turn them into devils;
+and they massacred the whole of the French inhabitants. It was
+inevitable that when the volcano in Jamaica began to show symptoms of
+similar activity the whites residing there should be unable to look on
+with the calmness which we, from thousands of miles away, unreasonably
+expected of them. They imagined their houses in flames, and themselves
+and their families at the mercy of a furious mob. No personal relation
+between the two races has grown up to take the place of slavery. The
+white gentry have blacks for labourers, blacks for domestic servants,
+yet as a rule (though, of course, there are exceptions) they have no
+interest in each other, no esteem nor confidence: therefore any symptom
+of agitation is certain to produce a panic, and panic is always violent.
+
+The blacks who attended Gordon's meetings came armed with guns and
+cutlasses; a party of white volunteers went in consequence to watch
+them, and to keep order if they showed signs of meaning insurrection.
+Stones were thrown; the Riot Act was read, more stones followed, and
+then the volunteers fired, and several persons were killed. Of course
+there was fury. The black mob then actually did rise. They marched about
+that particular district destroying plantations and burning houses. That
+they did so little, and that the flame did not spread, was a proof that
+there was no premeditation of rebellion, no prepared plan of action, no
+previous communication between the different parts of the island with a
+view to any common movement. There was no proof, and there was no
+reason to suppose, that Gordon had intended an armed outbreak. He would
+have been a fool if he had, when constitutional agitation and the weight
+of numbers at his back would have secured him all that he wanted. When
+inflammable materials are brought together, and sparks are flying, you
+cannot equitably distribute the blame or the punishment. Eyre was
+responsible for the safety of the island. He was not a Jamaican. The
+rule in the colonial service is that a governor remains in any colony
+only long enough to begin to understand it. He is then removed to
+another of which he knows nothing. He is therefore absolutely dependent
+in any difficulty upon local advice. When the riots began every white
+man in Jamaica was of one opinion, that unless the fire was stamped out
+promptly they would all be murdered. Being without experience himself,
+it was very difficult for Mr. Eyre to disregard so complete a unanimity.
+I suppose that a perfectly calm and determined man would have seen in
+the unanimity itself the evidence of alarm and imagination. He ought
+perhaps to have relied entirely on the police and the regular troops,
+and to have called in the volunteers. But here again was a difficulty;
+for the police were black, and the West India regiments were black, and
+the Sepoy rebellion was fresh in everybody's memory. He had no time to
+deliberate. He had to act, and to act promptly; and if, relying on his
+own judgment, he had disregarded what everyone round him insisted upon,
+and if mischief had afterwards come of it, the censure which would have
+fallen upon him would have been as severe as it would have been
+deserved. He assumed that the English colonists were right and that a
+general rebellion had begun. They all armed. They formed into companies.
+The disturbed district was placed under martial law, and these
+extemporised regiments, too few in number to be merciful, saw safety
+only in striking terror into the poor wretches. It was in Jamaica as it
+was in Natal afterwards; but we must allow for human nature and not be
+hasty to blame. If the rising at Morant Bay was but the boiling over of
+a pot from the orator of an excited patriot, there was deplorable
+cruelty and violence. But, again, it was all too natural. Men do not
+bear easily to see their late servants on their way to become their
+political masters, and they believe the worst of them because they are
+afraid. A model governor would have rather restrained their ardour than
+encouraged it; but all that can be said against Mr. Eyre (so far as
+regarded the general suppression of the insurgents) is that he acted as
+nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand would have acted in
+his place, and more ought not to be expected of average colonial
+governors.
+
+His treatment of Gordon, the original cause of the disturbance, was more
+questionable. Gordon had returned to his own house, the house where I
+was going, within sight of Eyre's windows. It would have been fair, and
+perhaps right, to arrest him, and right also to bring him to trial, if
+he had committed any offence for which he could be legally punished. So
+strong was the feeling against him that, if every white man in Kingston
+had been empannelled, there would have been a unanimous verdict, and
+they would not have looked too closely into niceties of legal
+construction. Unfortunately it was doubtful whether Gordon had done
+anything which could be construed into a capital crime. He had a right
+to call public meetings together. He had a right to appeal to political
+passions, and to indulge as freely as he pleased in the patriotic
+commonplaces of platforms, provided he did not himself advise or
+encourage a breach of the peace, and this it could not be easily proved
+that he had done. He was, however, the leader of the opposition to the
+Government. The opposition had broken into a riot, and Gordon was guilty
+of having excited the feelings which led to it. The leader could not be
+allowed to escape unpunished while his followers were being shot and
+flogged. The Kingston district where he resided was under the ordinary
+law. Eyre sent him into the district which was under martial law, tried
+him by a military court and hanged him.
+
+The Cabinet at home at first thanked their representative for having
+saved the island. A clamour rose, and they sent out a commission to
+examine into what had happened. The commission reported unfavourably,
+and Eyre was dismissed and ruined. In Jamaica I never heard anyone
+express a doubt on the full propriety of his action. He carried away
+with him the affection and esteem of the whole of the English colonists,
+who believe that he saved them from destruction. In my own opinion the
+fault was not in Mr. Eyre, and was not in the unfortunate Gordon, but in
+those who had insisted on applying a constitutional form of government
+to a country where the population is so unfavourably divided. If the
+numbers of white and black were more nearly equal, the objection would
+be less, for the natural superiority of the white would then assert
+itself without difficulty, and there would be no panics. Where the
+disproportion is so enormous as it is in Jamaica, where intelligence and
+property are in a miserable minority, and a half-reclaimed race of
+savages, cannibals not long ago, and capable, as the state of Hayti
+shows, of reverting to cannibalism again, are living beside them as
+their political equals, such panics arise from the nature of things, and
+will themselves cause the catastrophe from the dread of which they
+spring. Mutual fear and mistrust can lead to nothing in the end but
+violent collisions. The theory of constitutional government is that the
+majority shall rule the minority, and as long as the qualities, moral
+and mental, of the parties are not grossly dissimilar, such an
+arrangement forms a tolerable _modus vivendi_. Where in character, in
+mental force, in energy, in cultivation, there is no equality at all,
+but an inequality which has existed for thousands of years, and is as
+plain to-day as it was in the Egypt of the Pharaohs, to expect that the
+intelligent few will submit to the unintelligent many is to expect what
+has never been found and what never ought to be found. The whites cannot
+be trusted to rule the blacks, but for the blacks to rule the whites is
+a yet grosser anomaly. Were England out of the way, there would be a war
+of extermination between them. England prohibits it, and holds the
+balance in forced equality. England, therefore, so long as the West
+Indies are English, must herself rule, and rule impartially, and so
+acquit herself of her self-chosen responsibilities. Let the colonies
+which are occupied by our own race rule themselves as we rule ourselves.
+The English constituencies have no rights over the constituencies of
+Canada and Australia, for the Canadians and Australians are as well able
+to manage their own affairs as we are to manage ours. If they prefer
+even to elect governors of their own, let them do as they please. The
+link between us is community of blood and interest, and will not part
+over details of administration. But in these other colonies which are
+our own we must accept the facts as they are. Those who will not
+recognise realities are always beaten in the end.
+
+The train from Porus brought us back to Kingston an hour before sunset.
+The evening was lovely, even for Jamaica. The sea breeze had fallen. The
+land breeze had not risen, and the dust lay harmless on road and hedge.
+Cherry Garden, to which I was bound, was but seven miles distant by the
+direct road, so I calculated on a delightful drive which would bring me
+to my destination before dark. So I calculated; but alas! for human
+expectation. I engaged a 'buggy' at the station, with a decent-looking
+conductor, who assured me that he knew the way to Cherry Garden as well
+as to his own door. His horse looked starved and miserable. He insisted
+that there was not another in Kingston that was more than a match for
+it. We set out, and for the first two or three miles we went on well
+enough, conversing amicably upon things in general. But it so happened
+that it was again market day. The road was thronged as before with women
+plodding along with their baskets on their heads, a single male on a
+donkey to each detachment of them, carrying nothing, like an officer
+with a company of soldiers. Foolish indignation rose in me, and I asked
+my friend if he was not ashamed of seeing the poor creatures toiling so
+cruelly, while their lords and masters amused themselves. I appealed to
+his feelings as a man, as if it was likely that he had got any. The
+wretch only laughed. 'Ah, massa,' he said, with his tongue in his cheek,
+'women do women's work, men do men's work--all right.' 'And what is
+men's work?' I asked. Instead of answering he went on, 'Look at they
+women, massa--how they laugh--how happy they be! Nobody more happy than
+black woman, massa.' I would not let him off. I pricked into him, till
+he got excited too, and we argued and contradicted each other, till at
+last the horse, finding he was not attended to, went his own way and
+that was a wrong one. Between Kingston and our destination there is a
+deep sandy flat, overgrown with bush and penetrated in all directions
+with labyrinthine lanes. Into this we had wandered in our quarrels, and
+neither of us knew where we were. The sand was loose; our miserable
+beast was above his fetlocks in it, and was visibly dropping under his
+efforts to drag us along even at a walk. The sun went down. The tropic
+twilight is short. The evening star shone out in the west, and the
+crescent moon over our heads. My man said this and said that; every word
+was a lie, for he had lost his way and would not allow it. We saw a
+light through some trees. I sent him to inquire. We were directed one
+way and another way, every way except the right one. We emerged at last
+upon a hard road of some kind. The stars told me the general direction.
+We came to cottages where the name of Cherry Garden was known, and we
+were told that it was two miles off; but alas! again there were two
+roads to it; a short and good one, and a long and bad one, and they sent
+us by the last. There was a steep hill to climb, for the house is 800
+feet above the sea. The horse could hardly crawl, and my 'nigger' went
+to work to flog him to let off his own ill humour. I had to stop that by
+force, and at last, as it grew too dark to see the road under the trees,
+I got out and walked, leaving him to follow at a foot's pace. The night
+was lovely. I began to think that we should have to camp out after all,
+and that it would be no great hardship.
+
+It was like the gloaming of a June night in England, the daylight in the
+open spots not entirely gone, and mixing softly with the light of moon
+and planet and the flashing of the fireflies. I plodded on mile after
+mile, and Cherry Garden still receded to one mile farther. We came to a
+gate of some consequence. The outline of a large mansion was visible
+with gardens round it. I concluded that we had arrived, and was feeling
+for the latch when the forms of a lady and gentleman appeared against
+the sky who were strolling in the grounds. They directed me still
+upwards, with the mile which never diminished still to be travelled.
+Like myself, our weary animal had gathered hopes from the sight of the
+gate. He had again to drag on as he could. His owner was subdued and
+silent, and obeyed whatever order I gave him. The trees now closed over
+us so thick that I could see nothing. Vainly I repented of my
+unnecessary philanthropy which had been the cause of the mischief; what
+had I to do with black women, or white either for that matter? I had to
+feel the way with my feet and a stick. I came to a place where the lane
+again divided. I tried the nearest turn. I found a trench across it
+three feet deep, which had been cut by a torrent. This was altogether
+beyond the capacity of our unfortunate animal, so I took the other
+boldly, prepared if it proved wrong to bivouac till morning with my
+'nigger,' and go on with my argument. Happily there was no need; we came
+again on a gate which led into a field. There was a drive across it and
+wire fences. Finally lights began to glimmer and dogs to bark: we were
+at the real Cherry Garden at last, and found the whole household alarmed
+for what had become of us. I could not punish my misleader by stinting
+his fare, for I knew that I had only myself to blame. He was an honest
+fellow after all. In the disturbance of my mind I left a rather valuable
+umbrella in his buggy. He discovered it after he had gone, and had grace
+enough to see that it was returned to me.
+
+My entertainers were much amused at the cause of the misadventure,
+perhaps unique of its kind; to address homilies to the black people on
+the treatment of their wives not being the fashion in these parts.
+
+If there are no more Aaron Bangs in Jamaica, there are very charming
+people; as I found when I turned this new leaf in my West Indian
+experience. Mr. M---- could not have taken more pains with me if I had
+been his earliest friend. The chief luxury which he allowed himself in
+his simple life was a good supply of excellent horses. His business took
+him every day to Kingston, but he left me in charge of his family, and I
+had 'a good time,' as the Americans say. The house was large, with fine
+airy rooms, a draught so constantly blowing through it that the candles
+had to be covered with bell glasses; but the draughts in these countries
+are the very breath of life. It had been too dark when I arrived to see
+anything of the surroundings, and the next morning I strolled out to see
+what the place was like. It lies just at the foot of the Blue Mountains,
+where the gradual slope from the sea begins to become steep. The plain
+of Kingston lay stretched before me, with its woods and cornfields and
+villas, the long straggling town, the ships at anchor in the harbour,
+the steamers passing in and out with their long trails of smoke, the
+sand-spit like a thin grey line lying upon the water, as the natural
+breakwater by which the harbour is formed, and beyond it the broad blue
+expanse of the Caribbean Sea. The foreground was like an English park,
+studded over with handsome forest trees and broken by the rains into
+picturesque ravines. Some acres were planted with oranges of the choicer
+sorts, as an experiment to show what Jamaica could do, but they were as
+yet young and had not come into bearing. Round the house were gardens
+where the treasures of our hot-houses were carelessly and lavishly
+scattered. Stephanotis trailed along the railing or climbed over the
+trellis. Oleanders white and pink waved over marble basins, and were
+sprinkled by the spray from spouting fountains. Crotons stood about in
+tubs, not small plants as we know them, but large shrubs; great purple
+or parti-coloured bushes. They have a fancy for crotons in the West
+Indies; I suppose as a change from the monotony of green. I cannot share
+it. A red leaf, except in autumn before it falls, is a kind of monster,
+and I am glad that Nature has made so few of them. In the shade of the
+trees behind the house was a collection of orchids, the most perfect, I
+believe, in the island.
+
+[Illustration: KINGSTON AND HARBOUR FROM CHERRY GARDEN.]
+
+And here Gordon had lived. Here he had been arrested and carried away to
+his death; his crime being that he had dreamt of regenerating the negro
+race by baptising them in the Jordan of English Radicalism. He would
+have brought about nothing but confusion, and have precipitated Jamaica
+prematurely into the black anarchy into which perhaps it is still
+destined to fall. But to hang him was an extreme measure, and, in the
+present state of public opinion, a dangerous one.
+
+One does not associate the sons of darkness with keen perceptions of the
+beautiful. Yet no mortal ever selected a lovelier spot for a residence
+than did Gordon in choosing Cherry Garden. How often had his round dark
+eyes wandered over the scenes at which I was gazing, watched the early
+rays of the sun slanting upwards to the high peaks of the Blue
+Mountains, or the last as he sank in gold and crimson behind the hills
+at Mandeville; watched the great steamers entering or leaving Port
+Royal, and at night the gleam of the lighthouse from among the palm
+trees on the spit. Poor fellow! one felt very sorry for him, and sorry
+for Mr. Eyre, too. The only good that came of it all was the surrender
+of the constitution and the return to Crown government, and this our
+wonderful statesmen are beginning to undo.
+
+No one understood better than Mr. M---- the troubles and dangers of the
+colony, but he was inclined, perhaps by temperament, perhaps by
+knowledge, to take a cheerful view of things. For the present at least
+he did not think that there was anything serious to be feared. The
+finances, of which he had the best means of judging, were in tolerable
+condition. The debt was considerable, but more than half of it was
+represented by a railway. If sugar was languishing, the fruit trade with
+the United States was growing with the liveliest rapidity. Planters and
+merchants were not making fortunes, but business went on. The shares in
+the Colonial Bank were not at a high quotation, but the securities were
+sound, the shareholders got good dividends, and eight and ten per cent.
+was the interest charged on loans. High interest might be a good sign or
+a bad one. Anyway Mr. M---- could not see that there was much to be
+afraid of in Jamaica. There had been bad times before, and they had
+survived notwithstanding. He was a man of business, and talked himself
+little about politics. As it had been, so it would be again.
+
+In his absence at his work I found friends in the neighbourhood who were
+all attention and politeness. One took me to see my acquaintances at the
+camp again. Another drove me about, showed me the house where Scott had
+lived, the author of 'Tom Cringle.' One round in particular left a
+distinct impression. It was through a forest which had once been a
+flourishing sugar estate. Deep among the trees were the ruins of an
+aqueduct which had brought water to the mill, now overgrown and
+crumbling. The time had not been long as we count time in the history of
+nations, but there had been enough for the arches to fall in, the stream
+to return to its native bed, the tropical vegetation to spring up in its
+wild luxuriance and bury in shade the ruins of a past civilisation.
+
+I fell in with interesting persons who talked metaphysics and theology
+with me, though one would not have expected it in Jamaica. In this
+strange age of ours the spiritual atmosphere is more confused than at
+any period during the last eighteen hundred years. Men's hearts are
+failing them for fear, not knowing any longer where to rest. We look
+this way and that way, and catch at one another like drowning men. Go
+where you will, you find the same phenomena. Science grows, and
+observers are adding daily to our knowledge of the nature and structure
+of the material universe, but they tell us nothing, and can tell us
+nothing, of what we most want to know. They cannot tell us what our own
+nature is. They cannot tell us what God is, or what duty is. We had a
+belief once, in which, as in a boat, we floated safely on the unknown
+ocean; but the philosophers and critics have been boring holes in the
+timbers to examine the texture of the wood, and now it leaks at every
+one of them. We have to help ourselves in the best way that we can. Some
+strike out new ideas for themselves, others go back to the seven sages,
+and lay again for themselves the old eggs, which, after laborious
+incubation, will be addled as they were addled before. To my
+metaphysical friends in Jamaica the 'Light of Asia' had been shining
+amidst German dreams, and the moonlight of the Vedas had been
+illuminating the pessimism of Schopenhauer. So it is all round. Mr. ----
+goes to Mount Carmel to listen for communications from Elijah;
+fashionable countesses to the shrine of Our Lady at Lourdes. 'Are you a
+Buddhist?' lisps the young lady in Mayfair to the partner with whom she
+is sitting out at a ball. 'It is so nice,' said a gentleman to me who
+has been since promoted to high office in an unfortunate colony, 'it is
+so nice to talk of such things to pretty girls, and it always ends in
+one way, you know.' Conversations on theology, at least between persons
+of opposite sex, ought to be interdicted by law for everyone under
+forty. But there are questions on which old people may be permitted to
+ask one another what they think, if it only be for mutual comfort in the
+general vacancy. We are born alone, we pass alone into the great
+darkness. When the curtain falls is the play over? or is a new act to
+commence? Are we to start again in a new sphere, carrying with us what
+we have gained in the discipline of our earthly trials? Are we to become
+again as we were before we came into this world, when eternity had not
+yet splintered into time, or the universal being dissolved into
+individual existences? For myself, I have long ceased to speculate on
+these subjects, being convinced that they have no bottom which can be
+reasoned out by the intellect. We are in a world where much can be
+learnt which affects our own and others' earthly welfare, and we had
+better leave the rest alone. Yet one listens and cannot choose but
+sympathise when anxious souls open out to you what is going on within
+them. A Spanish legend, showing with whom these inquiries began and with
+what result, is not without its value.
+
+Jupiter, having made the world, proceeded to make animals to live in it.
+The ass was the earliest created. He looked about him. He looked at
+himself; and, as the habit of asses is, he asked himself what it all
+meant; what it was to be an ass, where did he come from, and what he was
+for? Not being able to discover, he applied to his maker. Jupiter told
+him that he was made to be the slave of another animal to be called Man.
+He was to carry men on his back, drag loads for them, and be their
+drudge. He was to live on thistles and straw, and to be beaten
+continually with sticks and ropes'-ends. The ass complained. He said
+that he had done nothing to deserve so hard a fate. He had not asked to
+be born, and he would rather not have been born. He inquired how long
+this life, or whatever it was, had to continue. Jupiter said it had to
+last thirty years. The poor ass was in consternation. If Jupiter would
+reduce the thirty to ten he undertook to be patient, to be a good
+servant, and to do his work patiently. Jupiter reflected and consented,
+and the ass retired grateful and happy.
+
+The dog, who had been born meanwhile, heard what had passed. He, too,
+went to Jupiter with the same question. He learnt that he also was a
+slave to men. In the day he was to catch their game for them, but was
+not to eat it himself. At night he was to be chained by a ring and to
+lie awake to guard their houses. His food was to be bones and refuse.
+Like the ass he was to have had thirty years of it, but on petition they
+were similarly exchanged for ten.
+
+The monkey came next. His function, he was told, was to mimic humanity,
+to be led about by a string, and grimace and dance for men's amusement.
+He also remonstrated at the length of time, and obtained the same
+favour.
+
+Last came the man himself. Conscious of boundless desires and, as he
+imagined, of boundless capabilities, he did not inquire what he was, or
+what he was to do. Those questions had been already answered by his
+vanity. He did not come to ask for anything, but to thank Jupiter for
+having created so glorious a being and to ascertain for how many ages
+he might expect to endure. The god replied that thirty years was the
+term allotted to all personal existences.
+
+'Only thirty years!' he exclaimed. 'Only thirty years for such
+capacities as mine. Thirty years will be gone like a dream. Extend them!
+oh, extend them, gracious Jupiter, that I may have leisure to use the
+intellect which thou hast given me, search into the secrets of nature,
+do great and glorious actions, and serve and praise thee, O my creator!
+longer and more worthily.'
+
+The lip of the god curled lightly, and again he acquiesced. 'I have some
+spare years to dispose of,' he said, 'of which others of my creatures
+have begged to be relieved. You shall have thirty years of your own.
+From thirty to fifty you shall have the ass's years, and labour and
+sweat for your support. From fifty to seventy you shall have the dog's
+years, and take care of the stuff, and snarl and growl at what younger
+men are doing. From seventy to ninety you shall have the monkey's years,
+and smirk and grin and make yourself ridiculous. After that you may
+depart.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was going on to Cuba. The commodore had insisted on my spending my
+last days with him at Port Royal. He undertook to see me on board the
+steamer as it passed out of the harbour. I have already described his
+quarters. The naval station has no colonial character except the
+climate, and is English entirely. The officers are the servants of the
+Admiralty, not of the colonial government. Their interests are in their
+profession. They look to promotion in other parts of the world, and
+their functions are on the ocean and not on the land. The commodore is
+captain of the guardship; but he has a commander under him and he
+resides on shore. Everyone employed in the dockyard, even down to his
+own household, is rated on the ship's books, consequently they are all
+men. There is not a woman servant about the place, save his lady's
+ladies'-maid. His daughters learn to take care of themselves, and are
+not brought up to find everything done for them. His boys are about the
+world in active service growing into useful and honourable manhood.
+
+Thus the whole life tastes of the element to which it belongs, and is
+salt and healthy as the ocean itself. It was not without its
+entertainments. The officers of the garrison were to give a ball. The
+young ladies of Kingston are not afraid of the water, cross the harbour
+in the steam launches, dance till the small hours, return in the dark,
+drive their eight or ten miles home, and think nothing of it. In that
+climate, night is pleasanter to be abroad in than day. I could not stay
+to be present, but I was in the midst of the preparations, and one
+afternoon there was a prospect of a brilliant addition to the party. A
+yacht steamed inside the Point--long, narrow, and swift as a torpedo
+boat. She carried American colours, and we heard that she was the famous
+vessel of the yet more famous Mr. Vanderbilt, who was on board with his
+family. Here was an excitement! The commodore was ordered to call the
+instant that she was anchored. Invitations were prepared--all was
+eagerness. Alas! she did not anchor at all. She learnt from the pilot
+that, the small-pox being in Jamaica, if any of her people landed there
+she would be quarantined in the other islands, and to the disappointment
+of everyone, even of myself, who would gladly have seen the great
+millionaire, she turned about and went off again to sea.
+
+I was very happy at the commodore's--low spirits not being allowed in
+that wholesome element. Decks were washed every morning as if at sea,
+i.e. every floor was scrubbed and scoured. It was an eternal washing
+day, lines of linen flying in the brisk sea breeze. The commodore was
+always busy making work if none had been found for him. He took me one
+day to see the rock spring where Rodney watered his fleet, as the great
+admiral describes in one of his letters, and from which Port Royal now
+draws its supply. The spring itself bursts full and clear out of the
+limestone rock close to the shore, four or five miles from Kingston.
+There is a natural basin, slightly improved by art, from which the old
+conduit pipes carry the stream to the sea. The tug comes daily, fills
+its tanks, and returns. The commodore has tidied up the place, planted
+shrubs, and cleared away the bush; but half the water at least, is still
+allowed to leak away, and turns the hollow below into an unwholesome
+swamp. It may be a necessity, but it is also a misfortune, that the
+officers at distant stations hold their appointments for so short a
+term. By the time that they have learnt what can or ought to be done,
+they are sent elsewhere, and their successor has to begin over again.
+The water in this spring, part of which is now worse than wasted and the
+rest carried laboriously in a vessel to Port Royal to be sold by measure
+to the people there, might be all conducted thither by pipes at small
+cost and trouble, were the commodore to remain a few years longer at the
+Jamaica Station.
+
+He is his own boatman, and we had some fine sails about the lagoon--the
+breeze always fresh and the surface always smooth. The shallow bays
+swarm with small fish, and it was a pretty thing to watch the pelicans
+devouring them. They gather in flocks, sweep and wheel in the air, and
+when they plunge they strike the water with a violence which one would
+expect would break their wings. They do not dive, but seize their prey
+with their long, broad bills, and seem never to miss.
+
+Between the ships and the barracks, there are many single men in Port
+Royal, for whom amusement has to be found if they are to be kept from
+drink. A canteen is provided for them, with bowling alley, tennis court,
+beer in moderation, and a reading room, for such as like it, with
+reviews and magazines and newspapers They can fish if they want sport,
+and there are sharks in plenty a cable's length from shore; but the
+schoolmaster has been abroad, and tastes run in more refined directions.
+The blacks of Tobago acted 'The Merchant of Venice' before Governor
+S----. The ships' companies of the gunboats at Port Royal gave a concert
+while I was there. The officers took no part, and left the men to manage
+it as they pleased. The commodore brought his party; the garrison, the
+crews of the other ships, and stray visitors came, and the large room at
+the canteen was completely full. The taste of the audience was curious.
+Dibdin was off the boards altogether, and favour was divided between the
+London popular comic song and the sentimental--no longer with any
+flavour of salt about it, but the sentimental spoony and sickly. 'She
+wore a wreath of roses' called out the highest enthusiasm. One of the
+performers recited a long poem of his own about Mary Stuart, 'the lovely
+and unfortunate.' Then followed the buffoonery; and this was at least
+genuine rough and tumble if there was little wit in it. A lad capered
+about on a tournament horse which flung him every other moment. Various
+persons pretended to be drunk, and talked and staggered as drunken men
+do. Then there was a farce, how conceived and by what kind of author I
+was puzzled to make out. A connoisseur of art is looking for Greek
+antiques. He has heard that a statue has recently been discovered of
+'Ajax quarrelling with his mother-in-law.' What Ajax was quarrelling
+about or who his mother-in-law might be does not appear. A couple of
+rogues, each unknown to the other, practise on the connoisseur's
+credulity. Each promises him the statue; each dresses up a confederate
+on a pedestal with a modern soldier's helmet and a blanket to represent
+a Greek hero. The two figures are shown to him. One of them, I forget
+how, contrived to pass as Ajax; the other had turned into Hercules doing
+something to the Stymphalides. At last they get tired of standing to be
+looked at, jump down, and together knock over the connoisseur. Ajax then
+turns on Hercules, who, of course, is ready for a row. They fight till
+they are tired, and then make it up over a whisky bottle.
+
+So entirely new an aspect of the British tar took me by surprise, and I
+speculated whether the inventors and performers of this astonishing
+drama were an advance on the Ben Bunting type. I was, of course,
+inclined to say no, but my tendency is to dislike changes, and I allow
+for it. The commodore said that in certain respects there really was an
+advance. The seamen fell into few scrapes, and they did not get drunk so
+often. This was a hardy assertion of the commodore, as a good many of
+them were drunk at that moment. I could see myself that they were
+better educated. If Ben Bunting had been asked who Ajax and Hercules
+were, he would have taken them to be three-deckers which were so named,
+and his knowledge would have gone no farther. Whether these tars of the
+new era are better sailors and braver and truer men is another question.
+They understand their rights much better, if that does any good to them.
+The officers used to be treated with respect at all times and seasons.
+This is now qualified. When they are on duty, the men are as respectful
+as they used to be; when they are off duty, the commodore himself is
+only old H----.
+
+We returned to the dockyard in a boat under a full moon, the guardship
+gleaming white in the blue midnight and the phosphorescent water
+flashing under the oars. The 'Dee,' which was to take me to Havana, was
+off Port Royal on the following morning. The commodore put me on board
+in his gig, with the white ensign floating over the stern. I took leave
+of him with warm thanks for his own and his family's hospitable
+entertainment of me. The screw went round--we steamed away out of the
+harbour, and Jamaica and the kind friends whom I had found there faded
+out of sight. Jamaica was the last of the English West India Islands
+which I visited. I was to see it again, but I will here set down the
+impressions which had been left upon me by what I had seen there and
+seen in the Antilles.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+    Present state of Jamaica--Test of progress--Resources of the
+    island--Political alternatives--Black supremacy and probable
+    consequences--The West Indian problem.
+
+
+As I was stepping into the boat at Port Royal, a pamphlet was thrust
+into my hand, which I was entreated to read at my leisure. It was by
+some discontented white of the island--no rare phenomenon, and the
+subject of it was the precipitate decline in the value of property
+there. The writer, unlike the planters, insisted that the people were
+taxed in proportion to their industry. There were taxes on mules, on
+carts, on donkeys, all bearing on the small black proprietors, whose
+ability to cultivate was thus checked, and who were thus deliberately
+encouraged in idleness. He might have added, although he did not, that
+while both in Jamaica and Trinidad everyone is clamouring against the
+beetroot bounty which artificially lowers the price of sugar, the local
+councils in these two islands try to counteract the effect and
+artificially raise the price of sugar by an export duty on their own
+produce--a singular method of doing it which, I presume, admits of
+explanation. My pamphleteer was persuaded that all the world were fools,
+and that he and his friends were the only wise ones: again a not
+uncommon occurrence in pamphleteers. He demanded the suppression of
+absenteeism; he demanded free trade. In exchange for the customs duties,
+which were to be abolished, he demanded a land tax--the very mention of
+which, I had been told by others, drove the black proprietors whom he
+wished to benefit into madness. He wanted Home Rule. He wanted fifty
+things besides which I have forgotten, but his grand want of all was a
+new currency. Mankind, he thought, had been very mad at all periods of
+their history. The most significant illustration of their madness had
+been the selection of gold and silver as the medium of exchange. The
+true base of the currency was the land. The Government of Jamaica was to
+lend to every freeholder up to the mortgage value of his land in paper
+notes, at 5 per cent. interest, the current rate being at present 8 per
+cent. The notes so issued, having the land as their security, would be
+in no danger of depreciation, and they would flow over the sugar estates
+like an irrigating stream. On the produce of sugar the fate of the
+island depended.
+
+On the produce of sugar? And why not on the produce of a fine race of
+men? The prospects of Jamaica, the prospects of all countries, depend
+not on sugar or on any form or degree of material wealth, but on the
+characters of the men and women whom they are breeding and rearing.
+Where there are men and women of a noble nature, the rest will go well
+of itself; where these are not, there will be no true prosperity though
+the sugar hogsheads be raised from thousands into millions. The colonies
+are interesting only as offering homes where English people can increase
+and multiply; English of the old type with simple habits, who do not
+need imported luxuries. There is room even in the West Indies for
+hundreds of thousands of them if they can be contented to lead human
+lives, and do not go there to make fortunes which they are to carry home
+with them. The time may not be far off when men will be sick of making
+fortunes, sick of being ground to pattern in the commonplace mill-wheel
+of modern society; sick of a state of things which blights and kills
+simple and original feeling, which makes us think and speak and act
+under the tyranny of general opinion, which masquerades as liberty and
+means only submission to the newspapers. I can conceive some modern men
+may weary of all this, and retire from it like the old ascetics, not as
+they did into the wilderness, but behind their own walls and hedges,
+shutting out the world and its noises, to inquire whether after all they
+have really immortal souls, and, if they have, what ought to be done
+about them. The West India Islands, with their inimitable climate and
+soil and prickly pears _ad libitum_ to make fences with, would be fine
+places for such recluses. Failing these ideal personages, there is work
+enough of the common sort to create wholesome prosperity. There are
+oranges to be grown, and pines and plantains, and coffee and cocoa, and
+rice and indigo and tobacco, not to speak of the dollars which my
+American friend found in the bamboos, and of the further dollars which
+other Americans will find in the untested qualities of thousands of
+other productions. Here are opportunities for innocent industrious
+families, where children can be brought up to be manly and simple and
+true and brave as their fathers were brought up, or as their fathers
+expressed it 'in the nurture and admonition of the Lord;' while such
+neighbours as their dark brothers-in-law might have a chance of a rise
+in life, in the only sense in which a 'rise' can be of real benefit to
+them. These are the objects which statesmen who have the care and
+conduct of a nation's welfare ought to set before themselves, and
+unfortunately they are the last which are remembered in countries which
+are popularly governed. There is a clamour for education in such
+countries, but education means to them only the sharpening of the
+faculties for the competitive race which is called progress. In
+democracies no one man is his brother's keeper. Each lives and struggles
+to make his own way and his own position. All that is insisted on is
+that there shall be a fair stage and that every lad shall learn the use
+of the weapons which will enable him to fight his own way. [Greek:
+Arete],'manliness,' the most essential of all acquisitions and the
+hardest to cultivate, as Aristotle observed long ago, is assumed in
+democracies as a matter of course. Of [Greek: arete] a moderate
+quantity [Greek: hoposonoun] would do, and in Aristotle's opinion this
+was the rock on which the Greek republics foundered. Their [Greek:
+arete] did not come as a matter of course, and they lost it, and the
+Macedonians and the Romans ate them up.
+
+From this point of view political problems, and the West Indian among
+them, present unusual aspects. Looking to the West Indies only, we took
+possession of those islands when they were of supreme importance in our
+great wrestle with Spain and France. We were fighting then for the
+liberties of the human race. The Spaniards had destroyed the original
+Carib and Indian inhabitants. We induced thousands of our own
+fellow-countrymen to venture life and fortune in the occupation of our
+then vital conquests. For two centuries we furnished them with black
+servants whom we purchased on the African coast and carried over and
+sold there, making our own profits out of the trade, and the colonists
+prospered themselves and poured wealth and strength into the empire of
+which they were then an integral part. A change passed over the spirit
+of the age. Liberty assumed a new dress. We found slavery to be a crime;
+we released our bondmen; we broke their chains as we proudly described
+it to ourselves; we compensated the owners, so far as money could
+compensate, for the entire dislocation of a state of society which we
+had ourselves created; and we trusted to the enchantment of liberty to
+create a better in its place. We had delivered our own souls; we had
+other colonies to take our emigrants. Other lands under our open trade
+would supply us with the commodities for which we had hitherto been
+dependent on the West Indies. They ceased to be of commercial, they
+ceased to be of political, moment to us, and we left them to their own
+resources. The modern English idea is that everyone must take care of
+himself. Individuals or aggregates of individuals have the world before
+them, to open the oyster or fail to open it according to their
+capabilities. The State is not to help them; the State is not to
+interfere with them unless for political or party reasons it happens to
+be convenient. As we treat ourselves we treat our colonies. Those who
+have gone thither have gone of their own free will, and must take the
+consequences of their own actions. We allow them no executional
+privileges which we do not claim for ourselves. They must stand, if they
+are to stand, by their own strength. If they cannot stand they must
+fall. This is our notion of education in 'manliness,' and for immediate
+purposes answers well enough. Individual enterprise, unendowed but
+unfettered, built the main buttresses of the British colonial empire.
+Australians and New Zealanders are English and Scotchmen who have
+settled at the antipodes where there is more room for them than at home.
+They are the same people as we are, and they have the same privileges as
+we have. They are parts of one and the same organic body as branches
+from the original trunk. The branch does not part from the trunk, but it
+discharges its own vital functions by its own energy, and we no more
+desire to interfere than London desires to interfere with Manchester.
+
+So it stands with us where the colonists are of our race, with the same
+character and the same objects; and, as I said, the system answers.
+Under no other relations could we continue a united people. But it does
+not answer--it has failed wherever we have tried it--when the majority
+of the inhabitants of countries of which for one or other reason we have
+possessed ourselves, and of which we keep possession, are not united to
+us by any of these natural bonds, where they have been annexed by
+violence or otherwise been forced under our flag. It has failed
+conspicuously in Ireland. We know that it would fail in the East Indies
+if we were rash enough to venture the experiment. Self-government in
+connection with the British Empire implies a desire or a willingness in
+those who are so left to themselves that the connection shall continue.
+We have been so sanguine as to believe that the privilege of being
+British subjects is itself sufficient to secure their allegiance; that
+the liberties which we concede will not be used for purposes which we
+are unable to tolerate; that, being left to govern themselves, they will
+govern in harmony with English interests and according to English
+principles. The privilege is not estimated so highly. They go their own
+way and not our way, and therefore we must look facts in the face as
+they are, and not as we wish them to be. If we extend to Ireland the
+independence which only links us closer to Australia, Ireland will use
+it to break away from us. If we extend it to Bengal and Madras and
+Bombay, we shall fling them into anarchy and bring our empire to an end.
+We cannot for our safety's sake part with Ireland. We do not mean to
+part with our Asiatic dominions. The reality of the relation in both
+cases is the superior force of England, and we must rely upon it and
+need not try to conceal that we do, till by the excellence of our
+administration we have converted submission into respect and respect
+into willingness for union. This may be a long process and a difficult
+one. If we choose to maintain our empire, however, we must pay the price
+for empire, and it is wiser, better, safer, in all cases to admit the
+truth and act upon it. Yet Englishmen so love liberty that they struggle
+against confessing what is disagreeable to them. Many of us would give
+Ireland, would give India Home Rule, and run the risk of what would
+happen, and only a probability, which reaches certainty, of the
+consequences to be expected to follow prevents us from unanimously
+agreeing. About the West Indies we do not care very earnestly. Nothing
+seriously alarming can happen there. So much, therefore, for the
+general policy of leaving them to help themselves out of their
+difficulties we have adopted completely. The corollary that they must
+govern themselves also on their own responsibilities we hesitate as yet
+to admit completely; but we do not recognise that any responsibility for
+their failing condition rests on us; and the inclination certainly, and
+perhaps the purpose, is to throw them entirely upon themselves at the
+earliest moment. Cuba sends representatives to the Cortes at Madrid,
+Martinique and Guadaloupe to the Assembly at Paris. In the English
+islands, being unwilling to govern without some semblance of a
+constitution, we try tentatively varieties of local boards and local
+councils, admitting the elective principle but not daring to trust it
+fully; creating hybrid constitutions, so contrived as to provoke ill
+feeling where none would exist without them, and to make impossible any
+tolerable government which could actively benefit the people. We cannot
+intend that arrangements the effects of which are visible so plainly in
+the sinking fortunes of our own kindred there, are to continue for ever.
+We suppose that we cannot go back in these cases. It is to be presumed,
+therefore, that we mean to go forward, and in doing so I venture to
+think myself that we shall be doing equal injustice both to our own race
+and to the blacks, and we shall bring the islands into a condition which
+will be a reproach and scandal to the empire of which they will remain a
+dishonoured part. The slave trade was an imperial monopoly, extorted by
+force, guaranteed by treaties, and our white West Indian interest was
+built up in connection with and in reliance upon it. We had a right to
+set the slaves free; but the payment of the indemnity was no full
+acquittance of our obligations for the condition of a society which we
+had ourselves created. We have no more right to make the emancipated
+slave his master's master in virtue of his numbers than we have a right
+to lay under the heel of the Catholics of Ireland the Protestant
+minority whom we planted there to assist us in controlling them.
+
+It may be said that we have no intention of doing anything of the kind,
+that no one at present dreams of giving a full colonial constitution to
+the West Indian Islands. They are allowed such freedom as they are
+capable of using; they can be allowed more as they are better educated
+and more fit for it, &c. &c.
+
+One knows all that, and one knows what it is worth in the half-elected,
+half-nominated councils. Either the nominated members are introduced
+merely as a drag upon the wheel, and are instructed to yield in the end
+to the demands of the representative members, or they are themselves the
+representatives of the white minority. If the first, the majority rule
+already; if the second, such constitutions are contrived ingeniously to
+create the largest amount of irritation, and to make impossible, as long
+as they last, any form of effective and useful government. Therefore
+they cannot last, and are not meant to last. A principle once conceded
+develops with the same certainty with which a seed grows when it is
+sown. In the English world, as it now stands, there is no middle
+alternative between self-government and government by the Crown, and the
+cause of our reluctance to undertake direct charge of the West Indies is
+because such undertaking carries responsibility along with it. If they
+are brought so close to us we shall be obliged to exert ourselves, and
+to rescue them from a condition which would be a reproach to us.
+
+The English of those islands are melting away. That is a fact to which
+it is idle to try to shut our eyes. Families who have been for
+generations on the soil are selling their estates everywhere and are
+going off. Lands once under high cultivation are lapsing into jungle.
+Professional men of ability and ambition carry their talents to
+countries where they are more sure of reward. Every year the census
+renews its warning. The rate may vary; sometimes for a year or two there
+may seem to be a pause in the movement, but it begins again and is
+always in the same direction. The white is relatively disappearing, the
+black is growing; that is the fact with which we have to deal.
+
+We may say if we please, 'Be it so then; we do not want those islands;
+let the blacks have them, poor devils. They have had wrongs enough in
+this world; let them take their turn and have a good time now.' This I
+imagine is the answer which will rise to the lips of most of us, yet it
+will be an answer which will not be for our honour, nor in the long run
+for our interest. Our stronger colonies will scarcely attach more value
+to their connection with us if they hear us declare impatiently that
+because part of our possessions have ceased to be of money value to us,
+we will not or we cannot take the trouble to provide them with a decent
+government, and therefore cast them off. Nor in the long run will it
+benefit the blacks either. The islands will not be allowed to run wild
+again, and if we leave them some one else will take them who will be
+less tender of his coloured brother's sensibilities. We may think that
+it would not come to that. The islands will still be ours; the English
+flag will still float over the forts; the government, whatever it be,
+will be administered in the Queen's name. Were it worth while, one might
+draw a picture of the position of an English governor, with a black
+parliament and a black ministry, recommending by advice of his
+constitutional ministers some measure like the Haytian Land Law.
+
+No Englishman, not even a bankrupt peer, would consent to occupy such a
+position; the blacks themselves would despise him if he did; and if the
+governor is to be one of their own race and colour, how long could such
+a connection endure?
+
+No one I presume would advise that the whites of the island should
+govern. The relations between the two populations are too embittered,
+and equality once established by law, the exclusive privilege of colour
+over colour cannot be restored. While slavery continued the whites ruled
+effectively and economically; the blacks are now free as they; there are
+two classes in the community; their interests are opposite as they are
+now understood, and one cannot be trusted with control over the other.
+As little can the present order of things continue. The West India
+Islands, once the pride of our empire, the scene of our most brilliant
+achievements, are passing away out of our hands; the remnant of our own
+countrymen, weary of an unavailing struggle, are more and more eager to
+withdraw from the scene, because they find no sympathy and no
+encouragement from home, and are forbidden to accept help from America
+when help is offered them, while under their eyes their quondam slaves
+are multiplying, thriving, occupying, growing strong, and every day more
+conscious of the changed order of things. One does not grudge the black
+man his prosperity, his freedom, his opportunities of advancing himself;
+one would wish to see him as free and prosperous as the fates and his
+own exertions can make him, with more and more means of raising himself
+to the white man's level. But left to himself, and without the white man
+to lead him, he can never reach it, and if we are not to lose the
+islands altogether, or if they are not to remain with us to discredit
+our capacity to rule them, it is left to us only to take the same course
+which we have taken in the East Indies with such magnificent success,
+and to govern whites and blacks alike on the Indian system. The
+circumstances are precisely analogous. We have a population to deal
+with, the enormous majority of whom are of an inferior race. Inferior, I
+am obliged to call them, because as yet, and as a body, they have shown
+no capacity to rise above the condition of their ancestors except under
+European laws, European education, and European authority, to keep them
+from making war on one another. They are docile, good-tempered,
+excellent and faithful servants when they are kindly treated; but their
+notions of right and wrong are scarcely even elementary; their
+education, such as it may be, is but skin deep, and the old African
+superstitions lie undisturbed at the bottom of their souls. Give them
+independence, and in a few generations they will peel off such
+civilisation as they have learnt as easily and as willingly as their
+coats and trousers.
+
+Govern them as we govern India, with the same conscientious care, with
+the same sense of responsibility, with the same impartiality, the same
+disinterested attention to the well-being of our subjects in its
+highest and most honourable sense, and we shall give the world one more
+evidence that while Englishmen can cover the waste places of it with
+free communities of their own blood, they can exert an influence no less
+beneficent as the guides and rulers of those who need their assistance,
+and whom fate and circumstances have assigned to their care. Our kindred
+far away will be more than ever proud to form part of a nation which has
+done more for freedom than any other nation ever did, yet is not a slave
+to formulas, and can adapt its actions to the demands of each community
+which belongs to it. The most timid among us may take courage, for it
+would cost us nothing save the sacrifice of a few official traditions,
+and an abstinence for the future from doubtful uses of colonial
+patronage. The blacks will be perfectly happy when they are satisfied
+that they have nothing to fear for their persons or their properties. To
+the whites it would be the opening of a new era of hope. Should they be
+rash enough to murmur, they might then be justly left to the
+consequences of their own folly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+    Passage to Cuba--A Canadian commissioner--Havana--The Moro--The city
+    and harbour--Cuban money--American visitors--The cathedral--Tomb of
+    Columbus--New friends--The late rebellion--Slave emancipation--Spain
+    and progress--A bull fight.
+
+
+I had gone to the West Indies to see our own colonies, but I could not
+leave those famous seas which were the scene of our ocean duels with the
+Spaniards without a visit to the last of the great possessions of Philip
+II. which remained to his successors. I ought not to say the last, for
+Puerto Rico is Spanish also, but this small island is insignificant and
+has no important memories connected with it. Puerto Rico I had no
+leisure to look at and did not care about, and to see Cuba as it ought
+to be seen required more time than I could afford; but Havana was so
+interesting, both from its associations and its present condition, that
+I could not be within reach of it and pass it by. The body of Columbus
+lies there for one thing, unless a trick was played when the remains
+which were said to be his were removed from St. Domingo, and I wished to
+pay my orisons at his tomb. I wished also to see the race of men who
+have shared the New World with the Anglo-Saxons, and have given a
+language and a religion to half the American continent, in the oldest
+and most celebrated of their Transatlantic cities.
+
+Cuba also had an immediate and present interest. Before the American
+civil war it was on the point of being absorbed into the United States.
+The Spanish Cubans had afterwards a civil war of their own, of which
+only confused accounts had reached us at home. We knew that it had
+lasted ten years, but who had been the parties and what their objects
+had been was very much a mystery. No sooner was it over than, without
+reservation or compensation, the slaves had been emancipated. How a
+country was prospering which had undergone such a succession of shocks,
+and how the Spaniards were dealing with the trials which were bearing so
+hard on our own islands, were inquiries worth making. But beyond these
+it was the land of romance. Columbus and Las Casas, Cortez and Pizarro,
+are the demigods and heroes of the New World. Their names will be
+familiar to the end of time as the founders of a new era, and although
+the modern Spaniards sink to the level of the modern Greeks, their
+illustrious men will hold their place for ever in imagination and
+memory.
+
+Our own Antilles had, as I have said, in their terror of small-pox,
+placed Jamaica under an interdict. The Spaniards at Cuba were more
+generous or more careless. Havana is on the north side of the island,
+facing towards Florida; thus, in going to it from Port Royal, we had to
+round the westernmost cape, and had four days of sea before us. We slid
+along the coast of Jamaica in smooth water, the air, while day lasted,
+intensely hot, but the breeze after nightfall blowing cool from off the
+mountains. We had a polite captain, polite officers, and agreeable
+fellow-passengers, two or three Cubans among them, swarthy, dark-eyed,
+thick-set men--_Americanos_; Spaniards with a difference--with whom I
+cultivated a kind of intimacy. In a cabin it was reported that there
+were again Spanish ladies on their way to the demonic gaieties at
+Darien, but they did not show.
+
+Among the rest of the party was a Canadian gentleman, a Mr. ----,
+exceptionally well-informed and intelligent. Their American treaty
+having been disallowed, the West Indies had proposed to negotiate a
+similar one with the Canadian Dominion. The authorities at Ottawa had
+sent Mr. M---- to see if anything could be done, and Mr. M---- was now
+on his way home, not in the best of humours with our poor relations.
+'The Jamaicans did not know what they wanted,' he said. 'They were
+without spirit to help themselves; they cried out to others to help
+them, and if all they asked could not be granted they clamoured as if
+the whole world was combining to hurt them. There was not the least
+occasion for these passionate appeals to the universe; they could not at
+this moment perhaps "go ahead" as fast as some countries, but there was
+no necessity to be always going ahead. They had a fine country, soil and
+climate all that could be desired, they had all that was required for a
+quiet and easy life, why could they not be contented and make the best
+of things?' Unfortunate Jamaicans! The old mother at home acts like an
+unnatural parent, and will neither help them nor let their Cousin
+Jonathan help them. They turn for comfort to their big brother in the
+north, and the big brother being himself robust and healthy, gives them
+wholesome advice.
+
+Adventures do occasionally happen at sea even in this age of steam
+engines. Ships catch fire or run into each other, or go on rocks in
+fogs, or are caught in hurricanes, and Nature can still assume her old
+terrors if she pleases. Shelley describes a wreck on the coast of
+Cornwall, and the treacherous waters of the ocean in the English
+Channel, now wild in fury, now smiling
+
+    As on the morn When the exulting elements in scorn Satiated with
+    destroyed destruction lay Sleeping in beauty on their mangled prey,
+    As panthers sleep.
+
+The wildest gale which ever blew on British shores was a mere summer
+breeze compared to a West Indian tornado. Behind all that beauty there
+lies the temper and caprice, not of a panther, but of a woman. But no
+tornadoes fell in our way, nor anything else worth mentioning, not even
+a buccaneer or a pirate. We saw the islands which these gentry haunted,
+and the headlands made memorable by their desperate deeds, but they are
+gone, even to the remembrance of them. What they were and what they did
+lies buried away in book mausoleums like Egyptian mummies, all as clean
+forgotten as if they had been honest men, they and all the wild scenes
+which these green estuaries have witnessed.
+
+Havana figures much in English naval history. Drake tried to take it and
+failed; Penn and Venables failed. We stormed the forts in 1760, and held
+them and held the city till the Seven Years' War was over. I had read
+descriptions of the place, but they had given me no clear conception of
+what it would be like, certainly none at all of what it was like.
+Kingston is the best of our West Indian towns, and Kingston has not one
+fine building in it. Havana is a city of palaces, a city of streets and
+plazas, of colonnades, and towers, and churches and monasteries. We
+English have built in those islands as if we were but passing visitors,
+wanting only tenements to be occupied for a time. The Spaniards built as
+they built in Castile; built with the same material, the white limestone
+which they found in the New World as in the Old. The palaces of the
+nobles in Havana, the residence of the governor, the convents, the
+cathedral, are a reproduction of Burgos or Valladolid, as if by some
+Aladdin's lamp a Castilian city had been taken up and set down again
+unaltered on the shore of the Caribbean Sea. And they carried with them
+their laws, their habits, their institutions and their creed, their
+religious orders, their bishops, and their Inquisition. Even now in her
+day of eclipse, when her genius is clouded by the modern spirit against
+which she fought so long and so desperately, the sons of Spain still
+build as they used to build, and the modern squares and market places,
+the castles and fortresses, which have risen in and round the ancient
+Havana, are constructed on the old massive model, and on the same lines.
+However it may be with us, and whatever the eventual fate of Cuba, the
+Spanish race has taken root there, and is visibly destined to remain.
+They have poured their own people into it. In Cuba alone there are ten
+times as many Spaniards as there are English and Scotch in all our West
+Indies together, and Havana is ten times the size of the largest of our
+West Indian cities. Refugees have flocked thither from the revolutions
+in the Peninsula. The Canary Islands overflow into it. You know the
+people from Teneriffe by their stature; they are the finest surviving
+specimens of the old conquering breed. The political future is dark; the
+government is unimaginably corrupt--so corrupt that change is
+inevitable, though what change it would be idle to prophesy. The
+Americans looked at the island which lay so temptingly near them, but
+they were wise in their generation. They reflected that to introduce
+into an Anglo-Saxon republic so insoluble an element as a million
+Spanish Roman Catholics alien in blood and creed, with half a million
+blacks to swell the dusky flood which runs too full among them already,
+would be to invite an indigestion of serious consequence. A few years
+since the Cubans born were on the eve of achieving their independence
+like their brothers in Mexico and South America. Perhaps they will yet
+succeed. Spanish, at any rate, they are to the bone and marrow, and
+Spanish they will continue. The magnitude of Havana, and the fullness of
+life which was going on there, entirely surprised me. I had thought of
+Cuba as a decrepit state, bankrupt or finance-exhausted by civil wars,
+and on the edge of social dissolution, and I found Havana at least a
+grand imposing city--a city which might compare for beauty with any in
+the world. The sanitary condition is as bad as negligence can make
+it--so bad that a Spanish gentleman told me that if it were not for the
+natural purity of the air they would have been all dead like flies long
+ago. The tideless harbour is foul with the accumulations of three
+hundred years. The administration is more good-for-nothing than in Spain
+itself. If, in spite of this, Havana still sits like a queen upon the
+waters, there are some qualities to be found among her people which
+belonged to the countrymen and subjects of Ferdinand the Catholic.
+
+The coast line from Cape Tubiron has none of the grand aspects of the
+Antilles or Jamaica. Instead of mountains and forests you see a series
+of undulating hills, cultivated with tolerable care, and sprinkled with
+farmhouses. All the more imposing, therefore, from the absence of marked
+natural forms, are the walls and towers of the great Moro, the fortress
+which defends the entrance of the harbour. Ten miles off it was already
+a striking object. As we ran nearer it rose above us stern, proud, and
+defiant, upon a rock right above the water, with high frowning bastions,
+the lighthouse at an angle of it, and the Spanish banner floating
+proudly from a turret which overlooked the whole. The Moro as a
+fortification is, I am told, indefensible against modern artillery,
+presenting too much surface as a target; but it is all the grander to
+look at. It is a fine specimen of the Vauban period, and is probably
+equal to any demands which will be made upon it. The harbour is
+something like Port Royal, a deep lagoon with a narrow entrance and a
+long natural breakwater between the lagoon and the ocean; but what at
+Port Royal is a sand-spit eight miles long, is at Havana a rocky
+peninsula on which the city itself is built. The opening from the sea is
+half a mile wide. On the city side there are low semicircular batteries
+which sweep completely the approaches and the passage itself. The Moro
+rises opposite at the extreme point of the entrance, and next to it,
+farther in towards the harbour on the same side, on the crest and slopes
+of a range of hills, stands the old Moro, the original castle which beat
+off Drake and Oliver's sea-generals, and which was captured by the
+English in the last century. The lines were probably weaker than they
+are at present, and less adequately manned. A monument is erected there
+to the officers and men who fell in the defence.
+
+[Illustration: HAVANA, FROM THE QUARRIES]
+
+The city as we steamed by looked singularly beautiful, with its domes
+and steeples and marble palaces, and glimpses of long boulevards and
+trees and handsome mansions and cool arcades. Inside we found ourselves
+in a basin, perhaps of three miles diameter, full of shipping of all
+sorts and nationalities. The water, which outside is pure as sapphire,
+has become filthy with the pollutions of a dozen generations. The tide,
+which even at the springs has but a rise and fall of a couple of feet,
+is totally ineffective to clear it, and as long as they have the Virgin
+Mary to pray to, the pious Spaniards will not drive their sewage into
+the ocean. The hot sun rays stream down into the thick black liquid.
+Horrible smells are let loose from it when it is set in motion by screw
+or paddle, and ships bring up at mooring buoys lest their anchors should
+disturb the compost which lies at the bottom. Yet one forgot the
+disagreeables in the novelty and striking character of the scene. A
+hundred boats were plying to and fro among the various vessels, with
+their white sails and white awnings. Flags of all countries were blowing
+out at stern or from masthead; among them, of course, the stars and
+stripes flying jauntily on some splendid schooner which stood there like
+a cock upon a dunghill that might be his own if he chose to crow for it.
+
+As soon as we had brought up we were boarded by the inevitable hotel
+touters, custom-house officers, porters, and boatmen. Interpreters
+offered their services in the confusion of languages. Gradually there
+emerged out of the general noise two facts of importance. First, that I
+ought to have had a passport, and if I had not brought one that I was
+likely to be fined at the discretion of Spanish officials. Secondly,
+that if I trusted to my own powers of self-defence, I should be the
+victim of indefinite other extortions. Passport I had none--such things
+are not required any longer in Spain, and it had not occurred to me that
+they might still be in demand in a Spanish colony. As to being cheated,
+no one could or would tell me what I was to pay for anything, for there
+were American dollars, Spanish dollars, Mexican dollars, and Cuban
+dollars, all different. And there were multiples of dollars in gold, and
+single dollars in silver, and last and most important of all there was
+the Cuban paper dollar, which was 230 per cent. below the Cuban gold
+dollar. And in this last the smaller transactions of common life were
+carried on, the practical part of it to a stranger being that when you
+had to receive you received in paper, and when you had to pay you paid
+in specie.
+
+I escaped for the time the penalty which would have been inflicted on me
+about the passport. I had a letter of introduction to the
+Captain-General of the island, and the Captain-General--so the viceroy
+is called--was so formidable a person that the officials did not venture
+to meddle with me. For the rest I was told that as soon as I had chosen
+my hotel, the agent, who was on board, would see me through all
+obstructions, and would not allow me to be plundered by anyone but
+himself. To this I had to submit. I named an hotel at random; a polite
+gentleman in a few moments had a boat alongside for me; I had stept into
+it when the fair damsels bound for Darien, who had been concealed all
+this time in their cabin, slipped down the ladder and took their places
+at my side, to the no small entertainment of the friends whom I had left
+on board and who were watching us from the deck.
+
+At the wharf I was able to shake off my companions, and I soon forgot
+the misadventure, for I found myself in Old Castile once more, amidst
+Spanish faces, Spanish voices, Spanish smells, and Spanish scenes. On
+the very wharf itself was a church grim and stern, and so massive that
+it would stand, barring earthquakes, for a thousand years. Church,
+indeed, it was no longer; it had been turned into a custom-house. But
+this was because it had been desecrated when we were in Havana by having
+an English service performed in it. They had churches enough without it,
+and they preferred to leave this one with a mark upon it of the anger of
+the Almighty. Of churches, indeed, there was no lack; churches thick as
+public-houses in a Welsh town. Church beyond church, palace beyond
+palace, the narrow streets where neighbours on either side might shake
+hands out of the upper stories, the deep colonnades, the private houses
+with the windows grated towards the street, with glimpses through the
+street door into the court and garden within, with its cloisters, its
+palm trees, and its fountains; the massiveness of the stonework, the
+curious old-fashioned bookstalls, the dirt, the smell, the carriages,
+the swearing drivers, the black-robed priest gliding along the
+footway--it was Toledo or Valladolid again with the sign manual on it of
+Spain herself in friendly and familiar form. Every face that I saw was
+Spanish. In Kingston or Port of Spain you meet fifty blacks for one
+European; all the manual work is done by them. In Havana the proportion
+is reversed, you hardly see a coloured man at all. Boatmen, porters,
+cab-drivers or cart-drivers, every one of whom are negroes in our
+islands, are there Spaniards, either Cuban born or emigrants from home.
+A few black beggars there were--permitted, as objects of charity to
+pious Catholics and as a sign of their inferiority of race. Of poverty
+among the whites, real poverty that could be felt, I saw no sign at all.
+
+After driving for about a mile we emerged out of the old town into a
+large square and thence into a wide Alameda or boulevard with double
+avenues of trees, statues, fountains, theatres, clubhouses, and all the
+various equipments of modern luxuriousness and so-called civilised life.
+Beyond the Alameda was another still larger square, one side of which
+was a railway station and terminus. In a colonnade at right angles was
+the hotel to which I had been recommended; spacious, handsome, in style
+half Parisian half Spanish, like the Fondas in the Puerto del Sol at
+Madrid.
+
+Spanish was the language generally spoken; but there were interpreters
+and waiters more or less accomplished in other tongues, especially in
+English, of which they heard enough, for I found Havana to be the winter
+resort of our American cousins, who go, generally, to Cuba, as we go to
+the Riviera, to escape the ice and winds of the eastern and middle
+States. This particular hotel was a favourite resort, and was full to
+overflowing with them. It was large, with an interior quadrangular
+garden, into which looked tiers of windows; and wings had been thrown
+out with terraced roofs, suites of rooms opening out upon them; each
+floor being provided with airy sitting rooms and music rooms. Here were
+to be heard at least a hundred American voices discussing the
+experiences and plans of their owners. The men lounged in the hall or at
+the bar, or sat smoking on the rows of leather chairs under the
+colonnade, or were under the hands of barbers or haircutters in an airy
+open saloon devoted to these uses. When I retreated upstairs to collect
+myself, a lady was making the corridors ring close by as she screamed at
+a piano in the middle of an admiring and criticising crowd. Dear as the
+Americans are to me, and welcome in most places as is the sound of those
+same sweet voices, one had not come to Havana for this. It was necessary
+to escape somewhere, and promptly, from the discord of noises which I
+hoped might be due to some momentary accident. The mail company's agent,
+Mr. R----, lived in the hotel. He kindly found me out, initiated me in
+the mysteries of Cuban paper money, and giving me a tariff of the fares,
+found me a cab, and sent me out to look about me.
+
+My first object was the cathedral and the tomb of Columbus. In Catholic
+cities in Europe churches stand always open; the passer-by can enter
+when he pleases, fall on his knees and say his silent prayers to his
+Master whom he sees on the altar. In Havana I discovered afterward that,
+except at special hours, and those as few as might be, the doors were
+kept locked and could only be opened by a golden key. It was carnival
+time, however; there were functions going on of various kinds, and I
+found the cathedral happily accessible. It was a vast building, little
+ornamented, but the general forms severe and impressive, in the style of
+the time of Philip II., when Gothic art had gone out in Spain and there
+had come in the place of it the implacable sternness which expresses the
+very genius of the Inquisition. A broad flight of stone steps led up to
+the great door. The afternoon was extremely hot; the curtains were
+thrown back to admit as much air as possible. There was some function
+proceeding of a peculiar kind. I know not what it was; something
+certainly in which the public had no interest, for there was not a
+stranger present but myself. But the great cathedral officials were busy
+at work, and liked to be at their ease. On the wall as you entered a box
+invited contributions, as _limosna por el Santo Padre_. The service was
+I know not what. In the middle of the nave stood twelve large chairs
+arranged in a semicircle; on these chairs sat twelve canons, like a row
+of mandarins, each with his little white patch like a silver dollar on
+the crown of his black head. Five or six minor dignitaries, deacons,
+precentors, or something of that sort, were droning out monotonous
+recitations like the buzzing of so many humble-bees in the warm summer
+air. The dean or provost sat in the central biggest chair of all. His
+face was rosy, and he wiped it from time to time with a red
+handkerchief; his chin was double or perhaps treble; he had evidently
+dined, and would or might have slept but for a pile of snuff on his
+chair arm, with continual refreshments from which he kept his faculties
+alive. I sat patiently till it was over, and the twelve holy men rose
+and went their way. I could then stroll about at leisure. The pictures
+were of the usual paltry kind. On the chancel arch stood the royal arms
+of Spain, as the lion and the unicorn used to stand in our parish
+churches till the High Church clergy mistook them for Erastian wild
+beasts. At the right side of the altar was the monument which I had come
+in search of; a marble tablet fixed against the wall, and on it a poorly
+executed figure in high relief, with a ruff about its neck and features
+which might be meant for anyone and for no one in particular. Somewhere
+near me there were lying I believed and could hope the mortal remains of
+the discoverer of the New World. An inscription said so. There was
+written:
+
+    O Restos y Imagen del grande Colon
+    Mil siglos durad guardados en la Urna
+    Y en remembranza de nuestra Nacion.
+
+The court poet, or whoever wrote the lines, was as poor an artist in
+verse as the sculptor in stone. The image of the grande Colon is
+certainly not 'guarded in the urn,' since you see it on the wall before
+your eyes. The urn, if urn there be, with the 'relics' in it, must be
+under the floor. Columbus and his brother Diego were originally buried
+to the right and left of the altar in the cathedral of St. Domingo. When
+St. Domingo was abandoned, a commission was appointed to remove the body
+of Christophe to Havana. They did remove _a_ body, but St. Domingo
+insists that it was Diego that was taken away, that Christophe remains
+where he was, and that if Spain wants him Spain must pay for him. I
+followed the canons into the sacristy where they were unrobing. I did
+not venture to address either of themselves, but I asked an acolyte if
+he could throw any light upon the matter. He assured me that there
+neither was nor could have been any mistake. They had the right body and
+were in no doubt about it. In more pious ages disputes of this sort were
+settled by an appeal to miracles. Rival pretenders for the possession of
+the same bones came, however, at last to be able to produce authentic
+proofs of miracles which had been worked at more than one of the
+pretended shrines; so that it was concluded that saints' relics were
+like the loaves and fishes, capable of multiplication without losing
+their identity, and of having the property of being in several places at
+the same moment. The same thing has been alleged of the Holy Coat of
+Treves and of the wood of the true cross. Havana and St. Domingo may
+perhaps eventually find a similar solution of their disagreement over
+the resting place of Columbus.
+
+I walked back to my hotel up a narrow shady street like a long arcade.
+Here were the principal shops; several libraries among them, into which
+I strayed to gossip and to look over the shelves. That so many persons
+could get a living by bookselling implied a reading population, but the
+books themselves did not indicate any present literary productiveness.
+They were chiefly old, and from the Old World, and belonged probably to
+persons who had been concerned in the late rebellion and whose property
+had been confiscated. They were absurdly cheap; I bought a copy of
+Guzman de Alfarache for a few pence.
+
+I had brought letters of introduction to several distinguished people in
+Havana; to one especially, Don G----, a member of a noble Peninsular
+family, once an officer in the Spanish navy, now chairman of a railway
+company and head of an important commercial house. His elder brother,
+the Marques de ----, called on me on the evening of the day of my
+arrival; a distinguished-looking man of forty or thereabouts, with
+courteous high-bred manners, rapid, prompt, and incisive, with the air
+of a soldier, which in early life he had been. He had travelled, spoke
+various languages, and spoke to me in admirable English. Don G----, who
+might be a year or two younger, came later and stayed an hour and a half
+with me. Let me acknowledge here, and in as warm language as I can
+express it, the obligations under which I stand to him, not for the
+personal attentions only which he showed me during my stay in Havana,
+but for giving me an opportunity of becoming acquainted with a real
+specimen of Plato's superior men, who were now and then, so Plato said,
+to be met with in foreign travel. It is to him that I owe any knowledge
+which I brought away with me of the present state of Cuba. He had seen
+much, thought much, read much. He was on a level with the latest phases
+of philosophical and spiritual speculation, could talk of Darwin and
+Spencer, of Schopenhauer, of Strauss, and of Renan, aware of what they
+had done, aware of the inconvenient truths which they had forced into
+light, but aware also that they had left the most important questions
+pretty much where they found them. He had taken no part in the political
+troubles of the late years in Cuba, but he had observed everything. No
+one knew better the defects of the present system of government; no one
+was less ready to rush into hasty schemes for violently mending it.
+
+The ten years' rebellion, of which I had heard so much and knew so
+little, he first made intelligible to me. Cuba had been governed as a
+province of Spain, and Spain, like other mother countries, had thought
+more of drawing a revenue out of it for herself than of the interests of
+the colony. Spanish officials had been avaricious, and Spanish fiscal
+policy oppressive and ruinous. The resources of the island in metals,
+in minerals, in agriculture were as yet hardly scratched, yet every
+attempt to develop them was paralysed by fresh taxation. The rebellion
+had been an effort of the Cuban Spaniards, precisely analogous to the
+revolt of our own North American colonies, to shake off the authority of
+the court of Madrid and to make themselves independent. They had fought
+desperately and had for several years been masters of half the island.
+They had counted on help from the United States, and at one time they
+seemed likely to get it. But the Americans could not see their way to
+admitting Cuba into the Union, and without such a prospect did not care
+to quarrel with Spain on their account. Finding that they were to be
+left to themselves, the insurgents came to terms and Spanish authority
+was re-established. Families had been divided, sons taking one side and
+fathers the other, as in our English Wars of the Roses, perhaps for the
+same reason, to save the family estates whichever side came out
+victorious. The blacks had been indifferent, the rebellion having no
+interest for them at all. They had remained by their masters, and they
+had been rewarded after the peace by complete emancipation. There was
+not a slave now in Cuba. No indemnity had been granted to their owners,
+nor had any been asked for, and the business on the plantations had gone
+on without interruption. Those who had been slaves continued to work at
+the same locations, receiving wages instead of food and maintenance; all
+were satisfied at the change, and this remarkable revolution had been
+carried out with an ease and completeness which found no parallel in any
+other slave-owning country.
+
+In spite of rebellion, in spite of the breaking up and reconstruction of
+the social system, in spite of the indifferent administration of
+justice, in spite of taxation, and the inexplicable appropriation of the
+revenue, Cuba was still moderately prosperous, and that it could
+flourish at all after trials so severe was the best evidence of the
+greatness of its natural wealth. The party of insurrection was
+dissolved, and would revive again only under the unlikely contingency of
+encouragement from the United States. There was a party, however, which
+desired for Cuba a constitution like the Canadian--Home Rule and the
+management of its own affairs--and as the black element was far
+outnumbered and under control, such a constitution would not be
+politically dangerous.
+
+If the Spanish Government does not mend its ways, concessions of this
+kind may eventually have to be made, though the improvement to be
+expected from it is doubtful. Official corruption is engrained in the
+character and habits of the Spanish people. Judges allowed their
+decisions to be 'influenced' under Philip III. as much as to-day in the
+colonies of Queen Christina; and when a fault is the habit of a people,
+it survives political reforms and any number of turnings of the
+kaleidoscope.
+
+The encouraging feature is the success of emancipation. There is no
+jealousy, no race animosity, no supercilious contempt of whites for
+'niggers.' The Spaniards have inherited a tinge of colour themselves
+from their African ancestors, and thus they are all friends together.
+The liberated slave can acquire and own land if he wishes for it, but as
+a rule he prefers to work for wages. These happy conditions arise in
+part from the Spanish temperament, but chiefly from the numerical
+preponderance of the white element, which, as in the United States, is
+too secure to be uneasy. The black is not encouraged in insubordination
+by a sense that he could win in a contest of strength, and the aspect of
+things is far more promising for the future than in our own islands. The
+Spaniards, however inferior we may think them to ourselves, have filled
+their colonies with their own people and are reaping the reward of it.
+We have so contrived that such English as had settled in the West Indies
+on their own account are leaving them.
+
+Spain, four centuries ago, was the greatest of European nations, the
+first in art, or second only to Italy, the first in arms, the first in
+the men whom she produced. She has been swept along in the current of
+time. She fought against the stream of tendency, and the stream proved
+too strong for her, great as she was. The modern spirit, which she
+would not have when it came in the shape of the Reformation, has flowed
+over her borders as revolution, not to her benefit, for she is unable to
+assimilate the new ideas. The old Spain of the Inquisition is gone; the
+Spain of to-day is divided between Liberalism and Catholic belief. She
+is sick in the process of the change, and neither she nor her colonies
+stand any longer in the front lines in the race of civilisation; yet the
+print of her foot is stamped on the New World in characters which will
+not be effaced, and may be found to be as enduring as our own.
+
+The colony is perhaps in advance of the mother country. The Catholic
+Church, Don G---- said, has little influence in Cuba; 'she has had no
+rival,' he explained, 'and so has grown lazy.' I judged the same from my
+own observations. The churches on Sundays were thinly attended, and men
+smiled when I asked them about 'confession.' I inquired about famous
+preachers. I was told that there was no preaching in Havana, famous or
+otherwise. I might if I was lucky and chose to go there in the early
+morning, hear a sermon in the church of the Jesuits; that was all. I
+went; I heard my Jesuit, who was fluent, eloquent, and gesticulating,
+but he was pouring out his passionate rhetoric to about fifty women with
+scarcely a man amongst them. It was piteous to look at him. The Catholic
+Church, whether it be for want of rivals, or merely from force of time,
+has fallen from its high estate. It can burn no more heretics, for it
+has lost the art to raise conviction to sufficient intensity. The power
+to burn was the measure of the real belief, which people had in the
+Church and its doctrines. The power has departed with the waning of
+faith; and religion in Havana, as in Madrid, is but 'use and wont;' not
+'belief' but opinion, and opinion which is half insincere. Nothing else
+can take its place. The day is too late for Protestantism, which has
+developed into wider forms, and in the matter of satisfied and complete
+religious conviction Protestants are hardly better off than Catholics.
+
+Don G---- had been much in Spain; he was acquainted with many of the
+descendants of the old aristocracy, who lingered there in faded
+grandeur. He had studied the history of his own country. He compared the
+Spain and England of the sixteenth century with the Spain and England of
+the present; and, like most of us, he knew where the yoke galled his own
+neck. But economical and political prosperity is no exhaustive measure
+of human progress. The Rome of Trajan was immeasurably more splendid
+than the Rome of the Scipios; yet the progress had been downwards
+nevertheless. If the object of our existence on this planet is the
+development of character, if the culminating point in any nation's
+history be that at which it produces its noblest and bravest men, facts
+do not tend to assure us that the triumphant march of the last hundred
+years is accomplishing much in that direction. I found myself arguing
+with Don G---- that if Charles V. and Philip II. were to come back to
+this world, and to see whither the movement had brought us of which they
+had worked so hard to suppress the beginning, they would still say that
+they had done right in trying to strangle it. The Reformation called
+itself a protest against lies, and the advocates of it imagined that
+when the lies, or what they called such, were cleared away, the pure
+metal of Christianity would remain unsullied. The great men who fought
+against the movement, Charles V. in his cabinet and Erasmus in his
+closet, had seen that it could not rest there; that it was the cradle of
+a revolution in which the whole spiritual and political organisation of
+Europe would be flung into the crucible. Under that organisation human
+nature had ascended to altitudes of chivalry, of self-sacrifice, which
+it had never before reached. The sixteenth century was the blossoming
+time of the Old World, and no such men had appeared since as then came
+to the front, either in Spain or Italy, or Germany or France or England.
+The actual leaders of the Reformation had been bred in the system which
+they destroyed. Puritanism and Calvinism produced men of powerful
+character, but they were limited and incapable of continuance; and now
+the liberty which was demanded had become what the instinct of the great
+Emperor had told him from the first must be the final shape of it, a
+revolution which would tolerate no inequalities of culture or position,
+which insisted that no man was better than another, which was to exalt
+the low and bring down the high till all mankind should stand upon a
+common level--a level, not of baseness or badness, but a level of
+good-humoured, smart, vulgar and vulgarising mediocrity, with melodrama
+for tragedy, farce for comedy, sounding speech for statesmanlike wisdom;
+and for a creed, when our fathers thought that we had been made a little
+lower than the angels, the more modest knowledge that we were only a
+little higher than the apes. This was the aspect in which the world of
+the nineteenth century would appear to Sir Thomas More or the Duke of
+Alva. From the Grand Captain to Senor Castelar, from Lord Burghley to
+Mr. Gladstone, from Leonardo da Vinci or Velasquez to Gustave Dore, from
+Cervantes and Shakespeare to 'Pickwick' and the 'Innocents at Home;'
+from the faith which built the cathedrals to evolution and the survival
+of the fittest; from the carving and architecture of the Middle Ages to
+the workmanship of the modern contractor; the change in the spiritual
+department of things had been the same along the whole line. Charles V.
+after seeing all that has been achieved, the railways, the steam
+engines, the telegraphs, the Yankee and his United States, which are the
+embodiment of the highest aspirations of the modern era, after attending
+a session of the British Association itself, and seeing the bishops
+holding out their hands to science which had done such great things for
+them, might fairly claim that it was a doubtful point whether the change
+had been really for the better.
+
+It may be answered, and answered truly, that the old thing was dead. The
+Catholic faith, where it was left standing and where it still stands,
+produces now nothing higher, nothing better than the Protestant. Human
+systems grow as trees grow. The seed shoots up, the trunk forms, the
+branches spread; leaves and flowers and fruit come out year after year
+as if they were able to renew themselves for ever. But that which has a
+beginning has an end, that which has life must die when the vital force
+is exhausted. The faith of More, as well as the faith of Ken or Wilson,
+were elevating and ennobling as long as they were sincerely believed,
+but the time came when they became clouded with uncertainty; and
+confused, perplexed, and honestly anxious, humanity struggles on as well
+as it can, all things considered, respectably enough, in its chrysalis
+condition, the old wings gone, the new wings that are to be (if we are
+ever to have another set) as yet imprisoned in their sheath.
+
+The same Sunday morning when I went in search of my sermon, the hotel
+was alive as bees at swarming time. There was to be a bull fight in
+honour of the carnival, and such a bull fight as had never been seen in
+Havana. Placards on the wall announced that a lady from Spain, Gloriana
+they called her, was to meet and slay a bull in single combat, and
+everyone must go and see the wonderful sight. I myself, having seen the
+real thing in Madrid many years ago, felt no more curiosity, and that a
+woman should be an actress in such a scene did not revive it. To those
+who went the performance was a disappointment. The bull provided turned
+out to be a calf of tender years. The spectators insisted that they
+would have a mature beast of strength and ferocity, and Gloriana when
+brought to the point declined the adventure.
+
+There was a prettier scene in the evening. In the cool after nightfall
+the beauty and fashion of Havana turns out to stroll in the illuminated
+Alameda. As it was now a high festival the band was to play, and the
+crowd was as dense as on Exhibition nights at South Kensington. The
+music was equally good, and the women as graceful and well dressed. I
+sat for an hour or two listening under the statue of poor Queen
+Isabella. The image of her still stands where it was placed, though
+revolution has long shaken her from her throne. All is forgotten now
+except that she was once a Spanish sovereign, and time and distance have
+deodorised her memory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+    Hotels in Havana--Sights in the city--Cigar manufactories--West
+    Indian industries--The Captain-General--The Jesuit college--Father
+    Vinez--Clubs in Havana--Spanish aristocracy--Sea lodging house.
+
+
+There was much to be seen in Havana, and much to think about. I
+regretted only that I had not been better advised in my choice of an
+hotel The dining saloon rang with American voices in their shrillest
+tones. Every table was occupied by groups of them, nor was there a sound
+in the room of any language but theirs. In the whole company I had not a
+single acquaintance. I have liked well almost every individual American
+that I have fallen in with and come to know. They are frank, friendly,
+open, and absolutely unaffected, and, like my friend at Miss Roy's in
+Jamaica, they take cheerful views of life, which is the highest of all
+recommendations. The distinctness and sharpness of utterance is
+tolerable and even agreeable in conversation with a single person. When
+a large number of them are together, all talking in a high tone, it
+tries the nerves and sets the teeth on edge. Nor could I escape from
+them in any part of the building. The gentlemen were talking politics in
+the hall, or lounging under the colonnade. One of them, an absolute
+stranger, who perhaps knew who I was, asked me abruptly for my opinion
+of Cardinal Newman. The ladies filled the sitting rooms; their pianos
+and their duets pierced the walls of my bedroom, and only ceased an hour
+after midnight. At five in the morning the engines began to scream at
+the adjoining railway station. The church bells woke at the same hour
+with their superfluous summons to matins which no one attended. Sleep
+was next to an impossibility under these hard conditions, and I wanted
+more and not less of it when I had the duties upon me of sightseeing.
+Sleep or no sleep, however, I determined that I would see what I could
+as long as I could keep going.
+
+A few hundred yards off was one of the most famous of the Havana cigar
+manufactories. A courteous message from the manager, Senor Bances, had
+informed me that he would be happy to show me over it on any morning
+before the sun was above the roofs of the houses. I found the senor a
+handsome elderly gentleman, tall and lean, with Castilian dignity of
+manner, free and frank in all his communications, with no reserve,
+concealments, or insincerities. I told him that in my experience cigars
+were not what they had been, that the last good one which I had smoked I
+had bought twenty years ago from a _contrabandista_ at Madrid. I had
+come to Havana to see whether I could find another equally good at the
+fountain head. He said that he was not at all surprised. It was the same
+story as at Jamaica; the consumption of cigars had increased with
+extreme rapidity; the area on which the finest tobacco had been grown
+was limited, and the expense of growing it was very great. Only a small
+quantity of the best cigars was now made for the market. In general the
+plants were heavily manured, and the flavour suffered. Leaf of coarse
+fibre was used for the core of the cigars, with only a fold or two
+wrapped round it of more delicate quality. He took me into the different
+rooms where the manufacture was going on. In the first were perhaps a
+hundred or a hundred and fifty sallow-faced young men engaged in
+rolling. They were all Cubans or Spaniards with the exception of a
+single negro; and all, I should think, under thirty. On each of the
+tables was one of the names with which we have grown familiar in modern
+cigar shops, Reynas, Regalias, Principes, and I know not how many else.
+The difference of material could not be great, but there was a real
+difference in the fineness of the make, and in the quality of the
+exterior leaf. The workmen were of unequal capacity and were unequally
+paid. The senor employed in all about 1,400; at least so I understood
+him.
+
+The black field hands had eighteenpence a day. The rollers were paid by
+quality and quantity; a good workman doing his best could earn sixty
+dollars a week, an idle and indifferent one about twelve. They smoked as
+they rolled, and there was no check upon the consumption, the loss in
+this way being estimated at 40,000 dollars a year. The pay was high;
+but there was another side to it--the occupation was dangerous. If there
+were no boys in the room, there were no old men. Those who undertook it
+died often in two or three years. Doubtless with precaution the
+mortality might be diminished; but, like the needle and the scissor
+grinders in England, the men themselves do not wish it to be diminished.
+The risk enters into the wages, and they prefer a short life and a merry
+one.
+
+The cigarettes, of which the varieties are as many as there are of
+cigars, were made exclusively by Chinese. The second room which we
+entered was full of them, their curious yellow faces mildly bending over
+their tobacco heaps. Of these there may have been a hundred. Of the
+general expenses of the establishment I do not venture to say anything,
+bewildered as I was in the labyrinthine complication of the currency,
+but it must certainly be enormous, and this house, the Partagas, was but
+one of many equally extensive in Havana alone.
+
+The senor was most liberal. He filled my pockets with packets of
+excellent cigarettes; he gave me a bundle of cigars. I cannot say
+whether they were equal to what I bought from my _contrabandista_, for
+these may have been idealised by a grateful memory, but they were so
+incomparably better than any which I have been able to get in London
+that I was tempted to deal with him, and so far I have had no reason to
+repent. The boxes with which he provided me bettered the sample, and the
+price, duty at home included, was a third below what I should have paid
+in London for an article which I would rather leave unconsumed. A broker
+whom I fell in with insisted to me that the best cigars all went to
+London, that my preference for what I got from my senor was mere fancy
+and vanity, and that I could buy better in any shop in Regent Street. I
+said that he might but I couldn't, and so we left it.
+
+I tell all this, not with the affectation of supposing that tobacco or
+my own taste about it can have any interest, but as an illustration of
+what can be done in the West Indies, and to show how immense a form of
+industry waits to be developed in our own islands, if people with
+capital and knowledge choose to set about it. Tobacco as good as the
+best in Cuba has been grown and can be grown in Jamaica, in St. Domingo,
+and probably in every one of the Antilles. 'There are dollars in those
+islands,' as my Yankee said, and many a buried treasure will be brought
+to light there when capitalists can feel assured that they will not be
+at the mercy of black constitutional governments.
+
+My letter of introduction to the Captain-General was still undelivered,
+and as I had made use of it on landing I thought it right at least to
+pay my respects to the great man. The Marques M---- kindly consented to
+go with me and help me through the interview, being of course acquainted
+with him. He was at his country house, a mile out of the town. The
+buildings are all good in Havana. It was what it called itself, not a
+palace but a handsome country residence in the middle of a large
+well-kept garden. The viceroyalty has a fair but not extravagant income
+attached to it. The Captain-General receives about 8,000_l._ a year
+besides allowances. Were the balls and dinners expected of him which our
+poor governors are obliged to entertain their subjects with, he would
+not be able to make much out of it. The large fortunes which used to be
+brought back by the fortunate Captains-General who could connive at the
+slave trade were no longer attainable; those good days are gone. Public
+opinion therefore permits them to save their incomes. The Spaniards are
+not a hospitable people, or rather their notion of hospitality differs
+in form from ours. They are ready to dine with you themselves as often
+as you will ask them. Nothing in the shape of dinners is looked for from
+the Captain-General, and when I as a stranger suggested the possibility
+of such a thing as an invitation happening to me, my companion assured
+me that I need not be in the least alarmed. We were introduced into a
+well-proportioned hall, with a few marble busts in it and casts of Greek
+and Roman statues. Aides-de-camp and general officers were lounging
+about, with whom we exchanged distant civilities. After waiting for a
+quarter of an hour we were summoned by an official into an adjoining
+room and found ourselves in his Excellency's presence. He was a small
+gentlemanlike-looking man, out of uniform, in plain morning dress with a
+silk sash. He received us with natural politeness; cordiality was
+uncalled for, but he was perfectly gracious. He expressed his pleasure
+at seeing me in the island; he hoped that I should enjoy myself, and on
+his part would do everything in his power to make my stay agreeable. He
+spoke of the emancipation of the slaves and of the social state of the
+island with pardonable satisfaction, enquired about our own West Indies,
+&c., and finally asked me to tell him in what way he could be of service
+to me. I told him that I had found such kind friends in Havana already,
+that I could think of little. One thing only he could do if he pleased.
+I had omitted to bring a passport with me, not knowing that it would be
+required. My position was irregular and might be inconvenient. I was
+indebted to my letter of introduction to his Excellency for admission
+into his dominions. Perhaps he would write a few words which would
+enable me to remain in them and go out of them when my visit was over.
+His Excellency said that he would instruct the Gobierno Civil to see to
+it, an instruction the meaning of which I too sadly understood. I was
+not to be allowed to escape the fine. A fresh shower followed of polite
+words, and with these we took ourselves away.
+
+The afternoon was spent more instructively, perhaps more agreeably, in a
+different scene. The Marques M---- had been a pupil of the Jesuits. He
+had personal friends in the Jesuit college at Havana, especially one,
+Father Vinez, whose name is familiar to students of meteorological
+science, and who has supplemented and corrected the accepted law of
+storms by careful observation of West Indian hurricanes. The Jesuits
+were as well spoken of in Havana as the Moravians in Jamaica. Everyone
+had a good word for them. They alone, as I have said, took the trouble
+to provide the good people there with a sermon on Sundays. They alone
+among the Catholic clergy, though they live poorly and have no
+endowment, exert themselves to provide a tolerable education for the
+middle and upper classes. The Marques undertook that if we called we
+should be graciously received, and I was curious and interested. Their
+college had been an enormous monastery. Wherever the Spaniards went they
+took an army of monks with them of all the orders. The monks contrived
+always to house themselves handsomely. While soldiers fought and
+settlers planted, the monks' duty was to pray. In process of time it
+came to be doubted whether the monks' prayers were worth what they cost,
+or whether, in fact, they had ever had much effect of any kind. They
+have been suppressed in Spain; they have been clipped short in all the
+Spanish dominions, and in Havana there are now left only a handful of
+Dominicans, a few nuns, and these Jesuits, who have taken possession of
+the largest of the convents, much as a soldier-crab becomes the vigorous
+tenant of the shell of some lazy sea-snail. They have a college there
+where there are four hundred lads and young men who pay for their
+education; some hundreds more are taken out of charity. The Jesuits
+conduct the whole, and do it all unaided, on their own resources. And
+this is far from all that they do. They keep on a level with the age;
+they are men of learning; they are men of science; they are the Royal
+Society of Cuba. They have an observatory in the college, and the Father
+Vinez of whom I have spoken is in charge of it. Father Vinez was our
+particular object. The porter's lodge opened into a courtyard like the
+quadrangle of a college at Oxford. From the courtyard we turned into a
+narrow staircase, up which we climbed till we reached the roof, on and
+under which the Father had his lodgings and his observing machinery. We
+entered a small room, plainly furnished with a table and a few
+uncushioned chairs; tables and chairs, all save the Father's, littered
+with books and papers. Cases stood round the wall, containing
+self-registering instruments of the most advanced modern type, each with
+its paper barrel unrolling slowly under clockwork, while a pencil noted
+upon it the temperature of the air, the atmospheric pressure, the degree
+of moisture, the ozone, the electricity. In the middle, surrounded by
+his tools and his ticking clocks, sat the Father, middle-aged, lean and
+dry, with shrivelled skin and brown threadbare frock. He received my
+companion with a warm affectionate smile. The Marques told him that I
+was an Englishman who was curious about the work in which he was
+engaged, and he spoke to me at once with the politeness of a man of
+sense. After a few questions asked and answered, he took us out to a
+shed among the roof-tiles, where he kept his large telescope, his
+equatorial, and his transit instruments--not on the great scale of
+State-supported observatories, but with everything which was really
+essential. He had a laboratory, too, and a workshop, with all the recent
+appliances. He was a practical optician and mechanic. He managed and
+repaired his own machinery, observed, made his notes, and wrote his
+reports to the societies with which he was in correspondence, all by
+himself. The outfit of such an establishment, even on a moderate scale,
+is expensive. I said I supposed that the Government gave him a grant.
+'So far from it,' he said, 'that we have to pay a duty on every
+instrument which we import.' 'Who, then, pays for it all?' I asked. 'The
+order,' he answered, quite simply.
+
+The house, I believe, _was_ a gift, though it cost the State nothing,
+having been simply seized when the monks were expelled. The order now
+maintains it, and more than repays the Government for their single act
+of generosity. At my companion's suggestion Father Vinez gave me a copy
+of his book on hurricanes. It contains a record of laborious journeys
+which he made to the scene of the devastations of the last ten years.
+The scientific value of the Father's work is recognised by the highest
+authorities, though I cannot venture even to attempt to explain what he
+has done. He then conducted us over the building, and showed us the
+libraries, dormitories, playgrounds, and the other arrangements which
+were made for the students. Of these we saw none, they were all out, but
+the long tables in the refectory were laid for afternoon tea. There was
+a cup of milk for each lad, with a plate of honey and a roll of bread;
+and supper would follow in the evening. The sleeping gallery was
+divided into cells, open at the top for ventilation, with bed, table,
+chest of drawers, and washing apparatus--all scrupulously clean. So far
+as I could judge, the Fathers cared more for the boys' comfort than for
+their own. Through an open door our conductor faintly indicated the
+apartment which belonged to himself. Four bare walls, a bare tiled
+floor, a plain pallet, with a crucifix above the pillow, was all that it
+contained. There was no parade of ecclesiasticism. The libraries were
+well furnished, but the books were chiefly secular and scientific. The
+chapel was unornamented; there were a few pictures, but they were simple
+and inoffensive. Everything was good of its kind, down to the gymnastic
+courts and swimming bath. The holiness was kept in the back ground. It
+was in the spirit and not in the body. The cost of the whole
+establishment was defrayed out of the payments of the richer students
+managed economically for the benefit of the rest, with complete
+indifference on the part of the Fathers to indulgence and pleasures of
+their own. As we took leave the Marques kissed his old master's brown
+hand. I rather envied him the privilege.
+
+Something I saw of Havana society in the received sense of the word.
+There are many clubs there, and high play in most of them, for the
+Cubans are given to the roulette tables. The Union club which is the
+most distinguished among them, invites occasional strangers staying in
+the city to temporary membership as we do at the Athenaeum. Here you meet
+Spanish _grandes_, who have come to Cuba to be out of reach of
+revolution, proud as ever and not as poor as you might expect; and when
+you ask who they are you hear the great familiar names of Spanish
+history. I was introduced to the president--young, handsome, and
+accomplished. I was startled to learn that he was the head of the old
+house of Sandoval. The house of Columbus ought to be there also, for
+there is still a Christophe Colon, the direct linear representative of
+the discoverer, disguised under the title of the Duque de Veragua. A
+perpetual pension of 20,000 dollars a year was granted to the great
+Christophe and his heirs for ever as a charge on the Cuban revenue. It
+has been paid to the family through all changes of dynasty and forms of
+government, and is paid to them still. But the Duque resides in Spain,
+and the present occupation of him, I was informed, is the breeding and
+raising bulls for the Plaza de Toros at Seville.
+
+Thus, every way, my stay was made agreeable to me. There were breakfasts
+and dinners and introductions. Don G---- and his brother were not fine
+gentlemen only, but were men of business and deeply engaged in the
+active life of the place. The American consul was a conspicuous figure
+at these entertainments. America may not find it her interest to annex
+these islands, but since she ordered the French out of Mexico, and the
+French obeyed, she is universally felt on that side of the Atlantic to
+be the supreme arbiter of all their fates. Her consuls are thus persons
+of consequence. The Cubans like the Americans well. The commercial
+treaty which was offered to our islands by the United States would have
+been accepted eagerly by the Spaniards. To them, the Americans have, as
+yet, not been equally liberal, but an arrangement will soon be
+completed. They say that they have hills of solid iron in the island and
+mountains of copper with fifty per cent. of virgin ore in them waiting
+for the Americans to develop. The present administration would swallow
+up in taxation the profits of the most promising enterprise that ever
+was undertaken, but the metals are there, and will come one day into
+working. The consul was a swift peremptory man who knew his own mind at
+any rate. Between his 'Yes, sir,' and his 'No, sir,' you were at no loss
+for his meaning. He told me a story of a 'nigger' officer with whom he
+had once got into conversation at Hayti. He had inquired why they let so
+fine an island run to waste? Why did they not cultivate it? The dusky
+soldier laid his hand upon his breast and waved his hand. 'Ah,' he said,
+'that might do for English or Germans or Americans; we of the Latin race
+have higher things to occupy us.'
+
+I liked the consul well. I could not say as much for his countrymen and
+countrywomen at my hotel. Individually I dare say they would have been
+charming; collectively they drove me to distraction. Space and time had
+no existence for them; they and their voices were heard in all places
+and at all hours. The midnight bravuras at the pianos mixed wildly in my
+broken dreams. The Marques M---- wished to take me with him to his
+country seat and show me his sugar plantations. Nothing could have been
+more delightful, but with want of sleep and the constant racket I found
+myself becoming unwell. In youth and strength one can defy the foul
+fiend and bid him do his worst; in age one finds it wiser to get out of
+the way.
+
+On the sea, seven miles from Havana, and connected with it by a
+convenient railway, at a place called Vedado, I found a lodging house
+kept by a Frenchman (the best cook in Cuba) with a German wife. The
+situation was so attractive, and the owners of it so attentive, that
+quiet people went often into 'retreat' there. There were delicious
+rooms, airy and solitary as I could wish. The sea washed the coral rock
+under the windows. There were walks wild as if there was no city within
+a thousand miles--up the banks of lonely rivers, over open moors, or
+among inclosures where there were large farming establishments with
+cattle and horses and extensive stables and sheds. There was a village
+and a harbour where fishing people kept their boats and went out daily
+with their nets and lines--blacks and whites living and working side by
+side. I could go where I pleased without fear of interference or
+question. Only I was warned to be careful of the dogs, large and
+dangerous, descendants of the famous Cuban bloodhounds, which are kept
+everywhere to guard the yards and houses. These beasts were really
+dangerous, and had to be avoided. The shore was of inexhaustible
+interest. It was a level shelf of coral rock extending for many miles
+and littered over with shells and coral branches which had been flung up
+by the surf. I had hoped for bathing. In the open water it is not to be
+thought of on account of the sharks, but baths have been cut in the rock
+all along that part of the coast at intervals of half a mile; deep
+square basins with tunnels connecting them with the sea, up which the
+waves run clear and foaming. They are within inclosures, roofed over to
+keep out the sun, and with attendants regularly present. Art and nature
+combined never made more charming pools; the water clear as sapphire,
+aerated by the constant inrush of the foaming breakers, and so warm that
+you could lie in it without a chill for hours. Alas! that I could but
+look at them and execrate the precious Government which forbade me their
+use. So severe a tax is laid on these bathing establishments that the
+owners can only afford to keep them open during the three hottest months
+in the year, when the demand is greatest.
+
+In the evenings people from Havana would occasionally come down to dine
+as we go to Greenwich, being attracted partly by the air and partly by
+my host's reputation. There was a long verandah under which tables were
+laid out, and there were few nights on which one or more parties were
+not to be seen there. Thus I encountered several curious specimens of
+Cuban humanity, and on one of my runs up to Havana I met again the cigar
+broker who had so roughly challenged my judgment. He was an original and
+rather diverting man; I should think a Jew. Whatever he was he fell upon
+me again and asked me scornfully whether I supposed that the cigars
+which I had bought of Senor Bances were anything out of the way. I said
+that they suited my taste and that was enough. 'Ah,' he replied, '_Cada
+loco con su tema._ Every fool had his opinion.' 'I am the _loco_
+(idiot), then,' said I, 'but that again is matter of opinion.' He spoke
+of Cuba and professed to know all about it. 'Can you tell me, then,'
+said I, 'why the Cubans hate the Spaniards?' 'Why do the Irish hate the
+English?' he answered. I said it was not an analogous case. Cubans and
+Spaniards were of the same breed and of the same creed. 'That is
+nothing,' he replied; 'the Americans will have both Cuba and Ireland
+before long.' I said I thought the Americans were too wise to meddle
+with either. If they did, however, I imagined that on our own side of
+the Atlantic we should have something to say on the subject before
+Ireland was taken from us. He laughed good-humouredly. 'Is it possible,
+sir,' he said, 'that you live in England and are so absolutely
+ignorant?' I laughed too. He was a strange creature, and would have made
+an excellent character in a novel.
+
+Don G---- or his brother came down occasionally to see how I was getting
+on and to talk philosophy and history. Other gentlemen came, and the
+favourite subject of conversation was Spanish administration. One of
+them told me this story as an illustration of it. His father was the
+chief partner in a bank; a clerk absconded, taking 50,000 dollars with
+him; he had been himself sent in pursuit of the man, overtook him with
+the money still in his possession, and recovered it. With this he ought
+to have been contented, but he tried to have the offender punished. The
+clerk replied to the criminal charge by a counter-charge against the
+house. It was absurd in itself, but he found that a suit would grow out
+of it which would swallow more than the 50,000 dollars, and finally he
+bribed the judge to allow him to drop the prosecution. _Cosas de
+Espana_; it lies in the breed. Guzman de Alfarache was robbed of his
+baggage by a friend. The facts were clear, the thief was caught with
+Guzman's clothes on his back; but he had influential friends--he was
+acquitted. He prosecuted Guzman for a false accusation, got a judgment
+and ruined him.
+
+The question was, whether if the Cubans could make themselves
+independent there would be much improvement. The want in Cuba just now,
+as in a good many other places, is the want of some practical religion
+which insists on moral duty. A learned English judge was trying a case
+one day, when there seemed some doubt about the religious condition of
+one of the witnesses. The clerk of the court retired with him to
+ascertain what it really was, and returned radiant almost immediately,
+saying, 'All right, my lord. Knows he'll be damned--competent
+witness--knows he'll be damned.' That is really the whole of the matter.
+If a man is convinced that if he does wrong he will infallibly be
+punished for it he has then 'a saving faith.' This, unfortunately, is
+precisely the conviction which modern forms of religion produce hardly
+anywhere. The Cubans are Catholics, and hear mass and go to confession;
+but confession and the mass between them are enough for the consciences
+of most of them, and those who think are under the influence of the
+modern spirit, to which all things are doubtful. Some find comfort in
+Mr. Herbert Spencer. Some regard Christianity as a myth or poem, which
+had passed in unconscious good faith into the mind of mankind, and there
+might have remained undisturbed as a beneficent superstition had not
+Protestantism sprung up and insisted on flinging away everything which
+was not literal and historical fact. Historical fact had really no more
+to do with it than with the stories of Prometheus or the siege of Troy.
+The end was that no bottom of fact could be found, and we were all set
+drifting.
+
+Notably too I observed among serious people there, what I have observed
+in other places, the visible relief with which they begin to look
+forward to extinction after death. When the authority is shaken on which
+the belief in a future life rests, the question inevitably recurs. Men
+used to pretend that the idea of annihilation was horrible to them; now
+they regard the probability of it with calmness, if not with actual
+satisfaction. One very interesting Cuban gentleman said to me that life
+would be very tolerable if one was certain that death would be the end
+of it. The theological alternatives were equally unattractive; Tartarus
+was an eternity of misery, and the Elysian Fields an eternity of ennui.
+
+There is affectation in the talk of men, and one never knows from what
+they say exactly what is in their mind. I have often thought that the
+real character of a people shows itself nowhere with more unconscious
+completeness than in their cemeteries. Philosophise as we may, few of us
+are deliberately insincere in the presence of death; and in the
+arrangements which we make for the reception of those who have been dear
+to us, and in the lines which we inscribe upon their monuments, we show
+what we are in ourselves perhaps more than what they were whom we
+commemorate. The parish churchyard is an emblem and epitome of English
+country life; London reflects itself in Brompton and Kensal Green, and
+Paris in Pere la Chaise. One day as I was walking I found myself at the
+gate of the great suburban cemetery of Havana. It was enclosed within
+high walls; the gateway was a vast arch of brown marble, beautiful and
+elaborately carved. Within there was a garden simply and gracefully laid
+out with trees and shrubs and flowers in borders. The whole space
+inclosed may have been ten acres, of which half was assigned to those
+who were contented with a mere mound of earth to mark where they lay;
+the rest was divided into family vaults covered with large white marble
+slabs, separate headstones marking individuals for whom a particular
+record was required, and each group bearing the name of the family the
+members of which were sleeping there. The peculiarity of the place was
+the absence of inscriptions. There was a name and date, with E.P.D.--'en
+paz descansa'[14]--or E.G.E.--'en gracia esta'[15]--and that seemed all
+that was needed. The virtues of the departed and the grief of the
+survivors were taken for granted in all but two instances. There may
+have been more, but I could find only these.
+
+One was in Latin:
+
+    AD COELITES EVOCATAE UXORI EXIMAE IGNATIUS.
+    _Ignatius to his admirable wife who has been called up to heaven._
+
+The other was in Spanish verse, and struck me as a graceful imitation of
+the old manner of Cervantes and Lope de Vega. The design on the monument
+was of a girl hanging an immortelle upon a cross. The tomb was of a
+Caridad del Monte, and the lines were:
+
+    Bendita Caridad, las que piadosa
+    Su mano vierte en la funerea losa
+    Son flores recogidas en el suelo,
+    Mas con su olor perfumaian el cielo.
+
+It is dangerous for anyone to whom a language is only moderately
+familiar to attempt an appreciation of elegiac poetry, the effect of
+which, like the fragrance of a violet, must rather be perceived than
+accounted for. He may imagine what is not there, for a single word ill
+placed or ill chosen may spoil the charm, and of this a foreigner can
+never entirely judge. He may know what each word means, but he cannot
+know the associations of it. Here, however, is a translation in which
+the sense is preserved, though the aroma is gone.
+
+    The flowers which thou, oh Blessed Charity,
+    With pious hand hast twined in funeral wreath,
+    Although on earthly soil they gathered be,
+    Will sweeten heaven with their perfumed breath.
+
+The flowers, I suppose, were the actions of Caridad's own innocent life,
+which she was offering on the cross of Christ; but one never can be sure
+that one has caught the exact sentiment of emotional verse in a foreign
+language. The beauty lies in an undefinable sweetness which rises from
+the melody of the words, and in a translation disappears altogether. Who
+or what Caridad del Monte was, whether a young girl whom somebody had
+loved, or an allegoric and emblematic figure, I had no one to tell me.
+
+I must not omit one acquaintance which I was fortunate enough to make
+while staying at my seaside lodging. There appeared there one day,
+driven out of Havana like myself by the noise, an American ecclesiastic
+with a friend who addressed him as 'My lord.' By the ring and purple, as
+well as by the title, I perceived that he was a bishop. His friend was
+his chaplain, and from their voices I gathered that they were both by
+extraction Irish. The bishop had what is called a 'clergy-man's throat,'
+and had come from the States in search of a warmer climate. They kept
+entirely to themselves, but from the laughter and good-humour they were
+evidently excellent company for one another, and wanted no other. I
+rather wished than hoped that accident might introduce me to them. Even
+in Cuba the weather is uncertain. One day there came a high wind from
+the sea; the waves roared superbly upon the rocks, flying over them in
+rolling cataracts. I never saw foam so purely white or waves so
+transparent. As a spectacle it was beautiful, and the shore became a
+museum of coralline curiosities. Indoors the effect was less agreeable.
+Windows rattled and shutters broke from their fastenings and flew to and
+fro. The weathercock on the house-top creaked as he was whirled about,
+and the verandahs had to be closed, and the noise was like a prolonged
+thunder peal. The second day the wind became a cyclone, and chilly as if
+it came from the pole. None of us could stir out. The bishop suffered
+even more than I did; he walked up and down on the sheltered side of the
+house wrapped in a huge episcopalian cloak. I think he saw that I was
+sorry for him, as I really was. He spoke to me; he said he had felt the
+cold less in America when the thermometer marked 25 deg. below zero. It was
+not much, but the silence was broken. Common suffering made a kind of
+link between us. After this he dropped an occasional gracious word as he
+passed, and one morning he came and sat by me and began to talk on
+subjects of extreme interest. Chiefly he insisted on the rights of
+conscience and the tenderness for liberty of thought which had always
+been shown by the Church of Rome. He had been led to speak of it by the
+education question which has now become a burning one in the American
+Union. The Church, he said, never had interfered, and never could or
+would interfere, with any man's conscientious scruples. Its own
+scruples, therefore, ought to be respected. The American State schools
+were irreligious, and Catholic parents were unwilling to allow their
+children to attend them. They had established schools of their own, and
+they supported them by subscriptions among themselves. In these schools
+the boys and girls learnt everything which they could learn in the State
+schools, and they learnt to be virtuous besides. They were thus
+discharging to the full every duty which the State could claim of them,
+and the State had no right to tax them in addition for the maintenance
+of institutions of which they made no use, and of the principles of
+which they disapproved. There were now eight millions of Catholics in
+the Union. In more than one state they had an actual majority; and they
+intended to insist that as long as their children came up to the present
+educational standard, they should no longer be compelled to pay a second
+education tax to the Government. The struggle, he admitted, would be a
+severe one, but the Catholics had justice on their side, and would fight
+on till they won.
+
+In democracies the majority is to prevail, and if the control of
+education falls within the province of each separate state government,
+it is not easy to see on what ground the Americans will be able to
+resist, or how there can be a struggle at all where the Catholic vote is
+really the largest. The presence of the Catholic Church in a democracy
+is the real anomaly. The principle of the Church is authority resting on
+a divine commission; the principle of democracy is the will of the
+people; and the Church in the long run will have as hard a battle to
+fight with the divine right of the majority of numbers as she had with
+the divine right of the Hohenstauffens and the Plantagenets. She is
+adroit in adapting herself to circumstances, and, like her emblem the
+fish, she changes her colour with that of the element in which she
+swims. No doubt she has a strong position in this demand and will know
+how to use it.
+
+But I was surprised to hear even a Catholic bishop insist that his
+Church had always paid so much respect to the rights of conscience. I
+had been taught to believe that in the days of its power the Church had
+not been particularly tender towards differences of opinion. Fire and
+sword had been used freely enough as long as fire and sword were
+available. I hinted my astonishment. The bishop said the Church had been
+slandered; the Church had never in a single instance punished any man
+merely for conscientious error. Protestants had falsified history.
+Protestants read their histories, Catholics read theirs, and the
+Catholic version was the true one. The separate governments of Europe
+had no doubt been cruel. In France, Spain, the Low Countries, even in
+England, heretics had been harshly dealt with, but it was the
+governments that had burnt and massacred all those people, not the
+Church. The governments were afraid of heresy because it led to
+revolution. The Church had never shed any blood at all; the Church
+could not, for she was forbidden to do so by her own canons. If she
+found a man obstinate in unbelief, she cut him off from the communion
+and handed him over to the secular arm. If the secular arm thought fit
+to kill him, the Church's hands were clear of it.
+
+[Illustration: PORT AU PRINCE, HAYTI.]
+
+So Pilate washed his hands; so the judge might say he never hanged a
+murderer; the execution was the work of the hangman. The bishop defied
+me to produce an instance in which in Rome, when the temporal power was
+with the pope and the civil magistrates were churchmen, there had ever
+been an execution for heresy. I mentioned Giordano Bruno, whom the
+bishop had forgotten; but we agreed not to quarrel, and I could not
+admire sufficiently the hardihood and the ingenuity of his argument. The
+English bishops and abbots passed through parliament the Act _de
+haeretico comburendo_, but they were acting as politicians, not as
+churchmen. The Spanish Inquisition burnt freely and successfully. The
+inquisitors were archbishops and bishops, but the Holy Office was a
+function of the State. When Gregory XIII. struck his medal in
+commemoration of the massacre of St. Bartholomew he was then only the
+secular ruler of Rome, and therefore fallible and subject to sin like
+other mortals. The Church has many parts to play; her stage wardrobe is
+well furnished, and her actors so well instructed in their parts that
+they believe themselves in all that they say. The bishop was speaking no
+more than his exact conviction. He told me that in the Middle Ages
+secular princes were bound by their coronation oath to accept the pope
+as the arbiter of all quarrels between them. I asked where this oath
+was, or what were the terms of it? The words, he said, were unimportant.
+The fact was certain, and down to the fatal schism of the sixteenth
+century the pope had always been allowed to arbitrate, and quarrels had
+been prevented. I could but listen and wonder. He admitted that he had
+read one set of books and I another, as it was clear that he must have
+done.
+
+In the midst of our differences we found we had many points of
+agreement. We agreed that the breaking down of Church authority at the
+Reformation had been a fatal disaster; that without a sense of
+responsibility to a supernatural power, human beings would sink into
+ingenious apes, that human society would become no more than a
+congregation of apes, and that with differences of opinion and belief,
+that sense was becoming more and more obscured. So long as all serious
+men held the same convictions, and those convictions were embodied in
+the law, religion could speak with authority. The authority being denied
+or shaken, the fact itself became uncertain. The notion that everybody
+had a right to think as he pleased was felt to be absurd in common
+things. In every practical art or science the ignorant submitted to be
+guided by those who were better instructed than themselves. Why should
+they be left to their private judgment on subjects where to go wrong was
+the more dangerous. All this was plain sailing. The corollary that if it
+is to retain its influence the Church must not teach doctrines which
+outrage the common sense of mankind as Luther led half Europe to believe
+that the Church was doing in the sixteenth century, we agreed that we
+would not dispute about. But I was interested to see that the leopard
+had not changed its spots, that it merely readjusted its attitudes to
+suit the modern taste, and that if it ever recovered its power it would
+claw and scratch in the old way. Rome, like Pilate, may protest its
+innocence of the blood which was spilt in its name and in its interests.
+Did that tender and merciful court ever suggest to those prelates who
+passed the Act in England for the burning of heretics that they were
+transgressing the sacred rights of conscience? Did it reprove the
+Inquisition or send a mild remonstrance to Philip II.? The eyes of those
+who are willing to be blinded will see only what they desire to see.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[14] He rests in peace.
+
+[15] He is now in grace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+    Return to Havana--The Spaniards in Cuba--Prospects--American
+    influence--Future of the West Indies--English rumours--Leave
+    Cuba--The harbour at night--The Bahama Channel--Hayti--Port au
+    Prince--The black republic--West Indian history.
+
+
+The air and quiet of Vedado (so my retreat was called) soon set me up
+again, and I was able to face once more my hotel and its Americans. I
+did not attempt to travel in Cuba, nor was it necessary for my purpose.
+I stayed a few days longer at Havana. I went to operas and churches; I
+sailed about the harbour in boats, the boatmen, all of them, not
+negroes, as in the Antilles, but emigrants from the old country, chiefly
+Gallicians. I met people of all sorts, among the rest a Spanish
+officer--a major of engineers--who, if he lives, may come to something.
+Major D---- took me over the fortifications, showed me the interior
+lines of the Moro, and their latest specimens of modern artillery. The
+garrison are, of course, Spanish regiments made of home-bred Castilians,
+as I could not fail to recognise when I heard any of them speak. There
+are certain words of common use in Spain powerful as the magic formulas
+of enchanters over the souls of men. You hear them everywhere in the
+Peninsula; at cafe's, at tables d'hote, and in private conversation.
+They are a part of the national intellectual equipment. Either from
+prudery or because they are superior to old-world superstitions, the
+Cubans have washed these expressions out of their language; but the
+national characteristics are preserved in the army, and the spell does
+not lose its efficacy because the islanders disbelieve in it. I have
+known a closed post office in Madrid, where the clerk was deaf to polite
+entreaty, blown open by an oath as by a bomb shell. A squad of recruits
+in the Moro, who were lying in the shade under a tree, neglected to rise
+as an officer went by. 'Saludad, C----o!' he thundered out, and they
+bounded to their feet as if electrified.
+
+On the whole Havana was something to have seen. It is the focus and
+epitome of Spanish dominion in those seas, and I was forced to conclude
+that it was well for Cuba that the English attempts to take possession
+of it had failed. Be the faults of their administration as heavy as they
+are alleged to be, the Spaniards have done more to Europeanise their
+islands than we have done with ours. They have made Cuba
+Spanish--Trinidad, Dominica, St. Lucia, Grenada have never been English
+at all, and Jamaica and Barbadoes are ceasing to be English. Cuba is a
+second home to the Spaniards, a permanent addition to their soil. We are
+as birds of passage, temporary residents for transient purposes, with no
+home in our islands at all. Once we thought them worth fighting for, and
+as long as it was a question of ships and cannon we made ourselves
+supreme rulers of the Caribbean Sea; yet the French and Spaniards will
+probably outlive us there. They will remain perhaps as satellites of the
+United States, or in some other confederacy, or in recovered strength of
+their own; we, in a generation or two, if the causes now in operation
+continue to work as they are now working, shall have disappeared from
+the scene. In Cuba there is a great Spanish population; Martinique and
+Guadaloupe are parts of France; to us it seems a matter of indifference
+whether we keep our islands or abandon them, and we leave the remnants
+of our once precious settlements to float or drown as they can.
+Australia and Canada take care of themselves; we expect our West Indies
+to do the same, careless of the difference of circumstance. We no longer
+talk of cutting our colonies adrift; the tone of public opinion is
+changed, and no one dares to advocate openly the desertion of the least
+important of them. But the neglect and indifference continue. We will
+not govern them effectively ourselves: our policy, so far as we have any
+policy, is to extend among them the principles of self-government, and
+self-government can only precipitate our extinction there as completely
+as we know that it would do in India if we were wild enough to venture
+the plunge. There is no enchantment in self-government which will make
+people love each other when they are indifferent or estranged. It can
+only force them into sharper collision.
+
+The opinion in Cuba was, and is, that America is the residuary legatee
+of all the islands, Spanish and English equally, and that she will be
+forced to take charge of them in the end whether she likes it or not.
+Spain governs unjustly and corruptly; the Cubans will not rest till they
+are free from her, and if once independent they will throw themselves on
+American protection.
+
+We will not govern our islands at all, but leave them to drift. Jamaica
+and the Antilles, given over to the negro majorities, can only become
+like Hayti and St. Domingo; and the nature of things will hardly permit
+so fair a part of the earth which has been once civilised and under
+white control to fall back into barbarism.
+
+To England the loss of the West Indies would not itself be serious; but
+in the life of nations discreditable failures are not measured by their
+immediate material consequences. To allow a group of colonies to slide
+out of our hands because we could not or would not provide them with a
+tolerable government would be nothing less than a public disgrace. It
+would be an intimation to all the world that we were unable to maintain
+any longer the position which our fathers had made for us; and when the
+unravelling of the knitted fabric of the Empire has once begun the
+process will be a rapid one.
+
+'But what would you do?' I am asked impatiently. 'We send out peers or
+gentlemen against whose character no direct objection can be raised; we
+assist them with local councils partly chosen by the people themselves.
+We send out bishops, we send out missionaries, we open schools. What can
+we do more? We cannot alter the climate, we cannot make planters prosper
+when sugar will not pay, we cannot convert black men into whites, we
+cannot force the blacks to work for the whites when they do not wish to
+work for them. "Governing," as you call it, will not change the natural
+conditions of things. You can suggest no remedy, and mere fault-finding
+is foolish and mischievous.'
+
+I might answer a good many things. Government cannot do everything, but
+it can do something, and there is a difference between governors against
+whom there is nothing to object and men of special and marked capacity.
+There is a difference between governors whose hands are tied by local
+councils and whose feet are tied by instructions from home, and a
+governor with a free hand and a wise head left to take his own measures
+on the spot. I presume that no one can seriously expect that an orderly
+organised nation can be made out of the blacks, when, in spite of your
+schools and missionaries, sixty per cent. of the children now born among
+them are illegitimate. You can do for the West Indies, I repeat over and
+over again, what you do for the East; you can establish a firm
+authoritative government which will protect the blacks in their civil
+rights and protect the whites in theirs. You cannot alter the climate,
+it is true, or make the soil more fertile. Already it is fertile as any
+in the earth, and the climate is admirable for the purposes for which it
+is needed. But you can restore confidence in the stability of your
+tenure, you can give courage to the whites who are on the spot to remain
+there, and you can tempt capital and enterprise to venture there which
+now seek investments elsewhere. By keeping the rule in your own hands
+you will restore the white population to their legitimate influence; the
+blacks will again look up to them and respect them as they ought to do.
+This you can do, and it will cost you nothing save a little more pains
+in the selection of the persons whom you are to trust with powers
+analogous to those which you grant to your provincial governors in the
+Indian peninsula.
+
+A preliminary condition of this, as of all other real improvements, is
+one, however, which will hardly be fulfilled. Before a beginning can be
+made, a conviction is wanted that life has other objects besides present
+interest and convenience; and very few of us indeed have at the bottom
+of our hearts any such conviction at all. We can talk about it in fine
+language--no age ever talked more or better--but we don't believe in it;
+we believe only in professing to believe, which soothes our vanity and
+does not interfere with our actions. From fine words no harvests grow.
+The negroes are well disposed to follow and obey any white who will be
+kind and just to them, and in such following and obedience their only
+hope of improvement lies. The problem is to create a state of things
+under which Englishmen of vigour and character will make their homes
+among them. Annexation to the United States would lead probably to their
+extermination at no very distant time. The Antilles are small, and the
+fate of the negroes there might be no better than the fate of the
+Caribs. The Americans are not a people who can be trifled with; no one
+knows it better than the negroes. They fear them. They prefer infinitely
+the mild rule of England, and under such a government as we might
+provide if we cared to try, the whole of our islands might become like
+the Moravian settlement in Jamaica, and the black nature, which has
+rather degenerated than improved in these late days of licence, might be
+put again in the way of regeneration. The process would be slow--your
+seedlings in a plantation hang stationary year after year, but they do
+move at last. We cannot disown our responsibility for these poor adopted
+brothers of ours. We send missionaries into Africa to convert them to a
+better form of religion; why should the attempt seem chimerical to
+convert them practically to a higher purpose in our own colonies?
+
+The reader will be weary of a sermon the points of which have been
+reiterated so often. I might say that he requires to have the lesson
+impressed upon him--that it is for his good that I insist upon it, and
+not for my own. But this is the common language of all preachers, and it
+is not found to make the hearers more attentive. I will not promise to
+say no more upon the subject, for it was forced upon me at every moment
+and point of my journey. I am arriving near the end, however, and if he
+has followed so far, he will perhaps go on with me to the conclusion. I
+had three weeks to give to Havana; they were fast running out, and it
+was time for me to be going. Strange stories, too, came from England,
+which made me uneasy till I knew how they were set in circulation. One
+day Mr. Gladstone was said to have gone mad, and the Queen the next.
+The Russians were about to annex Afghanistan. Our troops had been cut to
+pieces in Burmah. Something was going wrong with us every day in one
+corner of the world or another. I found at last that the telegraphic
+intelligence was supplied to the Cuban newspapers from New York, that
+the telegraph clerks there were generally Irish, and their facts were
+the creation of their wishes. I was to return to Jamaica in the same
+vessel which had brought me from it. She had been down to the isthmus,
+and was to call at Havana on her way back. The captain's most English
+face was a welcome sight to me when he appeared one evening at dinner.
+He had come to tell me that he was to sail early on the following
+morning, and I arranged to go on board with him the same night. The
+Captain-General had not forgotten to instruct the Gobierno Civil to
+grant me an _exeat regno_. I do not know that I gained much by his
+intercession, for without it I should hardly have been detained
+indefinitely, and as it was I had to pay more dollars than I liked to
+part with. The necessary documents, however, had been sent through the
+British consul, and I was free to leave when I pleased. I paid my bill
+at the hotel, which was not after all an extravagant one, cleared my
+pocket-book of the remainder of the soiled and tattered paper which is
+called money, and does duty for it down to a half-penny, and with my
+distinguished friend Don G----, the real acquisition which I had made in
+coming to his country, and who would not leave me till I was in the
+boat, I drove away to the wharf.
+
+It was a still, lovely, starlight night. The moon had risen over the
+hills, and was shining brightly on the roofs and towers of the city, and
+on the masts and spars of the vessels which were riding in the harbour.
+There was not a ripple on the water, and stars and city, towers and
+ships, stood inverted on the surface pointing downward as into a second
+infinity. The charm was unfortunately interfered with by odours worse
+than Coleridge found at Cologne and cursed in rhyme. The drains of
+Havana, like orange blossom, give off their most fragrant vapours in
+the dark hours. I could well believe Don G----'s saying, that but for
+the natural healthiness of the place, they would all die of it like
+poisoned flies. We had to cut our adieus short, for the mouth of some
+horrid sewer was close to us. In the boat I did not escape; the water
+smelt horribly as it was stirred by the oars, charged as it was with
+three centuries of pollution, and the phosphorescent light shone with a
+sickly, sulphur-like brilliance. One could have fancied that one was in
+Charon's boat and was crossing Acheron. When I reached the steamer I
+watched from the deck the same ghost-like phenomenon which is described
+by Tom Cringle. A fathom deep, in the ship's shadow, some shark or other
+monster sailed slowly by in an envelope of spectral lustre. When he
+stopped his figure disappeared, when he moved on again it was like the
+movement of a streak of blue flame. Such a creature did not seem as if
+it could belong to our familiar sunlit ocean.
+
+The state of the harbour is not creditable to the Spanish Government,
+and I suppose will not be improved till there is some change of dynasty.
+All that can be said for it is that it is not the worst in these seas.
+Our ship had just come from the Canal, and had brought the latest news
+from thence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the miscalculations of the work to be done and of the expense of
+doing it are now notorious to all the world. The alternatives are to
+abandon an enterprise so splendid in conception, so disastrous in the
+execution, or to raise and spend fresh tens of millions to follow those
+that are gone with no certain prospect of success after all. The saddest
+part of the story will be soonest forgotten--the frightful consumption
+of human life in those damp and pestilential jungles. M. Lesseps having
+made his name immortal at Suez, aspired at eclipsing his first
+achievement, by a second yet more splendidly ambitious, at a time of
+life when common men are content to retire upon their laurels. He
+deserves and will receive an unstinted admiration for his energy and his
+enthusiasm. But his countrymen who have so zealously supported him will
+be rewarded with no dividend upon their shares, even if the two oceans
+are eventually united, and no final success can be looked for in the
+bold projector's life time.
+
+At dawn we swept out under the Moro, and away once more into the free
+fresh open sea. We had come down on the south side of the island, we
+returned by the north up the old Bahama Channel where Drake died on his
+way home from his last unsuccessful expedition--Lope de Vega singing a
+paean over the end of the great 'dragon.' Fresh passengers brought fresh
+talk. There was a clever young Jamaican on board returning from a
+holiday; he had the spirits of youth about him, and would have pleased
+my American who never knew good come of despondency. He had hopes for
+his country, but they rested, like those of every sensible man that I
+met, on an inability to believe that there would be further advances in
+the direction of political liberty. A revised constitution, he said,
+could issue only in fresh Gordon riots and fresh calamities. He had been
+travelling in the Southern States. He had seen the state of Mississippi
+deserted by the whites, and falling back into a black wilderness. He had
+seen South Carolina, which had narrowly escaped ruin under a black and
+carpet-bagger legislature, and had recovered itself under the steady
+determination of the Americans that the civil war was not to mean the
+domination of negro over white. The danger was greater in the English
+islands than in either of these states, from the enormous disproportion
+of numbers. The experiment could be ventured only under a high census
+and a restricted franchise. But the experience of all countries showed
+that these limited franchises were invidious and could not be
+maintained, the end was involved in the beginning, and he trusted that
+prudent counsels would prevail. We had gone too far already.
+
+On board also there was a traveller from a Manchester house of business,
+who gave me a more flourishing account than I expected of the state of
+our trade, not so much with the English islands as with the Spaniards in
+Cuba and on the mainland. His own house, he said, had a large business
+with Havana; twenty firms in the north of England were competing there,
+and all were doing well. The Spanish Americans on the west side of the
+continent were good customers, with the exception of the Mexicans, who
+were energetic and industrious, and manufactured for their own
+consumption. These modern Aztecs were skilful workmen, nimble-fingered
+and inventive. Wages were low, but they were contented with them.
+Mexico, I was surprised to hear from him, was rising fast into
+prosperity. Whether human life was any safer then than it was a few
+years ago, he did not tell me.
+
+Amidst talk and chess and occasional whist after nightfall when reading
+became difficult, we ran along with smooth seas, land sometimes in
+sight, with shoals on either side of us.
+
+We were to have one more glimpse of Hayti; we were to touch at Port au
+Prince, the seat of government of the successors of Toussaint. If beauty
+of situation could mould human character, the inhabitants of Port au
+Prince might claim to be the first of mankind. St. Domingo or Espanola,
+of which Hayti is the largest division, was the earliest island
+discovered by Columbus and the finest in the Caribbean Ocean. It
+remained Spanish, as I have already said, for 200 years, when Hayti was
+taken by the French buccaneers, and made over by them to Louis XIV. The
+French kept it till the Revolution. They built towns; they laid out
+farms and sugar fields; they planted coffee all over the island, where
+it now grows wild.' Vast herds of cattle roamed over the mountains;
+splendid houses rose over the rich savannahs. The French Church put out
+its strength; there were churches and priests in every parish; there
+were monasteries and nunneries for the religious orders. So firm was the
+hold that they had gained that Hayti, like Cuba, seemed to have been
+made a part of the old world, and as civilised as France itself. But
+French civilisation became itself electric. The Revolution came, and the
+reign of Liberty. The blacks took arms; they surprised the plantations;
+they made a clean sweep of the whole French population. Yellow fever
+swept away the armies which were sent to avenge the massacre, and France
+being engaged in annexing Europe had no leisure to despatch more. The
+island being thus derelict, Spain and England both tried their hand to
+recover it, but failed from the same cause, and a black nation, with a
+republican constitution and a population perhaps of about a million and
+a half of pure-blood negroes, has since been in unchallenged possession,
+and has arrived at the condition which has been described to us by Sir
+Spenser St. John. Republics which begin with murder and plunder do not
+come to much good in this world. Hayti has passed through many
+revolutions, and is no nearer than at first to stability. The present
+president, M. Salomon, who was long a refugee in Jamaica, came into
+power a few years back by a turn of the wheel. He was described to me as
+a peremptory gentleman who made quick work with his political opponents.
+His term of office having nearly expired, he had re-elected himself
+shortly before for another seven years and was prepared to maintain his
+right by any measures which he might think expedient. He had a few
+regiments of soldiers, who, I was told, were devoted to him, and a fleet
+consisting of two gunboats commanded by an American officer, to whom he
+chiefly owed his security.
+
+We had steamed along the Hayti coast all one afternoon, underneath a
+high range of hills which used to be the hunting ground of the
+buccaneers. We had passed their famous Tortugas[16] without seeing them.
+Towards evening we entered the long channel between Gonaive island and
+the mainland, going slowly that we might not arrive at Port au Prince
+before daylight. It was six in the morning when the anchor rattled down,
+and I went on deck to look about me. We were at the head of a fiord
+rather broader than those in Norway, but very like them--wooded
+mountains rising on either side of us, an open valley in front, and on
+the rich level soil washed down by the rains and deposited along the
+shore, the old French and now President Salomon's capital. Palms and
+oranges and other trees were growing everywhere among the houses giving
+the impression of graceful civilisation. Directly before us were three
+or four wooded islets which form a natural breakwater, and above them
+were seen the masts of the vessels which were lying in the harbour
+behind. Close to where we were brought up lay the 'Canada,' an English
+frigate, and about a quarter of a mile from her an American frigate of
+about the same size, with the stars and stripes conspicuously flying. We
+have had some differences of late with the Hayti authorities, and the
+satisfaction which we asked for having been refused or delayed, a
+man-of-war had been sent to ask redress in more peremptory terms. The
+town lay under her guns; the president's ships, which she might perhaps
+have seized as a security, had been taken out of sight into shallow
+water, where she could not follow them. The Americans have no particular
+rights in Hayti, and are as little liked as we are, but they are feared,
+and they do not allow any business of a serious kind to go on in those
+waters without knowing what it is about. Perhaps the president's admiral
+of the station being an American may have had something to do with their
+presence. Anyway, there the two ships were lying when I came up from
+below, their hulks and spars outlined picturesquely against the steep
+wooded shores. The air was hot and steamy; fishing vessels with white
+sails were drifting slowly about the glassy water. Except for the heat
+and a black officer of the customs in uniform, and his boat and black
+crew alongside, I could have believed myself off Moelde or some similar
+Norwegian town, so like everything seemed, even to the colour of the
+houses.
+
+We were to stay some hours. After breakfast we landed. I had seen
+Jacmel, and therefore thought myself prepared for the worst which I
+should find. Jacmel was an outlying symptom; Port au Prince was the
+central ulcer. Long before we came to shore there came off whiffs, not
+of drains as at Havana, but of active dirt fermenting in the sunlight.
+Calling our handkerchiefs to our help and looking to our feet carefully,
+we stepped up upon the quay and walked forward as judiciously as we
+could. With the help of stones we crossed a shallow ditch, where rotten
+fish, vegetables, and other articles were lying about promiscuously, and
+we came on what did duty for a grand parade.
+
+We were in a Paris of the gutter, with boulevards and _places_, _fiacres_
+and crimson parasols. The boulevards were littered with the refuse of
+the houses and were foul as pigsties, and the ladies under the parasols
+were picking their way along them in Parisian boots and silk dresses. I
+saw a _fiacre_ broken down in a black pool out of which a blacker
+ladyship was scrambling. Fever breeds so prodigally in that pestilential
+squalor that 40,000 people were estimated to have died of it in a single
+year. There were shops and stores and streets, men and women in tawdry
+European costume, and officers on horseback with a tatter of lace and
+gilding. We passed up the principal avenue, which opened on the market
+place. Above the market was the cathedral, more hideous than even the
+Mormon temple at Salt Lake. It was full of ladies; the rank, beauty, and
+fashion of Port au Prince were at their morning mass, for they are
+Catholics with African beliefs underneath. They have a French clergy, an
+archbishop and bishop, paid miserably but still subsisting; subsisting
+not as objects of reverence at all, as they are at Dominica, but as the
+humble servants and ministers of black society. We English are in bad
+favour just now; no wonder, with the guns of the 'Canada' pointed at the
+city; but the chief complaint is on account of Sir Spenser St. John's
+book, which they cry out against with a degree of anger which is the
+surest evidence of its truth. It would be unfair even to hint at the
+names or stations of various persons who gave me information about the
+condition of the place and people. Enough that those who knew well what
+they were speaking about assured me that Hayti was the most ridiculous
+caricature of civilisation in the whole world. Doubtless the whites
+there are not disinterested witnesses; for they are treated as they once
+treated the blacks. They can own no freehold property, and exist only on
+tolerance. They are called 'white trash.' Black dukes and marquises
+drive over them in the street and swear at them, and they consider it an
+invasion of the natural order of things. If this was the worst, or even
+if the dirt and the disease was the worst, it might be borne with, for
+the whites might go away if they pleased, and they pay the penalty
+themselves for choosing to be there. But this is not the worst.
+Immorality is so universal that it almost ceases to be a fault, for a
+fault implies an exception, and in Hayti it is the rule. Young people
+make experiment of one another before they will enter into any closer
+connection. So far they are no worse than in our own English islands,
+where the custom is equally general; but behind the immorality, behind
+the religiosity, there lies active and alive the horrible revival of the
+West African superstitions; the serpent worship, and the child
+sacrifice, and the cannibalism. There is no room to doubt it. A
+missionary assured me that an instance of it occurred only a year ago
+within his own personal knowledge. The facts are notorious; a full
+account was published in one of the local newspapers, and the only
+result was that the president imprisoned the editor for exposing his
+country. A few years ago persons guilty of these infamies were tried and
+punished; now they are left alone, because to prosecute and convict them
+would be to acknowledge the truth of the indictment.
+
+In this, as in all other communities, there is a better side as well as
+a worse. The better part is ashamed of the condition into which the
+country has fallen; rational and well-disposed Haytians would welcome
+back the French but for an impression, whether well founded or ill I
+know not, that the Americans would not suffer any European nation to
+reacquire or recover any new territory on their side of the Atlantic.
+They make the most they can of their French connection. They send their
+children to Paris to be educated, and many of them go thither
+themselves. There is money among them, though industry there is none.
+The Hayti coffee which bears so high a reputation is simply gathered
+under the bushes which the French planters left behind them, and is half
+as excellent as it ought to be because it is so carelessly cleaned. Yet
+so rich is the island in these and other natural productions that they
+cannot entirely ruin it. They have a revenue from their customs of
+5,000,000 dollars to be the prey of political schemers. They have a
+constitution, of course, with a legislature--two houses of a
+legislature--universal suffrage, &c., but it does not save them from
+revolutions, which recurred every two or three years till the time of
+the present president. He being of stronger metal than the rest, takes
+care that the votes are given as he pleases, shoots down recusants, and
+knows how to make himself feared. He is a giant, they say--I did not see
+him--six feet some inches in height and broad in proportion. When in
+Jamaica he was a friend of Gordon, and the intimacy between them is
+worth noting, as throwing light on Gordon's political aspirations.
+
+I stayed no longer than the ship's business detained the captain, and I
+breathed more freely when I had left that miserable cross-birth of
+ferocity and philanthropic sentiment. No one can foretell the future
+fate of the black republic, but the present order of things cannot last
+in an island so close under the American shores. If the Americans forbid
+any other power to interfere, they will have to interfere themselves. If
+they find Mormonism an intolerable blot upon their escutcheon, they will
+have to put a stop in some way or other to cannibalism and
+devil-worship. Meanwhile, the ninety years of negro self-government have
+had their use in showing what it really means, and if English statesmen,
+either to save themselves trouble or to please the prevailing
+uninstructed sentiment, insist on extending it, they will be found when
+the accounts are made up to have been no better friends to the unlucky
+negro than their slave-trading forefathers.
+
+From the head of the bay on which Port au Prince stands there reaches
+out on the west the long arm or peninsula which is so peculiar a feature
+in the geography of the island. The arm bone is a continuous ridge of
+mountains rising to a height of 8,000 feet and stretching for 160 miles.
+At the back towards the ocean is Jacmel, on the other side is the bight
+of Leogane, over which and along the land our course lay after leaving
+President Salomon's city. The day was unusually hot, and we sat under an
+awning on deck watching the changes in the landscape as ravines opened
+and closed again, and tall peaks changed their shapes and angles.
+Clouds came down upon the mountain tops and passed off again, whole
+galleries of pictures swept by, and nature never made more lovely ones.
+The peculiarity of tropical mountain scenery is that the high summits
+are clothed with trees. The outlines are thus softened and rounded, save
+where the rock is broken into precipices. Along the sea and for several
+miles inland are the Basses Terres as they used to be called, level
+alluvial plains, cut and watered at intervals by rivers, once covered
+with thriving plantations and now a jungle. There are no wild beasts
+there save an occasional man, few snakes, and those not dangerous. The
+acres of richest soil which are waiting there till reasonable beings can
+return and cultivate them, must be hundreds of thousands. In the valleys
+and on the slopes there are all gradations of climate, abundant water,
+grass lands that might be black with cattle, or on the loftier ranges
+white with sheep.
+
+It is strange to think how chequered a history these islands have had,
+how far they are even yet from any condition which promises permanence.
+Not one of them has arrived at any stable independence. Spaniards,
+English and French, Dutch and Danes scrambled for them, fought for them,
+occupied them more or less with their own people, but it was not to
+found new nations, but to get gold or get something which could be
+changed for gold. Only occasionally, and as it were by accident, they
+became the theatre of any grander game. The war of the Reformation was
+carried thither, and heroic deeds were done there, but it was by
+adventurers who were in search of plunder for themselves. France and
+England fought among the Antilles, and their names are connected with
+many a gallant action; but they fought for the sovereignty of the seas,
+not for the rights and liberties of the French or English inhabitants of
+the islands. Instead of occupying them with free inhabitants, the
+European nations filled them with slave gangs. They were valued only for
+the wealth which they yielded, and society there has never assumed any
+particularly noble aspect. There has been splendour and luxurious
+living, and there have been crimes and horrors, and revolts and
+massacres. There has been romance, but it has been the romance of
+pirates and outlaws. The natural graces of human life do not show
+themselves under such conditions. There has been no saint in the West
+Indies since Las Casas, no hero, unless philonegro enthusiasm can make
+one out of Toussaint. There are no people there in the true sense of the
+word, with a character and purpose of their own, unless to some extent
+in Cuba, and therefore when the wind has changed and the wealth for
+which the islands were alone desired is no longer to be made among them,
+and slavery is no longer possible and would not pay if it were, there is
+nothing to fall back upon. The palaces of the English planters and
+merchants fall to decay; their wines and their furniture, their books
+and their pictures, are sold or dispersed. Their existence is a struggle
+to keep afloat, and one by one they go under in the waves.
+
+The blacks as long as they were slaves were docile and partially
+civilised. They have behaved on the whole well in our islands since
+their emancipation, for though they were personally free the whites were
+still their rulers, and they looked up to them with respect. They have
+acquired land and notions of property, some of them can read, many of
+them are tolerable workmen and some excellent, but in character the
+movement is backwards, not forwards. Even in Hayti, after the first
+outburst of ferocity, a tolerable government was possible for a
+generation or two. Orderly habits are not immediately lost, but the
+effect of leaving the negro nature to itself is apparent at last. In the
+English islands they are innocently happy in the unconsciousness of the
+obligations of morality. They eat, drink, sleep, and smoke, and do the
+least in the way of work that they can. They have no ideas of duty, and
+therefore are not made uneasy by neglecting it. One or other of them
+occasionally rises in the legal or other profession, but there is no
+sign, not the slightest, that the generality of the race are improving
+either in intelligence or moral habits; all the evidence is the other
+way. No Uncle Tom, no Aunt Chloe need be looked for in a negro's cabin
+in the West Indies. If such specimens of black humanity are to be found
+anywhere, it will be where they have continued under the old influences
+as servants in white men's houses. The generality are mere good-natured
+animals, who in service had learnt certain accomplishments, and had
+developed certain qualities of a higher kind. Left to themselves they
+fall back upon the superstitions and habits of their ancestors. The key
+to the character of any people is to be found in the local customs which
+have spontaneously grown or are growing among them. The customs of
+Dahomey have not yet shown themselves in the English West Indies and
+never can while the English authority is maintained; but no custom of
+any kind will be found in a negro hut or village from which his most
+sanguine friend can derive a hope that he is on the way to mending
+himself.
+
+Roses do not grow on thorn trees, nor figs on thistles. A healthy human
+civilisation was not perhaps to be looked for in countries which have
+been alternately the prey of avarice, ambition, and sentimentalism. We
+visit foreign countries to see varieties of life and character, to learn
+languages that we may gain an insight into various literatures, to see
+manners unlike our own springing naturally out of different soils and
+climates, to see beautiful works of art, to see places associated with
+great men and great actions, and subsidiary to these, to see lakes and
+mountains, and strange skies and seas. But the localities of great
+events and the homes of the actors in them are only saddening when the
+spiritual results are disappointing, and scenery loses its charm unless
+the grace of humanity is in the heart of it. To the man of science the
+West Indies may be delightful and instructive. Rocks and trees and
+flowers remain as they always were, and Nature is constant to herself.
+But the traveller whose heart is with his kind, and who cares only to
+see his brother mortals making their corner of this planet into an
+orderly and rational home, had better choose some other object for his
+pilgrimage.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[16] Tortoise Islands; the buccaneers' head quarters.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+    Return to Jamaica--Cherry Garden again--Black servants--Social
+    conditions--Sir Henry Norman--King's House once more--Negro
+    suffrage--The will of the people--The Irish python--Conditions of
+    colonial union--Oratory and statesmanship.
+
+
+I had to return to Jamaica from Cuba to meet the mail to England. My
+second stay could be but brief. For the short time that was allowed me I
+went back to my hospitable friends at Cherry Garden, which is an oasis
+in the wilderness. In the heads of the family there was cultivation and
+simplicity and sense. There was a home life with its quiet occupations
+and enjoyments--serious when seriousness was needed, light and bright in
+the ordinary routine of existence. The black domestics, far unlike the
+children of liberty whom I had left at Port au Prince, had caught their
+tone from their master and mistress, and were low-voiced, humorous, and
+pleasant to talk with. So perfect were they in their several capacities,
+that, like the girls at Government House at Dominica, I would have liked
+to pack them in my portmanteau and carry them home. The black butler
+received me on my arrival as an old friend. He brought me a pair of
+boots which I had left behind me on my first visit; he told me 'the
+female' had found them. The lady of the house took me out for a drive
+with her. The coachman half-upset us into a ditch, and we narrowly
+escaped being pitched into a ravine. The dusky creature insisted
+pathetically that it was not his fault, nor the horse's fault. His ebony
+wife had left him for a week's visit to a friend, and his wits had gone
+after her. Of course he was forgiven. Cherry Garden was a genuine
+homestead, a very menagerie of domestic animals of all sorts and breeds.
+Horses loitered under the shade of the mangoes; cows, asses, dogs,
+turkeys, cocks and hens, geese, guinea fowl and pea fowl lounged and
+strutted about the paddocks. In the grey of the morning they held their
+concerts; the asses brayed, the dogs barked, the turkeys gobbled, and
+the pea fowl screamed. It was enough to waken the seven sleepers, but
+the noises seemed so home-like and natural that they mixed pleasantly in
+one's dreams. One morning, after they had been holding a special
+jubilee, the butler apologised for them when he came to call me, and
+laughed as at the best of jokes when I said they did not mean any harm.
+The great feature of the day was five cats, with blue eyes and
+spotlessly white, who walked in regularly at breakfast, ranged
+themselves on their tails round their mistress's chair, and ate their
+porridge and milk like reasonable creatures. Within and without all was
+orderly. The gardens were in perfect condition; fields were being
+inclosed and planted; the work of the place went on of itself, with the
+eye of the mistress on it, and her voice, if necessary, heard in
+command; but black and white were all friends together. What could man
+ask for, more than to live all his days in such a climate and with such
+surroundings? Why should a realised ideal like this pass away? Why may
+it not extend itself till it has transformed the features of all our
+West Indian possessions? Thousand of English families might be living in
+similar scenes, happy in themselves and spreading round them a happy,
+wholesome English atmosphere. Why not indeed? Only because we are
+enchanted. Because in Jamaica and Barbadoes the white planters had a
+constitution granted them two hundred years ago, therefore their
+emancipated slaves must now have a constitution also. Wonderful logic of
+formulas, powerful as a witches' cauldron for mischief as long as it is
+believed in. The colonies and the Empire! If the colonies were part
+indeed of the Empire, if they were taken into partnership as the
+Americans take theirs, and were members of an organised body, if an
+injury to each single limb would be felt as an injury to the whole, we
+should not be playing with their vital interests to catch votes at home.
+Alas! at home we are split in two, and party is more than the nation,
+and famous statesmen, thinly disguising their motives under a mask of
+policy, condemn to-day what they approved of yesterday, and catch at
+power by projects which they would be the first to denounce if suggested
+by their adversaries. Till this tyranny be overpast, to bring into one
+the scattered portions of the Empire is the idlest of dreams, and the
+most that is to be hoped for is to arrest any active mischief. Happy
+Americans, who have a Supreme Court with a code of fundamental laws to
+control the vagaries of politicians and check the passions of
+fluctuating electoral majorities! What the Supreme Court is to them, the
+Crown ought to be for us; but the Crown is powerless and must remain
+powerless, and therefore we are as we are, and our national existence is
+made the shuttlecock of party contention.
+
+Time passed so pleasantly with me in these concluding days that I could
+have wished it to be the nothing which metaphysicians say that it is,
+and that when one was happy it would leave one alone. We wandered in the
+shade in the mornings, we made expeditions in the evenings, called at
+friends' houses, and listened to the gossip of the island. It turned
+usually on the one absorbing subject--black servants and the difficulty
+of dealing with them. An American lady from Pennsylvania declared
+emphatically as her opinion that emancipation had been a piece of folly,
+and that things would never mend till they were slaves again.
+
+One of my own chief hopes in going originally to Jamaica had been to see
+and learn the views of the distinguished Governor there. Sir Henry
+Norman had been one of the most eminent of the soldier civilians in
+India. He had brought with him a brilliant reputation; he had won the
+confidence in the West Indies of all classes and all colours. He, if
+anyone, would understand the problem, and from the high vantage ground
+of experience would know what could or could not be done to restore the
+influence of England and the prosperity of the colonies. Unfortunately,
+Sir Henry had been called to London, as I mentioned before, on a
+question of the conduct of some official, and I was afraid that I should
+miss him altogether. He returned, however, the day before I was to sail.
+He was kind enough to ask me to spend an evening with him, and I was
+again on my last night a guest at King's House.
+
+A dinner party offers small opportunity for serious conversation, nor,
+indeed, could I expect a great person in Sir Henry's position to enter
+upon subjects of consequence with a stranger like myself. I could see,
+however, that I had nothing to correct in the impression of his
+character which his reputation had led me to form about him, and I
+wished more than ever that the system of government of which he had been
+so admirable a servant in India could be applied to his present
+position, and that he or such as he could have the administration of it.
+We had common friends in the Indian service to talk about; one
+especially, Reynell Taylor, now dead, who had been the earliest of my
+boy companions. Taylor had been one of the handful of English who held
+the Punjaub in the first revolt of the Sikhs. With a woman's modesty he
+had the spirit of a knight-errant. Sir Henry described him as the 'very
+soul of chivalry,' and seemed himself to be a man of the same pure and
+noble nature, perhaps liable, from the generosity of his temperament, to
+believe more than I could do in modern notions and in modern political
+heroes, but certainly not inclining of his own will to recommend any
+rash innovations. I perceived that like myself he felt no regret that so
+much of the soil of Jamaica was passing to peasant black proprietors. He
+thought well of their natural disposition; he believed them capable of
+improvement. He thought that the possession of land of their own would
+bring them into voluntary industry, and lead them gradually to the
+adoption of civilised habits. He spoke with reserve, and perhaps I may
+not have understood him fully, but he did not seem to me to think much
+of their political capacity. The local boards which have been
+established as an education for higher functions have not been a
+success. They had been described to me in all parts of the island as
+inflammable centres of peculation and mismanagement. Sir Henry said
+nothing from which I could gather his own opinion. I inferred, however
+(he will pardon me if I misrepresent him), that he had no great belief
+in a federation of the islands, in 'responsible government,' and such
+like, as within the bounds of present possibilities. Nor did he think
+that responsible statesmen at home had any such arrangement in view.
+
+That such an arrangement was in contemplation a few years ago, I knew
+from competent authority. Perhaps the unexpected interest which the
+English people have lately shown in the colonies has modified opinion in
+those high circles, and has taught politicians that they must advance
+more cautiously. But the wind still sits in the old quarter. Three years
+ago, the self-suppressed constitution in Jamaica was partially
+re-established. A franchise was conceded both there and in Barbadoes
+which gave every black householder a vote. Even in poor Dominica, an
+extended suffrage was hung out as a remedy for its wretchedness. If
+nothing further is intended, these concessions have been gratuitously
+mischievous. It has roused the hopes of political agitators, not in
+Jamaica only, but all over the Antilles. It has taught the people, who
+have no grievances at all, who in their present state are better
+protected than any peasantry in the world except the Irish, to look to
+political changes as a road to an impossible millennium. It has
+rekindled hopes which had been long extinguished, that, like their
+brothers in Hayti, they were on the way to have the islands to
+themselves. It has alienated the English colonists, filled them with the
+worst apprehensions, and taught them to look wistfully from their own
+country to a union with America. A few elected members in a council
+where they may be counterbalanced by an equal number of official members
+seems a small thing in itself. So long as the equality was maintained,
+my Yankee friend was still willing to risk his capital in Jamaican
+enterprises. But the principle has been allowed. The existing
+arrangement is a half-measure which satisfies none and irritates all,
+and collisions between the representatives of the people and the
+nominees of the Government are only avoided by leaving a sufficient
+number of official seats unfilled. To have re-entered upon a road where
+you cannot stand still, where retreat is impossible, and where to go
+forward can only be recommended on the hypothesis that to give a man a
+vote will itself qualify him for the use of it, has been one of the
+minor achievements of the last Government of Mr. Gladstone, and is
+likely to be as successful as his larger exploits nearer home have as
+yet proved to be. A supreme court, were we happy enough to possess such
+a thing, would forbid these venturous experiments of sanguine statesmen
+who may happen, for a moment, to command a trifling majority in the
+House of Commons.
+
+I could not say what I felt completely to Sir Henry, who, perhaps, had
+been in personal relations with Mr. Gladstone's Government. Perhaps,
+too, he was one of those numerous persons of tried ability and
+intelligence who have only a faint belief that the connection between
+Great Britain and the colonies can be of long continuance. The public
+may amuse themselves with the vision of an imperial union; practical
+statesmen who are aware of the tendencies of self-governed communities
+to follow lines of their own in which the mother country cannot support
+them may believe that they know it to be impossible.
+
+As to the West Indies there are but two genuine alternatives: one to
+leave them to themselves to shape their own destinies, as we leave
+Australia; the other to govern them as if they were a part of Great
+Britain with the same scrupulous care of the people and their interests
+with which we govern Bengal, Madras, and Bombay. England is responsible
+for the social condition of those islands. She filled them with negroes
+when it was her interest to maintain slavery, she emancipated those
+negroes when popular opinion at home demanded that slavery should end.
+It appears to me that England ought to bear the consequences of her own
+actions, and assume to herself the responsibilities of a state of things
+which she has herself created. We are partly unwilling to take the
+trouble, partly we cling to the popular belief that to trust all
+countries with the care of their own concerns is the way to raise the
+character of the inhabitants and to make them happy and contented. We
+dimly perceive that the population of the West Indies is not a natural
+growth of internal tendencies and circumstances, and we therefore
+hesitate before we plunge completely and entirely into the downward
+course; but we play with it, we drift towards it, we advance as far as
+we dare, giving them the evils of both systems and the advantages of
+neither. At the same moment we extend the suffrage to the blacks with
+one hand, while with the other we refuse to our own people the benefit
+of a treaty which would have rescued them from imminent ruin and brought
+them into relations with their powerful kindred close at hand--relations
+which might save them from the most dangerous consequences of a negro
+political supremacy--and the result is that the English in those islands
+are melting away and will soon be crowded out, or will have departed of
+themselves in disgust. A policy so far-reaching, and affecting so
+seriously the condition of the oldest of our colonial possessions, ought
+not to have been adopted on their own authority, by doctrinaire
+statesmen in a cabinet, without fully and frankly consulting the English
+nation; and no further step ought to be taken in that direction until
+the nation has had the circumstances of the islands laid before it, and
+has pronounced one way or the other its own sovereign pleasure. Does or
+does not England desire that her own people shall be enabled to live and
+thrive in the West Indies? If she decides that her hands are too full,
+that she is over-empired and cannot attend to them--_caditquaestio_--there
+is no more to be said. But if this is her resolution the hands of the
+West Indians ought to be untied. They ought to be allowed to make their
+sugar treaties, to make any treaties, to enter into the closest relations
+with America which the Americans will accept, as the only chance which
+will be left them.
+
+Such abandonment, however, will bring us no honour. It will not further
+that federation of the British Empire which so many of us now profess to
+desire. If we wish Australia and Canada to draw into closer union with
+us, it will not be by showing that we are unable to manage a group of
+colonies which are almost at our doors. Englishmen all round the globe
+have rejoiced together in this year which is passing by us over the
+greatness of their inheritance, and have celebrated with enthusiasm the
+half-century during which our lady-mistress has reigned over the English
+world. Unity and federation are on our lips, and we have our leagues and
+our institutes, and in the eagerness of our wishes we dream that we see
+the fulfilment of them. Neither the kingdom of heaven nor any other
+kingdom 'comes with observation.' It comes not with after-dinner
+speeches however eloquent, or with flowing sentiments however for the
+moment sincere. The spirit which made the Empire can alone hold it
+together. The American Union was not saved by oratory. It was saved by
+the determination of the bravest of the people; it was cemented by the
+blood which dyed the slopes of Gettysburg. The union of the British
+Empire, if it is to be more than a dream, can continue only while the
+attracting force of the primary commands the willing attendance of the
+distant satellites. Let the magnet lose its power, let the confidence of
+the colonies in the strength and resolution of their central orb be once
+shaken, and the centrifugal force will sweep them away into orbits of
+their own.
+
+The race of men who now inhabit this island of ours show no signs of
+degeneracy. The bow of Ulysses is sound as ever; moths and worms have
+not injured either cord or horn; but it is unstrung, and the arrows
+which are shot from it drop feebly to the ground. The Irish python rises
+again out of its swamp, and Phoebus Apollo launches no shaft against
+the scaly sides of it. Phoebus Apollo attempts the milder methods of
+concession and persuasion. 'Python,' he says, 'in days when I was
+ignorant and unjust I struck you down and bound you. I left officers and
+men with you of my own race to watch you, to teach you, to rule you; to
+force you, if your own nature could not be changed, to leave your
+venomous ways. You have refused to be taught, you twist in your chains,
+you bite and tear, and when you can you steal and murder. I see that I
+was wrong from the first. Every creature has a right to live according
+to its own disposition. I was a tyrant, and you did well to resist; I
+ask you to forgive and forget. I set you free; I hand you over my own
+representatives as a pledge of my goodwill, that you may devour them at
+your leisure. They have been the instruments of my oppression; consume
+them, destroy them, do what you will with them; and henceforward I hope
+that we shall live together as friends, and that you will show yourself
+worthy of my generosity and of the freedom which you have so gloriously
+won.'
+
+A sun-god who thus addressed a disobedient satellite might have the
+eloquence of a Demosthenes and the finest of the fine intentions which
+pave the road to the wrong place, but he would not be a divinity who
+would command the willing confidence of a high-spirited kindred. Great
+Britain will make the tie which holds the colonies to her a real one
+when she shows them and shows the world that she is still equal to her
+great place, that her arm is not shortened and her heart has not grown
+faint.
+
+Men speak of the sacredness of liberty. They talk as if the will of
+everyone ought to be his only guide, that allegiance is due only to
+majorities, that allegiance of any other kind is base and a relic of
+servitude. The Americans are the freest people in the world; but in
+their freedom they have to obey the fundamental laws of the Union. Again
+and again in the West Indies Mr. Motley's words came back to me. To be
+taken into the American Union is to be adopted into a partnership. To
+belong as a Crown colony to the British Empire, as things stand, is no
+partnership at all. It is to belong to a power which sacrifices, as it
+has always sacrificed, the interest of its dependencies to its own. The
+blood runs freely through every vein and artery of the American body
+corporate. Every single citizen feels his share in the life of his
+nation. Great Britain leaves her Crown colonies to take care of
+themselves, refuses what they ask, and forces on them what they had
+rather be without. If I were a West Indian I should feel that under the
+stars and stripes I should be safer than I was at present from political
+experimenting. I should have a market in which to sell my produce where
+I should be treated as a friend; I should have a power behind me and
+protecting me, and I should have a future to which I could look forward
+with confidence. America would restore me to home and life; Great
+Britain allows me to sink, contenting herself with advising me to be
+patient. Why should I continue loyal when my loyalty was so
+contemptuously valued?
+
+But I will not believe that it will come to this. An Englishman may be
+heavily tempted, but in evil fortune as in good his heart is in the old
+place. The administration of our affairs is taken for the present from
+prudent statesmen, and is made over to those who know how best to
+flatter the people with fine-sounding sentiments and idle adulation. All
+sovereigns have been undone by flatterers. The people are sovereign now,
+and, being new to power, listen to those who feed their vanity. The
+popular orator has been the ruin of every country which has trusted to
+him. He never speaks an unwelcome truth, for his existence depends on
+pleasing, and he cares only to tickle the ears of his audience. His
+element is anarchy; his function is to undo what better men have done.
+In wind he lives and moves and has his being. When the gods are angry,
+he can raise it to a hurricane and lay waste whole nations in ruin and
+revolution. It was said long ago, a man full of words shall not prosper
+upon the earth. Times have changed, for in these days no one prospers so
+well. Can he make a speech? is the first question which the
+constituencies ask when a candidate is offered to their suffrages. When
+the Roman commonwealth developed from an aristocratic republic into a
+democracy, and, as now with us, the sovereignty was in the mass of the
+people, the oratorical faculty came to the front in the same way. The
+finest speaker was esteemed the fittest man to be made a consul or a
+praetor of, and there were schools of rhetoric where aspirants for office
+had to go to learn gesture and intonation before they could present
+themselves at the hustings. The sovereign people and their orators could
+do much, but they could not alter facts, or make that which was not, to
+be, or that which was, not to be. The orators could perorate and the
+people could decree, but facts remained and facts proved the strongest,
+and the end of that was that after a short supremacy the empire which
+they had brought to the edge of ruin was saved at the last extremity;
+the sovereign people lost their liberties, and the tongues of political
+orators were silenced for centuries. Illusion at last takes the form of
+broken heads, and the most obstinate credulity is not proof against that
+form of argument.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+    Going home--Retrospect--Alternative courses--Future of the
+    Empire--Sovereignty of the sea--The Greeks--The rights of
+    man--Plato--The voice of the people--Imperial federation--Hereditary
+    colonial policy--New Irelands--Effects of party government.
+
+
+Once more upon the sea on our homeward way, carrying, as Emerson said,
+'the bag of AEolus in the boiler of our boat,' careless whether there be
+wind or calm. Our old naval heroes passed and repassed upon the same
+waters under harder conditions. They had to struggle against tempests,
+to fight with enemy's cruisers, to battle for their lives with nature as
+with man--and they were victorious over them all. They won for Britannia
+the sceptre of the sea, and built up the Empire on which the sun never
+sets. To us, their successors, they handed down the splendid
+inheritance, and we in turn have invented steam ships and telegraphs,
+and thrown bridges over the ocean, and made our far-off possessions as
+easy of access as the next parish. The attractive force of the primary
+ought to have increased in the same ratio, but we do not find that it
+has, and the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies of our
+satellites are year by year becoming more nicely balanced. These
+beautiful West Indian Islands were intended to be homes for the
+overflowing numbers of our own race, and the few that have gone there
+are being crowded out by the blacks from Jamaica and the Antilles. Our
+poor helots at home drag on their lives in the lanes and alleys of our
+choking cities, and of those who gather heart to break off on their own
+account and seek elsewhere for a land of promise, the large majority are
+weary of the flag under which they have only known suffering, and prefer
+America to the English colonies. They are waking now to understand the
+opportunities which are slipping through their hands. Has the awakening
+come too late? We have ourselves mixed the cup; must we now drink it the
+dregs?
+
+It is too late to enable us to make homes in the West Indies for the
+swarms who are thrown off by our own towns and villages. We might have
+done it. Englishmen would have thriven as well in Jamaica and the
+Antilles as the Spaniards have thriven in Cuba. But the islands are now
+peopled by men of another colour. The whites there are as units among
+hundreds, and the proportion cannot be altered. But it is not too late
+to redeem our own responsibilities. We brought the blacks there; we have
+as yet not done much for their improvement, when their notions of
+morality are still so elementary that more than half of their children
+are born out of marriage. The English planters were encouraged to settle
+there when it suited our convenience to maintain the islands for
+Imperial purposes; like the landlords in Ireland, they were our English
+garrison; and as with the landlords in Ireland, when we imagine that
+they have served their purpose and can be no longer of use to us, we
+calmly change the conditions of society. We disclaim obligations to help
+them in the confusion which we have introduced; we tell them to help
+themselves, and they cannot help themselves in such an element as that
+in which they are now struggling, unless they know that they may count
+on the sympathy and the support of their countrymen at home. Nothing is
+demanded of the English exchequer; the resources of the islands are
+practically boundless; there is a robust population conscious at the
+bottom of their native inferiority, and docile and willing to work if
+anyone will direct them and set them to it. There will be capital
+enough forthcoming, and energetic men enough and intelligence enough,
+if we on our part will provide one thing, the easiest of all if we
+really set our minds to it--an effective and authoritative government.
+It is not safe even for ourselves to leave a wound unattended to, though
+it be in the least significant part of our bodies. The West Indies are a
+small limb in the great body corporate of the British Empire, but there
+is no great and no small in the life of nations. The avoidable decay of
+the smallest member is an injury to the whole. Let it be once known and
+felt that England regards the West Indies as essentially one with
+herself, and the English in the islands will resume their natural
+position, and respect and order will come back, and those once thriving
+colonies will again advance with the rest on the high road of
+civilisation and prosperity. Let it be known that England considers only
+her immediate interests and will not exert herself, and the other
+colonies will know what they have to count upon, and the British Empire
+will dwindle down before long into a single insignificant island in the
+North Sea.
+
+So end the reflections which I formed there from what I saw and what I
+heard. I have written as an outside observer unconnected with practical
+politics, with no motive except a loyal pride in the greatness of my own
+country, and a conviction, which I will not believe to be a dream, that
+the destinies have still in store for her a yet grander future. The
+units of us come and go; the British Empire, the globe itself and all
+that it inherits, will pass away as a vision.
+
+    [Greek: essetai emar hotan pot' ololei Hilios hire,
+            kai Priamos kai laos eummelio Priamoio.]
+
+    The day will be when Ilium's towers may fall,
+    And large-limbed[17] Priam, and his people all.
+
+But that day cannot be yet. Out of the now half-organic fragments may
+yet be formed one living Imperial power, with a new era of beneficence
+and usefulness to mankind. The English people are spread far and wide.
+The sea is their dominion, and their land is the finest portion of the
+globe. It is theirs now, it will be theirs for ages to come if they
+remain themselves unchanged and keep the heart and temper of their
+forefathers.
+
+          Naught shall make us rue,
+    If England to herself do rest but true.
+
+The days pass, and our ship flies fast upon her way.
+
+    [Greek: glaukon huper oidma kuanochroa te kumaton
+            rhothia polia thalassas.]
+
+How perfect the description! How exactly in those eight words Euripides
+draws the picture of the ocean; the long grey heaving swell, the darker
+steel-grey on the shadowed slope of the surface waves, and the foam on
+their breaking crests. Our thoughts flow back as we gaze to the times
+long ago, when the earth belonged to other races as it now belongs to
+us. The ocean is the same as it was. Their eyes saw it as we see it:
+
+    Time writes no wrinkle on that azure brow.
+
+Nor is the ocean alone the same. Human nature is still vexed with the
+same problems, mocked with the same hopes, wandering after the same
+illusions. The sea affected the Greeks as it affects us, and was equally
+dear to them. It was a Greek who said, 'The sea washes off all the ills
+of men;' the 'stainless one' as AEschylus called it--the eternally pure.
+On long voyages I take Greeks as my best companions. I had Plato with me
+on my way home from the West Indies. He lived and wrote in an age like
+ours, when religion had become a debatable subject on which every one
+had his opinion, and democracy was master of the civilised world, and
+the Mediterranean states were running wild after liberty, preparatory to
+the bursting of the bubble. Looking out on such a world Plato left
+thoughts behind him the very language of which is as full of
+application to our own larger world as if it was written yesterday. It
+throws light on small things as well as large, and interprets alike the
+condition of the islands which I had left, the condition of England, the
+condition of all civilised countries in this modern epoch.
+
+The chief characteristic of this age, as it was the chief characteristic
+of Plato's, is the struggle for what we call the 'rights of man.' In
+other times the thing insisted on was that men should do what was
+'right' as something due to a higher authority. Now the demand is for
+what is called their 'rights' as something due to themselves, and among
+these rights is a right to liberty; liberty meaning the utmost possible
+freedom of every man consistent with the freedom of others, and the
+abolition of every kind of authority of one man over another. It is with
+this view that we have introduced popular suffrage, that we give
+everyone a vote, or aim at giving it, as the highest political
+perfection.
+
+We turn to Plato and we find: 'In a healthy community there ought to be
+some authority over every single man and woman. No person--not
+one--ought to act on his or her judgment alone even in the smallest
+trifle. The soldier on a campaign obeys his commander in little things
+as well as great. The safety of the army requires it. But it is in peace
+as it is in war, and there is no difference. Every person should be
+trained from childhood to rule and to be ruled. So only can the life of
+man, and the life of all creatures dependent on him, be delivered from
+anarchy.'
+
+It is worth while to observe how diametrically opposite to our notions
+on this subject were the notions of a man of the finest intellect, with
+the fullest opportunities of observation, and every one of whose
+estimates of things was confirmed by the event. Such a discipline as he
+recommends never existed in any community of men except perhaps among
+the religious orders in the enthusiasm of their first institution, nor
+would a society be long tolerable in which it was tried. Communities,
+however, have existed where people have thought more of their
+obligations than of their 'rights,' more of the welfare of their
+country, or of the success of a cause to which they have devoted
+themselves, than of their personal pleasure or interest--have preferred
+the wise leading of superior men to their own wills and wishes. Nay,
+perhaps no community has ever continued long, or has made a mark in the
+world of serious significance, where society has not been graduated in
+degrees, and there have not been deeper and stronger bands of coherence
+than the fluctuating votes of majorities.
+
+Times are changed we are told. We live in a new era, when public opinion
+is king, and no other rule is possible; public opinion, as expressed in
+the press and on the platform, and by the deliberately chosen
+representatives of the people. Every question can be discussed and
+argued, all sides of it can be heard, and the nation makes up its mind.
+The collective judgment of all is wiser than the wisest single
+man--_securus judicat orbis_.
+
+Give the public time, and I believe this to be true; general opinion
+does in the long run form a right estimate of most persons and of most
+things. As surely its immediate impulses are almost invariably in
+directions which it afterwards regrets and repudiates, and therefore
+constitutions which have no surer basis than the popular judgment, as it
+shifts from year to year or parliament to parliament, are built on
+foundations looser than sand.
+
+In concluding this book I have a few more words to say on the subject,
+so ardently canvassed, of Imperial federation. It seems so easy. You
+have only to form a new parliament in which the colonies shall be
+represented according to numbers, while each colony will retain its own
+for its own local purposes. Local administration is demanded everywhere;
+England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, can each have theirs, and the vexed
+question of Home Rule can be disposed of in the reconstruction of the
+whole. A central parliament can then be formed in which the parts can
+all be represented in proportion to their number; and a cabinet can be
+selected out of this for the management of Imperial concerns. Nothing
+more is necessary; the thing will be done.
+
+So in a hundred forms, but all on the same principle, schemes of
+Imperial union have fallen under my eye. I should myself judge from
+experience of what democratically elected parliaments are growing into,
+that at the first session of such a body the satellites would fly off
+into space, shattered perhaps themselves in the process. We have
+parliaments enough already, and if no better device can be found than by
+adding another to the number, the rash spirit of innovation has not yet
+gone far enough to fling our ancient constitution into the crucible on
+so wild a chance.
+
+Imperial federation, as it is called, is far away, if ever it is to be
+realised at all. If it is to come it will come of itself, brought about
+by circumstances and silent impulses working continuously through many
+years unseen and unspoken of. It is conceivable that Great Britain and
+her scattered offspring, under the pressure of danger from without, or
+impelled by some general purpose, might agree to place themselves for a
+time under a single administrative head. It is conceivable that out of a
+combination so formed, if it led to a successful immediate result, some
+union of a closer kind might eventually emerge. It is not only
+conceivable, but it is entirely certain, that attempts made when no such
+occasion has arisen, by politicians ambitious of distinguishing
+themselves, will fail, and in failing will make the object that is aimed
+at more confessedly unattainable than it is now.
+
+The present relation between the mother country and her self-governed
+colonies is partly that of parent and children who have grown to
+maturity and are taking care of themselves, partly of independent
+nations in friendly alliance, partly as common subjects of the same
+sovereign, whose authority is exercised in each by ministers of its own.
+Neither of these analogies is exact, for the position alters from year
+to year. So much the better. The relation which now exists cannot be
+more than provisional; let us not try to shape it artificially, after a
+closet-made pattern. The threads of interest and kindred must be left to
+spin themselves in their own way. Meanwhile we can work together
+heartily and with good will where we need each other's co-operation.
+Difficulties will rise, perhaps, from time to time, but we can meet them
+as they come, and we need not anticipate them. If we are to be
+politically one, the organic fibres which connect us are as yet too
+immature to bear a strain. All that we can do, and all that at present
+we ought to try, is to act generously whenever our assistance can be of
+use. The disposition of English statesmen to draw closer to the colonies
+is of recent growth. They cannot tell, and we cannot tell, how far it
+indicates a real change of attitude or is merely a passing mood. One
+thing, however, we ought to bear in mind, that the colonies sympathise
+one with another, and that wrong or neglect in any part of the Empire
+does not escape notice. The larger colonies desire to know what the
+recent professions of interest are worth, and they look keenly at our
+treatment of their younger brothers who are still in our power. They are
+practical, they attend to results, they guard jealously their own
+privileges, but they are not so enamoured of constitutional theory that
+they will patiently see their fellow-countrymen in less favoured
+situations swamped under the votes of the coloured races. Australians,
+Canadians, New Zealanders, will not be found enthusiastic for the
+extension of self-government in the West Indies, when they know that it
+means the extinction of their own white brothers who have settled there.
+The placing English colonists at the mercy of coloured majorities they
+will resent as an injury to themselves; they will not look upon it as an
+extension of a generous principle, but as an act of airy virtue which
+costs us nothing, and at the bottom is but carelessness and
+indifference.
+
+We imagine that we have seen the errors of our old colonial policy, and
+that we are in no danger of repeating them. Yet in the West Indies we
+are treading over again the too familiar road. The Anglo-Irish colonists
+in 1705 petitioned for a union with Great Britain. A union would have
+involved a share in British trade; it was refused therefore, and we gave
+them the penal laws instead. They set up manufactures, built ships, and
+tried to raise a commerce of their own. We laid them under disabilities
+which ruined their enterprises, and when they were resentful and became
+troublesome we turned round to the native Irish and made a virtue of
+protecting them against our own people whom we had injured. When the
+penal laws ceased to be useful to us, we did not allow them to be
+executed. We played off Catholic against Protestant while we were
+sacrificing both to our own jealousy. Having made the government of the
+island impossible for those whom we had planted there to govern it, we
+emancipate the governed, and to conciliate them we allow them to
+appropriate the possessions of their late masters. And we have not
+conciliated the native Irish; it was impossible that we should; we have
+simply armed them with the only weapons which enable them to revenge
+their wrongs upon us.
+
+The history of the West Indies is a precise parallel. The islands were
+necessary to our safety in our struggle with France and Spain. The
+colonists held them chiefly for us as a garrison, and we in turn gave
+the colonists their slaves. The white settlers ruled as in Ireland, the
+slaves obeyed, and all went swimmingly. Times changed at home. Slavery
+became unpopular; it was abolished; and, with a generosity for which we
+never ceased to applaud ourselves, we voted an indemnity of twenty
+millions to the owners. We imagined that we had acquitted our
+consciences, but such debts are not discharged by payments of money. We
+had introduced the slaves into the islands for our own advantage; in
+setting them free we revolutionised society. We remained still
+responsible for the social consequences, and we did not choose to
+remember it. The planters were guilty only, like the Irish landlords, of
+having ceased to be necessary to us. We practised our virtues
+vicariously at their expense: we had the praise and honour, they had the
+suffering. They begged that the emancipation might be gradual; our
+impatience to clear our reputation refused to wait. Their system of
+cultivation being deranged, they petitioned for protection against the
+competition of countries where slavery continued. The request was
+natural, but could not be listened to because to grant it might raise
+infinitesimally the cost of the British workman's breakfast. They
+struggled on, and even when a new rival rose in the beetroot sugar they
+refused to be beaten. The European powers, to save their beetroot, went
+on to support it with a bounty. Against the purse of foreign governments
+the sturdiest individuals cannot compete. Defeated in a fight which had
+become unfair, the planters looked, and looked in vain, to their own
+government for help. Finding none, they turned to their kindred in the
+United States; and there, at last, they found a hand held out to them.
+The Americans were willing, though at a loss of two millions and a half
+of revenue, to admit the poor West Indians to their own market. But a
+commercial treaty was necessary; and a treaty could not be made without
+the sanction of the English Government. The English Government, on some
+fine-drawn crotchet, refused to colonies which were weak and helpless
+what they would have granted without a word if demanded by Victoria or
+New South Wales, whose resentment they feared. And when the West
+Indians, harassed, desperate, and half ruined, cried out against the
+enormous injustice, in the fear that their indignation might affect
+their allegiance and lead them to seek admission into the American
+Union, we extend the franchise among the blacks, on whose hostility to
+such a measure we know that we can rely.
+
+There is no occasion to suspect responsible English politicians of any
+sinister purpose in what they have done or not done, or suspect them,
+indeed, of any purpose at all. They act from day to day under the
+pressure of each exigency as it rises, and they choose the course which
+is least directly inconvenient. But the result is to have created in the
+Antilles and Jamaica so many fresh Irelands, and I believe that British
+colonists the world over will feel together in these questions. They
+will not approve; rather they will combine to condemn the betrayal of
+their own fellow-countrymen. If England desires her colonies to rally
+round her, she must deserve their affection and deserve their respect.
+She will find neither one nor the other if she carelessly sacrifices her
+own people in any part of the world to fear or convenience. The
+magnetism which will bind them to her must be found in herself or
+nowhere.
+
+Perhaps nowhere! Perhaps if we look to the real origin of all that has
+gone wrong with us, of the policy which has flung Ireland back into
+anarchy, which has weakened our influence abroad, which has ruined the
+oldest of our colonies, and has made the continuance under our flag of
+the great communities of our countrymen who are forming new nations in
+the Pacific a question of doubt and uncertainty, we shall find it in our
+own distractions, in the form of government which is fast developing
+into a civil war under the semblance of peace, where party is more than
+country, and a victory at the hustings over a candidate of opposite
+principles more glorious than a victory in the field over a foreign foe.
+Society in republican Rome was so much interested in the faction fights
+of Clodius and Milo that it could hear with apathy of the destruction of
+Crassus and a Roman army. The senate would have sold Caesar to the Celtic
+chiefs in Gaul, and the modern English enthusiast would disintegrate the
+British Islands to purchase the Irish vote. Till we can rise into some
+nobler sphere of thought and conduct we may lay aside the vision of a
+confederated empire.
+
+    Oh, England, model to thy inward greatness,
+    Like little body with a mighty heart,
+    What might'st thou do that honour would thee do
+    Were all thy children kind and natural!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[17] I believe this to be the true meaning of [Greek: eummelies]. It is
+usually rendered, 'armed with a stout spear.'
+
+
+KELLY & CO., Printers, Gate Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, W.C.; and
+Kingston-on-Thames.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The English in the West Indies, by
+James Anthony Froude
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author	Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org>	2025-10-14 19:58:08 -0700
committer	Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org>	2025-10-14 19:58:08 -0700
commit	7a392b3a232ba08bf9d887cb46b3c3fdd3356759 (patch)
tree	d2876ef790229b5b62ee6d5b4d00046d3cea5b13