The 'provision grounds' of the Negroes were very interesting. I had
longed to behold, alive and growing, fruits and plants which I had
heard so often named, and seen so often figured, that I had expected
to recognise many of them at first sight; and found, in nine cases
out of ten, that I could not. Again, I had longed to gather some
hints as to the possibility of carrying out in the West Indian
islands that system of 'Petite Culture'--of small spade farming--
which I have long regarded, with Mr. John Stuart Mill and others, as
not only the ideal form of agriculture, but perhaps the basis of any
ideal rustic civilisation. And what scanty and imperfect facts I
could collect I set down here.
It was a pleasant sensation to have, day after day, old names
translated for me into new facts. Pleasant, at least to me: not so
pleasant, I fear, to my kind companions, whose courtesy I taxed to
the uttermost by stopping to look over every fence, and ask, 'What
is that? And that?' Let the reader who has a taste for the
beautiful as well as the useful in horticulture, do the same, and
look in fancy over the hedge of the nearest provision ground.
There are orange-trees laden with fruit: who knows not them? and
that awkward-boughed tree, with huge green fruit, and deeply-cut
leaves a foot or more across--leaves so grand that, as one of our
party often suggested, their form ought to be introduced into
architectural ornamentation, and to take the place of the Greek
acanthus, which they surpass in beauty--that is, of course, a Bread-
fruit tree.
That round-headed tree, with dark rich Portugal laurel foliage,
arranged in stars at the end of each twig, is the Mango, always a
beautiful object, whether in orchard or in open park. In the West
Indies, as far as I have seen, the Mango has not yet reached the
huge size of its ancestors in Hindostan. There--to judge, at least,
from photographs--the Mango must be indeed the queen of trees;
growing to the size of the largest English oak, and keeping always
the round oak-like form. Rich in resplendent foliage, and still
more rich in fruit, the tree easily became encircled with an
atmosphere of myth in the fancy of the imaginative Hindoo.
That tree with upright branches, and large, dark, glossy leaves
tiled upwards along them, is the Mammee Sapota, {311a} beautiful
likewise. And what is the next, like an evergreen peach, shedding
from the under side of every leaf a golden light--call it not shade?
A Star-apple; {311b} and that young thing which you may often see
grown into a great timber-tree, with leaves like a Spanish chestnut,
is the Avocado, {311c} or, as some call it, alligator, pear. This
with the glossy leaves, somewhat like the Mammee Sapota, is a
Sapodilla, {311d} and that with leaves like a great myrtle, and
bright flesh-coloured fruit, a Malacca-apple, or perhaps a Rose-
apple. {311e} Its neighbour, with large leaves, gray and rough
underneath, flowers as big as your two hands, with greenish petals
and a purple eye, followed by fat scaly yellow apples, is the Sweet-
sop; {311f} and that privet-like bush with little flowers and green
berries a Guava, {311g} of which you may eat if you will, as you may
of the rest.
The truth, however, must be told. These West Indian fruits are,
most of them, still so little improved by careful culture and
selection of kinds, that not one of them (as far as we have tried
them) is to be compared with an average strawberry, plum, or pear.
But how beautiful they are all and each, after their kinds! What a
joy for a man to stand at his door and simply look at them growing,
leafing, blossoming, fruiting, without pause, through the perpetual
summer, in his little garden of the Hesperides, where, as in those
of the Phoenicians of old, 'pear grows ripe on pear, and fig on
fig,' for ever and for ever!
Now look at the vegetables. At the Bananas and Plantains first of
all. A stranger's eye would not distinguish them. The practical
difference between them is, that the Plaintain {311h} bears large
fruits which require cooking; the Banana {312a} smaller and sweeter
fruits, which are eaten raw. As for the plant on which they grow,
no mere words can picture the simple grandeur and grace of a form
which startles me whenever I look steadily at it. For however
common it is--none commoner here--it is so unlike aught else, so
perfect in itself, that, like a palm, it might well have become, in
early ages, an object of worship.
And who knows that it has not? Who knows that there have not been
races who looked on it as the Red Indians looked on Mondamin, the
maize-plant; as a gift of a god--perhaps the incarnation of a god?
Who knows? Whence did the ancestors of that plant come? What was
its wild stock like ages ago? It is wild nowhere now on earth. It
stands alone and unique in the vegetable kingdom, with distant
cousins, but no brother kinds. It has been cultivated so long that
though it flowers and fruits, it seldom or never seeds, and is
propagated entirely by cuttings. The only spot, as far as I am
aware, in which it seeds regularly and plentifully, is the remote,
and till of late barbarous Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.
{312b}
There it regularly springs up in the second growth, after the forest
is cleared, and bears fruits full of seed as close together as they
can be pressed. How did the plant get there? Was it once
cultivated there by a race superior to the now utterly savage
islanders, and at an epoch so remote that it had not yet lost the
power of seeding? Are the Andamans its original home? or rather,
was its original home that great southern continent of which the
Andamans are perhaps a remnant? Does not this fact, as well as the
broader fact that different varieties of the Plantain and Banana
girdle the earth round at the Tropics, and have girdled it as long
as records go back, hint at a time when there was a tropic continent
or archipelago round the whole equator, and at a civilisation and a
horticulture to which those of old Egypt are upstarts of yesterday?
There are those who never can look at the Banana without a feeling
of awe, as at a token of holy ancient the race of man may be, and
how little we know of his history.
Most beautiful it is. The lush fat green stem; the crown of huge
leaves, falling over in curves like those of human limbs; and below,
the whorls of green or golden fruit, with the purple heart of
flowers dangling below them; and all so full of life, that this
splendid object is the product of a few months. I am told that if
you cut the stem off at certain seasons, you may see the young leaf-
-remember that it is an endogen, and grows from within, like a palm,
or a lily, or a grass--actually move upward from within and grow
before your eyes; and that each stem of Plantain will bear from
thirty to sixty pounds of rich food during the year of its short
life.
But, beside the grand Plantains and Bananas, there are other
interesting plants, whose names you have often heard. The tall
plant with stem unbranched, but knotty and zigzag, and leaves atop
like hemp, but of a cold purplish tinge, is the famous Cassava,
{313a} or Manioc, the old food of the Indians, poisonous till its
juice is squeezed out in a curious spiral grass basket. The young
Laburnums (as they seem), with purple flowers, are Pigeon-peas,
{313b} right good to eat. The creeping vines, like our Tamus, or
Black Bryony, are Yams, {313c}--best of all roots.
The branching broad-leaved canes, with strange white flowers, is
Arrowroot. {313d} The tall mallow-like shrub, with large pale
yellowish-white flowers, Cotton. The huge grass with beads on it
{313e} is covered with the Job's tears, which are precious in
children's eyes, and will be used as beads for necklaces. The
castor-oil plants, and the maize--that last always beautiful--are of
course well known. The arrow leaves, three feet long, on stalks
three feet high, like gigantic Arums, are Tanias, {313f} whose roots
are excellent. The plot of creeping convolvulus-like plants, with
purple flowers, is the Sweet, or true, Potato. {313g}
And we must not overlook the French Physic-nut, {313h} with its hemp
like leaves, and a little bunch of red coral in the midst, with
which the Negro loves to adorn his garden, and uses it also as
medicine; or the Indian Shot, {313i} which may be seen planted out
now in summer gardens in England. The Negro grows it, not for its
pretty crimson flowers, but because its hard seed put into a bladder
furnishes him with that detestable musical instrument the chac-chac,
wherewith he accompanies nightly that equally detestable instrument
the tom-tom.
The list of vegetables is already long: but there are a few more to
be added to it. For there, in a corner, creep some plants of the
Earth-nut, {314a} a little vetch which buries its pods in the earth.
The owner will roast and eat their oily seeds. There is also a tall
bunch of Ochro {314b}--a purple-stemmed mallow-flowered plant--whose
mucilaginous seeds will thicken his soup. Up a tree, and round the
house-eaves, scramble a large coarse Pumpkin, and a more delicate
Granadilla, {314c} whose large yellow fruits hang ready to be
plucked, and eaten principally for a few seeds of the shape and
colour of young cockroaches. If he be a prudent man (especially if
he lives in Jamaica), he will have a plant of the pretty Overlook
pea, {314d} trailing aloft somewhere, to prevent his garden being
'overlooked,' i.e. bewitched by an evil eye, in case the Obeah-
bottle which hangs from the Mango-tree, charged with toad and
spider, dirty water, and so forth, has no terrors for his secret
enemy. He will have a Libidibi {314e} tree, too, for astringent
medicine; and his hedge will be composed, if he be a man of taste--
as he often seems to be--of Hibiscus bushes, whose magnificent
crimson flowers contrast with the bright yellow bunches of the
common Cassia, and the scarlet flowers of the Jumby-bead bush,
{314f} and blue and white and pink Convolvuluses. The sulphur and
purple Neerembergia of our hothouses, which is here one mass of
flower at Christmas, and the creeping Crab's-eye Vine, {314g} will
scramble over the fence; while, as a finish to his little Paradise,
he will have planted at each of its four corners an upright
Dragon's-blood {314h} bush, whose violet and red leaves bedeck our
dinner-tables in winter; and are here used, from their unlikeness to
any other plant in the island, to mark boundaries.
I have not dared--for fear of prolixity--to make this catalogue as
complete as I could have done. But it must be remembered that, over
and above all this, every hedge and wood furnishes wild fruit more
or less eatable; the high forests plenty of oily seeds, in which the
tropic man delights; and woods, forests, and fields medicinal plants
uncounted. 'There is more medicine in the bush, and better, than in
all the shops in Port of Spain,' said a wise medical man to me; and
to the Exhibition of 1862 Mr. M'Clintock alone contributed, from
British Guiana, one hundred and forty species of barks used as
medicine by the Indians. There is therefore no fear that the
tropical small farmer should suffer, either from want, or from
monotony of food; and equally small fear lest, when his children
have eaten themselves sick--as they are likely to do if, like the
Negro children, they are eating all day long--he should be unable to
find something in the hedge which will set them all right again.
At the amount of food which a man can get off this little patch I
dare not guess. Well says Humboldt, that an European lately arrived
in the torrid zone is struck with nothing so much as the extreme
smallness of the spots under cultivation round a cabin which
contains a numerous family. The plantains alone ought, according to
Humboldt, to give one hundred and thirty-three times as much food as
the same space of ground sown with wheat, and forty-four times as
much as if it grew potatoes. True, the plantain is by no means as
nourishing as wheat: which reduces the actual difference between
their value per acre to twenty-five to one. But under his plantains
he can grow other vegetables. He has no winter, and therefore some
crop or other is always coming forward. From whence it comes, that,
as I just hinted, his wife and children seem to have always
something to eat in their mouths, if it be only the berries and nuts
which abound in every hedge and wood. Neither dare I guess at the
profit which he might make, and I hope will some day make, out of
his land, if he would cultivate somewhat more for exportation, and
not merely for home consumption. If any one wishes to know more on
this matter, let him consult the catalogue of contributions from
British Guiana to the London Exhibition of 1862; especially the
pages from lix. to lxviii. on the starch-producing plants of the
West Indies.
Beyond the facts which I have given as to the plantain, I have no
statistics of the amount of produce which is usually raised on a
West Indian provision ground. Nor would any be of use; for a glance
shows that the limit of production has not been nearly reached.
Were the fork used instead of the hoe; were the weeds kept down;
were the manure returned to the soil, instead of festering about
everywhere in sun and rain: in a word, were even as much done for
the land as an English labourer does for his garden; still more, if
as much were done for it as for a suburban market-garden, the
produce might be doubled or trebled, and that without exhausting the
soil.
The West Indian peasant can, if he will, carry 'la petite Culture'
to a perfection and a wealth which it has not yet attained even in
China, Japan, and Hindostan, and make every rood of ground not
merely maintain its man, but its civilised man. This, however, will
require a skill and a thoughtfulness which the Negro does not as yet
possess. If he ever had them, he lost them under slavery, from the
brutalising effects of a rough and unscientific 'grande culture';
and it will need several generations of training ere he recovers
them. Garden-tillage and spade-farming are not learnt in a day,
especially when they depend--as they always must in temperate
climates--for their main profit on some article which requires
skilled labour to prepare it for the market--on flax, for instance,
silk, wine, or fruits. An average English labourer, I fear, if put
in possession of half a dozen acres of land, would fare as badly as
the poor Chartists who, some twenty years ago, joined in Feargus
O'Connor's land scheme, unless he knew half a dozen ways of eking
out a livelihood which even our squatters around Windsor and the New
Forest are, alas! forgetting, under the money-making and man-
unmaking influences of the 'division of labour.' He is vanishing
fast, the old bee-keeping, apple-growing, basket-making, copse-
cutting, many-counselled Ulysses of our youth, as handy as a sailor:
and we know too well what he leaves behind him; grandchildren better
fed, better clothed, better taught than he, but his inferiors in
intellect and in manhood, because--whatever they may be taught--they
cannot be taught by schooling to use their fingers and their wits.
I fear, therefore, that the average English labourer would not
prosper here. He has not stamina enough for the hard work of the
sugar plantation. He has not wit and handiness enough for the more
delicate work of a little spade-farm: and he would sink, as the
Negro seems inclined to sink, into a mere grower of food for
himself; or take to drink--as too many of the white immigrants to
certain West Indian colonies did thirty years ago--and burn the life
out of himself with new rum. The Hindoo immigrant, on the other
hand, has been trained by long ages to a somewhat scientific
agriculture, and civilised into the want of many luxuries for which
the Negro cares nothing; and it is to him that we must look, I
think, for a 'petite culture' which will do justice to the
inexhaustible wealth of the West Indian soil and climate.
As for the house, which is embowered in the little Paradise which I
have been describing, I am sorry to say that it is, in general, the
merest wooden hut on stilts; the front half altogether open and
unwalled; the back half boarded up to form a single room, a passing
glance into which will not make the stranger wish to enter, if he
has any nose, or any dislike of vermin. The group at the door,
meanwhile, will do anything but invite him to enter; and he will
ride on, with something like a sigh at what man might be, and what
he is.
Doubtless, there are great excuses for the inmates. A house in this
climate is only needed for a sleeping or lounging place. The
cooking is carried on between a few stones in the garden; the
washing at the neighbouring brook. No store rooms are needed, where
there is no winter, and everything grows fresh and fresh, save the
salt-fish, which can be easily kept--and I understand usually is
kept--underneath the bed. As for separate bedrooms for boys and
girls, and all those decencies and moralities for which those who
build model cottages strive, and with good cause--of such things
none dream. But it is not so very long ago that the British Isles
were not perfect in such matters; some think that they are not quite
perfect yet. So we will take the beam out of our own eye, before we
try to take the mote from the Negro's. The latter, however, no man
can do. For the Negro, being a freeholder and the owner of his own
cottage, must take the mote out of his own eye, having no landlord
to build cottages for him; in the meanwhile, however, the less said
about his lodging the better.
In the villages, however, in Maraval, for instance, you see houses
of a far better stamp, belonging, I believe, to coloured people
employed in trades; long and low wooden buildings with jalousies
instead of windows--for no glass is needed here; divided into rooms,
and smart with paint, which is not as pretty as the native wood.
You catch sight as you pass of prints, usually devotional, on the
walls, comfortable furniture, looking-glasses, and sideboards, and
other pleasant signs that a civilisation of the middle classes is
springing up; and springing, to judge from the number of new houses
building everywhere, very rapidly, as befits a colony whose revenue
has risen, since 1855, from 72,300 pounds to 240,000 pounds, beside
the local taxation of the wards, some 30,000 pounds or 40,000 pounds
more.
What will be the future of agriculture in the West Indian colonies I
of course dare not guess. The profits of sugar-growing, in spite of
all drawbacks, have been of late very great. They will be greater
still under the improved methods of manufacture which will be
employed now that the sugar duties have been at least rationally
reformed by Mr. Lowe. And therefore, for some time to come, capital
will naturally flow towards sugar-planting; and great sheets of the
forest will be, too probably, ruthlessly and wastefully swept away
to make room for canes. And yet one must ask, regretfully, are
there no other cultures save that of cane which will yield a fair,
even an ample, return, to men of small capital and energetic habits?
What of the culture of bamboo for paper-fibre, of which I have
spoken already? It has been, I understand, taken up successfully in
Jamaica, to supply the United States' paper market. Why should it
not be taken up in Trinidad? Why should not Plantain-meal {318a} be
hereafter largely exported for the use of the English working
classes? Why should not Trinidad, and other islands, export fruits-
-preserved fruits especially? Surely such a trade might be
profitable, if only a quarter as much care were taken in the West
Indies as is taken in England to improve the varieties by selection
and culture; and care taken also not to spoil the preserves, as now,
for the English market, by swamping them with sugar or sling. Can
nothing be done in growing the oil-producing seeds with which the
Tropics abound, and for which a demand is rising in England, if it
be only for use about machinery? Nothing, too, toward growing drugs
for the home market? Nothing toward using the treasures of gutta-
percha which are now wasting in the Balatas? Above all, can nothing
be done to increase the yield of the cacao-farms, and the quality of
Trinidad cacao?
For this latter industry, at least, I have hope. My friend--if he
will allow me to call him so--Mr. John Law has shown what
extraordinary returns may be obtained from improved cacao-growing;
at least, so far to his own satisfaction that he is himself trying
the experiment. He calculates {318b} that 200 acres, at a maximum
outlay of about 11,000 dollars spread over six years, and
diminishing from that time till the end of the tenth year, should
give, for fifty years after that, a net income of 6800 dollars; and
then 'the industrious planter may sit down,' as I heartily hope Mr.
Law will do, 'and enjoy the fruits of his labour.'
Mr. Law is of opinion that, to give such a return, the cacao must be
farmed in a very different way from the usual plan; that the trees
must not be left shaded, as now, by Bois Immortelles, sixty to
eighty feet high, during their whole life. The trees, he says with
reason, impoverish the soil by their roots. The shade causes excess
of moisture, chills, weakens and retards the plants; encourages
parasitic moss and insects; and, moreover, is least useful in the
very months in which the sun is hottest, viz. February, March, and
April, which are just the months in which the Bois Immortelles shed
their leaves. He believes that the cacao needs no shade after the
third year; and that, till then, shade would be amply given by
plantains and maize set between the trees, which would, in the very
first year, repay the planter some 6500 dollars on his first outlay
of some 8000. It is not for me to give an opinion upon the
correctness of his estimates: but the past history of Trinidad
shows so many failures of the cacao crop, that even a practically
ignorant man may be excused for guessing that there is something
wrong in the old Spanish system; and that with cacao, as with wheat
and every other known crop, improved culture means improved produce
and steadier profits.
As an advocate of 'petite culture,' I heartily hope that such may be
the case. I have hinted in these volumes my belief that exclusive
sugar cultivation, on the large scale, has been the bane of the West
Indies.
I went out thither with a somewhat foregone conclusion in that
direction. But it was at least founded on what I believed to be
facts. And it was, certainly, verified by the fresh facts which I
saw there. I returned with a belief stronger than ever, that
exclusive sugar cultivation had put a premium on unskilled slave-
labour, to the disadvantage of skilled white-labour; and to the
disadvantage, also, of any attempt to educate and raise the Negro,
whom it was not worth while to civilise, as long as he was needed
merely as an instrument exerting brute strength. It seems to me,
also, that to the exclusive cultivation of sugar is owing, more than
to any other cause, that frightful decrease throughout the islands
of the white population, of which most English people are, I
believe, quite unaware. Do they know, for instance, that Barbadoes
could in Cromwell's time send three thousand white volunteers, and
St. Kitts and Nevis a thousand, to help in the gallant conquest of
Jamaica? Do they know that in 1676 Barbadoes was reported to
maintain, as against 80,000 black, 70,000 free whites; while in 1851
the island contained more than 120,000 Negroes and people of colour,
as against only 15,824 whites? That St. Kitts held, even as late as
1761, 7000 whites; but in 1826--before emancipation--only 1600? Or
that little Montserrat, which held, about 1648, 1000 white families,
and had a militia of 360 effective men, held in 1787 only 1300
whites, in 1828 only 315, and in 1851 only 150?
It will be said that this ugly decrease in the white population is
owing to the unfitness of the climate. I believe it to have been
produced rather by the introduction of sugar cultivation, at which
the white man cannot work. These early settlers had grants of ten
acres apiece; at least in Barbadoes. They grew not only provisions
enough for themselves, but tobacco, cotton, and indigo--products now
all but obliterated out of the British islands. They made cotton
hammocks, and sold them abroad as well as in the island. They
might, had they been wisely educated to perceive and use the natural
wealth around them, have made money out of many other wild products.
But the profits of sugar-growing were so enormous, in spite of their
uncertainty, that, during the greater part of the eighteenth
century, their little freeholds were bought up, and converted into
cane-pieces by their wealthier neighbours, who could afford to buy
slaves and sugar-mills. They sought their fortunes in other lands:
and so was exterminated a race of yeomen, who might have been at
this day a source of strength and honour, not only to the colonies,
but to England herself.
It may be that the extermination was not altogether undeserved; that
they were not sufficiently educated or skilful to carry out that
'petite culture' which requires--as I have said already--not only
intellect and practical education, but a hereditary and traditional
experience, such as is possessed by the Belgians, the Piedmontese,
and, above all, by the charming peasantry of Provence and Languedoc,
the fathers (as far as Western Europe is concerned) of all our
agriculture. It may be, too, that as the sugar cultivation
increased, they were tempted more and more, in the old hard drinking
days, by the special poison of the West Indies--new rum, to the
destruction both of soul and body. Be that as it may, their
extirpation helped to make inevitable the vicious system of large
estates cultivated by slaves; a system which is judged by its own
results; for it was ruinate before emancipation; and emancipation
only gave the coup de grace. The 'Latifundia perdidere' the
Antilles, as they did Italy of old. The vicious system brought its
own Nemesis. The ruin of the West Indies at the end of the great
French war was principally owing to that exclusive cultivation of
the cane, which forced the planter to depend on a single article of
produce, and left him embarrassed every time prices fell suddenly,
or the canes failed from drought or hurricane. We all know what
would be thought of an European farmer who thus staked his capital
on one venture. 'He is a bad farmer,' says the proverb, 'who does
not stand on four legs, and, if he can, on five.' If his wheat
fails, he has his barley--if his barley, he has his sheep--if his
sheep, he has his fatting oxen. The Provencal, the model farmer,
can retreat on his almonds if his mulberries fail; on his olives, if
his vines fail; on his maize, if his wheat fails. The West Indian
might have had--the Cuban has--his tobacco; his indigo too; his
coffee, or--as in Trinidad--his cacao and his arrowroot; and half a
dozen crops more: indeed, had his intellect--and he had intellect
in plenty--been diverted from the fatal fixed idea of making money
as fast as possible by sugar, he might have ere now discovered in
America, or imported from the East, plants for cultivation far more
valuable than that Bread-fruit tree, of which such high hopes were
once entertained, as a food for the Negro. As it was, his very
green crops were neglected, till, in some islands at least, he could
not feed his cattle and mules with certainty; while the sugar-cane,
to which everything else had been sacrificed, proved sometimes,
indeed, a valuable servant: but too often a tyrannous and
capricious master.
But those days are past; and better ones have dawned, with better
education, and a wider knowledge of the world and of science. What
West Indians have to learn--some of them have learnt it already--is
that if they can compete with other countries only by improved and
more scientific cultivation and manufacture, as they themselves
confess, then they can carry out the new methods only by more
skilful labour. They therefore require now, as they never required
before, to give the labouring classes a practical education; to
quicken their intellect, and to teach them habits of self-dependent
and originative action, which are--as in the case of the Prussian
soldier, and of the English sailor and railway servant--perfectly
compatible with strict discipline. Let them take warning from the
English manufacturing system, which condemns a human intellect to
waste itself in perpetually heading pins, or opening and shutting
trap-doors, and punishes itself by producing a class of workpeople
who alternate between reckless comfort and moody discontent. Let
them be sure that they will help rather than injure the labour-
market of the colony, by making the labourer also a small free-
holding peasant. He will learn more in his own provision ground--
properly tilled--than he will in the cane-piece: and he will take
to the cane-piece and use for his employer the self-helpfulness
which he has learnt in the provision ground. It is so in England.
Our best agricultural day-labourers are, without exception, those
who cultivate some scrap of ground, or follow some petty occupation,
which prevents their depending entirely on wage-labour. And so I
believe it will be in the West Indies. Let the land-policy of the
late Governor be followed up. Let squatting be rigidly forbidden.
Let no man hold possession of land without having earned, or
inherited, money enough to purchase it, as a guarantee of his
ability and respectability, or--as in the case of Coolies past their
indenture's--as a commutation for rights which he has earned in
likewise. But let the coloured man of every race be encouraged to
become a landholder and a producer in his own small way. He will
thus, not only by what he produces, but by what he consumes, add
largely to the wealth of the colony; while his increased wants, and
those of his children, till they too can purchase land, will draw
him and his sons and daughters to the sugar-estates, as intelligent
and helpful day-labourers.
So it may be: and I cannot but trust, from what I have seen of the
temper of the gentlemen of Trinidad, that so it will be.