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.