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.