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.