Present state of Jamaica--Test of progress--Resources of the
island--Political alternatives--Black supremacy and probable
consequences--The West Indian problem.
As I was stepping into the boat at Port Royal, a pamphlet was thrust
into my hand, which I was entreated to read at my leisure. It was by
some discontented white of the island--no rare phenomenon, and the
subject of it was the precipitate decline in the value of property
there. The writer, unlike the planters, insisted that the people were
taxed in proportion to their industry. There were taxes on mules, on
carts, on donkeys, all bearing on the small black proprietors, whose
ability to cultivate was thus checked, and who were thus deliberately
encouraged in idleness. He might have added, although he did not, that
while both in Jamaica and Trinidad everyone is clamouring against the
beetroot bounty which artificially lowers the price of sugar, the local
councils in these two islands try to counteract the effect and
artificially raise the price of sugar by an export duty on their own
produce--a singular method of doing it which, I presume, admits of
explanation. My pamphleteer was persuaded that all the world were fools,
and that he and his friends were the only wise ones: again a not
uncommon occurrence in pamphleteers. He demanded the suppression of
absenteeism; he demanded free trade. In exchange for the customs duties,
which were to be abolished, he demanded a land tax--the very mention of
which, I had been told by others, drove the black proprietors whom he
wished to benefit into madness. He wanted Home Rule. He wanted fifty
things besides which I have forgotten, but his grand want of all was a
new currency. Mankind, he thought, had been very mad at all periods of
their history. The most significant illustration of their madness had
been the selection of gold and silver as the medium of exchange. The
true base of the currency was the land. The Government of Jamaica was to
lend to every freeholder up to the mortgage value of his land in paper
notes, at 5 per cent. interest, the current rate being at present 8 per
cent. The notes so issued, having the land as their security, would be
in no danger of depreciation, and they would flow over the sugar estates
like an irrigating stream. On the produce of sugar the fate of the
island depended.
On the produce of sugar? And why not on the produce of a fine race of
men? The prospects of Jamaica, the prospects of all countries, depend
not on sugar or on any form or degree of material wealth, but on the
characters of the men and women whom they are breeding and rearing.
Where there are men and women of a noble nature, the rest will go well
of itself; where these are not, there will be no true prosperity though
the sugar hogsheads be raised from thousands into millions. The colonies
are interesting only as offering homes where English people can increase
and multiply; English of the old type with simple habits, who do not
need imported luxuries. There is room even in the West Indies for
hundreds of thousands of them if they can be contented to lead human
lives, and do not go there to make fortunes which they are to carry home
with them. The time may not be far off when men will be sick of making
fortunes, sick of being ground to pattern in the commonplace mill-wheel
of modern society; sick of a state of things which blights and kills
simple and original feeling, which makes us think and speak and act
under the tyranny of general opinion, which masquerades as liberty and
means only submission to the newspapers. I can conceive some modern men
may weary of all this, and retire from it like the old ascetics, not as
they did into the wilderness, but behind their own walls and hedges,
shutting out the world and its noises, to inquire whether after all they
have really immortal souls, and, if they have, what ought to be done
about them. The West India Islands, with their inimitable climate and
soil and prickly pears _ad libitum_ to make fences with, would be fine
places for such recluses. Failing these ideal personages, there is work
enough of the common sort to create wholesome prosperity. There are
oranges to be grown, and pines and plantains, and coffee and cocoa, and
rice and indigo and tobacco, not to speak of the dollars which my
American friend found in the bamboos, and of the further dollars which
other Americans will find in the untested qualities of thousands of
other productions. Here are opportunities for innocent industrious
families, where children can be brought up to be manly and simple and
true and brave as their fathers were brought up, or as their fathers
expressed it 'in the nurture and admonition of the Lord;' while such
neighbours as their dark brothers-in-law might have a chance of a rise
in life, in the only sense in which a 'rise' can be of real benefit to
them. These are the objects which statesmen who have the care and
conduct of a nation's welfare ought to set before themselves, and
unfortunately they are the last which are remembered in countries which
are popularly governed. There is a clamour for education in such
countries, but education means to them only the sharpening of the
faculties for the competitive race which is called progress. In
democracies no one man is his brother's keeper. Each lives and struggles
to make his own way and his own position. All that is insisted on is
that there shall be a fair stage and that every lad shall learn the use
of the weapons which will enable him to fight his own way. [Greek:
Arete],'manliness,' the most essential of all acquisitions and the
hardest to cultivate, as Aristotle observed long ago, is assumed in
democracies as a matter of course. Of [Greek: arete] a moderate
quantity [Greek: hoposonoun] would do, and in Aristotle's opinion this
was the rock on which the Greek republics foundered. Their [Greek:
arete] did not come as a matter of course, and they lost it, and the
Macedonians and the Romans ate them up.
From this point of view political problems, and the West Indian among
them, present unusual aspects. Looking to the West Indies only, we took
possession of those islands when they were of supreme importance in our
great wrestle with Spain and France. We were fighting then for the
liberties of the human race. The Spaniards had destroyed the original
Carib and Indian inhabitants. We induced thousands of our own
fellow-countrymen to venture life and fortune in the occupation of our
then vital conquests. For two centuries we furnished them with black
servants whom we purchased on the African coast and carried over and
sold there, making our own profits out of the trade, and the colonists
prospered themselves and poured wealth and strength into the empire of
which they were then an integral part. A change passed over the spirit
of the age. Liberty assumed a new dress. We found slavery to be a crime;
we released our bondmen; we broke their chains as we proudly described
it to ourselves; we compensated the owners, so far as money could
compensate, for the entire dislocation of a state of society which we
had ourselves created; and we trusted to the enchantment of liberty to
create a better in its place. We had delivered our own souls; we had
other colonies to take our emigrants. Other lands under our open trade
would supply us with the commodities for which we had hitherto been
dependent on the West Indies. They ceased to be of commercial, they
ceased to be of political, moment to us, and we left them to their own
resources. The modern English idea is that everyone must take care of
himself. Individuals or aggregates of individuals have the world before
them, to open the oyster or fail to open it according to their
capabilities. The State is not to help them; the State is not to
interfere with them unless for political or party reasons it happens to
be convenient. As we treat ourselves we treat our colonies. Those who
have gone thither have gone of their own free will, and must take the
consequences of their own actions. We allow them no executional
privileges which we do not claim for ourselves. They must stand, if they
are to stand, by their own strength. If they cannot stand they must
fall. This is our notion of education in 'manliness,' and for immediate
purposes answers well enough. Individual enterprise, unendowed but
unfettered, built the main buttresses of the British colonial empire.
Australians and New Zealanders are English and Scotchmen who have
settled at the antipodes where there is more room for them than at home.
They are the same people as we are, and they have the same privileges as
we have. They are parts of one and the same organic body as branches
from the original trunk. The branch does not part from the trunk, but it
discharges its own vital functions by its own energy, and we no more
desire to interfere than London desires to interfere with Manchester.
So it stands with us where the colonists are of our race, with the same
character and the same objects; and, as I said, the system answers.
Under no other relations could we continue a united people. But it does
not answer--it has failed wherever we have tried it--when the majority
of the inhabitants of countries of which for one or other reason we have
possessed ourselves, and of which we keep possession, are not united to
us by any of these natural bonds, where they have been annexed by
violence or otherwise been forced under our flag. It has failed
conspicuously in Ireland. We know that it would fail in the East Indies
if we were rash enough to venture the experiment. Self-government in
connection with the British Empire implies a desire or a willingness in
those who are so left to themselves that the connection shall continue.
We have been so sanguine as to believe that the privilege of being
British subjects is itself sufficient to secure their allegiance; that
the liberties which we concede will not be used for purposes which we
are unable to tolerate; that, being left to govern themselves, they will
govern in harmony with English interests and according to English
principles. The privilege is not estimated so highly. They go their own
way and not our way, and therefore we must look facts in the face as
they are, and not as we wish them to be. If we extend to Ireland the
independence which only links us closer to Australia, Ireland will use
it to break away from us. If we extend it to Bengal and Madras and
Bombay, we shall fling them into anarchy and bring our empire to an end.
We cannot for our safety's sake part with Ireland. We do not mean to
part with our Asiatic dominions. The reality of the relation in both
cases is the superior force of England, and we must rely upon it and
need not try to conceal that we do, till by the excellence of our
administration we have converted submission into respect and respect
into willingness for union. This may be a long process and a difficult
one. If we choose to maintain our empire, however, we must pay the price
for empire, and it is wiser, better, safer, in all cases to admit the
truth and act upon it. Yet Englishmen so love liberty that they struggle
against confessing what is disagreeable to them. Many of us would give
Ireland, would give India Home Rule, and run the risk of what would
happen, and only a probability, which reaches certainty, of the
consequences to be expected to follow prevents us from unanimously
agreeing. About the West Indies we do not care very earnestly. Nothing
seriously alarming can happen there. So much, therefore, for the
general policy of leaving them to help themselves out of their
difficulties we have adopted completely. The corollary that they must
govern themselves also on their own responsibilities we hesitate as yet
to admit completely; but we do not recognise that any responsibility for
their failing condition rests on us; and the inclination certainly, and
perhaps the purpose, is to throw them entirely upon themselves at the
earliest moment. Cuba sends representatives to the Cortes at Madrid,
Martinique and Guadaloupe to the Assembly at Paris. In the English
islands, being unwilling to govern without some semblance of a
constitution, we try tentatively varieties of local boards and local
councils, admitting the elective principle but not daring to trust it
fully; creating hybrid constitutions, so contrived as to provoke ill
feeling where none would exist without them, and to make impossible any
tolerable government which could actively benefit the people. We cannot
intend that arrangements the effects of which are visible so plainly in
the sinking fortunes of our own kindred there, are to continue for ever.
We suppose that we cannot go back in these cases. It is to be presumed,
therefore, that we mean to go forward, and in doing so I venture to
think myself that we shall be doing equal injustice both to our own race
and to the blacks, and we shall bring the islands into a condition which
will be a reproach and scandal to the empire of which they will remain a
dishonoured part. The slave trade was an imperial monopoly, extorted by
force, guaranteed by treaties, and our white West Indian interest was
built up in connection with and in reliance upon it. We had a right to
set the slaves free; but the payment of the indemnity was no full
acquittance of our obligations for the condition of a society which we
had ourselves created. We have no more right to make the emancipated
slave his master's master in virtue of his numbers than we have a right
to lay under the heel of the Catholics of Ireland the Protestant
minority whom we planted there to assist us in controlling them.
It may be said that we have no intention of doing anything of the kind,
that no one at present dreams of giving a full colonial constitution to
the West Indian Islands. They are allowed such freedom as they are
capable of using; they can be allowed more as they are better educated
and more fit for it, &c. &c.
One knows all that, and one knows what it is worth in the half-elected,
half-nominated councils. Either the nominated members are introduced
merely as a drag upon the wheel, and are instructed to yield in the end
to the demands of the representative members, or they are themselves the
representatives of the white minority. If the first, the majority rule
already; if the second, such constitutions are contrived ingeniously to
create the largest amount of irritation, and to make impossible, as long
as they last, any form of effective and useful government. Therefore
they cannot last, and are not meant to last. A principle once conceded
develops with the same certainty with which a seed grows when it is
sown. In the English world, as it now stands, there is no middle
alternative between self-government and government by the Crown, and the
cause of our reluctance to undertake direct charge of the West Indies is
because such undertaking carries responsibility along with it. If they
are brought so close to us we shall be obliged to exert ourselves, and
to rescue them from a condition which would be a reproach to us.
The English of those islands are melting away. That is a fact to which
it is idle to try to shut our eyes. Families who have been for
generations on the soil are selling their estates everywhere and are
going off. Lands once under high cultivation are lapsing into jungle.
Professional men of ability and ambition carry their talents to
countries where they are more sure of reward. Every year the census
renews its warning. The rate may vary; sometimes for a year or two there
may seem to be a pause in the movement, but it begins again and is
always in the same direction. The white is relatively disappearing, the
black is growing; that is the fact with which we have to deal.
We may say if we please, 'Be it so then; we do not want those islands;
let the blacks have them, poor devils. They have had wrongs enough in
this world; let them take their turn and have a good time now.' This I
imagine is the answer which will rise to the lips of most of us, yet it
will be an answer which will not be for our honour, nor in the long run
for our interest. Our stronger colonies will scarcely attach more value
to their connection with us if they hear us declare impatiently that
because part of our possessions have ceased to be of money value to us,
we will not or we cannot take the trouble to provide them with a decent
government, and therefore cast them off. Nor in the long run will it
benefit the blacks either. The islands will not be allowed to run wild
again, and if we leave them some one else will take them who will be
less tender of his coloured brother's sensibilities. We may think that
it would not come to that. The islands will still be ours; the English
flag will still float over the forts; the government, whatever it be,
will be administered in the Queen's name. Were it worth while, one might
draw a picture of the position of an English governor, with a black
parliament and a black ministry, recommending by advice of his
constitutional ministers some measure like the Haytian Land Law.
No Englishman, not even a bankrupt peer, would consent to occupy such a
position; the blacks themselves would despise him if he did; and if the
governor is to be one of their own race and colour, how long could such
a connection endure?
No one I presume would advise that the whites of the island should
govern. The relations between the two populations are too embittered,
and equality once established by law, the exclusive privilege of colour
over colour cannot be restored. While slavery continued the whites ruled
effectively and economically; the blacks are now free as they; there are
two classes in the community; their interests are opposite as they are
now understood, and one cannot be trusted with control over the other.
As little can the present order of things continue. The West India
Islands, once the pride of our empire, the scene of our most brilliant
achievements, are passing away out of our hands; the remnant of our own
countrymen, weary of an unavailing struggle, are more and more eager to
withdraw from the scene, because they find no sympathy and no
encouragement from home, and are forbidden to accept help from America
when help is offered them, while under their eyes their quondam slaves
are multiplying, thriving, occupying, growing strong, and every day more
conscious of the changed order of things. One does not grudge the black
man his prosperity, his freedom, his opportunities of advancing himself;
one would wish to see him as free and prosperous as the fates and his
own exertions can make him, with more and more means of raising himself
to the white man's level. But left to himself, and without the white man
to lead him, he can never reach it, and if we are not to lose the
islands altogether, or if they are not to remain with us to discredit
our capacity to rule them, it is left to us only to take the same course
which we have taken in the East Indies with such magnificent success,
and to govern whites and blacks alike on the Indian system. The
circumstances are precisely analogous. We have a population to deal
with, the enormous majority of whom are of an inferior race. Inferior, I
am obliged to call them, because as yet, and as a body, they have shown
no capacity to rise above the condition of their ancestors except under
European laws, European education, and European authority, to keep them
from making war on one another. They are docile, good-tempered,
excellent and faithful servants when they are kindly treated; but their
notions of right and wrong are scarcely even elementary; their
education, such as it may be, is but skin deep, and the old African
superstitions lie undisturbed at the bottom of their souls. Give them
independence, and in a few generations they will peel off such
civilisation as they have learnt as easily and as willingly as their
coats and trousers.
Govern them as we govern India, with the same conscientious care, with
the same sense of responsibility, with the same impartiality, the same
disinterested attention to the well-being of our subjects in its
highest and most honourable sense, and we shall give the world one more
evidence that while Englishmen can cover the waste places of it with
free communities of their own blood, they can exert an influence no less
beneficent as the guides and rulers of those who need their assistance,
and whom fate and circumstances have assigned to their care. Our kindred
far away will be more than ever proud to form part of a nation which has
done more for freedom than any other nation ever did, yet is not a slave
to formulas, and can adapt its actions to the demands of each community
which belongs to it. The most timid among us may take courage, for it
would cost us nothing save the sacrifice of a few official traditions,
and an abstinence for the future from doubtful uses of colonial
patronage. The blacks will be perfectly happy when they are satisfied
that they have nothing to fear for their persons or their properties. To
the whites it would be the opening of a new era of hope. Should they be
rash enough to murmur, they might then be justly left to the
consequences of their own folly.