Return to Jamaica--Cherry Garden again--Black servants--Social
conditions--Sir Henry Norman--King's House once more--Negro
suffrage--The will of the people--The Irish python--Conditions of
colonial union--Oratory and statesmanship.
I had to return to Jamaica from Cuba to meet the mail to England. My
second stay could be but brief. For the short time that was allowed me I
went back to my hospitable friends at Cherry Garden, which is an oasis
in the wilderness. In the heads of the family there was cultivation and
simplicity and sense. There was a home life with its quiet occupations
and enjoyments--serious when seriousness was needed, light and bright in
the ordinary routine of existence. The black domestics, far unlike the
children of liberty whom I had left at Port au Prince, had caught their
tone from their master and mistress, and were low-voiced, humorous, and
pleasant to talk with. So perfect were they in their several capacities,
that, like the girls at Government House at Dominica, I would have liked
to pack them in my portmanteau and carry them home. The black butler
received me on my arrival as an old friend. He brought me a pair of
boots which I had left behind me on my first visit; he told me 'the
female' had found them. The lady of the house took me out for a drive
with her. The coachman half-upset us into a ditch, and we narrowly
escaped being pitched into a ravine. The dusky creature insisted
pathetically that it was not his fault, nor the horse's fault. His ebony
wife had left him for a week's visit to a friend, and his wits had gone
after her. Of course he was forgiven. Cherry Garden was a genuine
homestead, a very menagerie of domestic animals of all sorts and breeds.
Horses loitered under the shade of the mangoes; cows, asses, dogs,
turkeys, cocks and hens, geese, guinea fowl and pea fowl lounged and
strutted about the paddocks. In the grey of the morning they held their
concerts; the asses brayed, the dogs barked, the turkeys gobbled, and
the pea fowl screamed. It was enough to waken the seven sleepers, but
the noises seemed so home-like and natural that they mixed pleasantly in
one's dreams. One morning, after they had been holding a special
jubilee, the butler apologised for them when he came to call me, and
laughed as at the best of jokes when I said they did not mean any harm.
The great feature of the day was five cats, with blue eyes and
spotlessly white, who walked in regularly at breakfast, ranged
themselves on their tails round their mistress's chair, and ate their
porridge and milk like reasonable creatures. Within and without all was
orderly. The gardens were in perfect condition; fields were being
inclosed and planted; the work of the place went on of itself, with the
eye of the mistress on it, and her voice, if necessary, heard in
command; but black and white were all friends together. What could man
ask for, more than to live all his days in such a climate and with such
surroundings? Why should a realised ideal like this pass away? Why may
it not extend itself till it has transformed the features of all our
West Indian possessions? Thousand of English families might be living in
similar scenes, happy in themselves and spreading round them a happy,
wholesome English atmosphere. Why not indeed? Only because we are
enchanted. Because in Jamaica and Barbadoes the white planters had a
constitution granted them two hundred years ago, therefore their
emancipated slaves must now have a constitution also. Wonderful logic of
formulas, powerful as a witches' cauldron for mischief as long as it is
believed in. The colonies and the Empire! If the colonies were part
indeed of the Empire, if they were taken into partnership as the
Americans take theirs, and were members of an organised body, if an
injury to each single limb would be felt as an injury to the whole, we
should not be playing with their vital interests to catch votes at home.
Alas! at home we are split in two, and party is more than the nation,
and famous statesmen, thinly disguising their motives under a mask of
policy, condemn to-day what they approved of yesterday, and catch at
power by projects which they would be the first to denounce if suggested
by their adversaries. Till this tyranny be overpast, to bring into one
the scattered portions of the Empire is the idlest of dreams, and the
most that is to be hoped for is to arrest any active mischief. Happy
Americans, who have a Supreme Court with a code of fundamental laws to
control the vagaries of politicians and check the passions of
fluctuating electoral majorities! What the Supreme Court is to them, the
Crown ought to be for us; but the Crown is powerless and must remain
powerless, and therefore we are as we are, and our national existence is
made the shuttlecock of party contention.
Time passed so pleasantly with me in these concluding days that I could
have wished it to be the nothing which metaphysicians say that it is,
and that when one was happy it would leave one alone. We wandered in the
shade in the mornings, we made expeditions in the evenings, called at
friends' houses, and listened to the gossip of the island. It turned
usually on the one absorbing subject--black servants and the difficulty
of dealing with them. An American lady from Pennsylvania declared
emphatically as her opinion that emancipation had been a piece of folly,
and that things would never mend till they were slaves again.
One of my own chief hopes in going originally to Jamaica had been to see
and learn the views of the distinguished Governor there. Sir Henry
Norman had been one of the most eminent of the soldier civilians in
India. He had brought with him a brilliant reputation; he had won the
confidence in the West Indies of all classes and all colours. He, if
anyone, would understand the problem, and from the high vantage ground
of experience would know what could or could not be done to restore the
influence of England and the prosperity of the colonies. Unfortunately,
Sir Henry had been called to London, as I mentioned before, on a
question of the conduct of some official, and I was afraid that I should
miss him altogether. He returned, however, the day before I was to sail.
He was kind enough to ask me to spend an evening with him, and I was
again on my last night a guest at King's House.
A dinner party offers small opportunity for serious conversation, nor,
indeed, could I expect a great person in Sir Henry's position to enter
upon subjects of consequence with a stranger like myself. I could see,
however, that I had nothing to correct in the impression of his
character which his reputation had led me to form about him, and I
wished more than ever that the system of government of which he had been
so admirable a servant in India could be applied to his present
position, and that he or such as he could have the administration of it.
We had common friends in the Indian service to talk about; one
especially, Reynell Taylor, now dead, who had been the earliest of my
boy companions. Taylor had been one of the handful of English who held
the Punjaub in the first revolt of the Sikhs. With a woman's modesty he
had the spirit of a knight-errant. Sir Henry described him as the 'very
soul of chivalry,' and seemed himself to be a man of the same pure and
noble nature, perhaps liable, from the generosity of his temperament, to
believe more than I could do in modern notions and in modern political
heroes, but certainly not inclining of his own will to recommend any
rash innovations. I perceived that like myself he felt no regret that so
much of the soil of Jamaica was passing to peasant black proprietors. He
thought well of their natural disposition; he believed them capable of
improvement. He thought that the possession of land of their own would
bring them into voluntary industry, and lead them gradually to the
adoption of civilised habits. He spoke with reserve, and perhaps I may
not have understood him fully, but he did not seem to me to think much
of their political capacity. The local boards which have been
established as an education for higher functions have not been a
success. They had been described to me in all parts of the island as
inflammable centres of peculation and mismanagement. Sir Henry said
nothing from which I could gather his own opinion. I inferred, however
(he will pardon me if I misrepresent him), that he had no great belief
in a federation of the islands, in 'responsible government,' and such
like, as within the bounds of present possibilities. Nor did he think
that responsible statesmen at home had any such arrangement in view.
That such an arrangement was in contemplation a few years ago, I knew
from competent authority. Perhaps the unexpected interest which the
English people have lately shown in the colonies has modified opinion in
those high circles, and has taught politicians that they must advance
more cautiously. But the wind still sits in the old quarter. Three years
ago, the self-suppressed constitution in Jamaica was partially
re-established. A franchise was conceded both there and in Barbadoes
which gave every black householder a vote. Even in poor Dominica, an
extended suffrage was hung out as a remedy for its wretchedness. If
nothing further is intended, these concessions have been gratuitously
mischievous. It has roused the hopes of political agitators, not in
Jamaica only, but all over the Antilles. It has taught the people, who
have no grievances at all, who in their present state are better
protected than any peasantry in the world except the Irish, to look to
political changes as a road to an impossible millennium. It has
rekindled hopes which had been long extinguished, that, like their
brothers in Hayti, they were on the way to have the islands to
themselves. It has alienated the English colonists, filled them with the
worst apprehensions, and taught them to look wistfully from their own
country to a union with America. A few elected members in a council
where they may be counterbalanced by an equal number of official members
seems a small thing in itself. So long as the equality was maintained,
my Yankee friend was still willing to risk his capital in Jamaican
enterprises. But the principle has been allowed. The existing
arrangement is a half-measure which satisfies none and irritates all,
and collisions between the representatives of the people and the
nominees of the Government are only avoided by leaving a sufficient
number of official seats unfilled. To have re-entered upon a road where
you cannot stand still, where retreat is impossible, and where to go
forward can only be recommended on the hypothesis that to give a man a
vote will itself qualify him for the use of it, has been one of the
minor achievements of the last Government of Mr. Gladstone, and is
likely to be as successful as his larger exploits nearer home have as
yet proved to be. A supreme court, were we happy enough to possess such
a thing, would forbid these venturous experiments of sanguine statesmen
who may happen, for a moment, to command a trifling majority in the
House of Commons.
I could not say what I felt completely to Sir Henry, who, perhaps, had
been in personal relations with Mr. Gladstone's Government. Perhaps,
too, he was one of those numerous persons of tried ability and
intelligence who have only a faint belief that the connection between
Great Britain and the colonies can be of long continuance. The public
may amuse themselves with the vision of an imperial union; practical
statesmen who are aware of the tendencies of self-governed communities
to follow lines of their own in which the mother country cannot support
them may believe that they know it to be impossible.
As to the West Indies there are but two genuine alternatives: one to
leave them to themselves to shape their own destinies, as we leave
Australia; the other to govern them as if they were a part of Great
Britain with the same scrupulous care of the people and their interests
with which we govern Bengal, Madras, and Bombay. England is responsible
for the social condition of those islands. She filled them with negroes
when it was her interest to maintain slavery, she emancipated those
negroes when popular opinion at home demanded that slavery should end.
It appears to me that England ought to bear the consequences of her own
actions, and assume to herself the responsibilities of a state of things
which she has herself created. We are partly unwilling to take the
trouble, partly we cling to the popular belief that to trust all
countries with the care of their own concerns is the way to raise the
character of the inhabitants and to make them happy and contented. We
dimly perceive that the population of the West Indies is not a natural
growth of internal tendencies and circumstances, and we therefore
hesitate before we plunge completely and entirely into the downward
course; but we play with it, we drift towards it, we advance as far as
we dare, giving them the evils of both systems and the advantages of
neither. At the same moment we extend the suffrage to the blacks with
one hand, while with the other we refuse to our own people the benefit
of a treaty which would have rescued them from imminent ruin and brought
them into relations with their powerful kindred close at hand--relations
which might save them from the most dangerous consequences of a negro
political supremacy--and the result is that the English in those islands
are melting away and will soon be crowded out, or will have departed of
themselves in disgust. A policy so far-reaching, and affecting so
seriously the condition of the oldest of our colonial possessions, ought
not to have been adopted on their own authority, by doctrinaire
statesmen in a cabinet, without fully and frankly consulting the English
nation; and no further step ought to be taken in that direction until
the nation has had the circumstances of the islands laid before it, and
has pronounced one way or the other its own sovereign pleasure. Does or
does not England desire that her own people shall be enabled to live and
thrive in the West Indies? If she decides that her hands are too full,
that she is over-empired and cannot attend to them--_caditquaestio_--there
is no more to be said. But if this is her resolution the hands of the
West Indians ought to be untied. They ought to be allowed to make their
sugar treaties, to make any treaties, to enter into the closest relations
with America which the Americans will accept, as the only chance which
will be left them.
Such abandonment, however, will bring us no honour. It will not further
that federation of the British Empire which so many of us now profess to
desire. If we wish Australia and Canada to draw into closer union with
us, it will not be by showing that we are unable to manage a group of
colonies which are almost at our doors. Englishmen all round the globe
have rejoiced together in this year which is passing by us over the
greatness of their inheritance, and have celebrated with enthusiasm the
half-century during which our lady-mistress has reigned over the English
world. Unity and federation are on our lips, and we have our leagues and
our institutes, and in the eagerness of our wishes we dream that we see
the fulfilment of them. Neither the kingdom of heaven nor any other
kingdom 'comes with observation.' It comes not with after-dinner
speeches however eloquent, or with flowing sentiments however for the
moment sincere. The spirit which made the Empire can alone hold it
together. The American Union was not saved by oratory. It was saved by
the determination of the bravest of the people; it was cemented by the
blood which dyed the slopes of Gettysburg. The union of the British
Empire, if it is to be more than a dream, can continue only while the
attracting force of the primary commands the willing attendance of the
distant satellites. Let the magnet lose its power, let the confidence of
the colonies in the strength and resolution of their central orb be once
shaken, and the centrifugal force will sweep them away into orbits of
their own.
The race of men who now inhabit this island of ours show no signs of
degeneracy. The bow of Ulysses is sound as ever; moths and worms have
not injured either cord or horn; but it is unstrung, and the arrows
which are shot from it drop feebly to the ground. The Irish python rises
again out of its swamp, and Phoebus Apollo launches no shaft against
the scaly sides of it. Phoebus Apollo attempts the milder methods of
concession and persuasion. 'Python,' he says, 'in days when I was
ignorant and unjust I struck you down and bound you. I left officers and
men with you of my own race to watch you, to teach you, to rule you; to
force you, if your own nature could not be changed, to leave your
venomous ways. You have refused to be taught, you twist in your chains,
you bite and tear, and when you can you steal and murder. I see that I
was wrong from the first. Every creature has a right to live according
to its own disposition. I was a tyrant, and you did well to resist; I
ask you to forgive and forget. I set you free; I hand you over my own
representatives as a pledge of my goodwill, that you may devour them at
your leisure. They have been the instruments of my oppression; consume
them, destroy them, do what you will with them; and henceforward I hope
that we shall live together as friends, and that you will show yourself
worthy of my generosity and of the freedom which you have so gloriously
won.'
A sun-god who thus addressed a disobedient satellite might have the
eloquence of a Demosthenes and the finest of the fine intentions which
pave the road to the wrong place, but he would not be a divinity who
would command the willing confidence of a high-spirited kindred. Great
Britain will make the tie which holds the colonies to her a real one
when she shows them and shows the world that she is still equal to her
great place, that her arm is not shortened and her heart has not grown
faint.
Men speak of the sacredness of liberty. They talk as if the will of
everyone ought to be his only guide, that allegiance is due only to
majorities, that allegiance of any other kind is base and a relic of
servitude. The Americans are the freest people in the world; but in
their freedom they have to obey the fundamental laws of the Union. Again
and again in the West Indies Mr. Motley's words came back to me. To be
taken into the American Union is to be adopted into a partnership. To
belong as a Crown colony to the British Empire, as things stand, is no
partnership at all. It is to belong to a power which sacrifices, as it
has always sacrificed, the interest of its dependencies to its own. The
blood runs freely through every vein and artery of the American body
corporate. Every single citizen feels his share in the life of his
nation. Great Britain leaves her Crown colonies to take care of
themselves, refuses what they ask, and forces on them what they had
rather be without. If I were a West Indian I should feel that under the
stars and stripes I should be safer than I was at present from political
experimenting. I should have a market in which to sell my produce where
I should be treated as a friend; I should have a power behind me and
protecting me, and I should have a future to which I could look forward
with confidence. America would restore me to home and life; Great
Britain allows me to sink, contenting herself with advising me to be
patient. Why should I continue loyal when my loyalty was so
contemptuously valued?
But I will not believe that it will come to this. An Englishman may be
heavily tempted, but in evil fortune as in good his heart is in the old
place. The administration of our affairs is taken for the present from
prudent statesmen, and is made over to those who know how best to
flatter the people with fine-sounding sentiments and idle adulation. All
sovereigns have been undone by flatterers. The people are sovereign now,
and, being new to power, listen to those who feed their vanity. The
popular orator has been the ruin of every country which has trusted to
him. He never speaks an unwelcome truth, for his existence depends on
pleasing, and he cares only to tickle the ears of his audience. His
element is anarchy; his function is to undo what better men have done.
In wind he lives and moves and has his being. When the gods are angry,
he can raise it to a hurricane and lay waste whole nations in ruin and
revolution. It was said long ago, a man full of words shall not prosper
upon the earth. Times have changed, for in these days no one prospers so
well. Can he make a speech? is the first question which the
constituencies ask when a candidate is offered to their suffrages. When
the Roman commonwealth developed from an aristocratic republic into a
democracy, and, as now with us, the sovereignty was in the mass of the
people, the oratorical faculty came to the front in the same way. The
finest speaker was esteemed the fittest man to be made a consul or a
praetor of, and there were schools of rhetoric where aspirants for office
had to go to learn gesture and intonation before they could present
themselves at the hustings. The sovereign people and their orators could
do much, but they could not alter facts, or make that which was not, to
be, or that which was, not to be. The orators could perorate and the
people could decree, but facts remained and facts proved the strongest,
and the end of that was that after a short supremacy the empire which
they had brought to the edge of ruin was saved at the last extremity;
the sovereign people lost their liberties, and the tongues of political
orators were silenced for centuries. Illusion at last takes the form of
broken heads, and the most obstinate credulity is not proof against that
form of argument.