British West Indies

“ The successful propagation of this plant drew to the islands crowds of adventurers, many of them men of considerable wealth. The West Indies were for many years used by the English government as penal settlements, the prisoners working on the plantations as slaves. In 1655 a British force made an unsuccessful attack on Haiti, but a sudden descent on Jamaica was more fortunate in its result, and that rich and beautiful island has since remained in the possession of Great Britain. ”

“ Those who go to make new homes for the old country in Australia and America do not feel her want of interest keenly; but those heroes of commerce who go to fight and die in fever-stricken lands for the sake of the old homes at home, do feel her want of interest.
I am not speaking hastily, nor have I only West Africa in my mind in this matter; there are other regions where we could have succeeded better, with advantage to all concerned—Malaya, British Guiana, New Guinea, the West Indies, as well as West Africa. ”

“ The West Indies was a heroic poem, on one of the most heroic acts which ever did honor to the decrees of a great nation—the abolition of the slave-trade. But it was a work not merely of triumph over what was done, but of incentive to what yet remained to do—to the abolition of slavery itself. Time has shown what a stupendous mustering of national powers that achievement has demanded. ”

“ Schools are closely centralized, as in France, and not particularly numerous or effective, though there is less illiteracy than the census of the French islanders who helped to dig the Panama Canal seemed to indicate. Among the surprises in store for the visitor is the profound patriotism of almost all classes. Twenty thousand Martiniquais went to France as conscripts, while the British West Indies sent only volunteers, yet only one British island can in any way compare with their French neighbors in loyalty to the homeland. ”

“ The US who are flourishing, or pining, as the case may be, in the British West Indies—by favour of the Colonial Office on the former hypothesis, or, on the second, through the misdirection of their own faculties—do not, and, in the very nature of things, cannot in any race take the lead of any set of men endowed with virile attributes, the conditions of the contest being on all sides identical. ”

“ In 1860 he published a work entitled ‘Slavery and Freedom in the British West Indies,’ in which he endeavoured to prove that England had secured the spread of civilisation in West Africa, as well as the permanent prosperity of the West India islands. ”

“ Notwithstanding the
operations of educational institutions and of large numbers of missionaries of various religious denominations, the percentage of illegitimate births among the population of the British West Indian islands remains very high—in Barbados about 54, in Jamaica, 63; in Trinidad, 59% of the general births; and 79% of the East Indian. The population of the West Indies represents many original stocks, the descendants of which have developed variations of habits and customs in their New World environment. ”

“ Of these, the people of pure African blood are in a large majority, the "coloured" race of mixed European and African blood being next in numerical importance. Under British influence the negroes of the West Indies have become British in thought and habit; and it would seem that the stimulating influence of European direction and encouragement is absolutely necessary for the future development and progress of these islands. In the republics of Santo Domingo and Haiti the negroes are left to drift along, while the French and Danish islands show no great sign, of progress. ”

“ But for the most part the negroes appreciate their advantages under British government and are quick to assimilate British customs and ideas. Advances in the system of peasant proprietorship have brought beneficial results. The drafting of large numbers of labourers from the West Indies to the Panama canal works early in the 20th century, though causing a shortage of labour and involving legislation in some of the islands, exercised a moral effect on the natives by enlarging their horizon. ”

“ Now, there are two powerful forces working underground in the West Indies. One is the Spanish and negro combination, which desires to shake off all the British, French and Dutch possessions, and to create a Creole Empire of the Islands. The other is an English plan, to weld all the British islands in the West Indies into a single Confederation and to buy as many of the smaller isles from France and Holland as may seem possible. Both are hostile to the extension of American power in the Gulf of Mexico. Possibly, some European power is back of this plot. ”

“ A great majority of British electors would certainly have felt no hesitation in deciding, as between the markets of the United States and of the West Indies, that if a choice must be made, good policy required the government to save at all hazards the West Indies. Both as a permanent market for manufactures and as a steady support for shipping, the West Indian commerce held the first place in British interests. ”

“ The subjects of a free and happy constitution of government have a thousand advantages to colonize above those who live under despotic princes. We see how the British colonies on the continent have outgrown those of the French notwithstanding they have ever engaged the savages to keep us back. Their advantages over us in the West Indies are, among other causes perhaps, partly owing to these: (1) A capital neglect in former reigns in suffering them to have a firm possession of so many valuable islands that we had a better title to than they. ”

“ Is it the fact that labourers immigrating to the West Indies have been ill treated, whether they be Portuguese from Madeira, Coolies from India, Africans from the Western Coast, or Chinese? In Jamaica, unfortunately, their number is as yet but scanty, but in British Guiana they are numerous. I think I may venture to say that no labourers in any country are so cared for, so closely protected, so certainly saved from the usual wants and sorrows incident to the labouring classes. ”

“ It is hard to tear one’s thoughts away from the [236] glorious scenes where the history of the great British race has been made. I cannot, however, draw my remarks to a close on the West Indies without referring to another way in which we add to the glory and stability of the Empire to which we are proud to belong. I am alluding to the education which in Jamaica is provided by government for the younger generation of this colony. ”

“ The Spaniards nevertheless did, as we have seen, engage in active reprisal, especially as they knew the cutting of logwood to be but the preliminary step to the {211} growth of English settlements upon the coasts of Yucatan and Honduras, settlements, indeed, which later crystallized into a British colony. The Queen-Regent of Spain sent orders and instructions to her governors in the West Indies to encourage privateers to take and punish as pirates all English and French who robbed and carried away wood within their jurisdictions ”

“ From the shores to the steeper heights of the mountain the swiftly sloping island is covered with sugar-cane; above that the woods are said to 340be full of monkeys, descendants of the pets which British soldiers brought with them when St. Kitts was a bone of contention between the French and the English. With one slight exception, this and the neighboring island of Nevis are the only West Indies inhabited by our racial ancestors, which are so troublesome that their direct descendants below have given up trying to plant their gardens more than half-way up the mountains. ”

“ In the event of our being at war with those nations which had possessions in the West Indies, the islands formed convenient bases for operations against our North American Colonies, as well as harbours of refuge for the innumerable privateers which preyed upon our commerce. When war unhappily broke out between our Colonies and the Mother-Country, it became more than ever a matter of paramount necessity that no Power but ourselves should hold possession of these islands. ”

“ As the separation of Canada and the West Indies is an event which may ere long be looked for—not less from the universal discontents of the colonies, who have lost by Free Trade their only interest in upholding the connection with the British Empire, than from the growing disinclination of our Free Trade rulers to continue much longer the burdens and expense consequent on their government—it is evident that, the moment it happens, the foreign ships employed in carrying on our trade will outnumber the British. ”

“ We have little or no doubt of being able to reduce the enemy by land, and we likewise believe that the united powers of France, Spain, and America would be able to expel the British fleet from the western seas, by which the communication for trade would be opened, the number of interests reduced which have hitherto distracted the West Indies, and consequently the peace of all this side of the globe put on a better foundation than it has hitherto been ”

“ Even the wealth which is acquired by British subjects in the East Indies is brought home to be spent in our own country. It improves our land, or it increases the funds to be employed in commercial or manufacturing enterprizes.
273How differently circumstanced is that part of our national capital, which is invested in the West Indies. It is in a situation where it is peculiarly open to seizure; and where, in consequence, it often invites the attack of an enemy, while at the same time it is defended at an immense expence of the lives of our fellow subjects. ”

“ Acres of the most fertile country in the world lie fallow within the confines of this island, whose name is written large in Britain’s naval history. Virgin forests of wild fruit trees still cover vast tracts of a country which one day will be claimed by English husbandmen. Like Jamaica, Dominica cries out for men—new men, new energy, new enterprise. In England we associate our West Indian islands with only a dead prosperity. In the West Indies one encounters ample evidence of present wealth and great promise of future riches. ”

“ In our dreams of Empire we prefer to think of Canada, Africa, and strenuous Australasia. Commercially and politically our West Indies are, according to the general idea, more than half derelict, and wholly without the attractions of wealth and promise. ”

“ We forget that these Western islands were at one time the richest of England’s possessions; we do not realise how rich they, some day, will again become. If Britain only understood aright she would know that it is only through her own neglect, through her half-hearted, penurious West Indian policy, that our Caribbean Empire is not in the front rank of her richest possessions to-day. The riches of the West Indies played a large part in the formation of Britain’s greatness. We swept the islands clear of all their surface wealth at a period when England was most in need of gold. ”

“ Round you spread the tropics. Shorewards the palm bends languidly as it feels the breath of the sea’s vigour; the sun, seen through an ocean breeze, is dulled into purple haze; the moving boats and rocking masts give life and motion to a dead world. At midday the West Indies present the picture of death. There is no movement, no life current. It is as though the island of Jamaica were scorched dead. The birds float like ragged strips of paper on the edge of the breeze which dies on its journey inland. ”

“ Let men who have such materials, and such models, proscribe all tawdry and poor European art—most of it a bad imitation of bad Greek, or worse Renaissance—and trust to Nature and the facts which lie nearest them. But when will a time come for the West Indies when there will be wealth and civilisation enough to make such an art possible? Soon, if all the employers of labour were like the gentleman at whose house we were that day, and like some others in the same island. ”

“ What a race, of mingled Spaniard and Indian, might have grown up throughout the West Indies. What a life, what a society, what an art, what a science it might have developed ere now, equalling, even surpassing, that of Ionia, Athens, and Sicily, till the famed isles and coasts of Greece should have been almost forgotten in the new fame of the isles and coasts of the Caribbean Sea. ”

“ The West Indies was as much a cock-pit of the fighting powers as ever Belgium was; and in those islands there was wealth and the power which wealth buys; the clash of white and black and coloured peoples ”

“ But when that is done; when civilization, commerce, and education shall have been spread; when sufficient of our blood shall have been infused into the veins of those children of the sun; then, I think, we may be ready, without stain to our patriotism, to take off our hats and bid farewell to the West Indies. ”

“ 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. ”