League of the Indies

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The West Indies are a small limb in the great body corporate of the British Empire, but there is no great and no small in the life of nations. The avoidable decay of the smallest member is an injury to the whole. Let it be once known and felt that England regards the West Indies as essentially one with herself, and the English in the islands will resume their natural position, and respect and order will come back, and those once thriving colonies will again advance with the rest on the high road of civilisation and prosperity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To one who has seen something of both the United States and of the West Indies, the reason for the improved state of affairs was easily understood, viz., the American foremen and others in charge had begun to understand the type of men with whom they were dealing. Accustomed to the character of the American negro, and to the conventions which regulate intercourse with the coloured man in the United States, they did not at first recognise that the West Indian was a distinct type, and accustomed, at any rate in the British Colonies, to very different social relations towards the white man. ”

“ Can the West Indies be successfully cultivated by free labor? These and sundry other questions, springing out of the gross materialism of our age and nation, have been characteristically put respecting West India Emancipation. All our tests of the grand measure have been such as we might look for from slave-holders themselves. They all proceed from the slave-holders side, and never from the side, of the emancipated slaves.
The effect of freedom upon the emancipated people of the West Indies passes for nothing. It is nothing that the plundered slave is now a freeman ”

“ As we are an island, it concerns our very being to have store of ships to defend us, and also our well-being by their trade to enrich us. This Association for the West Indies, when it shall be regulated and established by act of parliament, and thereby secured from the violence and injury of any intruding hand, will certainly give many men encouragement and confidence voluntarily to bring in large and liberal contributions towards so noble and so profitable an enterprize ”

“ The council was commanded to have for its chief care the conversion and good treatment of the Indians. The laws made by the Council for the Indies should conform as nearly as possible to the existing laws of Spain. In selecting ecclesiastics and civil officers for the Indies, the greatest care should be exercised that none but good men were sent, and their final nomination must rest with the king. ”

“ The Council of the Indies.—Spanish America was a possession of the sovereigns of Castile, as heirs of Queen Isabella, under whose patronage America had been discovered. At first, legislative and political matters relating to the Indies had been considered by the sovereigns in consultation with Fonseca and other personal advisors, but to supervise these matters a new board was gradually formed. In 1517 it was formally organized, among the members being Fonseca and Peter Martyr, the historian. In 1524 the board was reorganized as the Council of the Indies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ French influence is in no danger of dying out in Martinique and Guadaloupe. [Pg 108] The Spanish race is not dying in Cuba and Puerto Rico. England will soon be no more than a name in Barbadoes and the Antilles. Having acquitted our conscience by emancipation, we have left our West Indian interest to sink or swim. Our principle has been to leave each part of our empire (except the East Indies) to take care of itself: we give the various inhabitants liberty, and what we understand by fair play ”

“ The placing English colonists at the mercy of coloured majorities they will resent as an injury to themselves; they will not look upon it as an extension of a generous principle, but as an act of airy virtue which costs us nothing, and at the bottom is but carelessness and indifference.
We imagine that we have seen the errors of our old colonial policy, and that we are in no danger of repeating them. Yet in the West Indies we are treading over again the too familiar road. The Anglo-Irish colonists in 1705 petitioned for a union with Great Britain. ”

“ The slave emancipation was a terrible blow to the West Indies, and one from which many of the islands have not yet recovered. It was, the planters said, the second attempt to ruin them, the first having been the abolition of the slave-trade. The party who brought it about looked to see their protégées become a contented, hard-working peasantry, in place of driven cattle, as they called them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the Indies a premium was placed on rebellion; the oftener the Indians could be goaded into open revolt, the more slaves could be acquired according to due process of law, and everybody's profits increased. To such profitable encouragement the colonists were not slow to respond and they were fertile in devices for rendering the lives of the Indians intolerable. ”

“ The reporters insist with much earnestness on their right to the continuance of the Slave trade, on the ground of its having been sanctioned by Acts of Parliament. But is it not absurd to suppose that any Acts of Parliament, which may have been framed to encourage the importation of African labourers into the West Indies, can have conveyed to West Indians the right of establishing such a frightful system of oppression as the preceding part of this pamphlet has proved to exist among them? ”

“ We have decided that if the West Indies are to become again prosperous they must recover by their own energy. Our other colonies can do without help; why not they? We ought to remember that they are not like the other colonies. We occupied them at a time when slavery was considered a lawful institution, profitable to ourselves and useful to the souls of the negroes, who were brought by it within reach of salvation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus in India and in Africa the gulf between the white and the black has continued unbridged. The representatives of the British have remained as a governing race, relying upon the strict justice of their rule for its preservation. They have refrained from interference in the thousand jealousies and caste regulations with which the East Indies were, and are, honeycombed, becoming active only when oppression became barefaced. These officials, that is to say, have made a point of respecting the religions of the various tribes, and have even encouraged them to continue unmolested. ”

“ But the love of country, the unknown but magnified perils of a sea voyage, and stories of cruel Spaniards and man-eating Caribs, prevented many from going to the Indies, notwithstanding the great inducements offered. The English planters found it difficult to get negroes, as their enemy controlled the trade. As for the Indians, they had to deal with cannibals whose women cultivated small clearings, but resented anything like coercion, while no labour [Pg 146] whatever could be got from the men. ”

“ The shameful extermination of the native races of the West Indies is a long, sad history of kindly intentions and wise regulations on the part of the home government, made nugatory by the determined self-interest and heartless cruelty of the colonists. [Footnote: Lea, "The Indian Policy of Spain" (in Yale Review, August, 1899) ; Bourne, Spain in America, chap. xviii.] The fervor of Las Casas could readily obtain from the Spanish monarchs proclamations declaring the freedom of the Indians and even definite statutes providing for their good treatment ”

“ In Australia they led a not disagreeable life, spite of hardships they certainly never could have endured at home. In the West Indies success resolved itself into a game at hazard with death. If death won, why they died, and there was an end of it; if they won, they won wealth as well. ”

“ He who casts his eye on the East Indies will there see quite a different state of things. The conquered districts have merely changed one European master for another; and I believe there is no instance of any portion of the East Indies throwing off the yoke of the Europeans and establishing a Government of their own. ”

“ He alone can make them understand that, while they are establishing a new régime for their colonial possessions of the West Indies, "in policy, if not in justice, they should be disposed to avoid oppression, which, falling on us, as well as on their colonies, might tempt us to act together." ”

“ 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. ”

“ The result is a division of responsibility from power and frequent deadlocks that make the apparent autonomy of the island a continual process of “standing pat.”
The few white officials are slow, antiquated, precedence-ridden, in striking contrast to the young and bustling, if sometimes poorly informed rulers of our own dependencies. Indeed, a journey to the West Indies is apt to cause the American to rearrange his notions of the relative efficiency of the English, and the French or ourselves, as colonizers. ”

“ That's true, but I understand the Indians. Those who are my friends are my friends, and those who are my enemies are my enemies. I take it that in the West Indies you never know what change is coming. ”

“ The miserable skin and race doctrine we have been discussing does not at all prefigure the destinies at all events of the West Indies, or determine the motives that will affect them. With the exception of those belonging to the Southern states of the Union, the vast body of African descendants now dispersed in various countries of the Western Hemisphere are at sufficient peace to begin occupying themselves, according to some fixed programme, about matters of racial importance. ”

“ 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. ”