It is strange how even thinking minds, in the consideration of these matters, often forget that the evils of slavery weigh scarce less heavily, and in the long-run more perniciously, on the slaveholders than on the slaves themselves; and that the prosperity, the existence even, of the former in our West Indian Colonies, was not less at stake in the parliamentary struggle of 1833, than those of the latter. Yet of this the present condition of Jamaica, as contrasted with its past, affords the clearest proof.

Insular history has this advantage, that it presents us with the working out of social and political problems, free to a great extent from the disturbing influences that complicate similar processes in continental, and therefore of necessity, conterminal, states. Hence it comes that among European annals those of England are unquestionably the most instructive; and thus it has been in the New World with Jamaica, the island which of all others has exhibited the greatest vicissitudes within, while maintaining a peculiarly independent attitude towards its neighbours without. A battle-field of the most sharply defined interests, a theatre of the most triumphant success and the most disastrous failure; now depressed, now flourishing; now the most autonomic among British Colonies, and now the most subject, Jamaica supplies lessons nowhere else so distinctly to be read as in her chronicles, and claims our attention with better right than many larger and wealthier colonies of the Empire.

The 3rd of May, 1655, was a fortunate day for Jamaica. When the weather-stained sails of the fleet, sent on its war-errand by the far-reaching policy of the great Protector, appeared against the morning sky, above the southern sea horizon of what was then San Jago, the island had been already for a century and a half under Spanish dominion. But except exterminating the native Caribs, that is an inoffensive and unarmed people from whom they themselves had met a friendly and hospitable reception, stocking the woods with half-wild cattle, horses, and swine, and founding, or rather indicating, the future islandcapital to which they left their name, the Spaniards had done little or nothing for their possession. Rather, they had done worse than nothing; since by the fugitive slaves and vagabonds, afterwards known as Maroons, with whom they had peopled the mountain districts, and the habits of brigandage and murder that they had implanted among these their successors by example and precept, they had rendered Jamaica on the whole less adapted to become a centre of civilization, labour, and commerce, than they had found it. So weak indeed was their rule,

so feeble their grasp, that not even the divided counsels of the half-hearted Penn and the incapable Venables, could enable the lords of the land to prolong their struggle against their famished and fever-stricken invaders; and a week sufficed for hauling down the Spanish flag and hoisting the British ensign in its place over St. Jago de la Vega. Only on the extreme north of the island, amid the sheltering gorges of Ocho Rias and the crags of Rio Nuevo, did the Dons, reinforced from the mother country and Cuba, keep up a five years' resistance, till the skill of D'Oyley and the bravery of his troops dislodged them for ever from the coast. But departing, they left their savage pupils, the Maroons, behind them, to be for long years a thorn in the side of the settlers, and in our own day a discredit and an evil name, though enlisted in the cause of order.

Jamaica was now an English possession, and no time was lost in rendering it an English colony in the fullest sense of the word. To the energy of Cromwell were due more than 2000 settlers, most of them labouring men, sent out to subdue and replenish the soil; to the very dissimilar administration of Charles II. Jamaica owed a still more important reinforcement of men, even now influential through their descendants; men whom too prominent a share in the reign of the saints had rendered specially obnoxious to the reign of courtiers and courtesans. Barbadoes, the lesser Antilles, Surinam, New England itself, furnished others; and by 1662 the census could already return above 4000 white residents in Jamaica. A few years later the number was almost doubled; it then remained nearly stationary for half a century; and now, after two hundred years and more, it barely exceeds 11,000 in all.

So scant an increase during so long a period appears almost equivalent to a falling off. Has such been really the case? To answer aright we must consider the causes at work in the island.

Of these the chief was undoubtedly the rapid rise, and soon the almost universal prevalence of sugar cultivation. The first settlers indeed, enchanted by the immense, the seemingly unlimited, fertility of the soil, had turned their attention to a variety of valuable products, such as cocoa, indigo, dyewoods, tobacco, and even cotton; while the mild and balmy climate, joined to their own ignorance of the deadly power of a vertical sun, however delusively cool the breeze, encouraged them in the belief that outdoor labour was not less practicable for Englishmen in Jamaica than at home. And truly, in a land where the highest thermometric range, even on the heated coast level, rarely exceeds 90°, and where amid the uplands of the interior, that is throughout

throughout three-fourths of the island, the medium temperature ranges from 70° downward to 55°, and even lower, a European might well be excused for thinking himself capable of any exertion to which he had been accustomed in his native country. So Cromwell's emigrants and their comrades tried the experiment, and the fatal results that speedily thinned their ranks established a prejudice, hardly effaced in our day, against the real, though relative, healthiness of the place. True, sanitary conditions were often not so much ignored as defied by the selection of the first plantation grounds amid spots where excess of moisture promised abundance, but concealed fever and death; common sense was defied also by neglected cleanliness, ill-constructed dwellings, and too often by the wild excesses of debauched and desperate men. But the reversal of all these evil conditions would not, as is now admitted, have granted immunity to European labour under a West-Indian sun; and the experiments of Scotch and Irish immigration scarce thirty years since, of Mr. Myers and his German labourers in the favoured western districts, and of but too many others throughout the island, though made with every precaution that prudence could suggest, have met with nothing but a sad uniformity of failure. The lesson is neither far to seek nor to learn. Europeans, Teutons as well as Celts, Englishmen as Spaniards, emigrants from the bleak coast-line of the German Ocean, no less than from the olive-clad shores of the blue Mediterranean, may all enjoy health and fulness of days in Jamaica, equal to any they could have hoped for in Yorkshire or Italy, on condition that they screen themselves behind the comparative ease and comfort of an upper class; but they must look elsewhere than among their own ranks for mechanics, day-workmen, and field-labourers above all.

Energy and perseverance, even British, must yield to nature and fact: and the settlers soon found themselves compelled to restrict their share of the task before them within the limits allotted by tropical laws, and to make over the remainder to a race better adapted than their own to the climatic conditions around.

It were waste of time to speculate what might have happened had an indigenous population been ready to hand. Certainly the 'Indians—to call them by the convenient but inexact designation of ordinary use-have not, where they have survived, shown themselves particularly adapted for occupying a grade, however low, in the scale of civilized labour and life. In Jamaica Spanish cruelty had never allowed them so much as a chance. But negro importation was already in vogue; and from the coast of Guinea across to the Caribbean Archipelago,

the

the Atlantic is well nigh at its narrowest. In 1658 the sum total of African slaves in Jamaica had been only 1400, against four times the number of whites; in 1670 it had swelled to 8000; twenty years later it exceeded 40,000, and at the close of the last century had attained the enormous reckoning of 256,000.

This multiplication of negro slaves was correlative with the increase of sugar cultivation, of which, indeed it was at once the effect and the cause. The cane, that blessing and curse of the West Indies, a blessing in itself, a curse in the folly of those to whom it was given, existed, and was cultivated in Jamaica prior to British occupation; but the improvement in its quality by the introduction of choice varieties, brought over first from Barbadoes and afterwards from Bourbon, gave the plant tenfold value and importance. Its cultivation requires hard labour, and prolonged endurance of heat, but comparatively little science or skill; nor did the extraction of the juice and the separation of the sugar, after the fashion in which these processes were for more than a century carried on throughout the 'estates,' tax so much the intelligence as the muscles and the constitution of those employed. Later improvements, and the introduction of steam power and complicated machinery, have considerably modified all this. But for a long, too long, a period, the canefield and the sugar-factory were as much at the level of negro labour and intellect, as negro labour and intellect were of theirs. Each seemed made for the other. Meanwhile the West-African slave-trade was alike easy and remunerative; nor in 1750 were there many Englishmen outside the precincts of Strawberry Hill who shared the humane, we had almost said the human, sentiments expressed that very year by Horace Walpole, in a letter to Sir H. Mann, on that ghastly traffic.

With everything to encourage, nothing to thwart it, what wonder if sugar cultivation in short space almost monopolized the soil, annihilated most rival productions, dwarfed others into insignificance, inundated Jamaica with negroes, and transformed the European colonists from farmers into 'estate-owners,' from cultivators into taskmasters for the century and a half of its triumph? Meantime, under the fostering wing of high protective duties, and with no competition worth mentioning in the trade market, for the supply from other quarters of the globe was proportionately insignificant, or was fettered by incidents of war and custom-house regulations, while beetroot, the enemy of the future, was as yet a mere harmless esculent, the cane proved a veritable gold-mine, and something more, to Jamaica. The yearly exports of the island, among which sugar and rum figured

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for at least three-fourths of the total value, reckoned at less than half a million sterling on the opening of the eighteenth century, had long before its close risen to a million and a half; ultimately they reached, and for several years maintained, an average exceeding three millions. If the New World in general was an Eldorado, Jamaica realized for its white owners Sir Guyon's Garden of Proserpina and Bower of Bliss in one. But prosperity has its price; and the price in this instance was one that made the bargain over-dear, indeed well-nigh fatal, to the purchasers. It was in fact none other than the deterioration, moral and intellectual alike, of standard among the planters, and the mismanagement, followed by the almost unexampled ruin, of the estates themselves.

Paradoxical though it may seem, experience proves that it is not the upper class of a population which in the long-run imparts its tone and characteristics to the lower, but the lower to the upper. From the lower classes, where caste limitations do not prohibitively interfere, the upper ranks are gradually and healthily recruited; while, where the barriers interposed by custom or race between the two orders are insurmountable, the ever-deepening degradation of the inferior layer reacts by inducing, first stagnation and then positive degeneration and debasement of the higher. Very early the operation of this social law made itself felt in Jamaica-surrounded by an atmosphere of slaves, that is of men and women who, after leading a life of savages in their own country, had been violently dragged thence, to be plunged on arriving at their new home into a yet lower depth of existence, that namely of brute beasts and chattels, for whom morality was illegal and the exercise of intelligence or will a crime that could not be too jealously repressed nor too severely punished. Honourable exceptions there were, we know; estates where negroes were governed like human beings, and Europeans acted 'as ever in the Great Taskmaster's eye;' but these bright cases were few and far between. It could not be but that many of the masters, of the mistresses even, became gradually, unconsciously, irresistibly fashioned, heart and mind, manner and ways, into the image and likeness of those they despised, and became themselves worthy of the slaves over whom they ruled.

A second evil, not less than the first, and its natural consequence, was that a large proportion among the estate-owners, those whose nobler feelings and better-nurtured minds instinctively revolted against the scenes around and beneath them of negroes treated like brutes by Europeans, and Europeans brutalised by their treatment of negroes, abandoned the island, left their magnificent estates to the doubtful mercies of 'attorneys' Vol. 139.-No. 277.

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