and overseers, of book-keepers and drivers, crossed the seas, and remained as absentees at home, enforcedly content with the cur-tailed remittances of some agent, careless, the most often, of his employer's interests, and not rarely disloyal to them. Now, indeed, in our own time, when the past is past, when Jamaican society is in every respect a reproduction of English, only without its formality, Jamaican life English without its monotony, and Jamaican pursuits English, but without their feverish urgency, absenteeism is not inexcusable merely, it is incomprehensible. He who has once visited this loveliest spot of God's fair earth, this paradise of beauty, this island worthy to be queen among those of the blest, may well stand amazed that anyone owning were it but a single acre of its soil could consent, whatever the motive, to dwell elsewhere, to leave it though only for a season. Yet so it was, and we may gather some idea of the magnitude not of the evil only, but of the yet greater evils that caused it,. when we remember that throughout the wealthier classes, and especially the landowners of the island, (precisely those, in a word, the best qualified by position, education, and social accomplishments to have remedied, or at least mitigated, the evils of the time,) absenteeism was for a century and more, the rule, residence the rare exception.

Hope, however, remained in the high character and English virtues of not a few among the colonists, and especially among the descendants of the seventeenth-century settlers, the men who had done battle where small quarter was asked or given with Dutchmen and buccaniers, with French and Spaniards; they, too, who had resisted to the face the would-be despots of Stuart patronage, the Carlisles of Charles II. and the Albemarles of his foolish successor. 6 Quo semel est imbuta recens,' says Horace ;. we all know the rest and its application. Some of the best, the most generous blood of England had been poured into Jamaica from the first, and had perpetuated itself by descent and by influence to later times. Nor was the custom, a laudable one, and which we trust will never be given up, of sending out for Governors of the island men decorated with the highest rank and belonging to the noblest families in the mother country, without its effect both on the quality of fresh immigrants or on the tone and status of those already there. No British colony perhaps, no West Indian certainly, has ever numbered more and truer gentlemen among its planters and landowners than Jamaica; none assuredly numbers more in our own day; none more worthily deserves the best that England can lend of her coronets to represent her Crown.

Yet the system itself of the colony was bad, the superstructure

vicious,

vicious, and the dry-rot of slavery ate slowly but surely into every timber till the hour of collapse came, when crash on crash the building fell, and great was the fall thereof.

After the gallant struggles, already alluded to, of 1680 and 1688 for constitutional and religious freedom and self-government, followed long, and, but for the reflected splendours of Rodney and Nelson, inglorious years, during which the officers of Council, the Assembly, and even the Governors themselves gradually sank deeper and deeper into a bottomless slough of jobbery and sinecures. Law had little to do where the immense majority of the population was, theoretically in most things and practically in all, without the pale, as the small European minority was, in nine cases out of ten, above the reach of the law, and the office of Government chiefly resolved itself into repressing Maroon depredations and putting down servile revolts.*

And thus, as matters went on, the habit of self-government, Parliamentary tact, and legislative discretion, the honourable heirlooms of the early colonists, all were lost; and when in 1823 the first serious intimations of the anti-slavery movement, already powerful at home, reached Jamaica, they drew forth from the representatives of the ruling island caste a series of resolutions and acts, the injustice of which was only equalled by their imbecility. Fortunately for the Jamaicans themselves, their skill at self-organisation had pretty well disappeared along with their legislative intelligence; and menaces of separation and revolt remained empty monuments of folly rather than crime. Among the blacks, however, who were dimly aware of the struggle and of its cause, the counter-exasperation thus excited was more pernicious, because more enduring, and furnished but a sorry preparation for coming liberty and the exercise of civil rights.

Followed emancipation, begun in 1833, completed in 1838; and with it brought a complication of difficulties hardly conceivable, as certainly not conceived at the time, by the home statesmen who enforced it. A population outnumbering by twenty to one their former, and, as they not unnaturally deemed, their vanquished masters-a population but one degree removed from savagery, grossly ignorant, blind, and led by the blind

*Not less than twenty-seven of these are recorded in a century and a half of Jamaican history, being an average of rather more than one in every six years. The expense of putting down one alone of these, that of 1760, was 100,000l.; the rising of 1832 was represented at a cost of 161,5961., exclusive of the value of property destroyed, estimated at 1,154,5831.; besides a loan of 500,000l., granted by the Imperial Parliament to assist the almost ruined planters. It is difficult to reconcile these facts with the theories, still occasionally advanced by some, regarding the contentment of negroes in a servile condition; or again, that slavelabour is, from an economical point of view, preferable to free. E 2

fanatics

.

fanatics of agitation and dissent-a labouring population for whom the very name of labour was associated with degradation, injustice, and cruelty-an impulsive population, and trained from generation to no impulses but those of the brute-now found themselves lords of the position, able to dictate their own terms, follow their own pleasure, and enforce their own will. More yet, between them and the whites stood numerous and comparatively wealthy, the so-called 'coloured' class, a class now the most hope-giving of the island, but then turbulent and untrained, powerless to cement and construct, powerful to disintegrate and pull down. Individual exceptions there were; but such are ever of little help in the evil day. Impoverished, disheartened, almost despairing, the white colonists were unable to devise remedies for the ills present and impending, yet obstinately refused those suggested at home. It was a dark hour for Jamaica, to be followed by a darker still.

The questionable merit of having precipitated the inevitable crisis belongs to Mr. Bright and the ministry of 1846. Every student of history, Lord Macaulay's schoolboy included, knows how much the financial difficulties of France in the latter part of the eighteenth century contributed to the revolutionary convulsion at its close; and the equalisation of sugar duties in 1846, and those who carried it, are in no small measure responsible for Morant Bay and the events of 1865. The triumph of freetrade,—a triumph which, in this instance, we do not hesitate to say, was gained over our own subjects, over our own best interests, nay, over justice and common sense themselves, followed, it should be remembered, on a long period of false security, of extravagance, of absenteeism, of mismanagement, of indebtedness among the estate-owners themselves. A cry of ruin, unhappily too real, arose on every side; the backbone of the island was broken; and all colours, all classes, from the highest to the lowest, were involved, more or less directly, in the common distress. Like the drowning crew of the ill-fated 'Medusa,' each one turned on his neighbour; and the Spanish Town Assembly, never over-orderly in its proceedings, became by its daily scenes of faction, recrimination, and confusion, not a remedy but an aggravation of the evils outside. Agitators, democrats, fanatics, all the vile things that have their element in troubled waters, now came forth to the surface; the folly of the well-intentioned, that worst of follies, seconded their endeavours, and when the outbreak of 1865 brought matters to a climax, the wonder was not that the mischief came, but that it had not come sooner; not that the conflagration burst forth, but that it did not spread wider over the land.

With the history of the Morant Bay riots, with the conduct of Governor Eyre, or Major-General O'Connor, with the guilt and punishment of Gordon, with all the lamentable accessories of the revolt and its suppression, we have nothing to do; except it be to endorse the well-grounded sentence passed by the Storks Commission, for approval or blame. Yet it is but justice to say that had some fortunate accident removed Governor Eyre from the scene at the end of the first week, or even the first ten days after the outbreak, his monument might have been inscribed, and justly so, with the proud title of him who had saved Jamaica, not indeed from "becoming a second Haiti,”—that was a catastrophe impossible under any circumstances, as whoever considers the antecedents of the two islands must be well aware, -but from infinite horrors, from pillage, murder, savage retaliation, and all the abominations of a servile though unsuccessful war. But the great lesson, Teîov μov πavтós,* though. uttered more than two thousand years ago, has yet been learnt by few; and of those few Governor Eyre was not one.

Scared at the confusion without, more scared it might well be at the consciousness of incapacity within, Assembly, Council, and executive Committee all spontaneously voted their own dissolution; and Jamaica, of her own accord, renounced the prerogatives of self-government, for which she had once so gallantly striven, so long exercised. The Imperial Government ratified the abdication; and in so doing assumed on itself the entire rule, and with it the entire responsibility of the island.

Was it well done? On the whole, and all the circumstances of the case considered, we think that the decision was on both sides a wise one. It was an extreme remedy, applied to an extreme evil. That it was also meant as a temporary remedy, and one subject to future revision and modification, is no less certain. No politician, indeed, possessed of the most ordinary common sense, would advocate popular elections, extended franchise, self-government in a word, for the Jamaica of our day. For though, to the credit of the island be it said, there are few West Indian Colonies where the prejudices of colour, and the barriers of caste, are less regarded, where merit, under whatever skin, is better appreciated, and education, whatever the descent, more readily claims and obtains the social privileges that are its due; yet much remains to be done, a road long, though open, to be traversed, before the political rights, which if exercised by one class must be exercised by all, can be wisely or even safely brought in to act. On the other hand, a large, an important, a

*Half is more than the whole.'-Hesiod.

noble,

noble, a rising colony, with no voice of its own in its taxation, expenditure, administration, or law, is an anomaly in British annals, an exception to our rule of empire. How this exception may gradually be eliminated, and the anomalous condition of things brought back to the normal, whether by judiciously strengthening the hands of the local magistracies, and decentralising in some measure the, now perhaps over-centralised, administration, or by some form of indirect local election, after the old Prussian system, thus introducing a more representative element among the non-official members of Council; or by other expedients, best suggested by experience and time, remains to be seen. For the present, the medical and the educational departments excepted, the former of which seems somewhat wanting in efficiency as the latter in direction, there is little to cavil at in the present order of things; much to praise.

'Nothing succeeds so well as success,' says the French proverb; and the success of the administration inaugurated in 1866 by Sir H. Storks, and carried out into permanence by Sir John Peter Grant, is not a problem for inquiry, but an evident and acknowledged fact. A colony of which the population has in ten years multiplied by nearly a sixth, while the financial balance-sheet shows the former yearly deficit of an average £46,000 replaced by an actual surplus of almost equal amount, cannot but be acknowledged as rising, if not yet at the actual height of its possible, or even of its historical, prosperity. Further statistics are not wanting to corroborate the advantageous change. During six years the imports of the island have augmented by a full half, the exports by more than a third; even sugar, though no longer the precious West Indian staple of old times, begins to reassume importance; while the other scarce less valuable island products prove by their steady increase the progress of cultivation in every county and parish. The Savings-Bank deposits, sure tests of well-doing, stability, and public confidence among the poorer classes, only 56,7407. in the year 1866, numbered 142,2407. in 1872, and have since then gone on augmenting; while offences against property, the never-failing offspring of disorder and want, have, in spite of bad seasons and unusual drought, diminished year after year. Who desires further details, may advantageously consult the Colonial Blue Book, which, like those of the Foreign Office, contains a thousand full and trustworthy replies to endless questions daily asked at home, within Parliament and without; questions often left unanswered, or answered wrong, because so few care to look for information at its legitimate sources; and prefer the sweeping mis-statements of party, of interest, of prejudice, of downright ignorance itself,

to