date, if unforeseen misadventure or strange mismanagement interfere not, be itself the solution of that very difficulty. All know the stereotyped complaint, the 'groans' echoed in more than one periodical, from more than one platform, set to music -sometimes in the modulated falsetto of Kingsley, sometimes in the howling barytone of Carlyle. That the negro is a lazy, pumpkin-eating, good-for-nothing rascal; that he will not work for hire, will not work for himself, will not work at all; that, with the option between labour with wages on the one hand, and poverty with pilfering on the other, he invariably chooses the latter and rejects the former; that the 'secure possession of land'-we quote from print-only developes him into a lazy, reckless, naked savage, or at best, a mere grower of food for himself;' that his vices, for a correct exposé of which we are referred to clergymen and policemen,' are such as will in a short time lead to his absolute extinction; in fine, that ever since emancipation, say some of our declamators, since acquired ease, say others, he has been retroceding, degenerating, dwindling; every year more lazy, more vicious, more ragged, more useless, more bestial; all this has been said, and is believed. Hence, to continue, the canes remain uncut, the coffee-berries unpicked, the fields uncleared; unless with the author of 'At Last' for supporter on the right hand, and him of 'Ginx's Baby' on the left, the great Hindoo Avatar, the Coolie, appear to save the West Indies from utter wreck; perhaps the Chinaman. With a vast proportion of misrepresentation and prejudice, these complaints do yet contain a certain amount of truth. Doubtless the negro, like most other human beings, prefers working for himself on his own ground, to working on another's ground and for another; and where interests compete will often prefer a fancied one in his own name to a more real, but less manifestly personal advantage in that of another. Doubtless, too, the sudden multiplication, creation rather, of small estates has withdrawn, and still withdraws, scores and scores of labourers from the cultivation of large ones, and that too often in the most inconvenient manner; since the black owner of an acre or two of cane, however ready to earn an extra shilling at other times by day-labour, will in crop season turn a deaf ear to the offers of hire, and retreat to his own little plot of ground and the few dozen of yellowing plants he calls his own; justifying thus, in many instances, if not necessitating, that costliest of all costly supplements, the vicarious Coolie. Doubtless, too, the sudden acquirement not of personal freedom only, but of personal property, large in proportion to his ideas or requireVol. 139.-No. 277. F ments, ments, has in many, too many, instances tended to divert the negro from useful labour, and has encouraged him in selfish, and, by its consequences, suicidal indolence. Collateral influences also, the perilous self-esteem inspired by the flattering declamations of foolish or interested teachers; the traditional hatred of toil, and of the cane-field above all, intimately connected in his mind, if not absolutely identified, with slavery and degradation; the very recoil of nature that follows on the abrupt cessation of a long and hated task: all these have combined to urge the emancipated black in the wrong direction; and our astonishment should be not that he has strayed so much, but that on the whole he has strayed so little. Yet we have been ourselves assured by many of the largest estate owners, men of long experience, and deservedly esteemed, not for their wealth and position only, but for their practical tact, solid judgment, and high public character, that they, for their own part, had never found negro hands fail them when required; never been compelled to apply for coolie help in cane-piece or factory. Nay, more, they have not hesitated, though with no personal allusion, to affirm that, in Jamaica at least, a contrary state of things, where it occurs, must oftenest be ascribed to the fault of the employers or their subordinates, to an irregular or deficient scale of wages-payment, to arbitrary fines, harsh treatment, and the like local or individual, not general, causes. Yet all allowances made, it is positive that negro labour at the present day not only barely meets, or falls somewhat short of the exigencies of existing cultivation, but is absolutely inadequate to the one, and, but for this, practicable enlargement of its limits. Certain, too, that the number of large estates and plantations might, the capabilities of the island considered, be advantageously doubled, trebled even; and no less certain that the sudden and excessive multiplication of small freeholds is a very serious retarding cause, if not indeed the principal one. But what does all this, rightly understood, indicate, except that Jamaica is, in this respect, passing through a necessary, though a transitory stage, one through which England herself has already passed, and during which her own landed interest, and with it her noblest institutions, her most precious prerogatives, laid the deep foundations and solid underwork of present prosperity and greatness? Hence we, for our part, unhesitatingly subscribe to the opinion expressed by one well competent to pronounce on these subjects, Mr. Herbert Ussher, Vice-Governor of Tobago, who in a report, embodied by Governor Rawson in the same Blue Book the title of which heads this article, says that he 'observes with satisfaction,' in the colony of his charge, a small small but increasing class of independent negro householders, living in good tenements, and cultivating provision grounds;' and, in spite of their 'great laziness produced by their present easy mode of life,' hopes that this class will continue to increase,' as certain to contribute sensibly to the agricultural prosperity of the island;' in a word, looks confidently forward to the progressive diminution of the accidental evils, and the ultimate permanence of the real benefits arising from this state of things. No prophet indeed is needed to predict the result. However fertile Jamaica may be, Cuba alone excepted no West Indian island more so, however great the extent of its tilled and of its yet untilled soil, it is after all an island; nor, when allowance has been made for the inaccessible heights of the Blue Mountains, the rocky waste lands of the Pedro and some other districts to the centre and north, and the coast-swamps, occasionally reaching up for several miles to the interior on the south and west, can the most liberal computation assign, out of the four millions of acres that make up the Jamaican total, more than a million at most to the still unredeemed possibilities of agricultural improvement. Already the prices of land, twenty years ago almost nominal, are rising fast; and the negroes, eager purchasers in this market, tend by their ever-increasing enclosures to narrow the limits of what remains, and to raise the standard of its value. Year by year competition will grow keener, and in the struggle ensuing the poorer will, sooner or later, be bought out by the richer; the idle and the unsteady ousted by the diligent and persevering; property will coalesce, and capital, European or creole, cement into masses the now countless subdivisions of atomic freeholds. Meanwhile, as the 'petite culture' diminishes by absorption, the lacklands of the colony will go on increasing; necessity will drive them to seek in wages and hire the subsistence they can no longer find in property of their own; and thus the number of day-labourers will be multiplied and filled up by the very same cause that had at first reduced and drained it. Add to this that the negro, here synonymous with the labouring population, which in slavery-times could only be kept from extinction by constant fresh importations, averaging 5000 Africans a year, so fearfully did the death-rate exceed that of birth, is now, the census assures us, advancing at an annual increase of almost as many negro-creole, or island-born children, and has already attained a total of 400,000 souls. Nor should we omit from our consideration the constant stream of emigrants flowing into Jamaica from Haiti, from Cuba, and even from the more distant regions of the Caribbean Archipelago and the adjoining main; a tide that cannot fail to rise in proportion with the rising fortunes of the island, and the growing demand for labour. In fine, let but matters hold on their actual course, and we need not doubt ourselves to see the day when Jamaica will be hardly less crowded than Barbadoes is now, and when she will have busier gangs to show in her cane-fields, and readier hands at her sugar-works than ever were seen in the palmiest days of forced labour and negro slavery. It is a remarkable fact, that while the imaginative author of 'At Last,' and others of his fashion, fill whole pages with pathetic declamations about the decrease and dying out of the creole-negro race in the West Indies, the unimpassioned statistics of the Blue Book now before us, pp. 67, 97, 105, 111, 119, and elsewhere, exhibit on the contrary a rapid increase of the identical black creole population, not in Jamaica alone, but for almost every one of our West Indian possessions; while the only apparent exceptions, two in number, Barbadoes to wit, and the Leeward Islands, are readily explained by an unusual amount of adult emigration, occasioned by two consecutive years of disastrous drought. Much in the same way the vaguely allusive calumnies, for they are nothing else, by which the emancipated negro is charged with a growing and almost preternatural propensity to every kind of vice and crime, the worst the most, meet a conclusive refutation from the same impartial authority already cited. One island report after another, the criminal statistics have scarce anything on their lists, except cases of petty larceny, that is, the stealing of a few bananas, or the unlawful abstraction of a barndoor fowl; and we would heartily wish that many not manufacturing only, but agricultural districts nearer home, furnished materials for no worse verdict on the white labouring classes than the official pages before us do on the black. There is-and on this point we cannot insist too strongly-no need of special or protective, still less of class legislation to foster or compel labour in Jamaica. The problem is already working itself out by itself, and interference of the kind implied can only complicate and retard, perhaps altogether vitiate its solution. Forced labour, under whatever name disguised, apprenticeship or other, always odious, becomes doubly so when applied to a special caste or race of men; and the attempt, so rashly counselled by some to introduce it, would only by the reaction of certain failure involve the colony in hopeless ruin. Scarce less odious, less foolish, are the laws by which the terms and duration of agreement between workmen and their em ployers ployers are fixed and limited beforehand; above all, where differences of blood and colour tend inevitably to render irritating the very semblance of constraint, and exaggerate every difficulty of class and position. And hence the injudicious interference of artificial regulations, however seemingly well intentioned, and, to use the cant phrase, 'paternal,' like those yet existing, the remnants of a best-forgotten past, in some West Indian colonies, the Danish for example, can only, as the result has already proved in those same Danish islands, blight instead of fostering, stunt, not promote development; besides giving rise to deep ill-feeling, mistrust, and eventual resistance; the sure consequences of class legislation, whatever its pretext. Something, however, remains to be done before the multitude of Jamaican negroes apply themselves to work with a will,' as honest men, who understand their own advantage and that of others should; and the sooner it is done in the interests of agriculture and of public morality alike, the better. And very simple that something' is. Good, sound, practical education to direct; just, and not over-expensive law to control; with strict enforcement of the acts already existing against vagrancy and squatting; this and nothing more is needed. Acting in conjunction with the normal tendencies of human society, and the general laws that govern the distribution of labour and wealth, these measures will amply suffice to keep the surplus population, black, white, or coloured, from stagnating in idleness or running over into crime, and effectually compel it into the fertilising channels of day labour and well-earned wages. All this is already in the power of the Jamaican Government to do; and if to put it in full practice requires energy, resolution, and somewhat of the rare courage that can disregard alike the clamour of fools and, it may be, the coldness of friends, what then? the prize is worth the effort. Coolies are, in the long run, too expensive, and not seldom too troublesome for importation on anything like a sufficient scale. The coolie, if indeed he be as his rapt admirer Canon Kingsley affirms, 6 nature's gentleman -in which case nature must be, we would venture to suggest, still at her 'prentice hand' with a vengeance has for certain at any rate the gentlemanlike quality of being a very costly article, and is, like some other gentlemen, better to look at than to deal with. That his class does not give much more trouble to Government than other classes do,' is the highest commendation that Sir J. P. Grant, a discreet and by no means an unfavourable judge in this cause, can bestow on him; while to his presence the numerous cases of cutting and wounding, an offence rare in those West Indian islands where coolies |