The English in the West Indies Part 11

They knew my companion, and visitors from the under-world were naturally welcome. The major was an active clever man, with a bright laughing Irish wife, whose relations in the old country were friends of my own.

The American consul and his lady happened to have ridden up also the same day; so, in spite of fog, which grew thicker every moment, we had a good time. As to seeing, we could see nothing; but then there was nothing to see except views; and panoramic views from mountain tops, extolled as they may be, do not particularly interest me. The officers, so far as I could learn, are less ill off than the privates. Those who are married have their wives with them; they can read, they can draw, they can ride; they have gardens about their houses where they can grow English flowers and vegetables and try experiments. Science can be followed anywhere, and is everywhere a resource. Major ----told me that he had never known what it was to find the day too long. Healthy the camp is at any rate. The temperature never rises above 70 nor sinks often below 60. They require charcoal fires to keep the damp out and blankets to sleep under; and when they see the sun it is an agreeable change and something to talk about. There are no large incidents, but small ones do instead. While I was there a man came to report that he had slipped by accident and set a stone rolling; the stone had cut a water pipe in two, and it had to be mended, and was an afternoon's work for somebody. Such officers as have no resources in themselves are, of course, bored to extinction. There is neither furred game to hunt nor feathered game to shoot; the mongoose has eaten up the partridges. I suggested that they should import two or three couple of bears from Norway; they would fatten and multiply among the roots and sugar canes, with a black piccaninny now and then for a special delicacy. One of the party extemporised us a speech which would be made on the occasion in Exeter Hall.

We had not seen the worst of the weather. As we mounted to ride back the fog changed to rain, and the rain to a deluge. The track became a torrent. Macintoshes were a vanity, for the water rushed down one's neck, and every crease made itself into a conduit carrying the stream among one's inner garments. Dominica itself had not prepared me for the violence of these Jamaican downpourings. False had proved our prophet down below. There was no help for it but to go on; and we knew by experience that one does not melt on these occasions. At a turn of the road we met another group of riders, among them Lady N----, who, during her husband's absence in England, was living at a country house in the hills. She politely stopped and would have spoken, but it was not weather to stand talking in; the torrent washed us apart.

And now comes the strangest part of the story. A thousand feet down we pa.s.sed out below the clouds into clear bright suns.h.i.+ne. Above us it was still black as ever. The vapour clung about the peaks and did not leave them. Underneath us and round us it was a lovely summer's day. The farther we descended the fewer the signs that any rain had fallen. When we reached the stables at Gordon's Town, the dust was on the road as we left it, and the horsekeeper congratulated us on the correctness of his forecast. Clothes soon dry in that country, and we drove down home none the worse for our wetting. I was glad to have seen a place of which I had heard so much. On the whole, I hoped that perhaps by-and-by the authorities may discover some camping ground for our poor soldiers halfway between the Inferno of Fort Augusta and the Caucasian cliffs to which they are chained like Prometheus. Malice did say that Newcastle was the property of a certain Sir ----, a high official of a past generation, who wished to part with it, and found a convenient purchaser in the Government.

The hospitalities at Government House were well maintained under the J---- administration. The Colonel was gracious, the lady beautiful and brilliant. There were lawn parties and evening parties, when all that was best in the island was collected; the old Jamaican aristocracy, army and navy officers, civilians, eminent lawyers, a few men among them of high intelligence. The tone was old-fas.h.i.+oned and courteous, with little, perhaps too little, of the _go-a-headism_ of younger colonies, but not the less agreeable on that account. As to prospects, or the present condition of things in the island, there were wide differences of opinion. If there was unanimity about anything, it was about the consequences likely to arise from an extension of the principle of self-government. There, at all events, lay the right road to the wrong place. The blacks had nothing to complain of, and the wrong at present was on the other side. The taxation fell heavily on the articles consumed by the upper cla.s.ses. The duty on tea, for instance, was a s.h.i.+lling a pound, and the duties on other luxuries in the same proportion. It scarcely touched the negroes at all. They were acquiring land, and some thought that there ought to be a land tax. They would probably object and resist, and trouble would come if it was proposed, for the blacks object to taxes. As long as there are white men to pay them, they will be satisfied to get the benefit of the expenditure; but let not their English friends suppose that when they have the island for their own they will tax themselves for police or schools, or for any other of those educational inst.i.tutions from which the believers in progress antic.i.p.ate such glorious results.

As to the planters, it seemed agreed that when an estate was unenc.u.mbered and the owner resided upon it and managed it himself, he could still keep afloat. It was agreed also that when the owner was an absentee the cost of management consumed all the profits, and thus the same impulse to sell which had gone so far in the Antilles was showing itself more and more in Jamaica also. Fine properties all about the island were in the market for any price which purchasers could be found to give. Too many even of the old English families were tired of the struggle, and were longing to be out of it at any cost.

At one time we heard much of the colonial Church and the power which it was acquiring, and as it seems unlikely that the political authority of the white race will be allowed to rea.s.sert itself, it must be through their minds and through those other qualities which religion addresses that the black race will be influenced by the white, if it is ever to be influenced at all.

I had marked the respect with which the Catholic clergy were treated in Dominica, and even the Hayti Republic still maintains the French episcopate and priesthood. But I could not find that the Church of England in Jamaica either was at present or had ever been more than the Church of the English in Jamaica, respected as long as the English gentry were a dominant power there, but with no independent charm to work on imagination or on superst.i.tion. Labat says, as I noted above, that the English clergy in his time did not baptise the black babies, on the curious ground that Christians could not lawfully be held as slaves, and the slaves therefore were not to be made Christians. A Jesuit Father whom I met at Government House told me that even now the clergy refuse to baptise the illegitimate children, and as, according to the official returns, nearly two-thirds of the children that are born in Jamaica come into the world thus irregularly, they are not likely to become more popular than they used to be. Perhaps Father ----was doing what a good many other people do, making a general practice out of a few instances.

Perhaps the blacks themselves who wish their children to be Christians carry them to the minister whom they prefer, and that minister may not be the Anglican clergyman. Of Catholics there are not many in Jamaica; of the Moravians I heard on all sides the warmest praise. They, above all the religious bodies in the island, are admitted to have a practical power for good over the limited number of people which belong to them.

But the Moravians are but a few. They do not rush to make converts in the highways and hedges, and my observations in Dominica almost led me to wish that, in the absence of other forms of spiritual authority, the Catholics might become more numerous than they are. The priests in Dominica were the only Europeans who, for their own sakes and on independent grounds, were looked up to with fear and respect.

The religion of the future! That is the problem of problems that rises before us at the close of this waning century. The future of the West Indies is a small matter. Yet that, too, like all else, depends on the spiritual beliefs which are to rise out of the present confusion. Men will act well and wisely, or ill and foolishly, according to the form and force of their conceptions of duty. Once before, under the Roman Empire, the conditions were not wholly dissimilar. The inherited creed had become unbelievable, and the scientific intellect was turning materialist. Christianity rose out of the chaos, confounding statesmen and philosophers, and became the controlling power among mankind for 1,800 years. But Christianity found a soil prepared for the seed. The ma.s.ses of the inhabitants of the Roman world were not materialist. The ma.s.ses of the people believed already in the supernatural and in penal retribution after death for their sins. Lucretius complains of the misery produced upon them by the terrors of the antic.i.p.ated Tartarus.

Serious and good men were rather turning away from atheism than welcoming it; and if they doubted the divinity of the Olympian G.o.ds, it was not because they doubted whether G.o.ds existed at all, but because the immoralities attributed to them were unworthy of the exalted nature of the Divine Being. The phenomena are different now. Who is now made wretched by the fear of h.e.l.l? The tendency of popular thought is against the supernatural in any shape. Far into s.p.a.ce as the telescope can search, deep as a.n.a.lysis can penetrate into mind and consciousness or the forces which govern natural things, popular thought finds only uniformity and connection of cause and effect--no sign anywhere of a personal will which is influenced by prayer or moral motive. When a subject is still obscure we are confident that it admits of scientific explanation; we no longer refer 'ad Deum,' whom we regard as a const.i.tutional monarch taking no direct part at all. The new creed, however, not having crystallised as yet into a shape which can be openly professed, and as without any creed at all the flesh and the devil might become too powerful, we maintain the old names and forms, as we maintain the monarchy. We surround both with reverence and majesty, and the reverence, being confined to feeling, continues to exercise a vague but wholesome influence. We row in one way while we look another. In the presence of the marked decay of Protestantism as a positive creed, the Protestant powers of Europe may, perhaps, patch up some kind of reconciliation with the old spiritual organisation which was shattered in the sixteenth century, and has since shown no unwillingness to adapt itself to modern forms of thought. The Olympian G.o.ds survived for seven centuries after Aristophanes with the help of allegory and 'economy.'

The Church of Rome may survive as long after Calvin and Luther. Carlyle mocked at the possibility when I ventured to say so to him. Yet Carlyle seemed to think that the ma.s.s was the only form of faith in Europe which had any sincerity remaining in it.

A religion, at any rate, which will keep the West Indian blacks from falling into devil wors.h.i.+p is still to seek. Const.i.tutions and belief in progress may satisfy Europe, but will not answer in Jamaica. In spite of the priests, child murder and cannibalism have reappeared in Hayti; but without them things might have been worse than they are, and the preservation of white authority and influence in any form at all may be better than none.

White authority and white influence may, however, still be preserved in a n.o.bler and better way. Slavery was a survival from a social order which had pa.s.sed away, and slavery could not be continued. It does not follow that _per se_ it was a crime. The negroes who were sold to the dealers in the African factories were most of them either slaves already to worse masters or were _servi_, servants in the old meaning of the word, prisoners of war, or else criminals, _servati_ or reserved from death. They would otherwise have been killed; and since the slave trade has been abolished are again killed in the too celebrated 'customs.' The slave trade was a crime when the chiefs made war on each other for the sake of captives whom they could turn into money. In many instances, perhaps in most, it was innocent and even beneficent. Nature has made us unequal, and Acts of Parliament cannot make us equal. Some must lead and some must follow, and the question is only of degree and kind. For myself, I would rather be the slave of a Shakespeare or a Burghley than the slave of a majority in the House of Commons or the slave of my own folly. Slavery is gone, with all that belonged to it; but it will be an ill day for mankind if no one is to be compelled any more to obey those who are wiser than himself, and each of us is to do only what is right in our own eyes. There may be authority, yet not slavery: a soldier is not a slave, a sailor is not a slave, a child is not a slave, a wife is not a slave; yet they may not live by their own wills or emanc.i.p.ate themselves at their own pleasure from positions in which nature has placed them, or into which they have themselves voluntarily entered. The negroes of the West Indies are children, and not yet disobedient children. They have their dreams, but for the present they are dreams only. If you enforce self-government upon them when they are not asking for it, you may turn the dream into a reality, and wilfully drive them back into the condition of their ancestors, from which the slave trade was the beginning of their emanc.i.p.ation.

CHAPTER XV.

The Church of England in Jamaica--Drive to Castleton--Botanical Gardens--Picnic by the river--Black women--Ball at Government House--Mandeville--Miss Roy--Country society--Manners--American visitors--A Moravian missionary--The modern Radical creed.

If I have spoken without enthusiasm of the working of the Church of England among the negroes, I have not meant to be disrespectful. As I lay awake at daybreak on the Sunday morning after my arrival, I heard the sound of church bells, not Catholic bells as at Dominica, but good old English chimes. The Church is disestablished so far as law can disestablish it, but, as in Barbadoes, the royal arms still stand over the arches of the chancel. Introduced with the English conquest, it has been identified with the ruling order of English gentry, respectable, harmless, and useful, to those immediately connected with it.

The parochial system, as in Barbadoes also, was spread over the island.

Each parish had its church, its parsonage and its school, its fonts where the white children were baptised--in spite of my Jesuit, I shall hope not whites only; and its graveyard, where in time they were laid to rest. With their quiet Sunday services of the old type the country districts were exact reproductions of English country villages. The church whose bells I had heard was of the more fas.h.i.+onable suburban type, standing in a central situation halfway to Kingston. The service was at the old English hour of eleven. We drove to it in the orthodox fas.h.i.+on, with our prayer books and Sunday costumes, the Colonel in uniform. The gentry of the neighbourhood are antiquated in their habits, and to go to church on Sunday is still regarded as a simple duty. A dozen carriages stood under the shade at the doors. The congregation was upper middle-cla.s.s English of the best sort, and was large, though almost wholly white. White tablets as at Port Royal covered the walls, with familiar English names upon them. But for the heat I could have imagined myself at home. There were no Aaron Bangs to be seen, or Paul Gelids, with the rough sense, the vigour, the energy, and roystering light-heartedness of our grandfathers. The faces of the men were serious and thoughtful, with the shadow resting on them of an uncertain future.

They are good Churchmen still, and walk on in the old paths, wherever those paths may lead. They are old-fas.h.i.+oned and slow to change, and are perhaps belated in an eddy of the great stream of progress; but they were pleasant to see and pleasant to talk to. After service there were the usual shakings of hands among friends outside; arrangements were made for amus.e.m.e.nts and expeditions in which I was invited to join--which were got up, perhaps, for my own entertainment. I was to be taken to the sights of the neighbourhood. I was to see this; I was to see that; above all, I must see the Peak of the Blue Mountains. The peak itself I could see better from below, for there it stood, never moving, between seven and eight thousand feet high. But I had had mountain riding enough and was allowed to plead my age and infirmities. It was arranged finally that I should be driven the next day to Castleton, seventeen miles off over a mountain pa.s.s, to see the Botanical Gardens.

Accordingly early on the following morning we set off; two carriages full of us; Mr. M----, a new friend lately made, but I hope long to be preserved, on the box of his four-in-hand. The road was as good as all roads are in Jamaica and Barbadoes, and more cannot be said in their favour. Forest trees made a roof over our heads as we climbed to the crest of the ridge. Thence we descended the side of a long valley, a stream running below us which gradually grew into a river. We pa.s.sed through all varieties of cultivation. On the high ground there was a large sugar plantation, worked by coolies, the first whom I had seen in Jamaica. In the alluvial meadows on the river-side were tobacco fields, cleanly and carefully kept, belonging to my Spanish friend in Kingston, and only too rich in leaves. There were sago too, and ginger, and tamarinds, and cocoa, and coffee, and cocoa-nut palms. On the hill-sides were the garden farms of the blacks, which were something to see and remember. They receive from the Government at an almost nominal quit rent an acre or two of uncleared forest. To this as the first step they set light; at twenty different spots we saw their fires blazing. To clear an acre they waste the timber on half a dozen or a dozen. They plant their yams and sweet potatoes among the ashes and grow crops there till the soil is exhausted. Then they move on to another, which they treat with the same recklessness, leaving the first to go back to scrub.

Since the Chinaman burnt his house to roast his pig, such waste was never seen. The male proprietors were lounging about smoking. Their wives, as it was market day, were tramping into Kingston with their baskets on their head. We met them literally in thousands, all merry and light-hearted, their little ones with little baskets trudging at their side. Of the lords of the creation we saw, perhaps, one to each hundred women, and he would be riding on mule or donkey, pipe in mouth and carrying nothing. He would be generally sulky too, while the ladies, young and old, had all a civil word for us and curtsied under their loads. Decidedly if there is to be a black const.i.tution I would give the votes only to the women.

We reached Castleton at last. It was in a hot damp valley, said to be a nest of yellow fever. The gardens slightly disappointed me; my expectations had been too much raised by Trinidad. There were lovely flowers of course, and curious plants and trees. Every known palm is growing there. They try hard to grow roses, and they say that they succeed. The roses were not in flower, and I could not judge. Bye the familiar names were all there, and others which were not familiar, the newest importations called after the great ladies of the day. I saw one labelled Mabel Morrison. To find the daughter of an ancient college friend and contemporary giving name to a plant in the New World makes one feel dreadfully old; but I expected to find, and I did not find, some useful practical horticulture going on. They ought, for instance, to have been trying experiments with orange trees. The orange in Jamaica is left to nature. They plant the seeds, and leave the result to chance.

They neither bud nor graft, and go upon the hypothesis that as the seed is, so will be the tree which comes of it. Yet even thus, so favourable is the soil and climate that the oranges of Jamaica are prized above all others which are sold in the American market. With skill and knowledge and good selection they might produce the finest in the world. 'There are dollars in that island, sir,' as an American gentleman said to me, 'if they look for them in the right way.' Nothing of this kind was going on at Castleton; so much the worse, but perhaps things will mend by-and-by. I was consoled partly by another specimen of the _Amherstia n.o.bilis_. It was not so large as those which I had seen at Trinidad, but it was in splendid bloom, and certainly is the most gorgeous flowering tree which the world contains.

Wild nature also was luxuriantly beautiful. We picnicked by the river, which here is a full rus.h.i.+ng stream with pools that would have held a salmon, and did hold abundant mullet. We found a bower formed by a twisted vine, so thick that neither sun nor rain could penetrate the roof. The floor was of s.h.i.+ning s.h.i.+ngle, and the air breathed cool from off the water. It was a spot which nymph or naiad may haunt hereafter, when nymphs are born again in the new era. The creatures of imagination have fled away from modern enlightenment. But we were a pleasant party of human beings, lying about under the shade upon the pebbles. We had brought a blanket of ice with us, and the champagne was manufactured into cup by choicest West Indian skill. Figures fall unconsciously at such moments into att.i.tudes which would satisfy a painter, and the scenes remain upon the memory like some fine finished work of art. We had done with the gardens, and I remember no more of them except that I saw a mongoose stalking a flock of turkeys. The young ones and their mother gathered together and showed fight. The old c.o.c.k, after the manner of the male animal, seemed chiefly anxious for his own skin, though a little ashamed at the same time, as if conscious that more was expected of him. On the way back we met the returning stream of women and children, loaded heavily as before and with the same elastic step.

In spite of all that is incorrect about them, the women are the material to work upon; and if they saw that we were in earnest, they would lend their help to make their husbands bestir themselves. A Dutch gentleman once boasted to me of the wonderful prosperity of Java, where everybody was well off and everybody was industrious. He so insisted upon the industry that I ask him how it was brought about. Were the people slaves? 'Oh,' he cried, as if shocked, 'G.o.d forbid that a Christian nation should be so wicked as to keep slaves!' 'Do they never wish to be idle?' I asked. 'Never, never,' he said; 'no, no: we do not permit anyone to be idle.'

My stay with Colonel J---- was drawing to a close; one great festivity was impending, which I wished to avoid; but the gracious lady insisted that I must remain. There was to be a ball, and all the neighbourhood was invited. Pretty it was sure to be. Windows and doors, galleries and pa.s.sages, would be all open. The gardens would be lighted up, and the guests could spread as they pleased. Brilliant it all was; more brilliant than you would see in our larger colonies. A ball in Sydney or Melbourne is like a ball in the north of England or in New York. There are the young men in black coats, and there are brightly dressed young ladies for them to dance with. The chaperons sit along the walls; the elderly gentlemen withdraw to the card room. Here all was different. The black coats in the ball at Jamaica were on the backs of old or middle-aged men, and, except Government officials, there was hardly a young man present in civilian dress. The rooms glittered with scarlet and white and blue and gold lace. The officers were there from the garrison and the fleet; but of men of business, of professional men, merchants, planters, lawyers, &c. there were only those who had grown up to middle age in the island, whose fortunes, bad or good, were bound up with it. When these were gone, it seemed as if there would be no one to succeed them. The coveted heirs of great estates were no longer to be found for mothers to angle after. The trades and professions in Kingston had ceased to offer the prospect of an income to younger brothers who had to make their own way. For 250 years generations of Englishmen had followed one upon another, but we seemed to have come to the last. Of gentlemen unconnected with the public service, under thirty-five or forty, there were few to be seen, they were seeking their fortunes elsewhere. The English interest in Jamaica is still a considerable thing. The English flag flies over Government House, and no one so far wishes to remove it. But the British population is scanty and refuses to grow. s.h.i.+ps and regiments come and go, and officers and State employes make what appears to be a brilliant society. But it is in appearance only. The station is no longer a favourite one. They are gone, those pleasant gentry whose country houses were the paradise of _middies_ sixty years ago. All is changed, even to the officers themselves. The drawling ensign of our boyhood, brave as a lion in the field, and in the mess room or the drawing room an idiot, appears also to be dead as the dodo. Those that one meets now are intelligent and superior men--no trace of the frivolous sort left. Is it the effect of the abolition of purchase, and compet.i.tive examinations? Is it that the times themselves are growing serious, and even the most empty-headed feel that this is no season for levity?

I had seen what Jamaican life was like in the upper spheres, and I had heard the opinions that were current in them; but I wished to see other parts of the country. I wished to see a cla.s.s of people who were farther from headquarters, and who might not all sing to the same note. I determined to start off on an independent cruise of my own. In the centre of the island, two thousand feet above the sea, it was reported to me that I should find a delightful village called Mandeville, after some Duke of Manchester who governed Jamaica a hundred years ago. The scenery was said to have a special charm of its own, the air to be exquisitely pure, the land to be well cultivated. Village manners were to be found there of the old-fas.h.i.+oned sort, and a lodging house and landlady of unequalled merit. There was a railway for the first fifty miles. The line at starting crosses the mangrove swamps at the mouth of the Cobre river. You see the trees standing in the water on each side of the road. Rising slowly, it hardens into level grazing ground, stocked with cattle and studded with mangoes and cedars. You pa.s.s Spanish Town, of which only the roofs of the old State buildings are visible from the carriages. Sugar estates follow, some of which are still in cultivation, while ruined mills and fallen aqueducts show where others once had been.

The scenery becomes more broken as you begin to ascend into the hills.

River beds, dry when I saw them, but powerful torrents in the rainy season, are crossed by picturesque bridges. You come to the forest, where the squatters were at their usual work, burning out their yam patches. Columns of white smoke were rising all about us, yet so abundant the timber and so rapid the work of restoration when the devastating swarm has pa.s.sed, that in this direction they have as yet made no marked impression, and the forest stretches as far as eye can reach. The glens grew more narrow and the trees grander as the train proceeded. After two hours we arrived at the present terminus, an inland town with the singular name of Porus. No explanation is given of it in the local handbooks; but I find a Porus among the companions of Columbus, and it is probably an interesting relic of the first Spanish occupation. The railway had brought business. Mule carts were going about, and waggons; omnibuses stood in the yards, and there were stores of various kinds. But it was all black. There was not a white face to be seen after we left the station. One of my companions in the train was a Cuban engineer, now employed upon the line; a refugee, I conjectured, belonging to the beaten party in the late rebellion, from the bitterness with which he spoke of the Spanish administration.

Porus is many hundred feet above the sea, in a hollow where three valleys meet. Mandeville, to which I was bound, was ten miles farther on, the road ascending all the way. A carriage was waiting for me, but too small for my luggage. A black boy offered to carry up a heavy bag for a s.h.i.+lling, a feat which he faithfully and expeditiously performed.

After climbing a steep hill, we came out upon a rich undulating plateau, long cleared and cultivated; green fields with cows feeding on them; pretty houses standing in gardens; a Wesleyan station; a Moravian station, with chapels and parsonages. The red soil was mixed with crumbling lumps of white coral, a ready-made and inexhaustible supply of manure. Great silk-cotton trees towered up in lonely magnificence, the home of the dreaded Jumbi--woe to the wretch who strikes an axe into those sacred stems! Almonds, cedars, mangoes, gum trees spread their shade over the road. Orange trees were everywhere; sometimes in orchards, sometimes growing at their own wild will in hedges and copse and thicket. Finally, at the outskirts of a perfectly English village, we brought up at the door of the lodging house kept by the justly celebrated Miss Roy. The house, or cottage, stood at the roadside, at the top of a steep flight of steps; a rambling one-story building, from which rooms, creeper-covered, had been thrown out as they were wanted.

There was the universal green verandah into which they all opened; and the windows looked out on a large common, used of old, and perhaps now, as a race-course; on wooded slopes, with sunny mansions dropped here and there in openings among the woods; on farm buildings at intervals in the distance, surrounded by clumps of palms; and beyond them ranges of mountains almost as blue as the sky against which they were faintly visible. Miss Roy, the lady and mistress of the establishment, came out to meet me: middle-aged, with a touch of the black blood, but with a face in which one places instant and sure dependence, shrewd, quiet, sensible, and entirely good-humoured. A white-haired brother, somewhat infirm and older than she, glided behind her as her shadow. She attends to the business. His pride is in his garden, where he has gathered a collection of rare plants in admired disorder; the night-blowing cereus hanging carelessly over a broken paling, and a palm, unique of its kind, waving behind it. At the back were orange trees and plantains and coffee bushes, with long-tailed humming birds flitting about their nests among the branches. All kinds of delicacies, from fruit and preserves to coffee, Miss Roy grows for her visitors on her own soil, and prepares from the first stage to the last with her own cunning hands.

Having made acquaintance with the mistress, I strolled out to look about me. After walking up the road for a quarter of a mile, I found myself in an exact reproduction of a Warwicks.h.i.+re hamlet before the days of railways and brick chimneys. There were no elms to be sure--there were silk cotton-trees and mangoes where the elms should have been; but there were the boys playing cricket, and a market house, and a modest inn, and a shop or two, and a blacksmith's forge with a shed where horses were standing waiting their turn to be shod. Across the green was the parish church, with its three aisles and low square tower, in which hung an old peal of bells. Parish stocks I did not observe, though, perhaps, I might have had I looked for them; but there was a schoolhouse and parsonage, and, withdrawn at a distance as of superior dignity, what had once perhaps been the squire's mansion, when squire and such-like had been the natural growth of the country. It was as if a branch of the old tree had been carried over and planted there ages ago, and as if it had taken root and become an exact resemblance of the parent stock. The people had black faces; but even they, too, had shaped their manners on the old English models. The men touched their hats respectfully (as they eminently did not in Kingston and its environs). The women smiled and curtsied, and the children looked shy when one spoke to them. The name of slavery is a horror to us; but there must have been something human and kindly about it, too, when it left upon the character the marks of courtesy and good breeding. I wish I could say as much for the effect of modern ideas. The negroes in Mandeville were, perhaps, as happy in their old condition as they have been since their glorious emanc.i.p.ation, and some of them to this day speak regretfully of a time when children did not die of neglect; when the sick and the aged were taken care of, and the strong and healthy were, at least, as well looked after as their owner's cattle.

Slavery could not last; but neither can the condition last which has followed it. The equality between black and white is a forced equality and not a real one, and nature in the long run has her way, and readjusts in their proper relations what theorists and philanthropists have disturbed.

I was not Miss Roy's only guest. An American lady and gentleman were staying there; he, I believe, for his health, as the climate of Mandeville is celebrated. Americans, whatever may be their faults, are always unaffected; and so are easy to get on with. We dined together, and talked of the place and its inhabitants. They had been struck like myself with the manners of the peasants, which were something entirely new to them. The lady said, and without expressing the least disapproval, that she had fallen in with an old slave who told her that, thanks to G.o.d, he had seen good times. 'He was bred in a good home, with a master and mistress belonging to him. What the master and mistress had the slaves had, and there was no difference; and his master used to visit at King's House, and his men were all proud of him. Yes, glory be to G.o.d, he had seen good times.'

In the evening we sat out in the verandah in the soft sweet air, the husband and I smoking our cigars, and the lady not minding it. They had come to Mandeville, as we go to Italy, to escape the New England winter.

They had meant to stay but a few days; they found it so charming that they had stayed for many weeks. We talked on till twilight became night, and then appeared a show of natural pyrotechnics which beat anything of the kind which I had ever seen or read of: fireflies as large as c.o.c.kchafers flitting round us among the leaves of the creepers, with two long antennae, at the point of each of which hangs out a blazing lanthorn. The unimaginative colonists call them gig-lamps. Had Shakespeare ever heard of them, they would have played round Ferdinand and Miranda in Prospero's cave, and would have borne a fairer name. The light is bluish-green, like a glowworm's, but immeasurably brighter; and we could trace them far away glancing like spirits over the meadows.

I could not wonder that my new friends had been charmed with the place.

The air was exquisitely pure; the temperature ten degrees below that of Kingston, never oppressively hot and never cold; the forest scenery as beautiful as at Arden; and Miss Roy's provision for us, rooms, beds, breakfasts, dinners, absolutely without fault. If ever there was an inspired coffee maker, Miss Roy was that person. The glory of Mandeville is in its oranges. The worst orange I ate in Jamaica was better than the best I ever ate in Europe, and the best oranges of Jamaica are the oranges of Mandeville. New York has found out their merits. One gentleman alone sent twenty thousand boxes to New York last year, clearing a dollar on each box; and this, as I said just now, when Nature is left to produce what she pleases, and art has not begun to help her.

Fortunes larger than were ever made by sugar wait for any man, and the blessings of the world along with it, who will set himself to work at orange growing with skill and science in a place where heat will not wither the trees, nor frosts, as in Florida, bite off the blossoms.

Yellow fever was never heard of there, nor any dangerous epidemic, nor snake nor other poisonous reptile. The droughts which parch the lowlands are unknown, for an even rain falls all the year and the soil is always moist. I inquired with wonder why the unfortunate soldiers who were perched among the crags at Newcastle were not at Mandeville instead. I was told that water was the difficulty; that there was no river or running stream there, and that it had to be drawn from wells or collected into cisterns. One must applaud the caution which the authorities have at last displayed; but cattle thrive at Mandeville, and sheep, and black men and women in luxuriant abundance. One would like to know that the general who sold the Newcastle estate to the Government was not the same person who was allowed to report as to the capabilities of a spot which, to the common observer, would seem as perfectly adapted for the purpose as the other is detestable.

A few English families were scattered about the neighbourhood, among whom I made a pa.s.sing acquaintance. They had a lawn-tennis club in the village, which met once a week; they drove in with their pony carriages; a lady made tea under the trees; they had amus.e.m.e.nts and pleasant society which cost nothing. They were not rich; but they were courteous, simple, frank, and cordial.

Mandeville is the centre of a district which all resembles it in character and extends for many miles. It is famous for its cattle as well as for its fruit, and has excellent grazing grounds. Mr. ----, an officer of police, took me round with him one morning. It was the old story. Though there were still a few white proprietors left, they were growing fewer, and the blacks were multiplying upon them. The smoke of their clearances showed where they were at work. Many of them are becoming well-to-do. We met them on the roads with their carts and mules; the young ones armed, too, in some instances with good double-barrelled muzzle-loaders. There is no game to shoot, but to have a gun raises them in their own estimation, and they like to be prepared for contingencies. Mr. ---- had a troublesome place of it. The negro peasantry were good-humoured, he said, but not universally honest. They stole cattle, and would not give evidence against each other. If brought into court, they held a pebble in their mouths, being under the impression that when they were so provided perjury did not count. Their education was only skin-deep, and the schools which the Government provided had not touched their characters at all. Mr. ----'s duties brought him in contact with the unfavourable specimens. I received a far pleasanter impression from a Moravian minister, who called on me with a friend who had lately taken a farm. I was particularly glad to see this gentleman, for of the Moravians everyone had spoken well to me. He was not the least enthusiastic about his poor black sheep, but he said that, if they were not better than the average English labourers, he did not think them worse. They were called idle. They would work well enough if they had fair wages, and if the wages were paid regularly; but what could be expected when women servants had but three s.h.i.+llings a week and 'found themselves,' when the men had but a s.h.i.+lling a day and the pay was kept in arrear, in order that, if they came late to work, or if they came irregularly, it might be kept back or cut down to what the employer chose to give? Under such conditions any man of any colour would prefer to work for himself if he had a garden, or would be idle if he had none.

'Living' costs next to nothing either to them or their families. But the minister said, and his friend confirmed it by his own experience, that these same fellows would work regularly and faithfully for any master whom they personally knew and could rely upon, and no Englishman coming to settle there need be afraid of failing for want of labour, if he had sense and energy, and did not prefer to lie down and groan. The blacks, my friends said, were kindly hearted, respectful, and well-disposed, but they were children; easily excited, easily tempted, easily misled, and totally unfit for self-government. If we wished to ruin them altogether, we should persevere in the course to which, they were sorry to hear, we were so inclined. The real want in the island was of intelligent Englishmen to employ and direct them, and Englishmen were going away so fast that they feared there would soon be none of them left. This was the opinion of two moderate and excellent men, whose natural and professional prejudices were all on the black man's side.

It was confirmed both in its favourable and unfavourable aspects by another impartial authority. My first American acquaintances had gone, but their rooms were occupied by another of their countrymen, a specimen of a cla.s.s of whom more will be heard in Jamaica if the fates are kind.

The English in the island cast in their lot with sugar, and if sugar is depressed they lose heart. Americans keep their 'eyes skinned,' as they call it, to look out for other openings. They have discovered, as I said, 'that there are dollars in Jamaica,' and one has come, and has set up a trade in plantains, in which he is making a fortune; and this gentleman has perceived that there were 'dollars in the bamboo,' and for bamboos there was no place in the world like the West Indies. He came to Jamaica, brought machines to clear the fibre, tried to make ropes of it, to make canvas, paper, and I know not what. I think he told me that he had spent a quarter of a million dollars, instead of finding any, before he hit upon a paying use for it. The bamboo fibre has certain elastic incompressible properties in which it is without a rival. He forms it into 'packing' for the boxes of the wheels of railway carriages, where it holds oil like a sponge, never hardens, and never wears out. He sends the packing over the world, and the demand grows as it is tried. He has set up a factory, thirty miles from Mandeville, in the valley of the Black River. He has a large body of the negroes working for him who are said to be so unmanageable. He, like Dr. Nicholls in Dominica, does not find them unmanageable at all. They never leave him; they work for him from year to year as regularly as if they were slaves. They have their small faults, but he does not magnify them into vices. They are attached to him with the old-fas.h.i.+oned affection which good labourers always feel for employers whom they respect, and dismissal is dreaded as the severest of punishments. In the course of time he thought that they might become fit for political privileges. To confer such privileges on them at present would fling Jamaica back into absolute barbarism.

I said I wished that more of his countrymen would come and settle in Jamaica as he had done and a few others already. American energy would be like new blood in the veins of the poor island. He answered that many would probably come if they could be satisfied that there would be no more political experimenting; but they would not risk their capital if there was a chance of a black parliament.

If we choose to make Jamaica into a Hayti, we need not look for Americans down that way.

Let us hope that enthusiasm for const.i.tutions will for once moderate its ardour. The black race has suffered enough at our hands. They have been sacrificed to slavery; are they to be sacrificed again to a dream or a doctrine? There has a new creed risen, while the old creed is failing.

It has its priests and its prophets, its formulas and its articles of belief.

Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Radical faith.

And the Radical faith is this: all men are equal, and the voice of one is as the voice of another.

And whereas one man is wise and another foolish, and one is upright and another crooked, yet in this suffrage none is greater or less than another. The vote is equal, the dignity co-eternal.

Truth is one and right is one; yet right is right because the majority so declare it, and justice is justice because the majority so declare it.

And if the majority affirm one thing to-day, that is right; and if the majority affirm the opposite to-morrow, that is right.

Because the will of the majority is the ground of right and there is no other, &c. &c. &c.