The English in the West Indies Part 15

The flowers which thou, oh Blessed Charity, With pious hand hast twined in funeral wreath, Although on earthly soil they gathered be, Will sweeten heaven with their perfumed breath.

The flowers, I suppose, were the actions of Caridad's own innocent life, which she was offering on the cross of Christ; but one never can be sure that one has caught the exact sentiment of emotional verse in a foreign language. The beauty lies in an undefinable sweetness which rises from the melody of the words, and in a translation disappears altogether. Who or what Caridad del Monte was, whether a young girl whom somebody had loved, or an allegoric and emblematic figure, I had no one to tell me.

I must not omit one acquaintance which I was fortunate enough to make while staying at my seaside lodging. There appeared there one day, driven out of Havana like myself by the noise, an American ecclesiastic with a friend who addressed him as 'My lord.' By the ring and purple, as well as by the t.i.tle, I perceived that he was a bishop. His friend was his chaplain, and from their voices I gathered that they were both by extraction Irish. The bishop had what is called a 'clergy-man's throat,'

and had come from the States in search of a warmer climate. They kept entirely to themselves, but from the laughter and good-humour they were evidently excellent company for one another, and wanted no other. I rather wished than hoped that accident might introduce me to them. Even in Cuba the weather is uncertain. One day there came a high wind from the sea; the waves roared superbly upon the rocks, flying over them in rolling cataracts. I never saw foam so purely white or waves so transparent. As a spectacle it was beautiful, and the sh.o.r.e became a museum of coralline curiosities. Indoors the effect was less agreeable.

Windows rattled and shutters broke from their fastenings and flew to and fro. The weatherc.o.c.k on the house-top creaked as he was whirled about, and the verandahs had to be closed, and the noise was like a prolonged thunder peal. The second day the wind became a cyclone, and chilly as if it came from the pole. None of us could stir out. The bishop suffered even more than I did; he walked up and down on the sheltered side of the house wrapped in a huge episcopalian cloak. I think he saw that I was sorry for him, as I really was. He spoke to me; he said he had felt the cold less in America when the thermometer marked 25 below zero. It was not much, but the silence was broken. Common suffering made a kind of link between us. After this he dropped an occasional gracious word as he pa.s.sed, and one morning he came and sat by me and began to talk on subjects of extreme interest. Chiefly he insisted on the rights of conscience and the tenderness for liberty of thought which had always been shown by the Church of Rome. He had been led to speak of it by the education question which has now become a burning one in the American Union. The Church, he said, never had interfered, and never could or would interfere, with any man's conscientious scruples. Its own scruples, therefore, ought to be respected. The American State schools were irreligious, and Catholic parents were unwilling to allow their children to attend them. They had established schools of their own, and they supported them by subscriptions among themselves. In these schools the boys and girls learnt everything which they could learn in the State schools, and they learnt to be virtuous besides. They were thus discharging to the full every duty which the State could claim of them, and the State had no right to tax them in addition for the maintenance of inst.i.tutions of which they made no use, and of the principles of which they disapproved. There were now eight millions of Catholics in the Union. In more than one state they had an actual majority; and they intended to insist that as long as their children came up to the present educational standard, they should no longer be compelled to pay a second education tax to the Government. The struggle, he admitted, would be a severe one, but the Catholics had justice on their side, and would fight on till they won.

In democracies the majority is to prevail, and if the control of education falls within the province of each separate state government, it is not easy to see on what ground the Americans will be able to resist, or how there can be a struggle at all where the Catholic vote is really the largest. The presence of the Catholic Church in a democracy is the real anomaly. The principle of the Church is authority resting on a divine commission; the principle of democracy is the will of the people; and the Church in the long run will have as hard a battle to fight with the divine right of the majority of numbers as she had with the divine right of the Hohenstauffens and the Plantagenets. She is adroit in adapting herself to circ.u.mstances, and, like her emblem the fish, she changes her colour with that of the element in which she swims. No doubt she has a strong position in this demand and will know how to use it.

But I was surprised to hear even a Catholic bishop insist that his Church had always paid so much respect to the rights of conscience. I had been taught to believe that in the days of its power the Church had not been particularly tender towards differences of opinion. Fire and sword had been used freely enough as long as fire and sword were available. I hinted my astonishment. The bishop said the Church had been slandered; the Church had never in a single instance punished any man merely for conscientious error. Protestants had falsified history.

Protestants read their histories, Catholics read theirs, and the Catholic version was the true one. The separate governments of Europe had no doubt been cruel. In France, Spain, the Low Countries, even in England, heretics had been harshly dealt with, but it was the governments that had burnt and ma.s.sacred all those people, not the Church. The governments were afraid of heresy because it led to revolution. The Church had never shed any blood at all; the Church could not, for she was forbidden to do so by her own canons. If she found a man obstinate in unbelief, she cut him off from the communion and handed him over to the secular arm. If the secular arm thought fit to kill him, the Church's hands were clear of it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PORT AU PRINCE, HAYTI.]

So Pilate washed his hands; so the judge might say he never hanged a murderer; the execution was the work of the hangman. The bishop defied me to produce an instance in which in Rome, when the temporal power was with the pope and the civil magistrates were churchmen, there had ever been an execution for heresy. I mentioned Giordano Bruno, whom the bishop had forgotten; but we agreed not to quarrel, and I could not admire sufficiently the hardihood and the ingenuity of his argument. The English bishops and abbots pa.s.sed through parliament the Act _de haeretico comburendo_, but they were acting as politicians, not as churchmen. The Spanish Inquisition burnt freely and successfully. The inquisitors were archbishops and bishops, but the Holy Office was a function of the State. When Gregory XIII. struck his medal in commemoration of the ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew he was then only the secular ruler of Rome, and therefore fallible and subject to sin like other mortals. The Church has many parts to play; her stage wardrobe is well furnished, and her actors so well instructed in their parts that they believe themselves in all that they say. The bishop was speaking no more than his exact conviction. He told me that in the Middle Ages secular princes were bound by their coronation oath to accept the pope as the arbiter of all quarrels between them. I asked where this oath was, or what were the terms of it? The words, he said, were unimportant.

The fact was certain, and down to the fatal schism of the sixteenth century the pope had always been allowed to arbitrate, and quarrels had been prevented. I could but listen and wonder. He admitted that he had read one set of books and I another, as it was clear that he must have done.

In the midst of our differences we found we had many points of agreement. We agreed that the breaking down of Church authority at the Reformation had been a fatal disaster; that without a sense of responsibility to a supernatural power, human beings would sink into ingenious apes, that human society would become no more than a congregation of apes, and that with differences of opinion and belief, that sense was becoming more and more obscured. So long as all serious men held the same convictions, and those convictions were embodied in the law, religion could speak with authority. The authority being denied or shaken, the fact itself became uncertain. The notion that everybody had a right to think as he pleased was felt to be absurd in common things. In every practical art or science the ignorant submitted to be guided by those who were better instructed than themselves. Why should they be left to their private judgment on subjects where to go wrong was the more dangerous. All this was plain sailing. The corollary that if it is to retain its influence the Church must not teach doctrines which outrage the common sense of mankind as Luther led half Europe to believe that the Church was doing in the sixteenth century, we agreed that we would not dispute about. But I was interested to see that the leopard had not changed its spots, that it merely readjusted its att.i.tudes to suit the modern taste, and that if it ever recovered its power it would claw and scratch in the old way. Rome, like Pilate, may protest its innocence of the blood which was spilt in its name and in its interests.

Did that tender and merciful court ever suggest to those prelates who pa.s.sed the Act in England for the burning of heretics that they were transgressing the sacred rights of conscience? Did it reprove the Inquisition or send a mild remonstrance to Philip II.? The eyes of those who are willing to be blinded will see only what they desire to see.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] He rests in peace.

[15] He is now in grace.

CHAPTER XX.

Return to Havana--The Spaniards in Cuba--Prospects--American influence--Future of the West Indies--English rumours--Leave Cuba--The harbour at night--The Bahama Channel--Hayti--Port au Prince--The black republic--West Indian history.

The air and quiet of Vedado (so my retreat was called) soon set me up again, and I was able to face once more my hotel and its Americans. I did not attempt to travel in Cuba, nor was it necessary for my purpose.

I stayed a few days longer at Havana. I went to operas and churches; I sailed about the harbour in boats, the boatmen, all of them, not negroes, as in the Antilles, but emigrants from the old country, chiefly Gallicians. I met people of all sorts, among the rest a Spanish officer--a major of engineers--who, if he lives, may come to something.

Major D---- took me over the fortifications, showed me the interior lines of the Moro, and their latest specimens of modern artillery. The garrison are, of course, Spanish regiments made of home-bred Castilians, as I could not fail to recognise when I heard any of them speak. There are certain words of common use in Spain powerful as the magic formulas of enchanters over the souls of men. You hear them everywhere in the Peninsula; at cafe's, at tables d'hote, and in private conversation.

They are a part of the national intellectual equipment. Either from prudery or because they are superior to old-world superst.i.tions, the Cubans have washed these expressions out of their language; but the national characteristics are preserved in the army, and the spell does not lose its efficacy because the islanders disbelieve in it. I have known a closed post office in Madrid, where the clerk was deaf to polite entreaty, blown open by an oath as by a bomb sh.e.l.l. A squad of recruits in the Moro, who were lying in the shade under a tree, neglected to rise as an officer went by. 'Saludad, C----o!' he thundered out, and they bounded to their feet as if electrified.

On the whole Havana was something to have seen. It is the focus and epitome of Spanish dominion in those seas, and I was forced to conclude that it was well for Cuba that the English attempts to take possession of it had failed. Be the faults of their administration as heavy as they are alleged to be, the Spaniards have done more to Europeanise their islands than we have done with ours. They have made Cuba Spanish--Trinidad, Dominica, St. Lucia, Grenada have never been English at all, and Jamaica and Barbadoes are ceasing to be English. Cuba is a second home to the Spaniards, a permanent addition to their soil. We are as birds of pa.s.sage, temporary residents for transient purposes, with no home in our islands at all. Once we thought them worth fighting for, and as long as it was a question of s.h.i.+ps and cannon we made ourselves supreme rulers of the Caribbean Sea; yet the French and Spaniards will probably outlive us there. They will remain perhaps as satellites of the United States, or in some other confederacy, or in recovered strength of their own; we, in a generation or two, if the causes now in operation continue to work as they are now working, shall have disappeared from the scene. In Cuba there is a great Spanish population; Martinique and Guadaloupe are parts of France; to us it seems a matter of indifference whether we keep our islands or abandon them, and we leave the remnants of our once precious settlements to float or drown as they can.

Australia and Canada take care of themselves; we expect our West Indies to do the same, careless of the difference of circ.u.mstance. We no longer talk of cutting our colonies adrift; the tone of public opinion is changed, and no one dares to advocate openly the desertion of the least important of them. But the neglect and indifference continue. We will not govern them effectively ourselves: our policy, so far as we have any policy, is to extend among them the principles of self-government, and self-government can only precipitate our extinction there as completely as we know that it would do in India if we were wild enough to venture the plunge. There is no enchantment in self-government which will make people love each other when they are indifferent or estranged. It can only force them into sharper collision.

The opinion in Cuba was, and is, that America is the residuary legatee of all the islands, Spanish and English equally, and that she will be forced to take charge of them in the end whether she likes it or not.

Spain governs unjustly and corruptly; the Cubans will not rest till they are free from her, and if once independent they will throw themselves on American protection.

We will not govern our islands at all, but leave them to drift. Jamaica and the Antilles, given over to the negro majorities, can only become like Hayti and St. Domingo; and the nature of things will hardly permit so fair a part of the earth which has been once civilised and under white control to fall back into barbarism.

To England the loss of the West Indies would not itself be serious; but in the life of nations discreditable failures are not measured by their immediate material consequences. To allow a group of colonies to slide out of our hands because we could not or would not provide them with a tolerable government would be nothing less than a public disgrace. It would be an intimation to all the world that we were unable to maintain any longer the position which our fathers had made for us; and when the unravelling of the knitted fabric of the Empire has once begun the process will be a rapid one.

'But what would you do?' I am asked impatiently. 'We send out peers or gentlemen against whose character no direct objection can be raised; we a.s.sist them with local councils partly chosen by the people themselves.

We send out bishops, we send out missionaries, we open schools. What can we do more? We cannot alter the climate, we cannot make planters prosper when sugar will not pay, we cannot convert black men into whites, we cannot force the blacks to work for the whites when they do not wish to work for them. "Governing," as you call it, will not change the natural conditions of things. You can suggest no remedy, and mere fault-finding is foolish and mischievous.'

I might answer a good many things. Government cannot do everything, but it can do something, and there is a difference between governors against whom there is nothing to object and men of special and marked capacity.

There is a difference between governors whose hands are tied by local councils and whose feet are tied by instructions from home, and a governor with a free hand and a wise head left to take his own measures on the spot. I presume that no one can seriously expect that an orderly organised nation can be made out of the blacks, when, in spite of your schools and missionaries, sixty per cent. of the children now born among them are illegitimate. You can do for the West Indies, I repeat over and over again, what you do for the East; you can establish a firm authoritative government which will protect the blacks in their civil rights and protect the whites in theirs. You cannot alter the climate, it is true, or make the soil more fertile. Already it is fertile as any in the earth, and the climate is admirable for the purposes for which it is needed. But you can restore confidence in the stability of your tenure, you can give courage to the whites who are on the spot to remain there, and you can tempt capital and enterprise to venture there which now seek investments elsewhere. By keeping the rule in your own hands you will restore the white population to their legitimate influence; the blacks will again look up to them and respect them as they ought to do.

This you can do, and it will cost you nothing save a little more pains in the selection of the persons whom you are to trust with powers a.n.a.logous to those which you grant to your provincial governors in the Indian peninsula.

A preliminary condition of this, as of all other real improvements, is one, however, which will hardly be fulfilled. Before a beginning can be made, a conviction is wanted that life has other objects besides present interest and convenience; and very few of us indeed have at the bottom of our hearts any such conviction at all. We can talk about it in fine language--no age ever talked more or better--but we don't believe in it; we believe only in professing to believe, which soothes our vanity and does not interfere with our actions. From fine words no harvests grow.

The negroes are well disposed to follow and obey any white who will be kind and just to them, and in such following and obedience their only hope of improvement lies. The problem is to create a state of things under which Englishmen of vigour and character will make their homes among them. Annexation to the United States would lead probably to their extermination at no very distant time. The Antilles are small, and the fate of the negroes there might be no better than the fate of the Caribs. The Americans are not a people who can be trifled with; no one knows it better than the negroes. They fear them. They prefer infinitely the mild rule of England, and under such a government as we might provide if we cared to try, the whole of our islands might become like the Moravian settlement in Jamaica, and the black nature, which has rather degenerated than improved in these late days of licence, might be put again in the way of regeneration. The process would be slow--your seedlings in a plantation hang stationary year after year, but they do move at last. We cannot disown our responsibility for these poor adopted brothers of ours. We send missionaries into Africa to convert them to a better form of religion; why should the attempt seem chimerical to convert them practically to a higher purpose in our own colonies?

The reader will be weary of a sermon the points of which have been reiterated so often. I might say that he requires to have the lesson impressed upon him--that it is for his good that I insist upon it, and not for my own. But this is the common language of all preachers, and it is not found to make the hearers more attentive. I will not promise to say no more upon the subject, for it was forced upon me at every moment and point of my journey. I am arriving near the end, however, and if he has followed so far, he will perhaps go on with me to the conclusion. I had three weeks to give to Havana; they were fast running out, and it was time for me to be going. Strange stories, too, came from England, which made me uneasy till I knew how they were set in circulation. One day Mr. Gladstone was said to have gone mad, and the Queen the next.

The Russians were about to annex Afghanistan. Our troops had been cut to pieces in Burmah. Something was going wrong with us every day in one corner of the world or another. I found at last that the telegraphic intelligence was supplied to the Cuban newspapers from New York, that the telegraph clerks there were generally Irish, and their facts were the creation of their wishes. I was to return to Jamaica in the same vessel which had brought me from it. She had been down to the isthmus, and was to call at Havana on her way back. The captain's most English face was a welcome sight to me when he appeared one evening at dinner.

He had come to tell me that he was to sail early on the following morning, and I arranged to go on board with him the same night. The Captain-General had not forgotten to instruct the Gobierno Civil to grant me an _exeat regno_. I do not know that I gained much by his intercession, for without it I should hardly have been detained indefinitely, and as it was I had to pay more dollars than I liked to part with. The necessary doc.u.ments, however, had been sent through the British consul, and I was free to leave when I pleased. I paid my bill at the hotel, which was not after all an extravagant one, cleared my pocket-book of the remainder of the soiled and tattered paper which is called money, and does duty for it down to a half-penny, and with my distinguished friend Don G----, the real acquisition which I had made in coming to his country, and who would not leave me till I was in the boat, I drove away to the wharf.

It was a still, lovely, starlight night. The moon had risen over the hills, and was s.h.i.+ning brightly on the roofs and towers of the city, and on the masts and spars of the vessels which were riding in the harbour.

There was not a ripple on the water, and stars and city, towers and s.h.i.+ps, stood inverted on the surface pointing downward as into a second infinity. The charm was unfortunately interfered with by odours worse than Coleridge found at Cologne and cursed in rhyme. The drains of Havana, like orange blossom, give off their most fragrant vapours in the dark hours. I could well believe Don G----'s saying, that but for the natural healthiness of the place, they would all die of it like poisoned flies. We had to cut our adieus short, for the mouth of some horrid sewer was close to us. In the boat I did not escape; the water smelt horribly as it was stirred by the oars, charged as it was with three centuries of pollution, and the phosph.o.r.escent light shone with a sickly, sulphur-like brilliance. One could have fancied that one was in Charon's boat and was crossing Acheron. When I reached the steamer I watched from the deck the same ghost-like phenomenon which is described by Tom Cringle. A fathom deep, in the s.h.i.+p's shadow, some shark or other monster sailed slowly by in an envelope of spectral l.u.s.tre. When he stopped his figure disappeared, when he moved on again it was like the movement of a streak of blue flame. Such a creature did not seem as if it could belong to our familiar sunlit ocean.

The state of the harbour is not creditable to the Spanish Government, and I suppose will not be improved till there is some change of dynasty.

All that can be said for it is that it is not the worst in these seas.

Our s.h.i.+p had just come from the Ca.n.a.l, and had brought the latest news from thence.

But the miscalculations of the work to be done and of the expense of doing it are now notorious to all the world. The alternatives are to abandon an enterprise so splendid in conception, so disastrous in the execution, or to raise and spend fresh tens of millions to follow those that are gone with no certain prospect of success after all. The saddest part of the story will be soonest forgotten--the frightful consumption of human life in those damp and pestilential jungles. M. Lesseps having made his name immortal at Suez, aspired at eclipsing his first achievement, by a second yet more splendidly ambitious, at a time of life when common men are content to retire upon their laurels. He deserves and will receive an unstinted admiration for his energy and his enthusiasm. But his countrymen who have so zealously supported him will be rewarded with no dividend upon their shares, even if the two oceans are eventually united, and no final success can be looked for in the bold projector's life time.

At dawn we swept out under the Moro, and away once more into the free fresh open sea. We had come down on the south side of the island, we returned by the north up the old Bahama Channel where Drake died on his way home from his last unsuccessful expedition--Lope de Vega singing a paean over the end of the great 'dragon.' Fresh pa.s.sengers brought fresh talk. There was a clever young Jamaican on board returning from a holiday; he had the spirits of youth about him, and would have pleased my American who never knew good come of despondency. He had hopes for his country, but they rested, like those of every sensible man that I met, on an inability to believe that there would be further advances in the direction of political liberty. A revised const.i.tution, he said, could issue only in fresh Gordon riots and fresh calamities. He had been travelling in the Southern States. He had seen the state of Mississippi deserted by the whites, and falling back into a black wilderness. He had seen South Carolina, which had narrowly escaped ruin under a black and carpet-bagger legislature, and had recovered itself under the steady determination of the Americans that the civil war was not to mean the domination of negro over white. The danger was greater in the English islands than in either of these states, from the enormous disproportion of numbers. The experiment could be ventured only under a high census and a restricted franchise. But the experience of all countries showed that these limited franchises were invidious and could not be maintained, the end was involved in the beginning, and he trusted that prudent counsels would prevail. We had gone too far already.

On board also there was a traveller from a Manchester house of business, who gave me a more flouris.h.i.+ng account than I expected of the state of our trade, not so much with the English islands as with the Spaniards in Cuba and on the mainland. His own house, he said, had a large business with Havana; twenty firms in the north of England were competing there, and all were doing well. The Spanish Americans on the west side of the continent were good customers, with the exception of the Mexicans, who were energetic and industrious, and manufactured for their own consumption. These modern Aztecs were skilful workmen, nimble-fingered and inventive. Wages were low, but they were contented with them.

Mexico, I was surprised to hear from him, was rising fast into prosperity. Whether human life was any safer then than it was a few years ago, he did not tell me.

Amidst talk and chess and occasional whist after nightfall when reading became difficult, we ran along with smooth seas, land sometimes in sight, with shoals on either side of us.

We were to have one more glimpse of Hayti; we were to touch at Port au Prince, the seat of government of the successors of Toussaint. If beauty of situation could mould human character, the inhabitants of Port au Prince might claim to be the first of mankind. St. Domingo or Espanola, of which Hayti is the largest division, was the earliest island discovered by Columbus and the finest in the Caribbean Ocean. It remained Spanish, as I have already said, for 200 years, when Hayti was taken by the French buccaneers, and made over by them to Louis XIV. The French kept it till the Revolution. They built towns; they laid out farms and sugar fields; they planted coffee all over the island, where it now grows wild.' Vast herds of cattle roamed over the mountains; splendid houses rose over the rich savannahs. The French Church put out its strength; there were churches and priests in every parish; there were monasteries and nunneries for the religious orders. So firm was the hold that they had gained that Hayti, like Cuba, seemed to have been made a part of the old world, and as civilised as France itself. But French civilisation became itself electric. The Revolution came, and the reign of Liberty. The blacks took arms; they surprised the plantations; they made a clean sweep of the whole French population. Yellow fever swept away the armies which were sent to avenge the ma.s.sacre, and France being engaged in annexing Europe had no leisure to despatch more. The island being thus derelict, Spain and England both tried their hand to recover it, but failed from the same cause, and a black nation, with a republican const.i.tution and a population perhaps of about a million and a half of pure-blood negroes, has since been in unchallenged possession, and has arrived at the condition which has been described to us by Sir Spenser St. John. Republics which begin with murder and plunder do not come to much good in this world. Hayti has pa.s.sed through many revolutions, and is no nearer than at first to stability. The present president, M. Salomon, who was long a refugee in Jamaica, came into power a few years back by a turn of the wheel. He was described to me as a peremptory gentleman who made quick work with his political opponents.

His term of office having nearly expired, he had re-elected himself shortly before for another seven years and was prepared to maintain his right by any measures which he might think expedient. He had a few regiments of soldiers, who, I was told, were devoted to him, and a fleet consisting of two gunboats commanded by an American officer, to whom he chiefly owed his security.

We had steamed along the Hayti coast all one afternoon, underneath a high range of hills which used to be the hunting ground of the buccaneers. We had pa.s.sed their famous Tortugas[16] without seeing them.

Towards evening we entered the long channel between Gonaive island and the mainland, going slowly that we might not arrive at Port au Prince before daylight. It was six in the morning when the anchor rattled down, and I went on deck to look about me. We were at the head of a fiord rather broader than those in Norway, but very like them--wooded mountains rising on either side of us, an open valley in front, and on the rich level soil washed down by the rains and deposited along the sh.o.r.e, the old French and now President Salomon's capital. Palms and oranges and other trees were growing everywhere among the houses giving the impression of graceful civilisation. Directly before us were three or four wooded islets which form a natural breakwater, and above them were seen the masts of the vessels which were lying in the harbour behind. Close to where we were brought up lay the 'Canada,' an English frigate, and about a quarter of a mile from her an American frigate of about the same size, with the stars and stripes conspicuously flying. We have had some differences of late with the Hayti authorities, and the satisfaction which we asked for having been refused or delayed, a man-of-war had been sent to ask redress in more peremptory terms. The town lay under her guns; the president's s.h.i.+ps, which she might perhaps have seized as a security, had been taken out of sight into shallow water, where she could not follow them. The Americans have no particular rights in Hayti, and are as little liked as we are, but they are feared, and they do not allow any business of a serious kind to go on in those waters without knowing what it is about. Perhaps the president's admiral of the station being an American may have had something to do with their presence. Anyway, there the two s.h.i.+ps were lying when I came up from below, their hulks and spars outlined picturesquely against the steep wooded sh.o.r.es. The air was hot and steamy; fis.h.i.+ng vessels with white sails were drifting slowly about the gla.s.sy water. Except for the heat and a black officer of the customs in uniform, and his boat and black crew alongside, I could have believed myself off Molde or some similar Norwegian town, so like everything seemed, even to the colour of the houses.

We were to stay some hours. After breakfast we landed. I had seen Jacmel, and therefore thought myself prepared for the worst which I should find. Jacmel was an outlying symptom; Port au Prince was the central ulcer. Long before we came to sh.o.r.e there came off whiffs, not of drains as at Havana, but of active dirt fermenting in the sunlight.

Calling our handkerchiefs to our help and looking to our feet carefully, we stepped up upon the quay and walked forward as judiciously as we could. With the help of stones we crossed a shallow ditch, where rotten fish, vegetables, and other articles were lying about promiscuously, and we came on what did duty for a grand parade.

We were in a Paris of the gutter, with boulevards and _places_, _fiacres_ and crimson parasols. The boulevards were littered with the refuse of the houses and were foul as pigsties, and the ladies under the parasols were picking their way along them in Parisian boots and silk dresses. I saw a _fiacre_ broken down in a black pool out of which a blacker ladys.h.i.+p was scrambling. Fever breeds so prodigally in that pestilential squalor that 40,000 people were estimated to have died of it in a single year. There were shops and stores and streets, men and women in tawdry European costume, and officers on horseback with a tatter of lace and gilding. We pa.s.sed up the princ.i.p.al avenue, which opened on the market place. Above the market was the cathedral, more hideous than even the Mormon temple at Salt Lake. It was full of ladies; the rank, beauty, and fas.h.i.+on of Port au Prince were at their morning ma.s.s, for they are Catholics with African beliefs underneath. They have a French clergy, an archbishop and bishop, paid miserably but still subsisting; subsisting not as objects of reverence at all, as they are at Dominica, but as the humble servants and ministers of black society. We English are in bad favour just now; no wonder, with the guns of the 'Canada' pointed at the city; but the chief complaint is on account of Sir Spenser St. John's book, which they cry out against with a degree of anger which is the surest evidence of its truth. It would be unfair even to hint at the names or stations of various persons who gave me information about the condition of the place and people. Enough that those who knew well what they were speaking about a.s.sured me that Hayti was the most ridiculous caricature of civilisation in the whole world. Doubtless the whites there are not disinterested witnesses; for they are treated as they once treated the blacks. They can own no freehold property, and exist only on tolerance. They are called 'white trash.' Black dukes and marquises drive over them in the street and swear at them, and they consider it an invasion of the natural order of things. If this was the worst, or even if the dirt and the disease was the worst, it might be borne with, for the whites might go away if they pleased, and they pay the penalty themselves for choosing to be there. But this is not the worst.

Immorality is so universal that it almost ceases to be a fault, for a fault implies an exception, and in Hayti it is the rule. Young people make experiment of one another before they will enter into any closer connection. So far they are no worse than in our own English islands, where the custom is equally general; but behind the immorality, behind the religiosity, there lies active and alive the horrible revival of the West African superst.i.tions; the serpent wors.h.i.+p, and the child sacrifice, and the cannibalism. There is no room to doubt it. A missionary a.s.sured me that an instance of it occurred only a year ago within his own personal knowledge. The facts are notorious; a full account was published in one of the local newspapers, and the only result was that the president imprisoned the editor for exposing his country. A few years ago persons guilty of these infamies were tried and punished; now they are left alone, because to prosecute and convict them would be to acknowledge the truth of the indictment.

In this, as in all other communities, there is a better side as well as a worse. The better part is ashamed of the condition into which the country has fallen; rational and well-disposed Haytians would welcome back the French but for an impression, whether well founded or ill I know not, that the Americans would not suffer any European nation to reacquire or recover any new territory on their side of the Atlantic.

They make the most they can of their French connection. They send their children to Paris to be educated, and many of them go thither themselves. There is money among them, though industry there is none.

The Hayti coffee which bears so high a reputation is simply gathered under the bushes which the French planters left behind them, and is half as excellent as it ought to be because it is so carelessly cleaned. Yet so rich is the island in these and other natural productions that they cannot entirely ruin it. They have a revenue from their customs of 5,000,000 dollars to be the prey of political schemers. They have a const.i.tution, of course, with a legislature--two houses of a legislature--universal suffrage, &c., but it does not save them from revolutions, which recurred every two or three years till the time of the present president. He being of stronger metal than the rest, takes care that the votes are given as he pleases, shoots down recusants, and knows how to make himself feared. He is a giant, they say--I did not see him--six feet some inches in height and broad in proportion. When in Jamaica he was a friend of Gordon, and the intimacy between them is worth noting, as throwing light on Gordon's political aspirations.

I stayed no longer than the s.h.i.+p's business detained the captain, and I breathed more freely when I had left that miserable cross-birth of ferocity and philanthropic sentiment. No one can foretell the future fate of the black republic, but the present order of things cannot last in an island so close under the American sh.o.r.es. If the Americans forbid any other power to interfere, they will have to interfere themselves. If they find Mormonism an intolerable blot upon their escutcheon, they will have to put a stop in some way or other to cannibalism and devil-wors.h.i.+p. Meanwhile, the ninety years of negro self-government have had their use in showing what it really means, and if English statesmen, either to save themselves trouble or to please the prevailing uninstructed sentiment, insist on extending it, they will be found when the accounts are made up to have been no better friends to the unlucky negro than their slave-trading forefathers.