JAMAICA—WHITE MEN.
It seems to us natural that white men should hold ascendency over those who are black or coloured. Although we have emancipated our own slaves, and done so much to abolish slavery elsewhere, nevertheless we regard the negro as born to be a servant. We do not realize it to ourselves that it is his right to share with us the high places of the world, and that it should be an affair of individual merit whether we wait on his beck or he on ours. We have never yet brought ourselves so to think, and probably never shall. They still are to us a servile race. Philanthropical abolitionists will no doubt deny the truth of this; but I have no doubt that the conviction is strong with them—could they analyze their own convictions—as it is with others.
Where white men and black men are together, the white will order and the black will obey, with an obedience more or less implicit according to the terms on which they stand. When those terms are slavery, the white men order with austerity, and the black obey with alacrity. But such terms have been found to be prejudicial to both. Each is brutalized by the contact. The black man becomes brutal and passive as a beast of burden; the white man becomes brutal and ferocious as a beast of prey.
But there are various other terms on which they may stand as servants and masters. There are those well-understood terms which regulate employment in England and elsewhere, under which the poor man's time is his money, and the rich man's capital his certain means of obtaining labour. As far as we can see, these terms, if properly carried out, are the best which human wisdom can devise for the employment and maintenance of mankind. Here in England they are not always properly carried out. At an occasional spot or two things will run rusty for a while. There are strikes, and there are occasional gluts of labour, very distressing to the poor man; and occasional gluts of the thing laboured, very embarrassing to the rich man. But on the whole, seeing that after all the arrangement is only human, here in England it does work pretty well. We intended, no doubt, when we emancipated our slaves in Jamaica, that the affair should work in the same way there.
But the terms there at present are as far removed from the English system as they are from the Cuban, and are almost as abhorrent to justice as slavery itself—as abhorrent to justice, though certainly not so abhorrent to mercy and humanity.
What would a farmer say in England if his ploughman declined to work, and protested that he preferred going to his master's granary and feeding himself and his children on his master's corn? "Measter, noa; I beez a-tired thick day, and dunna mind to do no wark!" Then the poorhouse, my friend, the poorhouse! And hardly that; starvation first, and nakedness, and all manner of misery. In point of fact, our friend the ploughman must go and work, even though his o'erlaboured bones be tired, as no doubt they often are. He knows it, and does it, and in his way is not discontented. And is not this God's ordinance?
His ordinance in England and elsewhere, but not so, apparently, in Jamaica. There we had a devil's ordinance in those days of slavery; and having rid ourselves of that, we have still a devil's ordinance of another sort. It is not perhaps very easy for men to change devil's work into heavenly work at once. The ordinance that at present we have existing there is that far niente one of lying in the sun and eating yams—"of eating, not your own yams, you lazy, do-nothing, thieving darkee; but my yams; mine, who am being ruined, root and branch, stock and barrel, house and homestead, wife and bairns, because you won't come and work for me when I offer you due wages; you thieving, do-nothing, lazy nigger."
"Hush!" will say my angry philanthropist. "For the sake of humanity, hush! Will coarse abuse and the calling of names avail anything? Is he not a man and a brother?" No, my angry philanthropist; while he will not work and will only steal, he is neither the one nor the other, in my estimation. As for his being a brother, that we may say is—fudge; and I will call no professional idler a man.
But the abuse above given is not intended to be looked on as coming out of my own mouth, and I am not, therefore, to be held responsible for the wording of it. It is inserted there—with small inverted commas, as you see—to show the language with which our angry white friends in Jamaica speak of the extraordinary condition in which they have found themselves placed.
Slowly—with delay that has been awfully ruinous—they now bethink themselves of immigration—immigration from the coast of Africa, immigration from China, Coolie immigrants from Hindostan. When Trinidad and Guiana have helped themselves, then Jamaica bestirs itself. And what then? Then the negroes bestir themselves. "For heaven's sake let us be looked to! Are we not to be protected from competition? If labourers be brought here, will not these white people again cultivate their grounds? Shall we not be driven from our squatting patches? Shall we not starve; or, almost worse than that, shall we not again fall under Adam's curse? Shall we not again be slaves, in reality, if not in name? Shall we not have to work?"