ROAD NEAR KINGSTON.
In 1900-1901 this amounted to £760,387. The expenditure of the same year was £763,902. I have heard it said that if you cut down the official incomes you won’t get the right men, and that the Jamaicans would not like to be considered, or to rate themselves, a third-rate colony. If that be so, all one can say is, that they must pay for their pride. A government official, who worked hard for something under £400 a year, told me he thought that Englishmen would not live year after year in such an enervating climate unless the pay was good. He had been six years out here; his work was hard and unremitting, and he had not even left the island for a holiday in all that time. When he came to Jamaica he was an athlete, now he could scarcely run a quarter of a mile. Thus there are two sides to every question!
Soon after leaving Kingston we passed through swamps covered with mangroves, then through a thousand acres of level land quite recently irrigated and brought into cultivation. The climate here is hot, and specially suited to the growth of bananas. Since the days of sugar failure this has been a remunerative industry. Eleven years ago, about thirty bunches of bananas were imported into England. In 1901, 3,000,000 came from the Canaries and 450,000 from Jamaica. The revenue of the island for the first five months of the financial year 1902, exceeded by £40,000 the receipts for the same period in the year previous, and, owing to the extension of the fruit trade, the financial outlook is more hopeful than it has been for years. Canada, so the local papers say, is looking forward to consignments of Jamaican bananas.
The fact of Elder, Dempster & Co. having combined with the United Fruit Company means a continual market open to the banana trade, both in Britain and in the United States. The latter is an American enterprise, having steamers running between the West Indies, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Sir Alfred Jones, who is the moving spirit of the Direct Line, is most generous in his dealings with this poverty-stricken island. He announced, some months ago, that the Line he represents (Elder, Dempster) would take, free of freight from Bristol, English stallions, bulls, and rams, for breeding purposes, the object being to improve the breeds of cattle, there being splendid grazing land in some parts of the island.
At a dinner given by the West Indian Club in London, 1st October 1902, Sir Alfred Jones, in referring to the position of the West Indies, said he thought there “had been too much complaining, the people should do what they could themselves to develop the island. There were many possibilities before them. The tourist traffic might be developed, and there were splendid opportunities for breeding horses and cattle. Mineral also afforded a possible field for expansion. The great thing for West Indians was not to sit down and think they had a grievance, but to get up and put their shoulders to the wheel.” He also referred to the prosperous olden time when activity reigned in the cotton industry, and trusted to see a revival of it some day. He believed in the future of the island, deploring the ignorance still reigning in England regarding the West Indies.
One is somewhat amused here at the newspaper revelations. Great confidence in Mr Chamberlain is felt over the difficulties connected with the Sugar Convention, etc. One paragraph states that a good deal of literature is being circulated just now concerning the injustice of depriving the working man at home of his cheap sugar. “The best answer,” says the paper to this, “is that the Trades Unions are dead against bounties, and ask that bounty-fed sugar should be denied access to this country altogether.”
Rumours of discontent are also to be heard in this land to the effect that the chief trade goes to America and not to Britain. Local economists talk of the mother-country giving preferential tariffs to her colonies and dependencies, having learnt their lesson from no less a person than Mr Seddon, of New Zealand fame. They should have heard Judge Shaw’s paper, read last September in the Section of Economics, at the British Association, Belfast, in which he strove to show how the law of commercial development meant the natural and inevitable selection of the nearest market, whatever code of tariffs prevailed, and instanced Canada’s trade with the United States as an example of this. If the mother-country were to give to her colonies preferential trading facilities, it would disorganise all existing fiscal agreements with every Continental power, he said, and the price she would pay would be financial and commercial suicide. Since we are a nation of shopkeepers and traders, our teeming millions of workers must be fed as cheaply as possible.