The other side of the case was most vehemently espoused by a mulatto journalist of Guadeloupe. His editorials accused the “materialistic Yankees” of “wishing to buy the rest of the world cheap,” and cited the drop in value of the franc and the pound sterling as proof of their nefarious projects; for it is a general impression in the West Indies that the rate of exchange is set by American capitalists quite at will. In private conversation he was more courteous, though none the less insistent.

“We are quite ready to admit,” he asserted, “that the United States would give us more material advancement in two years than France has in two centuries. We are friendly to Americans, grateful to them; America was the first to give after the Pélée disaster; we might even fight for America; but we feel a love for France as for a mother. We are French and we wish to remain French; we wish to keep our French liberty, which is liberty as we understand it. From our point of view the United States is the greatest autocracy in the world; it has no real republican form of government, no real freedom of the people. Take your white slave law and the prohibition amendment, for example; they are abhorrent to our idea of liberty. The idea of a great federal government chasing a pair of lovers because they happen to cross a state-line, or putting a free citizen in jail merely for selling a bottle of wine, a perfectly legitimate action in any part of the world since the dawn of history! C’est fantastique. The Americans violate our very conception of civil liberty. In Panama and Haiti they come into a house and break up household utensils, throw disinfectants about. We grant that our health might improve under such drastic sanitary measures, but the suffering to our pride would far more than offset that advantage. And above all,” he concluded, “under French rule we people of color have what America never has and never will give us, equality of opportunity and standing with the whites.”

These two views are typical of a hundred we heard on the subject, and form the boundaries of opinion among West Indians. Roughly speaking, the French islands and Barbados, possibly Trinidad, are decidedly against changing their allegiance, and the rest of the British West Indies looks rather favorably upon the idea. When a rumor came to Martinique soon after the armistice that France was contemplating such a move, frantic cables were sent to Paris, and mobs gathered before the American consulate. “Have we not fought and died for France, not to be thus treacherously abandoned?” demanded the enraged citizens. In Barbados the people froth at the mouth at the mere suggestion of losing their British standing. “Little England” has always been proud of her loyalty; when Charles I was beheaded, the island was so strongly royalist that it immediately declared allegiance to Charles II. Trinidad is farther away and has a prosperity of her own, which may be why the problem is not taken very seriously there. In the other British colonies it is largely an economic question, with no great amount of patriotism or sentiment entering into the matter. Scores of Jamaican negroes replied to the query of whether they had heard of the proposed change with, “Oh, we all wishin’ dat hard, sir.” Even Englishmen living in Jamaica expressed themselves as feeling it would be better for the island, much as they would regret it from a sentimental point of view. “The trouble with the English,” said a Jamaican of standing, “is that if they have a dollar, they put it in the bank and sit on it, whereas the American makes it get out and work for him. We are backward because England will not spend the money to develop our resources. The men who work for the big American companies here on the island get three or four times the salaries of those employed by British corporations.”

There are exceptions to the rule in both groups of islands. Thus the working classes are more apt to favor the proposed change than are business men or employers. They feel that the interests of their group are more generously considered under the Stars and Stripes. The poorer white people of the French Antilles are like-minded for another reason; they chafe under the overwhelming political power of the great colored mass of the population. Then there are further ramifications. Many working-men who would otherwise be decided advocates of the transfer stick at the American conception of the color-line. Strangely enough, prohibition is the hardest pill for many to contemplate swallowing, which perhaps is not so strange, after all, in countries where the making of rum is one of the chief industries.

That there would be certain advantages to the United States in acquiring possession of, or political control over, all the islands on our southeastern seaboard goes without saying. Politicians of “imperialistic” tendencies will in all probability explain them to us in detail from time to time as the years roll by. But there is little doubt that they are outweighed by the disadvantages, at least all those of a material nature. Sentimentally it would be pleasant to see our flag flying over all the Caribbean; it would be still more so to feel that no European nation has a foothold on the western hemisphere. That day is in all probability coming, though it is still perhaps far off. As a merely financial proposition, Holland, France, and even England could afford to pay us for taking their possessions in tropical America off their hands. But with the Virgin Islands as an example, we would be paying dearly long after we had parted with any acceptable price which would bring the European West Indies under our flag. Merely to raise them to the American standard in sanitation would be a colossal task, to say nothing of adding materially to our already troublesome “color question.” As some joker has put it, “We could well afford to buy all the West Indies on the basis of the price paid to Denmark, if the sellers would agree to remove all the population”; any other arrangement would probably prove a poor bargain.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

  1. P. [xi], corrected the page references of the illustrations but left them in the original order in the List of Illustrations.
  2. P. [344], changed “thought there were evidences” to “though there were evidences”.
  3. P. [320], changed “yams, okre” to “yams, okra”.
  4. Silently corrected typographical errors and also variations in spelling.
  5. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.