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 passing 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 amusements 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 shillings a week and 'found themselves,' when the men had but a shilling 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 class 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-fashioned 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 constitutions 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.