From this point of view political problems, and the West Indian among them, present unusual aspects. Looking to the West Indies only, we took possession of those islands when they were of supreme importance in our great wrestle with Spain and France. We were fighting then for the liberties of the human race. The Spaniards had destroyed the original Carib and Indian inhabitants. We induced thousands of our own fellow-countrymen to venture life and fortune in the occupation of our then vital conquests. For two centuries we furnished them with black servants whom we purchased on the African coast and carried over and sold there, making our own profits out of the trade, and the colonists prospered themselves and poured wealth and strength into the empire of which they were then an integral part. A change passed over the spirit of the age. Liberty assumed a new dress. We found slavery to be a crime; we released our bondmen; we broke their chains as we proudly described it to ourselves; we compensated the owners, so far as money could compensate, for the entire dislocation of a state of society which we had ourselves created; and we trusted to the enchantment of liberty to create a better in its place. We had delivered our own souls; we had other colonies to take our emigrants. Other lands under our open trade would supply us with the commodities for which we had hitherto been dependent on the West Indies. They ceased to be of commercial, they ceased to be of political, moment to us, and we left them to their own resources. The modern English idea is that everyone must take care of himself. Individuals or aggregates of individuals have the world before them, to open the oyster or fail to open it according to their capabilities. The State is not to help them; the State is not to interfere with them unless for political or party reasons it happens to be convenient. As we treat ourselves we treat our colonies. Those who have gone thither have gone of their own free will, and must take the consequences of their own actions. We allow them no executional privileges which we do not claim for ourselves. They must stand, if they are to stand, by their own strength. If they cannot stand they must fall. This is our notion of education in 'manliness,' and for immediate purposes answers well enough. Individual enterprise, unendowed but unfettered, built the main buttresses of the British colonial empire. Australians and New Zealanders are English and Scotchmen who have settled at the antipodes where there is more room for them than at home. They are the same people as we are, and they have the same privileges as we have. They are parts of one and the same organic body as branches from the original trunk. The branch does not part from the trunk, but it discharges its own vital functions by its own energy, and we no more desire to interfere than London desires to interfere with Manchester.
So it stands with us where the colonists are of our race, with the same character and the same objects; and, as I said, the system answers. Under no other relations could we continue a united people. But it does not answer—it has failed wherever we have tried it—when the majority of the inhabitants of countries of which for one or other reason we have possessed ourselves, and of which we keep possession, are not united to us by any of these natural bonds, where they have been annexed by violence or otherwise been forced under our flag. It has failed conspicuously in Ireland. We know that it would fail in the East Indies if we were rash enough to venture the experiment. Self-government in connection with the British Empire implies a desire or a willingness in those who are so left to themselves that the connection shall continue. We have been so sanguine as to believe that the privilege of being British subjects is itself sufficient to secure their allegiance; that the liberties which we concede will not be used for purposes which we are unable to tolerate; that, being left to govern themselves, they will govern in harmony with English interests and according to English principles. The privilege is not estimated so highly. They go their own way and not our way, and therefore we must look facts in the face as they are, and not as we wish them to be. If we extend to Ireland the independence which only links us closer to Australia, Ireland will use it to break away from us. If we extend it to Bengal and Madras and Bombay, we shall fling them into anarchy and bring our empire to an end. We cannot for our safety's sake part with Ireland. We do not mean to part with our Asiatic dominions. The reality of the relation in both cases is the superior force of England, and we must rely upon it and need not try to conceal that we do, till by the excellence of our administration we have converted submission into respect and respect into willingness for union. This may be a long process and a difficult one. If we choose to maintain our empire, however, we must pay the price for empire, and it is wiser, better, safer, in all cases to admit the truth and act upon it. Yet Englishmen so love liberty that they struggle against confessing what is disagreeable to them. Many of us would give Ireland, would give India Home Rule, and run the risk of what would happen, and only a probability, which reaches certainty, of the consequences to be expected to follow prevents us from unanimously agreeing. About the West Indies we do not care very earnestly. Nothing seriously alarming can happen there. So much, therefore, for the general policy of leaving them to help themselves out of their difficulties we have adopted completely. The corollary that they must govern themselves also on their own responsibilities we hesitate as yet to admit completely; but we do not recognise that any responsibility for their failing condition rests on us; and the inclination certainly, and perhaps the purpose, is to throw them entirely upon themselves at the earliest moment. Cuba sends representatives to the Cortes at Madrid, Martinique and Guadaloupe to the Assembly at Paris. In the English islands, being unwilling to govern without some semblance of a constitution, we try tentatively varieties of local boards and local councils, admitting the elective principle but not daring to trust it fully; creating hybrid constitutions, so contrived as to provoke ill feeling where none would exist without them, and to make impossible any tolerable government which could actively benefit the people. We cannot intend that arrangements the effects of which are visible so plainly in the sinking fortunes of our own kindred there, are to continue for ever. We suppose that we cannot go back in these cases. It is to be presumed, therefore, that we mean to go forward, and in doing so I venture to think myself that we shall be doing equal injustice both to our own race and to the blacks, and we shall bring the islands into a condition which will be a reproach and scandal to the empire of which they will remain a dishonoured part. The slave trade was an imperial monopoly, extorted by force, guaranteed by treaties, and our white West Indian interest was built up in connection with and in reliance upon it. We had a right to set the slaves free; but the payment of the indemnity was no full acquittance of our obligations for the condition of a society which we had ourselves created. We have no more right to make the emancipated slave his master's master in virtue of his numbers than we have a right to lay under the heel of the Catholics of Ireland the Protestant minority whom we planted there to assist us in controlling them.
It may be said that we have no intention of doing anything of the kind, that no one at present dreams of giving a full colonial constitution to the West Indian Islands. They are allowed such freedom as they are capable of using; they can be allowed more as they are better educated and more fit for it, &c. &c.
One knows all that, and one knows what it is worth in the half-elected, half-nominated councils. Either the nominated members are introduced merely as a drag upon the wheel, and are instructed to yield in the end to the demands of the representative members, or they are themselves the representatives of the white minority. If the first, the majority rule already; if the second, such constitutions are contrived ingeniously to create the largest amount of irritation, and to make impossible, as long as they last, any form of effective and useful government. Therefore they cannot last, and are not meant to last. A principle once conceded develops with the same certainty with which a seed grows when it is sown. In the English world, as it now stands, there is no middle alternative between self-government and government by the Crown, and the cause of our reluctance to undertake direct charge of the West Indies is because such undertaking carries responsibility along with it. If they are brought so close to us we shall be obliged to exert ourselves, and to rescue them from a condition which would be a reproach to us.
The English of those islands are melting away. That is a fact to which it is idle to try to shut our eyes. Families who have been for generations on the soil are selling their estates everywhere and are going off. Lands once under high cultivation are lapsing into jungle. Professional men of ability and ambition carry their talents to countries where they are more sure of reward. Every year the census renews its warning. The rate may vary; sometimes for a year or two there may seem to be a pause in the movement, but it begins again and is always in the same direction. The white is relatively disappearing, the black is growing; that is the fact with which we have to deal.
We may say if we please, 'Be it so then; we do not want those islands; let the blacks have them, poor devils. They have had wrongs enough in this world; let them take their turn and have a good time now.' This I imagine is the answer which will rise to the lips of most of us, yet it will be an answer which will not be for our honour, nor in the long run for our interest. Our stronger colonies will scarcely attach more value to their connection with us if they hear us declare impatiently that because part of our possessions have ceased to be of money value to us, we will not or we cannot take the trouble to provide them with a decent government, and therefore cast them off. Nor in the long run will it benefit the blacks either. The islands will not be allowed to run wild again, and if we leave them some one else will take them who will be less tender of his coloured brother's sensibilities. We may think that it would not come to that. The islands will still be ours; the English flag will still float over the forts; the government, whatever it be, will be administered in the Queen's name. Were it worth while, one might draw a picture of the position of an English governor, with a black parliament and a black ministry, recommending by advice of his constitutional ministers some measure like the Haytian Land Law.
No Englishman, not even a bankrupt peer, would consent to occupy such a position; the blacks themselves would despise him if he did; and if the governor is to be one of their own race and colour, how long could such a connection endure?
No one I presume would advise that the whites of the island should govern. The relations between the two populations are too embittered, and equality once established by law, the exclusive privilege of colour over colour cannot be restored. While slavery continued the whites ruled effectively and economically; the blacks are now free as they; there are two classes in the community; their interests are opposite as they are now understood, and one cannot be trusted with control over the other. As little can the present order of things continue. The West India Islands, once the pride of our empire, the scene of our most brilliant achievements, are passing away out of our hands; the remnant of our own countrymen, weary of an unavailing struggle, are more and more eager to withdraw from the scene, because they find no sympathy and no encouragement from home, and are forbidden to accept help from America when help is offered them, while under their eyes their quondam slaves are multiplying, thriving, occupying, growing strong, and every day more conscious of the changed order of things. One does not grudge the black man his prosperity, his freedom, his opportunities of advancing himself; one would wish to see him as free and prosperous as the fates and his own exertions can make him, with more and more means of raising himself to the white man's level. But left to himself, and without the white man to lead him, he can never reach it, and if we are not to lose the islands altogether, or if they are not to remain with us to discredit our capacity to rule them, it is left to us only to take the same course which we have taken in the East Indies with such magnificent success, and to govern whites and blacks alike on the Indian system. The circumstances are precisely analogous. We have a population to deal with, the enormous majority of whom are of an inferior race. Inferior, I am obliged to call them, because as yet, and as a body, they have shown no capacity to rise above the condition of their ancestors except under European laws, European education, and European authority, to keep them from making war on one another. They are docile, good-tempered, excellent and faithful servants when they are kindly treated; but their notions of right and wrong are scarcely even elementary; their education, such as it may be, is but skin deep, and the old African superstitions lie undisturbed at the bottom of their souls. Give them independence, and in a few generations they will peel off such civilisation as they have learnt as easily and as willingly as their coats and trousers.
Govern them as we govern India, with the same conscientious care, with the same sense of responsibility, with the same impartiality, the same disinterested attention to the well-being of our subjects in its highest and most honourable sense, and we shall give the world one more evidence that while Englishmen can cover the waste places of it with free communities of their own blood, they can exert an influence no less beneficent as the guides and rulers of those who need their assistance, and whom fate and circumstances have assigned to their care. Our kindred far away will be more than ever proud to form part of a nation which has done more for freedom than any other nation ever did, yet is not a slave to formulas, and can adapt its actions to the demands of each community which belongs to it. The most timid among us may take courage, for it would cost us nothing save the sacrifice of a few official traditions, and an abstinence for the future from doubtful uses of colonial patronage. The blacks will be perfectly happy when they are satisfied that they have nothing to fear for their persons or their properties. To the whites it would be the opening of a new era of hope. Should they be rash enough to murmur, they might then be justly left to the consequences of their own folly.