To England the loss of the West Indies would not itself be serious; but in the life of nations discreditable failures are not measured by their immediate material consequences. To allow a group of colonies to slide out of our hands because we could not or would not provide them with a tolerable government would be nothing less than a public disgrace. It would be an intimation to all the world that we were unable to maintain any longer the position which our fathers had made for us; and when the unravelling of the knitted fabric of the Empire has once begun the process will be a rapid one.
'But what would you do?' I am asked impatiently. 'We send out peers or gentlemen against whose character no direct objection can be raised; we assist them with local councils partly chosen by the people themselves. We send out bishops, we send out missionaries, we open schools. What can we do more? We cannot alter the climate, we cannot make planters prosper when sugar will not pay, we cannot convert black men into whites, we cannot force the blacks to work for the whites when they do not wish to work for them. "Governing," as you call it, will not change the natural conditions of things. You can suggest no remedy, and mere fault-finding is foolish and mischievous.'
I might answer a good many things. Government cannot do everything, but it can do something, and there is a difference between governors against whom there is nothing to object and men of special and marked capacity. There is a difference between governors whose hands are tied by local councils and whose feet are tied by instructions from home, and a governor with a free hand and a wise head left to take his own measures on the spot. I presume that no one can seriously expect that an orderly organised nation can be made out of the blacks, when, in spite of your schools and missionaries, sixty per cent. of the children now born among them are illegitimate. You can do for the West Indies, I repeat over and over again, what you do for the East; you can establish a firm authoritative government which will protect the blacks in their civil rights and protect the whites in theirs. You cannot alter the climate, it is true, or make the soil more fertile. Already it is fertile as any in the earth, and the climate is admirable for the purposes for which it is needed. But you can restore confidence in the stability of your tenure, you can give courage to the whites who are on the spot to remain there, and you can tempt capital and enterprise to venture there which now seek investments elsewhere. By keeping the rule in your own hands you will restore the white population to their legitimate influence; the blacks will again look up to them and respect them as they ought to do. This you can do, and it will cost you nothing save a little more pains in the selection of the persons whom you are to trust with powers analogous to those which you grant to your provincial governors in the Indian peninsula.
A preliminary condition of this, as of all other real improvements, is one, however, which will hardly be fulfilled. Before a beginning can be made, a conviction is wanted that life has other objects besides present interest and convenience; and very few of us indeed have at the bottom of our hearts any such conviction at all. We can talk about it in fine language—no age ever talked more or better—but we don't believe in it; we believe only in professing to believe, which soothes our vanity and does not interfere with our actions. From fine words no harvests grow. The negroes are well disposed to follow and obey any white who will be kind and just to them, and in such following and obedience their only hope of improvement lies. The problem is to create a state of things under which Englishmen of vigour and character will make their homes among them. Annexation to the United States would lead probably to their extermination at no very distant time. The Antilles are small, and the fate of the negroes there might be no better than the fate of the Caribs. The Americans are not a people who can be trifled with; no one knows it better than the negroes. They fear them. They prefer infinitely the mild rule of England, and under such a government as we might provide if we cared to try, the whole of our islands might become like the Moravian settlement in Jamaica, and the black nature, which has rather degenerated than improved in these late days of licence, might be put again in the way of regeneration. The process would be slow—your seedlings in a plantation hang stationary year after year, but they do move at last. We cannot disown our responsibility for these poor adopted brothers of ours. We send missionaries into Africa to convert them to a better form of religion; why should the attempt seem chimerical to convert them practically to a higher purpose in our own colonies?
The reader will be weary of a sermon the points of which have been reiterated so often. I might say that he requires to have the lesson impressed upon him—that it is for his good that I insist upon it, and not for my own. But this is the common language of all preachers, and it is not found to make the hearers more attentive. I will not promise to say no more upon the subject, for it was forced upon me at every moment and point of my journey. I am arriving near the end, however, and if he has followed so far, he will perhaps go on with me to the conclusion. I had three weeks to give to Havana; they were fast running out, and it was time for me to be going. Strange stories, too, came from England, which made me uneasy till I knew how they were set in circulation. One day Mr. Gladstone was said to have gone mad, and the Queen the next. The Russians were about to annex Afghanistan. Our troops had been cut to pieces in Burmah. Something was going wrong with us every day in one corner of the world or another. I found at last that the telegraphic intelligence was supplied to the Cuban newspapers from New York, that the telegraph clerks there were generally Irish, and their facts were the creation of their wishes. I was to return to Jamaica in the same vessel which had brought me from it. She had been down to the isthmus, and was to call at Havana on her way back. The captain's most English face was a welcome sight to me when he appeared one evening at dinner. He had come to tell me that he was to sail early on the following morning, and I arranged to go on board with him the same night. The Captain-General had not forgotten to instruct the Gobierno Civil to grant me an exeat regno. I do not know that I gained much by his intercession, for without it I should hardly have been detained indefinitely, and as it was I had to pay more dollars than I liked to part with. The necessary documents, however, had been sent through the British consul, and I was free to leave when I pleased. I paid my bill at the hotel, which was not after all an extravagant one, cleared my pocket-book of the remainder of the soiled and tattered paper which is called money, and does duty for it down to a half-penny, and with my distinguished friend Don G——, the real acquisition which I had made in coming to his country, and who would not leave me till I was in the boat, I drove away to the wharf.
It was a still, lovely, starlight night. The moon had risen over the hills, and was shining brightly on the roofs and towers of the city, and on the masts and spars of the vessels which were riding in the harbour. There was not a ripple on the water, and stars and city, towers and ships, stood inverted on the surface pointing downward as into a second infinity. The charm was unfortunately interfered with by odours worse than Coleridge found at Cologne and cursed in rhyme. The drains of Havana, like orange blossom, give off their most fragrant vapours in the dark hours. I could well believe Don G——'s saying, that but for the natural healthiness of the place, they would all die of it like poisoned flies. We had to cut our adieus short, for the mouth of some horrid sewer was close to us. In the boat I did not escape; the water smelt horribly as it was stirred by the oars, charged as it was with three centuries of pollution, and the phosphorescent light shone with a sickly, sulphur-like brilliance. One could have fancied that one was in Charon's boat and was crossing Acheron. When I reached the steamer I watched from the deck the same ghost-like phenomenon which is described by Tom Cringle. A fathom deep, in the ship's shadow, some shark or other monster sailed slowly by in an envelope of spectral lustre. When he stopped his figure disappeared, when he moved on again it was like the movement of a streak of blue flame. Such a creature did not seem as if it could belong to our familiar sunlit ocean.
The state of the harbour is not creditable to the Spanish Government, and I suppose will not be improved till there is some change of dynasty. All that can be said for it is that it is not the worst in these seas. Our ship had just come from the Canal, and had brought the latest news from thence.
But the miscalculations of the work to be done and of the expense of doing it are now notorious to all the world. The alternatives are to abandon an enterprise so splendid in conception, so disastrous in the execution, or to raise and spend fresh tens of millions to follow those that are gone with no certain prospect of success after all. The saddest part of the story will be soonest forgotten—the frightful consumption of human life in those damp and pestilential jungles. M. Lesseps having made his name immortal at Suez, aspired at eclipsing his first achievement, by a second yet more splendidly ambitious, at a time of life when common men are content to retire upon their laurels. He deserves and will receive an unstinted admiration for his energy and his enthusiasm. But his countrymen who have so zealously supported him will be rewarded with no dividend upon their shares, even if the two oceans are eventually united, and no final success can be looked for in the bold projector's life time.
At dawn we swept out under the Moro, and away once more into the free fresh open sea. We had come down on the south side of the island, we returned by the north up the old Bahama Channel where Drake died on his way home from his last unsuccessful expedition—Lope de Vega singing a pæan over the end of the great 'dragon.' Fresh passengers brought fresh talk. There was a clever young Jamaican on board returning from a holiday; he had the spirits of youth about him, and would have pleased my American who never knew good come of despondency. He had hopes for his country, but they rested, like those of every sensible man that I met, on an inability to believe that there would be further advances in the direction of political liberty. A revised constitution, he said, could issue only in fresh Gordon riots and fresh calamities. He had been travelling in the Southern States. He had seen the state of Mississippi deserted by the whites, and falling back into a black wilderness. He had seen South Carolina, which had narrowly escaped ruin under a black and carpet-bagger legislature, and had recovered itself under the steady determination of the Americans that the civil war was not to mean the domination of negro over white. The danger was greater in the English islands than in either of these states, from the enormous disproportion of numbers. The experiment could be ventured only under a high census and a restricted franchise. But the experience of all countries showed that these limited franchises were invidious and could not be maintained, the end was involved in the beginning, and he trusted that prudent counsels would prevail. We had gone too far already.