A dinner party offers small opportunity for serious conversation, nor, indeed, could I expect a great person in Sir Henry's position to enter upon subjects of consequence with a stranger like myself. I could see, however, that I had nothing to correct in the impression of his character which his reputation had led me to form about him, and I wished more than ever that the system of government of which he had been so admirable a servant in India could be applied to his present position, and that he or such as he could have the administration of it. We had common friends in the Indian service to talk about; one especially, Reynell Taylor, now dead, who had been the earliest of my boy companions. Taylor had been one of the handful of English who held the Punjaub in the first revolt of the Sikhs. With a woman's modesty he had the spirit of a knight-errant. Sir Henry described him as the 'very soul of chivalry,' and seemed himself to be a man of the same pure and noble nature, perhaps liable, from the generosity of his temperament, to believe more than I could do in modern notions and in modern political heroes, but certainly not inclining of his own will to recommend any rash innovations. I perceived that like myself he felt no regret that so much of the soil of Jamaica was passing to peasant black proprietors. He thought well of their natural disposition; he believed them capable of improvement. He thought that the possession of land of their own would bring them into voluntary industry, and lead them gradually to the adoption of civilised habits. He spoke with reserve, and perhaps I may not have understood him fully, but he did not seem to me to think much of their political capacity. The local boards which have been established as an education for higher functions have not been a success. They had been described to me in all parts of the island as inflammable centres of peculation and mismanagement. Sir Henry said nothing from which I could gather his own opinion. I inferred, however (he will pardon me if I misrepresent him), that he had no great belief in a federation of the islands, in 'responsible government,' and such like, as within the bounds of present possibilities. Nor did he think that responsible statesmen at home had any such arrangement in view.
That such an arrangement was in contemplation a few years ago, I knew from competent authority. Perhaps the unexpected interest which the English people have lately shown in the colonies has modified opinion in those high circles, and has taught politicians that they must advance more cautiously. But the wind still sits in the old quarter. Three years ago, the self-suppressed constitution in Jamaica was partially re-established. A franchise was conceded both there and in Barbadoes which gave every black householder a vote. Even in poor Dominica, an extended suffrage was hung out as a remedy for its wretchedness. If nothing further is intended, these concessions have been gratuitously mischievous. It has roused the hopes of political agitators, not in Jamaica only, but all over the Antilles. It has taught the people, who have no grievances at all, who in their present state are better protected than any peasantry in the world except the Irish, to look to political changes as a road to an impossible millennium. It has rekindled hopes which had been long extinguished, that, like their brothers in Hayti, they were on the way to have the islands to themselves. It has alienated the English colonists, filled them with the worst apprehensions, and taught them to look wistfully from their own country to a union with America. A few elected members in a council where they may be counterbalanced by an equal number of official members seems a small thing in itself. So long as the equality was maintained, my Yankee friend was still willing to risk his capital in Jamaican enterprises. But the principle has been allowed. The existing arrangement is a half-measure which satisfies none and irritates all, and collisions between the representatives of the people and the nominees of the Government are only avoided by leaving a sufficient number of official seats unfilled. To have re-entered upon a road where you cannot stand still, where retreat is impossible, and where to go forward can only be recommended on the hypothesis that to give a man a vote will itself qualify him for the use of it, has been one of the minor achievements of the last Government of Mr. Gladstone, and is likely to be as successful as his larger exploits nearer home have as yet proved to be. A supreme court, were we happy enough to possess such a thing, would forbid these venturous experiments of sanguine statesmen who may happen, for a moment, to command a trifling majority in the House of Commons.
I could not say what I felt completely to Sir Henry, who, perhaps, had been in personal relations with Mr. Gladstone's Government. Perhaps, too, he was one of those numerous persons of tried ability and intelligence who have only a faint belief that the connection between Great Britain and the colonies can be of long continuance. The public may amuse themselves with the vision of an imperial union; practical statesmen who are aware of the tendencies of self-governed communities to follow lines of their own in which the mother country cannot support them may believe that they know it to be impossible.
As to the West Indies there are but two genuine alternatives: one to leave them to themselves to shape their own destinies, as we leave Australia; the other to govern them as if they were a part of Great Britain with the same scrupulous care of the people and their interests with which we govern Bengal, Madras, and Bombay. England is responsible for the social condition of those islands. She filled them with negroes when it was her interest to maintain slavery, she emancipated those negroes when popular opinion at home demanded that slavery should end. It appears to me that England ought to bear the consequences of her own actions, and assume to herself the responsibilities of a state of things which she has herself created. We are partly unwilling to take the trouble, partly we cling to the popular belief that to trust all countries with the care of their own concerns is the way to raise the character of the inhabitants and to make them happy and contented. We dimly perceive that the population of the West Indies is not a natural growth of internal tendencies and circumstances, and we therefore hesitate before we plunge completely and entirely into the downward course; but we play with it, we drift towards it, we advance as far as we dare, giving them the evils of both systems and the advantages of neither. At the same moment we extend the suffrage to the blacks with one hand, while with the other we refuse to our own people the benefit of a treaty which would have rescued them from imminent ruin and brought them into relations with their powerful kindred close at hand—relations which might save them from the most dangerous consequences of a negro political supremacy—and the result is that the English in those islands are melting away and will soon be crowded out, or will have departed of themselves in disgust. A policy so far-reaching, and affecting so seriously the condition of the oldest of our colonial possessions, ought not to have been adopted on their own authority, by doctrinaire statesmen in a cabinet, without fully and frankly consulting the English nation; and no further step ought to be taken in that direction until the nation has had the circumstances of the islands laid before it, and has pronounced one way or the other its own sovereign pleasure. Does or does not England desire that her own people shall be enabled to live and thrive in the West Indies? If she decides that her hands are too full, that she is over-empired and cannot attend to them—caditquæstio—there is no more to be said. But if this is her resolution the hands of the West Indians ought to be untied. They ought to be allowed to make their sugar treaties, to make any treaties, to enter into the closest relations with America which the Americans will accept, as the only chance which will be left them.
Such abandonment, however, will bring us no honour. It will not further that federation of the British Empire which so many of us now profess to desire. If we wish Australia and Canada to draw into closer union with us, it will not be by showing that we are unable to manage a group of colonies which are almost at our doors. Englishmen all round the globe have rejoiced together in this year which is passing by us over the greatness of their inheritance, and have celebrated with enthusiasm the half-century during which our lady-mistress has reigned over the English world. Unity and federation are on our lips, and we have our leagues and our institutes, and in the eagerness of our wishes we dream that we see the fulfilment of them. Neither the kingdom of heaven nor any other kingdom 'comes with observation.' It comes not with after-dinner speeches however eloquent, or with flowing sentiments however for the moment sincere. The spirit which made the Empire can alone hold it together. The American Union was not saved by oratory. It was saved by the determination of the bravest of the people; it was cemented by the blood which dyed the slopes of Gettysburg. The union of the British Empire, if it is to be more than a dream, can continue only while the attracting force of the primary commands the willing attendance of the distant satellites. Let the magnet lose its power, let the confidence of the colonies in the strength and resolution of their central orb be once shaken, and the centrifugal force will sweep them away into orbits of their own.
The race of men who now inhabit this island of ours show no signs of degeneracy. The bow of Ulysses is sound as ever; moths and worms have not injured either cord or horn; but it is unstrung, and the arrows which are shot from it drop feebly to the ground. The Irish python rises again out of its swamp, and Phœbus Apollo launches no shaft against the scaly sides of it. Phœbus Apollo attempts the milder methods of concession and persuasion. 'Python,' he says, 'in days when I was ignorant and unjust I struck you down and bound you. I left officers and men with you of my own race to watch you, to teach you, to rule you; to force you, if your own nature could not be changed, to leave your venomous ways. You have refused to be taught, you twist in your chains, you bite and tear, and when you can you steal and murder. I see that I was wrong from the first. Every creature has a right to live according to its own disposition. I was a tyrant, and you did well to resist; I ask you to forgive and forget. I set you free; I hand you over my own representatives as a pledge of my goodwill, that you may devour them at your leisure. They have been the instruments of my oppression; consume them, destroy them, do what you will with them; and henceforward I hope that we shall live together as friends, and that you will show yourself worthy of my generosity and of the freedom which you have so gloriously won.'
A sun-god who thus addressed a disobedient satellite might have the eloquence of a Demosthenes and the finest of the fine intentions which pave the road to the wrong place, but he would not be a divinity who would command the willing confidence of a high-spirited kindred. Great Britain will make the tie which holds the colonies to her a real one when she shows them and shows the world that she is still equal to her great place, that her arm is not shortened and her heart has not grown faint.
Men speak of the sacredness of liberty. They talk as if the will of everyone ought to be his only guide, that allegiance is due only to majorities, that allegiance of any other kind is base and a relic of servitude. The Americans are the freest people in the world; but in their freedom they have to obey the fundamental laws of the Union. Again and again in the West Indies Mr. Motley's words came back to me. To be taken into the American Union is to be adopted into a partnership. To belong as a Crown colony to the British Empire, as things stand, is no partnership at all. It is to belong to a power which sacrifices, as it has always sacrificed, the interest of its dependencies to its own. The blood runs freely through every vein and artery of the American body corporate. Every single citizen feels his share in the life of his nation. Great Britain leaves her Crown colonies to take care of themselves, refuses what they ask, and forces on them what they had rather be without. If I were a West Indian I should feel that under the stars and stripes I should be safer than I was at present from political experimenting. I should have a market in which to sell my produce where I should be treated as a friend; I should have a power behind me and protecting me, and I should have a future to which I could look forward with confidence. America would restore me to home and life; Great Britain allows me to sink, contenting herself with advising me to be patient. Why should I continue loyal when my loyalty was so contemptuously valued?
But I will not believe that it will come to this. An Englishman may be heavily tempted, but in evil fortune as in good his heart is in the old place. The administration of our affairs is taken for the present from prudent statesmen, and is made over to those who know how best to flatter the people with fine-sounding sentiments and idle adulation. All sovereigns have been undone by flatterers. The people are sovereign now, and, being new to power, listen to those who feed their vanity. The popular orator has been the ruin of every country which has trusted to him. He never speaks an unwelcome truth, for his existence depends on pleasing, and he cares only to tickle the ears of his audience. His element is anarchy; his function is to undo what better men have done. In wind he lives and moves and has his being. When the gods are angry, he can raise it to a hurricane and lay waste whole nations in ruin and revolution. It was said long ago, a man full of words shall not prosper upon the earth. Times have changed, for in these days no one prospers so well. Can he make a speech? is the first question which the constituencies ask when a candidate is offered to their suffrages. When the Roman commonwealth developed from an aristocratic republic into a democracy, and, as now with us, the sovereignty was in the mass of the people, the oratorical faculty came to the front in the same way. The finest speaker was esteemed the fittest man to be made a consul or a prætor of, and there were schools of rhetoric where aspirants for office had to go to learn gesture and intonation before they could present themselves at the hustings. The sovereign people and their orators could do much, but they could not alter facts, or make that which was not, to be, or that which was, not to be. The orators could perorate and the people could decree, but facts remained and facts proved the strongest, and the end of that was that after a short supremacy the empire which they had brought to the edge of ruin was saved at the last extremity; the sovereign people lost their liberties, and the tongues of political orators were silenced for centuries. Illusion at last takes the form of broken heads, and the most obstinate credulity is not proof against that form of argument.