Not that there are not rich pens and well kept pens, but they are managed by men and they are much greater in extent.
Kempshot specially attracted me because it was run by a young woman of an age when many girls are thinking only of their amusement, run not only with the intention of getting every ounce of good out of the soil, but of putting back into that soil all the good that came out out of it. And the place where she earns her livelihood, the place where the slaves rose and ninety years ago drove Major Hall and his wife fleeing in the night down through the jungle for their very lives, bids fair to be a very jewel among homesteads, a model for all Jamaican homesteads. I only trust the loneliness of it will not drive her away. And then, of course, with a woman, and an attractive one, there is always the danger that some man may persuade her to marry him and he will carry her off.
Oh, but some of those ladies Madden talks about, “accustomed to all the refinements of English society,” would turn in their graves if they could see this their modern representative. She will be still in her youth when her years make her old enough to be the mother of the girls of his time. But then she arises long before dawn, she is riding or walking in boots and breeches, dogs at her heels, over the pen seeking with the eye of the master for defects as soon as the first glimmer of light comes over the mountains; she rests in the middle of the day, but her work is hardly done when the sun sinks gorgeously to rest behind the tree-topped hills in the west.
And she has her work cut out for her. For the negro, whether on her estate or, what is worse, on its borders, is intolerably wasteful of his property and other people's. For instance, she found on the land when it came into her hands two well-grown handsome trees which she discovered were mahogany trees. She hailed them with delight and gave them every attention. And then one day to her dismay she found her precious trees, trees nearly as old as herself, dying and past all hope, for some negro outside her boundaries had stripped the bark off them, because mahogany bark—and mahogany bark is difficult to get now in accessible places—makes the best floor stain! That is the sort of difficulty the man or woman who would do well by the country has to encounter in Jamaica. It takes the heart out of the worker. What was the good of storming and raging, the seventeen year old mahogany trees were dead, because a negro wanted to earn without trouble a few pence in Montego Bay. Again and again going the rounds, Miss Maxwell Hall finds that the black people have ruthlessly cut down trees she is cherishing, cut them down for firewood, or to make shingles, or for a riding-whip or some other trifle.
In my experience the negro peasant makes a very wasteful agriculturist. Sir Hugh Clifford I see, speaking of the countries from which the forbears of the coloured Jamaican came, advocates that white men be not encouraged to settle in these lands, that they be left to the peasants.
I see what he means. He deprecates the arrival of the white man, who comes as a bird of passage, anxious to take all he can out of the land before retiring after a certain number of years to enjoy his spoils—a well-earned, peaceful old age he would call it, an old age beginning somewhere about forty—in the country of his birth.
The countries that go to make up the Empire should not be so treated. But I cannot think that the peasant on the soil is best left alone to work out his own salvation. He will work it out I suppose in time, but the cost will be heavy. I have watched the peasant in the Alpes Maritimes in France, I have seen the fishermen drawing their nets in the Italian Riviera, and I have seen the negro in Jamaica and West Africa, and I unhesitatingly say that the cost of that working out is very heavy indeed.
The fishermen complained bitterly—there are no more fish, only the little young ones, but they went on fishing relentlessly, taking every one, destroying those that were so small they fell through the fine meshes of the net on to the beach.
“Oh, they take all,” said a man looking on who spoke a little French, and he laughed.
In Jamaica the peasant is a very wasteful, a ruinous agriculturist, the only thing he does not waste is his own health and energy. In West Africa the same accusation held good. The peasant ruthlessly burnt down the forest trees to make a place for his patch of food-stuffs, and when the land was worn out there he chose another spot and repeated the destruction. He does the same in Jamaica.