In France it is the other way. The country is carefully tilled. The hillsides that would be barren anywhere else are blooming gardens, but the working out bears cruelly on the individual, especially on the women. Look at the people, white people all, industrious, thrifty, admirable in many ways—and about as far advanced in civilisation as they were at the end of the eighteenth century! Their women are worn with toil, they are haggard and old, toothless crones, before they are thirty. All the joy and loveliness has gone out of their life. Up in the mountains they are devout enough, but they have no use for modern science, and as I saw them they are not as far advanced as many a negro I have met in Jamaica, even as the negroes are far behind the farmers of Australia and New Zealand.
Now I am sure that most people will agree with me that the capable business man—and in “man” I include the capable of both sexes—the man with modern knowledge and training, the farseeing man who will settle in a country and give it the best of his years, will educate and help the peasant to get the most out of the land and better his lot, who will bring up his children to follow in his footsteps, must be a boon in any land. The ignorant peasant wastes; in France his labour and strength in archaic methods of labour and life, in Jamaica and West Africa he wastes the timber, he wastes the animals he has under him, he wastes the soil, the earth brings forth not one-tenth of what it might under more enlightened rule.
And I need not say what that increase would mean, not only to the peasant but to a great manufacturing country like Great Britain.
When I read about Garden Cities in England, and the necessity for women emigrating, I am full of wonder why someone with a little money does not start an agricultural colony in Jamaica. I can see no reason why the beautiful land should become the exclusive property of the rich fleeing from the northern winter. It should be an ideal place for people who are not rich, especially for women. Here is eternal summer, here are beautiful surroundings, here is a fertile soil crying out for cultivation, here is a large peasant population waiting for employment, here is an ample fruit supply, here should be milk and eggs and chickens in abundance; here is no need of fires and furs, of winter clothing, of carpets and curtains, of heavy bedding.
If a woman go to Canada or Australia she must use her hands—it will do her no harm, but many women do not like the prospect—but in Jamaica for many a long day to come there will be labour in plenty crying out for a guiding hand. All it seems to me that is required to make such settlements a great success is a little money—you cannot have land and plan to work it for nothing anywhere—a little common sense, and they would be a boon not only to Jamaica but to the Empire. Only one thing, two things, perhaps, I would insist on. All the windows must be built as are those in the south of France and in Italy—like doors that open wide and let in an abundance of air, and not as they make them in Jamaica, sash fashion, after the custom of cold England. And no settler must live in a mosquito-proof room. He must clear away the mosquitoes.
They talk about the Jamaican negro as dishonest, but I think that is to be attributed to ignorance, and will mend with better wages and better education. My servants, low as were their wages, might have been trusted as a rule with my money or my jewellery or even my clothes, and they only pilfered the flour and sugar and such like commodities which, considering they fed themselves and these things were dear, was putting their sins on a par with that of the boy who steals sugar or apples; but there is a form of larceny in Jamaica which is very crippling to industry, and which I have not heard of in any other land. The Jamaican peasant cannot for the life of him help predial larceny, that is field larceny. He steals not only from the well-to-do man with a large acreage, but from his neighbour and his friend. Before the yams are ready for digging, or the corn ready to be cut, comes along the predial thief and relieves the owner of a large portion of his crop. Whenever any man plants he must put in enough to supply the greedy robber, who is too lazy to plant for himself. Everyone expects part of his crop to be taken. It is the curse of the country.
“Missus,” said a black boy to Miss Maxwell Hall, “you buy my corn when him ripe?”
“Have you any corn, Cyril?” He rejoiced in that high-sounding name.
“Got good big plot, missus. Him ripe soon.”
“Very well,” she said good-naturedly, anxious to help on the industrious, and passing over the fact that he had calmly taken her land without paying any rent. So the time went on and the fowls wanted food.