Yet Jamaica is poor and discontented, and from year to year is growing more miserable and more full of complaints. While on the little island of Barbadoes, which is flat and comparatively destitute of natural beauty, the inhabitant is proud to the verge of the ludicrous of his home, the Jamaican, dwelling amid scenes of perpetual loveliness, despises his native soil. And not without reason. For Jamaica presents that saddest and least flattering sight, a land sinking into hopeless ruin. Her plantations are left uncultivated. Her cities look time-worn and crumbling. Her fields, which once blossomed like the rose, are relapsing into the wilderness. She does not feed her people. She does not clothe them. She does not furnish them shelter. With three hundred and fifty thousand negroes she has not sufficient labor. With twenty thousand whites she has not employers enough who are capable of managing wisely and paying honestly what labor she has. With a soil which Nature has made one broad pasture, she does not raise the half of her own beef and pork. With plains which ought to be waving with luxuriant harvests of wheat and corn, her children are fed from our overflowing granaries. With woods filled with trees fit for building, she sends all the way to the Provinces for shingles, joist, and boards. On her two hundred swift, sparkling rivers there was not, in 1850, a single saw-mill. In an age of invention and labor-saving machines, the plough is to her a modern innovation; and her laborers still scratch the soil which they seek to till with tools of the Middle Ages. Even the production of sugar, to which she has sacrificed every other industrial interest, has sunk from the boasted hundred and fifty thousand hogsheads of the last century, to a meagre yearly crop of thirty thousand. Nine tenths of her proprietors are absentees. More than that proportion of her great estates are ruinously mortgaged. A tourist gives as the final evidence of exhaustion, that Jamaica has no amusements, no circus, no theatre, no opera, none of the pleasant trifles which surplus wealth creates.
Nor are the moral aspects any more encouraging. Slavery, dying, cursed the soil with its fatal bequest, contempt for labor; and the years which have elapsed since emancipation have done little or nothing to give to the toiler conscious dignity and worth. The bondsman, scarcely yet freed from all his chains, naturally enough thinks that, "if Massa will not work," it is the highest gentility in him not to work either, and sighs for a few acres whereon he may live in sluggish content. And his quondam master, left to his own resources, will not any more than before put his shoulder to the work; and, though sunk himself in sloth, ceases not to complain of another's indolence. The spirit of caste is still relentless. The white man despises the black man, and, if he can, cheats him and tramples upon him. The black man, in return, suspects and fears his old oppressor, and sometimes, goaded to desperation, turns upon him. A perpetual discontent has always brooded over Jamaica; and it is recorded that no less than thirty bloody rebellions have left their crimson stains on her ignoble annals.
It is in vain to inquire for the causes of this physical and moral decay. For every class has its special complaint, every traveller his favorite theory, and every political economist his sufficient explanation. But let the cause be what it may, the fact stands out black and repulsive. Jamaica, which came from the hand of the Creator a fair and well-watered garden, has presented for more than half a century that melancholy spectacle, too common in Equatorial America, of a land rich in every natural advantage, and yet through the misfortune or folly of its people plunged in poverty and misery.
The world at large had become tired of the griefs of Jamaica, and reconciled itself to her wretchedness as a foregone conclusion, when the events of last October lent a fresh and terrible interest to her history. An insurrection, including in its purpose the murder of every white man on the island, has been quenched in the blood of its leaders, say the Governor of Jamaica and his defenders. An insignificant riot has been followed by a wholesale and indiscriminate massacre, sparing not even the women and children, reply their opponents.
Admitting for a moment the whole planter theory of a general insurrection, the question inevitably arises, What are the causes which would prompt such a rebellion, and which, while they do not justify violence, furnish reasons why every humane mind should desire to treat with leniency the errors, and even the crimes, of an ignorant and oppressed race? The ordinary burden of the Jamaica negro is far from a light one. The yearly expense of his government is not less than a million dollars, or about three dollars for every man, woman, and child on the island. The executive and judicial departments are on a scale of expense which would befit a continent. The Governor receives a salary of forty thousand dollars, the Chief Justice fifteen thousand dollars, the Associate Justices ten thousand dollars. The ecclesiastical establishment, which ministers little or nothing to the religious wants of the colored race, absorbs another huge portion of the public revenue. And all this magnificence of expenditure in a population of twenty thousand bankrupt whites and three hundred and fifty thousand half-naked blacks. If, now, the negro believed that this burden was distributed evenly, he might bear it with patience. But he does not believe so. He is sure, on the contrary, that the white man, who controls legislation, so assesses the revenue that it shall relieve the rich and burden the poor. He tells you that the luxuries of the planter are admitted at a nominal duty, while the coarse fabrics with which he must clothe himself and family pay forty per cent; that while the planter's huge hogshead of seventeen hundred pounds' weight pays only an excise of three shillings, the hard-raised barrel of his home produce of two hundred pounds must pay two shillings; that every miserable mule-cart of the petty land-owner is subjected to eighteen shillings license, while the great ox-carts of the thousand-acre plantation go untaxed,—a law under which the number of little carts in one district sunk from five hundred to less than two hundred, and with it sunk who shall tell how much growing enterprise. These complaints may be unjust, but the negro believes in them, and they chafe and exasperate him.
Another important question is, What is the ability of the negro to bear these burdens? A defender of the planters gravely asserts "that the negro demands a price for his labor which would be exorbitant in any part of the world." What is that exorbitant price? An able-bodied agricultural laborer in Jamaica receives from eighteen to thirty cents a day; and, if he is both fortunate and industrious, may net for a year's work the fabulous sum of from fifty to eighty dollars. And this in a country which is one of the dearest in the world; where the necessaries of life are always at war prices; where flour is now twenty dollars a barrel, and eggs are fifty cents a dozen, and butter is forty cents a pound, and ham twenty-five, and beef and mutton still higher.
Did the laborer actually receive his pittance, his lot might be more tolerable. But it is the almost universal complaint, that, either from inability or disinclination, the planter does not keep his agreements. Sometimes the overseer, when the work has been done, and well done, arbitrarily retains a quarter, or even a half, of the stipulated wages. The negro says he has no chance for redress; that even a written agreement is worth no more than a blank paper, for the magistrates are either all planters, or their dependents, and have no ears to hear the cry of the lowly. Add now to all this the fact, that the last few seasons have been unfavorable to agriculture; that planters and peasants alike are even more than usually poor; that in whole districts the blacks are destitute, their children up to the age of ten or twelve years from absolute necessity going about stark naked, and their men and women wearing only rags and streamers, which do not preserve even the show of decency;—and is there not sufficient reason, not indeed to justify murder and arson, but why a whole race of suffering and excitable people should not be stamped as fiends in human shape for the outrages of a few of their number?