Kitabı oku: «The English in the West Indies; Or, The Bow of Ulysses», sayfa 18

I fell in with interesting persons who talked metaphysics and theology with me, though one would not have expected it in Jamaica. In this strange age of ours the spiritual atmosphere is more confused than at any period during the last eighteen hundred years. Men's hearts are failing them for fear, not knowing any longer where to rest. We look this way and that way, and catch at one another like drowning men. Go where you will, you find the same phenomena. Science grows, and observers are adding daily to our knowledge of the nature and structure of the material universe, but they tell us nothing, and can tell us nothing, of what we most want to know. They cannot tell us what our own nature is. They cannot tell us what God is, or what duty is. We had a belief once, in which, as in a boat, we floated safely on the unknown ocean; but the philosophers and critics have been boring holes in the timbers to examine the texture of the wood, and now it leaks at every one of them. We have to help ourselves in the best way that we can. Some strike out new ideas for themselves, others go back to the seven sages, and lay again for themselves the old eggs, which, after laborious incubation, will be addled as they were addled before. To my metaphysical friends in Jamaica the 'Light of Asia' had been shining amidst German dreams, and the moonlight of the Vedas had been illuminating the pessimism of Schopenhauer. So it is all round. Mr. – goes to Mount Carmel to listen for communications from Elijah; fashionable countesses to the shrine of Our Lady at Lourdes. 'Are you a Buddhist?' lisps the young lady in Mayfair to the partner with whom she is sitting out at a ball. 'It is so nice,' said a gentleman to me who has been since promoted to high office in an unfortunate colony, 'it is so nice to talk of such things to pretty girls, and it always ends in one way, you know.' Conversations on theology, at least between persons of opposite sex, ought to be interdicted by law for everyone under forty. But there are questions on which old people may be permitted to ask one another what they think, if it only be for mutual comfort in the general vacancy. We are born alone, we pass alone into the great darkness. When the curtain falls is the play over? or is a new act to commence? Are we to start again in a new sphere, carrying with us what we have gained in the discipline of our earthly trials? Are we to become again as we were before we came into this world, when eternity had not yet splintered into time, or the universal being dissolved into individual existences? For myself, I have long ceased to speculate on these subjects, being convinced that they have no bottom which can be reasoned out by the intellect. We are in a world where much can be learnt which affects our own and others' earthly welfare, and we had better leave the rest alone. Yet one listens and cannot choose but sympathise when anxious souls open out to you what is going on within them. A Spanish legend, showing with whom these inquiries began and with what result, is not without its value.

Jupiter, having made the world, proceeded to make animals to live in it. The ass was the earliest created. He looked about him. He looked at himself; and, as the habit of asses is, he asked himself what it all meant; what it was to be an ass, where did he come from, and what he was for? Not being able to discover, he applied to his maker. Jupiter told him that he was made to be the slave of another animal to be called Man. He was to carry men on his back, drag loads for them, and be their drudge. He was to live on thistles and straw, and to be beaten continually with sticks and ropes'-ends. The ass complained. He said that he had done nothing to deserve so hard a fate. He had not asked to be born, and he would rather not have been born. He inquired how long this life, or whatever it was, had to continue. Jupiter said it had to last thirty years. The poor ass was in consternation. If Jupiter would reduce the thirty to ten he undertook to be patient, to be a good servant, and to do his work patiently. Jupiter reflected and consented, and the ass retired grateful and happy.

The dog, who had been born meanwhile, heard what had passed. He, too, went to Jupiter with the same question. He learnt that he also was a slave to men. In the day he was to catch their game for them, but was not to eat it himself. At night he was to be chained by a ring and to lie awake to guard their houses. His food was to be bones and refuse. Like the ass he was to have had thirty years of it, but on petition they were similarly exchanged for ten.

The monkey came next. His function, he was told, was to mimic humanity, to be led about by a string, and grimace and dance for men's amusement. He also remonstrated at the length of time, and obtained the same favour.

Last came the man himself. Conscious of boundless desires and, as he imagined, of boundless capabilities, he did not inquire what he was, or what he was to do. Those questions had been already answered by his vanity. He did not come to ask for anything, but to thank Jupiter for having created so glorious a being and to ascertain for how many ages he might expect to endure. The god replied that thirty years was the term allotted to all personal existences.

'Only thirty years!' he exclaimed. 'Only thirty years for such capacities as mine. Thirty years will be gone like a dream. Extend them! oh, extend them, gracious Jupiter, that I may have leisure to use the intellect which thou hast given me, search into the secrets of nature, do great and glorious actions, and serve and praise thee, O my creator! longer and more worthily.'

The lip of the god curled lightly, and again he acquiesced. 'I have some spare years to dispose of,' he said, 'of which others of my creatures have begged to be relieved. You shall have thirty years of your own. From thirty to fifty you shall have the ass's years, and labour and sweat for your support. From fifty to seventy you shall have the dog's years, and take care of the stuff, and snarl and growl at what younger men are doing. From seventy to ninety you shall have the monkey's years, and smirk and grin and make yourself ridiculous. After that you may depart.'

I was going on to Cuba. The commodore had insisted on my spending my last days with him at Port Royal. He undertook to see me on board the steamer as it passed out of the harbour. I have already described his quarters. The naval station has no colonial character except the climate, and is English entirely. The officers are the servants of the Admiralty, not of the colonial government. Their interests are in their profession. They look to promotion in other parts of the world, and their functions are on the ocean and not on the land. The commodore is captain of the guardship; but he has a commander under him and he resides on shore. Everyone employed in the dockyard, even down to his own household, is rated on the ship's books, consequently they are all men. There is not a woman servant about the place, save his lady's ladies'-maid. His daughters learn to take care of themselves, and are not brought up to find everything done for them. His boys are about the world in active service growing into useful and honourable manhood.

Thus the whole life tastes of the element to which it belongs, and is salt and healthy as the ocean itself. It was not without its entertainments. The officers of the garrison were to give a ball. The young ladies of Kingston are not afraid of the water, cross the harbour in the steam launches, dance till the small hours, return in the dark, drive their eight or ten miles home, and think nothing of it. In that climate, night is pleasanter to be abroad in than day. I could not stay to be present, but I was in the midst of the preparations, and one afternoon there was a prospect of a brilliant addition to the party. A yacht steamed inside the Point – long, narrow, and swift as a torpedo boat. She carried American colours, and we heard that she was the famous vessel of the yet more famous Mr. Vanderbilt, who was on board with his family. Here was an excitement! The commodore was ordered to call the instant that she was anchored. Invitations were prepared – all was eagerness. Alas! she did not anchor at all. She learnt from the pilot that, the small-pox being in Jamaica, if any of her people landed there she would be quarantined in the other islands, and to the disappointment of everyone, even of myself, who would gladly have seen the great millionaire, she turned about and went off again to sea.

I was very happy at the commodore's – low spirits not being allowed in that wholesome element. Decks were washed every morning as if at sea, i.e. every floor was scrubbed and scoured. It was an eternal washing day, lines of linen flying in the brisk sea breeze. The commodore was always busy making work if none had been found for him. He took me one day to see the rock spring where Rodney watered his fleet, as the great admiral describes in one of his letters, and from which Port Royal now draws its supply. The spring itself bursts full and clear out of the limestone rock close to the shore, four or five miles from Kingston. There is a natural basin, slightly improved by art, from which the old conduit pipes carry the stream to the sea. The tug comes daily, fills its tanks, and returns. The commodore has tidied up the place, planted shrubs, and cleared away the bush; but half the water at least, is still allowed to leak away, and turns the hollow below into an unwholesome swamp. It may be a necessity, but it is also a misfortune, that the officers at distant stations hold their appointments for so short a term. By the time that they have learnt what can or ought to be done, they are sent elsewhere, and their successor has to begin over again. The water in this spring, part of which is now worse than wasted and the rest carried laboriously in a vessel to Port Royal to be sold by measure to the people there, might be all conducted thither by pipes at small cost and trouble, were the commodore to remain a few years longer at the Jamaica Station.

He is his own boatman, and we had some fine sails about the lagoon – the breeze always fresh and the surface always smooth. The shallow bays swarm with small fish, and it was a pretty thing to watch the pelicans devouring them. They gather in flocks, sweep and wheel in the air, and when they plunge they strike the water with a violence which one would expect would break their wings. They do not dive, but seize their prey with their long, broad bills, and seem never to miss.

Between the ships and the barracks, there are many single men in Port Royal, for whom amusement has to be found if they are to be kept from drink. A canteen is provided for them, with bowling alley, tennis court, beer in moderation, and a reading room, for such as like it, with reviews and magazines and newspapers They can fish if they want sport, and there are sharks in plenty a cable's length from shore; but the schoolmaster has been abroad, and tastes run in more refined directions. The blacks of Tobago acted 'The Merchant of Venice' before Governor S – . The ships' companies of the gunboats at Port Royal gave a concert while I was there. The officers took no part, and left the men to manage it as they pleased. The commodore brought his party; the garrison, the crews of the other ships, and stray visitors came, and the large room at the canteen was completely full. The taste of the audience was curious. Dibdin was off the boards altogether, and favour was divided between the London popular comic song and the sentimental – no longer with any flavour of salt about it, but the sentimental spoony and sickly. 'She wore a wreath of roses' called out the highest enthusiasm. One of the performers recited a long poem of his own about Mary Stuart, 'the lovely and unfortunate.' Then followed the buffoonery; and this was at least genuine rough and tumble if there was little wit in it. A lad capered about on a tournament horse which flung him every other moment. Various persons pretended to be drunk, and talked and staggered as drunken men do. Then there was a farce, how conceived and by what kind of author I was puzzled to make out. A connoisseur of art is looking for Greek antiques. He has heard that a statue has recently been discovered of 'Ajax quarrelling with his mother-in-law.' What Ajax was quarrelling about or who his mother-in-law might be does not appear. A couple of rogues, each unknown to the other, practise on the connoisseur's credulity. Each promises him the statue; each dresses up a confederate on a pedestal with a modern soldier's helmet and a blanket to represent a Greek hero. The two figures are shown to him. One of them, I forget how, contrived to pass as Ajax; the other had turned into Hercules doing something to the Stymphalides. At last they get tired of standing to be looked at, jump down, and together knock over the connoisseur. Ajax then turns on Hercules, who, of course, is ready for a row. They fight till they are tired, and then make it up over a whisky bottle.

So entirely new an aspect of the British tar took me by surprise, and I speculated whether the inventors and performers of this astonishing drama were an advance on the Ben Bunting type. I was, of course, inclined to say no, but my tendency is to dislike changes, and I allow for it. The commodore said that in certain respects there really was an advance. The seamen fell into few scrapes, and they did not get drunk so often. This was a hardy assertion of the commodore, as a good many of them were drunk at that moment. I could see myself that they were better educated. If Ben Bunting had been asked who Ajax and Hercules were, he would have taken them to be three-deckers which were so named, and his knowledge would have gone no farther. Whether these tars of the new era are better sailors and braver and truer men is another question. They understand their rights much better, if that does any good to them. The officers used to be treated with respect at all times and seasons. This is now qualified. When they are on duty, the men are as respectful as they used to be; when they are off duty, the commodore himself is only old H – .

We returned to the dockyard in a boat under a full moon, the guardship gleaming white in the blue midnight and the phosphorescent water flashing under the oars. The 'Dee,' which was to take me to Havana, was off Port Royal on the following morning. The commodore put me on board in his gig, with the white ensign floating over the stern. I took leave of him with warm thanks for his own and his family's hospitable entertainment of me. The screw went round – we steamed away out of the harbour, and Jamaica and the kind friends whom I had found there faded out of sight. Jamaica was the last of the English West India Islands which I visited. I was to see it again, but I will here set down the impressions which had been left upon me by what I had seen there and seen in the Antilles.

CHAPTER XVII

Present state of Jamaica – Test of progress – Resources of the island – Political alternatives – Black supremacy and probable consequences – The West Indian problem.

As I was stepping into the boat at Port Royal, a pamphlet was thrust into my hand, which I was entreated to read at my leisure. It was by some discontented white of the island – no rare phenomenon, and the subject of it was the precipitate decline in the value of property there. The writer, unlike the planters, insisted that the people were taxed in proportion to their industry. There were taxes on mules, on carts, on donkeys, all bearing on the small black proprietors, whose ability to cultivate was thus checked, and who were thus deliberately encouraged in idleness. He might have added, although he did not, that while both in Jamaica and Trinidad everyone is clamouring against the beetroot bounty which artificially lowers the price of sugar, the local councils in these two islands try to counteract the effect and artificially raise the price of sugar by an export duty on their own produce – a singular method of doing it which, I presume, admits of explanation. My pamphleteer was persuaded that all the world were fools, and that he and his friends were the only wise ones: again a not uncommon occurrence in pamphleteers. He demanded the suppression of absenteeism; he demanded free trade. In exchange for the customs duties, which were to be abolished, he demanded a land tax – the very mention of which, I had been told by others, drove the black proprietors whom he wished to benefit into madness. He wanted Home Rule. He wanted fifty things besides which I have forgotten, but his grand want of all was a new currency. Mankind, he thought, had been very mad at all periods of their history. The most significant illustration of their madness had been the selection of gold and silver as the medium of exchange. The true base of the currency was the land. The Government of Jamaica was to lend to every freeholder up to the mortgage value of his land in paper notes, at 5 per cent. interest, the current rate being at present 8 per cent. The notes so issued, having the land as their security, would be in no danger of depreciation, and they would flow over the sugar estates like an irrigating stream. On the produce of sugar the fate of the island depended.

On the produce of sugar? And why not on the produce of a fine race of men? The prospects of Jamaica, the prospects of all countries, depend not on sugar or on any form or degree of material wealth, but on the characters of the men and women whom they are breeding and rearing. Where there are men and women of a noble nature, the rest will go well of itself; where these are not, there will be no true prosperity though the sugar hogsheads be raised from thousands into millions. The colonies are interesting only as offering homes where English people can increase and multiply; English of the old type with simple habits, who do not need imported luxuries. There is room even in the West Indies for hundreds of thousands of them if they can be contented to lead human lives, and do not go there to make fortunes which they are to carry home with them. The time may not be far off when men will be sick of making fortunes, sick of being ground to pattern in the commonplace mill-wheel of modern society; sick of a state of things which blights and kills simple and original feeling, which makes us think and speak and act under the tyranny of general opinion, which masquerades as liberty and means only submission to the newspapers. I can conceive some modern men may weary of all this, and retire from it like the old ascetics, not as they did into the wilderness, but behind their own walls and hedges, shutting out the world and its noises, to inquire whether after all they have really immortal souls, and, if they have, what ought to be done about them. The West India Islands, with their inimitable climate and soil and prickly pears ad libitum to make fences with, would be fine places for such recluses. Failing these ideal personages, there is work enough of the common sort to create wholesome prosperity. There are oranges to be grown, and pines and plantains, and coffee and cocoa, and rice and indigo and tobacco, not to speak of the dollars which my American friend found in the bamboos, and of the further dollars which other Americans will find in the untested qualities of thousands of other productions. Here are opportunities for innocent industrious families, where children can be brought up to be manly and simple and true and brave as their fathers were brought up, or as their fathers expressed it 'in the nurture and admonition of the Lord;' while such neighbours as their dark brothers-in-law might have a chance of a rise in life, in the only sense in which a 'rise' can be of real benefit to them. These are the objects which statesmen who have the care and conduct of a nation's welfare ought to set before themselves, and unfortunately they are the last which are remembered in countries which are popularly governed. There is a clamour for education in such countries, but education means to them only the sharpening of the faculties for the competitive race which is called progress. In democracies no one man is his brother's keeper. Each lives and struggles to make his own way and his own position. All that is insisted on is that there shall be a fair stage and that every lad shall learn the use of the weapons which will enable him to fight his own way. Ἀρετὴ, 'manliness,' the most essential of all acquisitions and the hardest to cultivate, as Aristotle observed long ago, is assumed in democracies as a matter of course. Of ἀρετὴ a moderate quantity (ὁποσονοῦν) would do, and in Aristotle's opinion this was the rock on which the Greek republics foundered. Their ἀρετὴ did not come as a matter of course, and they lost it, and the Macedonians and the Romans ate them up.

From this point of view political problems, and the West Indian among them, present unusual aspects. Looking to the West Indies only, we took possession of those islands when they were of supreme importance in our great wrestle with Spain and France. We were fighting then for the liberties of the human race. The Spaniards had destroyed the original Carib and Indian inhabitants. We induced thousands of our own fellow-countrymen to venture life and fortune in the occupation of our then vital conquests. For two centuries we furnished them with black servants whom we purchased on the African coast and carried over and sold there, making our own profits out of the trade, and the colonists prospered themselves and poured wealth and strength into the empire of which they were then an integral part. A change passed over the spirit of the age. Liberty assumed a new dress. We found slavery to be a crime; we released our bondmen; we broke their chains as we proudly described it to ourselves; we compensated the owners, so far as money could compensate, for the entire dislocation of a state of society which we had ourselves created; and we trusted to the enchantment of liberty to create a better in its place. We had delivered our own souls; we had other colonies to take our emigrants. Other lands under our open trade would supply us with the commodities for which we had hitherto been dependent on the West Indies. They ceased to be of commercial, they ceased to be of political, moment to us, and we left them to their own resources. The modern English idea is that everyone must take care of himself. Individuals or aggregates of individuals have the world before them, to open the oyster or fail to open it according to their capabilities. The State is not to help them; the State is not to interfere with them unless for political or party reasons it happens to be convenient. As we treat ourselves we treat our colonies. Those who have gone thither have gone of their own free will, and must take the consequences of their own actions. We allow them no executional privileges which we do not claim for ourselves. They must stand, if they are to stand, by their own strength. If they cannot stand they must fall. This is our notion of education in 'manliness,' and for immediate purposes answers well enough. Individual enterprise, unendowed but unfettered, built the main buttresses of the British colonial empire. Australians and New Zealanders are English and Scotchmen who have settled at the antipodes where there is more room for them than at home. They are the same people as we are, and they have the same privileges as we have. They are parts of one and the same organic body as branches from the original trunk. The branch does not part from the trunk, but it discharges its own vital functions by its own energy, and we no more desire to interfere than London desires to interfere with Manchester.

So it stands with us where the colonists are of our race, with the same character and the same objects; and, as I said, the system answers. Under no other relations could we continue a united people. But it does not answer – it has failed wherever we have tried it – when the majority of the inhabitants of countries of which for one or other reason we have possessed ourselves, and of which we keep possession, are not united to us by any of these natural bonds, where they have been annexed by violence or otherwise been forced under our flag. It has failed conspicuously in Ireland. We know that it would fail in the East Indies if we were rash enough to venture the experiment. Self-government in connection with the British Empire implies a desire or a willingness in those who are so left to themselves that the connection shall continue. We have been so sanguine as to believe that the privilege of being British subjects is itself sufficient to secure their allegiance; that the liberties which we concede will not be used for purposes which we are unable to tolerate; that, being left to govern themselves, they will govern in harmony with English interests and according to English principles. The privilege is not estimated so highly. They go their own way and not our way, and therefore we must look facts in the face as they are, and not as we wish them to be. If we extend to Ireland the independence which only links us closer to Australia, Ireland will use it to break away from us. If we extend it to Bengal and Madras and Bombay, we shall fling them into anarchy and bring our empire to an end. We cannot for our safety's sake part with Ireland. We do not mean to part with our Asiatic dominions. The reality of the relation in both cases is the superior force of England, and we must rely upon it and need not try to conceal that we do, till by the excellence of our administration we have converted submission into respect and respect into willingness for union. This may be a long process and a difficult one. If we choose to maintain our empire, however, we must pay the price for empire, and it is wiser, better, safer, in all cases to admit the truth and act upon it. Yet Englishmen so love liberty that they struggle against confessing what is disagreeable to them. Many of us would give Ireland, would give India Home Rule, and run the risk of what would happen, and only a probability, which reaches certainty, of the consequences to be expected to follow prevents us from unanimously agreeing. About the West Indies we do not care very earnestly. Nothing seriously alarming can happen there. So much, therefore, for the general policy of leaving them to help themselves out of their difficulties we have adopted completely. The corollary that they must govern themselves also on their own responsibilities we hesitate as yet to admit completely; but we do not recognise that any responsibility for their failing condition rests on us; and the inclination certainly, and perhaps the purpose, is to throw them entirely upon themselves at the earliest moment. Cuba sends representatives to the Cortes at Madrid, Martinique and Guadaloupe to the Assembly at Paris. In the English islands, being unwilling to govern without some semblance of a constitution, we try tentatively varieties of local boards and local councils, admitting the elective principle but not daring to trust it fully; creating hybrid constitutions, so contrived as to provoke ill feeling where none would exist without them, and to make impossible any tolerable government which could actively benefit the people. We cannot intend that arrangements the effects of which are visible so plainly in the sinking fortunes of our own kindred there, are to continue for ever. We suppose that we cannot go back in these cases. It is to be presumed, therefore, that we mean to go forward, and in doing so I venture to think myself that we shall be doing equal injustice both to our own race and to the blacks, and we shall bring the islands into a condition which will be a reproach and scandal to the empire of which they will remain a dishonoured part. The slave trade was an imperial monopoly, extorted by force, guaranteed by treaties, and our white West Indian interest was built up in connection with and in reliance upon it. We had a right to set the slaves free; but the payment of the indemnity was no full acquittance of our obligations for the condition of a society which we had ourselves created. We have no more right to make the emancipated slave his master's master in virtue of his numbers than we have a right to lay under the heel of the Catholics of Ireland the Protestant minority whom we planted there to assist us in controlling them.

It may be said that we have no intention of doing anything of the kind, that no one at present dreams of giving a full colonial constitution to the West Indian Islands. They are allowed such freedom as they are capable of using; they can be allowed more as they are better educated and more fit for it, &c. &c.

One knows all that, and one knows what it is worth in the half-elected, half-nominated councils. Either the nominated members are introduced merely as a drag upon the wheel, and are instructed to yield in the end to the demands of the representative members, or they are themselves the representatives of the white minority. If the first, the majority rule already; if the second, such constitutions are contrived ingeniously to create the largest amount of irritation, and to make impossible, as long as they last, any form of effective and useful government. Therefore they cannot last, and are not meant to last. A principle once conceded develops with the same certainty with which a seed grows when it is sown. In the English world, as it now stands, there is no middle alternative between self-government and government by the Crown, and the cause of our reluctance to undertake direct charge of the West Indies is because such undertaking carries responsibility along with it. If they are brought so close to us we shall be obliged to exert ourselves, and to rescue them from a condition which would be a reproach to us.