that, while the blacks would oppose it unanimously, the feeling, if it existed at all among the whites, was confined as yet to a very few persons. They had been English for 230 years, and the large majority of them wished to remain English. There had been suffering among them; but there had been suffering in other places besides Jamaica. Better times might perhaps be coming with the opening of the Darien canal, when Kingston might hope to become again the centre of a trade. Of the negroes, both men and women, Mr. Walker spoke extremely favourably. They were far less indolent than they were supposed to be; they were settling on the waste lands, acquiring property, growing yams and oranges, and harming no one; they had no grievance left; they knew it, and were perfectly contented.

As Mr. Walker was an official, I did not ask him about the working of the recent changes in the constitution; nor could he have properly answered me if I had. The state of things is briefly this: Jamaica, after the first settlement, received a parliamentary form of government, modelled on that of Ireland, the colonial liberties being restricted by a law analogous to Poynings' Act. The legislature, so constructed, of course represented the white interest only and was entirely composed of whites. It remained substantially unaltered till 1853, when modifications were made which admitted coloured men to the suffrage, though with so high a franchise as to be almost exclusive. It became generally felt that the franchise would have to be extended. A popular movement, led by Mr. Gordon, who was a member of the legislature, developed into a riot, into bloodshed and panic. Gordon was hanged by a court-martial, and the assembly, aware that, if allowed to exist any longer, it could exist only with the broad admission of the negro vote, pronounced its own dissolution, surrendered its powers to the Crown, and represented formally that nothing but a strong government could prevent the island from lapsing into the condition of Hayti.'

The surrender was accepted. Jamaica was administered till within the last four years by a governor, officials, and council

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all nominated by the Queen. No dissatisfaction had been expressed, and the blacks at least had enjoyed a prosperity and tranquillity which had been unbroken by a single disturbance. If the island has suffered, it has suffered from causes with which political dissatisfaction has had nothing to do, and which, therefore, political changes cannot remove. In 1884 Mr. Gladstone's Government, for reasons which I have not been able to ascertain, revived suddenly the representative system; constructed a council composed equally of nominated and of elected members, and placed the franchise so low as to include practically every negro peasant who possessed a hut and a garden. So long as the Crown retains and exercises its power of nomination, no worse results can ensue than the inevitable discontent when the votes of the elected members are disregarded or overborne. But to have ventured so important an alteration with the intention of leaving it without further extension would have been an act of gratuitous folly, of which it would be impossible to imagine an English cabinet to have been capable. It is therefore assumed and understood to have been no more than an initial step towards passing over the management of Jamaica to the black constituencies. It has been so construed in the other islands, and was the occasion of the agitation in Trinidad which I observed when I was there.

My own opinion as to the wisdom of such an experiment matters little but I have a right to say that neither blacks nor whites have asked for it; that no one who knows anything of the West Indies and wishes them to remain English sincerely asked for it; that no one has agitated for it save a few newspaper writers and politicians whom it would raise into consequence. If tried at all, it will be tried either with a deliberate intention of cutting Jamaica free from us altogether, or else in deference to English political superstitions, which attribute supernatural virtues to the exercise of the franchise, and assume that a form of self-government which suits us tolerably at home will be equally beneficial in all countries and under all conditions.

CHAPTER XIII.

The English mails-Irish agitation-Two kinds of colonies-- Indian administration-How far applicable in the West Indies-Land at Kingston -Government House-Dinner party-Interesting officer-Majuba Hill -Mountain station-Kingston curiosities-Tobacco-Valley in the Blue Mountains.

I AM reminded as I write of an adventure which befell Archbishop Whately soon after his promotion to the see of Dublin. On arriving in Ireland he saw that the people were miserable. The cause, in his mind, was their ignorance of political economy, of which he had himself written what he regarded as an excellent manual. An Irish translation of this manual he conceived would be the best possible medicine, and he commissioned a native Scripture reader to make one. To insure correctness he required the reader to retranslate to him what he had written line by line. He observed that the man as he read turned sometimes two pages at a time. The text went on correctly, but his quick eye perceived that something was written on the intervening leaves. He insisted on knowing what it was, and at last extorted an explanation, 'Your Grace, me and my comrade conceived that it was mighty dry reading, so we have just interposed now and then a bit of a pawem, to help it forward, your Grace.' I am myself imitating the translators, and making sandwiches out of politics and local descriptions.

There were

We had brought the English mails with us. letters to read which had been in the ship with us, though out of our reach. There were the newspapers to read. They told me nothing but the weary round of Irish outrages and the rival remedies of Tory or Radical politicians who cared for Ireland less than I did, and considered only how to trim their sails to keep in office or to get it. How sick one is of all that! Half-a-dozen times at least in Anglo-Irish history things have come to the same point. 'All Ireland cannot govern the Earl

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of Kildare,' said someone in Henry VIII.'s privy council. Then answered Wolsey, in the tone of Mr. Gladstone, 'Let the Earl of Kildare govern all Ireland.' Elizabeth wished to conciliate. Shan O'Neil, Desmond, Tyrone promised in turn to rule Ireland in loyal union with England under Irish ideas. Lord Grey, who was for 'a Mahometan conquest,' was censured and 'girded at :' yet the end was always broken heads. From 1641 to 1649 an Irish parliament sat at Kilkenny, and Charles I. and the Tories dreamt of an alliance between Irish popery and English loyalism. Charles lost his head, and Cromwell had to make an end of Irish self-government at Drogheda and Wexford. Tyrconnell and James II. were to repeal the Act of Settlement and restore the forfeited lands to the old owners. The end of that came at the Boyne and at Aghrim. Grattan would remake the Irish nation. The English Liberals sent Lord Fitzwilliam to help him, and the Saxon mastiff and the Celtic wolf were to live as brothers evermore. The result has been always the same; the wretched country inflated with a dream of independence, and then trampled into mud again. So it has been. So it will be again. Ireland cannot be independent, for England is stronger than she, and cannot permit it. Yet nothing less will satisfy her. And so there has been always a weary round of fruitless concessions leading to demands which cannot be gratified, and in the end we are driven back upon force, which the miserable people lack the courage to encounter like men. Mr. Gladstone's experiment differs only from its antecedents because in the past the English friends of Irish liberty had a real hope that a reconciliation was possible. They believed in what they were trying to do. The present enterprise is the creation of parliamentary faction. I have never met any person acquainted with the minds and motives of the public men of the day who would not confess to me that, if it had suited the interests of the leaders of the present Radical party to adopt the Irish policy of the Long Parliament, their energy and their eloquence would have been equally at the service of the Protestant ascendency, which they have now denounced as a upas tree.

They even ask you with wide eyes what else you would expect?

Mr. Sexton says that if England means to govern Ireland she must keep an army there as large as she keeps in India. England could govern Ireland in perfect peace, without an army at all, if there was no faction in the House of Commons. The spirit of party will either destroy the British Empire, or the British nation will make an end of party government on its present lines. There are sounds in the air like the cracking of the ice of the Neva at the incoming of spring, as if a nobler purpose was at last awaking in us. In a few more years there may be no more Radicals and no more Conservatives, and the nation will be all in all.

Here is the answer to the question so often asked, What is the use of the colonies to us? The colonies are a hundredfold multiplication of the area of our own limited islands. In taking possession of so large a portion of the globe, we have enabled ourselves to spread and increase, and carry our persons, our language and our liberties, into all climates and continents. We overflow at home; there are too many of us here already; and if no lands belonged to us but Great Britain and Ireland, we should become a small insignificant power beside the mighty nations which are forming around us. There is space for hundreds of millions of us in the territories of which we and our fathers have possessed ourselves. In Canada, Australia, New Zealand we add to our numbers and our resources. There are so many more Englishmen in the world able to hold their own against the mightiest of their rivals. And we have another function, such as the Romans had. The sections of men on this globe are unequally gifted. Some are strong and can govern themselves; some are weak and are the prey of foreign invaders or internal anarchy; and freedom, which all desire, is only attainable by weak nations when they are subject to the rule of others who are at once powerful and just. This was the duty which fell to the Latin race two thousand years ago. In these modern times it has fallen to ours, and in the discharge of it the highest features in the English