The English in the West Indies Part 17

Give the public time, and I believe this to be true; general opinion does in the long run form a right estimate of most persons and of most things. As surely its immediate impulses are almost invariably in directions which it afterwards regrets and repudiates, and therefore const.i.tutions which have no surer basis than the popular judgment, as it shifts from year to year or parliament to parliament, are built on foundations looser than sand.

In concluding this book I have a few more words to say on the subject, so ardently canva.s.sed, of Imperial federation. It seems so easy. You have only to form a new parliament in which the colonies shall be represented according to numbers, while each colony will retain its own for its own local purposes. Local administration is demanded everywhere; England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, can each have theirs, and the vexed question of Home Rule can be disposed of in the reconstruction of the whole. A central parliament can then be formed in which the parts can all be represented in proportion to their number; and a cabinet can be selected out of this for the management of Imperial concerns. Nothing more is necessary; the thing will be done.

So in a hundred forms, but all on the same principle, schemes of Imperial union have fallen under my eye. I should myself judge from experience of what democratically elected parliaments are growing into, that at the first session of such a body the satellites would fly off into s.p.a.ce, shattered perhaps themselves in the process. We have parliaments enough already, and if no better device can be found than by adding another to the number, the rash spirit of innovation has not yet gone far enough to fling our ancient const.i.tution into the crucible on so wild a chance.

Imperial federation, as it is called, is far away, if ever it is to be realised at all. If it is to come it will come of itself, brought about by circ.u.mstances and silent impulses working continuously through many years unseen and unspoken of. It is conceivable that Great Britain and her scattered offspring, under the pressure of danger from without, or impelled by some general purpose, might agree to place themselves for a time under a single administrative head. It is conceivable that out of a combination so formed, if it led to a successful immediate result, some union of a closer kind might eventually emerge. It is not only conceivable, but it is entirely certain, that attempts made when no such occasion has arisen, by politicians ambitious of distinguishing themselves, will fail, and in failing will make the object that is aimed at more confessedly unattainable than it is now.

The present relation between the mother country and her self-governed colonies is partly that of parent and children who have grown to maturity and are taking care of themselves, partly of independent nations in friendly alliance, partly as common subjects of the same sovereign, whose authority is exercised in each by ministers of its own.

Neither of these a.n.a.logies is exact, for the position alters from year to year. So much the better. The relation which now exists cannot be more than provisional; let us not try to shape it artificially, after a closet-made pattern. The threads of interest and kindred must be left to spin themselves in their own way. Meanwhile we can work together heartily and with good will where we need each other's co-operation.

Difficulties will rise, perhaps, from time to time, but we can meet them as they come, and we need not antic.i.p.ate them. If we are to be politically one, the organic fibres which connect us are as yet too immature to bear a strain. All that we can do, and all that at present we ought to try, is to act generously whenever our a.s.sistance can be of use. The disposition of English statesmen to draw closer to the colonies is of recent growth. They cannot tell, and we cannot tell, how far it indicates a real change of att.i.tude or is merely a pa.s.sing mood. One thing, however, we ought to bear in mind, that the colonies sympathise one with another, and that wrong or neglect in any part of the Empire does not escape notice. The larger colonies desire to know what the recent professions of interest are worth, and they look keenly at our treatment of their younger brothers who are still in our power. They are practical, they attend to results, they guard jealously their own privileges, but they are not so enamoured of const.i.tutional theory that they will patiently see their fellow-countrymen in less favoured situations swamped under the votes of the coloured races. Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, will not be found enthusiastic for the extension of self-government in the West Indies, when they know that it means the extinction of their own white brothers who have settled there.

The placing English colonists at the mercy of coloured majorities they will resent as an injury to themselves; they will not look upon it as an extension of a generous principle, but as an act of airy virtue which costs us nothing, and at the bottom is but carelessness and indifference.

We imagine that we have seen the errors of our old colonial policy, and that we are in no danger of repeating them. Yet in the West Indies we are treading over again the too familiar road. The Anglo-Irish colonists in 1705 pet.i.tioned for a union with Great Britain. A union would have involved a share in British trade; it was refused therefore, and we gave them the penal laws instead. They set up manufactures, built ships, and tried to raise a commerce of their own. We laid them under disabilities which ruined their enterprises, and when they were resentful and became troublesome we turned round to the native Irish and made a virtue of protecting them against our own people whom we had injured. When the penal laws ceased to be useful to us, we did not allow them to be executed. We played off Catholic against Protestant while we were sacrificing both to our own jealousy. Having made the government of the island impossible for those whom we had planted there to govern it, we emanc.i.p.ate the governed, and to conciliate them we allow them to appropriate the possessions of their late masters. And we have not conciliated the native Irish; it was impossible that we should; we have simply armed them with the only weapons which enable them to revenge their wrongs upon us.

The history of the West Indies is a precise parallel. The islands were necessary to our safety in our struggle with France and Spain. The colonists held them chiefly for us as a garrison, and we in turn gave the colonists their slaves. The white settlers ruled as in Ireland, the slaves obeyed, and all went swimmingly. Times changed at home. Slavery became unpopular; it was abolished; and, with a generosity for which we never ceased to applaud ourselves, we voted an indemnity of twenty millions to the owners. We imagined that we had acquitted our consciences, but such debts are not discharged by payments of money. We had introduced the slaves into the islands for our own advantage; in setting them free we revolutionised society. We remained still responsible for the social consequences, and we did not choose to remember it. The planters were guilty only, like the Irish landlords, of having ceased to be necessary to us. We practised our virtues vicariously at their expense: we had the praise and honour, they had the suffering. They begged that the emanc.i.p.ation might be gradual; our impatience to clear our reputation refused to wait. Their system of cultivation being deranged, they pet.i.tioned for protection against the compet.i.tion of countries where slavery continued. The request was natural, but could not be listened to because to grant it might raise infinitesimally the cost of the British workman's breakfast. They struggled on, and even when a new rival rose in the beetroot sugar they refused to be beaten. The European powers, to save their beetroot, went on to support it with a bounty. Against the purse of foreign governments the st.u.r.diest individuals cannot compete. Defeated in a fight which had become unfair, the planters looked, and looked in vain, to their own government for help. Finding none, they turned to their kindred in the United States; and there, at last, they found a hand held out to them.

The Americans were willing, though at a loss of two millions and a half of revenue, to admit the poor West Indians to their own market. But a commercial treaty was necessary; and a treaty could not be made without the sanction of the English Government. The English Government, on some fine-drawn crotchet, refused to colonies which were weak and helpless what they would have granted without a word if demanded by Victoria or New South Wales, whose resentment they feared. And when the West Indians, hara.s.sed, desperate, and half ruined, cried out against the enormous injustice, in the fear that their indignation might affect their allegiance and lead them to seek admission into the American Union, we extend the franchise among the blacks, on whose hostility to such a measure we know that we can rely.

There is no occasion to suspect responsible English politicians of any sinister purpose in what they have done or not done, or suspect them, indeed, of any purpose at all. They act from day to day under the pressure of each exigency as it rises, and they choose the course which is least directly inconvenient. But the result is to have created in the Antilles and Jamaica so many fresh Irelands, and I believe that British colonists the world over will feel together in these questions. They will not approve; rather they will combine to condemn the betrayal of their own fellow-countrymen. If England desires her colonies to rally round her, she must deserve their affection and deserve their respect.

She will find neither one nor the other if she carelessly sacrifices her own people in any part of the world to fear or convenience. The magnetism which will bind them to her must be found in herself or nowhere.

Perhaps nowhere! Perhaps if we look to the real origin of all that has gone wrong with us, of the policy which has flung Ireland back into anarchy, which has weakened our influence abroad, which has ruined the oldest of our colonies, and has made the continuance under our flag of the great communities of our countrymen who are forming new nations in the Pacific a question of doubt and uncertainty, we shall find it in our own distractions, in the form of government which is fast developing into a civil war under the semblance of peace, where party is more than country, and a victory at the hustings over a candidate of opposite principles more glorious than a victory in the field over a foreign foe.

Society in republican Rome was so much interested in the faction fights of Clodius and Milo that it could hear with apathy of the destruction of Cra.s.sus and a Roman army. The senate would have sold Caesar to the Celtic chiefs in Gaul, and the modern English enthusiast would disintegrate the British Islands to purchase the Irish vote. Till we can rise into some n.o.bler sphere of thought and conduct we may lay aside the vision of a confederated empire.

Oh, England, model to thy inward greatness, Like little body with a mighty heart, What might'st thou do that honour would thee do Were all thy children kind and natural!

FOOTNOTES:

[17] I believe this to be the true meaning of [Greek: eummelies]. It is usually rendered, 'armed with a stout spear.'