THE WEST INDIES : THE NEGRO SINCE HIS EMANCIPATION.

 (From the London Review)

OF all the various regions that compose the British empire, none, perhaps, engage the interest of the imperial race at home less than their colonies in the West Indies. We feel little or no shame in confessing that our notions respecting the relative situation of Jamaica and Barbadoes are of the haziest kind. Indeed, it is not many years since even a Secretary of State spoke of Demerara as an island ; and the same delusion is often betrayed in perfect innocence by persons of more than ordinary information. The truth is that we are not very proud of our colonies in that quarter of the globe. The history of our dominion there has had but few passages on which the pride of patriotism can dwell with unalloyed complacency. The exploits by which these territories were added to our empire, have furnished bright pages to our military and naval annals ; and the Emancipation Act stands for all time a noble monument of national morality, but our pride in it is chequered with misgivings, and a wistful regret for the wealth and prosperity on the ruins of which it was reared. Associations of poverty and decay cling closely to the West Indies. They are as a house the glory of which has departed ; but the ruin that comes of altering duties on sugar is a prosaic and unpicturesque form of ruin. So we turn our eyes in another direction, and the less that is said about it the better. And when we do think of our countrymen in the broken-down sugar colonies, we compassionate them. We pity them that their lot has been cast in places where the beauty of scenery and the fertility of the soil are but poor compensation for all the perils that harass life—where, in the twinkling of an eye, a whole town is shot into its harbour by an earthquake, and ships henceforth sail over the church-steeple, till their turn comes of being whirled into space by a hurricane—where pestilence walks abroad night and day, and the same sun that awakens a household in the enjoyment of as much health as is compatible with such conditions of existence, at its setting leaves them all cold in their graves. Nor are we disposed to be harsh in our judgment, if unhappy exiles, whose lives hang by a thread, seek to forget, in loud and bitter complaints of their wrongs, and in endless potation of brandy-and-water, the inevitable hour when those who have survived all other chances shall be removed by the yellow fever to some land where they are, at least, believed to hope that "niggers" good or bad do not go.

From time to time, however, it happens that a mission, religious or secular, condemns a stranger fresh from home to temporary banishment in these dismal regions, where all save the spirit of man is inhospitable. He lives to tell the tale of what he has seen and heard ; and, encouraged by the congratulations of his friends at his unexpected return, gives to the world the experiences of six months or a year in the West Indies. Mr. Trollope's amusing book, " The West Indies and the Spanish Main," is probably fresh is the memory of many of our readers. Much of the ground over which he went has recently been trod by another and very different traveller—Mr. Underhill, an agent of the Baptist Missionary Society,— who has published his own account of the same group of colonies. The two accounts, taken together, give a tolerably complete picture of life in the West Indies. What was omitted by Mr. Trollope has been in the main supplied by Mr. Underhill; but the style of the one work is pretty much all that the other was not. Mr. Trollope's book was humorous and lively. Mr. Underhill's book, though it has many solid merits, is neither humourous nor lively. In respect of the circumstances of their missions, their habits of thought, their points of view, and, we may add, their religious opinions, the two writers seem to stand as wide asunder at the poles. Mr. Trollope travelled en gareol, was the guest and friend of the white officials and planters, saw things very much from their point of view, and (as he candidly owned) hates a Baptist like poison. Whereas Mr. Underhill had throughout his travels a "constant associate " in the person of "my dear Mrs. Underhill," lived and moved chiefly among the Dissenting pastors and their black and coloured flocks, collected their opinions, and, finally, is a Baptist missionary.

Mr. Underhill's tour "was undertaken at the request of the treasurer and committee of the Baptist Missionary Society. Its object was primarily to investigate the religious condition of the numerous Bapist churches, which have been formed in the islands of the West, especially as that condition has been affected by the Act of Emancipation." and he adds that he "cannot doubt that the evidence here collected will satisfy both the friends of Christian missions and the philanthropist, that their efforts have not been made in vain; that the creoles of the West are not deserving of the reproaches which have been of late so freely cast upon their character, as wanting in industry and intelligence." It would be too much to expect that this gentleman's estimate of men and things should take no tinge from the peculiar tenets and discipline of the sect to which he belongs ; but, to do him justice, there is conclusive evidence of a wish to be fair, of readiness to listen to both sides of a vexed question, and of a genuine desire to discover what real progress, moral and intellectual, has been made by the negroes since their emancipation. He alludes more than once to a very prevalent conviction among the planters, that Baptist ministers have often been the active cause of discontent and disaffection among the labouring classes in the West Indies. The feud between the planters and Dissenting ministers is one of long standing. To the latter belongs the honour of having striven to Christianise the slaves at a time when the Church of England, listless and supine, made no effort to raise them from the depths of degradation in which it suited the policy and the passions of the masters to keep them but the missionary zeal of Dissenters awoke the suspicions and the hatred of the planters, who saw in their labours the "thin end of a wedge " that would broaden into emancipation. And for a while the cause of the Dissenters wore the dignity and the glory which persecution alone can give. With the connivance, if not the express approval of magistrates, who were also planters, their chapels were razed to the ground, their ministers ill-treated and driven away, the slaves among them cruelly punished, and their congregations compelled to meet for prayer by night in deep ravines and secret caves. From such an honourable source may flow much of the popularity of Dissent among the lower orders ; but, unless the Baptist ministers and their brethren of the London Missionary Society are very much belied, that same dependence on the voluntary contributions of their followers, which Mr. Underhill vaunts as the best incentive and the surest pledge of zeal, has too often led them to pander to all that is vain, jealous, and restless in the nature of their black sheep. It has too often made of them journalists and political intriguers, who have not scrupled, for private ends, to set race against race ; and this is what the planters mean when they use strong language about the Baptists.

Jamaica, of all the islands in the globe, with the single exception, perhaps, of Java, has the richest gifts of nature ; and, of all without exception, it now exhibits the saddest spectacle of ruin and departed splendour. Half the sugar estates, and more than half the coffee plantations in the island, it is said, are abandoned and "ruinate." But such as the colony now is, it is, on the whole, the best field for noting the moral condition and tendencies of the emancipated slave ; and the events that are passing on the other side of the Atlantic make the moment opportune for taking stock of our own "chattels." Behind the golden hopes of conquest and a restored Union, the "everlasting nigger" looms very black in the vision of the Northerners. We paid twenty millions sterling to emancipate half a million of slaves ; and that, perhaps, is the least part of what they have cost us. But the Federal Government stands pledged, if successful in the present war, somehow to emancipate more than four million slaves. And what then? Rather than endure their hated presence within the pale of the Union, the costliest schemes of expulsion and colonisation are regarded with favour in the Free States. The intense antipathy to colour in those States is matter of universal notoriety. Here in England, where we pass a few negroes in the street, or are occasionally told to admire a black lion at a conversazione, we denounce this antipathy with all our eloquence as irrational, illiberal, and unchristian. So it is, no doubt ; but, unhappily, wherever the white races have lived side by side with the black and coloured, this feeling has always shown itself ; nor are there any symptoms of its decline in the communities where it exists. And it is uniformly most intense where the black and coloured are seen in a state of freedom; and this may be owing to the fact that "your Sybarite negro," as Mr. Trollope remarked, " when closely looked at, is not a pleasing object. Distance may doubtless lend enchantment to the view." Seen, indeed, through this rosy medium, he is still the darling of the Anti-Slavery Society. It is in his behalf that they have persistently opposed every effort of the planter to supply the crying want of labour by emigration from India and China. Most manfully has the society fought what is now, we trust, the finally vanquished cause of protection to native sloth and idleness.

Knowing for whose especial information Mr. Underhill's tour was undertaken, we were quite prepared to find in his notes of travel a rich collection of conversions and other spiritual experiences which Christian negroes are ever ready to pour into sympathetic ears. Their groans at the recollection of the fallen state in which they once lay, the ejaculations of comfort which their regenerate condition draws from them, and their Jeremiads over "backsliders," are faithfully recorded as evidence of the awakening of a true spiritual life among them. We sincerely hope that these edifying utterances are all that Mr. Underhill takes them to be ; but unluckily we know that the negroes are adepts in learning the use of scripture language without being penetrated with its spirit in practice. It is their evil habit to be always handling sacred things with unhesitating freedom. One of Mr. Underhill's flock in the Bahamas said a truer thing than he meant when he exclaimed, " It is our only amusement to sing and pray " And with this frame of mind one of their favourite "anthems" exactly chimes:—

" I'll kneel down here, and I'll kneel down there,
And I kneel down a little 'most everywhere."

But it is not in secret and behind a closed door that they care to kneel. A Tartuffe is not a very rare phenomenon in any Christian land; but the white Tartuffe knows that it is vain to attempt the part without throwing a veil over all that is not moral and sanctimonious. The black Tartuffe, to judge from his acts, sees no necessity for anything of the kind. To know no studies but the Bible and the hymn-book to quote texts on all conceivable occasions—to be unfailing in attendance at church; when at church, to repeat the responses loudly and sing with discordant energy—to lose no opportunity of taking the sacrament, and make the blandest bows to the clergyman on receiving the bread and wine, at the same time to be living in open adultery with three or four women, seems to him to be the most natural thing in the world. With all this, their fear of death is extreme ; and suicide is not recognised by them, as by Coolies and Chinese, to be the simplest method of spiting a neighbour, or recording a moral protest against him. The King of Terrors has, however, his fascinations ; for, to get drunk at a wake, and then attend the funeral in a decorous suit of black cloth and a white neckcloth, with a countenance of unfathomable woe, is to negroes the most perfect union of sublunary delights. They are too superstitious in the extreme : the dread of "Jumbies" or ghosts, and the belief in incantations, are widely spread and deeply rooted among them ; and they are subject, as Mr. Underhill tells us, to constant relapses into Obeahism. At the best it is, we fear, but a thin partition which separates their "revivals " from the wild and hideous vagaries of Obeahism.

There is not space to give the social and economical statistics which Mr. Underhill has collected with reference to the hotly contested question of the negro's industry. Jamaica, even more than the other colonies, rings with the mutual recriminations of planters and labourers. It is matter of history that many planters in Jamaica, as stupid as they were cruel, drove the negroes on their emancipation from the provision grounds which they had occupied as slaves, thinking thereby to ensure their labour; while the impoverished state of the island and the prevalence of absenteeism make it probable that the negro's complaints of the uncertainty of the work on the sugar estates, and of irregularity in payment of wages, have often been too well founded. If proof were needed that the negro is not different from the mortals of other races who prefer work to starvation, that proof is supplied occupation of every inch of ground force the alternative upon him, and he goes to his work with the regularity of an English labourer. But Barbadoes alone of the West Indian colonies is thickly populated. In Trinidad, Jamaica, and Guinea, tracts of land, mountain pastures, savannas, or "bush," extend for miles and miles unoccupied and unowned ; and it is the growing habit of the negroes to retire to these waste but fertile districts and become squatters. Sufficient space for a provision ground is soon cleared and planted with the edible products which Nature scatters with a lavish hand in the tropics ; and such is the richness of the soil that more than enough for subsistence is readily yielded to the smallest amount of labour. But the attractions of living in independence, and the facility with which this independence is secured, are fraught with danger to the future of the race. Generation succeeds generation, and no habit of industry is acquired, and, what is even worse, the gradual migration removes the negro to places where civilisation with difficulty follows him. He wanders beyond the reach of education and religion. He loses all taste for the comforts and luxuries of civilised life, and his mind, like the abandoned estates on which he squats, "goes back into bush." He relapses into barbarism, and the little ground that has been hardly won is lost for ever. And to more than mental and moral improvement this squatting is injurious; for there seems to be something in it which saps the springs of life itself, and checks the tide of increase. There is reason to believe that these squatters rapidly decline in numbers; and it is probable that the paramount cause of their diminution is the frightful waste of infant life. There is no darker trait in the character of the negroes than the habitual neglect and ill-usage of their children. It is often in vain that the local governments establish dispensaries in their settlements, and bring medicines to their very doors—even then an infant is suffered to die rather than pay the smallest sum to save it.

We are, indeed, slow to believe that much progress, either social, economical, or moral, has been made by the negro since his emancipation ; it is only fair, therefore, to let those be heard who take a more cheering and hopeful view of him. With this end we make an extract from Mr. Underhill's concluding chapter on the "Queen of the Antilles." "Emancipation," he says, "has brought an amount of happiness, of improvement, of material wealth, and prospective elevation to the enfranchised slave, in which every lover of man must rejoice." And he goes on to say:—" Social order everywhere prevails. Breaches of the peace are rare. Crimes, especially in their darker and more sanguinary forms, are few. Persons and property are perfectly safe. The planter sleeps in security, dreads no insurrection, fears not the torch of the incendiary, travels day or night in the loneliest solitudes without anxiety or care. The people are not drunkards, even if they be impure ; and this sad feature in the moral life of the people is meeting its check in the growing respect for the marriage tie, and the improved life of the white community in their midst." To this we will add, in conclusion, extracts, quoted by Mr. Underhill, from a recent despatch of the present Governor of Jamaica, Captain Darling, for whose removal, by-the-by, some of the colonists have lately been passing fierce resolutions. Speaking of the present state of the island, he says :—

"The proportion of those who are settling themselves industriously in their holdings, and rapidly rising in the social scale, while commanding the respect of all classes of the community, and some of whom are, to a limited extent, themselves the employers of hired labour, paid for either in money or in kind, is, I am happy to think, not only steadily increasing, but at the present moment is far more extensive than was anticipated by those who are cognisant of all that took place in this colony in the earlier days of freedom."

" There can be no doubt, in fact, that an independent, respectable, and, I believe, trustworthy middle-class, is rapidly forming. . . . . . If the real object of emancipation was to place the freed man in such a position that he might work out his own advancement in the social scale, and prove his capacity for the full and rational enjoyment of personal independence, secured by constitutional liberty, Jamaica will afford more instances, even in proportion to its large population, of such gratifying results, than any other land in which African slavery once existed."

" Jamaica at this moment presents, as I believe, at once the strongest proof of the complete success of the great measure of emancipation, as relates to the capacity of the emancipated race for freedom, and the most unfortunate instance of a descent in the scale of agricultural and commercial importance as a colonial community."

Sydney Morning Herald (NSW  1863, ) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13071863