d under the inspection (as are the labour-books,
indeed every document and arrangement connected with the Coolies) of
the Agent-General of Immigrants or his deputies. One of these
officers, the Inspector, is always on the move, and daily visits,
without warning, one or more estates, reporting every week to the
Agent-General. The Governor may at any time, without assigning any
cause, cancel the indenture of any immigrant, or remove any part or
the whole of the indentured immigrant labourers from any estate; and
this has been done ere now.

I know but too well that, whether in Europe or in the Indies, no
mere laws, however wisely devised, will fully protect the employed
from the employer; or, again, the employer from the employed. What
is needed is a moral bond between them; a bond above, or rather
beneath, that of mere wages, however fairly paid, for work, however
fairly done. The patriarchal system had such a bond; so had the
feudal: but they are both dead and gone, having done, I presume,
all that it was in them to do, and done it, like all human
institutions, not over well. And meanwhile, that nobler bond, after
which Socialists so-called have sought, and after which I trust they
will go on seeking still--a bond which shall combine all that was
best in patriarchism and feudalism, with that freedom of the
employed which those forms of society failed to give--has not been
found is yet; and, for a generation or two to come, 'cash-payment
seems likely to be the only nexus between man and man.' Because
that is the meanest and weakest of all bonds, it must be watched
jealously and severely by any Government worthy of the name; for to
leave it to be taken care of by the mere brute tendencies of supply
and demand, and the so-called necessities of the labour market, is
simply to leave the poor man who cannot wait to be blockaded and
starved out by the rich who can. Therefore all Colonial Governments
are but doing their plain duty in keeping a clear eye and a strong
hand on this whole immigration movement; and in fencing it round, as
in Trinidad, with such regulations as shall make it most difficult
for a Coolie to be seriously or permanently wronged without direct
infraction of the law, and connivance of Government officers; which
last supposition is, in the case of Trinidad, absurd, as long as Dr.
Mitchell, whom I am proud to call my friend, holds a post for which
he is equally fit