uenched in the blood of its leaders,
say the Governor of Jamaica and his defenders. An insignificant riot has
been followed by a wholesale and indiscriminate massacre, sparing not
even the women and children, reply their opponents.

Admitting for a moment the whole planter theory of a general
insurrection, the question inevitably arises, What are the causes which
would prompt such a rebellion, and which, while they do not justify
violence, furnish reasons why every humane mind should desire to treat
with leniency the errors, and even the crimes, of an ignorant and
oppressed race? The ordinary burden of the Jamaica negro is far from a
light one. The yearly expense of his government is not less than a
million dollars, or about three dollars for every man, woman, and child
on the island. The executive and judicial departments are on a scale of
expense which would befit a continent. The Governor receives a salary of
forty thousand dollars, the Chief Justice fifteen thousand dollars, the
Associate Justices ten thousand dollars. The ecclesiastical
establishment, which ministers little or nothing to the religious wants
of the colored race, absorbs another huge portion of the public revenue.
And all this magnificence of expenditure in a population of twenty
thousand bankrupt whites and three hundred and fifty thousand half-naked
blacks. If, now, the negro believed that this burden was distributed
evenly, he might bear it with patience. But he does not believe so. He
is sure, on the contrary, that the white man, who controls legislation,
so assesses the revenue that it shall relieve the rich and burden the
poor. He tells you that the luxuries of the planter are admitted at a
nominal duty, while the coarse fabrics with which he must clothe himself
and family pay forty per cent; that while the planter's huge hogshead of
seventeen hundred pounds' weight pays only an excise of three shillings,
the hard-raised barrel of his home produce of two hundred pounds must
pay two shillings; that every miserable mule-cart of the petty
land-owner is subjected to eighteen shillings license, while the great
ox-carts of the thousand-acre plantation go untaxed,--a law under which
the number of little carts in one district sunk from five hundred to
less than two hundred, and with it sunk who shall tell how much growing
enterprise. These complaints may be unjust, but the negro believes in
them, and they chafe and exasperate him.

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