"that, as
a general statement, there is no generous feeling in the relations
between employer and employed. The negro can expect nothing but barest
justice, and is happy if he gets that." Can there be any safety for the
minority, when the majority, which numbers fifteen to one, has such a
sense of injustice rankling in its breast? One wades through the late
reprints of the Jamaica journals, column after column, page after page,
filled with coarse invective, with bitter denunciation, with injurious
suspicion; sees with what terrible relish the sufferings of these
deluded people are recorded; marks how the heroism which goes to the
scaffold without a tremor, and looks undeserved death in the face
without a fear, is travestied; shudders to hear the planters, after
thousands have been slain, yet cry for more blood; and then he puts the
paper down and says, "Here in this language is material enough out of
which to create a dozen bloody rebellions." How any race with the blood
of the tropics boiling in their veins, with the traditions of old
oppressions burning in their memory, can ever forget or forgive this
language and these unbridled outrages is inconceivable. He is mad who
does not see that the gulf of caste, too wide before, has widened and
deepened almost unfathomably by the influence of the events of the last
few months. He is mad, too, who thinks that Morant Bay, or the parish of
St. Thomas in the East, with their unshrived dead, is a safer place for
a white man to dwell in than it was six months ago.

It is too early to gather up all the lessons of this last of the almost
innumerable outbreaks in Jamaica. They may never be gathered up. But one
lesson stands out prominently, and that is, the safety of justice. We
cannot bring perfect equality upon the earth. It is not desirable
perhaps that we should. To the end of time, probably, there will be rich
and poor, high and low, weak and strong, black and white. But we can be
just. We can recognize every man as a child of God. We can grant to him
all the rights, all the privileges, and all the opportunities which
belong to a man. That is a lesson which Jamaica has never learned, and
therefore she sits under the shadow of her mountains, by the side of the
restless sea, clothed in garments of wretchedness.

FOOTNOTES:

[G] Since the above was written, despatches and explanations have been
received from Governor Eyre, and published; also an unofficial account
of the trial