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THE ENGLISH IN THE WEST INDIES.

CHAPTER I.

Colonial policy--Union or separation--Self-government--Varieties of
condition--The Pacific colonies--The West Indies--Proposals for a
West Indian federation--Nature of the population--American union and
British plantations--Original conquest of the West Indies.

The Colonial Exhibition has come and gone. Delegates from our great
self-governed dependencies have met and consulted together, and have
determined upon a common course of action for Imperial defence. The
British race dispersed over the world have celebrated the Jubilee of the
Queen with an enthusiasm evidently intended to bear a special and
peculiar meaning. The people of these islands and their sons and
brothers and friends and kinsfolk in Canada, in Australia, and in New
Zealand have declared with a general voice, scarcely disturbed by a
discord, that they are fellow-subjects of a single sovereign, that they
are united in feeling, united in loyalty, united in interest, and that
they wish and mean to preserve unbroken the integrity of the British
Empire. This is the answer which the democracy has given to the
advocates of the doctrine of separation. The desire for union while it
lasts is its own realisation. As long as we have no wish to part we
shall not part, and the wish can never rise if when there is occasion we
can meet and deliberate together with the same regard for each other's
welfare which has been shown in the late conference in London.

Events mock at human foresight, and nothing is certain but the
unforeseen. Constitutional government and an independent executive were
conferred upon our larger colonies, with the express and scarcely veiled
intention that at the earliest moment they were to relieve the mother
country of responsibility for them. They were regarded as fledgelings
who are fed only by the parent birds till their feathers are grown, and
are then expected to shift for themselves. They were provided with the
full plumage of parliamentary institutions on the home pattern and
model, and the expectation of experienced politicians was that they
would each at the earliest moment go off on their separate accounts, and
would bid us a friendly farewell. The irony of fate has turned to folly
the wisdom of the wise. The wise themselves, the same political party
which were most anxious twenty years ago to see the colonies
independe