e innocence of heart. In fact
these poor children of darkness have escaped the consequences of the
Fall, and must come of another stock after all.

Meanwhile they are perfectly happy. In no part of the globe is there any
peasantry whose every want is so completely satisfied as her Majesty's
black subjects in these West Indian islands. They have no aspirations to
make them restless. They have no guilt upon their consciences. They have
food for the picking up. Clothes they need not, and lodging in such a
climate need not be elaborate. They have perfect liberty, and are safe
from dangers, to which if left to themselves they would be exposed, for
the English rule prevents the strong from oppressing the weak. In their
own country they would have remained slaves to more warlike races. In
the West Indies their fathers underwent a bondage of a century or two,
lighter at its worst than the easiest form of it in Africa; their
descendants in return have nothing now to do save to laugh and sing and
enjoy existence. Their quarrels, if they have any, begin and end in
words. If happiness is the be all and end all of life, and those who
have most of it have most completely attained the object of their being,
the 'nigger' who now basks among the ruins of the West Indian
plantations is the supremest specimen of present humanity.

We retired to our berths at last. At waking we were at anchor off St.
Vincent, an island of volcanic mountains robed in forest from shore to
crest. Till late in the last century it was the headquarters of the
Caribs, who kept up a savage independence there, recruited by runaway
slaves from Barbadoes or elsewhere. Brandy and Sir Ralph Abercrombie
reduced them to obedience in 1796, and St. Vincent throve tolerably down
to the days of free trade. Even now when I saw it, Kingston, the
principal town, looked pretty and well to do, reminding me, strange to
say, of towns in Norway, the houses stretching along the shore painted
in the same tints of blue or yellow or pink, with the same red-tiled
roofs, the trees coming down the hill sides to the water's edge, villas
of modest pretensions shining through the foliage, with the patches of
cane fields, the equivalent in the landscape of the brilliant Norwegian
grass. The prosperity has for the last forty years waned and waned.
There are now two thousand white people there, and forty thousand
coloured people, and proportions alter annually to our disadvantage. The
usual rem