either to them or their families. But the
minister said, and his friend confirmed it by his own experience, that
these same fellows would work regularly and faithfully for any master
whom they personally knew and could rely upon, and no Englishman coming
to settle there need be afraid of failing for want of labour, if he had
sense and energy, and did not prefer to lie down and groan. The blacks,
my friends said, were kindly hearted, respectful, and well-disposed, but
they were children; easily excited, easily tempted, easily misled, and
totally unfit for self-government. If we wished to ruin them altogether,
we should persevere in the course to which, they were sorry to hear, we
were so inclined. The real want in the island was of intelligent
Englishmen to employ and direct them, and Englishmen were going away so
fast that they feared there would soon be none of them left. This was
the opinion of two moderate and excellent men, whose natural and
professional prejudices were all on the black man's side.

It was confirmed both in its favourable and unfavourable aspects by
another impartial authority. My first American acquaintances had gone,
but their rooms were occupied by another of their countrymen, a specimen
of a class of whom more will be heard in Jamaica if the fates are kind.
The English in the island cast in their lot with sugar, and if sugar is
depressed they lose heart. Americans keep their 'eyes skinned,' as they
call it, to look out for other openings. They have discovered, as I
said, 'that there are dollars in Jamaica,' and one has come, and has set
up a trade in plantains, in which he is making a fortune; and this
gentleman has perceived that there were 'dollars in the bamboo,' and for
bamboos there was no place in the world like the West Indies. He came to
Jamaica, brought machines to clear the fibre, tried to make ropes of it,
to make canvas, paper, and I know not what. I think he told me that he
had spent a quarter of a million dollars, instead of finding any, before
he hit upon a paying use for it. The bamboo fibre has certain elastic
incompressible properties in which it is without a rival. He forms it
into 'packing' for the boxes of the wheels of railway carriages, where
it holds oil like a sponge, never hardens, and never wears out. He sends
the packing over the world, and the demand grows as it is tried. He has
set up a factory, thirty miles from Mandeville, in the valley of the
Black River. He has a