d without doubt
shall perish everlastingly.

Once the Radical was a Liberal and went for toleration and freedom of
opinion. He has become a believer now. He is right and you are wrong,
and if you do not agree with him you are a fool, and you are wicked
besides. Voltaire says that atheism and superstition are the two poles
of intellectual disease. Superstition he thinks the worse of the two.
The atheist is merely mistaken, and can be cured if you show him that he
is wrong. The fanatic can never be cured. Yet each alike, if he
prevails, will destroy human society. What would Voltaire have expected
for poor mankind had he seen both the precious qualities combined in
this new _Symbolum Fidei_?

A creed is not a reasoned judgment based upon experience and insight. It
is a child of imagination and passion. Like an organised thing, it has
its appointed period and then dies. You cannot argue it out of
existence. It works for good; it works for evil; but work it will while
the life is in it. Faith, we are told, is not contradictory to reason,
but is above reason. Whether reason or faith sees truer, events will
prove.

One more observation this American gentleman made to me. He was speaking
of the want of spirit and of the despondency of the West Indian whites.
'I never knew, sir,' he said, 'any good come of desponding men. If you
intend to strike a mark, you had better believe that you can strike it.
No one ever hit anything if he thought that he was most likely to miss
it. You must take a cheerful view of things, or you will have no success
in this world.'

'Tyne heart tyne a',' the Scotch proverb says. The Anglo-West Indians
are tyning heart, and that is the worst feature about them. They can get
no help except in themselves, and they can help themselves after all if
we allow them fair play. The Americans will not touch them politically,
but they will trade with them; they will bring their capital and their
skill and knowledge among them, and make the islands richer and more
prosperous than ever they were--on one condition: they will risk nothing
in such enterprises as long as the shadow hangs over them of a possible
government by a black majority. Let it suffice to have created one
Ireland without deliberately manufacturing a second.

CHAPTER XVI.

Jamaican hospitality--Cherry Garden--George William Gordon--The
Gordon riots--Governor Eyre--A dispute and its
consequences--Jamaican country-house societ