lerable government which could actively benefit the people. We cannot
intend that arrangements the effects of which are visible so plainly in
the sinking fortunes of our own kindred there, are to continue for ever.
We suppose that we cannot go back in these cases. It is to be presumed,
therefore, that we mean to go forward, and in doing so I venture to
think myself that we shall be doing equal injustice both to our own race
and to the blacks, and we shall bring the islands into a condition which
will be a reproach and scandal to the empire of which they will remain a
dishonoured part. The slave trade was an imperial monopoly, extorted by
force, guaranteed by treaties, and our white West Indian interest was
built up in connection with and in reliance upon it. We had a right to
set the slaves free; but the payment of the indemnity was no full
acquittance of our obligations for the condition of a society which we
had ourselves created. We have no more right to make the emancipated
slave his master's master in virtue of his numbers than we have a right
to lay under the heel of the Catholics of Ireland the Protestant
minority whom we planted there to assist us in controlling them.

It may be said that we have no intention of doing anything of the kind,
that no one at present dreams of giving a full colonial constitution to
the West Indian Islands. They are allowed such freedom as they are
capable of using; they can be allowed more as they are better educated
and more fit for it, &c. &c.

One knows all that, and one knows what it is worth in the half-elected,
half-nominated councils. Either the nominated members are introduced
merely as a drag upon the wheel, and are instructed to yield in the end
to the demands of the representative members, or they are themselves the
representatives of the white minority. If the first, the majority rule
already; if the second, such constitutions are contrived ingeniously to
create the largest amount of irritation, and to make impossible, as long
as they last, any form of effective and useful government. Therefore
they cannot last, and are not meant to last. A principle once conceded
develops with the same certainty with which a seed grows when it is
sown. In the English world, as it now stands, there is no middle
alternative between self-government and government by the Crown, and the
cause of our reluctance to undertake direct charge of the West Indies is
because such undertaking carries r