I repeat over and
over again, what you do for the East; you can establish a firm
authoritative government which will protect the blacks in their civil
rights and protect the whites in theirs. You cannot alter the climate,
it is true, or make the soil more fertile. Already it is fertile as any
in the earth, and the climate is admirable for the purposes for which it
is needed. But you can restore confidence in the stability of your
tenure, you can give courage to the whites who are on the spot to remain
there, and you can tempt capital and enterprise to venture there which
now seek investments elsewhere. By keeping the rule in your own hands
you will restore the white population to their legitimate influence; the
blacks will again look up to them and respect them as they ought to do.
This you can do, and it will cost you nothing save a little more pains
in the selection of the persons whom you are to trust with powers
analogous to those which you grant to your provincial governors in the
Indian peninsula.

A preliminary condition of this, as of all other real improvements, is
one, however, which will hardly be fulfilled. Before a beginning can be
made, a conviction is wanted that life has other objects besides present
interest and convenience; and very few of us indeed have at the bottom
of our hearts any such conviction at all. We can talk about it in fine
language--no age ever talked more or better--but we don't believe in it;
we believe only in professing to believe, which soothes our vanity and
does not interfere with our actions. From fine words no harvests grow.
The negroes are well disposed to follow and obey any white who will be
kind and just to them, and in such following and obedience their only
hope of improvement lies. The problem is to create a state of things
under which Englishmen of vigour and character will make their homes
among them. Annexation to the United States would lead probably to their
extermination at no very distant time. The Antilles are small, and the
fate of the negroes there might be no better than the fate of the
Caribs. The Americans are not a people who can be trifled with; no one
knows it better than the negroes. They fear them. They prefer infinitely
the mild rule of England, and under such a government as we might
provide if we cared to try, the whole of our islands might become like
the Moravian settlement in Jamaica, and the black nature, which has
rather degenerated than improved