o get gold or get something which could be
changed for gold. Only occasionally, and as it were by accident, they
became the theatre of any grander game. The war of the Reformation was
carried thither, and heroic deeds were done there, but it was by
adventurers who were in search of plunder for themselves. France and
England fought among the Antilles, and their names are connected with
many a gallant action; but they fought for the sovereignty of the seas,
not for the rights and liberties of the French or English inhabitants of
the islands. Instead of occupying them with free inhabitants, the
European nations filled them with slave gangs. They were valued only for
the wealth which they yielded, and society there has never assumed any
particularly noble aspect. There has been splendour and luxurious
living, and there have been crimes and horrors, and revolts and
massacres. There has been romance, but it has been the romance of
pirates and outlaws. The natural graces of human life do not show
themselves under such conditions. There has been no saint in the West
Indies since Las Casas, no hero, unless philonegro enthusiasm can make
one out of Toussaint. There are no people there in the true sense of the
word, with a character and purpose of their own, unless to some extent
in Cuba, and therefore when the wind has changed and the wealth for
which the islands were alone desired is no longer to be made among them,
and slavery is no longer possible and would not pay if it were, there is
nothing to fall back upon. The palaces of the English planters and
merchants fall to decay; their wines and their furniture, their books
and their pictures, are sold or dispersed. Their existence is a struggle
to keep afloat, and one by one they go under in the waves.

The blacks as long as they were slaves were docile and partially
civilised. They have behaved on the whole well in our islands since
their emancipation, for though they were personally free the whites were
still their rulers, and they looked up to them with respect. They have
acquired land and notions of property, some of them can read, many of
them are tolerable workmen and some excellent, but in character the
movement is backwards, not forwards. Even in Hayti, after the first
outburst of ferocity, a tolerable government was possible for a
generation or two. Orderly habits are not immediately lost, but the
effect of leaving the negro nature to itself is apparent at last. In the
E