dras, and Bombay. England is responsible
for the social condition of those islands. She filled them with negroes
when it was her interest to maintain slavery, she emancipated those
negroes when popular opinion at home demanded that slavery should end.
It appears to me that England ought to bear the consequences of her own
actions, and assume to herself the responsibilities of a state of things
which she has herself created. We are partly unwilling to take the
trouble, partly we cling to the popular belief that to trust all
countries with the care of their own concerns is the way to raise the
character of the inhabitants and to make them happy and contented. We
dimly perceive that the population of the West Indies is not a natural
growth of internal tendencies and circumstances, and we therefore
hesitate before we plunge completely and entirely into the downward
course; but we play with it, we drift towards it, we advance as far as
we dare, giving them the evils of both systems and the advantages of
neither. At the same moment we extend the suffrage to the blacks with
one hand, while with the other we refuse to our own people the benefit
of a treaty which would have rescued them from imminent ruin and brought
them into relations with their powerful kindred close at hand--relations
which might save them from the most dangerous consequences of a negro
political supremacy--and the result is that the English in those islands
are melting away and will soon be crowded out, or will have departed of
themselves in disgust. A policy so far-reaching, and affecting so
seriously the condition of the oldest of our colonial possessions, ought
not to have been adopted on their own authority, by doctrinaire
statesmen in a cabinet, without fully and frankly consulting the English
nation; and no further step ought to be taken in that direction until
the nation has had the circumstances of the islands laid before it, and
has pronounced one way or the other its own sovereign pleasure. Does or
does not England desire that her own people shall be enabled to live and
thrive in the West Indies? If she decides that her hands are too full,
that she is over-empired and cannot attend to them--_caditquaestio_--there
is no more to be said. But if this is her resolution the hands of the
West Indians ought to be untied. They ought to be allowed to make their
sugar treaties, to make any treaties, to enter into the closest relations
with America which the A