The West Indies and the Spanish Main. Anthony Trollope

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СКАЧАТЬ such subjects our greatest difficulty is perhaps that of avoiding an opinion formed by exceptional cases. That there are and have been pious negroes I do not doubt. That many are strongly tinctured with the language and outward bearing of piety I am well aware. I know that they love the Bible—love it as the Roman Catholic girl loves the doll of a Madonna which she dresses with muslin and ribbons. In a certain sense this is piety, and such piety they often possess.

      And I do not deny their family attachments; but it is the attachment of a dog. We have all had dogs whom we have well used, and have prided ourselves on their fidelity. We have seen them to be wretched when they lose us for a moment, and have smiled at their joy when they again discover us. We have noted their patience as they wait for food from the hand they know will feed them. We have seen with delight how their love for us glistens in their eyes. We trust them with our children as the safest playmates, and teach them in mocking sport the tricks of humanity. In return for this, the dear brutes give us all their hearts, but it is not given in gratitude; and they abstain with all their power from injury and offence, but they do not abstain from judgment. Let his master ill use his dog ever so cruelly, yet the animal has no anger against him when the pain is over. Let a stranger save him from such ill usage, and he has no thankfulness after the moment. Affection and fidelity are things of custom with him.

      I know how deep will be the indignation I shall draw upon my head by this picture of a fellow-creature and a fellow-Christian. Man's philanthropy would wish to look on all men as walking in a quick path towards the perfection of civilization. And men are not happy in their good efforts unless they themselves can see their effects. They are not content to fight for the well-being of a race, and to think that the victory shall not come till the victors shall for centuries have been mingled with the dust. The friend of the negro, when he puts his shoulder to the wheel, and tries to rescue his black brother from the degradation of an inferior species, hopes to see his client rise up at once with all the glories of civilization round his head. "There; behold my work; how good it is!" That is the reward to which he looks. But what if the work be not as yet good? What if it be God's pleasure that more time be required before the work be good—good in our finite sense of the word—in our sense, which requires the show of an immediate effect?

      After all, what we should desire first, and chiefly—is it not the truth? It will avail nothing to humanity to call a man a civilized Christian if the name be not deserved. Philanthropy will gain little but self-flattery and gratification of its vanity by applying to those whom it would serve a euphemistic but false nomenclature. God, for his own purposes—purposes which are already becoming more and more intelligible to his creatures—has created men of inferior and superior race. Individually, the state of an Esquimaux is grievous to an educated mind: but the educated man, taking the world collectively, knows that it is good that the Esquimaux should be, should have been made such as he is; knows also, that that state admits of improvement; but should know also that such cannot be done by the stroke of a wand—by a speech in Exeter Hall—by the mere sounds of Gospel truth, beautiful as those sounds are.

      We are always in such a hurry; although, as regards the progress of races, history so plainly tells us how vain such hurry is! At thirty, a man devotes himself to proselytizing a people; and if the people be not proselytized when he has reached forty, he retires in disgust. In early life we have aspirations for the freedom of an ill-used nation; but in middle life we abandon our protégé to tyranny and the infernal gods. The process has been too long. The nation should have arisen free, at once, upon the instant. It is hard for man to work without hope of seeing that for which he labours.

      But to return to our sable friends. The first desire of a man in a state of civilization is for property. Greed and covetousness are no doubt vices; but they are the vices which have grown from cognate virtues. Without a desire for property, man could make no progress. But the negro has no such desire; no desire strong enough to induce him to labour for that which he wants. In order that he may eat to-day and be clothed to-morrow, he will work a little; as for anything beyond that, he is content to lie in the sun.

      Emancipation and the last change in the sugar duties have made land only too plentiful in Jamaica, and enormous tracts have been thrown out of cultivation as unprofitable. And it is also only too fertile. The negro, consequently, has had unbounded facility of squatting, and has availed himself of it freely. To recede from civilization and become again savage—as savage as the laws of the community will permit—has been to his taste. I believe that he would altogether retrograde if left to himself.

      I shall now be asked, having said so much, whether I think that emancipation was wrong. By no means. I think that emancipation was clearly right; but I think that we expected far too great and far too quick a result from emancipation.

      These people are a servile race, fitted by nature for the hardest physical work, and apparently at present fitted for little else. Some thirty years since they were in a state when such work was their lot; but their tasks were exacted from them in a condition of bondage abhorrent to the feelings of the age, and opposed to the religion which we practised. For us, thinking as we did, slavery was a sin. From that sin we have cleansed ourselves. But the mere fact of doing so has not freed us from our difficulties. Nor was it to be expected that it should. The discontinuance of a sin is always the commencement of a struggle. Few, probably, will think that Providence has permitted so great an exodus as that which has taken place from Africa to the West without having wise results in view. We may fairly believe that it has been a part of the Creator's scheme for the population and cultivation of the earth; a part of that scheme which sent Asiatic hordes into Europe, and formed, by the admixture of nations, that race to which it is our pride to belong. But that admixture of blood has taken tens of centuries. Why should we think that Providence should work more rapidly now in these latter ages?

      No Englishman, no Anglo-Saxon, could be what he now is but for that portion of wild and savage energy which has come to him from his Vandal forefathers. May it not then be fair to suppose that a time shall come when a race will inhabit those lovely islands, fitted by nature for their burning sun, in whose blood shall be mixed some portion of northern energy, and which shall owe its physical powers to African progenitors—a race that shall be no more ashamed of the name of negro than we are of the name of Saxon?

      But, in the mean time, what are we to do with our friend, lying as he now is at his ease under the cotton-tree, and declining to work after ten o'clock in the morning? "No, tankee, massa, me tired now; me no want more money." Or perhaps it is, "No; workee no more; money no 'nuff; workee no pay." These are the answers which the suppliant planter receives when at ten o'clock he begs his negro neighbours to go a second time into the cane-fields and earn a second shilling, or implores them to work for him more than four days a week, or solicits them at Christmas-time to put up with a short ten days' holiday. His canes are ripe, and his mill should be about; or else they are foul with weeds, and the hogsheads will be very short if they be not cleansed. He is anxious enough, for all his world depends upon it. But what does the negro care? "No; me no more workee now."

      The busher (overseer; elide the o and change v into b, and the word will gradually explain itself)—The busher, who remembers slavery and former happy days, d——s him for a lazy nigger, and threatens him with coming starvation, and perhaps with returning monkeydom. "No, massa; no starve now; God send plenty yam. No more monkey now, massa." The black man is not in the least angry, though the busher is. And as for the canes, they remain covered with dirt, and the return of the estate is but one hundred and thirty hogsheads instead of one hundred and ninety. Let the English farmer think of that; and in realizing the full story, he must imagine that the plenteous food alluded to has been grown on his own ground, and probably planted at his own expense. The busher was wrong to curse the man, and wrong to threaten him with the monkey's tail; but it must be admitted that the position is trying to the temper.

      And who can blame the black man? He is free to work, or free to let it alone. He can live without work and roll in the sun, and suck oranges and eat bread-fruit; ay, and ride a horse perhaps, and wear a СКАЧАТЬ