boasted hundred and fifty thousand hogsheads of the last century, to
a meagre yearly crop of thirty thousand. Nine tenths of her proprietors
are absentees. More than that proportion of her great estates are
ruinously mortgaged. A tourist gives as the final evidence of
exhaustion, that Jamaica has no amusements, no circus, no theatre, no
opera, none of the pleasant trifles which surplus wealth creates.

Nor are the moral aspects any more encouraging. Slavery, dying, cursed
the soil with its fatal bequest, contempt for labor; and the years which
have elapsed since emancipation have done little or nothing to give to
the toiler conscious dignity and worth. The bondsman, scarcely yet freed
from all his chains, naturally enough thinks that, "if Massa will not
work," it is the highest gentility in him not to work either, and sighs
for a few acres whereon he may live in sluggish content. And his quondam
master, left to his own resources, will not any more than before put his
shoulder to the work; and, though sunk himself in sloth, ceases not to
complain of another's indolence. The spirit of caste is still
relentless. The white man despises the black man, and, if he can, cheats
him and tramples upon him. The black man, in return, suspects and fears
his old oppressor, and sometimes, goaded to desperation, turns upon him.
A perpetual discontent has always brooded over Jamaica; and it is
recorded that no less than thirty bloody rebellions have left their
crimson stains on her ignoble annals.

It is in vain to inquire for the causes of this physical and moral
decay. For every class has its special complaint, every traveller his
favorite theory, and every political economist his sufficient
explanation. But let the cause be what it may, the fact stands out black
and repulsive. Jamaica, which came from the hand of the Creator a fair
and well-watered garden, has presented for more than half a century that
melancholy spectacle, too common in Equatorial America, of a land rich
in every natural advantage, and yet through the misfortune or folly of
its people plunged in poverty and misery.

* * * * *

The world at large had become tired of the griefs of Jamaica, and
reconciled itself to her wretchedness as a foregone conclusion, when the
events of last October lent a fresh and terrible interest to her
history. An insurrection, including in its purpose the murder of every
white man on the island, has been q