d not
have been, in a belt of country one mile wide and the twelve miles long,
over five hundred people; and we are forced to the conclusion, that
these restorers of peace cleaned a strip a mile wide of every man and
every well-grown boy. "And the soldiers enjoy it!" And the officers
glory in it! Nothing was permitted to stop or clog the death mills. At
Morant Bay, "to save time," two court-martials were formed. No time was
lost in proceeding to business. "Each five minutes condemned rebels were
taken down under escort awaiting their doom." Only three brought before
these terrible tribunals escaped death. The court, composed exclusively
of military and naval officers, spared none; every one brought before it
was hanged. How many other such courts were at work does not appear; but
it is evident not less than ten or a dozen. And subalterns, who ought
not to have been intrusted with the charge of a score of men, assumed
the dread power of life and death over poor wretches snatched from their
homes, and given neither time nor opportunity for defence. Yet all this
does not satisfy the remorseless planter. When, in a parish of thirty
thousand people, two or three thousand sleep in bloody graves, and at
least as many more have been pitilessly scourged, he calls "the clemency
of the authorities extraordinary," and says, "that it comes too soon."
No wonder that such a record as this stirred to its depth the popular
heart of England. And it is the only relieving feature, that the
indignation thus aroused has overridden all opposition, silenced all
paltry excuses, and forced the government to appoint a Commission of
Inquiry, and pending that inquiry to suspend Governor Eyre from his
office.

One case, that of the judicial murder of Mr. Gordon, has properly
awakened great attention. Mr. Gordon was the very magistrate whose
removal from office created so much discontent in the whole parish of
St. Thomas in the East. He was a colored man with a very slight infusion
of black blood. His father was an Englishman, and he himself was bred in
England and married an English lady. He was wealthy, and the owner of a
great plantation. A bitter and fearless opponent of what he considered
to be the oppression of the planters, they in turn concentrated upon him
all their anger and malice, while the negroes looked up to him as their
hope and defence. The mere statement of the facts indicates that, if Mr.
Gordon was to be tried at all, the investig