ery white man and to outrage every white woman. This is what the
Governor asserts. This is what the Assembly reiterates. This is the
charge upon which every appeal of the Jamaican journals turns. The whole
truth we probably never shall know. The men who could best reveal it are
silent in the graves which lawless violence has dug for them, and will
bear no testimony except at the bar or Eternal Justice. The report of
the Committee of Inquiry will no doubt shed some light. Pending that
inquiry there are considerations which strike every one. If for two
years a bloody insurrection had been plotted, and the outbreak at Morant
Bay was the first stroke to toward its accomplishment, is it credible
that these truculent rebels should submit themselves as sheep to the
slaughter,--that not one band should be found to strike a manly blow for
life and liberty? If such an insurrection had its roots in every part of
the island, is it credible, that, while the whole military and naval
force, and no small part of the white inhabitants, were engaged in
putting down the thirty thousand of their brethren in St. Thomas and
Portland parishes, the three hundred thousand blacks all over the island
should remain peaceable and law-abiding? And it is to be noticed that,
since the reign of terror has subsided a little, those who know the
negroes best, the missionaries who labor among them, express the most
hearty contempt for these charges. But suppose that the negro had
plotted insurrection, diabolical, satanic, would that be any excuse for
wholesale slaughter, without forms of law, when all resistance was at an
end? We know that the South plotted and consummated rebellion; that her
people have slain three hundred thousand of our sons on the
battle-field; that more than thirty thousand have wasted and died of
slow torture in her prisons; that whenever the secrets of that
charnel-house, Southern life, are disclosed, they will tell of thousands
of Unionists who were hung, who were shot, who were burned at the stake,
who were hunted by dogs, who were scourged to death with whips, and all
because they were faithful to their country. And knowing all this, is
there a man of the North who, when military resistance has ceased, would
march our armies southward, hang every tenth man, shoot every fourth,
scourge as many more, and suffer a wild soldiery to strip half naked and
score with cruel whips thousands of the women? And does it alter the
moral aspect of