tained in any printed paper which may be considered
seditious, or that may be adjudged so by any court which the Governor
may appoint, the writer shall be sentenced to hard labor in the
penitentiary for seven years." It is idle to suppose that these measures
will be sanctioned by the Queen; but they show what feelings burn in the
breasts of the planters, and admonish us to receive with caution any
statements which they may make concerning other classes of the
community.

* * * * *

This Jamaica "insurrection," whose origin, growth, and extinguishment in
blood have now been traced, has been the cause of we know not how many
oracular warnings from the lips of those who have not been distinguished
by any hearty attachment to the rights of the black. "See now," they
say, "what is the peril of emancipating these blacks." "Behold what
comes of educating this people up to the capacity of mischief."
"Acknowledge now that not even the gift of universal suffrage will
elevate and soften a race at once fickle and ferocious. There is no
safety but in keeping them under. Stop in your perilous experiments
while you can."

So long as the accounts of this outbreak are at once so conflicting and
so colored by party feeling, it may not be easy to say what are its
positive lessons. But it is easy to tell some things which it does not
teach.

In the _first_ place, it does not teach the danger of conferring the
right to vote upon the negro, for the negro of Jamaica has never
attained to that privilege. His traducers cry out, "What a race! The
best fed, the best clothed, the best sheltered, the least worked
peasantry on the face of the earth! Free! Free to make their own laws,
to choose their own rulers, to govern themselves! And yet they are
discontented!" Turn now and inquire what are the facts about their
governing themselves. True, no law says the negro shall not vote, but
the qualification is made so high that it is impossible that he should
vote. In a country where wages are scarcely a quarter of a dollar a day,
he is required to have an estate worth thirty dollars a year, or an
income of one hundred and forty dollars a year, or to pay taxes of
fifteen dollars a year. Suppose now that in New England a law were
passed that no man should vote who had not an estate worth two hundred
dollars a year, or an income of one thousand dollars, or who did not pay
one hundred dollars yearly tax,--and this, conside