ring the difference of
wages, is scarcely as high a qualification as that of Jamaica,--and how
large a proportion of our people would obtain the privileges of a voter?
In fact, in Jamaica only three thousand vote, or about one twenty-fifth
of the adult males. Is it not just possible that the discontent there
may grow out of aspirations for self-government, and for the dignity and
privileges, as well as the name, of freemen? May not the outbreak teach
the danger of not allowing the negro to vote?

In the _second_ place, this rebellion does not teach the danger of
educating the negro; for the negro of Jamaica never has been educated.
While the government has wrung from his scanty wages a million dollars,
it pays the Governor alone more than three times the sum it appropriates
to education. It doles out for the education of seventy-five thousand
children the pittance of twelve thousand five hundred dollars. Did not
the negro himself eke out this bounty from his own little savings, not
one in a dozen of the children would ever enter a school-room or see a
book. As it is, only one sixth part of the children are, or ever were,
under instruction. And the instruction they receive is too often from
persons themselves illiterate and full of superstition, but who are the
best teachers who can be obtained with limited means. Consider, then,
the real condition of affairs,--three hundred and fifty thousand blacks,
a large share of them children or grandchildren of those who were
brought from Africa, with the wild blood of their fathers scarcely
diluted in their veins, with all the old traditions of Fetichism and Obi
worship fresh in their minds, altogether uneducated, or at best half
educated; consider what virgin soil is here for every vile superstition,
what a field for the demagogue to cultivate, and then decide whether it
might not be safer, after all, to educate the negro in Jamaica.

This insurrection does not teach, in the _third_ place, the danger of
obliterating the lines of caste, for in Jamaica those lines have never
been obliterated, or even made faint. It may be doubted whether there
was ever a moment when the ill-dissembled contempt of the whites, and
the distrust of the blacks, were more profound then now. An intelligent
observer declared, in 1850, that the gap between the blacks and whites
had been steadily increasing ever since emancipation. And ten years
later the Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society records,