ey remember to do
it good. We should be at once surprised and humiliated, were we to
compare the much-vaunted gifts of our charity with those of these poor
people, these freed men of yesterday, whom we think that we may
rightfully treat with disdain.

Thanks to the Gospel, and it is to this that I return, the problem of
the coexistence of races is resolved in the most pacific manner in the
Antilles. Among freemen, however little these freemen may be
Christianized, specific inequalities become speedily effaced, and the
prejudice of skin is not found to be ultimately as insurmountable as we
have been told. In these English colonies, which are true republics,
governing themselves, and which also remind us, through this feature, of
the Southern States, the blacks have come to be accepted as
fellow-citizens. They practise the liberal professions; they are
electors and often elected, for they form of themselves alone one-fifth
of the Colonial Assembly at Jamaica; they are officers of the police and
the militia, and their authority never fails to be recognized by all. I
named Jamaica just now. Some may seek to bring it as an argument against
me. The fact is, that this great island has seemed to form an exception
to the general prosperity; considerable fortunes have been sunk there,
and the transformation has been slower and more painful there than
elsewhere. But, when they arm themselves with these circumstances, they
forget two things: first, that the causes of the malady were anterior to
emancipation; next, that the cure has come from emancipation itself.
Before emancipation, Jamaica was insolvent, her plantations were
mortgaged beyond their value, and its planting was threatened in other
ways far more than now. Do you know what has since happened?
Difficulties which appeared insoluble have been resolved; to-day, the
cape is doubled, and men navigate in peace. At the present time, Jamaica
comprises two or three hundred villages, inhabited by free negroes; the
latter are willing to work; for, according to the latest information,
(February, 1861,) the price of daily labor decreases instead of rising.
Among these free negroes, there are not less than ten thousand
landholders, and three-eighths of the cultivated soil is in their hands.
They have established sugar-mills everywhere, imperfect, rude, yet
working in a passable manner; and mills of this sort are numbered by
thousands. The middle class of color thus grows richer day b