e West Indies were rarely inhuman. Lord Rodney says:

'I have been often in all the West India Islands, and I have often made
my observations on the treatment of the negro slaves, and can aver that
I never knew the least cruelty inflicted on them, but that in general
they lived better than the honest day-labouring man in England, without
doing a fourth part of his work in a day, and I am fully convinced that
the negroes in our islands are better provided for and live better than
when in Guinea.'

Rodney, it is true, was a man of facts and was defective in sentiment.
Let us suppose him wrong, let us believe the worst horrors of the slave
trade or slave usage as fluent tongue of missionary or demagogue has
described them, yet nevertheless, when we consider what the lot of
common humanity has been and is, we shall be dishonest if we deny that
the balance has been more than redressed; and the negroes who were taken
away out of Africa, as compared with those who were left at home, were
as the 'elect to salvation,' who after a brief purgatory are secured an
eternity of blessedness. The one condition is the maintenance of the
authority of the English crown. The whites of the islands cannot
equitably rule them. They have not shaken off the old traditions. If,
for the sake of theory or to shirk responsibility, we force them to
govern themselves, the state of Hayti stands as a ghastly example of the
condition into which they will then inevitably fall. If we persist, we
shall be sinning against light--the clearest light that was ever given
in such affairs. The most hardened believers in the regenerating effects
of political liberty cannot be completely blind to the ruin which the
infliction of it would necessarily bring upon the race for whose
interests they pretend particularly to care.

The Pitch Lake I resisted all exhortations to visit, but the days in the
forest were delightful--pre-eminently a day which we spent at the 'Blue
Basin,' a pool scooped out in the course of ages by a river falling
through a mountain gorge; blue, not from any colour in the water, which
is purely transparent, but from a peculiar effect of sky reflection
through an opening in the overhanging trees. As it was far off, we had
to start early and encounter the noonday heat. We had to close the
curtains of the carriage to escape the sun, and in losing the sun we
shut out the wind. All was well, however, when we turned into the hills.
Thenceforward the r