e, a wife is
not a slave; yet they may not live by their own wills or emancipate
themselves at their own pleasure from positions in which nature has
placed them, or into which they have themselves voluntarily entered. The
negroes of the West Indies are children, and not yet disobedient
children. They have their dreams, but for the present they are dreams
only. If you enforce self-government upon them when they are not asking
for it, you may turn the dream into a reality, and wilfully drive them
back into the condition of their ancestors, from which the slave trade
was the beginning of their emancipation.

CHAPTER XV.

The Church of England in Jamaica--Drive to Castleton--Botanical
Gardens--Picnic by the river--Black women--Ball at Government
House--Mandeville--Miss Roy--Country society--Manners--American
visitors--A Moravian missionary--The modern Radical creed.

If I have spoken without enthusiasm of the working of the Church of
England among the negroes, I have not meant to be disrespectful. As I
lay awake at daybreak on the Sunday morning after my arrival, I heard
the sound of church bells, not Catholic bells as at Dominica, but good
old English chimes. The Church is disestablished so far as law can
disestablish it, but, as in Barbadoes, the royal arms still stand over
the arches of the chancel. Introduced with the English conquest, it has
been identified with the ruling order of English gentry, respectable,
harmless, and useful, to those immediately connected with it.

The parochial system, as in Barbadoes also, was spread over the island.
Each parish had its church, its parsonage and its school, its fonts
where the white children were baptised--in spite of my Jesuit, I shall
hope not whites only; and its graveyard, where in time they were laid
to rest. With their quiet Sunday services of the old type the country
districts were exact reproductions of English country villages. The
church whose bells I had heard was of the more fashionable suburban
type, standing in a central situation halfway to Kingston. The service
was at the old English hour of eleven. We drove to it in the orthodox
fashion, with our prayer books and Sunday costumes, the Colonel in
uniform. The gentry of the neighbourhood are antiquated in their habits,
and to go to church on Sunday is still regarded as a simple duty. A
dozen carriages stood under the shade at the doors. The congregation was
upper middle-class English o