ndian problem.

As I was stepping into the boat at Port Royal, a pamphlet was thrust
into my hand, which I was entreated to read at my leisure. It was by
some discontented white of the island--no rare phenomenon, and the
subject of it was the precipitate decline in the value of property
there. The writer, unlike the planters, insisted that the people were
taxed in proportion to their industry. There were taxes on mules, on
carts, on donkeys, all bearing on the small black proprietors, whose
ability to cultivate was thus checked, and who were thus deliberately
encouraged in idleness. He might have added, although he did not, that
while both in Jamaica and Trinidad everyone is clamouring against the
beetroot bounty which artificially lowers the price of sugar, the local
councils in these two islands try to counteract the effect and
artificially raise the price of sugar by an export duty on their own
produce--a singular method of doing it which, I presume, admits of
explanation. My pamphleteer was persuaded that all the world were fools,
and that he and his friends were the only wise ones: again a not
uncommon occurrence in pamphleteers. He demanded the suppression of
absenteeism; he demanded free trade. In exchange for the customs duties,
which were to be abolished, he demanded a land tax--the very mention of
which, I had been told by others, drove the black proprietors whom he
wished to benefit into madness. He wanted Home Rule. He wanted fifty
things besides which I have forgotten, but his grand want of all was a
new currency. Mankind, he thought, had been very mad at all periods of
their history. The most significant illustration of their madness had
been the selection of gold and silver as the medium of exchange. The
true base of the currency was the land. The Government of Jamaica was to
lend to every freeholder up to the mortgage value of his land in paper
notes, at 5 per cent. interest, the current rate being at present 8 per
cent. The notes so issued, having the land as their security, would be
in no danger of depreciation, and they would flow over the sugar estates
like an irrigating stream. On the produce of sugar the fate of the
island depended.

On the produce of sugar? And why not on the produce of a fine race of
men? The prospects of Jamaica, the prospects of all countries, depend
not on sugar or on any form or degree of material wealth, but on the
characters of the men and women whom they are breeding an