d rearing.
Where there are men and women of a noble nature, the rest will go well
of itself; where these are not, there will be no true prosperity though
the sugar hogsheads be raised from thousands into millions. The colonies
are interesting only as offering homes where English people can increase
and multiply; English of the old type with simple habits, who do not
need imported luxuries. There is room even in the West Indies for
hundreds of thousands of them if they can be contented to lead human
lives, and do not go there to make fortunes which they are to carry home
with them. The time may not be far off when men will be sick of making
fortunes, sick of being ground to pattern in the commonplace mill-wheel
of modern society; sick of a state of things which blights and kills
simple and original feeling, which makes us think and speak and act
under the tyranny of general opinion, which masquerades as liberty and
means only submission to the newspapers. I can conceive some modern men
may weary of all this, and retire from it like the old ascetics, not as
they did into the wilderness, but behind their own walls and hedges,
shutting out the world and its noises, to inquire whether after all they
have really immortal souls, and, if they have, what ought to be done
about them. The West India Islands, with their inimitable climate and
soil and prickly pears _ad libitum_ to make fences with, would be fine
places for such recluses. Failing these ideal personages, there is work
enough of the common sort to create wholesome prosperity. There are
oranges to be grown, and pines and plantains, and coffee and cocoa, and
rice and indigo and tobacco, not to speak of the dollars which my
American friend found in the bamboos, and of the further dollars which
other Americans will find in the untested qualities of thousands of
other productions. Here are opportunities for innocent industrious
families, where children can be brought up to be manly and simple and
true and brave as their fathers were brought up, or as their fathers
expressed it 'in the nurture and admonition of the Lord;' while such
neighbours as their dark brothers-in-law might have a chance of a rise
in life, in the only sense in which a 'rise' can be of real benefit to
them. These are the objects which statesmen who have the care and
conduct of a nation's welfare ought to set before themselves, and
unfortunately they are the last which are remembered in countries which
ar