ings which I have seen were collected
together they would make an interesting volume.' This was all. He had
delivered his soul and relapsed into silence.

From a Puerto Rico merchant I learnt that, if the English colonies were
in a bad way, the Spanish colonies were in a worse. His own island, he
said, was a nest of squalor, misery, vice, and disease. Blacks and
whites were equally immoral; and so far as habits went, the whites were
the filthier of the two. The complaints of the English West Indians were
less sweeping, and, as to immorality between whites and blacks, neither
from my companions in the 'Moselle' nor anywhere afterward did I hear or
see a sign of it. The profligacy of planter life passed away with
slavery, and the changed condition of the two races makes impossible any
return to the old habits. But they had wrongs of their own, and were
eloquent in their exposition of them. We had taken the islands from
France and Spain at an enormous expense, and we were throwing them aside
like a worn-out child's toy. We did nothing for them. We allowed them no
advantage as British subjects, and when they tried to do something for
themselves, we interposed with an Imperial veto. The United States,
seeing the West Indian trade gravitating towards New York, had offered
them a commercial treaty, being willing to admit their sugar duty free,
in consideration of the islands admitting in return their salt fish and
flour and notions. A treaty was in process of negotiation between the
United States and the Spanish islands. A similar treaty had been freely
offered to them, which might have saved them from ruin, and the Imperial
Government had disallowed it. How, under such treatment, could we
expect them to be loyal to the British connection?

It was a relief to turn back from these lamentations to the brilliant
period of past West Indian history. With the planters of the present it
was all _sugar_--sugar and the lazy blacks who were England's darlings
and would not work for them. The handbooks were equally barren. In them
I found nothing but modern statistics pointing to dreary conclusions,
and in the place of any human interest, long stories of constitutions,
suffrages, representative assemblies, powers of elected members, and
powers reserved to the Crown. Such things, important as they might be,
did not touch my imagination; and to an Englishman, proud of his
country, the West Indies had a far higher interest. Strange scenes