tmas Day.

What to do was the question. I knew no one in Jamaica--no one at
all except the governor, Lord Mallow, and him I had fought with
swords in Phoenix Park five years before. I had not known he was
governor here. I came to know it when I first saw him riding over
the unpaved street into Kingston from Spanish Town with his suite,
ornate with his governorship. He was a startling figure in scarlet,
with huge epaulets on his lieutenant-general's uniform, as big a pot
as ever boiled on any fire-chancellor, head of the government and of
the army, master of the legislature, judging like one o'clock in the
court of chancery, controller of the affairs of civil life, and
maker of a policy of which he alone can judge who knows what
interests clash in the West Indies.

English, French, Spanish, and Dutch are all hereabout. All struggle
for place above the other in the world of commerce and society,
though chiefly it is the English versus the French in these days;
and the policy of the governor is the policy of the country. He
never knows whether there will be a French naval descent or whether
the blacks in his own island will do as the blacks in St. Domingo
did--massacre the white people in thousands. Or whether the free
blacks, the Maroons, who got their freedom by treaty with Governor
Trelawney, when the British commander changed hats with Cudjoe, the
Maroon chief, as the sealing of the bargain--whether they will rise
again, as they before have risen, and bring terror into the white
settlement; and whether, in that case, all negro-slaves will join
them, and Jamaica become a land of revolution.

Of what good, then, will be the laws lately passed regulating the
control of slaves, securing them rights never given before, even
forbidding lashes beyond forty-nine! Of what use, then, the
punishment of owners who have ill-used the slaves? The local
councils who have power to punish never proceed against white men
with rigour; and to preserve a fair balance between the white man up
above and the black down below is the responsibility of the fair-
minded governor. If, like Mallow, he is not fair-minded, then is
the lash the heavier, and the governor has burdens greater than
could easily be borne in lands where the climate is more friendly.

Lord Mallow did not see me when I passed him in the street, but he
soon came to