ghtning, tempest, and _earthquake_, good Lord, deliver
us,' falls on the stranger's ear with unwontedly solemn force.

The awful magnificence of these convulsions of nature is in strange
contrast with the insignificance of the record of human actions in this
island. Not that Jamaica was an insignificant member of the empire. Far
from it. The teeming source of wealth, she was, on the contrary, during
the whole of the eighteenth century, continually increasing in
importance. Even dukes were glad to leave England to assume the princely
state of a governor of Jamaica. Six hundred thousand African slaves were
introduced during the last century, of which number something over half
remained at the beginning of this. Human blood flowed in fertilizing
streams over the island, and out of this ghastly compost rose an
opulence so splendid as to silence for generations all inquiry into its
origin or character. It secured its possessors not only easy access, but
frequent intermarriages among the aristocracy of England, who thus in
time came to be among the largest West Indian slaveholders. Jamaica was
justly reckoned one of the brightest jewels in the British crown. But
the brilliancy was merely that of wealth, and as the ownership of this
was transferred more and more to Great Britain, the island itself at
length came to be of little more independent account than an outlying
estate. Petty squabbles between the governors and the Assembly,
occasional negro conspiracies, soon suppressed and cruelly punished, and
the wearying contests with the remaining negroes, who, under the name of
Maroons, long maintained a harassing warfare from their mountain
fastnesses, and yielded at last to favorable terms, are almost all that
fills the chronicles of the colony.

The island society, unrelieved by any eminence of genius or virtue, or
by the stir of great public interests, presented little more than a dull
monotony of sensuality and indolence, on a ground of inhumanity. It is
no wonder that Zachary Macaulay, from his experience in Jamaica as the
superintendent of an estate, formed in quiet sternness that resolution
to devote his life to uprooting a social system whose presiding
divinities he saw to be Mammon and Moloch, which he afterward so nobly
fulfilled. The graces and virtues of private character that lent some
relief to this dreary picture, I shall speak of hereafter.

One relief to the prevailing dulness of Jamaica life was found in a bar