It is now sixty years since Bryan Edwards apologised for the publication of his "History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies," on the grounds that his fellowsubjects in the old country were at the time in a state of gross ignorance in regard to the circumstances of those important dominions of the crown of England. In those days "ships, colonies, and commerce was a charter toast at every convivial meeting of bold Britons, and the West Indies (according to the testimony of their historian) had "become the principal source of the national opulence and maritime power;" yet Edwards "had not met with any book that even pretends to furnish a comprehensive and satisfactory account of the origin and progress of our national settlements in the tropical parts of America.

The system of agriculture (he continues) practised in the West Indies is almost as much unknown to the people of Great Britain as that of Japan. They know, indeed, that sago, indigo, and cotton are raised and produced there; but they are very generally, and to a surprising degree, uninformed concerning the method by which these and other valuable commodities are cultivated and brought to perfection." Whether the attempt made to dispel this darkness was followed by the success it deserved, we need not now pause to inquire. The ability and enlightened spirit of patriotism which distinguish the "History" were, at all events, rewarded by the speedy sale of two editions, and by its establishment as a standard national work, so firmly that it retains its authority but little diminished even at the present day. It is quite certain, however, that even though our grandsires may have walked safely in the light reflected by Bryan Edwards, the cloud has again descended upon our path. If a comprehensive and satisfactory knowledge

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of the origin, progress, and condition of our West Indian settlements ever generally existed in the public mind of England, it has been obliterated, and the excuse of novelty to most readers as fully justifies the publication, in 1854, of the work of Dr. Davy, the title of which we give below, as it did that of Edwards, in 1793. But, in the interval of half a century, a marvellous change has been suffered by the subject of the labours of these authors. West Indian opulence has vanished like the visionary grandeur of Alnaschar; the idea of a planter, once brilliant in the imagination of every youthful adventurer, has lost its halo of gold and parliamentary honours, and exists but as a tradition of the past. No trace of the sugar-lords of Bristol and Glasgow remains even in a fossil state. Those islands of the Caribbean sea, "surpassing all the rest of the world in beauty and conveniency," an adequate idea of whose charms Columbus despaired of conveying to his royal master-are now well-nigh forgotten by the world; the very groans of the plantations" have died away upon the air. Nevertheless, we do not altogether despair of interesting our readers, so far as to induce them to accompany us willingly in a rapid sketch of some of the more remarkable circumstances that distinguish the past and passing history of the British West Indies, and render it a worthy subject of study to all who desire to comprehend the principles, good and bad, which have governed the development of the most important of our national relations, social, commercial and political. In little more than two centuries, these colonies have passed through the several stages of the life of a nation. By the light of history, as authentic and fresh as if it were set forth in the newspapers of the days in which we live, we can trace the growth of British institutions from infancy to maturity, watch their de

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cline into decrepitude and dissolution, and even, as we hope, discover the rising signs of their future regeneration. In each of these settlements, with but three exceptions, the course which in England was commenced at the period of the Norman Conquest, and which is now, perhaps, but in mid career, has been begun and ended within about two hundred years.

In the early part of the seventeenth century, a disorderly crowd of English adventurers, impelled by various motives, invaded this new world, and drove out or subdued the aboriginal inhabitants and the earlier European settlers. A struggle of very brief duration ended in their obtaining political freedom, as it exists under the British Constitution. Unexampled commercial prosperity attended upon the progress and completion of this struggle. Wealth then brought its evils and errors; those who won liberty and fortune by their energy declined the labour of guarding the former inestimable but most transitory possession, and delegated to others the care of the latter. The necessary and natural result was a decrease of the white population, rapidly increasing financial embarrassment, a feeble but acrimonious struggle, not as in former days for, but against, progress, and finally bankruptcy and revolution. The causes of early prosperity, says Dr. Davy, were "a virgin soil of great fertility, rich productions, amply remunerating the cultivator, all of them luxuries fetching high prices in the market of Europe; first, tobacco, cotton, and indigo, with the minor articles of profit; afterwards sugar, with greater profit; free trade, free navigation, few or no fiscal duties, little competition; self-government and self-defence; with mental qualities fitted to make the most of advantagesthose qualities which belong to enterprising settlers, especially of the same race zeal, industry, perseverance, frugality, which we still witness carrying the American population westward without stop or check. Wealth, and the enervating influence of a tropical climate, ere long became antagonistic in these favoured regions, tending to introduce causes of an opposite kind, the effects of which soon became apparent, and are now too manifest.

Slavery was permitted by the home Government, after the example of the Spanish. Slaves in

large numbers were imported, and soon the cultivation was almost entirely carried on by them, with little skill, no implement but the hoe, and with a great cost of life. With the introduction of slaves a change took place, and that of an unfavourable kind, in the description of agriculture. The number of small proprietors diminished; the same variety of productions ceased to be cultivated; more capital was invested; plantations were enlarged; one or two articles, sugar or cotton, chiefly the former, engrossed almost entirely the attention. The large proprietors now began to become absentees, taking up their residence in England, trusting the management of their estates to attorneys, with increased expense, and often diminishing profit. Coeval with which were restrictions on trade, increased duties, augmented colonial expenditure from increase of salaried officers, many of them not needed but for ministerial patronage, and to meet it, an augmentation of colonial rates, and taxes, and duties, both on imports and exports; and last, and not least, an augmenting competition with the foreign growers, especially the French, of West India produce." This is a strange, eventful history, and not less strange in its own events than in the analogies it can scarcely fail to suggest to the minds of many of our readers. A small portion of their time and a little of our own space will not, we hope, be misspent in a brief demonstration of its accuracy.

Few acts in the much-criticised administration of Cromwell have been more generally reprobated than his invasion of Jamaica, and conquest of that island from the Spaniards in May, 1655. It is no part of our present object to enter upon a formal defence of that proceeding, or of his subsequent attempt to people the island by what has been represented as a forced immigration from Ireland. Both measures seem to us to have been grounded upon reasons of sound statesmanship; but it is sufficient for our present purpose to know that they constituted, in reality, the first beginning of an or ganised British settlement in the West Indies. It was not, however, until after the Restoration, that the troubles and discontents of the new settlers were appeased, and the rigour of military jurisdiction relaxed, by the establishment of a regular civil govern

ment. A large accession to the population of the settlement had been made from among the discontented of many classes and parties to whom the death of Cromwell and the return of the King had rendered a residence in England distasteful or dangerous. Jamaica was then, too, the head-quarters of the buccaneers; and the community formed out of these elements, it will easily be imagined, was not one from which civil immunities could long be withheld. Accordingly, we find that, early in 1661,Colonel Edward D'Oyley, Cromwell's governor, was re-commissioned; and shortly afterwards the Magna Charta of Jamaica was granted in a royal proclamation, conferring the privileges of "free denizens of England" upon all the children of natural born subjects of England to be born in the island. At the same time, royal orders were issued for the abrogation of martial law, for the erection of courts of judicature, and for the election of a council to pass, in conjunction with the governor, laws suitable to the exigencies of the colony. The royal bounty to the island was completed by a concession-at that period of the highest import-of a broad seal, bearing "a cross gules, charged with five pine apples in a field argent; supporters, two Indians, plumed and caudaled; crest, an alligator vivant; the inscription in the orb

"Ecce alium Ramos porrexit in orbem
Nec sterilis est crux.'"

Ac

These extraordinary favours, no doubt, produced the usual results. The cofonists having been permitted to sip at the springs of constitutional liberty, desired to drink deeper, and the King became alarmed for the consequences of the thirst he had stimulated. cordingly, in 1678 (we quote from Edwards), "a new system of legislation was adopted for Jamaica, founded nearly on the model of the Irish Constitution under Poynings' Act, and the Earl of Carlisle was appointed Chief Governor, for the purpose of enforcing it. A body of laws was prepared by the Privy Council of England. Among the rest, a bill for settling a perpetual revenue on the Crown, which his lordship was directed to offer to the Assembly, requiring them to adopt the whole code, without amendment or alteration. In future the heads of all bills (money bills excepted) were to be sug

VOL. XLIV.-NO. CCLIX.

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gested, in the first instance, by the Governor and Council, and transmitted to his Majesty, to be approved or rejected at home. On obtaining the royal confirmation, they were to be returned under the great seal, in the shape of laws, and passed by the General Assembly, which was to be convened for no other purpose than that and the business of voting the usual supplies, unless in consequence of special orders from England." A precedent for this encroachment had been already set in Barbadoes, by the extortion from the people of that island of a subsidy to the Crown of four and a-half per cent. on the gross exports for ever. alligator vivant was not, however, so easily to be dealt with. The Assembly threw out all the bills offered to them, and sent up to the Governor a revenue bill for one year, enacted in the style previously in use-" By the Governor, Council, and Representatives of the Commons assembled," which they refused to convert, in accordance with the King's instructions, into, "Be it enacted by the King's most excellent Majesty, by and with the consent of the General Assembly." To this bill the Governor, "having contracted many debts," gave the royal assent, and then immediately dissolved the Assembly. The battle-essentially the same as that waged some forty years before between Charles I. and the Commons of England-was renewed in the ensuing year. In the meantime, Lord Carlisle, as he informed Mr. Secretary Coventry, "used all methods possible with the several members apart," but with no better result. They now passed a revenue bill for six months only, when, "finding them nettled and warm, I thought it discretion" (writes his Excellency) "to let them take time to digest their thoughts;" and, having assented to the bill, he prorogued them for a month. The whole affair, as detailed in the letters of the Governor, protests of the House of Assembly, and other documents, is in the highest degree interesting, from its similarity to the great struggle of England, and from the proof it affords of the slowness of the House of Stuart to profit by the lessons of experience. The attempt to raise revenue by the action of the prerogative of the Crown, which had so fatal an issue in the case of ship-money, was re-produced; and even the arrest of the five members

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had its analogy in this little war of liberty.

The Governor, having frightened the Council into a compliance with the royal schemes, with their assistance "framed a bill of revenue indefinite," and sent it to the Assembly, where it was at once rejected, and an address of remonstrance presented to his Excellency by the hands of the Speaker, who contended to give it its due accent, by reading it himself." In the course of these transactions, the Governor, attended by the Council, intruded himself into the meeting of the Assembly, and after appointing and swearing in a clerk, in opposition to their claim of right to choose their own clerk, much urged them to discourse the matter commanded by the King freely and openly, which they one and all silently declined to do. For these men, the noble examples set by Sir Thomas More and Speaker Lenthall, were not recorded in vain; nor in another sense, were those of Cardinal Wolsey and Charles I. thrown away upon Governor Carlisle. Finding that Colonel Samuel Long, ChiefJustice of the island, and a most pertinacious abettor and cherisher of the Assembly's stubbornness, had a hand in framing and advising some parts of their address, his Excellency, "upon serious and deliberate consideration, sent him his quietus, and appointed Colonel Robert Byndloss, Chief-Justice in his place." He further suspended Colonel Long from his seat in the Council, and sent him a prisoner to England. There the struggle was continued for another year, during which the terrors of the Privy Council, and of his Majesty's judges, were in vain directed against the pertinacious Jamaicans. The power of the purse at length prevailed, and towards the close of the year 1680, a new commission was granted to the Earl of Carlisle, by which free deliberation and legislative powers were confirmed to the Assembly, and the attempt to impose Poynings' law upon the colony was finally abandoned. Thus, a work which the genius of Molyneux and the eloquence of Grattan, supported by the bayonets of the Volunteers, did not accomplish for Ireland in less than a century of agitation, was brought to maturity by those hot natures in a score of months.

Throughout the whole of this struggle it is apparent and the fact

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is very significant that no favour was ever asked from the Crown. To be permitted to stand upon the ancient ways of British liberty, was all that these true British men condescended to demand. They desired not new privileges, nor any power but what his Majesty's governors assured them was their birthrights," and they could not "imagine that the Irish model of government was, in principio, ever intended for Englishmen." A repre sentative Assembly, free deliberation and legislation, the control of the public purse for the Commons, according to the ancient method, was what they demanded, and less they would not accept. Nevertheless, all was not obtained as the result of the first conflict; and although the Revolution of 1688 prevented a repetition of such scenes as those we have sketched, we find abundance of evidence in the proceedings of the colonial legislatures that they remained mindful of the nature of their rights, and nicely sensitive to all infringements upon them. Thus, in 1764, when Governor Lyttelton, in his capacity of Chancellor of Jamaica, issued writs of habeas corpus and, upon their return, released two prisoners committed by the Assembly for breach of privilege, the House asserted "a right to the laws of England, as their inheritance ;" and, as a main part of that right, the same rank in the system of the constitution for the Assembly, as representing the whole body of the people, and as being the grand inquest of the community, as the House of Commons holds in that of the mother country. In the course of this quarrel, five different Assemblies were called and abruptly dissolved, refusing to vote supplies unless satisfaction was given them, until at length, the patience of the Government being exhausted, it submitted; and the Lieutenant-Governor, in Council, and in presence of the Assembly, ordered the registrar of the Court of Chancery to "enter a vacatur in the margent of the several proceedings, and the entries of the same in the book of records, and to draw cross lines over the said proceedings and the entries thereof, in the usual form and manner."

We have derived our illustration of the political constitution of the West Indies altogether from the parliamentary history of Jamaica, because although there was, undoubtedly, a crude

beginning of a representative government made at an earlier period in other islands, still the system seems to have been first perfected and established in that colony, and there is little difference in the form in which it exists in the others. "In all of them," says Dr. Davy, "excepting Trinidad, St. Lucia, and British Guiana, there is one identical form, following the analogy of the government of the mother country, being tripartite, composed of a Governor, or Lieutenant-Governor, the representative of the Sovereign, owing his appointment to the Colonial Minister and commissioned by the Crown; of a deliberative and executive Council, similarly appointed, bearing a faint analogy to the House of Lords; and of a House of Assembly, strictly resembling the House of Commons, both in the manner of the election of its members, and in its functions; with the marked exception, that the executive does not take a part and a lead in its proceedings, the Governor having only the power of exercising his veto.

"In Trinidad, the popular representative part is wanting, as it is also in St. Lucia; the government in each is conducted by a Council, presided over by the Governor. In British Guiana, there is the Court of Policy, with the Combined Court; the former, the executive, composed of an equal number of official and non-official members; the latter formed of the preceding, with the addition of a certain number of financial representatives, elected by the people-both presided over by the Governor. By this latter court supplies are voted."

The three constitutionless settlements are so, because they are foreign conquests, or cessions on capitulation to the Crown. The others enjoy their free institutions rather by virtue of the British denizenship of the original settlers, than by any direct concession of charters. Whatever was the origin of their constitutions, they were certainly not octroyès. they grew; whether, as in Jamaica, out of the prudential desire of the home authority to reduce discontented soldiers and bold buccaneers within the control of civil government; or, as in Barbadoes, out of the mere necessity of being governed, felt by a band of adventurers, who, to use the words of Lord Clarendon, "planted without any body's leave, and without being

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opposed by any body." Under whatever circumstances the first germ of liberty was placed in the soil, it developed itself, under the influence of Anglo-Saxon husbandry, in strict conformity with the original type. the monarchical republics of Nevis and Montserrat, mere dots of land in the Caribbean sea, equally as in New York or Boston, British origin is marked and certified not more surely by the authentic records of history, than by the legislative machinery of President, Council, and Assembly. King, Lords, and Commons, these really are, by whatever name called, and whether their constituent members be numbered by hundreds, as in the United States and Great Britain, or be altogether no more than nineteen souls, as in the legislature of Montserrat. With a Queen's message informing the Lords and Commons of England of the Russian war ringing in our ears, it is, doubtless, difficult to suppress a smile, when we turn to the miniature presentment of the pomp and circumstance of Parliament in one of the lesser Antilles. The President's command of the attendance upon him of the Lower House; his speech on divers weighty affairs, punctitiously addressed to six honourable gentlemen of the Council, and twelve gentlemen of the House of Assembly; the Speaker's claim of all ancient privileges and immunities; the address to his IIonour-echo of the speech; the mace (large emblem of so small an authority) form a picture not unlikely, we admit, to provoke laughter among the unskilful; but deeply affecting to those to whom history being something more than an old almanac they present themselves as real symbols of a true, and happily not yet extinct, political faith. While that faith retained its purity and strength in the West Indian colonies, the fruit of prosperity was produced in abundance; no sooner did the tares of wealth, and luxury, and an irregular ambition, grow up so as to choke it, than the fruit languished and died.

At the present time, when the spirit of colonisation has revived among Englishmen, and when constitutional government has again become the fashion in our colonies, it may not seem inopportune to interpose a word or two upon the defects and shortcomings, as well as upon the advantages of the