BARBADOES.
• [TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPBOTATOR.1
have read with much pain your remarks of Saturday on the state of affairs at Barbadoes. The "previously-expressed opinions" to which you allude were wrong, and they appear to jou "to be justified by the letter of an occasional correspondent in the Times," because you are not aware, as I am, that that letter is thoroughly untruthful. You had no means of knowing that it emanates from a small knot of conspirators against Barbadoes self-government, who can only hope to carry out their aims and palliate their misdeeds by prejudicing the mind of the English public against the institutions of the colony.
I do not blame you for the conclusions you have arrived at, -considering the premises from which you start, but it certainly sadly shakes the confidence of a colonist in English public opinion, which he has hitherto regarded as the palladium of justice, when the Times, whose vaunted mission it is to form it, readily admits to its columns and emphasises by its most conspicuous type all that pertains to one side of a question, and pertinaciously refuses admission to almost everything that may be said on the other side. It is simply disheartening to discover that in days when a more sordid consideration would not pay, that there nevertheless exist subtle influences superior to justice to which the leading journal is amenable.
• Your space, I know, is too valuable to afford sufficient room for 4 4 the cackle of our" Barbadoes " burgh " in the form of the long and perhaps tedious explanations which would be necessary to show the false gloss given to our island doings by the Times' occa- sional correspondent, and thereby to extract the sting of your own pungent comments, and so I will content myself with asking you to suspend your further judgment until the other side of the question is also before you. I will ask you more. I will ask you to lend us your great influence in obtaining the common justice of a fair hearing.
A petition signed, with hardly an exception, by all the intelli- gent and propertied classes of Barbadoes (by -no means composed exclusively of whites and planters, a majority of the signatures being those of black and coloured men), has been sent to Lord Carnarvon, praying for a Royal Commission to inquire, among other things, into the alleged shortcomings and abuses of Bar- badoes institutions, and instead of condemning on the evidence of the prosecution without hearing the defence, I ask you to atone for the unwitting injustice you have done us by urging the grant- ing of this Commission, and I will promise not to complain of the judgment you may pronounce after duly weighing its report.—I am, Sir, 84c., [We should be very glad to see such a Commission, and are quite sure that its report would justify a great many more of the state- ments in the Times' letters than of the statements made by the West Indian Committee in London.—En. Spectator.]
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