BARBADOES. T HERE are two entirely separate questions involved in the
controversy as to Barbadoes, namely, the conduct of the Governor, Mr. Pope Hennessy, and the general condition of the island, and on neither of them is the decision announced by Lord Carnarvon on Tuesday quite satisfactory. Mr. Pope Hennessy is entirely acquitted on every charge but one, and the condition of the island is described in language which would thoroughly justify a Commission ; but Mr.. Hennessy is blamed for the best thing he ever did, and the Commission is relegated to some future date. As the public always attends, first of all, to the personal question, we will speak first of the Governor's conduct. Mr. Hennessy is, of course, acquitted of having fomented disorder,—an absurd charge, resting on no evidence, and springing evidently from that deep apprehension of the mass of the people from which men inheriting slave-owning sentiments can never shake themselves entirely free. You may detect it in the complaints of Russian landlords as easily as in those of West-Indian planters. He is also acquitted of having justified the personal hatred borne to him by the planters and their representatives, who behave, as Lord Carnarvon, with needful plainness of speech, assures them, more like "fractious children" than "political men." And finally, Mr. Hennessy is not only acquitted for his con- duct during the revolt, but very cordially praised. He alone in the island seems completely to have kept his head ; he put down the disturbances with vigour, yet with the wildest counsels perpetually offered him, and with an opportunity of completely conciliating the planters, he determinately abstained from bloodshed. But it is evident through Lord Carnarvon's reticent language that he thinks Mr. Hennessy to blame for the Message in which he represented the condition of the people as deplorable, and suggested confederation as one remedy ; and it is on this point that we hold the Colonial Secretary, and a large section of the public, to be in error. "Discretion" is not, as the Pall Mall Gazette affirms," the first duty of a colonial governor." It may be the first quality required of him, but his first duty is to see that the people committed to his charge are well governed, and if they are not well governed, to represent that fact as strongly as possible to the Legislature which governs. This is admitted not only in England, where insurrection is only apprehended by hot-heads, but in countries like India, Ceylon, the Mauritius, and Guiana,' where the governing class is outnumbered by fifty or a hundred to one. Some of the greatest measures adopted by the Indian Governments have been proposed on the distinct ground that the abuses to be removed were intolerable to the labouring population, and the whole Report of the Coolie Commission is, from the Pall Mall 'point of view, an indiscretion. Governor Hennessy found the people of Barbadoes suf- fering from extreme poverty—poverty so deep that only a race abnormally patient would submit to it—he found that the tone of local legislation was inspired by the desire of keeping this poverty quiet by the fear of small but severe punishments, the inordinate frequency of whippings being the principal ; he found the Legislature so opposed to measures of relief, that in passing an Act to assist emigration they had specifically provided that no assist- ance should be given to any artisan or labourer, thus nulli- fying the relief they pretended to offer; and he, therefore, thinking that confederation would ameliorate the condition of the people, told the Legislature so. This was all he did. He did not write half as angrily as Administrator Freeling had done on the same side. He did not address any irresponsible authority. He simply appealed to the legal and responsible Legislature of the island to pass a measure which he, in common with his superiors at home, believed would be for the welfare of the people, on the ground of that welfare. 'What is there in the argument he used that is contrary to political etiquette? If he had defended confederation as favourable to English policy, or planters' profits, or the growth of sugar, he would have been considered an excellent official. If he had. used the same language in India, or Ceylon, or the Mauritius, nothing would have been heard of it outside a limited circle, in which he might have been spoken of as an unexpectedly. philanthropic Governor. But because he pleaded quite mode- rately for the people in a West-Indian Wand, where the popu- lation happens to be negro, he is accused of indiscretion, and though strongly defended on other grounds by his superior, is on this ground told that he is to blame. He is to blame, we dare say, on many grounds, but on this one he is, so far as we can see, deserving of all praise.
If the condition of Barbadoes were paradisaical, the matter would be different—though then we should never have heard of it, for it is only the unhappy, not the happy, whom it is dangerous to sympathise with—but Lord Carnarvon, while not acquitting Mr. Hennessy of indiscretion, is compelled, by his hatred of injustice, to describe the situation of the island in terms as black as the correspondent of the Times ever used. The population is redundant, says the Secretary for the Cob- flies; the condition of the peasantry—i.e., the people of Barba- does, the rest being hundreds to their thousands—is " unsatis- factory," and even " unsound ;" the wages are low, "and even these wages are sometimes," he suspects, "liable to various stoppages and deductions." He "doubts whether the law does not press with a certain amount of severity upon the peasantry," whether the prisons are not in a bad condition, a vital question for a population always liable to imprisonment ; whether the amount of corporal punishment is not monstrous—it is twenty times that of Jamaica ; whether the police is sufficient, and above all, whether the anomalous Constitution can be relied on for the improvement of the social condition of the people. The governing body is really the Legislature, which is elected by 1,200 or 1,300 out of 160,000 people—that is, in reality, represents nothing but employers—and not only makes laws, but appropriates the revenue, through Committees of itself, to such purposes as it thinks right. The Government has not even the power, as in England, to prevent a private Member from proposing a money vote. The island, in fact, is not only governed by a caste, but by a caste ruling through a vestry, which, while blazing with wrath at the mere idea of Confederation, has never discussed the proposal, preferring instead to punish the Governor, who advocates the Colonial-Office plan, by re- fusing to pay for his telegrams. Surely there is enough in this very speech, not to speak of the references scattered through the Blue-books, to justify a Royal Commission of Inquiry,—not into Mr. Hennessy's conduct, but into the working of the Con- stitution of Barbadoes, which, unless Barbadian planters are. infinitely better than any other human beings, must be radically and oppressively bad. We cannot but regret that such a Com- mission has not been granted, unless, indeed, Lord Carnarvon is prepared to take a still better and bolder course, and sweep away by Act of Parliament this grotesque and unjust form of government, in favour of the responsible despotism which, as experience in India, in Ceylon, and in Jamaica has proved, is the only form of government which, when inferior and superior races are mixed in unequal numbers, can be trusted not to post- pone justice to considerations of caste. Barbacloes wants for twenty years the government of Bengal, and even then may not escape the visitation of a famine or an epidemic, with which nature warns tribes who have grown too thick, that half the earth is empty. How many millions of acres in Guiana need culture, while Barbadoes swarms with people like a rich cheese with mites
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