The Governor of Jamaica has just opened the session of
the Colonial Legislature with a speech which augurs so ill for the spirit of the island authorities as to create serious alarm for the sequel. The case of Jamaica is not unfamiliar to our readers. The island is one of those that have suffered most severely by "recent policy" in this country, and hope deferred is converted to despair. The English Government abandoned compulsory labour, abandoned protective sugar-duties, but did not abandon civil list; and Jamaica, struck with the inconsistency, proposes to redress the balance of right by retrenchment. The Assembly diminishes public salaries ; the Legislative Council, sympathizing with of- ficials, throws out the bill, as ultra vireo. The Assembly then passes the annual budget, greatly reduced; the sums to be raised by taxation being strictly appropriated to specific payments, and thus withheld from the payment of salaries,—a bill also thrown out by the Council; and the Legislature is prorogued, without pass- ing the annual taxes. As happened once in Guiana, commodities are hurried into port without payment of duty, and the public exchequer is for the time insolvent. It is after such events that the Governor meets the House of Assembly in a new session with a didactic lecture on the necessity of providing for the public ser- vice, and threats of establishing anarchy, by discharging the police and releasing the convicts. In these proceedings there may be more than is-strictly war- rantable; there is exasperation as well as indignation in the As- sembly. Still, the irritation has been caused by real injuries ; t
the nsembly adheres to the letter of its rights ; and if there is a _ tangible fault anywhere, it is in that constitution which does not ieai er the Government responsible to the governed, nor provide efficient means for giving the colonists control over their own ex- penditure. In considering the difficulties of the case, the true statesman will see his way out of them by the course which has pacified rebellion in Canada and the Cape of Good Hope after it had been aroused by lighter injuries; and he will not suffer his own arbitration to be affected by the angers which are pardonable in the colonists, but would be unpardonable in him.
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