TOPICS OF THE DAY
SLR H. STORKS AND GOVERNOR EYRE.
Government has acted in this matter of Jamaica with
more promptitude than was expected, and with equal justice and caution. It has resolved to appoint a Commission of inquiry into the insurrection officially said to have been organized in the island, into the illegal severity by which that insurrection has been anticipated, and, we trust, into the general condition of the population. The President of that Commission, Sir Henry Storks, has been gazetted as Governor and Captain- General of the island, Mr. Eyre being suspended pending the termination of the inquiry. The late Governor will not, however, be censured or in any way humiliated until his conduct has been investigated, but left in substantial possession of his post and present enjoyment of its emoluments, being placed in fact in the position of a Governor on leave, though of course, as defendant in the great suit, without liberty to quit the island. Nothing more than this has been asked of the Ministry, and nothing less than this would have contented the country. The inquiry, as was seen from the first, was unavoidable. Whatever else was doubtful, it was certain that Mr. Eyre asserted that he had hanged without legal trial the leader of Her Majesty's Opposition in the colony, that he had put to -death great numbers of Her Majesty's subjects, and that he had proposed measures intended to restrict or abolish freedom of speech, of meeting, and of public worship. Justified or unjustified, conduct of this kind must be explained before some tribunal interested only in justice and able to inquire upon the spot, and that tribunal it was certain must, in the interest of authority as well as justice, include a new Governor. We cannot try Her Majesty's representative within his own dominion and amidst passionate outbursts of feeling without destroying his moral authority, and it was certain that no negro would give evidence against a Governor of whose "energy" he had all round him proofs so terrible. Powers, too, will be required to place witnesses on oath, and they would not have been heartily asked by Governor Eyre to authenticate the evidence for his own prosecution. A new Governor, who should be also a Commissioner, was indispens- able, and we do not know that a better selection could have been made than that of Sir Henry Storks. He can govern to begin with, and the island, with its dominant class half wild with rage and the thirst for vengeance, its soldiery just recalled from a human battue, and its population maddened by the execution of one and a half per cent. of all its adult males, will need government. There is a trace of the marti- net in Sir Henry Storks which will be most useful in over- coming the passive resistance of local officials, and for the rest he has maintained through a long career a reputation for energy, judgment, and success. He has served among mixed races in the Mauritius, he commanded the nondescript sol- diery raised by Great Britain in Turkey during the Crimean war, and he pacified the Ionian Islands when they were seething with emotion. He will be assisted in his inquiry by two other Commissioners, and though much must depend upon, their character and ability, it is the president who gives tone to every court. It will be well if one of them is a judge, better if both are men of that grave and serene love of justice which in such cases effects more than either the spirit of philanthropy or an abstract detestation for slavery.
Sir Henry Storks sails, we imagine, by the mail of the 18th inst., and he will not arrive a moment too soon. Guilty or innocent, fighting a rebellion or only crushing a hated race, it is certain that Governor and planters have for- gotten for the moment the very existence of Great Britain. They have proposed, and tried to carry, a series of laws, permanent laws, with which nothing in our recent his- tory can be compared. Lord Canning's memorable Six Acts, the most tremendous series of measures ever passed by an English Council, were declared in force only for twelve months, and with the war still raging and the result still doubtful, he suffered them to lapse. Their result was bad, worse than Englishmen at home ever knew, but at least they made no permanent inroad on the principles of British authority. But Mr. Eyre and his colleagues propose to put an end for all time to freedom within Jamaica. Under his constitutional Bill power is not, as was imagined, to be con- centrated in the Governor, who is responsible to England, but in an assembly partly nominated by him, but irresponsible to him, and partly by the white planters alone. Nothing is altered except the possibility of negroes obtaining the fran-
chise, which is to be raised above their reach. We are by no means anxious they should have it. We prefer for a colony like Jamaica the Indian system of government, under which an absolute but responsible Viceroy works through a carefully selected bureaucracy, to any assembly a tropical race is as yet competent to elect, or likely to obey. But of all conceivable forms of government that which entrusts the legislative power to a limited caste divided from the people by interests and by colour is the absolute worst. The Indian settlers were never slaveholders, never hated a population whose facial angle is as perfect as their own, and have almost identical interests with the native aristocracy, yet no minister in his senses would trust them with the uncontrolled power of making contract laws. The new Constitution does so trust the whites of Jamaica, unimpeded by the necessity of asking half-castes for their votes, and unembarrassed by the possible presence of negro representatives. If the Assembly chooses to vote all power to the Governor so much the better, for a Governor is usually a king, a man who sees little difference in the claims of his subjects to justice before the law, but to vote it to a caste is simply to prepare an irresistible machinery for caste legislation. This Bill, however, is moderate com- pared with two others, one of which has proved too "strong" even for the Assembly of Jamaica. By the first, any person, white or black, who is guilty of " ill-advised,"— mark that word—"or malicious speaking," or who shall disseminate any doctrine subversive of public peace, shall if convicted before a circuit court, or a court to be appointed by the Governor, be condemned to imprisonment, with or without hard labour, for any period not more than seven years or less than twelve months. Moreover, any person found strolling about the country disseminating doctrine sub- versive of the public peace, lecturing, for example, on the Bill of Rights, shall, on conviction before two justices, be liable to imprisonment for three months. Free speech is punishable like burglary, lecturing like larceny. If Mr. Bright visits Jamaica and tells the people that reform is wanted in the land laws he is liable to seven years' tread- mill, if Mr. Gurney visits the missionary stations and calls on the people to petition the Crown for anything not approved by Mr. Eyre he may be imprisoned for three months. We- can imagine the kind of justice an unhappy man like Mr. Gordon, suspected of imploring his countrymen to appeal to the Queen, would obtain under such a law. And yet this is not the worst. In a Bill drawn up with a refined malignity of hate, the Governor of Jamaica pro- posed to suppress free -worship. No person, unless a minister of the Church of England, or of the Church of Scotland, or a Roman Catholic priest, could, had this law passed, preach or teach without a licence, costing 3/., under penalty of a fine of not less than 201., or imprisonment with or without hard labour for not less than six months, and the place of worship might have been confiscated to the State. We really hardly expect to be believed, and therefore give the precise words of the final clause :—" Any person who shall teach or preach in any con- gregation or assembly for religious worship as aforesaid, or who shall teach or instruct youth or other persons as a tutor or schoolmaster or schoolmistress, except as aforesaid, without being personally registered respectively, as by this Act is required, shall, for every offence, on summary conviction thereof before any two justices of the peace, forfeit a sum not exceeding (500, and not less than (200, or be imprisoned, with or without hard labour, for a period not exceeding (twelve) months, and not less than (six) months, at the discretion of the convicting justices."
Any negro therefore who fancied that he could instruct his fellows, any minister in the habit of opening prayer meet- ings, any Sunday-school teacher who thought his little knowledge night be beneficial to persons with none, must have taken out a licence, paid a fee fixed intentionally at a rate beyond his means, or endured the treadmill for not less than six months. Since Bunyan lay in his dungeon there has been no piece of English legislation like this. The Indian Government has indeed passed an Act under which the body of a political assassin may be burnt, and his soul thus prevented from reaching Paradise, and has within these two, months carried that Act into force at Peshawur, but even that Government, absolute in 'theory as well as practice, has never ventured to interfere with the public worship of the worst among its sects. The maharajas of Bombay may carry on the foul orgies which they call worship without the licence Mr. Eyre proposed to exact from poor Baptists, and all Christians not Catholic or established in Jamaica were declared liable to penalties not menaced to the millions of Sivaites who in India maintain the worship of the phallus. It is difficult to write of such proposals as if they were real measures, as if they were anything but sneers upon the folly of religious persecution. We all in this country felt so certain that they would be re- jected or disallowed, that they were from the beginning mere words, that it is hard to regard them seriously, but what are we to think of the judgment, or justice, or political acu- men of a Governor who could prepare so monstrous a series of propositions, who in an English colony and in 1865 could deliberately propose to make of Christian teaching a crime ? Or what are we to think of the community which, itself free, reads a law like this without a protest, and calls on us to suspend judgment till we see whether Governor Eyre is justified in striking at souls as well as bodies, in putting flown religion as well as rebellion, in proscribing education as well as ill-advised speaking ? Is the love of freedom abso- lutely dead in England that the Times can dare to endorse pro- posals like these, which strike not at black men, whose souls of course signify no more than their bodies, but at the imperial race, which rob them and not blacks, of all for which they have fought for two hundred years ? It will be said that the Bill was intended to prohibit irregular meetings held under cover of public worship, but it was not so. Had this been the object the measure would not have been rejected by an Assembly which hates Baptists, and Mr. Eyre would have prohibited all meetings, but it was open to any Mr. Gordon to ask five hundred friends to a tea party and there plot treason and massacre without penalty, but if he closed the evening with prayer—the treadmill. The proposal was the mere expres- sion of hate for the only class which has frankly stood up for the coloured poor, which has endeavoured to enlighten their ignorance, or failing that, to soften their lot by the only alleviation over which tyranny is powerless. If anything were wanting to prove the animus of this measure, it would be found in the last clauses of the Bill, which provided that if any preacher or teacher thought himself wronged under the Act, and brought an action against the wrong-doer, he should bring it in his own parish, i. e., before the justices who sentenced him, and if he failed to obtain a verdict be fined for asking justice by threefold costs. There must be in England at least four hundred thousand Nonconformist voters, and if they do not demand a public and unmistakeable reprobation of this official proposal, notwithstanding its rejection, they will deserve to see it applied to themselves, to be liable to six months of the treadmill for a spiritual offence which a Catholic priest is by the same statute expressly authorized to commit.
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