THE WEST INDIES [To the Editor of TEE SPECTATOR.]
you allow me to offer some captious observations on •Professor Coupland's review of Mr. W. M. Macmillan's recent book, Warning from the West Indies; in The Spectator of the 20th instant? Mr. Macmillan's book is, as Professor Coupland says, gloomy reading. I myself find it the more so because it does not discriminate perspicaciously between the causes for gloom and the indications of hope for improve- ment. With fifty years' close acquaintance with the West Indies and particularly with Jamaica, to which Mr. Macmillan in his book rather specially refers, I regret to have to say that I fmd his observations incomplete, superficial and largely incor- rect, and it is equally depressing to find that Professor Coup- kind's applications of them are scarcely more pertinent. It appears to me disappointing that whereas the fairly obvious prescription of " Federal organisation for the whole British Caribbean field " has been discussed for at least fifty years, Mr. Coupland, a professor of Colonial History and Philosophy, appears to be ignorant of the valid and practical reasons why it has gone no further. Anyhow it is certain that no administrative federation could have mitigated the economic failure which Mr. Macmillan justly deplores as manifest in the conditions of the general population of most of the West Indian colonies.
I must also express some perplexity at the reference made by Professor Coupland to " much advertised but rather half-hearted and ineffective attempts at fostering peasant proprietorship." Small proprietorship, where it exists, has been conclusively proved the one effective method of producing a tolerable degree of economic wealth and social comfort for the labouring class of these colonies, but I should never have spoken of it as having been " much advertised." It has been far too little advertised. And in so far -as it has been advertised the advertisement has received far too little attention. Such advertising as there has been may be said to have begun with the report of the Crossman-Baden Powell Commission of 1883, and it was reinforced by the Norman-Grey Commission of 1897, which pointed out that small proprietorship- with an agricultural education was the one hope for people of the West Indies. Very little practical attention has, however, since then been paid to these recommendations by the Colonial Office or by any Colonial Government except that of Jamaica ; and hardly anything practical has been done or attempted in that direction in any other colonies.
- Mr. Macmillan's book gravely fails to appreciate the proved positive value of this development, except in so far as he admits that the small proprietors of Jamaica and Grenada are better off than the landless labourers of Barbados, Antigua and St. Kitts, which at any rate may surely be regarded as something. Nor, I think, does he do justice to West Indian employers. Bad as are conditions in Barbados (which were fully described by Mr. Semple and myself in our report to the Colonial Office in 1980), I must say that the achievement of the Barbados planters and employers in maintaining the sugar industry of that island at all has been an astonishing feat. Moreover, the efficient work referred to by Professor Coupland and Mr. Macmillan as being done in Jamaica by irrigation of cane and bananas was pioneered and developed by Jamaican enterprise, public and private, and was not initiated by the " one big efficient company " (viz., The United Fruit Company of America) to which reference is made.
The truth about the failure of economic progress in the West Indies lies, I believe, in the view which I propounded more than thirty years ago in the first edition of my book, While Capital and Coloured Labour, namely, that the African appears destined, as a Nemesis of slavery, to defeat the European capitalist industrial system : because he is resolutely unaccommodating to the exploitation of his labour for another man's profit, though industrious enough when he can use it for his own. As all,our colonial development and administration for the last two or three hundred year has been actuated by men trained in the economics of the capitalist system, who can conceive no other method of economic exploitation, it never surprises me that English public officials or visitors fail to see what is wrong ; but it has been a great disappointment to me that Professors of Colonial Economics and History such as Mr. Macmillan and Professor Coupland should appear to remain equally devoid of perception.—
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