THE END OF THE JAMAICA PROSECUTION.
WE may assume that we have at last done not only with Mr. Eyre, but with the terrible story of the 'Terror in Jamaica for which it has been found impossible to call Mr. Eyre to account in England. We certainly have no reason to regret that these proceedings are at length at an end. As in the case of the American War, the opinions we have been forced to express upon them from beginning to end have been almost directly at issue with those of the greater number probably even of our own readers, and it is scarcely more pleasant to write in a strain which is known to be utterly repugnant to the majority of those who read, than to address an audience when every sentence is a wound inflicted on their self-love. Still, we cannot allow the matter to drop, or Mr. Justice Blackburn's clever reply to the Chief Justice to go forth to the world as the final judgment of English law upon what has happened, without briefly summing up the aspects of the case as it appears to us, and defining the indications which it gives us of English middle-class opinion.
As regards the pure law of the matter, even Mr. Justice Blackburn is compelled to agree with the Chief Justice that in continuing the reign of martial law in Jamaica long beyond the time at which the insurrection, or revolt, or murderous riot, or whatever the disturbance at Morant Bay may be most properly called, was suppressed, Mr. Eyre did what would have been utterly illegal in England, and what can only be legally justified, if at all, by the special law of Jamaica. It seems a matter of grave regret,—nay, for grave complaint against Mr. Justice Blackburn's charge,—that in explaining the special *colonial law of Jamaica by which martial law there was first controlled, and by reference to which he interprets, as we understand, all the subsequent statutes on the subject,---the law of the 33rd Charles II.,—Mr. Justice Blackburn omitted to recite that most important proviso that nothing therein con- tained should authorize any act " contrary to the law of England." It cannot be questioned that such a proviso had a most important bearing on the meaning of a statute the very purpose of which was, according to Mr. Justice Blackburn, to *confer powers which would not have been legal in England. For the rest, we have no further comment to make upon Mr. Justice Blackburn's judgment, except that the whole of the latter part of it reads as if intended expressly to answer the 'Chief Justice's charge to the grand jury concerning Lieu- tenant Brand and Colonel Nelson, and that it is not a -spectacle likely to enhance the respect of the English people for law when its highest judicial authorities speak somewhat dike opposite counsel in the same premisses. Mr. Justice Black- burn undoubtedly did his very best to impress on the grand jury all the circumstances diminishing Mr. Eyre's responsibility for the act of bringing Mr. Gordon and others from districts in which there was no martial law to districts in which it prevailed, in order that he might be tried and judged with that grotesque and impromptu equivalent for justice which was administered by Colonel Nelson and Lieutenant Brand at Morant Bay. In explaining this, of course Mr. Justice Blackburn was doing only what by his office he was bound to do, and he did it con amore and very ably. But if he laid any equal stress on the influences which should have weighed with any right-minded governor in the opposite direction, if he pointed out that the very fact that Mr. Gordon had been a violent political opponent of his own,—a "pestilent firebrand," as Mr. Justice Blackburn insisted on call- ing the dead man more than once, with apparently something almost of literary pride in the application of these not very novel epithets of political passion,—ought to have weighed with him in favour of the most anxious self-restraint when he came to contemplate thus ridding himself of a man who had been a personal enemy, if he represented that the governor of a colony is expected, by the very office which he holds, to stand decidedly above the violence and party passions of the circle in which he moves, and to consider what is due to all classes of the people over whom he reigns, if Mr. Justice Blackburn did this, we say, in summing up to the grand jury the merits of the case affecting the removal of Mr. Gordon to Morant Bay, we are unfortunate in not being able to find any trace whatever of such remarks in any of the various reports we have consulted. He put most justly and most forcibly to the jury the influences stimulating Mr. Eyre on to this extraordinary stretch of power,—" every one " [i.e., we suppose every white man among the colonists] " urging him on, no one holding him back,"—but we cannot see a trace of any attempt to enforce the class of considerations which should be assumed to be present in every governor's mind, merely by virtue of his office,—that he is responsible not solely for "every one " in the society which he moves, but for " every one " in the whole people whom he governs,—that he must think for the class which will suffer from the example of violent and exceptional measures taken by the governor himself, as well as for the class which may be saved by them,—and further, that his honour should be above, not only successful attack, but even fair suspicion, so that if he has a keen political foe, he should accord to that political foe the largest measure of consideration any way compatible with the safety of the whole people. If Mr. Justice Blackburn put these counter-considerations as ably as he put before the grand jury the excuses for Mr. Eyre's exceptional proceeding in Mr. Gordon's case, we regret sincerely that neither the Times nor any other of the journals that we have consulted appears to have reported this part of his charge. Indeed, the considerations submitted to the grand jury with reference to Mr. Gordon's apprehension and exceptional submission to the curious tribunal which condemned him, read exactly like a speech for the defence. We remark that Mr. Justice Black- burn uses the phrase, " general belief in the colony,"— which he says was all against Mr. Gordon,—as synonymous with general belief amongst the whites of the colony. The truth seems to us that Mr. Justice Blackburn did not in his own mind distinguish between the two phrases. That Mr. Gordon had plenty of warm friends who thoroughly dis- believed in his guilt amongst the mulatto and native popula- tion, and who were utterly aghast at the violent measure taken, no one disputes. But Mr. Justice Blackburn, like our whole middle class, and the grand juries which that middle class furnish, does not really appear to appre- hend the distinction. What Mr. Eyre was virtually charged with was considering the panic-struck white caste as "every- body," and acting for them as if their interest were " every- body's " interest. Mr. Justice Blackburn seems to endorse this discreditable confusion of thought. He thinks it de- cent to say of a governor urged on by a small class of the people, that " everybody " urged him on. That some people urged him on, and those the very people by whom he was but too likely to be influenced, we admit. The charge from which we fear that he can never now be exonerated is, that he who as governor was bound to consider gravely his duty to the thousands who were not in his own immediate circle, and who must suffer by the measures which the people around him believed to be essential to their safety, acted like the organ of a class, and not like the ruler of a people.
Turning from Mr. Justice Blackburn's charge, and that re- markable majority of twenty-one against two on the grand jury which gave effect to the obvious drift of the latter portion of that charge, let us say, finally, a few words of the temper which has been evinced in this matter by the majority of the English middle class. We have not been amongst those who blamed Mr. Eyre for sternly putting down the first outbreak. We have not blamed him for any act prior to his own declara- tion that the outbreak was virtually suppressed. We have never denied the great difficulty of his position. We were amongst the first to call attention to the honourable, and even heroic, courage which had marked his previous career as an explorer, and we have never for an instant questioned the sin- cerity of his own belief that in the matter of the Jamaica rebellion he had acted in the way best calculated to preserve the colony to the Crown. We admit, and should even con- tend, that under these circumstances the nation ought to adopt the most lenient construction of which his actual con- duct was capable, consistently with the due assertion of the right of all classes of Her Majesty's subjects to equal and just government, and of the strict responsibility of ill-judging governors for blunders of judgment so grave as to issue in all the consequences of deliberate oppression. But what we can- not help seeing is that the upper and middle class of the Eng- lish people,—especially the latter,—do not care to assert these principles at all ! that they are positively enraged at the de- mand of negroes for equal consideration with Irishmen, Scotch- men, and Englishmen ; that proceedings which would have cost the most well-meaning of weak-judging men his head if they had taken place in the United Kingdom,—which would have been received with shouts of execration if they had taken place in France or Austria,—are heartily admired as examples of " strong government " when they take place in the British West Indies. No man in his senses would have set up the plea that we ought not to fix responsibility too closely on public servants who do what they believe to be best in a very difficult position, if 300 Scotchmen, or Irishmen, or even Canadian or Australian British subjects had lost their lives after the complete suppression of a revolt, by the sentences of such tribunals as that at Morant Bay. We assert that no one can even put the case in imagination for a moment with any hesitation about the answer. Not a word would have been listened to,—though it might have been just as true,—as to the courage and honour and difficulties of a Governor re- sponsible for such acts. It would have been said at once that unless you could establish his moral incompetence to the claim of average reasoning powers, we must treat as crimes acts which had had all the evil result of crimes. It would have been said, and very justly, that Mr. Justice Blackburn's doctrine that the Governor was not responsible for what his own subordinates did, on the ground that, having once proclaimed martial law, he left them entirely to their own discretion in working it out,—though his Government had at any time in its own hands the power to annul the proclama- tion, and though he must have known generally well enough what was going on under the sanction of that discretionary power to slay, flog, and torture,—was a mockery under the protection of which any amount of political crime could be excused. It seems to us to be simple insincerity to maintain for a moment that Mr. Eyre's conduct would find a single palliator except on the implicit assumption that British sub- jects, being negroes or mulattoes with rebellion amongst them, cannot expect for a moment the same treatment as British sub- jects of Anglo-Saxon or even Celtic descent with rebellion amongst them. That is the true axiom at the bottom of Mr. Justice Blackburn's mind, and at the bottom of the mind of the great majority of both the grand juries which have ignored the bills against Colonel Nelson, Lieutenant Brand, and Mr. Eyre, and at the bottom also, we will not scruple to say, of the minds of nine-tenths of our own class,—if not of nine-tenths of the British nation. This is the only interpretation we can put on what has happened, and it is not a pleasant interpretation. Mr. Eyre has done what in him is no doubt consistent with many virtues, with high and—excepting in his want of honourable fastidiousness in dealing with a political foe—we might fairly say, perfect honour ; but what, nevertheless, in the perfectly needless, as well as frightful and savage enormity of its results, was politically as criminal as cruelty and partiality of the worst kind. And we pardon him, because his error of judgment involves only negro blood, what would have otherwise been in our nation's eyes simply unpardonable. We not only pardon him, but positively howl at every one who wishes to sustain the tradition of British impartiality, and of recognized ministerial responsibility for these grave aberrations of judgment, and this pitiable pliancy to the passions of the class to which it was most exposed. The word used against those who try to sustain the higher doctrine of government is per- secution.' The motives attributed to them are motives of pure malice. For our own parts, we view the spirit in which this prosecution has been treated by the nation generally, with sincere shame. It shows, we believe, that a partial, a vulgar, and an insolent temper still lurks in our hearts, utterly incon-
sistent with the equity, magnanimity, and self-restraint needful' to a people wielding a great empire which they can only extend by moral and religious virtues of a high order, and which they cannot lose without bringing down anarchy upon the earth.
Previous page
