Handbook of Jamaica, 1886 - 87. By A. C. Sinclair and Laurence
R. Fyfe. (Edward Stanford.)—This handbook of the oldest of exist- ing English Colonies comes as a useful reminder when the Colonial Conference is sitting, that a large portion, or rather the larger por- tion, of English Colonies are conspicuous in that Conference by their absence, and that there are failures as well as successes in the British Empire. Jamaica was taken from the Spaniard by Crom- well's fleet, under Admiral Penn, in 1655. In 1664, its first instal- ment of constitutional government, in the form of a Legislative Assembly, was convened at Spanish Town, though the population of the island was only four thousand. It remained at almost perpetual controversy with England till 1728, from which time for more than a century, to 1839, things went on smoothly for the planters, when the abolition of slavery and of the apprenticeship system, which emancipated some three hundred thousand slaves, produced a kind of Orange rebellion against the Mother-country, which ended is a Bill for the practical suppression of the Jamaican Constitution, under threat of which the Jamaicans settled down. In 1833, the Constitu- tion was made more popular, bat it still remained an "ascendency " Assembly, with an electorate of a high property qualification. After Governor Eyre's revolution, self-government was practically abolished. In 1884, popular representation was partially restored, and the franchise lowered; but the Constitution is stilt that practically of a Crown Colony, and the people at large are excluded from share in the government.
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