Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 9.djvu/164

150 ency since the Indian Mutiny. Few, however, suspected that the importance of the event itself would be lost in the still greater importance of the secondary issues which it raised—the questions of the duties of Colonial Governors, of the legality of martial law, and so forth. These, as will appear in the sequel, were the questions to which the Jamaica insurrection, or riot, gave rise. They were argued in the newspapers, in Parliament, and in courts of law, with passionate earnestness on both sides; for both those who approved of the acts done in the suppression, and those who disapproved of them, felt that a crisis of great magnitude had arrived, and that a proper settlement of the points at issue was essential to the welfare of the colonies, and, through them, to the welfare of England. It will be necessary in this History to treat the matter at some length.

Jamaica, as everybody knows, is the largest of the English colonies in the West Indies, and has been in English possession since the time of Cromwell. It is an island to the south of Cuba, and to the south-west of Hayti; its extreme length is 170 miles, its extreme breadth 50 miles, and its area about 6,250 square miles, or rather more than 4,000,000 acres. The population is about 350,000, of whom about 15,00 are whites, and the rest either black or "coloured," that is, of mixed race. In physical conditions, the island is subject to the laws that provail almost throughout the tropics; its soil is fertile to exuberance, bearing everything from the coffee-plant to the majestic palmetto-tree, 140 feet in height; the rain comes down in torrents at its season, and hurricanes sweep furiously across the sugar-fields. Still the heat is bearable, and white men can work if they choose. Yet the white workers are few, and, indeed, only a small part of the island—not more than an eighth—is under cultivation at all. The rest is mountain and virgin forest. The government of the island is vested in a Governor appointed by the Crown, a Council, and a House of Assembly, the former chosen by the Crown, that is with the exception of the ex officio members, by the Governor; the latter elected by the freeholders. There is usually

THE JAMAICA INSURRECTION: VOLUNTEERS FIRING ON THE MOB.

a military force amounting to about two English regiments, some of the soldiers being white and some natives; and male whites are subject to compulsory service in the militia. There is a bishop, and a considerable number of parish clergy (the Church Establishment ceased to exist in 1867, by an Act of the Jamaica Legislature); but these clergy have little influence over the black population, who prefer the more emotional services of the rival Nonconformist bodies of the Baptists and Wesleyans. Commercially and socially, the island has never recovered (although it is now recovering) the collapse which followed the abolishment of slavery in 1834. It was said above that an eighth of the acreage is all that has been brought into cultivation; the number of inhabitants has steadily decreased since the Jamaica planters lost their monopoly of the sugar trade; and the debt of the island, till the