Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/153

 1920 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 145 method the unsparing application of force by a company commissioned by the new Danish autocracy in 1670 to occupy islands uninhabited 'or if inhabited, then by such people who have no knowledge concerning us '. For population, male and female, the company might take from the gaol and the spinning-house as many recruits as it pleased. The first voyage, to St. Thomas, cost the Danes some eighty lives out of about 190, and although, owing to the Anglo-Dutch wars, * colonists of various sorts began to creep in ', tropical diseases and the rum called kill-devil made the island a charnel-house. In more settled times at St. Thomas, ' white women are not expected to do anything except drink tea and coffee, eat, make calls, play cards, and at times sew a little ', and the men were equally leisurely. In 1680 the king offered to send slaves from Guinea. Five years later the Great Elector of Brandenburg, instigated by a Dutch- man and aided by a Frenchman and a Jew, attempted the exploitation of the colony, but without success. Success came when the Danish com- pany took up the slave-trade in earnest and when Danish neutrality in the war of the Spanish Succession gave St, Thomas an abnormal though temporary advantage. The horrors of the Danish slave trade-were perhaps normal. The horrors of Danish slavery were abnormal. The slaves fled, when they could, to Porto Rico, and the Spaniards, claiming that they came to be baptised, refused to give them up. In 1733 they rebelled, and the island of St. John, occupied in 1717, was immersed in fresh abominations. In the same year the king of France sold St. Croix to Denmark for the sake of the Polish succession. Hitherto a dividend had been paid only in two years. St. Croix proved a more valuable acquisition than St. Thomas and St. John. But the whole position of the company was precarious, and in 1754, to the general relief, the state took over its assets and liabilities and threw open the trade to all its subjects. W. F. Reddaway. British Supremacy and Canadian Self-Government, 1839-54. By J. L. MoRisoN. (Glasgow : MacLehose, 1919.) Dr. Morison is an able and well-trained historian with a gift of style ; it is, therefore, matter for congratulation that he should have written a volume dealing with fifteen most critical years in Canadian constitutional history, based on the study of the contemporary material. After a pre- liminary survey of the Canadian community, wherein, as is his besetting fault, the author seems to exaggerate the novelty of his conclusions, he proceeds to deal successively with the governors-general, Sydenham, Bagot, Metcalfe, and Elgin. The most valuable chapter in the book is that on Bagot, wherein excellent use is made of the Bagot correspondence, which we may hope some day to see published, m extenso. It is a little difficult to reconcile the patronizing and very superior estimate of Bagot given at the beginning of this chapter with the later statement that two sets of his dispatches, * if dispatches ever deserve the term, must be called works of genius '. Of Sydenham the account given by Dr. Morison is to our mind much less satisfactory than that given by Dr. Shortt in his subtle and sympathetic study of that governor in the ' Builders of Canada ' series. The Elgin-Grey correspondence furnishes ample material to justify VOL. XXXV. — NO. CXXXVII. L