Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/421

Rh after all said, to be innocuous is the Indian's highest praise; and any notable increase in West-Indian lands of "Celestials" is — for reasons not all celestial, but much the reverse — not a thing to be desired; while coolies are expensive to import, and, as settlers, offer but a dubious future. Negroes, with all their defects, are now, as of old times, West-Indian labour’s best hope; and since "saltwater" blacks and purchased gangs are no longer to be had, creole negroes must to the fore. In this view, if in no other, they are worth study, and where can we study them better than at Munnikendam?

And here I would like, though I am not going to do it, to insert a sketch of the little village — not so little, neither — near Bel Air, on the way to Berbice, where live the liberated Congoites, or Congoese, or Congonians, rescued by our cruisers from the slave-ships to which they had already been consigned, and brought hither at a recent date. It is a village absolutely picturesque in its details; and what is, perhaps, more to the purpose, it offers to view in itself, and in its garden surroundings, abundant evidence of industry, skill, and the manly independence that lives by its own labour, and is content to live so. Another sketch, too, I would willingly give — that of the new quarter of Paramaribo, the one, I mean, situated on the westernmost outskirts of the town, and called "The Plain of the 13th May." That date last year was the jubilee of the Dutch king’s reign, and to celebrate the occasion the governor had offered prizes to the negro workmen who would best excel in laying out the roads and digging the trenches of the proposed suburb. It was opened on the day itself with great pomp and ceremony, and distribution of rewards, by his Excellency in person, and was at once made over to its present inhabitants, a class resembling in every respect the tenants of Bel-Air. A pretty patchwork of cottages and gardens, well-doing, diligent freemen to maintain them in order and comfort, a sight to justify the pride that its originator takes in it, a successful experiment on a small scale, indeed, but arousing a wish for more.

And this is exactly what, not I only, but every landowner, every proprietor, every planter in the colony, would wish to see — namely, a greater abundance of villages and settlements like those just described, only to a wider purpose and on a larger scale. Certainly I have no desire to disparage the good qualities of the slave-descended black creoles, or to join in the vague outcries, contradicted everywhere by facts, that ignorance, and still more prejudice, have raised against them. But this much must be allowed, that from the very circumstance of being slave-descended, they bear, and long will bear, traces of the deteriorating process to which they have been subjected in the persons of their ancestors, a deterioration not moral merely, but mental, and even physical. In fact, their rapid, though as yet only partial recovery from this very degradation is one proof among many of the wonderful elasticity of the negro character. Hesiod, if I remember rightly, or, if not he, some other old coeval Greek, has said, "When Jupiter makes a man a slave he takes away half his brains from him;" and a truer thing was never said or sung. Cowardice, duplicity, dislike of labour, a habit of theft, sexual immorality, irreflectiveness, apathy — these are the seven daughters of slavery, and they but too often live persistently on, though their ill mother be dead for generations past. Hence the negro who has never been a slave, or who, at any rate, has never experienced that most crushing form of slavery, the organized taskmastership of a foreign and superior race, has a decided vantage-ground, not only over his enslaved fellow-countrymen, but over the descendants of such, on whom his father’s sins, and still more the sins of his father’s masters, are by hereditary law visited even to the third and fourth generation.

Now assuming that of all races the negro is by physical constitution the best adapted to the South-American tropics, and that negro labour is of all others, not the cheapest merely, but also the most efficient in this soil — both of which are propositions that few experienced planters or overseers will dispute — why not organize migration from Africa to the West Indies after a regular and durable fashion? and as the east-African races are undoubtedly superior alike in mind and body to the western, why not establish an emigration agency on the east coast — why not fix a locality at Zanzibar? Have we not lately closed in principle, and shall soon, by means of our cruisers have closed in fact and deed, the east-African slave-trade, doing thereby a deed worthy of England, worthy of ourselves? True, and we look at our work, and justly pronounce it to be "very good." But what if some of the immediate results of our work, in order to be rightly called "very good," also require careful management, and the dexterity that not only destroys what is