Page:The empire and the century.djvu/922



history of the West Indies has been written by various men at different times, and little now remains to be told of those wonderful islands around which the naval heroes of England, France, Spain, and Portugal had many fierce fights and exciting adventures. It was on these waters that the immortal Nelson got his training. But Britons have a peculiar interest in the earliest oversea possessions of their country, and it is doubtless because of the romantic associations of Jamaica and the other luxuriant islands of the Antillian group, riveting my attention as a boy, and engrossing my thoughts as a man, which when their bitter cry for help was sounded throughout the length and breadth of the United Kingdom, which inspired me with the desire to do what lay in my power to extricate these Colonies from the trouble that threatened to swamp them. Pestilence and hurricane had played havoc with what remained of a prosperity that was phenomenal, but which had dwindled down to a condition of hand-to-mouth existence owing to one cause and another. This was principally due to the unlimited opportunities given to beet-producing countries for supplying the home markets with their subsidized products, thus ruining the staple industry of the West Indies—sugar. The once successful sugar-cane planter, finding his market captured and unable to compete with the near-at-hand and cheaply-produced beet-sugar, struggled on until finally compelled 877