ABSTRACT

The relative position of the classes, said Elgin, had completely changed since emancipation: the bankruptcy lists on the one side, the rapid increase of small freeholds on the other, were sufficient evidence of that.6 This change in material circumstances, however, was only part of the picture. The negroes had a general deference for law: but 'in spite of improved prison discipline, crime has not diminished: the utmost that can be said on this point being, that its increase appears to have received a check'. The atten-

dance at schools was falling off with the diminution of the first vague expectations that book-learning would be the means of achieving political privileges and advancement in life. The interest in education was declining, though he hoped that his establishment of a Board of Education would stimulate it by financial aid and by a system of inspection, and at the same time give more of an industrial bias to the instruction. Little as the planter seemed to realize the fact, the education of the negro along proper lines was highly in his interest. 'In this colony where there is so great an abundance of cheap and uncultivated land, no measures for producing an immediate increase of population that are consistent with the first principles of liberty, could occasion such a pressure on the means of subsistence as to reduce wages to the lowest point, and render the peasantry absolutely dependant upon them, so long as they are content to live as slaves have lived before them. The best security for their looking to something beyond what their provision grounds furnish is to be found in the encouragement among them of those tastes and habits which civilization creates, leading as such tastes and habits inevitably do to the existence of wants which cannot be gratified without exertion and money.' The Baptist missionaries with their suspicion of industrial education and all labour for wages and their aspirations to political power were the warmest friends but not the wisest advocates of the negro; and the planters for their part clung too closely to the methods of the past and the 'foreign aid' of immigration, and must be brought by patience and tact to rely rather on scientific agriculture. Mutual distrust was indeed gradually subsiding in Jamaica, but the colony had a long way to travel before it attained a satisfactory state of society. There was need for active guidance of the West Indies along the paths of progress.