The blacks as long as they were slaves were docile and partially civilised. They have behaved on the whole well in our islands since their emancipation, for though they were personally free the whites were still their rulers, and they looked up to them with respect. They have acquired land and notions of property, some of them can read, many of them are tolerable workmen and some excellent, but in character the movement is backwards, not forwards. Even in Hayti, after the first outburst of ferocity, a tolerable government was possible for a generation or two. Orderly habits are not immediately lost, but the effect of leaving the negro nature to itself is apparent at last. In the English islands they are innocently happy in the unconsciousness of the obligations of morality. They eat, drink, sleep, and smoke, and do the least in the way of work that they can. They have no ideas of duty, and therefore are not made uneasy by neglecting it. One or other of them occasionally rises in the legal or other profession, but there is no sign, not the slightest, that the generality of the race are improving either in intelligence or moral habits; all the evidence is the other way. No Uncle Tom, no Aunt Chloe need be looked for in a negro's cabin in the West Indies. If such specimens of black humanity are to be found anywhere, it will be where they have continued under the old influences as servants in white men's houses. The generality are mere good-natured animals, who in service had learnt certain accomplishments, and had developed certain qualities of a higher kind. Left to themselves they fall back upon the superstitions and habits of their ancestors. The key to the character of any people is to be found in the local customs which have spontaneously grown or are growing among them. The customs of Dahomey have not yet shown themselves in the English West Indies and never can while the English authority is maintained; but no custom of any kind will be found in a negro hut or village from which his most sanguine friend can derive a hope that he is on the way to mending himself.
Roses do not grow on thorn trees, nor figs on thistles. A healthy human civilisation was not perhaps to be looked for in countries which have been alternately the prey of avarice, ambition, and sentimentalism. We visit foreign countries to see varieties of life and character, to learn languages that we may gain an insight into various literatures, to see manners unlike our own springing naturally out of different soils and climates, to see beautiful works of art, to see places associated with great men and great actions, and subsidiary to these, to see lakes and mountains, and strange skies and seas. But the localities of great events and the homes of the actors in them are only saddening when the spiritual results are disappointing, and scenery loses its charm unless the grace of humanity is in the heart of it. To the man of science the West Indies may be delightful and instructive. Rocks and trees and flowers remain as they always were, and Nature is constant to herself. But the traveller whose heart is with his kind, and who cares only to see his brother mortals making their corner of this planet into an orderly and rational home, had better choose some other object for his pilgrimage.