The opinion in Cuba was, and is, that America is the residuary legatee of all the islands, Spanish and English equally, and that she will be forced to take charge of them in the end whether she likes it or not. Spain governs unjustly and corruptly; the Cubans will not rest till they are free from her, and if once independent they will throw themselves on American protection.
We will not govern our islands at all, but leave them to drift. Jamaica and the Antilles, given over to the negro majorities, can only become like Hayti and St. Domingo; and the nature of things will hardly permit so fair a part of the earth which has been once civilised and under white control to fall back into barbarism.
To England the loss of the West Indies would not itself be serious; but in the life of nations discreditable failures are not measured by their immediate material consequences. To allow a group of colonies to slide out of our hands because we could not or would not provide them with a tolerable government would be nothing less than a public disgrace. It would be an intimation to all the world that we were unable to maintain any longer the position which our fathers had made for us; and when the unravelling of the knitted fabric of the Empire has once begun the process will be a rapid one.
'But what would you do?' I am asked impatiently. 'We send out peers or gentlemen against whose character no direct objection can be raised; we assist them with local councils partly chosen by the people themselves. We send out bishops, we send out missionaries, we open schools. What can we do more? We cannot alter the climate, we cannot make planters prosper when sugar will not pay, we cannot convert black men into whites, we cannot force the blacks to work for the whites when they do not wish to work for them. "Governing," as you call it, will not change the natural conditions of things. You can suggest no remedy, and mere fault-finding is foolish and mischievous.'
I might answer a good many things. Government cannot do everything, but it can do something, and there is a difference between governors against whom there is nothing to object and men of special and marked capacity. There is a difference between governors whose hands are tied by local councils and whose feet are tied by instructions from home, and a governor with a free hand and a wise head left to take his own measures on the spot. I presume that no one can seriously expect that an orderly organised nation can be made out of the blacks, when, in spite of your schools and missionaries, sixty per cent. of the children now born among them are illegitimate. You can do for the West Indies, I repeat over and over again, what you do for the East; you can establish a firm authoritative government which will protect the blacks in their civil rights and protect the whites in theirs. You cannot alter the climate, it is true, or make the soil more fertile. Already it is fertile as any in the earth, and the climate is admirable for the purposes for which it is needed. But you can restore confidence in the stability of your tenure, you can give courage to the whites who are on the spot to remain there, and you can tempt capital and enterprise to venture there which now seek investments elsewhere. By keeping the rule in your own hands you will restore the white population to their legitimate influence; the blacks will again look up to them and respect them as they ought to do. This you can do, and it will cost you nothing save a little more pains in the selection of the persons whom you are to trust with powers analogous to those which you grant to your provincial governors in the Indian peninsula.