I must describe more particularly the reasons which there are for uneasiness. On the day on which I landed I saw an article in a Bridgetown paper in which my coming there was spoken of as perhaps the last straw which would break the overburdened back. I know not why I should be thought likely to add anything to the load of Barbadian afflictions. I should be a worse friend to the colonies than I have tried to be if I was one of those who would quench the smoking flax of loyalty in any West Indian heart. But loyalty, I very well know, is sorely tried just now. The position is painfully simple. The great prosperity of the island ended with emancipation. Barbadoes suffered less than Jamaica or the Antilles because the population was large and the land limited, and the blacks were obliged to work to keep themselves alive. The abolition of the sugar duties was the next blow. The price of sugar fell, and the estates yielded little more than the expense of cultivation. Owners of properties who were their own managers, and had sense and energy, continued to keep themselves afloat; but absenteeism had become the fashion. The brilliant society which is described by Labat had been melting for more than a century. More and more the old West Indian families removed to England, farmed their lands through agents and overseers, or sold them to speculating capitalists. The personal influence of the white man over the black, which might have been brought about by a friendly intercourse after slavery was abolished, was never so much as attempted. The higher class of gentry found the colony more and more distasteful to them, and they left the arrangement of the labour question to persons to whom the blacks were nothing, emancipated though they might be, except instruments of production. A negro can be attached to his employer at least as easily as a horse or a dog. The horse or dog requires kind treatment, or he becomes indifferent or sullen; so it is with the negro. But the forced equality of the races before the law made more difficult the growth of any kindly feeling. To the overseer on a plantation the black labourer was a machine out of which the problem was to get the maximum of work with the minimum of pay. In the slavery times the horse and dog relation was a real thing. The master and mistress joked and laughed with their dark bondsmen, knew Cæsar from Pompey, knew how many children each had, gave them small presents, cared for them when they were sick, and maintained them when they were old and past work. All this ended with emancipation. Between whites and blacks no relations remained save that of employer and employed. They lived apart. They had no longer, save in exceptional instances, any personal communication with each other. The law refusing to recognise a difference, the social line was drawn the harder, which the law was unable to reach.