The English in the West Indies or the bow of Ulysses

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THE

ENGLISH

IN

THE

WEST

INDIES

sir,’ he said, ‘ any good come of desponding men. If you intend to strike a mark, you had better believe that you can strike it. No one ever hit anything if he thought that he was most likely to miss it. You must take a cheerful view of things, or you will have no success in this world.’ ‘Tyne heart tyne a’,’ the Scotch proverb says. The Anglo-West Indians are tyning heart, and that is the worst feature about them. They can get no help except in them­ selves, and they can help themselves after all if we allow them fair play. The Americans will not touch them politically, but they will trade with them; they will bring their capital and their skill and knowledge among them, and make the islands richer and more prosperous than ever they were —on one condition: they will risk nothing in such enterprises as long as the shadow hangs over them of a possible government by a black majority. Let it suffice to have created one Ireland without deliberately manufac­ turing a second.


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