352
THE
ENGLISH
IN
THE
WEST
INDIES
it is believed in. The colonies and the Empire ! If the colonies were part indeed of the Empire, if they were taken into partnership as the Americans take theirs, and were members of an organised body, if an injury to each single limb would be felt as an injury to the whole, we should not be playing with their vital interests to catch votes at home. Alas ! at home we are split in two, and party is more than the nation, and famous statesmen, thinly dis guising their motives under a mask of policy, condemn to day what they approved of yesterday, and catch at power by projects which they would be the first to denounce if sug gested by their adversaries. Till this tyranny be overpast, to bring into one the scattered portions of the Empire is the idlest of dreams, and the most that is to be hoped for is to arrest any active mischief. Happy Americans, who have a Supreme Court with a code of fundamental laws to control the vagaries of politicians and check the passions of fluctua ting electoral majorities ! What the Supreme Court is to them, the Crown ought to be for u s ; but the Crown is power less and must remain powerless, and therefore we are as we are, and our national existence is made the shuttlecock of party contention. Time passed so pleasantly with me in these concluding days that I could have wished it to be the nothing which metaphysicians say that it is, and that when one was happy it would leave one alone. We wandered in the shade in the mornings, we made expeditions in the evenings, called at friends' houses, and listened to the gossip of the island. It turned usually on the one absorbing subject — black servants and the difficulty of dealing with them. An American lady from Pennsylvania declared emphatically as her opinion that emancipation had been a piece of folly, and that things would never mend till they were slaves again. One of my own chief hopes in going originally to Jamaica had been to see and learn the views of the distinguished