370
THE
ENGLISH
IN
THE
WEST
INDIES
who have settled there. The placing English colonists at the mercy of coloured majorities they will resent as an injury to themselves; they will not look upon it as an extension of a generous principle, but as an act of airy virtue which costs us nothing, and at the bottom is but carelessness and indifference. We imagine that we have seen the errors of our old colonial policy, and that we are in no danger of repeating them. Yet in the West Indies we are treading over again the too familiar road. The Anglo-Irish colonists in 1705 petitioned for a union with Great Britain. A union would have involved a share in British trade; it was refused there足 fore, and we gave them the penal laws instead. They set up manufactures, built ships, and tried to raise a com足 merce of their own. We laid them under disabilities which ruined their enterprises, and when they were resentful and became troublesome we turned round to the native Irish and made a virtue of protecting them against our own people whom we had injured. When the penal laws ceased to be useful to us, we did not allow them to be executed. We played off Catholic against Protestant while we were sacrificing both to our own jealousy. Having made the government of the island impossible for those whom we had planted there to govern it, we emancipate the governed, and to conciliate them we allow them to appropriate the possessions of their late masters. And we have not con足 ciliated the native Irish ; it was impossible that we should; we have simply armed them with the only weapons which enable them to revenge their wrongs upon us. The history of the West Indies is a precise parallel. The islands were necessary to our safety in our struggle with France and Spain. The colonists held them chiefly for us as a garrison, and we in turn gave the colonists their slaves. The white settlers ruled as in Ireland, the slaves obeyed, and all went swimmingly. Times changed at home.