278
BARBADOS.
are practical republics, and present as faithful a picture of the petty states of old Greece, as the change of manners and religion will allow. There is the same equality amongst the free, the same undue conception of their own importance, the same restlessness of spirit, the same irritability of temper which has ever been the characteristic curse of all little commonwealths. The old remark, that the masters of slaves, if free themselves, are always the freest of the free, is as eminently true of them as it was of the citizens of Athens or Sparta; submission from those below them is so natural to them, that submission to any one above them s e e m s unnatural, and that which would be considered as advice or remonstrance in England, is resented in the West Indies as interference or tyranny. To suppose that a Major-General or a Rear-Admiral, who depends for the best part of his pay upon the generosity of the colonists themselves, can effectually represent the office of the king in the British constitution, is quite idle; he is the governor, and nothing more than the governor; and the principle of honor, which Montesquieu with some reason asserts to b e a t least a great spring of action in all constitutional monarchies, does not exist in the colonies. I use the term honor in the sense of Montesquieu, and mean nothing with regard to the conduct of individuals. The forms indeed of the English Parliament are too gigantic for the capacities of little islands; the colonists are not elevated by the size, but lost in the folds,