I could not say what I felt completely to Sir Henry, who, perhaps, had been in personal relations with Mr. Gladstone's Government. Perhaps, too, he was one of those numerous persons of tried ability and intelligence who have only a faint belief that the connection between Great Britain and the colonies can be of long continuance. The public may amuse themselves with the vision of an imperial union; practical statesmen who are aware of the tendencies of self-governed communities to follow lines of their own in which the mother country cannot support them may believe that they know it to be impossible.
As to the West Indies there are but two genuine alternatives: one to leave them to themselves to shape their own destinies, as we leave Australia; the other to govern them as if they were a part of Great Britain with the same scrupulous care of the people and their interests with which we govern Bengal, Madras, and Bombay. England is responsible for the social condition of those islands. She filled them with negroes when it was her interest to maintain slavery, she emancipated those negroes when popular opinion at home demanded that slavery should end. It appears to me that England ought to bear the consequences of her own actions, and assume to herself the responsibilities of a state of things which she has herself created. We are partly unwilling to take the trouble, partly we cling to the popular belief that to trust all countries with the care of their own concerns is the way to raise the character of the inhabitants and to make them happy and contented. We dimly perceive that the population of the West Indies is not a natural growth of internal tendencies and circumstances, and we therefore hesitate before we plunge completely and entirely into the downward course; but we play with it, we drift towards it, we advance as far as we dare, giving them the evils of both systems and the advantages of neither. At the same moment we extend the suffrage to the blacks with one hand, while with the other we refuse to our own people the benefit of a treaty which would have rescued them from imminent ruin and brought them into relations with their powerful kindred close at hand--relations which might save them from the most dangerous consequences of a negro political supremacy--and the result is that the English in those islands are melting away and will soon be crowded out, or will have departed of themselves in disgust. A policy so far-reaching, and affecting so seriously the condition of the oldest of our colonial possessions, ought not to have been adopted on their own authority, by doctrinaire statesmen in a cabinet, without fully and frankly consulting the English nation; and no further step ought to be taken in that direction until the nation has had the circumstances of the islands laid before it, and has pronounced one way or the other its own sovereign pleasure. Does or does not England desire that her own people shall be enabled to live and thrive in the West Indies? If she decides that her hands are too full, that she is over-empired and cannot attend to them--_caditquæstio_--there is no more to be said. But if this is her resolution the hands of the West Indians ought to be untied. They ought to be allowed to make their sugar treaties, to make any treaties, to enter into the closest relations with America which the Americans will accept, as the only chance which will be left them.