On the produce of sugar? And why not on the produce of a fine race of men? The prospects of Jamaica, the prospects of all countries, depend not on sugar or on any form or degree of material wealth, but on the characters of the men and women whom they are breeding and rearing. Where there are men and women of a noble nature, the rest will go well of itself; where these are not, there will be no true prosperity though the sugar hogsheads be raised from thousands into millions. The colonies are interesting only as offering homes where English people can increase and multiply; English of the old type with simple habits, who do not need imported luxuries. There is room even in the West Indies for hundreds of thousands of them if they can be contented to lead human lives, and do not go there to make fortunes which they are to carry home with them. The time may not be far off when men will be sick of making fortunes, sick of being ground to pattern in the commonplace mill-wheel of modern society; sick of a state of things which blights and kills simple and original feeling, which makes us think and speak and act under the tyranny of general opinion, which masquerades as liberty and means only submission to the newspapers. I can conceive some modern men may weary of all this, and retire from it like the old ascetics, not as they did into the wilderness, but behind their own walls and hedges, shutting out the world and its noises, to inquire whether after all they have really immortal souls, and, if they have, what ought to be done about them. The West India Islands, with their inimitable climate and soil and prickly pears _ad libitum_ to make fences with, would be fine places for such recluses. Failing these ideal personages, there is work enough of the common sort to create wholesome prosperity. There are oranges to be grown, and pines and plantains, and coffee and cocoa, and rice and indigo and tobacco, not to speak of the dollars which my American friend found in the bamboos, and of the further dollars which other Americans will find in the untested qualities of thousands of other productions. Here are opportunities for innocent industrious families, where children can be brought up to be manly and simple and true and brave as their fathers were brought up, or as their fathers expressed it 'in the nurture and admonition of the Lord;' while such neighbours as their dark brothers-in-law might have a chance of a rise in life, in the only sense in which a 'rise' can be of real benefit to them. These are the objects which statesmen who have the care and conduct of a nation's welfare ought to set before themselves, and unfortunately they are the last which are remembered in countries which are popularly governed. There is a clamour for education in such countries, but education means to them only the sharpening of the faculties for the competitive race which is called progress. In democracies no one man is his brother's keeper. Each lives and struggles to make his own way and his own position. All that is insisted on is that there shall be a fair stage and that every lad shall learn the use of the weapons which will enable him to fight his own way. [Greek: Aretê],'manliness,' the most essential of all acquisitions and the hardest to cultivate, as Aristotle observed long ago, is assumed in democracies as a matter of course. Of [Greek: aretê] a moderate quantity [Greek: hoposonoun] would do, and in Aristotle's opinion this was the rock on which the Greek republics foundered. Their [Greek: aretê] did not come as a matter of course, and they lost it, and the Macedonians and the Romans ate them up.