One hundred years ago
Nothing can be more right than the advice that Englishmen should take a warmer interest in the West Indian Islands. They are among our oldest possessions, they are perplexed with many problems, and they ask for an at- tention they do not receive. One argu- ment, however, recently pressed for at- tending to them is utterly false. We have, it is said, a special responsibility to West Indian negroes, because in our un- wise Liberalism we gave them emancipa- tion. We might as well say that because we relieved the Catholics of the Penal laws we owe a special responsibility to Romanists. Emancipation is not a gift, but the cessation of a crime. The State authorised certain noblemen and 'gentlemen to rob the West Indian labourers of their wages, to sell their ser- !vices, and to whip them at discretion. ,Then it ceased to authorise those crimes. That we are specially responsible to the negroes because, for more than a hun- dred years, we degraded, and plundered, and terrified them, till the race has even yet not regained its morale, may be true; but to say that we are responsible for ceasing to do those things, is to adopt Hebridean morality, in lieu of Christian. In those islands, they had once an idea that if a man save another from drown- ing, he was bound to maintain him all his life. He had given life, and life must be sustained.
Spectator, 8 September 1883
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