The perpetual Saturnalia in which the Negro, in Trinidad at least, lives, will surely give physical strength and health to the body, and something of cheerfulness, self-help, independence to the spirit.  If the Saturnalia be prolonged too far, and run, as they seem inclined to run, into brutality and licence, those stern laws of Nature which men call political economy will pull the Negro up short, and waken him out of his dream, soon enough and sharply enough—­a ‘judgment’ by which the wise will profit and be preserved, while the fools only will be destroyed.  And meanwhile, what if in these Saturnalia (as in Rome of old) the new sense of independence manifests itself in somewhat of self-assertion and rudeness, often in insolence, especially disagreeable, because deliberate?  What if ‘You call me black fellow?  I mash you white face in,’ were the first words one heard at St. Thomas’s from a Negro, on being asked, civilly enough, by a sailor to cast off from a boat to which he had no right to be holding on?  What if a Negro now and then addresses you as simple ‘Buccra,’ while he expects you to call him ‘Sir’; or if a Negro woman, on being begged by an English lady to call to another Negro woman, answers at last, after long pretences not to hear, ’You coloured lady! you hear dis white woman a wanting of you’?  Let it be.  We white people bullied these black people quite enough for three hundred years, to be able to allow them to play (for it is no more) at bullying us.  As long as the Negroes are decently loyal and peaceable, and do not murder their magistrates and drink their brains mixed with rum, nor send delegates to the President of Hayti to ask if he will assist them, in case of a general rising, to exterminate the whites—­tricks which the harmless Negroes of Trinidad, to do them justice, never have played, or had a thought of playing—­we must remember that we are very seriously in debt to the Negro, and must allow him to take out instalments of his debt, now and then, in his own fashion.  After all, we brought him here, and we have no right to complain of our own work.  If, like Frankenstein, we have tried to make a man, and made him badly; we must, like Frankenstein, pay the penalty.

So much for the Negro.  As for the coloured population—­especially the educated and civilised coloured population of the towns—­they stand to us in an altogether different relation.  They claim to be, and are, our kinsfolk, on another ground than that of common humanity.  We are bound to them by a tie more sacred, I had almost said more stern, than we are to the mere Negro.  They claim, and justly, to be considered as our kinsfolk and equals; and I believe, from what I have seen of them, that they will prove themselves such, whenever they are treated as they are in Trinidad.  What faults some of them have, proceed mainly from a not dishonourable ambition, mixed with uncertainty of their own position.  Let them be made to feel that they are now not a class; to forget, if possible, that they ever were one.  Let any allusion to the painful past be treated, not merely as an offence against good manners, but as what it practically is, an offence against the British Government; and that Government will find in them, I believe, loyal citizens and able servants.