The West Indian peasant can, if he will, carry ‘la petite Culture’ to a perfection and a wealth which it has not yet attained even in China, Japan, and Hindostan, and make every rood of ground not merely maintain its man, but its civilised man.  This, however, will require a skill and a thoughtfulness which the Negro does not as yet possess.  If he ever had them, he lost them under slavery, from the brutalising effects of a rough and unscientific ‘grande culture’; and it will need several generations of training ere he recovers them.  Garden-tillage and spade-farming are not learnt in a day, especially when they depend—­as they always must in temperate climates—­for their main profit on some article which requires skilled labour to prepare it for the market—­on flax, for instance, silk, wine, or fruits.  An average English labourer, I fear, if put in possession of half a dozen acres of land, would fare as badly as the poor Chartists who, some twenty years ago, joined in Feargus O’Connor’s land scheme, unless he knew half a dozen ways of eking out a livelihood which even our squatters around Windsor and the New Forest are, alas! forgetting, under the money-making and man-unmaking influences of the ‘division of labour.’  He is vanishing fast, the old bee-keeping, apple-growing, basket-making, copse-cutting, many-counselled Ulysses of our youth, as handy as a sailor:  and we know too well what he leaves behind him; grandchildren better fed, better clothed, better taught than he, but his inferiors in intellect and in manhood, because—­whatever they may be taught—­they cannot be taught by schooling to use their fingers and their wits.  I fear, therefore, that the average English labourer would not prosper here.  He has not stamina enough for the hard work of the sugar plantation.  He has not wit and handiness enough for the more delicate work of a little spade-farm:  and he would sink, as the Negro seems inclined to sink, into a mere grower of food for himself; or take to drink—­as too many of the white immigrants to certain West Indian colonies did thirty years ago—­and burn the life out of himself with new rum.  The Hindoo immigrant, on the other hand, has been trained by long ages to a somewhat scientific agriculture, and civilised into the want of many luxuries for which the Negro cares nothing; and it is to him that we must look, I think, for a ‘petite culture’ which will do justice to the inexhaustible wealth of the West Indian soil and climate.

As for the house, which is embowered in the little Paradise which I have been describing, I am sorry to say that it is, in general, the merest wooden hut on stilts; the front half altogether open and unwalled; the back half boarded up to form a single room, a passing glance into which will not make the stranger wish to enter, if he has any nose, or any dislike of vermin.  The group at the door, meanwhile, will do anything but invite him to enter; and he will ride on, with something like a sigh at what man might be, and what he is.