But those days are past; and better ones have dawned, with better education, and a wider knowledge of the world and of science.  What West Indians have to learn—­some of them have learnt it already—­is that if they can compete with other countries only by improved and more scientific cultivation and manufacture, as they themselves confess, then they can carry out the new methods only by more skilful labour.  They therefore require now, as they never required before, to give the labouring classes a practical education; to quicken their intellect, and to teach them habits of self-dependent and originative action, which are—­as in the case of the Prussian soldier, and of the English sailor and railway servant—­perfectly compatible with strict discipline.  Let them take warning from the English manufacturing system, which condemns a human intellect to waste itself in perpetually heading pins, or opening and shutting trap-doors, and punishes itself by producing a class of workpeople who alternate between reckless comfort and moody discontent.  Let them be sure that they will help rather than injure the labour-market of the colony, by making the labourer also a small free-holding peasant.  He will learn more in his own provision ground—­ properly tilled—­than he will in the cane-piece:  and he will take to the cane-piece and use for his employer the self-helpfulness which he has learnt in the provision ground.  It is so in England.  Our best agricultural day-labourers are, without exception, those who cultivate some scrap of ground, or follow some petty occupation, which prevents their depending entirely on wage-labour.  And so I believe it will be in the West Indies.  Let the land-policy of the late Governor be followed up.  Let squatting be rigidly forbidden.  Let no man hold possession of land without having earned, or inherited, money enough to purchase it, as a guarantee of his ability and respectability, or—­as in the case of Coolies past their indenture’s—­as a commutation for rights which he has earned in likewise.  But let the coloured man of every race be encouraged to become a landholder and a producer in his own small way.  He will thus, not only by what he produces, but by what he consumes, add largely to the wealth of the colony; while his increased wants, and those of his children, till they too can purchase land, will draw him and his sons and daughters to the sugar-estates, as intelligent and helpful day-labourers.

So it may be:  and I cannot but trust, from what I have seen of the temper of the gentlemen of Trinidad, that so it will be.

CHAPTER XVII (AND LAST):  HOMEWARD BOUND