At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies
By . With Illustrations. London and New York.
WE find something curiously unluminous and unshapely in this mass of details. Personal experiences and adventures, observations, statistics, history, tropical vegetation, and tropical men, occur and recur haphazard throughout, and the reader is often quite abandoned to his fate amongst them. The formlessness of Mr. Kingsley’s novels is order and symmetry beside the formlessness of his book of travel, if one may so call it. One turns from it with the impression that the author could have told nearly all that is worth knowing of the West Indies, if he had been willing to tell less than he knew, and that a few general ideas clearly presented would outvalue the greater part of his instances, which, also, if they were properly ordered and subordinated, would be valuable. Yet, for all this, the book is very entertaining, and one can hardly open it without coming upon some glowing picture of tropical life, or some novel fact concerning a state of things of which we are almost wholly ignorant. Of course, you happen likewise upon Kingsleyan affectation, and the Kingsleyan wrongheadedness and aimlessness ; but the feeling seems for the most part good and wise.
The author spent the greater number of his seven weeks in the West Indies on the island of Trinidad, and his book is mainly a study of men and nature there. The nature is pretty much that of the tropics everywhere ; but humanity offers some new and experimental phases. It seems as if all possible problems for the association of different races, the reconciliation of different creeds, the assimilation of different civilizations, which we are perhaps one day to solve on a vaster scale, were already presented there. The politically dominant English, and their social equals, the Spaniards and Frenchmen, who ruled the land before them, form the upper classes, where the lower classes are negroes and colored people of various admixture, Hindoo Coolies, Chinese laborers, and such remnants of the aboriginal population as still linger in the mountain districts. The English are Protestants of all sects ; the Spanish and French, and very many of the negroes, are Catholics ; the Hindoos retain their own religion, and the Chinamen theirs. The question before the government is how to mould all these various materials into a harmonious nationality. Mr. Kingsley, while not shutting his eyes to the worst, likes to look upon the best side of the motley picture. He is inclined to think that the Church of Rome, with its confessional, and its imposing ritual, is quite as good as the Church or England for the negroes, who in one respect at least — an aggressive sort of independence — are like the Irish, whom we have to reconcile to equality with us. He tells us that their women are physically and mentally more on a level with the men than those of any other race. On the other hand, the Hindoo women are singularly inferior in all respects to their husbands. But the Coolies are better parents than the negroes, and it is probable that the future industry in the islands will rest with them and the Chinamen. The government throws all possible safeguards around these immigrants, and offers them many inducements to make the land to which they have come their permanent home. At the end of eight years they are entitled to a return passage, or to ten acres of land each, and many of the Coolies accept the latter. Their women, especially those of the Hindoos, adopt the bonnet and the hoop-skirt of our civilization, with the advancing fortunes of their husbands, and the children are educated in the English schools. Still, we do not understand from Mr. Kingsley that to any great degree they have been converted to Christianity.
The negro, in a climate where it costs little or nothing to live, will only work enough to sustain life; but the Hindoo and the Chinaman are more ambitious, and, Mr. Kingsley thinks, may be induced to engage in the small farming or gardening which he declares the true method of cultivation in the West Indies. He says nothing, so far as we remember, of the Chinaman’s final habit of going home, alive or dead ; and we are quite confident that he records no such cruelties and injustice as are practised upon them in California. In fact, all classes, races, and religions seem as yet to live in perfect peace, if not perfect friendship, though we learn nothing of ill-feeling amongst them. As Trinidad is a crown colony, the ignorant and helpless classes are not vexed with the problem of self-government, which no doubt accounts for much of their tranquillity.
Our author invites immigration to the West Indies of such young English people as cannot support gentility upon their means at home, and assures them of prosperity and elegance in the tropics. The small degree to which the resources of the country are developed amazes him, and he believes it a most advantageous field for enterprise and intelligent industry. He has great hope for the future of these islands, and he makes you feel that his hope is reasonable.