The English in the West Indies; or, The bow of Ulysses by Froude James Anthony 1818-1894

Author:Froude, James Anthony, 1818-1894
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: West Indies, British -- Description and travel, West Indies -- Description and travel, Great Britain -- Colonies Administration
Publisher: London : Longmans, Green, and Co.
Published: 1888-03-24T05:00:00+00:00

allow to fall under any other power, our right and our duty is to govern such races and to govern them well, or they will have a right in turn to cut our throats. This is our mission. When we have dared to act up to it we have succeeded magnificently; we have failed when we have paltered and trifled; and we shall fail again, and the great empire on which the sun never sets will be shattered to atoms, if we refuse to look facts in the face.

From these meditations, suggested by the batch of newspapers which I had been studying, I was roused by the arrival of the promised aide-de-camp, a good-looking and good-humoured young officer in white uniform (they all wear white in the tropics), who had brought the governor's carriage for me. Government House, or King's House, as it is called, answering to a ' Queen's House' in Barbadoes, is five miles from Kingston, on the slope which gradually ascends from the sea to the mountains. We drove through the town, which did not improve on closer acquaintance. The houses which front towards the streets are generally insignificant. The better sort, being behind walls or overhung with trees, were imperfectly visible. The roads were deep in white dust, which flies everywhere in whirling clouds from the unceasing wind. It was the dry season. The rains are not constant in Jamaica, as they are in the Antilles. The fields and the sides of the mountains were bare and brown and parched. The blacks, however, were about in crowds in their Sunday finery. Being in a British island, we had got back into the white calicoes and ostrich plumes, and I missed the grace of the women at Dominica; but men and women seemed as if they had not a care in the world. We passed Up Park Camp and the cantonments of the West India regiments, and then through a ' scrub ' of dwarf acacia and blue-flowered lignum vitse. Handsome villas were spread along the road with lawns and gardens, and the road itself was as excellent as those in Barbadoes.

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