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book upon "White Capital and Colored Labor," Mr. Olivier himself says: "On the countries where the white man has, with whatever philanthropic excuse or pretext, enslaved or used the black for his own economic profit, a curse still rests. They are sad lands. The harvest has been reaped and carried; the fortunes are spent; the industrial system has perished." Jamaica is one of those sad lands. The whites number barely 15,000; a halfbred stock of about 50,000 mulattoes serve as clerks, artisans, teachers, and even clergy; but outnumbering both these classes put together by about ten to one stands the solid black mass of 600,000 negroes, the descendants of the slaves our fathers imported from Africa by a lucrative and atrocious trade. There they remain, at first sight as hopeless as one of the mangrove swamps of their ancient home, where vast tree-trunks rising from the slime towards the distant sunlight rot as they grow and fall suddenly, crashing through silence, to sink again into slime among the stench and colorless creatures of the ooze. Earthquake and the ruin of the old sugar industry are bad enough; with them, too, the Governor will have to deal. But the after-growth of slavery is the great question before him in Jamaica, as it would be in the Southern States or in any country which slavery has touched. That is "the White Man's Burden"-a burden which the white man himself has laid upon the landand now he finds, to his indignation, that it is not the black man only who has to take it up.

The old solutions no longer satisfy; they are no longer possible. For centuries the cultured races believed quite simply in "slaves by nature," and found the belief convenient. When Christ's teaching of equality before God made this belief untenable, slavery was defended for centuries more

as an opportunity for baptism and an open gate by which black souls might enter the fold. That belief was also convenient, and still prevails in the clerical circles of Johannesburg. Then came Carlyle's "poor Quashee, with face deep in pumpkin squash," and an eternal right to be emancipated from idleness. The obvious advantages of forced labor still keep the "poor Quashee" theory alive in various forms. We have seen it quite lately in the proposals for labor conscription and for a taxation that will drive the Kafirs to the mines in the interests of their own moral redemption. But it is all no good. The latest refinement in excuses is seen to be inferior to the old Greek plea of "slave by nature." All such justifications betray the furtive greed lurking hardly concealed. Invoking an obvious hypocrisy, they perish of their own cant. In the best English of the negro's kinsmen upon the West Coast, "them live for die."

If we rule out the pretences of philanthropy and religion, one of two courses only remains open: either we must boldly go back to the assertion that the black races are fit for nothing but slavery, and we intend to use them for the production of white man's wealth whether they are fit or notan assertion which is growing more and more common in Africa and the Southern States; or else we must resolutely confront the question of race in all its aspects-legal equality, social behavior, possible inter-marriage. If we determine to abandon slavery in reality, as all civilized people have abandoned it in name, we must learn to understand race. But race is a hard thing to understand, and the African race one of the hardest. It is almost impossible to enter into the soul of another race, to see it lying as a constant quality beneath all the innumerable variations of men and women, and to realize in what aspect it regards

the world and ourselves. Even the members of the race are probably unconscious of their own racial spirit, nor could they define its character. It is a secret possession, an unknown heritage from the passions and affections and beliefs of incalculable lovers for many generations.

On

The understanding between race and race is as a rule little more intimate than the passing of a liner within sight of the African coast. She moves like a meteor, sparkling with electric light. In the saloon the passengers enjoy their seventh daily meal. deck a band plays for the fancy-dress ball. Peering out over the dark waters to the thin, black line of swamp and forest beyond, a man may say: "Do you smell the Coast?" and then they dance again. But upon that black line and amidst that damp and vegetable smell, the dim broods of men and Women are going their usual way. They, too, have their dances, and hearts which "live in the throat" throb to the drum all night. They, too, have their meals. They are slowly killing something, shouting with laughter to see it writhe. They are making charms of man's eyes, and pouring blood into bowls that the spirits may want no blood of living men. Outside the village gate, under a cluster of sticks hung with animal skulls, they are sprinkling meal that the spirits may not cross the palisade. They are tying up a kid for the leopard into whom a well-known villager's soul passes from time to time. The mothers are painting their young in stripes of red and black. The old men are chipping the teeth of grown boys into gaps and points. All round them flit disembodied forms, invisible but dire spirits of the elements, of disease, of the chase, and of the dead. Amid affection and terror and laughter and toil, the black swarms of forest and creek go upon their way, and if the

dancers from the liner landed and questioned them, the dark and seal-like eyes would assume their look of unfathomable silence, and the film which covered them grow impenetrable as a wall.

That is the relation of race to race. In the case of the black races, there are few who get nearer them; there are few who try. Most are content with maintaining race hatred, refusing to live in the same hotel, or to serve in the same office, or travel in the same car, or do the same work. lt is a counsel of despair, emphasizing inequality, goading to defiant ill-manners, and suggesting the crimes that lead to lynching. But five years of observant experience among Jamaican negroes have shown Mr. Olivier that there is another way. The soul of the race grew long ago among these dark and mysterious coasts on which the passing liners look. Into that soul have entered the vivid imaginings, the fluid consciousness, the emotional passion of unnumbered forefathers. It is singularly open to spiritual and invisible powers-singularly open to the unseen influences of goodwill, affection, and social impulse.

Whilst within the narrow bounds of his rational and practical world, the negro is markedly and even grossly practical; he is at the same time more conscious of the unformulated powers of life, and less under the dominion of the formulated.

The black soul often acts from motives alien to our economics, often from finer motives. It surpasses us in natural courtesy, and almost alone of mankind it equals and resembles us in laughter. Mr. Olivier traces in the African stocks "potentialities exceedingly important and valuable as vehicles for human manifestation," and by the grant of "equality according to capacity," the black soul has received a

fairer chance in Jamaica than elsewhere:

The civilization and morality of the Jamaican negro are not high (he writes); but he is on a markedly different level from his grandfather, the plantation slave, and his great-grandfather, the African savage. The negro in Jamaica has been so far raised, so much freedom of civic mixture between the races has been made tolerable, by the continuous application to the race of the theory of humanity and equality; equality, that is, in the essential sense of endowment in the Infinite a share, however obscure and undeveloped, in the inheritance of what we call the Soul.

The result of this theory of humanity and equality is that in Jamaica offences against white women are unknown, and both racial hatred and racial desire are dying out. The evidence of Professor Royce, of Harvard, is remarkable: "The negro race-quesThe Nation.

tion," he says, "in our present American sense of that term, seems to be substantially solved." He attributes the solution to "English administration and English reticence"-much higher achievements and qualities than those which our Imperialists celebrate with brazen trumpets. Coming fresh from the apparent hopelessness of the question in the States, Professor Royce is certainly over-sanguine. The problem still remains, even in Jamaica, and there, as in other places, it is one of the most serious in our Empire. But Mr. Olivier may be trusted to follow and develop the tradition of administration and reticence, of humanity and equality. He goes to a difficult enterprise with peculiar knowledge and peculiar sympathy. Above all, he goes with hope, and hope has a way of bringing its own fulfilment. That is why all nations honor the men who do not despair of the republic.

WILD FLOWER GARDENS.

Here and there not man, but the genius of the place, seeins to say to himself, "I will make a garden." On the clean slope of a Sussex hill, in the deep quiet of a Surrey wood, in a high hedgerow, on the level surface of a Thames backwater, he-or rather she, for the genius of flower places cannot but be feminine-she, then, sets so splendid a profusion of blossom, and with such care for the exact conditions under which her flowers will bloom most sweetly, that the word "garden" must not be disallowed her. If it is urged that she asks for a word which carries with it a sense of plan and of enclosure, even then she will not be without excuse. Her boundary may be a furrow, or it may be the horizon, but it is never the wrong boundary; and if she is to be asked

questions about care and planning, she can reply not only that it is sometimes the most careful gardeners who meet with the most surprising failures, but that her knowledge is absolute and makes care unnecessary; she cannot 'make a mistake. She has always made her gardens where she pleased, and has only set in them the flowers which she knew would be pleased to grow.

For sheer prodigality of blossom and color there is, perhaps, nothing in English countryside scenery to compare with the flowers of a Swiss or Tyrolese valley in early summer. But if the effect for a few weeks is unequalled, it is not lasting; there are many weeks in the year in which the Swiss valleys can show nothing to set beside the changing carpets of English

woodlands and meadows. Taken week in, week out throughout the year, the "wild gardens" of our own country need not fear comparison with those of any other of moderate climes. The genius of the gardener begins work earlier and ends it later. The first wild flower-show of the year is not, as the nursery-books would have it, a garden of snowdrops, but the chequered and shining gold and green carpet of the aconite, urging curved necks through rain-sodden, frostcracked mould and leaves hardly a month fallen,-the earliest and bravest of all winter flowers. Snowdrops will be shaking their bells in the northeaster a fortnight later; but it is doubtful whether they may be allowed to belong, after all, to the flowers of the wildest gardens. Probably, if their record could be traced back as far as possible, they would be found, even when they seem growing absolutely wild, to have been planted, perhaps in the plot of some long since tumbleddown cottage, or you will catch sight of the gnarled and lichened stem of some old apple-tree, showing that the ground on which it stands was not always uncared for. Indeed, there is a pretty legend that where you find snowdrops growing in profusion you may be sure that you are on "Abbey land," and near the site of a monastery or nunnery. But there is no doubt as to the essential wildness of the hillgardens and wood-gardens of a couple of months later. Nothing in all the year has quite the same fresh gaiety as the "host of golden daffodils" of Wordsworth's inimitable song or spring. He came upon them suddenly; and to see daffodils as they should be seen, you must come upon them suddenly in tens of thousands on the slope of a hill in sunlight and with a wind blowing. Daffodils need a wind as other flowers need the sun, and do not begin talking on the hill until the dry

sheaths behind their perianths are being danced backwards and forwards against their glaucous, spiky leaves. That is an even earlier and simpler sound of April than the first sharp notes of the chiffchaff tumbling among the beech-twigs. With the fading of daffodils, indeed, the first simplicity of spring ends; after that the gardener of the woods begins to try effects of color; she strews the most delicate yellows and crinkled greenery of primroses under plum-tinted birch-twigs and bronze bracken, and paints into her picture corners and edgings of dogviolets and white violets; or while the primroses are still pale and new among their lengthening leaves, she spreads high and wide over the bank a curtain of bluebells, and dots into the skirt of it burning spires of orchids, the most jewel-like of all flowers of May; or among the young meadow grasses of Oxfordshire waterways scatters purple-spotted fritillaries, “snake's heads" in the field to match the snake's head of the wryneck peering behind the willow boughs. Are there, though, any fritillaries still left at Oxford? Perhaps they are not all yet grubbed up for an unworthy market.

On occasion, there can be a distinct sense of pleasure in a set boundary to a wild garden. Of all the farmers' enclosures, the hayfield is the most riotous and unchecked in wealth of growth, and of all wild gardens there is none more shining than a field of buttercups in sunlight; you could almost see your face in a bunch of those burnished yellow chalices. It is not quite the yellowest field there can be, for that supreme yellow belongs to a field of weeds, or herbs, as those who believe in dandelion-tea may like to call them. A field which has, so to speak, been captured by dandelions is an astonishing piece of ground to look at; the brilliance of the color is even more continuous and dazzling than that

of buttercups, yet with the glamor of it strangely and most delicately veiled, with thousands of school-children's "flower-clocks" floating and fainting in the wind above it. Here, without doubt, the sense of a set boundary adds a charm of its own. All round and outside the hedges of that one field are the ordinary life and growth of the farm; inside, a haunted garden of filmy shapes moving over glowing flowers. Only one other field of wild flowers has something of the same magic, and that is a stretch of cornfield ablaze with poppies,-green colonnades and palaces hung with crumpled scarlet satin. That is, perhaps, the most brilliant garden of chalk downs near the sea; the far boundary a strip of blue water laced with white, and near you, along the level furrow, dusty pink convolvulus creeping out over the bank to the road.

For pure waywardness of choosing and planting there is nothing wilder, nor with secrets better kept, than the natural wall-garden. It is the easiest thing in the world, with the most careful planting, to fail dismally in making a wall-garden, or for that matter a rock-garden, which to many people's notions should consist chiefly of rocks. It might be worth some unsuccessful gardener's while to leave his old wall (if it is really an old wall, and not a new one with earth jammed in artificially by the local Balbus) entirely alone and to watch what happens to it. For in the crevices of old and crumbling walls, and in pockets on the sun-burnt façades of sheer cliffs, birds and the wind and rain contrive to place some of the most wonderful of all wild gardens. Nothing could very well look more parched or inhospitable than those weather-scarred surfaces; but so deep down into the stored crevices can the roots of the rock plants drive and search for moisture and food, and so level and unchanging is

the coolness of the solid stone, that not even the fiercest suns will wither the sea-lavender on the gray frontiers of the Welsh coastline, or the red valerian lining the banks of the South Country railway cutting, or the wallflowers and snapdragons on the ruined castle gateway. Or the genius of the roadside may decide upon a fernery, and set hart's-tongue and lady's-fern and maidenhair above West Country dipping wells, or clothe the long unsought combes by the sea with the rufous spikes and six-foot fronds of the Royal fern, the noble Osmunda regalis. Or she may decide to lead you out over the most difficult garden of all, sand and rock and shingle, and yet show you twenty acres starred and splashed with rock-rose and thyme and bedstraw, broom and bright-eye, and gray-green sea-holly waiting for August suns to burn it into blue; and then take you down from those sandy hills to change the garden into a sudden stretch of watered pasture, with cattle knee-deep in forget-me-not and meadow-sweet and yellow iris, their dark backs rubbing up into dog-rose and honeysuckle. Each is a true garden, defined and enclosured, though the boundary may be wilder and less easily known as a boundary than an iron railing or a laurel hedge.

Bacon kept part of his ideal garden to be hung with bird-cages, and it might be amusing to guess what birds he would have put in them. There is a bird proper to each wild garden, but a wilder genius than Bacon's opens the cage-door of the lark, and send him climbing up his own blue ladder. He belongs alike to the earliest and latest gardens of all; but there are others belonging only to one. There is the snipe, drumming high zigzags over the marshflowers, and the cuckoo calling never later than the roses-or for a thorough lusty call of spring, what is to be set beside the trium

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