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English Failure in the West Indies: Froude

More than any other writer, Froude has illuminated the questions we must have in mind in contemplation of the problem of the annexation. He goes to the bottom of history at once, saying the West Indies "had been regarded as precious jewels which hundreds of thousands of English lives had been sacrificed to tear from France and Spain. The Caribbean Sea was the cradle of the naval empire of Great Britain. There Drake and Hawkins intercepted the golden stream that flowed from Panama into the exchequer at Madrid, and furnished Philip with the means to carry on his war with the reformation." And "in those waters the men were formed and trained who drove the armada through the channel into wreck and ruin. In those waters the centuries which followed, France and England fought for the ocean empire, and England won it--won it on the day when her own politicians' hearts had failed them and all the powers of the world had combined to humiliate her, and Rodney shattered the French fleet, saved Gibraltar and avenged Yorktown."

We have here one of the historical pictures for which Froude's writings are famous, and behold in the West Indies one of the centres of imperial influence upon the world. He has not a high opinion of the black man who needs first, according to this political philosopher, to be saved from himself--and the West Indies should have been governed on the model of the Eastern Empire of England, and not according to the politics of eloquence. And presently Froude comes to the source of wealth in the Island, saying: Once the West Indies had a monopoly of the sugar trade. Steam and progress have given them a hundred natural competitors; and on the back of these came the unnatural bounty, the new beet-root sugar competition. Meanwhile the expense of living increased in the days of inflated hope and "unexampled prosperity." Free trade, whatever its immediate consequences, was to make everybody rich in the end. When the income of an estate fell short one year it was to rise in the next, and the money was borrowed to make ends meet. When it didn't rise, more money was borrowed; and there is now hardly a property in the Island that is not loaded to the sinking point. Tied to sugar-growing, Barbadoes has no second industry to fall back upon. The blacks who are heedless and light hearted, increase and multiply.