West Indian Recollections and Conditions

Mr. President and Gentlemen,

I am very glad of the opportunity of meeting the members of the Empire Club. I am a Vice-President of a similar club in the West Indies, and its aims and objects are, I believe, exactly on the same lines as those of this Club. I think I can be accepted in this assembly as a representative of the West Indies; in fact, I am the only man at present in the West Indies who is officially connected with all the Colonies. There are altogether eight colonies in the West Indies. They each have their own government, their own legislative council, and their own institutions. This is the first time that an attempt has been made to start a federal institution, and that federal institution is now called the Imperial Department of Agriculture. It has been supported hitherto entirely from Imperial funds, and Mr. Chamberlain brought the Department into existence in the hope that by means of improved agricultural methods and improved knowledge amongst planters in the West Indies they might be able to work out their own salvation.

This is not the first time that I have visited Canada. I was here in 1902, and last year I spent a week in Montreal, a week in Quebec, and about a fortnight in the Maritime Provinces. This is the first opportunity I have had of making acquaintance with this magnificent city of Toronto, and I am pleased indeed that I have been able to stay so long in the city and to make the acquaintance of such a large number of prominent people connected with it. I sincerely wish the Club every success, and especially I wish success to the noble ideal of maintaining connection with the Mother Country, and of true loyalty to the person and throne of our King. There is no doubt that in some respects it is a very great benefit, to the Mother Country to be in contact with her Colonies. That was very well expressed not long ago by Mr. Lyttelton, late Colonial Secretary. He mentioned a little story of a child and a very elderly lady, Mrs. Norton, who was then nearly eighty years of age. The child turned to the old lady and said: "Are you very young?" "Yes, my dear," answered the old lady, "I am very young, but I have been very young for a very long time." So it is with England. While the unity of the Empire is maintained, England is always receiving fresh accessions of vigour. Her ideals are larger, and her outlook is neither cramped nor settled. She has, in fact, the weight and experience of age, with all the hopefulness of youth.

I think that is a very important point connected with the welfare both of the Mother Country and of her Colonies. We have coming to England at the present time a very large number of Americans and Colonials. The Americans, as a rule; come there in order to enjoy the riches they have acquired in America, and to be able to take advantage of the old civilization that exists in the United Kingdom. The Colonials, on the other hand, are there in the Empire with their young life and energy, with their intimate relations with the Mother Country, and they contribute a very valuable share of the life and energy of the Empire, in spite of the considerable amount of time and attention that is devoted to purely national affairs.

Now with regard to the connection between the Mother Country and the West Indies, I mentioned to you just now that there are eight colonies in the West Indies altogether. We have Jamaica, British Honduras, British Guiana. Off the continent of South America we have the Islands of Trinidad, the Windward Islands, Barbadoes, St. Vincent and St. Lucia. We have the Leeward Islands, Antigua, Dominique, Montserrat, and the Virgin Islands. Those possessions are all British. They comprise a population of two and a quarter million, and these people are, practically, a remnant of a population that was very rich in olden times, rich in possessions as well as in many other respects. The West Indies had their days of prosperity before the emancipation of slaves, when the people of England peopled the islands with the best of their nobility and the best of their men of enterprise and energy.

The West Indies are very different from many other portions of the Colonial Empire in the fact that they have a large negro population, and that the white people are men who own large plantations, who live on the plantations, and who still keep up an intimate connection with the Mother Country. For instance, they send their sons to be educated in England, and a large number of planters in the West Indies, especially in the Island of Barbadoes, have been educated at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In fact, there is an annual dinner of the members of those universities which takes place at Barbadoes, and usually about forty or fifty men are present. A large number of them are active planters, who are looking after their estates and maintaining the prestige of the British people in that part of the world. The same thing occurs also in British Guiana, and, in some respects, Trinidad. Our white population is comparatively small. Probably it does not exceed 1570 of the whole population of the West Indies. The rest are black people. I think we can claim that in the West Indies, as in other parts of the world, the British people have treated the native races with great consideration and with great wisdom and judgment. To begin with, when the slaves had to be emancipated the Government, instead .of compelling the people to emancipate their slaves without compensation, gave them compensation. That was done neither in the United States, nor in Brazil, nor in Russia, nor anywhere, else. But England did not give the slaves power over the white people, as in the United States. We have kept. them in a contented condition; treated them fairly and honestly, with the result that the black people in the West Indies give us little or no trouble.

With regard to the future of the West Indies I am more hopeful possibly than a good many people. I have for now nearly thirty years taken a deep interest in their welfare. I was sent there from Ceylon in 1879, and at once took up my work in Jamaica of organizing a system of botanical gardens and experimental stations that seemed to meet the requirements of the people. A Royal Commission was sent out in 1883, and I was asked to sketch out a scheme of agriculture suited to the West Indies. I did so, but for twenty years no one at home or in the Islands was prepared to put such a scheme into operation. A Royal Commission was sent out in 1896 by Mr. Chamberlain, consisting of three eminent men Sir Edward Grey, now Foreign Secretary; Sir David Barber, and Sir Henry Norman. They made a tour of the country, and I was asked to go with them. They recommended the scheme which I had prepared in 1883, and although I then held an appointment and was settled in Kew, England--giving, however, all the time that I possibly could to the West Indies--Mr. Chamberlain sent for me and asked me to come out and take charge of the new Department. Although loth to do so, I accepted the position. I gave up my appointment at Kew and came out nine years ago. I am glad to say that, without claiming any more than a fair share of credit for the improvement that has taken place in the West Indies, they are now in a better condition than they have been at any time during the past forty years.

When I come to Canada and advocate, as I do most earnestly, closer trade relations between the West Indies and Canada, I do not ask you to hold out the hand of fellowship to a poor relation. I ask you to help make a part of the world that has been under a cloud for a good many years, and a part of the world that has still an immense amount of valuable resources, and only wants to be helped along in the path that it has struck out for itself. The land is as good as it ever was. Some islands have been producing sugar for two hundred years, and the soil and the land and the people are all there, as anxious and as eager to go on growing sugar, or any other crops, as they ever were. I believe that when the West Indies fully realize their opportunities they will be able to grow not only large crops of sugar, but also cotton, india rubber, hemp, cigars end tea. There is a very large plantation of tea in Jamaica, and Jamaica tea, I can assure you from actual experience, is a very good tea indeed. I spoke the other day at the Board of Trade about Jamaica cigars. They are quite as good as the Cuban cigars, and I hope they will soon be used at clubs in Canada. I shall be very glad to assist in introducing them, because in London all the clubs have Jamaica cigars, and they are very much liked.

Another point about which I would like to say a few words is that the West Indies in the olden days were the source of great wealth to England. For instance, the historian, Bryan Edwards, in 1793 said: "The West Indies are the main source of Great Britain's opulence and maritime power." This was literally true then, and it was partly true one hundred years afterwards. Not only did the West Indies produce an enormous amount of wealth that enabled them to build up the prestige of Great Britain, but also there came from the West. Indies a large number of very eminent people; not American heiresses, who are pratically foreigners, but heiresses who could claim descent from some scion or other of noble family that had settled in the West Indies. I may tell you that Jamaica, during the Napoleonic wars, voted a half-million sterling towards the cause of Empire defence, and also that the little Island of Barbadoes, called " Little England," wrote a letter to King George III. and told him not to despair, that they were behind him, and that if anything happened to him he could come out and they would make him King of Barbadoes.

I need not detain you longer, but I should like you to carry away with you this idea-that for two or three hundred years the West Indies were a source of immense wealth to the Mother Country; that a large number of the most prominent names in history were associated with the Islands; that all that did exist in the West Indies as regards material wealth is still there. What has killed the West Indies was the fiscal action of the Imperial Government with regard to sugar and other products, which followed slave emancipation. I am glad to say that both in England and elsewhere there is a very much better feeling now being shown towards the West Indies, and I therefore appeal to the people of Canada to do all they can to help the fortunes of these historic Islands. Their people are picking up and trying to imbibe some of the wonderful energy that is to be found in this northern climate, and trying also, hand in hand with the people of Canada, to make this part of the British Empire in the new world as strong and important as it ought to be.

The Rev. Dr. R. A. Falconer: The West Indies are very dear to my own heart. Although I am a Canadian, and was ten years old before I ever saw any of the West Indies, still I lived there for eight years, and I can assure you that there is no one more competent to speak of the West Indies than Sir Daniel Morris. I think we should very heartily try to second any effort that he has put forth in directing the attention of Canada to the West Indies. He has told you that they are lands of romance. The charm of the West Indies is certainly most fascinating. We in Canada cannot afford to neglect them and allow their produce to turn to other lands. They are only, I believe, in their beginning. Since I left Trinidad its population has doubled; not only has the population doubled, but the tone of the people is rising. They are being educated.

The black of the West Indies is quite a different character from that of the Southern States, and the purchasing power of these people is increasing constantly. They are taking professional courses and reaching out for larger things. It is to this quality increase that you can look for the future. In addition to that a very material extent of these countries has not been fully investigated. Take, for instance, Dernarara. I cannot remember the full extent of British Guiana, but it must be 90,000 square miles. It is only a stretch of the shore that has yet been touched. There is the vast hinterland farther back. I heard the other day that diamonds have been found in British Guiana. Just a strip of the country is now populated, and I believe that we ought to realize that in that country, within two thousand miles of Halifax, we have latent possibilities in which we surely ought to have interest, and not only because of the romantic connection of these Islands with the past and our sympathetic interest in them, but because of the material possibilities, we ought not to allow them to slip.