Mountain Crater, Dominica _Frontispiece_ Silk Cotton Tree, Jamaica _Title page_ Blue Basin, Trinidad _To face page_ 72 Morning Walk, Dominica 136 Port Royal, Jamaica 171 Valley in the Blue Mountains, Jamaica 194 Kingston and Harbour, from Cherry Gardens 234 Havana, from the Quarries 258 Port au Prince, Hayti 288 THE ENGLISH IN THE WEST INDIES. CHAPTER I. Colonial policy--Union or separation--Self-government--Varieties of condition--The Pacific colonies--The West Indies--Proposals for a West Indian federation--Nature of the population--American union and British plantations--Original conquest of the West Indies. The Colonial Exhibition has come and gone. Delegates from our great self-governed dependencies have met and consulted together, and have determined upon a common course of action for Imperial defence. The British race dispersed over the world have celebrated the Jubilee of the Queen with an enthusiasm evidently intended to bear a special and peculiar meaning. The people of these islands and their sons and brothers and friends and kinsfolk in Canada, in Australia, and in New Zealand have declared with a general voice, scarcely disturbed by a discord, that they are fellow-subjects of a single sovereign, that they are united in feeling, united in loyalty, united in interest, and that they wish and mean to preserve unbroken the integrity of the British Empire. This is the answer which the democracy has given to the advocates of the doctrine of separation. The desire for union while it lasts is its own realisation. As long as we have no wish to part we shall not part, and the wish can never rise if when there is occasion we can meet and deliberate together with the same regard for each other's welfare which has been shown in the late conference in London.