The mulattoes would settle on the seaboard, in order to keep continually
in touch with Europeans. This is their chief wish. Under European
direction they would become merchants (and especially money-brokers),
lawyers, and physicians. They would tighten the links with the higher
elements of their race by a continual crossing of blood; they would be
gradually improved and lose their African character in the same
proportion as their African blood.
The negroes would withdraw to the interior and form small societies like
those of the runaway slaves in San Domingo itself, in Martinique,
Jamaica, and especially in Cuba, where the size of the country and the
depth of the forests baffle all pursuit. Amid the varied and tropical
vegetation of the Antilles, the American negro would find the
necessities of life yielded him in abundance and without labour by the
fruitful earth. He would return quite freely to the despotic,
patriarchal system that is naturally suited to those of his brethren on
whom the conquering Mussulmans of Africa have not yet laid their yoke.
The love of isolation would be at once the cause and the result of his
institutions. Tribes would be formed, and become, at the end of a short
time, foreign and hostile to each other. Local wars would constitute the
sole political history of the different cantons; and the island, though
it would be wild, thinly peopled, and ill-cultivated, would yet maintain
a double population. This is now condemned to disappear, owing to the
fatal influence wielded by laws and institutions that have no relation
to the mind of the negro, his interests, and his wants.
The examples of San Domingo and the Sandwich Islands are conclusive. But
I cannot leave this part of my subject without touching on a similar
instance, of a peculiar character, which strongly supports my view. I
cited first a State where the institutions, imposed by Protestant
preachers, are a mere childish copy of the British system. I then spoke
of a government, materially free, but spiritually bound by European
theories; which it tries to carry out, with fatal consequences for the
unhappy population. I will now bring forward an instance of quite a
different kind; I mean the attempt of the Jesuits to civilize the
natives of Paraguay.[21]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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