These islands, being largely inhabited by black people, cannot be entrusted with complete self-government like purely white communities. They are under various forms of what is known as crown colony government. For example, Trinidad and the Windward Islands are under the complete control of the British Colonial Office, while Barbados and Jamaica enjoy a large measure of self-rule. But this division into a large number of small governments without any connection with each other is extremely expensive, and proposals have been made for a federation of the British West Indies either in one great system, including them all, with British Honduras and Guiana thrown in, or in two systems embracing respectively the Greater and the Lesser Antilles. England, it must be confessed, has treated her splendid West Indian empire very badly. In order that she might have sugar "dirt-cheap" at home she allowed the great staple product of the isles and mainland, cane-sugar, to be brought to the verge of ruin by the competition of European bounty-fed beet-sugar. Happily there was a statesman of strong imperial sympathies in England, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, who arranged the Brussels Sugar Convention with certain Powers of Europe, all of which agreed to suppress their own bounties and to impose countervailing duties on bounty-fed sugar imported from countries outside the convention. This gave the West Indies a fairer chance of competition, and they quickly felt the benefit. But the convention was always opposed in England by certain industries in which sugar is used and is therefore wanted as cheap as possible, and notice has recently been given, despite the protests and alarms of the West Indies, that England intends to withdraw from the convention. And this, too, without any sort of compensation for the sugar-islands, which had begun to rely upon the protection against unfair competition afforded by that instrument.