Oh, but some of those ladies Madden talks about, “accustomed to all the refinements of English society,” would turn in their graves if they could see this their modern representative. She will be still in her youth when her years make her old enough to be the mother of the girls of his time. But then she arises long before dawn, she is riding or walking in boots and breeches, dogs at her heels, over the pen seeking with the eye of the master for defects as soon as the first glimmer of light comes over the mountains; she rests in the middle of the day, but her work is hardly done when the sun sinks gorgeously to rest behind the tree-topped hills in the west. And she has her work cut out for her. For the negro, whether on her estate or, what is worse, on its borders, is intolerably wasteful of his property and other people's. For instance, she found on the land when it came into her hands two well-grown handsome trees which she discovered were mahogany trees. She hailed them with delight and gave them every attention. And then one day to her dismay she found her precious trees, trees nearly as old as herself, dying and past all hope, for some negro outside her boundaries had stripped the bark off them, because mahogany bark--and mahogany bark is difficult to get now in accessible places--makes the best floor stain! That is the sort of difficulty the man or woman who would do well by the country has to encounter in Jamaica. It takes the heart out of the worker. What was the good of storming and raging, the seventeen year old mahogany trees were dead, because a negro wanted to earn without trouble a few pence in Montego Bay. Again and again going the rounds, Miss Maxwell Hall finds that the black people have ruthlessly cut down trees she is cherishing, cut them down for firewood, or to make shingles, or for a riding-whip or some other trifle. In my experience the negro peasant makes a very wasteful agriculturist. Sir Hugh Clifford I see, speaking of the countries from which the forbears of the coloured Jamaican came, advocates that white men be not encouraged to settle in these lands, that they be left to the peasants. I see what he means. He deprecates the arrival of the white man, who comes as a bird of passage, anxious to take all he can out of the land before retiring after a certain number of years to enjoy his spoils--a well-earned, peaceful old age he would call it, an old age beginning somewhere about forty--in the country of his birth. The countries that go to make up the Empire should not be so treated. But I cannot think that the peasant on the soil is best left alone to work out his own salvation. He will work it out I suppose in time, but the cost will be heavy. I have watched the peasant in the Alpes Maritimes in France, I have seen the fishermen drawing their nets in the Italian Riviera, and I have seen the negro in Jamaica and West Africa, and I unhesitatingly say that the cost of that working out is very heavy indeed.