And so it is with Jamaica. Men can live, they can thrive there, but for the first comers, ingrained with British ideas, it was very hard indeed. We talk about planters, but I fancy some of those first comers were accustomed to live very humbly and had very small intellectual attainments. Of course there were the men of standing and their wives, the men who stood round the Governor, but the men who took out the patents for small parcels of land and lived on their land were probably hardly the equals of the Council School educated labourer of to-day. The only difference would be--and of course it is a tremendous difference--those planters, however small their educational attainments, were accustomed to look upon themselves as the salt of the earth. Each and all had slaves, and the gulf between the slave and his owner was so wide and so deep that there was no bridging it. It remains to-day in the colour question that is for ever cropping up, and it made one class arrogant as it made the other cringingly submissive. “If an average planter of 1720,” says _Planter's Punch_, “and his wife and daughters could be brought back to life and could live for a day now as they lived in times long passed, and if we could witness their manners and have a glimpse of their daily customs, it is little to say that we should be inexpressibly shocked.... There is a planter's house of the first century of colonisation still standing in St Elizabeth, but there are scarce a dozen in the colony. It has a broad verandah in front, which you approach by a low flight of stone steps, the walls are from 2 to 3 feet thick, there are shutters for the windows, you see at once that the place was originally built for defence. It is of one storey only; there is no ceiling; so that the heavy rafters are exposed. It may contain in all some six apartments; it would not be disturbed by a hurricane, hardly by an earthquake, and it could have withstood for sometime an assault from slaves.... It was in houses of this sort that the country planter lived for a hundred years or more in those fabled 'good old times' of which we sometimes speak.”