Lord Elgin | Page 4

to spread knowledge among the ignorant blacks,
as well as to create a spirit of emulation among the landlords, who were
still sullen and apathetic, requiring much persuasion to adapt
themselves to the new order of things, and make efforts to stimulate
skilled labour among the coloured population whom they still despised.
Then, as always in his career, he was animated by the noble impulse to
administer public affairs with a sole regard to the public interests,
irrespective of class or creed, to elevate men to a higher conception of
their public duties. "To reconcile the planter"--I quote from one of his
letters to Lord Stanley--"to the heavy burdens which he was called to
bear for the improvement of our establishments and the benefit of the
mass of the population, it was necessary to persuade him that he had an
interest in raising the standard of education and morals among the
peasantry; and this belief could be imparted only by inspiring a taste for
a more artificial system of husbandry." "By the silent operation of such
salutary convictions," he added, "prejudices of old standing are
removed; the friends of the negro and of the proprietary classes find
themselves almost unconsciously acting in concert, and conspiring to
complete that great and holy work of which the emancipation of the
slave was but the commencement."
At this time the relations between the island and the home governments
were always in a very strained condition on account of the difficulty of
making the colonial office fully sensible of the financial embarrassment
caused by the upheaval of the labour and social systems, and of the
wisest methods of assisting the colony in its straits. As it too often
happened in those old times of colonial rule, the home government
could with difficulty be brought to understand that the economic

principles which might satisfy the state of affairs in Great Britain could
not be hastily and arbitrarily applied to a country suffering under
peculiar difficulties. The same unintelligent spirit which forced taxation
on the thirteen colonies, which complicated difficulties in the Canadas
before the rebellion of 1837, seemed for the moment likely to prevail,
as soon as the legislature of Jamaica passed a tariff framed naturally
with regard to conditions existing when the receipts and expenditures
could not be equalized, and the financial situation could not be relieved
from its extreme tension in any other way than by the imposition of
duties which happened to be in antagonism with the principles then
favoured by the imperial government. At this critical juncture Lord
Elgin successfully interposed between the colonial office and the island
legislature, and obtained permission for the latter to manage this affair
in its own way. He recognized the fact, obvious enough to any one
conversant with the affairs of the island, that the tariff in question was
absolutely necessary to relieve it from financial ruin, and that any
strenuous interference with the right of the assembly to control its own
taxes and expenses would only tend to create complications in the
government and the relations with the parent state. He was convinced,
as he wrote to the colonial office, that an indispensable condition of his
usefulness as a governor was "a just appreciation of the difficulties with
which the legislature of the island had yet to contend, and of the
sacrifices and exertions already made under the pressure of no ordinary
embarrassments."
Here we see Lord Elgin, at the very commencement of his career as a
colonial governor, fully alive to the economic, social, and political
conditions of the country, and anxious to give its people every
legitimate opportunity to carry out those measures which they believed,
with a full knowledge and experience of their own affairs, were best
calculated to promote their own interests. We shall see later that it was
in exactly the same spirit that he administered Canadian questions of
much more serious import.
Though his government in Jamaica was in every sense a success, he
decided not to remain any longer than three years, and so wrote in 1845
to Lord Stanley. Despite his earnest efforts to identify himself with the
island's interests, he had led on the whole a retired and sad life after the
death of his wife. He naturally felt a desire to seek the congenial and

sympathetic society of friends across the sea, and perhaps return to the
active public life for which he was in so many respects well qualified.
In offering his resignation to the colonial secretary he was able to say
that the period of his administration had been "one of considerable
social progress"; that "uninterrupted harmony" had "prevailed between
the colonists and the local government"; that "the spirit of enterprise"
which had proceeded from Jamaica for two years had "enabled the
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