At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies

Meanwhile—and hereby hangs a tale—I was interested, not merely in the Armadillo, but in the excellent taste with which it, and everything else, was cooked in a little open shed over a few stones and firesticks.  And complimenting my host thereon, I found that he had, there in the primeval forest, an admirable French cook, to whom I begged to be introduced at once.  Poor fellow!  A little lithe Parisian, not thirty years old, he had got thither by a wild road.  Cook to some good bourgeois family in Paris, he had fallen in love with his master’s daughter, and she with him.  And when their love was hopeless, and discovered, the two young foolish things, not having—as is too common in France—the fear of God before their eyes, could think of no better resource than to shut themselves up with a pan of lighted charcoal, and so go they knew not-whither.  The poor girl went—and was found dead.  But the boy recovered; and was punished with twenty years of Cayenne; and here he was now, on a sort of ticket-of-leave, cooking for his livelihood.  I talked a while with him, cheered him with some compliments about the Parisians, and so forth, dear to the Frenchman’s heart—what else was there to say?—and so left him, not without the fancy that, if he had had but such an education as the middle classes in Paris have not, there were the makings of a man in that keen eye, large jaw, sharp chin.  ‘The very fellow,’ said some one, ‘to have been a first-rate Zouave.’  Well: perhaps he was a better man, even as he was, than as a Zouave.

And so we rode away again, and through Valencia, and through San Josef, weary and happy, back to Port of Spain.

I would gladly, had I been able, have gone farther due westward into the forests which hide the river Oropuche, that I might have visited the scene of a certain two years’ Idyll, which was enacted in them some forty years and more ago.

In 1827 cacao fell to so low a price (two dollars per cwt.) that it was no longer worth cultivating; and the head of the F– family, leaving his slaves to live at ease on his estates, retreated, with a household of twelve persons, to a small property of his own, which was buried in the primeval forests of Oropuche.  With them went his second son, Monsignor F–, then and afterwards curé of San Josef, who died shortly before my visit to the island.  I always heard him spoken of as a gentleman and a scholar, a saintly and cultivated priest of the old French School, respected and beloved by men of all denominations.  His church of San Josef, though still unfinished, had been taxed, as well as all the Roman Catholic churches of the island, to build the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Port of Spain; and he, refusing to obey an order which he considered unjust, threw up his curé, and retreated with the rest of the family to the palm-leaf ajoupas in the forest.

M. F– chose three of his finest Negroes as companions.  Melchior was to go out every day to shoot wild pigeons, coming every morning to ask how many were needed, so as not to squander powder and shot.  The number ordered were always punctually brought in, besides sometimes a wild turkey—Pajui—or other fine birds.  Alejos, who is now a cacao proprietor, and owner of a house in Arima, was chosen to go out every day, except Sundays, with the dogs; and scarcely ever failed to bring in a lapp or quenco.  Aristobal was chosen for the fishing, and brought in good loads of river fish, some sixteen pounds weight: and thus the little party of cultivated gentlemen and ladies were able to live, though in poverty, yet sumptuously.

The Bishop had given Monsignor F– permission to perform service on any of his father’s estates.  So a little chapel was built; the family and servants attended every Sunday, and many days in the week; and the country folk from great distances found their way through the woods to hear Mass in the palm-thatched sanctuary of ‘El Riposo.’

So did that happy family live ‘the gentle life’ for some two years; till cacao rose again in price, the tax on the churches was taken off, and the F–s returned again to the world: but not to civilisation and Christianity.  Those they had carried with them into the wilderness; and those they brought back with them unstained.

CHAPTER XIV: THE ‘EDUCATION QUESTION’ IN TRINIDAD

When I arrived in Trinidad, the little island was somewhat excited about changes in the system of education, which ended in a compromise like that at home, though starting from almost the opposite point.

Among the many good deeds which Lord Harris did for the colony was the establishment throughout it of secular elementary ward schools, helped by Government grants, on a system which had, I think, but two defects.  First, that attendance was not compulsory; and next, that it was too advanced for the state of society in the island.

In an ideal system, secular and religious education ought, I believe, to be strictly separate, and given, as far as possible, by different classes of men.  The first is the business of scientific men and their pupils; the second, of the clergy and their pupils: and the less either invades the domain of the other, the better for the community.  But, like all ideals, it requires not only first-rate workmen, but first-rate material to work on; an intelligent and high-minded populace, who can and will think for themselves upon religious questions; and who have, moreover, a thirst for truth and knowledge of every kind.  With such a populace, secular and religious education can be safely parted.  But can they be safely parted in the case of a populace either degraded or still savage; given up to the ‘lusts of the flesh’; with no desire for improvement, and ignorant of that ‘moral ideal,’ without the influence of which, as my friend Professor Huxley well says, there can be no true education?  It is well if such a people can be made to submit to one system of education.  Is it wise to try to burden them with two at once?  But if one system is to give way to the other, which is the more important: to teach them the elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic; or the elements of duty and morals?  And how these latter can be taught without religion is a problem as yet unsolved.

So argued some of the Protestant and the whole of the Roman Catholic clergy of Trinidad, and withdrew their support from the Government schools, to such an extent that at least three-fourths of the children, I understand, went to no school at all.

The Roman Catholic clergy had, certainly, much to urge on their own behalf.  The great majority of the coloured population of the island, besides a large proportion of the white, belonged to their creed.  Their influence was the chief (I had almost said the only) civilising and Christianising influence at work on the lower orders of their own coloured people.  They knew, none so well, how much the Negro required, not merely to be instructed, but to be reclaimed from gross and ruinous vices.  It was not a question in Port of Spain, any more than it is in Martinique, of whether the Negroes should be able to read and write, but of whether they should exist on the earth at all for a few generations longer.  I say this openly and deliberately; and clergymen and police magistrates know but too well what I mean.  The priesthood were, and are, doing their best to save the Negro; and they naturally wished to do their work, on behalf of society and of the colony, in their own way; and to subordinate all teaching to that of religion, which includes, with them, morality and decency.  They therefore opposed the Government schools; because they tended, it was thought, to withdraw the Negro from his priest’s influence.

I am not likely, I presume, to be suspected of any leaning toward Romanism.  But I think a Roman Catholic priest would have a right to a fair and respectful hearing, if he said:—

‘You have set these people free, without letting them go through that intermediate stage of feudalism, by which, and by which alone, the white races of Europe were educated into true freedom.  I do not blame you.  You could do no otherwise.  But will you hinder their passing through that process of religious education under a priesthood, by which, and by which alone, the white races of Europe were educated up to something like obedience, virtue, and purity?

‘These last, you know, we teach in the interest of the State, as well as of the Negro: and if we should ask the State for aid, in order that we may teach them, over and above a little reading and writing—which will not be taught save by us, for we only shall be listened to—are we asking too much, or anything which the State will not be wise in granting us?  We can have no temptation to abuse our power for political purposes.  It would not suit us—to put the matter on its lowest ground—to become demagogues.  For our congregations include persons of every rank and occupation; and therefore it is our interest, as much as that of the British Government, that all classes should be loyal, peaceable, and wealthy.

‘As for our peculiar creed, with its vivid appeals to the senses: is it not a question whether the utterly unimaginative and illogical Negro can be taught the facts of Christianity, or indeed any religion at all, save through his senses?  Is it not a question whether we do not, on the whole, give him a juster and clearer notion of the very truths which you hold in common with us, than an average Protestant missionary does?

‘Your Church of England’—it must be understood that the relations between the Anglican and the Romish clergy in Trinidad are, as far as I have seen, friendly and tolerant—‘ does good work among its coloured members.  But it does so by speaking, as we speak, with authority.  It, too, finds it prudent to keep up in its services somewhat at least of that dignity, even pomp, which is as necessary for the Negro as it was for the half-savage European of the early Middle Age, if he is to be raised above his mere natural dread of spells, witches, and other harmful powers, to somewhat of admiration and reverence.

‘As for the merely dogmatic teaching of the Dissenters: we do not believe that the mere Negro really comprehends one of those propositions, whether true or false, Catholic or Calvinist, which have been elaborated by the intellect and the emotions of races who have gone through a training unknown to the Negro.  With all respect for those who disseminate such books, we think that the Negro can no more conceive the true meaning of an average Dissenting Hymn-book, than a Sclavonian of the German Marches a thousand years ago could have conceived the meaning of St. Augustine’s Confessions.  For what we see is this—that when the personal influence of the white missionary is withdrawn, and the Negro left to perpetuate his sect on democratic principles, his creed merely feeds his inordinate natural vanity with the notion that everybody who differs from him is going to hell, while he is going to heaven whatever his morals may be.’

If a Roman Catholic priest should say all this, he would at least have a right, I believe, to a respectful hearing.

Nay, more.  If he were to say, ‘You are afraid of our having too much to do with the education of the Negro, because we use the Confessional as an instrument of education.  Now how far the Confessional is needful, or useful, or prudent, in a highly civilised and generally virtuous community, may be an open matter.  But in spite of all your English dislike of it, hear our side of the question, as far as Negroes and races in a similar condition are concerned.  Do you know why and how the Confessional arose?  Have you looked, for instance, into the old middle-age Penitentials?  If so, you must be aware that it arose in an age of coarseness, which seems now inconceivable; in those barbarous times when the lower classes of Europe, slaves or serfs, especially in remote country districts, lived lives little better than those of the monkeys in the forest, and committed habitually the most fearful crimes, without any clear notion that they were doing wrong: while the upper classes, to judge from the literature which they have left, were so coarse, and often so profligate, in spite of nobler instincts and a higher sense of duty, that the purest and justest spirits among them had again and again to flee from their own class into the cloister or the hermit’s cell.

‘In those days, it was found necessary to ask Christian people perpetually—Have you been doing this, or that?  For if you have, you are not only unfit to be called a Christian; you are unfit to be called a decent human being.  And this, because there was every reason to suppose that they had been doing it; and that they would not tell of themselves, if they could possibly avoid it.  So the Confessional arose, as a necessary element for educating savages into common morality and decency.  And for the same reasons we employ it among the Negroes of Trinidad.  Have no fears lest we should corrupt the minds of the young.  They see and hear more harm daily than we could ever teach them, were we so devilishly minded.  There is vice now, rampant and notorious, in Port of Spain, which eludes even our Confessional.  Let us alone to do our best.  God knows we are trying to do it, according to our light.’

If any Roman Catholic clergyman in Port of Spain spoke thus to me—and I have been spoken to in words not unlike these—I could only answer, ‘God’s blessing on you, and all your efforts, whether I agree with you in detail or not.’

The Roman Catholic inhabitants of the island are to the Protestant as about 2½ to 1. ²²²  The whole of the more educated portion of them, as far as I could ascertain, are willing to entrust the education of their children to the clergy.  The Archbishop of Trinidad, Monsignor Gonin, who has jurisdiction also in St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Grenada, and Tobago, is a man not only of great energy and devotion, but of cultivation and knowledge of the world; having, I was told, attained distinction as a barrister elsewhere before he took Holy Orders.  A group of clergy is working under him—among them a personal friend of mine—able and ready to do their best to mend a state of things in which most of the children in the island, born nominal Roman Catholics, but the majority illegitimate, were growing up not only in ignorance, but in heathendom and brutality.  Meanwhile, the clergy were in want of funds.  There were no funds at all, indeed, which would enable them to set up in remote forest districts a religious school side by side with the secular ward school; and the colony could not well be asked for Government grants to two sets of schools at once.  In face of these circumstances, the late Governor thought fit to take action on the very able and interesting report of Mr. J. P. Keenan, one of the chiefs of inspection of the Irish National Board of Education, who had been sent out as special commissioner to inquire into the state of education in the island; to modify Lord Harris’s plan, however excellent in itself; and to pass an Ordinance by which Government aid was extended to private elementary schools, of whatever denomination, provided they had duly certificated teachers; were accessible to all children of the neighbourhood without distinction of religion or race; and ‘offered solid guarantees for abstinence from proselytism and intolerance, by subjecting their rules and course of teaching to the Board of Education, and empowering that Board at any moment to cancel the certificate of the teacher.’  In the wards in which such schools were founded, and proved to be working satisfactorily, the secular ward schools were to be discontinued.  But the Government reserved to itself the power of reopening a secular school in the ward, in case the private school turned out a failure.

Such is a short sketch of an Ordinance which seems, to me at least, a rational and fair compromise, identical, mutatis mutandis, with that embodied in Mr. Forster’s new Education Act; and the only one by which the lower orders of Trinidad were likely to get any education whatever.  It was received, of course, with applause by the Roman Catholics, and by a great number of the Protestants of the colony.  But, as was to be expected, it met with strong expressions of dissent from some of the Protestant gentry and clergy; especially from one gentleman, who attacked the new scheme with an acuteness and humour which made even those who differed from him regret that such remarkable talents had no wider sphere than a little island of forty-five miles by sixty.  An accession of power to the Roman Catholic clergy was, of course, dreaded; and all the more because it was known that the scheme met with the approval of the Archbishop; that it was, indeed, a compromise with the requests made in a petition which that prelate had lately sent in to the Governor; a petition which seems to me most rational and temperate.  It was argued, too, that though the existing Act—that of 1851—had more or less failed, it might still succeed if Lord Harris’s plan was fully carried out, and the choice of the ward schoolmaster, the selection of ward school-books, and the direction of the course of instruction, were vested in local committees.  The simple answer was, that eighteen years had elapsed, and the colony had done nothing in that direction; that the great majority of children in the island did not go to school at all, while those who did attended most irregularly, and learnt little or nothing; ²²³ that the secular system of education had not attracted, as it was hoped, the children of the Hindoo immigrants, of whom scarcely one was to be found in a ward school; that the ward schoolmasters were generally inefficient, and the Central Board of Education inactive; that there was no rigorous local supervision, and no local interest felt in the schools; that there were fewer children in the ward schools in 1868 than there had been in 1863, in spite of the rapid increase of population: and all this for the simple reason which the Archbishop had pointed out—the want of religious instruction.  As was to be expected, the good people of the island, being most of them religious people also, felt no enthusiasm about schools where little was likely to be taught beyond the three royal R’s.

I believe they were wrong.  Any teaching which involves moral discipline is better than mere anarchy and idleness.  But they had a right to their opinion; and a right too, being the great majority of the islanders, to have that opinion respected by the Governor.  Even now, it will be but too likely, I think, that the establishment and superintendence of schools in remote districts will devolve—as it did in Europe during the Middle Age—entirely on the different clergies, simply by default of laymen of sufficient zeal for the welfare of the coloured people.  Be that as it may, the Ordinance has become Law; and I have faith enough in the loyalty of the good folk of Trinidad to believe that they will do their best to make it work.

If, indeed, the present Ordinance does not work, it is difficult to conceive any that will.  It seems exactly fitted for the needs of Trinidad.  I do not say that it is fitted for the needs of any and every country.  In Ireland, for instance, such a system would be, in my opinion, simply retrograde.  The Irishman, to his honour, has passed, centuries since, beyond the stage at which he requires to be educated by a priesthood in the primary laws of religion and morality.  His morality is—on certain important points—superior to that of almost any people.  What he needs is to be trained to loyalty and order; to be brought more in contact with the secular science and civilisation of the rest of Europe: and that must be done by a secular, and not by an ecclesiastical system of education.

The higher education, in Trinidad, seems in a more satisfactory state than the elementary.  The young ladies, many of them, go ‘home’—i.e. to England or France—for their schooling; and some of the young men to Oxford, Cambridge, London, or Edinburgh.  The Gilchrist Trust of the University of London has lately offered annually a Scholarship of £100 a year for three years, to lads from the West India colonies, the examinations for it to be held in Jamaica, Barbadoes, Trinidad, and Demerara; and in Trinidad itself two Exhibitions of £150 a year each, tenable for three years, are attainable by lads of the Queen’s Collegiate School, to help them toward their studies at a British University.

The Collegiate School received aid from the State to the amount of £3000 per annum—less by the students’ fees; and was open to all denominations.  But in it, again, the secular system would not work.  The great majority of Roman Catholic lads were educated at St. Mary’s College, which received no State aid at all.  417 Catholic pupils at the former school, as against 111 at the latter, were—as Mr. Keenan says—’a poor expression of confidence or favour on the part of the colonists.’  The Roman Catholic religion was the creed of the great majority of the islanders, and especially of the wealthier and better educated of the coloured families.  Justice seemed to demand that if State aid were given, it should be given to all creeds alike; and prudence certainly demanded that the respectable young men of Trinidad should not be arrayed in two alien camps, in which the differences of creed were intensified by those of race, and—in one camp at least—by a sense of something very like injustice on the part of a Protestant, and, it must always be remembered, originally conquering, Government.  To give the lads as much as possible the same interests, the same views; to make them all alike feel that they were growing up, not merely English subjects, but English men, was one of the most important social problems in Trinidad.  And the simplest way of solving it was, to educate them as much as possible side by side in the same school, on terms of perfect equality.

The late Governor, therefore, with the advice and consent of his Council, determined to develop the Queen’s Collegiate School into a new Royal College, which was to be open to all creeds and races without distinction: but upon such terms as will, it is hoped, secure the willing attendance of Roman Catholic scholars. ²²⁴  Not only it, but schools duly affiliated to it, are to receive Government aid; and four Exhibitions of £150 a year each, instead of two, are granted to young men going home to a British University.  The College was inaugurated—I am sorry to say after I had left the island—in June 1870, by the Governor, in the presence of (to quote the Port of Spain Gazette) the Council, consisting of—

The Honourable the Chief Judge Needham.

J. Scott Bushe (Colonial Secretary).

Charles W. Warner, C.B.

E. J. Eagles.

F. Warner.

Dr. L. A. A. Verteuil.

Henry Court.

M. Maxwell Philip.

His Honour Mr. Justice Fitzgerald.

André Bernard, Esq.

The last five of these gentlemen being, I believe, Roman Catholics.  Most of the Board of Education were also present; the Principal and Masters of the Collegiate School, the Superiors and Reverend Professors of St. Mary’s College, the Clergy of the Church of England in the island; the leading professional men and merchants, etc., and especially a large number of the Roman Catholic gentry of the island; ‘MM. Ambard, O’Connor, Giuseppi, Laney, Farfan, Gillineau, Rat, Pantin, Léotaud, Besson, Fraser, Paüll, Hobson, Garcia, Dr. Padron,’ etc.  I quote their names from the Gazette, in the order in which they occur.  Many of them I have not the honour of knowing: but judging of those whom I do not know by those whom I do, I should say that their presence at the inauguration was a solid proof that the foundation of the new College was a just and politic measure, opening, as the Gazette well says, a great future to the youth of all creeds in the colony.

The late Governor’s speech on the occasion I shall print entire.  It will explain the circumstances of the case far better than I can do; and it may possibly meet with interest and approval from those who like to hear sound sense spoken, even in a small colony.

‘We are met here to-day to inaugurate the Royal College, an institution in which the benefits of a sound education, I trust, will be secured to Protestants and Roman Catholics alike, without the slightest compromise of their respective principles.

‘The Queen’s Collegiate School, of which this College is, in some sort, an out-growth and development, was founded with the same object: but, successful as it has been in other respects, it cannot be said to have altogether attained this.

‘St. Mary’s College was founded by private enterprise with a different view, and to meet the wants of those who objected to the Collegiate School.

‘It has long been felt the existence of two Colleges—one, the smaller, almost entirely supported by the State; the other, the larger, wholly without State aid—was objectionable; and that the whole question of secondary education presented a most difficult problem.

‘Some saw its solution in the withdrawal of all State aid from higher education; others in the establishment by the State of two distinct Denominational Colleges.

‘I have elsewhere explained the reason why I consider both these suggestions faulty, and their probable effect bad; the one being certain to check and discourage superior education altogether, the other likely to substitute inefficient for efficient teaching, and small exclusive schools for a wide national institution.

‘I knew that, whilst insuperable objections existed to a combined education in all subjects, that objection had its limits: that in America and in Germany I had seen Protestants and Catholics learning side by side; that in Mauritius, a College numbering 700 pupils, partly Protestants, partly Roman Catholics, existed; and that similar establishments were not uncommon elsewhere.

‘I therefore determined to endeavour to effect the establishment of a College where combined study might be carried on in those branches of education with respect to which no objection to such a course was felt, and to support with Government aid, and bring under Government supervision, those establishments where those branches in which a separate education was deemed necessary were taught.

‘I had, when last at home, some anxious conferences with the highest ecclesiastical authority of the Roman Catholic Church in England on the subject, and came to a complete understanding with him in respect to it.  That distinguished prelate, himself a man of the highest University eminence, is not one to be indifferent to the interests of learning.  His position, his known opinions, afford a guarantee that nothing sanctioned by him could, even by the most scrupulous, be considered in the least degree inconsistent with the interests of his Church or his religion.

‘He expressed a strong preference for a totally separate education: but candidly admitted the objections to such a course in a small and not very wealthy island, and drew a wide distinction between combination for all purposes, and for some only.

‘There were certain courses of instruction in which combined instruction could not possibly be given consistently with due regard to the faith of the pupils; there were others where it was difficult to decide whether it could or could not properly be given; there were others again where it might be certainly given without objection.

‘On this understanding the plan carried into effect is based: but the Legislature have gone far beyond what was then agreed; and whilst Archbishop Manning would have assented to an arrangement which would have excluded certain branches only of education from the common course, the law, as now in force, allows exemption from attendance on all, provided competent instruction is given to the pupils in the same branches elsewhere; till, in fact, all that remains obligatory is attendance at examinations, and at the course of instruction in one or more of four given branches of education, if it should so happen that no adequate teaching in that particular branch is given in the pupil’s own school.

‘A scheme more liberal—a bond more elastic—could hardly have been devised, capable of effecting, if desired, the closest union—capable of being stretched to almost any degree of slight connection; and even if some Catholics would still prefer a wholly separate system, they must, if candid men, admit that the Protestant population here have a right to demand that they should not be called on to surrender, in order to satisfy a mere preference, the great advantages they derive from a united College under State control, with its efficient staff and national character.

‘If religious difficulties are met, and conscientious scruples are not wounded, a sacrifice of preferences must often be made.  Private wishes must often yield to the public good.

‘In the first instance, all the boys of the former Collegiate School have become students of the College; but probably a school of a similar character, but affiliated to the College, will shortly be formed, in which a large number of those boys will be included.

‘That the headship of the College should be entrusted to the Principal of the Queen’s Collegiate School will, I am sure, be universally felt to be only a just tribute to the zeal, efficiency, and success with which he has hitherto laboured in his office, whilst, in addition to these qualifications, he possesses the no less important one for the post he is about to fill, of a mind singularly impartial, just, liberal, and candid.

‘I hope that the other Professors of the College may be taken from affiliated schools indiscriminately, the lectures being given as may be most convenient, and as may be arranged by the College Council.

‘It is intended by the College Council that the fees charged for attendance at the Royal College should be much lower than those heretofore charged at the Queen’s Collegiate School.  I do not believe that the mere financial loss will be great, whilst I believe a good education will, by this means, be placed within the reach of many who cannot now afford it.