tribunal. Meanwhile, a general anxiety prevailed among the planters, and a dread of one of those negro insurrections which more than once have terrified the colonies with their unspeakable horrors. Military precautions had been taken, and no sooner did the negroes, armed with sticks and knives, present themselves before the court house at Morant Bay, than the volunteer troops were there to receive them. The force, however, was not sufficient; the court-house was set on fire, eighteen persons were killed and thirty wounded. Upon this, a general disturbance broke out through the neighborhood, which subsided at once upon the arrival of a small force of regulars, sent by the governor; and the negroes who had been concerned in the outbreak fled in every direction. Such were the facts of the "insurrection," as established before the commission sent out from England.

The chastisement inflicted was out of all proportion to the offence; it could be explained only by the alarm with which the white population, always a very small minority, habitually regarded the subject of an insurrection of the negroes, who were in this case excited not only by the wrongs of which they complained in the matter of the land, but also by a liberty to which they were not yet fully accustomed. The Governor of Jamaica, Mr. Edward John Eyre, was a brave and intelligent man. He had been a successful explorer in Australia, and a resident magistrate there, also Lieutenant-Governor in New Zealand and the Leeward Islands, and everywhere had been esteemed an upright and kindly-tempered man.

Yielding to the influence of the local terror, Governor Eyre had proclaimed martial law throughout the island, with the exception only of the city of Kingston. According to the report made by the commission, four hundred and thirty-nine persons were put to death, and more than six hundred suffered the cruel penalty of flogging, most of them, without any pro

cess of law whatever. A thousand houses were burned. The commission, in its report, declared that the punishments were excessive, and the repression cruel. Chief-Justice Cockburn declared that there was not a stone in the island of Jamaica which, if the rains of heaven had not washed off from it the stains of blood, might not have borne terrible witness to the manner in which martial law had been administered for the suppression of negro discontent.

It is to England's honor that, in the distant administration of her numerous colonies, which it is impossible always to govern with strict legality, public sentiment and public indignation have always rectified abuses and effectually repressed that tyranny to which the possession of absolute power sometimes leads even the most moderate men. The tumult of indignation with which England received the report of Governor Eyre's severity, the prosecution at once instituted against him, the bitterness of Chief-Justice Cockburn's language in charging the grand-jury, were all guarantees against the possible recurrence of a similar iniquity. At the same time, Mr. Eyre's conduct was defended by some persons as hotly as it was attacked by others; the urgency of the situation was pleaded, and, indeed, not unjustly, by way of palliation of the excesses of a government bewildered by the danger; Governor Eyre was never brought to trial, but his official career was ended, and he retired into private life, overwhelmed by debts incurred in defending himself before the grand-juries, which debts were, however, finally paid by government. Public equity and humanity were satisfied; Jamaica henceforth was ruled by a new governor, and received a new constitution, but the traces of what she had suffered were not and could not be effaced; countries which have long maintained slavery know that its imprint stamped for ages upon the soil and upon human souls, requires ages more before its traces can be finally obliterated.

While the deposed Governor of Jamaica was defending his conduct before his indignant countrymen, other disputes of a much wider importance were going on or being brought to a close in Europe. The despoilers of Denmark had quarrelled over their plunder, war had been declared between Austria and Prussia, and the battle of Sadowa fought and lost by Austria. Henceforth her power in Germany was forever weakened. The remnants of her Italian possessions were escaping from her; Venetia had been abandoned to France by the conquerors, and France had given it up to Italy. A new European state was developing with increasing rapidity; a threatening power was assuming vast proportions; the Powers dominant in the past saw their authority and their strength diminishing; they were bearing the penalty of their faults, and clear-sighted minds already perceived the grave consequences likely to ensue.

M. Guizot thus judged of the victory of Prussia over Austria, and the preponderance Prussia had by this event suddenly gained in Germany:

"Two great facts, one occurring in the eighteenth century, the other in our own times, have profoundly modified — I may say, have destroyed the ancient organization of the German. peoples. In the eighteenth century, by the political and military genius of Frederic II., Prussia, one of the states of the German Confederation, gained in territory and in internal strength, to the point of being able to dispute, and of disputing in fact, the preponderance in that confederation with Austria, who had for many centuries enjoyed it. The French Revolution and Napoleon, by their ideas and their wars, put a stop, for the time, to this rivalry between the two great German powers, and, by turns, humiliated Prussia and Austria, the former even more than the latter. Reduced, both of them, to the last extremity, they then rallied together in the general rising of the German

populations to shake off the yoke of Napoleon, and in the great struggle which brought about his fall. The German Confederation rallied also at that time with many mutilations and a new organization, and again appeared the rivalry between Prussia and Austria, abated, however, and restrained by the prolonged effect of their late alliance, by the personal sentiments of their rulers, by their common fear of revolutions, and by the German distrust of all foreign influence, especially of that of France. Thirtyfour years of European peace had exhausted in the German Confederation these causes of harmony, real or apparent, and had sowed the germs of new ambitions, more popular than royal. The revolution of 1848 developed these germs, and rekindled the rivalry of the two Powers. An apparently unimportant question, and one which the slightest European wisdom might have stifled or might have settled, — the question, namely, of constitutional rights in dispute between Denmark and Holstein, precipitated events. Allies for a moment, in order to perform together a joint act of superior power against the little nation of Denmark, Austria and Prussia soon entered upon a violent quarrel. At one blow the battle of Sadowa put an end to the struggle, and opened a question infinitely more important than that which had given cause for the movement.

"It would be equally puerile to see in this great fact all that the victors at Sadowa or that systematic dreamers pretend to discern therein, or, on the other hand, to underestimate its importance. The words and the ideas, German nationality,' and 'German unity,' played a vociferous part in this great event of 1866, but they did not constitute its real and serious character. It was a radical change accomplished by a German Power for its own profit, in the political condition of Germany and of Europe. There is no longer a German Confederation; there is no longer a struggle and balance of power between the great German States, and independence with

secured means of resistance for the secondary German States. The fact of Sadowa is a fact of aggrandizement and conquest, achieved by the military strength of Prussia, and by her influence upon the intellectual life of Germany. It is the work of Frederic II. taken up and carried forward by his people, rather than by his successors upon the throne. It is a warlike, ambitious, and sagacious nation, which has unquestionably taken rank among the foremost Powers of Europe.

"Without doubt there is cause here for the elder Powers to be most watchful and wary. This new German State creates for them all, and most of all for France, a new situation, full of obscure possibilities. This situation it would have been easy for them to prevent; easily, by means of influence and diplomacy, might they have resolved the question between Germany and Denmark, on the subject of Schleswig and Holstein. Thus they would have stifled a war which has settled that trifling question only in raising other and much more serious ones. But foresight and decision were alike lacking at this crisis, to the great Powers of Europe. Through her German sympathies, Austria was betrayed into the enormous fault of uniting with Prussia to crush Denmark. Through hesitation or through miscalculation in respect to the future, the French government not merely failed to take the initiative, which belonged to it in this affair, but refused the proposal of joint, and, if need should arise, decisive action, made by England. Russia, who seemed by geographical position, as well as by family ties, to be the natural protectress of Denmark, spoke only as a matter of form, willing at heart to witness divisions, uncertainties, and inertia among the Western Powers. Prussia alone acted judiciously and vigorously, pursuing a design clearly marked out and of admirable policy; she had put herself at the head of the Danish event; it was natural that she alone should profit by the German success and all that followed from it. Since