The Southern Press

From the Cincinnati Enquirer.

JAMAICA.—The chief of police in the city of Kingston, on the island of Jamaica, is a colored man.—We met him on the steamer Philadelphia last summer, while she was coaling at that port, and found him quite intelligent. He formerly belonged to Mr Stevenson, of Virginia, ran away to Canada, and thence made his way on a sail vessel to Jamaica, where he became popular with the authorities, and was promoted to his post of honor. He was dissatisfied with the island, and said he would prefer living with his master in Virginia, if he could be reinstated in his home and confidence. His testimony corroborated by thousands of walking witnesses, who flock around passengers on shore, for charity, was that he had never seen a colored community in slave States so debased, so indolent, so vicious and so impoverished as are the free negroes of Jamaica.

We could not doubt this man's testimony. A walk about the once flourishing and beautiful city, and a ride through the country, every moment introduced corroborating facts, in the persons of a ragged rabble of men, women and children, some crowding the docks, or flocking after you in the streets, or lounging upon the sidewalks and lanes, the most miserable beings in appearance that we had ever seen and in truth had ever conceived.

We did not wonder then that the tooth of time had marked and defaced everything that had once flourished in beauty and prosperity. It was not, in truth, the mark of time,—it was the decay of indolence,—the crumbling of walls abandoned to a people accustomed to servitude and naturally prone to slothfulness. And we do not wonder now that the legislative and crown authorities of that magnificent island are devising a scheme to introduce laborers upon it from among the more intelligent and energetic colored population of the United States.

Relieved of slave servitude by the emancipation act of Parliament, the colored people of Jamaica, on whom the sugar planters relied for labor, have misconceived the idea of freedom, and seemingly, and in truth, shown themselves totally indifferent to all its duties, obligations and principles. They have, in a good measure, abandoned labor, and made their chief dependence upon the bounties of nature in her fruits. The result naturally followed,—an abandonment of the plantations to the blight of the thistle and the weed, and a most consuming depreciation in value. Plantations, which yielded princely revenue but a few years ago, we point out, the buildings, which bore the view of elegance and taste, crumbling tottering, fences demolished, shrubbery destroyed, and the soil—given up to the growth of the cactus and the grazing of the goats. Universal Freedom is there, it is true, over here and around; and so are universal misery among the population, and a universal blight upon all that once made up an island paradise.

There is a high moral in all this, but statesmen and political economists in this country will differ in tracing its cause, as well as in making its application.