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."