better chance than anywhere else of success, that chance was never embodied in act. Facts like these speak certainly well for the creole blacks, but if attentively considered, they speak even better in favour of their white masters. Our present business is, however, not with these last, but with the negro creoles, as they show themselves in the capital, where they muster five or six to one among the entire population. Cheerful contentment is, the prevailing expression of every dusky face, whether turned towards you in friendly morning greeting as the busy swarm presses on talking, laughing, jesting, along the highways to the market and quay; or in the afternoon gatherings on the parade-ground, under the avenues, and alongside of the river-banks. You watch, and soon cease to wonder that the official statistics of Paramaribo, while enumerating and classifying its twenty-two thousand inhabitants, make no distinctive headings of colour or race. I wish many another West-Indian town could with equal good reason permit themselves a like omission.
Glossy, however, as the surface may be, there is a wrong side of the stuff; and to this we must now turn our attention. Though a comfortable and, so far at least as the majority of its indwellers are concerned, a contented town, Paramaribo cannot, if compared, say with Georgetown or Bridgetown, Kingston, or even Port d'Espagne, take rank as exactly prosperous or progressive. True, the streets of the creole quarters of the city are constantly extending themselves; there new rows of small neat dwellings, each with gay garden and well-stocked provision-ground, spring up year by year, but in the commercial and what may in a general way be termed the European quarter of the town, large half-empty stores, tall neglected-looking houses, a prevailing want of fresh repair, here deficient paint, there broken woodwork, besides a certain general air of listlessness verging on discouragement, and an evident insufficiency of occupation not from want of will but of means, all combine to give an appearance of stagnation suggestive of "better days" for the European colonists at least, in the past, and contrasting almost painfully with the more thriving back streets and suburbs beyond. If any of my readers have visited Italy in the sad bygone years when Italy was a geographical name only, and there compared, as they may well have done, the trim "Borghi" of grand-ducal Florence with her stately but dilapidated Lungarno; or have at Genoa seen the contrast of those times between the palatial loneliness of Strada Babbi and the pretty grove-embosomed villas of recent commercial date, they might, under all local differences of circumstance and colouring, recognize something not dissimilar in both the meaning implied and effect produced in this transatlantic capital of Dutch Guiana. The actual and immediate cause of decadence is a very common one, by no means peculiar to Paramaribo or Surinam: want of capital. Were, however, that want is in a certain sense doubled by the circumstance that not only are the means of the colony itself insufficient to its needs, but that there is no satisfactory prospect of an adequate supply from without. It is, I might almost say, the condition of a man indigent at home, and friendless out of doors. The home poverty is readily accounted for. It began with invasions, resistances, foreign occupations, treaty-embarrassments, and the other war-begotten ills of the troublous years that closed the last and opened the present century. Followed next the evil days already alluded to, evil for Transatlantic colonies everywhere; and, in. consequence of the hostilities of 1833 between France and Holland, doubly evil for Surinam. Then came emancipation, long and unwisely deferred till financial exhaustion had reached its lowest depths; and with all these the appalling conflagration of 1821, followed by one scarce less destructive in 1832; commercial difficulties of every kind; the fatal yellow-fever epidemic of 1851; in a word, a whole Pandora's box of adversities opened for Dutch Guiana in a scarce less disastrous profusion than for Jamaica herself. And thus, to revert to the more special topic of this chapter, Paramaribo was brought low indeed, almost to the very gates of death; and her condition, as we this day see her, is that of a patient recovering from a long and dangerous illness, and weak, not indeed with the weakness of actual disease, but the weakness of convalescence.
Nor is that convalescence likely to be a rapid one. With Jamaica, we know, it has been otherwise; but then Jamaica is the child of a parent alike vigorous and wealthy, able to chastise, able also to assist. Not so with Dutch Guiana. In more than one respect the good-will of Holland exceeds her power; and her comparatively recent severance from Belgium, a political gain, was yet a financial loss. Besides, Java is a more popular name by far in the home
