New Deal for Dungheaps

Year and a half ago a Royal Commission headed by Anthropologist Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne, left England for the West Indies to find out what was wrong with that restless segment of Empire. In Jamaica the Commission got its first smell of economic and physical deterioration. That sunny island, whose white 2% of the population (largely descendants of "lazy and immoral" Irish girls, "Scotch rogues and vagabonds" sent there by Oliver Cromwell) rules its black 98% (descendants of West African slaves), was in such a state that the two female members of the Commission pressed handkerchiefs to their noses and one male member described it as "a dungheap of physical abomination." Among other things, for Lord Moyne & friends to discover were the facts that nearly 70% of Jamaica's 1,138,558 people reacted positively to tuberculosis tests, 75% were bastards.

From Jamaica the Commission sailed eastward along the crescent of islands that forms the Leeward and Windward groups, down through Barbados (whose 1,163 people to the square mile make up the densest agricultural population in the Western Hemisphere) to Tobago and Trinidad (which imports four-fifths of its food). Everywhere the investigators found squalor, economic decay, unrest. Ruled by professional colonial administrators, with a hierarchy of whites and an exploited mass of blacks, Chinese and East Indian coolies, the West Indies were the victims of unrepresentative government, of the low exchange value of such primary products as sugar, cocoa, bananas.

By the time the Commission submitted its report late last year, Great Britain was at war. In peacetime the Government might have made the smug point that, bad as things are in the British-ruled islands, they are a whole lot better than conditions in self-ruled Haiti and the Dominican Republic. But with a war on, it was better policy to do something to make things better. So last week up-&-doing little Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald uprose in the House of Commons to announce what the Government planned to do. Cagey Scot that he is, Mr. MacDonald did not go so far as to publish the Commission's report, said only that the Government accepted it "in principle."

What he did submit was a 20-year new deal for the West Indies. If the British Exchequer were as big as little Scot MacDonald's heart he would put every blackamoor in the islands on Easy Street. But all he could expect to get from a war-pressed Parliament was $4,000,000 a year, to be spent for West Indian education, slum clearance, land settlement, labor departments. On all British colonies, Mr. MacDonald proposed to spend $20,000,000 a year for ten years. In addition to their specific allotment, the West Indies may share in this appropriation too. But nothing was said about one plan that had been considered by the Commission: a federation of Caribbean possessions.

Secretary MacDonald was not expected to have any trouble getting his bill through the House of Commons. Journalist H. N. Brailsford asked in the London News why all this discrimination in favor of the Indies' natives. "Let us not underestimate their gain. It comes to nearly a halfpenny for each of them through every week of the year -- two fifths of a penny to be exact."

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