f the
Tories, who nevertheless recognised that Toryism itself was passing
away under the universal solvent, and had ceased to be a faith which
could be believed in as a guide to conduct.

He no more than any one could tell what it was now wisest or even
possible to do. He spoke like some ancient _seer_, whose eyes looked
beyond the present time and the present world, and saw politics and
progress and the wild whirlwind of change as the play of atoms dancing
to and fro in the sunbeams of eternity. Yet he wished well to our poor
earth, and to us who were still struggling upon it. He was sorry for the
courses on which he saw mankind to be travelling. Spite of all the
newspapers and the blowing of the trumpets, he well understood whither
all that was tending. He spoke with horror and even loathing of the
sinister leader who was drawing England into the fatal whirlpool. He
could still hope, for he knew the power of the race. He knew that the
English heart was unaffected, that we were suffering only from delirium
of the brain. The day would yet come, he thought, when we should
struggle back into sanity again with such wreck of our past greatness as
might still be left to us, torn and shattered, but clothed and in our
right mind, and cured for centuries of our illusions.

My forebodings of the nearness of the end were too well founded. A month
later I heard that Charles Warner was dead. To have seen and spoken with
such a man was worth a voyage round the globe.

On the prospects of Trinidad I have a few more words to add. The
tendency of the island is to become what Grenada has become already--a
community of negro freeholders, each living on his own homestead, and
raising or gathering off the ground what his own family will consume.
They will multiply, for there is ample room. Three-quarters of the soil
are still unoccupied. The 140,000 blacks will rapidly grow into a
half-million, and the half-million, as long as we are on the spot to
keep the peace, will speedily double itself again. The English
inhabitants will and must be crowded out. The geographical advantages of
the Gulf of Paria will secure a certain amount of trade. There will be
merchants and bankers in the town as floating passage birds, and there
will be mulatto lawyers and shopkeepers and newspaper writers. But the
blacks hate the mulattoes, and the mulatto breed will not maintain
itself, as with the independence of the blacks the intimacy between
blacks and wh