comfort, and even signs of taste—armchairs, sofas, side-boards with cut-glass upon them, engravings and coloured prints upon the walls." As a result of this nocturnal examination, à vol d'oiseau, he has written paragraph upon paragraph about the people's character [49] and prospects in the island of Grenada. To read the patronizing terms in which our historian-traveller has seen fit to comment on Grenada and its people, one would believe that his account is of some half-civilized, out-of-the-way region under British sway, and inhabited chiefly by a horde of semi-barbarian ignoramuses of African descent. If the world had not by this time thoroughly assessed the intrinsic value of Mr. Froude's utterances, one who knows Grenada might have felt inclined to resent his causeless depreciation of the intellectual capacity of its inhabitants; but considering the estimate which has been pretty generally formed of his historical judgment, Mr. Froude may be dismissed, as regards Grenada and its people, with a certain degree of scepticism. Such scepticism, though lost upon himself, is unquestionably needful to protect his readers from the hallucination which the author's singular contempt for accuracy is but too liable to induce.

Those who know Grenada and its affairs are perfectly familiar with the fact that all of its chief intellectual business, whether official (even in the highest degree, such as temporary [50] administration of the government), legal, commercial, municipal, educational, or journalistic, has been for years upon years carried on by men of colour. And what, as a consequence of this fact, has the world ever heard in disparagement of Grenada throughout this long series of years? Assuredly not a syllable. On the contrary, she has been the theme of praise, not only for the admirable foresight with which she avoided the sugar crisis, so disastrous to her sister islands, but also for the pluck and persistence shown in sustaining herself through an agricultural emergency brought about by commercial reverses, whereby the steady march of her sons in self-advancement was only checked for a time, but never definitively arrested. In fine, as regards every branch of civilized employment pursued there, the good people of Grenada hold their own so well and worthily that any show of patronage, even from a source more entitled to confidence, would simply be a piece of obtrusive kindness, not acceptable to any, seeing that it is required by none.

BOOK II: TRINIDAD / TRINIDAD AND REFORM+

[53] Mr. Froude, crossing the ninety miles of the Caribbean Sea lying between Grenada and Trinidad, lands next morning in Port of Spain, the chief city of that "splendid colony," as Governor Irving, its worst ruler, truly calls it in his farewell message to the Legislature. Regarding Port of Spain in particular, Mr. Froude is positively exuberant in the display of the peculiar qualities that distinguish him, and which we have already admitted. Ecstatic praise and groundless detraction go hand in hand, bewildering to any one not possessed of the key to the mystery of the art of blowing hot and cold, which Mr. Froude so startlingly exemplifies. As it is our purpose to make what he says concerning this Colony the crucial test of his veracity as a writer of travels, [54] and also of the value of his judgments respecting men and things, we shall first invite the reader's attention to the following extracts, with our discussion thereof:—

"On landing we found ourselves in a large foreign-looking town, Port of Spain having been built by French and Spaniards according to their national tendencies, and especially with a view to the temperature, which is that of a forcing house, and rarely falls below 80°. The streets are broad, and are planted with trees for shade, each house where room permits having a garden of its own, with palms and mangoes and coffee-plants and creepers. Of sanitary arrangements there seemed to be none. There is abundance of rain, and the gutters which run down by the footway are flushed almost every day. But they are all open. Dirt of every kind lies about freely, to be washed into them or left to putrify as fate shall direct" (p. 64).

Lower down, on the same page, our author, luxuriating in his contempt for exactitude when the character of other folk only is at stake, continues:—"The town has between thirty and forty thousand people living in it, and the [55] rain and Johnny crows between them keep off pestilence." On page 65 we have the following astounding statement with respect to one of the trees in the garden in front of the house in which Mr. Froude was sojourning:—"At the gate stood as sentinel a cabbage palm a hundred feet high."

The above quotations, in which we have elected to be content with indicating by typographical differences the points on which attention should be mostly directed, will suffice, with any one knowing Trinidad, as examples of Mr. Froude's trustworthiness. But as these are only on matters of mere detail, involving no question of principle, they are dismissed without any further comment. It must not be so, however, with the following remarkable deliverances which occur on page 67 of his too picturesque work:—"The commonplace intrudes upon the imaginative. At moments one can fancy that the world is an enchanted place after all, but then comes generally an absurd awakening. On the first night of my arrival, before we went to bed, there came an invitation to me to attend a political meeting which was to be held in a few days on the Savannah.

[56] "Trinidad is a purely Crown colony, and has escaped hitherto the introduction of the election virus. The newspapers and certain busy gentlemen in Port of Spain had discovered that they were living under a 'degrading tyranny,' and they demanded a constitution. They did not complain that their affairs had been ill-managed. On the contrary, they insisted that they were the most prosperous of the West Indian colonies, and alone had a surplus in their treasury. If this was so, it seemed to me that they had better let well alone. The population, all told, was but 170,000, less by thirty thousand than that of Barbados. They were a mixed and motley assemblage of all races and colours, busy each with their own affairs, and never hitherto troubling themselves about politics. But it had pleased the Home Government to set up the beginning of a constitution again in Jamaica; no one knew why, but so it was; and Trinidad did not choose to be behindhand. The official appointments were valuable, and had been hitherto given away by the Crown. The local popularities very naturally wished to have them for themselves. This was the [57] reality in the thing, so far as there was a reality. It was dressed up in the phrases borrowed from the great English masters of the art, about privileges of manhood, moral dignity, the elevating influence of the suffrage, &c., intended for home consumption among the believers in the orthodox radical faith."

The passages which we have signalized in the above quotation, and which occur with more elaboration and heedless assurance on a later page, will produce a feeling of wonder at the hardihood of him who not only conceived, but penned and dared to publish them as well, against the gentlemen whom we all know to be foremost in the political agitation at which Mr. Froude so flippantly sneers. An emphatic denial may be opposed to his pretence that "they did not complain that their affairs had been ill-managed." Why, the very gist and kernel of the whole agitation, set forth in print through long years of iteration, has been the scandalous mismanagement of the affairs of the Colony—especially under the baleful administration of Governor Irving. The Augëan Stable, miscalled by him "The Public Works Department," and whose officials he coolly [58] fastened upon the financial vitals of that long-suffering Colony, baffled even the resolute will of a Des Voeux to cleanse it. Poor Sir Sanford Freeling attempted the cleansing, but