s more to do than he can
attend to, and is pleased with opportunities of gratifying popular
sentiment, or of showing off in Parliament the development of colonial
institutions. He knows nothing, can know nothing, of the special
conditions of our hundred dependencies. He accepts what his
representatives in the several colonies choose to tell him; and his
representatives, being birds of passage responsible only to their
employers at home, and depending for their promotion on making
themselves agreeable, are under irresistible temptations to report what
it will please the Secretary of State to hear.

For the Secretary of State, too, is a bird of passage as they are,
passing through the Colonial Office on his way to other departments, or
holding the seals as part of an administration whose tenure of office
grows every year more precarious, which exists only upon popular
sentiment, and cannot, and does not try to look forward beyond at
furthest the next session of Parliament.

But why, it may be asked, should not Trinidad govern itself as well as
Tasmania or New Zealand? Why not Jamaica, why not all the West Indian
Islands? I will answer by another question. Do we wish these islands to
remain as part of the British Empire? Are they of any use to us, or have
we responsibilities connected with them of which we are not entitled to
divest ourselves? A government elected by the majority of the people
(and no one would think of setting up constitutions on any other basis)
reflects from the nature of things the character of the electors. All
these islands tend to become partitioned into black peasant
proprietaries. In Grenada the process is almost complete. In Trinidad it
is rapidly advancing. No one can stop it. No one ought to wish to stop
it. But the ownership of freeholds is one thing, and political power is
another. The blacks depend for the progress which they may be capable of
making on the presence of a white community among them; and although it
is undesirable or impossible for the blacks to be ruled by the minority
of the white residents, it is equally undesirable and equally impossible
that the whites should be ruled by them. The relative numbers of the two
races being what they are, responsible government in Trinidad means
government by a black parliament and a black ministry. The negro voters
might elect, to begin with, their half-caste attorneys or such whites
(the most disreputable of their colour) as would court th