lous. Trinidad was a
battening ground for his friends; but she had in her bosom men who were
her friends, and the struggle began, constitutionally of course, which,
under the leadership of the Mayor of San Fernando, has continued up to
now, culminating at last in the Reform movement which Mr. Froude
decries, and which his pupil, Mr. S. H. Gatty, is, from what has
appeared in the Trinidad papers, doing his "level best" to render
abortive.

Sir Sanford Freeling, by the will and pleasure of Downing Street, was
the next successor, after Governor Irving, to the chief ruler-ship of
Trinidad. Incredible as it may sound, he was a yet more
disadvantageous bargain for the Colony's L4000 a year. A better man in
many respects than his predecessor, he was in many more a much worse
Governor. The personal affability of a man can be known only to those
who come into actual contact with him--the public measures of a ruler
over a community touches it, mediately or immediately, throughout all
its sections. The bad boldness of [69] Governor Irving achieved much
that the people, especially in the outlying districts, could see and
appreciate. For example, he erected Rest-houses all over the remoter
and more sparsely peopled quarters of the Colony, after the manner of
such provisions in Oriental lands. The population who came in contact
with these conveniences, and to whom access to them--for a
consideration--had never been denied, saw with their own eyes tangible
evidence of the Governor's activity, and inferred therefrom a
solicitude on his part for the public welfare. Had they, however, been
given a notion of the bill which had had to be paid for those frail,
though welcome hostelries, they would have stood aghast at the
imbecility, or, if not logically that, the something very much worse,
through which five times the actual worth of these buildings had been
extracted from the Treasury. Sir Sanford Freeling, on the other hand,
while being no screener of jobbery and peculation, had not the strength
of mind whereof jobbers and peculators do stand in dread. In evidence
of that poor ruler's infirmity of purpose, we would only cite the
double fact that, whereas in 1883 he was the first to enter a practical
protest against the housing [70] of the diseased and destitute in the
then newly finished, but most leaky, House of Refuge on the St. Clair
Lands, by having the poor saturated inmates carried off in his presence
to the Colonial Hosp