exactly where the brief
chapter "Trinidad" ends and where the longer one entitled "Reform in
Trinidad" begins. (The copy indicates that the "Trinidad" chapter ends
at page 54, but the relevant page contains no subheading.) I have,
therefore, chosen to fuse the two chapters since they form a logical
unit.

77. +Since there is little Greek in this work, I have simply
transliterated it.

BOOK II: NEGRO FELICITY IN THE WEST INDIES

[81] We come now to the ingenious and novel fashion in which Mr. Froude
carries out his investigations among the black population, and to his
dogmatic conclusions concerning them. He says:--

"In Trinidad, as everywhere else, my own chief desire was to see the
human inhabitants, to learn what they were doing, how they were living,
and what they were thinking about, and this could best be done by
drives about the town and neighbourhood."

"Drives about the town and neighbourhood," indeed! To learn and be
able to depict with faithful accuracy what people "were doing, how they
were living, and what they were thinking about"--all this being best
done (domestic circumstances, nay, soul-workings and all!) through
fleeting glimpses of shifting [82] panoramas of intelligent human
beings! What a bright notion! We have here the suggestion of a
capacity too superhuman to be accepted on trust, especially when, as in
this case, it is by implication self-arrogated. The modesty of this
thaumaturgic traveller in confining the execution of his detailed
scrutiny of a whole community to the moderate progression of some
conventional vehicle, drawn by some conventional quadruped or the
other, does injustice to powers which, if possessed at all, might have
compassed the same achievement in the swifter transit of an express
train, or, better still perhaps, from the empyrean elevation of a
balloon! Yet is Mr. Froude confident that data professed to be thus
collected would easily pass muster with the readers of his book! A
confidence of this kind is abnormal, and illustrates, we think most
fully, all the special characteristics of the man. With his passion
for repeating, our author tells us in continuation of a strange
rhapsody on Negro felicity:--

"Once more, the earth does not contain any peasantry so well off, so
well-cared for, so happy, so sleek and contented, as the sons [83] and
daughters of the emancipated slaves in the English West Indian Islands."

Again:--

"Under the rule of England,