In the evening of the day of the political meeting we dined at Government House. There was a large representative party, English, French, Spaniards, Corsicans—ladies and gentlemen each speaking his or her own language. There were the mayors of the two chief towns of Trinidad—Port of Spain and San Fernando—both enthusiastic for a constitution. The latter was my neighbour at dinner, and insisted much on the fine qualities of the leading persons in the island and the splendid things to be expected when responsible government should be conceded. The training squadron had arrived from Barbadoes, and the commodore and two or three officers were present in their uniforms. There was interesting talk about Trinidad's troublesome neighbour, Guzman Blanco, the President of Venezuela. It seems that Sir Walter Raleigh's Eldorado has turned out to be a fact after all. On the higher waters of the Orinoco actual gold mines do exist, and the discovery has quickened into life a long unsettled dispute about boundaries between British Guiana and the republic. Don Guzman had been encroaching, so it was alleged, and in other ways had been offensive and impertinent. Ships were going—had been actually ordered to La Guyra, to pull his nose for him, and to tell him to behave himself. The time is past when we flew our hawks at game birds. The opinion of most of the party was that Don Guzman knew it, and that his nose would not be pulled. He would regard our frigates as picturesque ornaments to his harbour, give the officers in command the politest reception, evade their demands, offer good words in plenty, and nothing else but words, and in the end would have the benefit of our indifference.[8]
In the late evening we had music. Our host sang well, our hostess was an accomplished artist. They had duets together, Italian and English, and the lady then sang 'The Three Fishers,' Kingsley being looked on as the personal property of Trinidad and as one of themselves. She sang it very well, as well as any one could do who had no direct acquaintance with an English sea-coast people. Her voice was beautiful, and she showed genuine feeling. The silence when she ended was more complimentary than the loudest applause. It was broken by a stupid member of council, who said to me, 'Is it not strange that a poet with such a gift of words as Mr. Kingsley should have ended that song with so weak a line? "The sooner it's over the sooner to sleep" is nothing but prose.' He did not see that the fault which he thought he had discovered is no more than the intentional 'dying away' of the emotion created by the story in the common lot of poor humanity. We drove back across the savannah in a blaze of fireflies. It is not till midnight that they put their lights out and go to sleep with the rest of the world.
One duty remained to me before I left the island. The Warners are among the oldest of West Indian families, distinguished through many generations, not the least in their then living chief and representative, Charles Warner, who in the highest ministerial offices had steered Trinidad through the trying times which followed the abolition of slavery. I had myself in early life been brought into relations with other members of his family. He himself was a very old man on the edge of the grave; but hearing that I was in Port of Spain, he had expressed a wish to see me. I found him in his drawing room, shrunk in stature, pale, bent double by weight of years, and but feebly able to lift his head to speak. I thought, and I judged rightly, that he could have but a few weeks, perhaps but a few days, to live.
There is something peculiarly solemn in being brought to speak with a supremely eminent man, who is already struggling with the moment which is to launch him into a new existence. He raised himself in his chair. He gave me his withered hand. His eyes still gleamed with the light of an untouched intelligence. All else of him seemed dead. The soul, untouched by the decay of the frame which had been its earthly tenement, burnt bright as ever on the edge of its release.
When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain,
And they breathe truth who breathe their words in pain.
He roused himself to talk, and he talked sadly, for all things at home and everywhere were travelling on the road which he well knew could lead to no good end. No statesman had done better practical work than he, or work which had borne better fruit, could it be allowed to ripen. But for him Trinidad would have been a wilderness, savage as when Columbus found the Caribs there. He belonged to the race who make empires, as the orators lose them, who do things and do not talk about them, who build and do not cast down, who reverence ancient habits and institutions as the organic functions of corporate national character; a Tory of 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 whites diminishes and must diminish. The English peasant immigration which enthusiasts have believed in is a dream, a dream which passed through the ivory gate, a dream which will never turn to a waking reality; and unless under the Indian system, which our rulers will never try unless the democracy orders them to adopt it, the English interest will come to an end.
The English have proved in India that they can play a great and useful part as rulers over recognised inferiors. Even in the West Indies the planters were a real something. Like the English in Ireland, they produced a remarkable breed of men: the Codringtons, the Warners, and many illustrious names besides. They governed cheaply on their own resources, and the islands under their rule were so profitable that we fought for them as if our Empire was at stake. All that is gone. The days of ruling races are supposed to be numbered. Trade drifts away to the nearest market—to New York or New Orleans—and in a money point of view the value of such possessions as Trinidad will soon be less than nothing to us.