remain. The good people of Trinidad have long since agreed to let
bygones be bygones; and it speaks well for the common-sense and good
feeling of the islanders, as well as for the mildness and justice of
British rule, that in two generations such a community as that of
modern Trinidad should have formed itself out of materials so
discordant. That British rule has been a solid blessing to
Trinidad, all honest folk know well. Even in Picton's time, the
population increased, in six years, from 17,700 to 28,400; in 1851
it was 69,600; and it is now far larger.

But Trinidad has gained, by becoming English, more than mere
numbers. Had it continued Spanish, it would probably be, like Cuba,
a slave-holding and slave-trading island, now wealthy, luxurious,
profligate; and Port of Spain would be such another wen upon the
face of God's earth as that magnificent abomination, the city of
Havanna. Or, as an almost more ugly alternative, it might have
played its part in that great triumph of Bliss by Act of Parliament,
which set mankind to rights for ever, when Mr. Canning did the
universe the honour of 'calling the new world into existence to
redress the balance of the old.' It might have been--probably would
have been--conquered by a band of 'sympathisers' from the
neighbouring Republic of Venezuela, and have been 'called into
existence' by the massacre of the respectable folk, the expulsion of
capital, and the establishment (with a pronunciamento and a
revolution every few years) of a Republic such as those of Spanish
America, combining every vice of civilisation with every vice of
savagery. From that fate, as every honest man in Trinidad knows
well, England has saved the island; and therefore every honest man
in Trinidad is loyal (with occasional grumblings, of course, as is
the right of free-born Britons, at home and abroad) to the British