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of the knitted fabric of the Empire has once begun the pro cess will be a rapid one. ‘ But what would you do ?’ I am asked impatiently. ‘ We send out peers or gentlemen against whose character no direct objection can be raised; we assist them with local councils partly chosen by the people themselves. We send out bishops, we send out missionaries, we open schools. What can we do more ? We cannot alter the climate, we cannot make planters prosper when sugar will not pay, we cannot convert black men into whites, we cannot force the blacks to work for the whites when they do not wish to work for them. “ Governing," as you call it, will not change the natural conditions of things. You can suggest no remedy, and mere fault-finding is foolish and mischievous.’ I might answer a good many things. Government can not do everything, but it can do something, and there is a difference between governors against whom there is no thing to object, and men of special and marked capacity. There is a difference between governors whose hands are tied by local councils and whose feet are tied by instruc tions from home, and a governor with a free hand and a wise head left to take his own measures on the spot. I presume that no one can seriously expect that an orderly organised nation can be made out of the blacks, when, in spite of your schools and missionaries, seventy per cent. of the children now born among them are illegitimate. You can do for the West Indies, I repeat over and over again, what you do for the E a s t ; you can establish a firm authoritative government which will protect the blacks in their civil rights and protect the whites in theirs. You can not alter the climate, it is true, or make the soil more fertile. Already it is fertile as any in the earth, and the climate is admirable for the purposes for which it is needed. But you can restore confidence in the stability of your tenure, you can give courage to the whites who are on the spot to