Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/282

 A few more extracts from my diary will carry me through this period.

"Called on Robert Lowe by appointment to-day, received me with great cordiality, and with a more beaming face than I ever noticed on him before. He spoke with perfect frankness and unreserve of his own position; it was not probable that he should come into the present Government, which was not likely to last. Lord John was a selfish little fellow who had no friends, and his colleagues, except Gladstone, were not very competent. Of Lord —— of whom I inquired sympathetically, Lowe said he was getting on in office, as well as a tenth-rate man could expect. I told him we were dissatisfied with Cardwell in the colonies. He said Cardwell meant well; he had known him for forty years, since their college days. Cardwell had a quick, even mind, lively but not of great compass.

"Lowe then spoke with indignation of the attempt to revive transportation to the colonies. If he had been on the select committee he would have prevented it, and he believed Childers had tried to do so. I said Childers' personal success was gratifying to the colonies. Yes, he said, he had been reasonably successful—a result which owed something to the fact that he was a near kinsman of Sir Charles Wood. He asked me about Michie, and spoke frankly of his correspondence. I said, Michie was faithful to Australia in the Times, but we felt that he (Lowe) had not been kind to his old country; articles which we attributed to him disparaged everything Australian. He said his hopes of a future for Australia were greatly mitigated. When men educated in Europe ceased to go there, and that the governing men had to be taken from colonial classes, it would fall very low. You tell me what great things you are doing now, he said, smiling, but wait till the larrikin comes on the stage. When one reflected, he went on, on the degradation to which the border ruffians of Kansas and other Western States have fallen, it was hard to maintain a hope in popular progress and popular government. The future was a great perplexity; it reproved the pride of race to remember that an especially good African was immensely better than an exceptionally degraded white man. God may have reserved some future for the descendants