Ch. XXI.] CONCLUSION. 389 



old friend Captain Birdsall. As I have already de- 

 scribed the scenery of the San Juan in the account of my 

 journey up, I shall not repeat the story, but simply state 

 that we reached Greytown on the llth September, and 

 on the IGth embarked on the West Indian Mail 

 Packet. I arrived in England within a month, to find 

 my native town (Newcastle) wealthier and dirtier than 

 ever, with thousands of furnaces belching out smoke and 

 poisonous gases : to find the people of England fretting 

 about the probable exhaustion of her coal-fields in a few 

 hundred years, actually dreading the time when she will 

 no longer be the smithy of the world, but the centre of 

 the science, philosophy, literature, and art of the Anglo- 

 Saxon race that race whose sons all over the globe will 

 then look up to her with loving reverence as the mother 

 of nations, the colonizer of the world, the pioneer of 

 freedom, progress, and morality. 



