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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Froudacity, by J. J. Thomas
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+Title: Froudacity: West Indian Fables by J. A. Froude
+       Explained by J. J. Thomas
+
+Author: J. J. Thomas
+
+Release Date: May, 2003  [Etext #4068]
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+***The Project Gutenberg Etext of Froudacity, by J. J. Thomas***
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+
+FROUDACITY (1889)
+J.J. Thomas
+
+WEST INDIAN FABLES BY JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
+EXPLAINED BY J. J. THOMAS
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+Preface by J.J. Thomas
+
+BOOK I.
+
+Introduction: 27-33
+Voyage out: 34-41
+Barbados: 41-44
+St. Vincent: 44-48
+Grenada: 48-50
+
+BOOK II.
+
+Trinidad: 53-55
+Reform in Trinidad: 55-80
+Negro Felicity in the West Indies: 81-110
+
+BOOK III.
+
+Social Revolution: 113-174
+West Indian Confederation: 175-200
+The Negro as a Worker: 201-206
+Religion for Negroes: 207-230
+
+BOOK IV.
+
+Historical Summary or Resume: 233-261, end
+
+
+
+FROUDACITY
+
+PREFACE
+
+[5] Last year had well advanced towards its middle--in fact it was
+already April, 1888--before Mr. Froude's book of travels in the West
+Indies became known and generally accessible to readers in those
+Colonies.
+
+My perusal of it in Grenada about the period above mentioned
+disclosed, thinly draped with rhetorical flowers, the dark outlines
+of a scheme to thwart political aspiration in the Antilles.  That
+project is sought to be realized by deterring the home authorities
+from granting an elective local legislature, however restricted in
+character, to any of the Colonies not yet enjoying such an advantage.
+An argument based on the composition of the inhabitants of those
+Colonies is confidently relied upon to confirm the inexorable mood of
+Downing Street.
+
+[6] Over-large and ever-increasing,--so runs the argument,--the
+African element in the population of the West Indies is, from its
+past history and its actual tendencies, a standing menace to the
+continuance of civilization and religion.  An immediate catastrophe,
+social, political, and moral, would most assuredly be brought about
+by the granting of full elective rights to dependencies thus
+inhabited.  Enlightened statesmanship should at once perceive the
+immense benefit that would ultimately result from such refusal of the
+franchise.  The cardinal recommendation of that refusal is that it
+would avert definitively the political domination of the Blacks,
+which must inevitably be the outcome of any concession of the modicum
+of right so earnestly desired.  The exclusion of the Negro vote being
+inexpedient, if not impossible, the exercise of electoral powers by
+the Blacks must lead to their returning candidates of their own race
+to the local legislatures, and that, too, in numbers preponderating
+according to the majority of the Negro electors.  The Negro
+legislators thus supreme in the councils of the Colonies would
+straightway proceed to pass vindictive and retaliatory laws against
+their white fellow- [7] colonists.  For it is only fifty years since
+the White man and the Black man stood in the reciprocal relations of
+master and slave.  Whilst those relations subsisted, the white
+masters inflicted, and the black slaves had to endure, the hideous
+atrocities that are inseparable from the system of slavery.  Since
+Emancipation, the enormous strides made in self-advancement by the
+ex-slaves have only had the effect of provoking a resentful
+uneasiness in the bosoms of the ex-masters.  The former bondsmen, on
+their side, and like their brethren of Hayti, are eaten up with
+implacable, blood-thirsty rancour against their former lords and
+owners.  The annals of Hayti form quite a cabinet of political and
+social object lessons which, in the eyes of British statesmen, should
+be invaluable in showing the true method of dealing with Ethiopic
+subjects of the Crown.  The Negro race in Hayti, in order to obtain
+and to guard what it calls its freedom, has outraged every humane
+instinct and falsified every benevolent hope.  The slave-owners there
+had not been a whit more cruel than slave-owners in the other
+islands.  But, in spite of this, how ferocious, how sanguinary, [8]
+how relentless against them has the vengeance of the Blacks been in
+their hour of mastery!  A century has passed away since then, and,
+notwithstanding that, the hatred of Whites still rankles in their
+souls, and is cherished and yielded to as a national creed and guide
+of conduct.  Colonial administrators of the mighty British Empire,
+the lesson which History has taught and yet continues to teach you in
+Hayti as to the best mode of dealing with your Ethiopic colonists
+lies patent, blood-stained and terrible before you, and should be
+taken definitively to heart.  But if you are willing that
+Civilization and Religion--in short, all the highest developments of
+individual and social life--should at once be swept away by a
+desolating vandalism of African birth; if you do not recoil from the
+blood-guiltiness that would stain your consciences through the
+massacre of our fellow-countrymen in the West Indies, on account of
+their race, complexion and enlightenment; finally, if you desire
+those modern Hesperides to revert into primeval jungle, horrent lairs
+wherein the Blacks, who, but a short while before, had been
+ostensibly civilized, shall be revellers, as high-priests and [9]
+devotees, in orgies of devil-worship, cannibalism, and obeah--dare to
+give the franchise to those West Indian Colonies, and then rue the
+consequences of your infatuation! . . .
+
+Alas, if the foregoing summary of the ghastly imaginings of Mr.
+Froude were true, in what a fool's paradise had the wisest and best
+amongst us been living, moving, and having our being!  Up to the date
+of the suggestion by him as above of the alleged facts and
+possibilities of West Indian life, we had believed (even granting the
+correctness of his gloomy account of the past and present positions
+of the two races) that to no well-thinking West Indian White, whose
+ancestors may have, innocently or culpably, participated in the gains
+as well as the guilt of slavery, would the remembrance of its palmy
+days be otherwise than one of regret.  We Negroes, on the other hand,
+after a lapse of time extending over nearly two generations, could be
+indebted only to precarious tradition or scarcely accessible
+documents for any knowledge we might chance upon of the sufferings
+endured in these Islands of the West by those of our race who have
+gone before us.  Death, with undiscriminating hand, had gathered [10]
+in the human harvest of masters and slaves alike, according to or out
+of the normal laws of nature; while Time had been letting down on the
+stage of our existence drop-scene after drop-scene of years, to the
+number of something like fifty, which had been curtaining off the
+tragic incidents of the past from the peaceful activities of the
+present.  Being thus circumstanced, thought we, what rational
+elements of mutual hatred should now continue to exist in the bosoms
+of the two races?
+
+With regard to the perpetual reference to Hayti, because of our
+oneness with its inhabitants in origin and complexion, as a criterion
+for the exact forecast of our future conduct under given
+circumstances, this appeared to us, looking at actual facts,
+perversity gone wild in the manufacture of analogies.  The founders
+of the Black Republic, we had all along understood, were not in any
+sense whatever equipped, as Mr. Froude assures us they were, when
+starting on their self-governing career, with the civil and
+intellectual advantages that had been transplanted from Europe.  On
+the contrary, we had been taught to regard them as most unfortunate
+in the circumstances under which [11] they so gloriously conquered
+their merited freedom.  We saw them free, but perfectly illiterate
+barbarians, impotent to use the intellectual resources of which their
+valour had made them possessors, in the shape of books on the spirit
+and technical details of a highly developed national existence.  We
+had learnt also, until this new interpreter of history had
+contradicted the accepted record, that the continued failure of Hayti
+to realize the dreams of Toussaint was due to the fatal want of
+confidence subsisting between the fairer and darker sections of the
+inhabitants, which had its sinister and disastrous origin in the
+action of the Mulattoes in attempting to secure freedom for
+themselves, in conjunction with the Whites, at the sacrifice of their
+darker-hued kinsmen.  Finally, it had been explained to us that the
+remembrance of this abnormal treason had been underlying and
+perniciously influencing the whole course of Haytian national
+history.  All this established knowledge we are called upon to throw
+overboard, and accept the baseless assertions of this conjuror-up of
+inconceivable fables!  He calls upon us to believe that, in spite of
+being free, educated, progressive, and at peace with [12] all men, we
+West Indian Blacks, were we ever to become constitutionally dominant
+in our native islands, would emulate in savagery our Haytian fellow-
+Blacks who, at the time of retaliating upon their actual masters,
+were tortured slaves, bleeding and rendered desperate under the
+oppressors' lash--and all this simply and merely because of the
+sameness of our ancestry and the colour of our skin!  One would have
+thought that Liberia would have been a fitter standard of comparison
+in respect of a coloured population starting a national life, really
+and truly equipped with the requisites and essentials of civilized
+existence.  But such a reference would have been fatal to Mr.
+Froude's object: the annals of Liberia being a persistent refutation
+of the old pro-slavery prophecies which our author so feelingly
+rehearses.
+
+Let us revert, however, to Grenada and the newly-published "Bow of
+Ulysses," which had come into my hands in April, 1888.
+
+It seemed to me, on reading that book, and deducing therefrom the
+foregoing essential summary, that a critic would have little more to
+do, in order to effectually exorcise this negrophobic political
+hobgoblin, than to appeal to [13] impartial history, as well as to
+common sense, in its application to human nature in general, and to
+the actual facts of West Indian life in particular.
+
+History, as against the hard and fast White-master and Black-slave
+theory so recklessly invented and confidently built upon by Mr.
+Froude, would show incontestably--(a) that for upwards of two hundred
+years before the Negro Emancipation, in 1838, there had never existed
+in one of those then British Colonies, which had been originally
+discovered and settled for Spain by the great Columbus or by his
+successors, the Conquistadores, any prohibition whatsoever, on the
+ground of race or colour, against the owning of slaves by any free
+person possessing the necessary means, and desirous of doing so; (b)
+that, as a consequence of this non-restriction, and from causes
+notoriously historical, numbers of blacks, half-breeds, and other
+non-Europeans, besides such of them as had become possessed of their
+"property" by inheritance, availed themselves of this virtual
+license, and in course of time constituted a very considerable
+proportion of the slave-holding section of those communities; (c)
+that these [14] dusky plantation-owners enjoyed and used in every
+possible sense the identical rights and privileges which were enjoyed
+and used by their pure-blooded Caucasian brother-slaveowners.  The
+above statements are attested by written documents, oral tradition,
+and, better still perhaps, by the living presence in those islands of
+numerous lineal representatives of those once opulent and flourishing
+non-European planter-families.
+
+Common sense, here stepping in, must, from the above data, deduce
+some such conclusions as the following.  First that, on the
+hypothesis that the slaves who were freed in 1838--full fifty years
+ago--were all on an average fifteen years old, those vengeful ex-
+slaves of to-day will be all men of sixty-five years of age; and,
+allowing for the delay in getting the franchise, somewhat further
+advanced towards the human life-term of threescore and ten years.
+Again, in order to organize and carry out any scheme of legislative
+and social retaliation of the kind set forth in the "Bow of Ulysses,"
+there must be (which unquestionably there is not) a considerable,
+well-educated, and very influential number surviving of those who had
+actually [15] been in bondage.  Moreover, the vengeance of these
+people (also assuming the foregoing nonexistent condition) would
+have, in case of opportunity, to wreak itself far more largely and
+vigorously upon members of their own race than upon Whites, seeing
+that the increase of the Blacks, as correctly represented in the "Bow
+of Ulysses," is just as rapid as the diminution of the White
+population.  And therefore, Mr. Froude's "Danger-to-the-Whites" cry
+in support of his anti-reform manifesto would not appear, after all,
+to be quite so justifiable as he possibly thinks.
+
+Feeling keenly that something in the shape of the foregoing programme
+might be successfully worked up for a public defence of the maligned
+people, I disregarded the bodily and mental obstacles that have beset
+and clouded my career during the last twelve years, and cheerfully
+undertook the task, stimulated thereto by what I thought weighty
+considerations.  I saw that no representative of Her Majesty's
+Ethiopic West Indian subjects cared to come forward to perform this
+work in the more permanent shape that I felt to be not only desirable
+but essential for our self-vindication.  [16] I also realized the
+fact that the "Bow of Ulysses" was not likely to have the same
+ephemeral existence and effect as the newspaper and other periodical
+discussions of its contents, which had poured from the press in Great
+Britain, the United States, and very notably, of course, in all the
+English Colonies of the Western Hemisphere.  In the West Indian
+papers the best writers of our race had written masterly refutations,
+but it was clear how difficult the task would be in future to procure
+and refer to them whenever occasion should require.  Such
+productions, however, fully satisfied those qualified men of our
+people, because they were legitimately convinced (even as I myself am
+convinced) that the political destinies of the people of colour could
+not run one tittle of risk from anything that it pleased Mr. Froude
+to write or say on the subject.  But, meditating further on the
+question, the reflection forced itself upon me that, beyond the mere
+political personages in the circle more directly addressed by Mr.
+Froude's volume, there were individuals whose influence or possible
+sympathy we could not afford to disregard, or to esteem lightly.  So
+I deemed it right and a patriotic duty to attempt [17] the enterprise
+myself, in obedience to the above stated motives.
+
+At this point I must pause to express on behalf of the entire
+coloured population of the West Indies our most heartfelt
+acknowledgments to Mr. C. Salmon for the luminous and effective
+vindication of us, in his volume on "West Indian Confederation,"
+against Mr. Froude's libels.  The service thus rendered by Mr. Salmon
+possesses a double significance and value in my estimation.  In the
+first place, as being the work of a European of high position, quite
+independent of us (who testifies concerning Negroes, not through
+having gazed at them from balconies, decks of steamers, or the seats
+of moving carriages, but from actual and long personal intercourse
+with them, which the internal evidence of his book plainly proves to
+have been as sympathetic as it was familiar), and, secondly, as the
+work of an individual entirely outside of our race, it has been
+gratefully accepted by myself as an incentive to self-help, on the
+same more formal and permanent lines, in a matter so important to the
+status which we can justly claim as a progressive, law-abiding, and
+self-respecting section of Her Majesty's liege subjects.
+
+[18] It behoves me now to say a few words respecting this book as a
+mere literary production.
+
+Alexander Pope, who, next to Shakespeare and perhaps Butler, was the
+most copious contributor to the current stock of English maxims,
+says:
+
+     "True ease in writing comes from Art, not Chance,
+     As those move easiest who have learnt to dance."
+
+A whole dozen years of bodily sickness and mental tribulation have
+not been conducive to that regularity of practice in composition
+which alone can ensure the "true ease" spoken of by the poet; and
+therefore is it that my style leaves so much to be desired, and
+exhibits, perhaps, still, more to be pardoned.  Happily, a quarrel
+such as ours with the author of "The English in the West Indies"
+cannot be finally or even approximately settled on the score of
+superior literary competency, whether of aggressor or defender.  I
+feel free to ignore whatever verdict might be grounded on a
+consideration so purely artificial.  There ought to be enough, if not
+in these pages, at any rate in whatever else I have heretofore
+published, that should prove me not so hopelessly stupid and wanting
+in [19] self-respect, as would be implied by my undertaking a contest
+in artistic phrase-weaving with one who, even among the foremost of
+his literary countrymen, is confessedly a master in that craft.  The
+judges to whom I do submit our case are those Englishmen and others
+whose conscience blends with their judgment, and who determine such
+questions as this on their essential rightness which has claim to the
+first and decisive consideration.  For much that is irregular in the
+arrangement and sequence of the subject-matter, some blame fairly
+attaches to our assailant.  The erratic manner in which lie launches
+his injurious statements against the hapless Blacks, even in the
+course of passages which no more led up to them than to any other
+section of mankind, is a very notable feature of his anti-Negro
+production.  As he frequently repeats, very often with cynical
+aggravations, his charges and sinister prophecies against the sable
+objects of his aversion, I could see no other course open to me than
+to take him up on the points whereto I demurred, exactly how, when,
+and where I found them.
+
+My purpose could not be attained up without direct mention of, or
+reference to, certain public [20] employes in the Colonies whose
+official conduct has often been the subject of criticism in the
+public press of the West Indies.  Though fully aware that such
+criticism has on many occasions been much more severe than my own
+strictures, yet, it being possible that some special responsibility
+may attach to what I here reproduce in a more permanent shape, I most
+cheerfully accept, in the interests of public justice, any
+consequence which may result.
+
+A remark or two concerning the publication of this rejoinder.  It has
+been hinted to me that the issue of it has been too long delayed to
+secure for it any attention in England, owing to the fact that the
+West Indies are but little known, and of less interest, to the
+generality of English readers.  Whilst admitting, as in duty bound,
+the possible correctness of this forecast, and regretting the oft-
+recurring hindrances which occasioned such frequent and, sometimes,
+long suspension of my labour; and noting, too, the additional delay
+caused through my unacquaintance with English publishing usages, I
+must, notwithstanding, plead guilty to a lurking hope that some small
+fraction of Mr. Froude's readers will yet be found, [21] whose
+interest in the West Indies will be temporarily revived on behalf of
+this essay, owing to its direct bearing on Mr. Froude and his
+statements relative to these Islands, contained in his recent book of
+travels in them.  This I am led to hope will be more particularly the
+case when it is borne in mind that the rejoinder has been attempted
+by a member of that very same race which he has, with such eloquent
+recklessness of all moral considerations, held up to public contempt
+and disfavour.  In short, I can scarcely permit myself to believe it
+possible that concern regarding a popular author, on his being
+questioned by an adverse critic of however restricted powers, can be
+so utterly dead within a twelvemonth as to be incapable of
+rekindling.  Mr. Froude's "Oceana," which had been published long
+before its author voyaged to the West Indies, in order to treat the
+Queen's subjects there in the same more than questionable fashion as
+that in which he had treated those of the Southern Hemisphere, had
+what was in the main a formal rejoinder to its misrepresentations
+published only three months ago in this city.  I venture to believe
+that no serious work in defence of an [22] important cause or
+community can lose much, if anything, of its intrinsic value through
+some delay in its issue; especially when written in the vindication
+of Truth, whose eternal principles are beyond and above the influence
+of time and its changes.
+
+At any rate, this attempt to answer some of Mr. Froude's main
+allegations against the people of the West Indies cannot fail to be
+of grave importance and lively interest to the inhabitants of those
+Colonies.  In this opinion I am happy in being able to record the
+full concurrence of a numerous and influential body of my fellow-West
+Indians, men of various races, but united in detestation of falsehood
+and injustice.
+
+J.J.T.
+
+LONDON, June, 1889.
+
+
+
+BOOK I: INTRODUCTION
+
+[27] Like the ancient hero, one of whose warlike equipments furnishes
+the complementary title of his book, the author of "The English in
+the West Indies; or, The Bow of Ulysses," sallied forth from his home
+to study, if not cities, at least men (especially black men), and
+their manners in the British Antilles.
+
+James Anthony Froude is, beyond any doubt whatever, a very
+considerable figure in modern English literature.  It has, however,
+for some time ceased to be a question whether his acceptability, to
+the extent which it reaches, has not been due rather to the verbal
+attractiveness than to the intrinsic value and trustworthiness of his
+opinions and teachings.  In fact, so far as a judgment can be formed
+from examined specimens of his writings, it appears that our [28]
+author is the bond-slave of his own phrases.  To secure an artistic
+perfection of style, he disregards all obstacles, not only those
+presented by the requirements of verity, but such as spring from any
+other kind of consideration whatsoever.  The doubt may safely be
+entertained whether, among modern British men of letters, there be
+one of equal capability who, in the interest of the happiness of his
+sentences, so cynically sacrifices what is due not only to himself as
+a public instructor, but also to that public whom he professes to
+instruct.  Yet, as the too evident plaything of an over-permeable
+moral constitution, he might set up some plea in explanation of his
+ethical vagaries.  He might urge, for instance, that the high culture
+of which his books are all so redolent has utterly failed to imbue
+him with the nil admirari sentiment, which Horace commends as the
+sole specific for making men happy and keeping them so.  For, as a
+matter of fact, and with special reference to the work we have
+undertaken to discuss, Mr.  Froude, though cynical in his general
+utterances regarding Negroes-of the male sex, be it noted-is, in the
+main, all extravagance and self-abandonment whenever he [29] brings
+an object of his arbitrary likes or dislikes under discussion.  At
+such times he is no observer, much less worshipper, of proportion in
+his delineations.  Thorough-paced, scarcely controllable, his
+enthusiasm for or against admits no degree in its expression, save
+and except the superlative.  Hence Mr.  Froude's statement of facts
+or description of phenomena, whenever his feelings are enlisted
+either way, must be taken with the proverbial "grain of salt" by all
+when enjoying the luxury of perusing his books.  So complete is his
+self-identification with the sect or individual for the time being
+engrossing his sympathy, that even their personal antipathies are
+made his own; and the hostile language, often exaggerated and unjust,
+in which those antipathies find vent, secures in his more chastened
+mode of utterance an exact reproduction none the less injurious
+because divested of grossness.
+
+Of this special phase of self-manifestation a typical instance is
+afforded at page 164, under the heading of "Dominica," in a passage
+which at once embraces and accentuates the whole spirit and method of
+the work.  To a eulogium of the professional skill and successful
+[30] agricultural enterprise of Dr.  Nichol, a medical officer of
+that Colony, with whom he became acquainted for the first time during
+his short stay there, our author travels out of his way to tack on a
+gratuitous and pointless sneer at the educational competency of all
+the elected members of the island legislature, among whom, he tells
+us, the worthy doctor had often tried in vain to obtain a place.  His
+want of success, our author informs his readers, was brought about
+through Dr.  Nichol "being the only man in the Colony of superior
+attainments."  Persons acquainted with the stormy politics of that
+lovely little island do not require to be informed that the bitterest
+animosity had for years been raging between Dr.  Nichol and some of
+the elected members-a fact which our author chose characteristically
+to regard as justifying an onslaught by himself on the whole of that
+section of which the foes of his new friend formed a prominent part.
+
+Swayed by the above specified motives, our author also manages to see
+much that is, and always has been, invisible to mortal eye, and to
+fail to hear what is audible to and remarked upon by every other
+observer.
+
+[31] Thus we find him (p. 56) describing the Grenada Carenage as
+being surrounded by forest trees, causing its waters to present a
+violet tint; whilst every one familiar with that locality knows that
+there are no forest trees within two miles of the object which they
+are so ingeniously made to colour.  Again, and aptly illustrating the
+influence of his prejudices on his sense of hearing, we will notice
+somewhat more in detail the following assertion respecting the speech
+of the gentry of Barbados:--
+
+"The language of the Anglo-Barbadians was pure English, the voices
+without the smallest transatlantic intonation."
+
+Now it so happens that no Barbadian born and bred, be he gentle or
+simple, can, on opening his lips, avoid the fate of Peter of Galilee
+when skulking from the peril of a detected nationality: "Thy speech
+bewrayeth thee!"  It would, however, be prudent on this point to take
+the evidence of other Englishmen, whose testimony is above suspicion,
+seeing that they were free from the moral disturbance that affected
+Mr.  Froude's auditory powers.  G.  J.  Chester, in his
+"Transatlantic Sketches" (page 95), deposes as follows-
+
+[32] "But worse, far worse than the colour, both of men and women, is
+their voice and accent.  Well may Coleridge enumerate among the pains
+of the West Indies, 'the yawny-drawny way in which men converse.'
+The soft, whining drawl is simply intolerable.  Resemble the worst
+Northern States woman's accent it may in some degree, but it has not
+a grain of its vigour.  A man tells you, 'if you can speer it, to
+send a beerer with a bottle of bare,' and the clergyman excruciates
+you by praying in church, 'Speer us, good Lord.'  The English
+pronunciation of A and E is in most words transposed.  Barbados has a
+considerable number of provincialisms of dialect.  Some of these, as
+the constant use of 'Mistress' for 'Mrs.,' are interesting as
+archaisms, or words in use in the early days of the Colony, and which
+have never died out of use.  Others are Yankeeisms or vulgarisms;
+others, again, such as the expression 'turning cuffums,' i.e.
+summersets, from cuffums, a species of fish, seem to be of local
+origin."
+
+In a note hereto appended, the author gives a list of English words
+of peculiar use and acceptation in Barbados.
+
+[33] To the same effect writes Anthony Trollope:
+
+"But if the black people differ from their brethren of the other
+islands, so certainly do the white people.  One soon learns to know--
+a Bim.  That is the name in which they themselves delight, and
+therefore, though there is a sound of slang about it, I give it here.
+One certainly soon learns to know a Bim.  The most peculiar
+distinction is in his voice.  There is always a nasal twang about it,
+but quite distinct from the nasality of a Yankee.  The Yankee's word
+rings sharp through his nose; not so that of the first-class Bim.
+There is a soft drawl about it, and the sound is seldom completely
+formed.  The effect on the ear is the same as that on the hand when a
+man gives you his to shake, and instead of shaking yours, holds his
+own still, &c., &c." ("The West Indies," p. 207).
+
+From the above and scores of other authoritative testimonies which
+might have been cited to the direct contrary of our traveller's tale
+under this head, we can plainly perceive that Mr. Froude's love is
+not only blind, but adder-deaf as well.  We shall now contemplate him
+under circumstances where his feelings are quite other than those of
+a partisan.
+
+
+
+BOOK I: VOYAGE OUT
+
+[34] That Mr. Froude, despite his professions to the contrary, did
+not go out on his explorations unhampered by prejudices, seems clear
+enough from the following quotation:--
+
+"There was a small black boy among us, evidently of pure blood, for
+his hair was wool and his colour black as ink.  His parents must have
+been well-to-do, for the boy had been to Europe to be educated.  The
+officers on board and some of the ladies played with him as they
+would play with a monkey.  He had little more sense than a monkey,
+perhaps less, and the gestures of him grinning behind gratings and
+perching out his long thin arms between the bars were curiously
+suggestive of the original from whom we are told now that all of us
+came.  The worst of it was that, being lifted above his own people,
+he had been taught to despise them.  He was spoilt as a black and
+could not be made into a white, and this I found afterwards was the
+invariable and dangerous consequence whenever a superior negro
+contrived to raise himself.  He might do well enough himself, but his
+family feel their blood as degradation.  His [35] children will not
+marry among their own people, and not only will no white girl marry a
+negro, but hardly any dowry can be large enough to tempt a West
+Indian white to make a wife of a black lady.  This is one of the most
+sinister features in the present state of social life there."
+
+We may safely assume that the playing of "the officers on board and
+some of the ladies" with the boy, "as they would play with a monkey,"
+is evidently a suggestion of Mr. Froude's own soul, as well as the
+resemblance to the simian tribe which he makes out from the frolics
+of the lad.  Verily, it requires an eye rendered more than
+microscopic by prejudice to discern the difference between the
+gambols of juveniles of any colour under similar conditions.  It is
+true that it might just be the difference between the friskings of
+white lambs and the friskings of lambs that are not white.  That any
+black pupil should be taught to despise his own people through being
+lifted above them by education, seems a reckless statement, and far
+from patriotic withal; inasmuch as the education referred to here was
+European, and the place from which it was obtained presumably
+England.  At all events, [36] the difference among educated black men
+in deportment towards their unenlightened fellow-blacks, can be
+proved to have nothing of that cynicism which often marks the bearing
+of Englishmen in an analogous case with regard to their less favoured
+countrymen.  The statement that a black person can be "spoilt" for
+such by education, whilst he cannot be made white, is one of the
+silly conceits which the worship of the skin engenders in ill-
+conditioned minds.  No sympathy should be wasted on the negro
+sufferer from mortification at not being able to "change his skin."
+The Ethiopian of whatever shade of colour who is not satisfied with
+being such was never intended to be more than a mere living figure.
+Mr. Froude further confidently states that whilst a superior Negro
+"might do well himself," yet "his family feel their blood as a
+degradation."  If there be some who so feel, they are indeed very
+much to be pitied; but their sentiments are not entitled to the
+serious importance with which our critic has invested them.  But is
+it at all conceivable that a people whose sanity has never in any way
+been questioned would strain every nerve to secure for their
+offspring a [37] distinction the consequence of which to themselves
+would be a feeling of their own abasement? The poor Irish peasant who
+toils and starves to secure for his eldest son admission into the
+Catholic priesthood, has a far other feeling than one of humiliation
+when contemplating that son eventually as the spiritual director of a
+congregation and parish.  Similarly, the laudable ambition which, in
+the case of a humble Scotch matron, is expressed in the wish and
+exertion to see her Jamie or Geordie "wag his pow in the pou'pit,"
+produces, when realized, salutary effects in the whole family
+connection.  These effects, which Mr. Froude would doubtless allow
+and commend in their case, he finds it creditable to ignore the very
+possibility of in the experience of people whose cuticle is not
+white.  It is, however, but bare justice to say that, as Negroes are
+by no means deficient in self-love and the tenderness of natural
+affection, such gratifying fulfilment of a family's hopes exerts an
+elevating and, in many cases, an ennobling influence on every one
+connected with the fortunate household.  Nor, from the eminently
+sympathetic nature of the African race, are the near friends of a
+family [38] unbenefited in a similar way.  This is true, and
+distinctively human; but, naturally, no apologist of Negro
+depreciation would admit the reasonableness of applying to the
+affairs of Negroes the principles of common equity, or even of common
+sense.  To sum up practically our argument on this head, we shall
+suppose West Indians to be called upon to imagine that the less
+distinguished relations respectively of, say, the late Solicitor-
+General of Trinidad and the present Chief Justice of Barbados could
+be otherwise than legitimately elated at the conspicuous position won
+by a member of their own household.
+
+Mr. Froude further ventures to declare, in this connection, that the
+children of educated coloured folk "will not marry among their own
+people."  Will he tell us, then, whom the daughters marry, or if they
+ever do marry at all, since he asserts, with regard to West Indian
+Whites, that "hardly any dowry can be large enough to tempt them to
+make a wife of a black lady"?  Our author evidently does not feel or
+care that the suggestion he here induces is a hideous slander against
+a large body of respectable people of whose affairs he is absolutely
+ignorant.  Full [39] of the "go" imparted to his talk by a
+consciousness of absolute license with regard to Negroes, our
+dignified narrator makes the parenthetical assertion that no white
+girl (in the West Indies) will "marry a Negro."  But has he been
+informed that cases upon cases have occurred in those Colonies, and
+in very high "Anglo-West Indian" families too, where the social
+degradation of being married to Negroes has been avoided by the
+alternative of forming base private connections even with menials of
+that race?
+
+The marrying of a black wife, on the other hand, by a West Indian
+White was an event of frequent occurrence at a period in regard to
+which our historian seems to be culpably uninformed.  In slavery
+days, when all planters, black and white alike, were fused in a
+common solidarity of interests, the skin-distinction which Mr. Froude
+so strenuously advocates, and would fain risk so much to promote, did
+not, so far as matrimony was concerned, exist in the degree that it
+now does.  Self-interest often dictated such unions, especially on
+the part of in-coming Whites desiring to strengthen their position
+and to increase their influence in [40] the land of their adoption by
+means of advantageous Creole marriages.  Love, too, sheer
+uncalculating love, impelled not a few Whites to enter the hymeneal
+state with the dusky captivators of their affections.  When rich, the
+white planter not seldom paid for such gratification of his laudable
+impulse by accepting exclusion from "Society"--and when poor, he
+incurred almost invariably his dismissal from employment.  Of course,
+in all cases of the sort the dispensers of such penalties were
+actuated by high motives which, nevertheless, did not stand in the
+way of their meeting, in the households of the persons thus obnoxious
+to punishment, the same or even a lower class of Ethiopic damsels,
+under the title of "housekeeper," on whom they lavished a very
+plethora of caresses.  Perhaps it may be wrong so to hint it, but,
+judging from indications in his own book, our author himself would
+have been liable in those days to enthralment by the piquant charms
+that proved irresistible to so many of his brother-Europeans.  It is
+almost superfluous to repeat that the skin-discriminating policy
+induced as regards the coloured subjects of the Queen since the [41]
+abolition of slavery did not, and could not, operate when coloured
+and white stood on the same high level as slave-owners and ruling
+potentates in the Colonies.  Of course, when the administrative power
+passed entirely into the hands of British officials, their colonial
+compatriots coalesced with them, and found no loss in being in the
+good books of the dominant personages.
+
+In conclusion of our remarks upon the above extracts, it may be
+stated that the blending of the races is not a burning question.  "It
+can keep," as Mr. Bright wittily said with regard to a subject of
+similar urgency.  Time and Nature might safely be left uninterfered
+with to work out whatever social development of this kind is in store
+for the world and its inhabitants.
+
+
+
+BOOK I: BARBADOS
+
+[41] Our distinguished voyager visited many of the British West
+Indies, landing first at Barbados, his social experience whereof is
+set forth in a very agreeable account.  Our immediate business,
+however, is not with what West Indian hospitality, especially among
+the well-to-do classes, can and does accomplish for [42] the
+entertainment of visitors, and particularly visitors so eminent as
+Mr. Froude.  We are concerned with what Mr. Froude has to say
+concerning our dusky brethren and sisters in those Colonies.  We
+have, thus, much pleasure in being able at the outset to extract the
+following favourable verdict of his respecting them--premising, at
+the same time, that the balcony from which Mr. Froude surveyed the
+teeming multitude in Bridgetown was that of a grand hotel at which he
+had, on invitation, partaken of the refreshing beverage mentioned in
+the citation:--
+
+"Cocktail over, and walking in the heat of the sun being a thing not
+to be thought of, I sat for two hours in the balcony, watching the
+people, who were as thick as bees in swarming time.  Nine-tenths of
+them were pure black.  You rarely saw a white face, but still less
+would you see a discontented one, imperturbable good humour and self-
+satisfaction being written on the features of every one.  The women
+struck me especially.  They were smartly dressed in white calico,
+scrupulously clean, and tricked out with ribands and feathers; but
+their figures were so good, and they carried themselves so [43] well
+and gracefully, that although they might make themselves absurd, they
+could not look vulgar.  Like the Greek and Etruscan women, they are
+trained from childhood to carry weights on their heads.  They are
+thus perfectly upright, and plant their feet firmly and naturally on
+the ground.  They might serve for sculptors' models, and are well
+aware of it."
+
+Regarding the other sex, Mr. Froude says:--
+
+"The men were active enough, driving carts, wheeling barrows, and
+selling flying-fish," &c.
+
+He also speaks with candour of the entire absence of drunkenness and
+quarrelling and the agreeable prevalence of good humour and light-
+heartedness among them.  Some critic might, on reading the above
+extract from our author's account of the men, be tempted to ask--"But
+what is the meaning of that little word 'enough' occurring therein?"
+We should be disposed to hazard a suggestion that Mr. Froude, being
+fair-minded and loyal to truth, as far as is compatible with his
+sympathy for his hapless "Anglo-West Indians," could not give an
+entirely ungrudging testimony in favour of the possible, nay
+probable, voters by whose suffrages the supremacy of the Dark [44]
+Parliament will be ensured, and the relapse into obeahism, devil-
+worship, and children-eating be inaugurated.  Nevertheless, Si sic
+omnia dixisset--if he had said all things thus!  Yes, if Mr. Froude
+had, throughout his volume, spoken in this strain, his occasional
+want of patience and fairness with regard to our male kindred might
+have found condonation in his even more than chivalrous appreciation
+of our womankind.  But it has been otherwise.  So we are forced to
+try conclusions with him in the arena of his own selection--
+unreflecting spokesman that he is of British colonialism, which, we
+grieve to learn through Mr. Froude's pages, has, like the Bourbon
+family, not only forgotten nothing, but, unfortunately for its own
+peace, learnt nothing also.
+
+
+
+BOOK I: ST. VINCENT
+
+[44] The following are the words in which our traveller embodies the
+main motive and purpose of his voyage:--
+
+"My own chief desire was to see the human inhabitants, to learn what
+they were doing, how they were living, and what they were thinking
+about. . . ."
+
+[45] But, alas, with the mercurialism of temperament in which he has
+thought proper to indulge when only Negroes and Europeans not of
+"Anglo-West Indian" tendencies were concerned, he jauntily threw to
+the winds all the scruples and cautious minuteness which were
+essential to the proper execution of his project.  At Barbados, as we
+have seen, he satisfies himself with sitting aloft, at a balcony-
+window, to contemplate the movements of the sable throng below, of
+whose character, moral and political, he nevertheless professes to
+have become a trustworthy delineator.  From the above-quoted account
+of his impressions of the external traits and deportment of the
+Ethiopic folk thus superficially gazed at, our author passes on to an
+analysis of their mental and moral idiosyncrasies, and other intimate
+matters, which the very silence of the book as to his method of
+ascertaining them is a sufficient proof that his knowledge in their
+regard has not been acquired directly and at first hand.  Nor need we
+say that the generally adverse cast of his verdicts on what he had
+been at no pains to study for himself points to the "hostileness" of
+the witnesses whose [46] testimony alone has formed the basis of his
+conclusions.  Throughout Mr. Froude's tour in the British Colonies
+his intercourse was exclusively with "Anglo-West Indians," whose
+aversion to the Blacks he has himself, perhaps they would think
+indiscreetly, placed on record.  In no instance do we find that he
+condescended to visit the abode of any Negro, whether it was the
+mansion of a gentleman or the hut of a peasant of that race.  The
+whole tenor of the book indicates his rigid adherence to this one-
+sided course, and suggests also that, as a traveller, Mr. Froude
+considers maligning on hearsay to be just as convenient as reporting
+facts elicited by personal investigation.  Proceed we, however, to
+strengthen our statement regarding his definitive abandonment, and
+that without any apparent reason, of the plan he had professedly laid
+down for himself at starting, and failing which no trustworthy data
+could have been obtained concerning the character and disposition of
+the people about whom he undertakes to thoroughly enlighten his
+readers.  Speaking of St. Vincent, where he arrived immediately after
+leaving Barbados, our author says:--
+
+[47] "I did not land, for the time was short, and as a beautiful
+picture the island was best seen from the deck.  The characteristics
+of the people are the same in all the Antilles, and could be studied
+elsewhere."
+
+Now, it is a fact, patent and notorious, that "the characteristics of
+the people are" not "the same in all the Antilles."  A man of Mr.
+Froude's attainments, whose studies have made him familiar with
+ethnological facts, must be aware that difference of local
+surroundings and influences does, in the course of time, inevitably
+create difference of characteristic and deportment.  Hence there is
+in nearly every Colony a marked dissimilarity of native qualities
+amongst the Negro inhabitants, arising not only from the causes above
+indicated, but largely also from the great diversity of their African
+ancestry.  We might as well be told that because the nations of
+Europe are generally white and descended from Japhet, they could be
+studied one by the light derived from acquaintance with another.  We
+venture to declare that, unless a common education from youth has
+been shared by them, the Hamitic inhabitants of one island have very
+little in common with [48] those of another, beyond the dusky skin
+and woolly hair.  In speech, character, and deportment, a coloured
+native of Trinidad differs as much from one of Barbados as a North
+American black does from either, in all the above respects.
+
+
+
+BOOK I: GRENADA
+
+[48] In Grenada, the next island he arrived at, our traveller's
+procedure with regard to the inhabitants was very similar.  There he
+landed in the afternoon, drove three or four miles inland to dine at
+the house of a "gentleman who was a passing resident," returned in
+the dark to his ship, and started for Trinidad.  In the course of
+this journey back, however, as he sped along in the carriage, Mr.
+Froude found opportunity to look into the people's houses along the
+way, where, he tells us, he "could see and was astonished to observe
+signs of comfort, and even signs of taste--armchairs, sofas, side-
+boards with cut-glass upon them, engravings and coloured prints upon
+the walls."  As a result of this nocturnal examination, a vol
+d'oiseau, he has written paragraph upon paragraph about the people's
+character [49] and prospects in the island of Grenada.  To read the
+patronizing terms in which our historian-traveller has seen fit to
+comment on Grenada and its people, one would believe that his account
+is of some half-civilized, out-of-the-way region under British sway,
+and inhabited chiefly by a horde of semi-barbarian ignoramuses of
+African descent.  If the world had not by this time thoroughly
+assessed the intrinsic value of Mr. Froude's utterances, one who
+knows Grenada might have felt inclined to resent his causeless
+depreciation of the intellectual capacity of its inhabitants; but
+considering the estimate which has been pretty generally formed of
+his historical judgment, Mr. Froude may be dismissed, as regards
+Grenada and its people, with a certain degree of scepticism.  Such
+scepticism, though lost upon himself, is unquestionably needful to
+protect his readers from the hallucination which the author's
+singular contempt for accuracy is but too liable to induce.
+
+Those who know Grenada and its affairs are perfectly familiar with
+the fact that all of its chief intellectual business, whether
+official (even in the highest degree, such as temporary [50]
+administration of the government), legal, commercial, municipal,
+educational, or journalistic, has been for years upon years carried
+on by men of colour.  And what, as a consequence of this fact, has
+the world ever heard in disparagement of Grenada throughout this long
+series of years?  Assuredly not a syllable.  On the contrary, she has
+been the theme of praise, not only for the admirable foresight with
+which she avoided the sugar crisis, so disastrous to her sister
+islands, but also for the pluck and persistence shown in sustaining
+herself through an agricultural emergency brought about by commercial
+reverses, whereby the steady march of her sons in self-advancement
+was only checked for a time, but never definitively arrested.  In
+fine, as regards every branch of civilized employment pursued there,
+the good people of Grenada hold their own so well and worthily that
+any show of patronage, even from a source more entitled to
+confidence, would simply be a piece of obtrusive kindness, not
+acceptable to any, seeing that it is required by none.
+
+
+
+BOOK II: TRINIDAD / TRINIDAD AND REFORM+
+
+[53] Mr. Froude, crossing the ninety miles of the Caribbean Sea lying
+between Grenada and Trinidad, lands next morning in Port of Spain,
+the chief city of that "splendid colony," as Governor Irving, its
+worst ruler, truly calls it in his farewell message to the
+Legislature.  Regarding Port of Spain in particular, Mr. Froude is
+positively exuberant in the display of the peculiar qualities that
+distinguish him, and which we have already admitted.  Ecstatic praise
+and groundless detraction go hand in hand, bewildering to any one not
+possessed of the key to the mystery of the art of blowing hot and
+cold, which Mr. Froude so startlingly exemplifies.  As it is our
+purpose to make what he says concerning this Colony the crucial test
+of his veracity as a writer of travels, [54] and also of the value of
+his judgments respecting men and things, we shall first invite the
+reader's attention to the following extracts, with our discussion
+thereof:--
+
+"On landing we found ourselves in a large foreign-looking town, Port
+of Spain having been built by French and Spaniards according to their
+national tendencies, and especially with a view to the temperature,
+which is that of a forcing house, and rarely falls below 80 degrees.  
+The streets are broad, and are planted with trees for shade, each house
+where room permits having a garden of its own, with palms and mangoes
+and coffee-plants and creepers.  Of sanitary arrangements there
+seemed to be none.  There is abundance of rain, and the gutters which
+run down by the footway are flushed almost every day.  But they are
+all open.  Dirt of every kind lies about freely, to be washed into
+them or left to putrify as fate shall direct" (p. 64).
+
+Lower down, on the same page, our author, luxuriating in his contempt
+for exactitude when the character of other folk only is at stake,
+continues:--"The town has between thirty and forty thousand people
+living in it, and the [55] rain and Johnny crows between them keep
+off pestilence."  On page 65 we have the following astounding
+statement with respect to one of the trees in the garden in front of
+the house in which Mr. Froude was sojourning:--"At the gate stood as
+sentinel a cabbage palm a hundred feet high."
+
+The above quotations, in which we have elected to be content
+with indicating by typographical differences the points on which
+attention should be mostly directed, will suffice, with any one
+knowing Trinidad, as examples of Mr. Froude's trustworthiness.  But
+as these are only on matters of mere detail, involving no question of
+principle, they are dismissed without any further comment.  It must
+not be so, however, with the following remarkable deliverances which
+occur on page 67 of his too picturesque work:--"The commonplace
+intrudes upon the imaginative.  At moments one can fancy that the
+world is an enchanted place after all, but then comes generally an
+absurd awakening.  On the first night of my arrival, before we went
+to bed, there came an invitation to me to attend a political meeting
+which was to be held in a few days on the Savannah.
+
+[56] "Trinidad is a purely Crown colony, and has escaped hitherto the
+introduction of the election virus.  The newspapers and certain busy
+gentlemen in Port of Spain had discovered that they were living under
+a 'degrading tyranny,' and they demanded a constitution.  They did
+not complain that their affairs had been ill-managed.  On the
+contrary, they insisted that they were the most prosperous of the
+West Indian colonies, and alone had a surplus in their treasury.  If
+this was so, it seemed to me that they had better let well alone.
+The population, all told, was but 170,000, less by thirty thousand
+than that of Barbados.  They were a mixed and motley assemblage of
+all races and colours, busy each with their own affairs, and never
+hitherto troubling themselves about politics.  But it had pleased the
+Home Government to set up the beginning of a constitution again in
+Jamaica; no one knew why, but so it was; and Trinidad did not choose
+to be behindhand.  The official appointments were valuable, and had
+been hitherto given away by the Crown.  The local popularities very
+naturally wished to have them for themselves.  This was the [57]
+reality in the thing, so far as there was a reality.  It was dressed
+up in the phrases borrowed from the great English masters of the art,
+about privileges of manhood, moral dignity, the elevating influence
+of the suffrage, &c., intended for home consumption among the
+believers in the orthodox radical faith."
+
+The passages which we have signalized in the above quotation, and
+which occur with more elaboration and heedless assurance on a later
+page, will produce a feeling of wonder at the hardihood of him who
+not only conceived, but penned and dared to publish them as well,
+against the gentlemen whom we all know to be foremost in the
+political agitation at which Mr. Froude so flippantly sneers.  An
+emphatic denial may be opposed to his pretence that "they did not
+complain that their affairs had been ill-managed."  Why, the very
+gist and kernel of the whole agitation, set forth in print through
+long years of iteration, has been the scandalous mismanagement of the
+affairs of the Colony--especially under the baleful administration of
+Governor Irving.  The Augean Stable, miscalled by him "The Public
+Works Department," and whose officials he coolly [58] fastened upon
+the financial vitals of that long-suffering Colony, baffled even the
+resolute will of a Des Voeux to cleanse it.  Poor Sir Sanford
+Freeling attempted the cleansing, but foundered ignominiously almost
+as soon as he embarked on that Herculean enterprise.  Sir A. E.
+Havelock, who came after, must be mentioned by the historian of
+Trinidad merely as an incarnate accident in the succession of
+Governors to whom the destinies of that maltreated Colony have been
+successively intrusted since the departure of Sir Arthur Hamilton
+Gordon.  The present Governor of Trinidad, Sir William Robinson, is a
+man of spirit and intelligence, keenly alive to the grave
+responsibilities resting on him as a ruler of men and moulder of
+men's destinies.  Has he, with all his energy, his public spirit and
+indisputable devotion to the furtherance of the Colony's interests,
+been able to grapple successfully with the giant evil?  Has he
+effectually gained the ear of our masters in Downing Street regarding
+the inefficiency and wastefulness of Governor Irving's pet
+department?  We presume that his success has been but very partial,
+for otherwise it is difficult to conceive the motive for [59]
+retaining the army of officials radiating from that office, with the
+chief under whose supervision so many architectural and other
+scandals have for so long been the order of the day.  The Public
+Works Department is costly enough to have been a warning to the whole
+of the West Indies.  It is true that the lavish squandering of the
+people's money by that department has been appreciably checked since
+the advent of the present head of the Government.  The papers no
+longer team with accounts, nor is even the humblest aesthetic sense,
+offended now, as formerly, with views of unsightly, useless and
+flimsy erections, the cost of which, on an average, was five times
+more than that of good and reputable structures.
+
+This, however, has been entirely due to the personal influence of the
+Governor.  Sir William Robinson, not being the tool, as Sir Henry
+Irving owned that he was, of the Director of Public Works, could not
+be expected to be his accomplice or screener in the cynical waste of
+the public funds.  Here, then, is the personal rectitude of a ruler
+operating as a safeguard to the people's interests; and we gladly
+confess our entire agreement with [60] Mr. Froude on the subject of
+the essential qualifications of a Crown Governor.  Mr. Froude
+contends, and we heartily coincide with him, that a ruler of high
+training and noble purposes would, as the embodiment of the
+administrative authority, be the very best provision for the
+government of Colonies constituted as ours are.  But he has also
+pointed out, and that in no equivocal terms, that the above are far
+from having been indispensable qualifications for the patronage of
+Downing Street.  He has shown that the Colonial Office is, more often
+than otherwise, swayed in the appointment of Colonial Governors by
+considerations among which the special fitness of the man appointed
+holds but a secondary place.  On this point we have much
+gratification in giving Mr. Froude's own words (p. 91):--"Among the
+public servants of Great Britain there are persons always to be found
+fit and willing for posts of honour and difficulty if a sincere
+effort be made to find them.  Alas! in times past we have sent
+persons to rule our Baratarias to whom Sancho Panza was a sage--
+troublesome members of Parliament, younger brothers of powerful
+families, impecunious peers; favourites, [61] with backstairs
+influence, for whom a provision was to be found; colonial clerks bred
+in the office who had been obsequious and useful!"  Now then,
+applying these facts to the political history of Trinidad, with which
+we are more particularly concerned at present, what do we find?  We
+find that in the person of Sir A. H. Gordon (1867-1870) that Colony
+at length chanced upon a ruler both competent and eager to advance
+her interests, not only materially, but in the nobler respects that
+give dignity to the existence of a community.  Of course, he was
+opposed--ably, strenuously, violently, virulently--but the metal of
+which the man was composed was only fused into greater firmness by
+being subjected to such fiery tests.  On leaving Trinidad, this
+eminent ruler left as legacies to the Colony he had loved and worked
+for so heartily, laws that placed the persons and belongings of the
+inhabitants beyond the reach of wanton aggression; the means by which
+honest and laborious industry could, through agriculture, benefit
+both itself and the general revenue.  He also left an educational
+system that opened (to even the humblest) a free pathway to
+knowledge, to [62] distinction, and, if the objects of its
+beneficence were worthy of the boon, to serviceableness to their
+native country.  Above all, he left peace among the jarring interests
+which, under the badge of Englishman and of Creole, under the badge
+of Catholic and under the badge of Protestant, and so many other
+forms of sectional divergence, had too long distracted Trinidad.
+This he had effected, not by constituting himself a partisan of
+either section, but by inquiring with statesmanlike appreciation, and
+allowing the legitimate claims of each to a certain scope of
+influence in the furtherance of the Colony's welfare.  Hence the
+bitter rivalry of jarring interests was transformed into harmonious
+co-operation on all sides, in advancing the common good of the common
+country.
+
+The Colonial Office, knowing little and caring less about that noble
+jewel in the British Crown, sent out as successor to so brilliant and
+successful an administrator--whom?  One Sir James Robert Longden, a
+gentleman without initiative, without courage, and, above all, with a
+slavish adherence to red-tape and a clerk-like dread of compromising
+his berth.  Having served for a long series of years in subordinate
+posts in [63] minor dependencies, the habit of being impressed and
+influenced by colonial magnates grew and gathered strength within
+him.  Such a ruler, of course, the serpents that had only been
+"scotched, but not killed," by the stern procedures of Governor
+Gordon, could wind round, beguile, and finally cause to fall.
+Measure after measure of his predecessor which he could in any way
+neutralize in the interests of the colonial clique, was rendered of
+none effect.  In fact, he was subservient to the wishes of those who
+had all long objected to those measures, but had not dared even to
+hint their objections to the beneficent autocrat who had willed and
+given them effect for the general welfare.  After Governor Longden
+came Sir Henry Turner Irving, a personage who brought to Trinidad a
+reputation for all the vulgar colonial prejudices which,
+discreditable enough in ordinary folk, are, in the Governor of a
+mixed community, nothing less than calamitous.  More than amply did
+he justify the evil reports with which rumour had heralded his
+coming.  Abler, more astute, more daring than Sir James Longden, who
+was, on the whole, only a constitutionally timid man, Governor Irving
+threw [64] himself heart and soul into the arms of the Sugar
+Interest, by whom he had been helped into his high office, and whose
+belief he evidently shared, that sugar-growers alone should be
+possessors of the lands of the West Indies.  It would be wearisome to
+detail the methods by which every act of Sir Arthur Gordon's to
+benefit the whole population was cynically and systematically undone
+by this his native-hating successor.  In short, the policy of
+reaction which Sir James Longden began, found in Governor Irving not
+only a consistent promoter, but, as it were, a sinister incarnation.
+It is true that he could not, at the bidding and on the advice of his
+planter-friends, shut up the Crown Lands of the Colony against
+purchasers of limited means, because they happened to be mostly
+natives of colour, but he could annul the provision by which every
+Warden in the rural districts, on the receipt of the statutory fees,
+had to supply a Government title on the spot to every one who
+purchased any acreage of Crown Lands.  Every intending purchaser,
+therefore, whether living at Toco, Guayaguayare, Monos, or Icacos,
+the four extreme points of the Island of Trinidad, was compelled to
+go to Port of [65] Spain, forty or fifty miles distant, through an
+almost roadless country, to compete at the Sub-Intendant's auction
+sales, with every probability of being outbid in the end, and having
+his long-deposited money returned to him after all his pains.
+Lieutenant-Governor Des Voeux told the Legislature of Trinidad that
+the monstrous Excise imposts of the Colony were an incentive to
+smuggling, and he thought that the duties, licenses, &c., should be
+lowered in the interest of good and equitable government.  Sir Henry
+Turner Irving, however, besides raising the duties on spirituous
+liquors, also enacted that every distillery, however small, must pay
+a salary to a Government official stationed within it to supervise
+the manufacture of the spirits.  This, of course, was the death-blow
+to all the minor competition which had so long been disturbing the
+peace of mind of the mighty possessors of the great distilleries.
+Ahab was thus made glad with the vineyard of Naboth.
+
+In the matter of official appointments, too, Governor Irving was
+consistent in his ostentatious hostility to Creoles in general, and
+to coloured Creoles in particular.  Of the fifty-six appointments
+which that model Governor [66] made in 1876, only seven happened to
+be natives and coloured, out of a population in which the latter
+element is so preponderant as to excite the fears of Mr. Froude.  In
+educational matters, though he could not with any show of sense or
+decency re-enact the rule which excluded students of illegitimate
+birth from the advantages of the Royal College, he could,
+nevertheless, pander to the prejudices of himself and his friends by
+raising the standard of proficiency while reducing the limit of the
+age for free admission to that institution--boys of African descent
+having shown an irrepressible persistency in carrying off prizes.
+
+Every one acquainted with Trinidad politics knows very well the
+ineffably low dodges and subterfuges under which the Arima Railway
+was prevented from having its terminus in the centre of that town.
+The public was promised a saving of Eight Thousand Pounds by their
+high-minded Governor for a diversion of the line "by only a few
+yards" from the originally projected terminus.  In the end it was
+found out not only that the terminus of the railway was nearly a
+whole mile outside of the town of Arima, but also that Twenty [67]
+Thousand Pounds "Miscellaneous" had to be paid up by the good folk of
+Trinidad, in addition to gulping down their disappointment at saving
+no Eight Thousand Pounds, and having to find by bitter experience,
+especially in rainy weather, that their Governor's few yards were
+just his characteristic way of putting down yards which he well knew
+were to be counted by hundreds.  Then, again, we have the so-called
+San Fernando Waterworks, an abortion, a scandal for which there is no
+excuse, as the head of the Public Works Department went his own way
+despite the experience of those who knew better than he, and the
+protests of those who would have had to pay.  Seventeen Thousand
+Pounds represent the amount of debt with which Governor Irving's pet
+department has saddled the town of San Fernando for water, which half
+the inhabitants cannot get, and which few of the half who do get it
+dare venture to drink.  Summa fastigia rerum secuti sumus.  If in the
+works that were so prominent before the public gaze these enormous
+abuses could flourish, defiant of protest and opposition, what shall
+we think of the nooks and corners of that same squandering
+department, which of [68] course must have been mere gnats in the
+eyes of a Governor who had swallowed so many monstrous camels!  The
+Governor was callous.  Trinidad was a battening ground for his
+friends; but she had in her bosom men who were her friends, and the
+struggle began, constitutionally of course, which, under the
+leadership of the Mayor of San Fernando, has continued up to now,
+culminating at last in the Reform movement which Mr. Froude decries,
+and which his pupil, Mr. S. H. Gatty, is, from what has appeared in
+the Trinidad papers, doing his "level best" to render abortive.
+
+Sir Sanford Freeling, by the will and pleasure of Downing Street, was
+the next successor, after Governor Irving, to the chief ruler-ship of
+Trinidad.  Incredible as it may sound, he was a yet more
+disadvantageous bargain for the Colony's L4000 a year.  A better man
+in many respects than his predecessor, he was in many more a much
+worse Governor.  The personal affability of a man can be known only
+to those who come into actual contact with him--the public measures
+of a ruler over a community touches it, mediately or immediately,
+throughout all its sections.  The bad boldness of [69] Governor
+Irving achieved much that the people, especially in the outlying
+districts, could see and appreciate.  For example, he erected Rest-
+houses all over the remoter and more sparsely peopled quarters of the
+Colony, after the manner of such provisions in Oriental lands.  The
+population who came in contact with these conveniences, and to whom
+access to them--for a consideration--had never been denied, saw with
+their own eyes tangible evidence of the Governor's activity, and
+inferred therefrom a solicitude on his part for the public welfare.
+Had they, however, been given a notion of the bill which had had to
+be paid for those frail, though welcome hostelries, they would have
+stood aghast at the imbecility, or, if not logically that, the
+something very much worse, through which five times the actual worth
+of these buildings had been extracted from the Treasury.  Sir Sanford
+Freeling, on the other hand, while being no screener of jobbery and
+peculation, had not the strength of mind whereof jobbers and
+peculators do stand in dread.  In evidence of that poor ruler's
+infirmity of purpose, we would only cite the double fact that,
+whereas in 1883 he was the first to enter a practical protest against
+the housing [70] of the diseased and destitute in the then newly
+finished, but most leaky, House of Refuge on the St. Clair Lands, by
+having the poor saturated inmates carried off in his presence to the
+Colonial Hospital, yet His Excellency was the very man who, in the
+very next year, 1884, not only sanctioned the shooting down of Indian
+immigrants at their festival, but actually directed the use of buck-
+shot for that purpose!  Evidently, if these two foregoing statements
+are true, Mr. Froude must join us in thinking that a man whose mind
+could be warped by external influences from the softest commiseration
+for the sufferings of his kind, one year, into being the cold-blooded
+deviser of the readiest method for slaughtering unarmed holiday-
+makers, the very next year, is not the kind of ruler whom he and we
+so cordially desiderate.  We have already mentioned above how
+ignominious Governor Freeling's failure was in attempting to meddle
+with the colossal abuses of the Public Works Department.
+
+Sir Arthur Elibank Havelock next had the privilege of enjoying the
+paradisaic sojourn at Queen's House, St. Ann's, as well as the four
+thousand pounds a year attached to the [71] right of occupying that
+princely residence.  Save as a dandy, however, and the harrier of
+subordinate officials, the writer of the annals of Trinidad may well
+pass him by.  So then it may be seen what, by mere freaks of Chance--
+the ruling deity at Downing Street--the administrative experience of
+Trinidad had been from the departure of that true king in Israel,--
+Sir Arthur Gordon, up to the visit of Mr. Froude.  First, a slave to
+red-tape, procrastination, and the caprices of pretentious
+colonialists; next, a daring schemer, confident of the support of the
+then dominant Sugar Interest, and regarding and treating the
+resources of the Island as free booty for his friends, sycophants,
+and favourites; then, an old woman, garbed in male attire, having an
+infirmity of purpose only too prone to be blown about by every wind
+of doctrine, alternating helplessly between tenderness and
+truculence, the charity of a Fry and the tragic atrocity of Medea.
+After this dismal ruler, Trinidad, by the grace of the Colonial
+Office, was subjected to the manipulation of an unctuous dandy.  This
+successor of Gordon, of Elliot, and of Cairns, durst not oppose high-
+placed official malfeasants, but [72] was inexorable with regard to
+minor delinquents.  In the above retrospect we have purposely omitted
+mentioning such transient rulers as Mr. Rennie, Sir G. W. Des Voeux,
+and last, but by no means least, Sir F. Barlee, a high-minded
+Governor, whom death so suddenly and inscrutably snatched away from
+the good work he had loyally begun.  Every one of the above temporary
+administrators was a right good man for a post in which brain power
+and moral back-bone are essential qualifications.  But the Fates so
+willed it that Trinidad should never enjoy the permanent governance
+of either.  In view of the above facts; in view also of the lessons
+taught the inhabitants of Trinidad so frequently, so cruelly, what
+wonder is there that, failing of faith in a probability, which stands
+one against four, of their getting another worthy ruler when Governor
+Robinson shall have left them, they should seek to make hay while the
+sun shines, by providing against the contingency of such Governors as
+they know from bitter experience that Downing Street would place over
+their destinies, should the considerations detailed by Mr. Froude or
+any other equally [73] unworthy counsellor supervene?  That the
+leading minds of Trinidad should believe in an elective legislature
+is a logical consequence of the teachings of the past, when the
+Colony was under the manipulation of the sort of Governors above
+mentioned as immediately succeeding Sir Arthur Gordon.
+
+This brings us to the motives, the sordid motives, which Mr. Froude,
+oblivious of the responsibility of his high literary status, has
+permitted himself gratuitously, and we may add scandalously, to
+impute to the heads of the Reform movement in Trinidad.  It was
+perfectly competent that our author should decline, as he did
+decline, to have anything to do, even as a spectator, at a meeting
+with the object of which he had no sympathy.  But our opinion is
+equally decided that Mr. Froude has transgressed the bounds of decent
+political antagonism, nay, even of common sense, when he presumes to
+state that it was not for any other object than the large salaries of
+the Crown appointments, which they covet for themselves, that the
+Reform leaders are contending.  This is not criticism: it is slander.
+To make culpatory statements against others, [74] without ability to
+prove them, is, to say the least, hazardous; but to make accusations
+to formulate which the accuser is forced, not only to ignore facts,
+but actually to deny them, is, to our mind, nothing short of rank
+defamation.
+
+Mr. Froude is not likely to impress the world (of the West Indies, at
+any rate) with the transparently silly, if not intentionally
+malicious, ravings which he has indulged in on the subject of
+Trinidad and its politics.  Here are some of the things which this
+"champion of Anglo-West Indians" attempts to force down the throats
+of his readers.  He would have us believe that Mr. Francis Damian,
+the Mayor of Port of Spain, and one of the wealthiest of the native
+inhabitants of Trinidad, a man who has retired from an honourable and
+lucrative legal practice, and devotes his time, his talents, and his
+money to the service of his native country; that Mr. Robert Guppy,
+the venerable and venerated Mayor of San Fernando, with his weight of
+years and his sufficing competence, and with his long record of self-
+denying services to the public; that Mr. George Goodwille, one of the
+most successful merchants in the Colonies; that Mr. Conrad [75] F.
+Stollmeyer, a gentleman retired, in the evening of his days, on his
+well-earned ample means, are open to the above sordid accusation.  In
+short, that those and such-like individuals who, on account of their
+private resources and mental capabilities, as well as the public
+influence resulting therefrom, are, by the sheer logic of
+circumstances, forced to be at the head of public movements, are
+actuated by a craving for the few hundred pounds a year for which
+there is such a scramble at Downing Street among the future official
+grandees of the West Indies!  But granting that this allegation of
+Mr. Froude's was not as baseless as we have shown it to be, and that
+the leaders of the Reform agitation were impelled by the desire which
+our author seeks to discredit them with, what then?  Have they who
+have borne the heat and the burden of the day in making the Colonies
+what they are no right to the enjoyment of the fruits of their
+labours?  The local knowledge, the confidence and respect of the
+population, which such men enjoy, and can wield for good or evil in
+the community, are these matters of small account in the efficient
+government of the Colony?  Our author, in [76] specifying the
+immunities of his ideal Governor, who is also ours, recommends,
+amongst other things, that His Excellency should be allowed to choose
+his own advisers.  By this Mr. Froude certainly does not mean that
+the advisers so chosen must be all pure-blooded Englishmen who have
+rushed from the destitution of home to batten on the cheaply obtained
+flesh-pots of the Colonies.
+
+At any rate, whatever political fate Mr. Froude may desire for the
+Colonies in general, and for Trinidad in particular, it is
+nevertheless unquestionable that he and the scheme that he may have
+for our future governance, in this year of grace 1888, have both come
+into view entirely out of season.  The spirit of the times has
+rendered impossible any further toleration of the arrogance which is
+based on historical self-glorification.  The gentlemen of Trinidad,
+who are struggling for political enfranchisement, are not likely to
+heed, except as a matter for indignant contempt, the obtrusion by our
+author of his opinion that "they had best let well alone."  On his
+own showing, the persons appointed to supreme authority in the
+Colonies are, more usually than not, entirely unfit for [77] holding
+any responsible position whatever over their fellows.  Now, can it be
+doubted that less care, less scruple, less consideration, would be
+exercised in the choice of the satellites appointed to revolve, in
+these far-off latitudes, around the central luminaries?  Have we not
+found, are we not still finding every day, that the brain-dizziness--
+Xenophon calls it kephalalgeia+--induced by sudden promotion has
+transformed the abject suppliants at the Downing Street backstairs
+into the arrogant defiers of the opinions, and violators of the
+rights, of the populations whose subjection to the British Crown
+alone could have rendered possible the elevation of such folk and
+their impunity in malfeasance?  The cup of loyal forbearance reached
+the overflowing point since the trickstering days of Governor Irving,
+and it is useless now to believe in the possibility of a return of
+the leading minds of Trinidad to a tame acquiescence as regards the
+probabilities of their government according to the Crown system.  Mr.
+Froude's own remarks point out definitely enough that a community so
+governed is absolutely at the mercy, for good or for evil, of the man
+who happens to be invested with [78] the supreme authority.  He has
+also shown that in our case that supreme authority is very often
+disastrously entrusted.  Yet has he nothing but sneers for the
+efforts of those who strive to be emancipated from liability to such
+subjection.  Mr. Froude's deftly-worded sarcasms about "degrading
+tyranny," "the dignity of manhood," &c., are powerless to alter the
+facts.  Crown Colony Government--denying, as it does to even the
+wisest and most interested in a community cursed with it all
+participation in the conduct of their own affairs, while investing
+irresponsible and uninterested "birds of passage" (as our author
+aptly describes them) with the right of making ducks and drakes of
+the resources wrung from the inhabitants--is a degrading tyranny,
+which the sneers of Mr. Froude cannot make otherwise.  The dignity of
+manhood, on the other hand, we are forced to admit, runs scanty
+chance of recognition by any being, however masculine his name, who
+could perpetrate such a literary and moral scandal as "The Bow of
+Ulysses."  Yet the dignity of manhood stands venerable there, and
+whilst the world lasts shall gain for its possessors the right of
+record on the roll of [79] those whom the worthy of the world delight
+to honour.
+
+All of a piece, as regards veracity and prudence, is the further
+allegation of Mr. Froude's, to the effect that there was never any
+agitation for Reform in Trinidad before that which he passes under
+review.  It is, however, a melancholy fact, which we are ashamed to
+state, that Mr. Froude has written characteristically here also,
+either through crass ignorance or through deliberate malice.  Any
+respectable, well-informed inhabitant of Trinidad, who happened not
+to be an official "bird of passage," might, on our author's honest
+inquiry, have informed him that Trinidad is the land of chronic
+agitation for Reform.  Mr. Froude might also have been informed that,
+even forty-five years ago, that is in 1843, an elective constitution,
+with all the electoral districts duly marked out, was formulated and
+transmitted by the leading inhabitants of Trinidad to the then
+Secretary of State for the Colonies.  He might also have learnt that
+on every occasion that any of the shady Governors, whom he has so
+well depicted, manifested any excess of his undesirable qualities,
+there has been a movement [80] among the educated people in behalf of
+changing their country's political condition.
+
+We close this part of our review by reiterating our conviction that,
+come what will, the Crown Colony system, as at present managed, is
+doomed.  Britain may, in deference to the alleged wishes of her
+impalpable "Anglo-West Indians"--whose existence rests on the
+authority of Mr. Froude alone--deny to Trinidad and other Colonies
+even the small modicum prayed for of autonomy, but in doing so the
+Mother Country will have to sternly revise her present methods of
+selecting and appointing Governors.  As to the subordinate lot, they
+will have to be worth their salt when there is at the head of the
+Government a man who is truly deserving of his.
+
+NOTES
+
+53. +It is not clear from the original text exactly where the brief
+chapter "Trinidad" ends and where the longer one entitled "Reform in
+Trinidad" begins.  (The copy indicates that the "Trinidad" chapter
+ends at page 54, but the relevant page contains no subheading.)  I
+have, therefore, chosen to fuse the two chapters since they form a
+logical unit.
+
+77. +Since there is little Greek in this work, I have simply
+transliterated it.
+
+
+
+BOOK II: NEGRO FELICITY IN THE WEST INDIES
+
+[81] We come now to the ingenious and novel fashion in which Mr.
+Froude carries out his investigations among the black population, and
+to his dogmatic conclusions concerning them.  He says:--
+
+"In Trinidad, as everywhere else, my own chief desire was to see the
+human inhabitants, to learn what they were doing, how they were
+living, and what they were thinking about, and this could best be
+done by drives about the town and neighbourhood."
+
+"Drives about the town and neighbourhood," indeed!  To learn and be
+able to depict with faithful accuracy what people "were doing, how
+they were living, and what they were thinking about"--all this being
+best done (domestic circumstances, nay, soul-workings and all!)
+through fleeting glimpses of shifting [82] panoramas of intelligent
+human beings!  What a bright notion!  We have here the suggestion of
+a capacity too superhuman to be accepted on trust, especially when,
+as in this case, it is by implication self-arrogated.  The modesty of
+this thaumaturgic traveller in confining the execution of his
+detailed scrutiny of a whole community to the moderate progression of
+some conventional vehicle, drawn by some conventional quadruped or
+the other, does injustice to powers which, if possessed at all, might
+have compassed the same achievement in the swifter transit of an
+express train, or, better still perhaps, from the empyrean elevation
+of a balloon!  Yet is Mr. Froude confident that data professed to be
+thus collected would easily pass muster with the readers of his book!
+A confidence of this kind is abnormal, and illustrates, we think most
+fully, all the special characteristics of the man.  With his passion
+for repeating, our author tells us in continuation of a strange
+rhapsody on Negro felicity:--
+
+"Once more, the earth does not contain any peasantry so well off, so
+well-cared for, so happy, so sleek and contented, as the sons [83]
+and daughters of the emancipated slaves in the English West Indian
+Islands."
+
+Again:--
+
+"Under the rule of England, in these islands, the two millions of
+these brothers-in-law of ours are the most perfectly contented
+specimens of the human race to be found upon the planet. . . . If
+happiness be the satisfaction of every conscious desire, theirs is a
+condition that admits of no improvement: were they independent, they
+might quarrel among themselves, and the weaker become the bondsmen of
+the stronger; under the beneficent despotism of the English
+Government, which knows no difference of colour and permits no
+oppression, they can sleep, lounge, and laugh away their lives as
+they please, fearing no danger," &c.
+
+Now, then, let us examine for a while this roseate picture of
+Arcadian blissfulness said to be enjoyed by British West Indian
+Negroes in general, and by the Negroes of Trinidad in particular.
+"No distinction of colour" under the British rule, and, better
+still, absolute protection of the weaker against the stronger!  This
+latter consummation especially, [84] Mr. Froude tells us, has been
+happily secured "under the beneficent despotism" of the Crown Colony
+system.  However, let the above vague hyperboles be submitted to the
+test of practical experience, and the abstract government analysed in
+its concrete relations with the people.
+
+Unquestionably the actual and direct interposition of the shielding
+authority above referred to, between man and man, is the immediate
+province of the MAGISTRACY.  All other branches of the Government,
+having in themselves no coercive power, must, from the supreme
+executive downwards, in cases of irreconcilable clashing of
+interests, have ultimate recourse to the magisterial jurisdiction.
+Putting aside, then, whatever culpable remissness may have been
+manifested by magistrates in favour of powerful malfeasants, we would
+submit that the fact of stipendiary justices converting the
+tremendous, far-reaching powers which they wield into an engine of
+systematic oppression, ought to dim by many a shade the glowing
+lustre of Mr. Froude's encomiums.  Facts, authentic and notorious,
+might be adduced in hundreds, especially with respect to [85] the
+Port of Spain and San Fernando magistracies (both of which, since the
+administration of Sir J. R. Longden, have been exclusively the prizes
+of briefless English barristers*), to prove that these gentry, far
+from being bulwarks to the weaker as against the stronger, have, in
+their own persons, been the direst scourges that the poor,
+particularly when coloured, have been afflicted by in aggravation of
+the difficulties of their lot.  Only typical examples can here be
+given out of hundreds upon hundreds which might easily be cited and
+proved against the incumbents of the abovementioned chief stipendiary
+magistracies.  One such example was a matter of everyday discussion
+at the time of Mr. Froude's visit.  The inhabitants were even backed
+in their complaints by the Governor, who had, in response to their
+cry of distress, forwarded their prayer [86] to the home authorities
+for relief from the hard treatment which they alleged themselves to
+be suffering at the hands of the then magistrate.  Our allusion here
+is to the chief town, Port of Spain, the magistracy of which embraces
+also the surrounding districts, containing a total population of
+between 60,000 and 70,000 souls.  Mr. R. D. Mayne filled this
+responsible office during the latter years of Sir J. R. Longden's
+governorship.  He was reputed, soon after his arrival, to have
+announced from the bench that in every case he would take the word of
+a constable in preference to the testimony of any one else.  The
+Barbadian rowdies who then formed the major part of the constabulary
+of Trinidad, and whose bitter hatred of the older residents had been
+not only plainly expressed, but often brutally exemplified, rejoiced
+in the opportunity thus afforded for giving effect to their truculent
+sentiments.  At that time the bulk of the immigrants from Barbados
+were habitual offenders whom the Government there had provided with a
+free passage to wherever they elected to betake themselves.  The more
+intelligent of the men flocked to the Trinidad [87] police ranks,
+into which they were admitted generally without much inquiry into
+their antecedents.  On this account they were shunned by the decent
+inhabitants, a course which they repaid with savage animosity.
+Perjuries the most atrocious and crushing, especially to the
+respectable poor, became the order of the day.  Hundreds of innocent
+persons were committed to gaol and the infamy of convict servitude,
+without the possibility of escape from, or even mitigation of, their
+ignominious doom.  A respectable woman (a native of Barbados, too,
+who in the time of the first immigration of the better sort of her
+compatriots had made Trinidad her home) was one of the first victims
+of this iniquitous state of affairs.
+
+The class of people to which she belonged was noted as orderly,
+industrious and law-abiding, and, being so, it had identified itself
+entirely with the natives of the land of its adoption.  This fact
+alone was sufficient to involve these immigrants in the same lot of
+persecution which their newly arrived countrymen had organized and
+were carrying out against the Trinidadians proper.  It happened that,
+on the occasion to which we wish particularly [88] to refer, the
+woman in question was at home, engaged in her usual occupation of
+ironing for her honest livelihood.  Suddenly she heard a heavy blow
+in the street before her door, and almost simultaneously a loud
+scream, which, on looking hastily out, she perceived to be the cry of
+a boy of some ten or twelve years of age, who had been violently
+struck with the fist by another youth of larger size and evidently
+his senior in age.  The smaller fellow had laid fast hold of his
+antagonist by the collar, and would not let go, despite the blows
+which, to extricate himself and in retaliation of the puny buffets of
+his youthful detainer, he "showered thick as wintry rain."
+
+The woman, seeing the posture of affairs, shouted to the combatants
+to desist, but to no purpose, rage and absorption in their wrathful
+occupation having deafened both to all external sounds.  Seized with
+pity for the younger lad, who was getting so mercilessly the worst of
+it, the woman, hastily throwing a shawl over her shoulders, sprang
+into the street and rushed between the juvenile belligerents.
+Dexterously extricating the hand of the little fellow from the collar
+of his antagonist, she hurried the former [89] into her gateway,
+shouting out to him at the same time to fasten the door on the
+inside.  This the little fellow did, and no doubt gladly, as this
+surcease from actual conflict, short though it was, must have
+afforded space for the natural instinct of self-preservation to
+reassert itself.  Hereupon the elder of the two lads, like a tiger
+robbed of his prey, sprang furiously to the gate, and began to use
+frantic efforts to force an entrance.  Perceiving this, the woman
+(who meanwhile had not been idle with earnest dissuasions and
+remonstrances, which had all proved futile) pulled the irate
+youngster back, and interposed her body between him and the gate,
+warding him off with her hands every time that he rushed forward to
+renew the assault.  At length a Barbadian policeman hove in sight,
+and was hastily beckoned to by the poor ironer, who, by this time,
+had nearly come to the end of her strength.  The uniformed "Bim" was
+soon on the spot; but, without asking or waiting to hear the cause of
+the disturbance, he shouted to the volunteer peacemaker, "I see you
+are fighting: you are my prisoner!"  Saying this, he clutched the
+poor thunderstruck creature by the wrist, and there [90] and then set
+about hurrying her off towards the police station.  It happened,
+however, that the whole affair had occurred in the sight of a
+gentleman of well-known integrity.  He, seated at a window
+overlooking the street, had witnessed the whole squabble, from its
+beginning in words to its culmination in blows; so, seeing that the
+woman was most unjustly arrested, he went out and explained the
+circumstances to the guardian of order.  But to no purpose; the poor
+creature was taken to the station, accompanied by the gentleman, who
+most properly volunteered that neighbourly turn.  There she was
+charged with "obstructing the policeman in the lawful execution of
+his duty."  She was let out on bail, and next day appeared to answer
+the charge.
+
+Mr. Mayne, the magistrate, presided.  The constable told his tale
+without any material deviation from the truth, probably confident,
+from previous experience, that his accusation was sufficient to
+secure a conviction.  On the defendant's behalf, the gentleman
+referred to, who was well known to the magistrate himself, was
+called, and he related the facts as we have above given them.  Even
+Mr. Mayne [91] could see no proof of the information, and this he
+confessed in the following qualified judgment:--
+
+"You are indeed very lucky, my good woman, that the constable has
+failed to prove his case against you; otherwise you would have been
+sent to hard labour, as the ordinance provides, without the option of
+a fine.  But as the case stands, you must pay a fine of L2"!!!
+
+Comment on this worse than scandalous decision would be superfluous.
+
+Another typical case, illustrative of the truth of Mr. Froude's boast
+of the eminent fair play, nay, even the stout protection, that
+Negroes, and generally, "the weaker," have been wont to receive from
+British magistrates, may be related.
+
+An honest, hard-working couple, living in one of the outlying
+districts, cultivated a plot of ground, upon the produce of which
+they depended for their livelihood.  After a time these worthy folk,
+on getting to their holding in the morning, used to find exasperating
+evidence of the plunder overnight of their marketable provisions.
+Determined to discover the depredator, they concealed themselves
+[92] in the garden late one night, and awaited the result.  By that
+means they succeeded in capturing the thief, a female, who, not
+suspecting their presence, had entered the garden, dug out some of
+the provisions, and was about to make off with her booty.  In spite
+of desperate resistance, she was taken to the police station and
+there duly charged with larceny.  Meanwhile her son, on hearing of
+his mother's incarceration, hastened to find her in her cell, and,
+after briefly consulting with her, he decided on entering a
+countercharge of assault and battery against both her captors.
+Whether or not this bold proceeding was prompted by the knowledge
+that the dispensing of justice in the magistrate's court was a mere
+game of cross-purposes, a cynical disregard of common sense and
+elementary equity, we cannot say; but the ultimate result fully
+justified this abnormal hardihood of filial championship.
+
+On the day of the trial, the magistrate heard the evidence on both
+sides, the case of larceny having been gone into first.  For her
+defence, the accused confined herself to simple denials of the
+allegations against her, at the [93] same time entertaining the court
+with a lachrymose harangue about her rough treatment at the hands of
+the accusing parties.  Finally, the decision of the magistrate was:
+that the prisoner be discharged, and the plundered goods restored to
+her; and, as to the countercharge, that the husband and wife be
+imprisoned, the former for three and the latter for two months, with
+hard labour!  When we add that there was, at that time, no Governor
+or Chief Justice accessible to the poorer and less intelligent
+classes, as is now the case (Sir Henry T. Irving and Sir Joseph
+Needham having been respectively superseded by Sir William Robinson
+and Sir John Gorrie), one can imagine what scope there was for
+similar exhibitions of the protecting energy of British rule.
+
+As we have already said, during Mr. Froude's sojourn in Trinidad the
+"sleek, happy, and contented" people, whose condition "admitted of no
+improvement," were yet groaning in bitter sorrow, nay, in absolute
+despair, under the crushing weight of such magisterial decisions as
+those which I have just recorded.  Let me add two more [94] typical
+cases which occurred during Mr. Mayne's tenure of office in the
+island.
+
+L. B. was a member of one of those brawling sisterhoods that
+frequently disturbed the peace of the town of Port of Spain.  She had
+a "pal" or intimate chum familiarly known as "Lady," who staunchly
+stood by her in all the squabbles that occurred with their
+adversaries.  One particular night, the police were called to a
+street in the east of the town, in consequence of an affray between
+some women of the sort referred to.  Arriving on the spot, they found
+the fight already over, but a war of words was still proceeding among
+the late combatants, of whom the aforesaid "Lady" was one of the most
+conspicuous.  A list was duly made out of the parties found so
+engaged, and it included the name of L. B., who happened not to be
+there, or even in Port of Spain at all, she having some days before
+gone into the country to spend a little time with some relatives.
+The inserting of her name was an inferential mistake on the part of
+the police, arising from the presence of "Lady" at the brawl, she
+being well known by them to be the inseparable ally of L. B. on such
+occasions.
+
+[95] It was not unnatural that in the obscurity they should have
+concluded that the latter was present with her altera ego, when in
+reality she was not there.
+
+The participants in the brawl were charged at the station, and
+summonses, including one to L. B., were duly issued.  On her return
+to Port of Spain a day or two after the occurrence, the wrongly
+incriminated woman received from the landlady her key, along with the
+magisterial summons that had resulted from the error of the
+constables.  The day of the trial came on, and L. B. stood before Mr.
+Mayne, strong in her innocence, and supported by the sworn testimony
+of her landlady as well as of her uncle from the country, with whom
+and with his family she had been uninterruptedly staying up to one or
+two days after the occurrence in which she had been thus implicated.
+The evidence of the old lady, who, like thousands of her advanced age
+in the Colony, had never even once had occasion to be present in any
+court of justice, was to the following effect: That the defendant,
+who was a tenant of hers, had, on a certain morning (naming days
+before the affray occurred), [96] come up to her door well dressed,
+and followed by a porter carrying her luggage.  L. B., she continued,
+then handed her the key of the apartment, informing her at the same
+time that she was going for some days into the country to her
+relatives, for a change, and requesting also that the witness should
+on no account deliver the key to any person who should ask for it
+during her absence.  This witness further deposed to receiving the
+summons from the police, which she placed along with the key for
+delivery to L. B. on the latter's return home.
+
+The testimony of the uncle was also decisively corroborative of that
+of the preceding witness, as to the absence from Port of Spain of L.
+B. during the days embraced in the defence.  The alibi was therefore
+unquestionably made out, especially as none of the police witnesses
+would venture to swear to having actually seen L. B. at the brawl.
+The magistrate had no alternative but that of acquiescing in the
+proof of her innocence; so he dismissed the charge against the
+accused, who stood down from among the rest, radiant with
+satisfaction.  The other defendants were duly [97] convicted, and
+sentenced to a term of imprisonment with hard labour.  All this was
+quite correct; but here comes matter for consideration with regard to
+the immaculate dispensation of justice as vaunted so confidently by
+Mr. Froude.
+
+On receiving their sentence the women all stood down from the dock,
+to be escorted to prison, except "Lady," who, by the way, had
+preserved a rigid silence, while some of the other defendants had
+voluntarily and, it may be added, generously protested that L. B.
+was not present on the occasion of this particular row.  "Lady,"
+whether out of affection or from a less respectable motive, cried out
+to the stipendiary justice.  "But, sir, it ain't fair.  How is it
+every time that L. B. and me come up before you, you either fine or
+send up the two of us together, and to-day you are sending me up
+alone?"  Moved either by the logic or the pathos of this objurgation,
+the magistrate, turning towards L. B., who had lingered after her
+narrow escape to watch the issue of the proceedings, thus addressed
+her:--"L. B., upon second thoughts I order you to the same term of
+hard labour at the Royal Gaol with the [98] others."  The poor girl,
+having neither money nor friends intelligent enough to interfere on
+her behalf, had to submit, and she underwent the whole of this
+iniquitous sentence.
+
+The last typical case that we shall give illustrates the singular
+application by this more than singular judge of the legal maxim
+caveat emptor.  A free coolie possessed of a donkey resolved to
+utilize the animal in carting grass to the market.  He therefore
+called on another coolie living at some distance from him, whom he
+knew to own two carts, a small donkey-cart and an ordinary cart for
+mule or horse.  He proposed the purchase of the smaller cart, stating
+his reason for wishing to have it.  The donkey-cart was then shown to
+the intending purchaser, who, along with two Creole witnesses brought
+by him to make out and attest the receipt on the occasion, found some
+of the iron fittings defective, and drew the vendor's attention
+thereto.  He, on his side, engaged, on receiving the amount agreed to
+for the cart, to send it off to the blacksmith for immediate repairs,
+to be delivered to the purchaser next morning at the latest.  On this
+understanding the purchase money was paid down, and the [99] receipt,
+specifying that the sum therein mentioned was for a donkey-cart,
+passed from the vendor to the purchaser of the little vehicle.  Next
+day at about noon the man went with his donkey for the cart.  Arrived
+there, his countryman had the larger of the two carts brought out,
+and in pretended innocence said to the purchaser of the donkey-cart,
+"Here is your cart."  On this a warm dispute arose, which was not
+abated by the presence and protests of the two witnesses of the day
+before, who had hastily been summoned by the victim to bear out his
+contention that it was the donkey-cart and not the larger cart which
+had been examined, bargained for, purchased, and promised to be
+delivered, the day before.
+
+The matter, on account of the sturdiness of the rascal's denials, had
+to be referred to a court of law.  The complainant engaged an able
+solicitor, who laid the case before Mr. Mayne in all its transparent
+simplicity and strength.  The defendant, although he had, and as a
+matter of fact could have, no means of invalidating the evidence of
+the two witnesses, and above all of his receipt with his signature,
+relied upon the fact that the cart which he [100] offered was much
+larger than the one the complainant had actually bought, and that
+therefore complainant would be the gainer by the transaction.
+Incredible as it may sound, this view of the case commended itself to
+the magistrate, who adopted it in giving his judgment against the
+complainant.  In vain did the solicitor protest that all the facts of
+the case were centred in the desire and intention of the prosecutor
+to have specifically a donkey-cart, which was abundantly proved by
+everything that had come out in the proceedings.  In vain also was
+his endeavour to show that a man having only a donkey would be
+hopelessly embarrassed by having a cart for it which was entirely
+intended for animals of much larger size.  The magistrate solemnly
+reiterated his decision, and wound up by saying that the victim had
+lost his case through disregard of the legal maxim caveat emptor--let
+the purchaser be careful.  The rascally defendant thus gained his
+case, and left the court in defiant triumph.
+
+The four preceding cases are thoroughly significant of the original
+method in which thousands of cases were decided by this model
+magistrate, to the great detriment, pecuniary, [101] social, and
+moral, during more than ten years, of between 60,000 and 70,000 of
+the population within the circle of his judicial authority.  What
+shall we think, therefore, of the fairness of Mr. Froude or his
+informants, who,  prompt and eager in imputing unworthy motives to
+gentlemen with characters above reproach, have yet been so silent
+with regard to the flagrant and frequent abuses of more than one of
+their countrymen by whom the honour and fair fame of their nation
+were for years draggled in the mire, and whose misdeeds were the
+theme of every tongue and thousands of newspaper-articles in the West
+Indian Colonies?
+
+     MR. ARTHUR CHILD, S.J.P.
+
+We now take San Fernando, the next most important magisterial
+district after Port of Spain.  At the time of Mr. Froude's visit, and
+for some time before, the duties of the magistracy there were
+discharged by Mr. Arthur Child, an "English barrister" who, of
+course, had possessed the requisite qualification of being hopelessly
+briefless.  For the ideal justice which Mr. Froude would have Britons
+believe is meted out to the weaker classes by their fellow-
+countrymen [102] in the West Indies, we may refer the reader to the
+conduct of the above-named functionary on the memorable occasion of
+the slaughter of the coolies under Governor Freeling, in October,
+1884.  Mr. Child, as Stipendiary justice, had the duty of reading the
+Riot Act to the immigrants, who were marching in procession to the
+town of San Fernando, contrary, indeed, to the Government
+proclamation which had forbidden it; and he it was who gave the order
+to "fire," which resulted fatally to many of the unfortunate devotees
+of Hosein.  This mandate and its lethal consequences anticipated by
+some minutes the similar but far more death-dealing action of the
+Chief of Police, who was stationed at another post in the vicinity of
+San Fernando.  The day after the shooting down of a total of more
+than one hundred immigrants, the protecting action of this magistrate
+towards the weaker folk under his jurisdiction had a striking
+exemplification, to which Mr. Froude is hereby made welcome.  Of
+course there was a general cry of horror throughout the Colony, and
+especially in the San Fernando district, at the fatal outcome of the
+proclamation, which had mentioned only "fine" and "imprisonment,"
+[103] but not Death, as the penalty of disregarding its prohibitions.
+For nearly forty years, namely from their very first arrival in the
+Colony, the East Indian immigrants had, according to specific
+agreement with the Government, invariably been allowed the privilege
+of celebrating their annual feast of Hosein, by walking in procession
+with their Pagodas through the public roads and streets of the
+island, without prohibition or hindrance of any kind from the
+authorities, save and except in cases where rival estate pagodas were
+in danger of getting into collision on the question of precedence.
+On such occasions the police, who always attended the processions,
+usually gave the lead to the pagodas of the labourers of estates
+according to their seniority as immigrants.
+
+In no case up to 1884, after thirty odd years' inauguration in the
+Colony, was the Hosein festival ever pretended to be any cause of
+danger, actual or prospective, to any town or building.  On the
+contrary, business grew brisker and solidly improved at the approach
+of the commemoration, owing to the very considerable sale of parti-
+coloured paper, velvet, calico, and similar articles used in the
+construction [104] of the pagodas.  Governor Freeling, however, was,
+it may be presumed, compelled to see danger in an institution which
+had had nearly forty years' trial, without a single accident
+happening to warrant any sudden interposition of the Government
+tending to its suppression.  At all events, the only action taken in
+1884, in prospect of their usual festival, was to notify the
+immigrants by proclamation, and, it is said, also through authorized
+agents, that the details of their fete were not to be conducted in
+the usual manner; and that their appearance with pagodas in any
+public road or any town, without special license from some competent
+local authority, would entail the penalty of so many pounds fine, or
+imprisonment for so many months with hard labour.  The immigrants, to
+whom this unexpected change on the part of the authorities was
+utterly incomprehensible, both petitioned and sent deputations to the
+Governor, offering guarantees for the, if possible, more secure
+celebration of the Hosein, and praying His Excellency to cancel the
+prohibition as to the use of the roads, inasmuch as it interfered
+with the essential part of their religious rite, which was the
+"drowning," or casting into [105] the sea, of the pagodas.  Having
+utterly failed in their efforts with the Governor, the coolies
+resolved to carry out their religious duty according to prescriptive
+forms, accepting, at the same time, the responsibility in the way of
+fine or imprisonment which they would thus inevitably incur.  A
+rumour was also current at the time that, pursuant to this
+resolution, the head men of the various plantations had authorized a
+general subscription amongst their countrymen, for meeting the
+contingency of fines in the police courts.  All these things were the
+current talk of the population of San Fernando, in which town the
+leading immigrants, free as well as indentured, had begun to raise
+funds for this purpose.
+
+All that the public, therefore, expected would have resulted from the
+intended infringement of the Proclamation was an enormous influx of
+money in the shape of fines into the Colonial Treasury; as no one
+doubted the extreme facility which existed for ascertaining exactly,
+in the case of persons registered and indentured to specific
+plantations, the names and abodes of at least the chief offenders
+against the proclamation.  Accordingly, on the [106] occurrence of
+the bloody catastrophe related above, every one felt that the mere
+persistence in marching all unarmed towards the town, without
+actually attempting to force their way into it, was exorbitantly
+visited upon the coolies by a violent death or a life-long
+mutilation.  This sentiment few were at any pains to conceal; but as
+the poorer and more ignorant classes can be handled with greater
+impunity than those who are intelligent and have the means of self-
+defence, Mr. Justice Child, the very day after the tragedy, and
+without waiting for the pro forma official inquiry into the tragedy
+in which he bore so conspicuous a part, actually caused to be
+arrested, sat to try and sent to hard labour, persons whom the
+police, in obedience to his positive injunctions, had reported to him
+as having condemned the shooting down of the immigrants!  Those who
+were arrested and thus summarily punished had, of course, no means of
+self-protection; and as the case is typical of others, as
+illustrative of "justice-made law" applied to "subject races" in a
+British colony, Mr. Froude is free to accept it, or not, in
+corroboration of his unqualified panegyrics.
+
+[107]
+
+     MR. GROVE HUMPHREY CHAPMAN, S.J.P.
+
+As Stipendary Magistrate of this self-same San Fernando district,
+Grove Humphrey Chapman, Esquire (another English barrister), was the
+immediate predecessor of Mr. Child.  More humane than Mr. Mayne, his
+colleague and contemporary in Port of Spain, this young magistrate
+began his career fairly well.  But he speedily fell a victim to the
+influences immediately surrounding him in his new position.  His
+head, which later events proved never to have been naturally strong,
+began to be turned by the unaccustomed deference which he met with on
+all hands, from high and low, official and non-official, and he
+himself soon consummated the addling of his brain by persistent
+practical revolts against every maxim of the ancient Nazarenes in the
+matter of potations.  His decisions at the court, therefore, became
+perfect emulations of those of Mr. Mayne, as well in perversity as in
+harshness, and many in his case also were the appeals for relief made
+to the head of the executive by the inhabitants of the district--but
+of course in vain.  Governor Irving was at this time in office, and
+the unfortunate [108] victims of perverse judgments--occasionally
+pronounced by this magistrate in his cups--were only poor Negroes,
+coolies, or other persons whose worldly circumstances placed them in
+the category of the "weaker" in the community.  To these classes of
+people that excellent ruler unhappily denied--we dare not say his
+personal sympathy, but--the official protection which, even through
+self-respect, he might have perfunctorily accorded.  Bent, however,
+on running through the whole gamut of extravagance, Mr. Chapman--by
+interpreting official impunity into implying a direct license for the
+wildest of his caprices--plunged headlong with ever accelerating
+speed, till the deliverance of the Naparimas became the welcome
+consequence of his own personal action.  On one occasion it was
+credibly reported in the Colony that this infatuated dispenser of
+British justice actually stretched his official complaisance so far
+as to permit a lady not only to be seated near him on the judicial
+bench, but also to take a part--loud, boisterous and abusive--in the
+legal proceedings of the day.  Meanwhile, as the Governor could not
+be induced to interfere, things went [109] on from bad to worse, till
+one day, as above hinted, the unfortunate magistrate so publicly
+committed himself as to be obliged to be borne for temporary refuge
+to the Lunatic Asylum, whence he was clandestinely shipped from the
+Colony on "six months' leave of absence," never more to resume his
+official station.
+
+The removal of two such magistrates as those whose careers we have so
+briefly sketched out--Mr. Mayne having died, still a magistrate,
+since Mr. Froude's departure--has afforded opportunity for the
+restoration of British protecting influence.  In the person of Mr.
+Llewellyn Lewis, as magistrate of Port of Spain, this opportunity has
+been secured.  He, it is generally rumoured, strives to justify the
+expectations of fair play and even-handed justice which are generally
+entertained concerning Englishmen.  It is, however, certain that with
+a Governor so prompt to hear the cry of the poor as Sir William
+Robinson has proved himself to be, and with a Chief Justice so
+vigilant, fearless, and painstaking as Sir John Gorrie, the entire
+magistracy of the Colony must be so beneficially influenced as to
+preclude [110] the frequency of appeals being made to the higher
+courts, or it may be to the Executive, on account of scandalously
+unjust and senseless decisions.
+
+So long, too, as the names of T. S. Warner, Captain Larcom, and F. H.
+Hamblin abide in the grateful remembrance of the entire population,
+as ideally upright, just, and impartial dispensers of justice, each
+in his own jurisdiction, we can only sigh at the temporal
+dispensation which renders practicable the appointment and retention
+in office of such administrators of the Law as were Mr. Mayne and Mr.
+Chapman.  The widespread and irreparable mischiefs wrought by these
+men still affect disastrously many an unfortunate household; and the
+execration by the weaker in the community of their memory,
+particularly that of Robert Dawson Mayne, is only a fitting
+retribution for their abuse of power.
+
+NOTES
+
+85. *A West Indian official superstition professes to believe that a
+British barrister must make an exceptionally good colonial S.J.P.,
+seeing that he is ignorant of everything, save general English law,
+that would qualify him for the post!  In this, to acquit oneself
+tolerably, some acquaintance with the language, customs, and habits
+of thought of the population is everywhere else held to be of prime
+importance,--native conscientiousness and honesty of purpose being
+definitively presupposed.
+
+
+
+BOOK III: SOCIAL REVOLUTION
+
+[113] Never was the Knight of La Mancha more convinced of his
+imaginary mission to redress the wrongs of the world than Mr. James
+Anthony Froude seems to be of his ability to alter the course of
+events, especially those bearing on the destinies of the Negro in the
+British West Indies.  The doctrinaire style of his utterances, his
+sublime indifference as to what Negro opinion and feelings may be, on
+account of his revelations, are uniquely charming.  In that portion
+of his book headed "Social Revolution" our author, with that mixture
+of frankness and cynicism which is so dear to the soul of the British
+esprit fort of to-day, has challenged a comparison between British
+Colonial policy on the [114] one hand, and the Colonial policy of
+France and Spain on the other.  This he does with an evident
+recklessness that his approval of Spain and France involves a
+definite condemnation of his own country.  However, let us hear
+him:--
+
+"The English West Indies, like other parts of the world, are going
+through a silent revolution.  Elsewhere the revolution, as we hope,
+is a transition state, a new birth; a passing away of what is old and
+worn out, that a fresh and healthier order may rise in its place.  In
+the West Indies the most sanguine of mortals will find it difficult
+to entertain any such hope at all."
+
+As Mr. Froude is speaking dogmatically here of his, or rather our,
+West Indies, let us hear him as he proceeds:--
+
+"We have been a ruling power there for two hundred and fifty years;
+the whites whom we planted as our representatives are drifting into
+ruin, and they regard England and England's policy as the principal
+cause of it.  The blacks whom, in a fit of virtuous benevolence, we
+emancipated, do not feel particularly obliged to us.  They think, if
+they think at all, that they were [115] ill-treated originally, and
+have received no more than was due to them."
+
+Thus far.  Now, as to "the whites whom we planted as our
+representatives," and who, Mr. Froude avers, are drifting into ruin,
+we confess to a total ignorance of their whereabouts in these islands
+in this jubilee year of Negro Emancipation.  Of the representatives
+of Britain immediately before and after Emancipation we happen to
+know something, which, on the testimony of Englishmen, Mr. Froude
+will be made quite welcome to before our task is ended.  With respect
+to Mr. Froude's statement as to the ingratitude of the emancipated
+Blacks, if it is aimed at the slaves who were actually set free, it
+is utterly untrue; for no class of persons, in their humble and
+artless way, are more attached to the Queen's majesty, whom they
+regard as incarnating in her gracious person the benevolence which
+Mr. Froude so jauntily scoffs at.  But if our censor's remark under
+this head is intended for the present generation of Blacks, it is a
+pure and simple absurdity.  What are we Negroes of the present day to
+be grateful for to the US, personified by Mr. Froude and the Colonial
+[116] Office exportations?  We really believe, from what we know of
+Englishmen, that very few indeed would regard Mr. Froude's reproach
+otherwise than as a palpable adding of insult to injury.  Obliged to
+"us," indeed!  Why, Mr. Froude, who speaks of us as dogs and horses,
+suggests that the same kindliness of treatment that secures the
+attachment of those noble brutes would have the same result in our
+case.  With the same consistency that marks his utterances throughout
+his book, he tells his readers "that there is no original or
+congenital difference between the capacity of the White and the Negro
+races."  He adds, too, significantly: "With the same chances and with
+the same treatment, I believe that distinguished men would be
+produced equally from both races."  After this truthful testimony,
+which Pelion upon Ossa of evidence has confirmed, does Mr. Froude, in
+the fatuity of his skin-pride, believe that educated men, worthy of
+the name, would be otherwise than resentful, if not disgusted, at
+being shunted out of bread in their own native land, which their
+parents' labours and taxes have made desirable, in order to afford
+room to blockheads, vulgarians, [117] or worse, imported from beyond
+the seas?  Does Mr. Froude's scorn of the Negroes' skin extend,
+inconsistently on his part, to their intelligence and feelings also?
+And if so, what has the Negro to care--if let alone and not wantonly
+thwarted in his aspirations?  It sounds queer, not to say unnatural
+and scandalous, that Englishmen should in these days of light be the
+champions of injustice towards their fellow-subjects, not for any
+intellectual or moral disqualification, but on the simple account of
+the darker skin of those who are to be assailed and thwarted in their
+life's career and aspirations.  Really, are we to be grateful that
+the colour difference should be made the basis and justification of
+the dastardly denials of justice, social, intellectual, and moral,
+which have characterized the regime of those who Mr. Froude boasts
+were left to be the representatives of Britain's morality and fair
+play?  Are the Negroes under the French flag not intensely French?
+Are the Negroes under the Spanish flag not intensely Spanish?
+Wherefore are they so?  It is because the French and Spanish nations,
+who are neither of them inferior in origin or the [118] nobility of
+the part they have each played on the historic stage, have had the
+dignity and sense to understand the lowness of moral and intellectual
+consciousness implied in the subordination of questions of an
+imperial nature to the slaveholder's anxiety about the hue of those
+who are to be benefited or not in the long run.  By Spain and France
+every loyal and law-abiding subject of the Mother Country has been a
+citizen deemed worthy all the rights, immunities, and privileges
+flowing from good and creditable citizenship.  Those meriting such
+distinction were taken into the bosom of the society which their
+qualifications recommended them to share, and no office under the
+Government has been thought too good or too elevated for men of their
+stamp.  No wonder, then, that Mr. Froude is silent regarding the
+scores of brilliant coloured officials who adorn the civil service of
+France and Spain, and whose appointment, in contrast with what has
+usually been the case in British Colonies, reflects an abiding lustre
+on those countries, and establishes their right to a foremost place
+among nations.
+
+Mr. Froude, in speaking of Chief Justice [119] Reeves, ventures upon
+a smart truism which we can discuss for him, but of course not in the
+sense in which he has meant it.  "Exceptions," our author remarks,
+"are supposed proverbially to prove nothing, or to prove the very
+opposite of what they appear to prove.  When a particular phenomenon
+occurs rarely, the probabilities are strong against the recurrence of
+it."  Now, is it in ignorance, or through disingenuousness, that Mr.
+Froude has penned this argument regarding exceptions?  Surely, in the
+vast area of American life, it is not possible that he could see
+Frederick Douglass alone out of the cluster of prominent Black
+Americans who are doing the work of their country so worthily and so
+well in every official department.  Anyhow, Mr. Froude's history of
+the Emancipation may here be amended for him by a reminder that, in
+the British Colonies, it was not Whites as masters, and Blacks as
+slaves, who were affected by that momentous measure.  In fact, 1838
+found in the British Colonies very nearly as many Negro and Mulatto
+slave-owners as there were white.  Well then, these black and yellow
+planters received their quota, it may be presumed, of [120] the
+L20,000,000 sterling indemnity.  They were part and parcel of the
+proprietary body in the Colonies, and had to meet the crisis like the
+rest.  They were very wealthy, some of these Ethiopic accomplices of
+the oppressors of their own race.  Their sons and daughters were
+sent, like the white planter's children, across the Atlantic for a
+European education.  These young folk returned to their various
+native Colonies as lawyers and doctors.  Many of them were also
+wealthy planters.  The daughters, of course, became in time the
+mothers of the new generation of prominent inhabitants.  Now, in
+America all this was different.  No "nigger," however alabaster fair,
+was ever allowed the privileges of common citizenship, let alone the
+right to hold property in others.  If possessed by a weakness to pass
+for white men, as very many of them could easily have contrived to
+do, woe unto the poor impostors!  They were hunted down from city to
+city as few felons would be, and finally done to death--"serve them
+right!" being the grim commentary regarding their fate for having
+sought to usurp the ineffable privilege of whitemanship!  All this,
+Mr. Froude, was [121] the rule, the practice, in America, with regard
+to persons of colour up to twenty-five years ago.  Now, sir, what is
+the phenomenon which strikes your vision in that mighty Republic to-
+day, with regard to those self-same despised, discountenanced,
+persecuted and harried descendants of Ham?  We shall tell you of the
+change that has taken place in their condition, and also some of the
+reasons of that beneficent revolution.
+
+The Proclamation of Emancipation on January 1st, 1863, was, by
+President Lincoln, frankly admitted to have been a war necessity.  No
+abstract principle of justice or of morals was of primary
+consideration in the matter.  The saving of the Union at any cost,--
+that is, the stern political emergency forced forth the document
+which was to be the social salvation of every descendant of Ham in
+the United States of America.  Close upon the heels of their
+emancipation, the enfranchisement of the Negroes was pushed forward
+by the thorough-going American statesmen.  They had no sentimentality
+to defer to.  The logic of events--the fact not only of the coloured
+race being freedmen, but also of their having been effective [122]
+comrades on the fields of battle, where the blood of eager thousands
+of them had flowed on the Union side, pointed out too plainly that
+men with such claims should also be partners in the resulting
+triumph.
+
+Mr. Froude, being so deferential to skin prejudice, will doubtless
+find it strange that such a measure as the Civil Rights Bill should
+have passed a Congress of Americans.  Assuredly with the feeling
+against the coloured race which custom and law had engrafted into the
+very nature of the vast majority, this was a tremendous call to make
+on the national susceptibilities.  But it has been exactly this that
+has brought out into such vivid contrast the conduct of the British
+statesman, loudly professing to be unprejudiced as to colour, and
+fair and humane, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the
+dealings of the politicians of America, who had, as a matter of fact,
+sucked in aversion and contempt towards the Negro together with their
+mother's milk.  Of course no sane being could expect that feelings so
+deeply ingrained and nourished could be rooted out by logic or by any
+legislative enactment.  But, indeed, it is sublimely creditable to
+[123] the American Government that, whatever might be the personal
+and private sentiments of its individual members as regards race,
+palmam ferat qui meruit--"let him bear the palm who has deserved it"-
+-has been their motto in dealing generally with the claims of their
+Ethiopic fellow-citizens.  Hence it is that in only twenty-five years
+America can show Negro public officers as thick as blackberries,
+while Mr. Froude can mention only Mr. Justice Reeves in FIFTY years
+as a sample of the "exceptional" progress under British auspices of a
+man of African descent!  Verily, if in fifty long years British
+policy can recognize only one single exception in a race between
+which and the white race there is no original or congenital
+difference of capacity, the inference must be that British policy has
+been not only systematically, but also too successfully, hostile to
+the advancement of the Ethiopians subject thereto; while the "fair
+field and no favour" management of the strong-minded Americans has,
+by its results, confirmed the culpability of the English policy in
+its relation to "subject races."
+
+The very suggestive section of "the English [124] in the West
+Indies," from which we have already given extracts, and which bears
+the title "Social Revolution," thus proceeds:--
+
+"But it does not follow that what can be done eventually can be done
+immediately, and the gulf which divides the colours is no arbitrary
+prejudice, but has been opened by the centuries of training and
+discipline which have given us the start in the race" (p. 125
+[Froude]).
+
+The reference in the opening clause of the above citation, as to what
+is eventually possible not being immediately feasible, is to the
+elevation of Blacks to high official posts, such as those occupied by
+Judge Reeves in Barbados, and by Mr. F. Douglass in the United
+States.  We have already disposed by anticipation of the above
+contention of Mr. Froude's, by showing that in only twenty-five years
+America has found hundreds of eminent Blacks to fill high posts under
+her government.  Our author's futile mixture of Judge Reeves'
+exceptional case with that of Fred. Douglass, which he cunningly
+singles out from among so many in the United States, is nothing but a
+subterfuge, of the same queer and flimsy description with which the
+literature of the cause now championed [125] by his eloquence has
+made the world only too familiar.  What can Mr. Froude conceive any
+sane man should see in common between the action of British and of
+American statesmanship in the matter now under discussion?  If his
+utterance on this point is that of a British spokesman, let him abide
+by his own verdict against his own case, as embodied in the words,
+"the gulf which divides the two COLOURS is no arbitrary prejudice,"
+which, coupled with his contention that the elevation of the Blacks
+is not immediately feasible, discloses the wideness of divergence
+between British and American political opinion on this identical
+subject.
+
+Mr. Froude is pathetically eloquent on the colour question.  He tells
+of the wide gulf between the two colours--we suppose it is as wide as
+exists between his white horse and his black horse.  Seriously,
+however, does not this kind of talk savour only too much of the
+slave-pen and the auction-block of the rice-swamp and the cotton-
+field; of the sugar-plantation and the driver's lash?  In the United
+States alone, among all the slave-holding Powers, was the difference
+of race and colour invoked openly and boldly to justify all the
+enormities that [126] were the natural accompaniments of those
+"institutions" of the Past.  But is Mr. Froude serious in invoking
+the ostracizing of innocent, loyal, and meritorious British subjects
+on account of their mere colour?  Physical slavery--which was no
+crime per se, Mr. Froude tells us--had at least overwhelming brute
+power, and that silent, passive force which is even more potential as
+an auxiliary, viz., unenlightened public opinion, whose neutrality is
+too often a positive support to the empire of wrong.
+
+But has Mr. Froude, in his present wild propaganda on behalf of
+political and, therefore, of social repression, anything analogous to
+those two above-specified auxiliaries to rely on?  We trow not.  Then
+why this frantic bluster and shouting forth of indiscreet aspirations
+on be half of a minority to whom accomplished facts, when not
+agreeable to or manipulated by themselves, are a perpetual grievance,
+generating life-long impotent protestations?  Presumably there are
+possibilities the thoughts of which fascinate our author and his
+congeners in this, to our mind, vain campaign in the cause of social
+retrogression.  But, be the incentives what they may, it might not be
+amiss on our [127] part to suggest to those impelled by them that the
+ignoring of Negro opinion in their calculations, though not only
+possible but easily practised fifty years ago, is a portentous
+blunder at the present time.  Verbum sapienti.
+
+Mr. Froude must see that he has set about his Negro-repression
+campaign in too blundering a fashion.  He evidently expects to be
+able to throw dust into the eyes of the intelligent world, juggler-
+wise, through the agency of the mighty pronoun US, as representing
+the entire Anglo-Saxon race, in his advocacy of the now scarcely
+intelligible pretensions of a little coterie of Her Majesty's
+subjects in the West Indies.  These gentry are hostile, he urges, to
+the presence of progressive Negroes on the soil of the tropics!  Yet
+are these self-same Negroes not only natives, but active improvers
+and embellishers of that very soil.  We cannot help concluding that
+this impotent grudge has sprung out of the additional fact that these
+identical Negroes constitute also a living refutation of the sinister
+predictions ventured upon generally against their race, with frantic
+recklessness, even within the last three decades, by affrighted
+slave-holders, of whose ravings Mr. Froude's book is only a [128]
+diluted echo, out of season and outrageous to the conscience of
+modern civilization.
+
+It is patent, then, that the matters which Mr. Froude has sought to
+force up to the dignity of genetic rivalship, has nothing of that
+importance about it.  His US, between whom and the Negro subjects of
+Great Britain the gulf of colour lies, comprises, as he himself owns,
+an outnumbered and, as we hope to prove later on, a not over-
+creditable little clique of Anglo-Saxon lineage.  The real US who
+have started ahead of the Negroes, "through the training and
+discipline of centuries," are assuredly not anything like
+"represented" by the few pretentious incapables who, instead of
+conquering predominance, as they who deserve it always do, like men,
+are whimpering like babies after dearly coveted but utterly
+unattainable enjoyments--to be had at the expense of the interests of
+the Negroes whom they, rather amusingly, affect to despise.  When Mr.
+Froude shall have become able to present for the world's
+contemplation a question respecting which the Anglo-Saxon family, in
+its grand world-wide predominance, and the African family, in its yet
+feeble, albeit promising, incipience of self-adjustment, shall [129]
+actually be competitors, then, and only then, will it be time to
+accept the outlook as serious.  But when, as in the present case, he
+invokes the whole prestige of the Anglo-Saxon race in favour of the
+untenable pretensions of a few blases of that race, and that to the
+social and political detriment of tens of thousands of black fellow-
+subjects, it is high time that the common sense of civilization
+should laugh him out of court.  The US who are flourishing, or
+pining, as the case may be, in the British West Indies--by favour of
+the Colonial Office on the former hypothesis, or, on the second,
+through the misdirection of their own faculties--do not, and, in the
+very nature of things, cannot in any race take the lead of any set of
+men endowed with virile attributes, the conditions of the contest
+being on all sides identical.
+
+Pass we onward to extract and comment on other passages in this very
+engaging section of Mr. Froude's book.  On the same page (125) he
+says:--
+
+"The African Blacks have been free enough for thousands, perhaps for
+ten thousands of years, and it has been the absence of restraint
+which has prevented them from becoming civilized."
+
+[130] All this, perhaps, is quite true, and, in the absence of
+positive evidence to the contrary of our author's dogmatic
+assertions, we save time by allowing him all the benefit he can
+derive from whatever weight they might carry.
+
+"Generation has followed generation, and the children are as like
+their fathers as the successive generations of apes."
+
+To this we can have nothing to object; especially in view of what the
+writer goes on to say, and that on his own side of the hedge--
+somewhat qualified though his admission may be:--"The whites, it is
+likely enough, succeeded one another with the same similarity for a
+series of ages."  Our speculator grows profoundly philosophic here;
+and in this mood thus entertains his readers in a strain which,
+though deep, we shall strive to find clear:--
+
+"It is now supposed that human race has been on the planet for a
+hundred thousand years at least; and the first traces of civilization
+cannot be thrown back at furthest beyond six thousand.  During all
+this time mankind went on treading in the same steps, century after
+century making no more advance than the birds and beasts."
+
+[131] In all this there is nothing that can usefully be taken
+exception to; for speculation and conjecture, if plausible and
+attractive, are free to revel whenever written documents and the
+unmistakable indications of the earth's crust are both entirely at
+fault.  Warming up with his theme, Mr. Froude gets somewhat ambiguous
+in the very next sentence.  Says he:--
+
+"In Egypt or India or one knows not where, accident or natural
+development quickened into life our moral and intellectual faculties;
+and these faculties have grown into what we now experience, not in
+the freedom in which the modern takes delight, but under the sharp
+rule of the strong over the weak, of the wise over the unwise."
+
+Our author, as we see, begins his above quoted deliverance quite at a
+loss with regard to the agency to which the incipience, growth, and
+fructification of man's faculties should be attributed.  "Accident,"
+"natural development," he suggests, quickened the human faculties
+into the progressive achievements which they have accomplished.  But
+then, wherefore is this writer so forcible, so confident in his
+prophecies regarding Negroes and their future temporal condition
+[132] and proceedings, since it is "accident," and "accident" only,
+that must determine their fulfilment?  Has he so securely bound the
+fickle divinity to his service as to be certain of its agency in the
+realization of his forecasts?  And if so, where then would be the
+fortuitousness that is the very essence of occurrences that glide,
+undesigned, unexpected, unforeseen, into the domain of Fact, and
+become material for History?  So far as we feel capable of
+intelligently meditating on questions of this inscrutable nature, we
+are forced to conclude that since "natural development" could be so
+regular, so continuous, and withal so efficient, in the production of
+the marvellous results that we daily contemplate, there must be
+existent and in operation--as, for instance, in the case of the
+uniformity characterizing for ages successive generations of mankind,
+as above adduced by our philosopher himself--some controlling LAW,
+according and subject to which no check has marred the harmonious
+progression, or prevented the consummations that have crowned the
+normal exercise of human energy, intellectual as well as physical.
+
+The sharp rule of the strong over the [133] weak," is the first
+clause of the Carlylean-sounding phrase which embodies the requisite
+conditions for satisfactory human development.  The terms expressive
+of these conditions, however, while certainly suggesting and
+embracing the beneficent, elevating influence and discipline of
+European civilization, such as we know and appreciate it, do not by
+any means exclude the domination of Mr. Legree or any other typical
+man-monster, whose power over his fellow-creatures is at once a
+calamity to the victims and a disgrace to the community tolerating
+not only its exercise, but the very possibility of its existence.
+The sharp rule of "the wise over the unwise," is the closing section
+of the recommendation to ensure man's effective development.  Not
+even savages hesitate to defer in all their important designs to the
+sought-for guidance of superior judgments.  But in the case of us
+West Indian Blacks, to whom Mr. Froude's doctrine here has a special
+reference, is it suggested by him that the bidders for predominance
+over us on the purely epidermal, the white skin, ground, are ipso
+facto the monopolists of directing wisdom?  It surely cannot be so;
+for Mr. Froude's own chapters regarding both the [134] nomination by
+Downing Street of future Colonial office-holders and the disorganized
+mental and moral condition of the indigenous representatives--as he
+calls them!--of his country in these climes, preclude the possibility
+that the reference regarding the wise can be to them.  Now since this
+is so, we really cannot see why the pains should have been taken to
+indite the above truism, to the truth whereof, under every normal or
+legitimate circumstance, the veriest barbarian, by spontaneously
+resorting to and cheerfully abiding by it, is among the first to
+secure practical effect.
+
+"Our own Anglo-Saxon race," continues our author, "has been capable
+of self-government only after a thousand years of civil and spiritual
+authority.  European government, European instruction, continued
+steadily till his natural tendencies are superseded by higher
+instincts, may shorten the probation period of the negro.  Individual
+blacks of exceptional quality, like Frederick Douglass in America, or
+the Chief Justice of Barbados, will avail themselves of opportunities
+to rise, and the freest opportunity OUGHT TO BE offered them."  Here
+we are reminded of the dogma laid down by a certain [135] class of
+ethnologists, to the effect that intellectuality, when displayed by a
+person of mixed European and African blood, must always be assigned
+to the European side of the parentage; and in the foregoing citation
+our author speaks of two personages undoubtedly belonging to the
+class embraced in the above dogma.  Three specific objections may,
+therefore, be urged against the statements which we have indicated in
+the above quotation.  First and foremost, neither Judge Reeves nor
+Mr. Fred Douglass is a black man, as Mr. Froude inaccurately
+represents each of them to be.  The former is of mixed blood, to what
+degree we are not adepts enough to determine; and the latter, if his
+portrait and those who have personally seen him mislead us not, is a
+decidedly fair man.
+
+We, of course, do not for a moment imagine that either of those
+eminent descendants of Ham cares a jot about the settlement of this
+question, which doubtless would appear very trivial to both.  But as
+our author's crusade is against the Negro--by which we understand the
+undiluted African descendant, the pure Negro, as he singularly
+describes Chief Justice Reeves--our anxiety is to show that there
+exist, both [136] in the West Indies and in the United States, scores
+of genuine black men to whom neither of these two distinguished
+patriots would, for one instant, hesitate to concede any claim to
+equality in intellectual and social excellence.  The second exception
+which we take is, as we have already shown in a previous page, to the
+persistent lugging in of America by Mr. Froude, doubtless to keep his
+political countrymen in countenance with regard to the Negro
+question.  We have already pointed out the futility of this
+proceeding on our author's part, and suggested how damaging it might
+prove to the cause he is striving to uphold.  "Blacks of exceptional
+quality," like the two gentlemen he has specially mentioned, "will
+avail themselves of opportunities to rise."  Most certainly they
+will, Mr. Froude--but, for the present, only in America, where those
+opportunities are really free and open to all.  There no parasitical
+non-workers are to be found, eager to eat bread, but in the sweat of
+other people's brows; no impecunious title-bearers; no importunate
+bores, nor other similar characters whom the Government there would
+regard it as their duty  "to provide for"--by quartering them on the
+revenues [137] of Colonial dependencies.  But in the British Crown--
+or rather "Anglo-West Indian"--governed Colonies, has it ever been,
+can it ever be, thus ordered?  Our author's description of the
+exigencies that compel injustice to be done in order to requite, or
+perhaps to secure, Parliamentary support, coupled with his account of
+the bitter animus against the coloured race that rankles in the bosom
+of his "Englishmen in the West Indies," sufficiently proves the utter
+hypocrisy of his recommendation, that the freest opportunities should
+be offered to Blacks of the said exceptional order.  The very wording
+of Mr. Froude's recommendation is disingenuous.  It is one stone sped
+at two birds, and which, most naturally, has missed them both.
+
+Mr. Froude knew perfectly well that, twenty-five years before he
+wrote his book, America had thrown open the way to public advancement
+to the Blacks, as it had been previously free to Whites alone.  His
+use of "should be offered," instead of "are offered," betrays his
+consciousness that, at the time he was writing, the offering of any
+opportunities of the kind he suggests was a thing still to be desired
+under British jurisdiction.  The third objection [138] which we
+shall take to Mr. Froude's bracketing of the cases of Mr. Fred
+Douglass and of Judge Reeves together, is that, when closely
+examined, the two cases can be distinctly seen to be not in any way
+parallel.  The applause which our author indirectly bids for on
+behalf of British Colonial liberality in the instance of Mr. Reeves
+would be the grossest mockery, if accorded in any sense other than we
+shall proceed to show.  Fred Douglass was born and bred a slave in
+one of the Southern States of the Union, and regained his freedom by
+flight from bondage, a grown man, and, of course, under the
+circumstances, solitary and destitute.  He reached the North at a
+period when the prejudice of the Whites against men of his race was
+so rampant as to constitute a positive mania.
+
+The stern and cruelly logical doctrine, that a Negro had no rights
+which white men were bound to respect, was in full blast and
+practical exemplification.  Yet amidst it all, and despite of it all,
+this gifted fugitive conquered his way into the Temple of Knowledge,
+and became eminent as an orator, a writer, and a lecturer on
+political and general subjects.  Hailed abroad [139] as a prodigy,
+and received with acclamation into the brotherhood of intelligence,
+abstract justice and moral congruity demanded that such a man should
+no longer be subject to the shame and abasement of social, legal, and
+political proscription.  The land of his birth proved herself equal
+to this imperative call of civilized Duty, regardless of customs and
+the laws, written as well as unwritten, which had doomed to life-long
+degradation every member of the progeny of Ham.  Recognizing in the
+erewhile bondman a born leader of men, America, with the unflinching
+directness that has marked her course, whether in good or in evil,
+responded with spontaneous loyalty to the inspiration of her highest
+instincts.  Shamed into compunction and remorse at the solid fame and
+general sympathy secured for himself by a son of her soil, whom, in
+the wantonness of pride and power, she had denied all fostering care
+(not, indeed, for any conscious offending on his part, but by reason
+of a natural peculiarity which she had decreed penal), America, like
+a repentant mother, stooped from her august seat, and giving with
+enthusiasm both hands to the outcast, she helped him to stand forward
+and erect, [140] in the dignity of untrammeled manhood, making him,
+at the same time, welcome to a place of honour amongst the most
+gifted, the worthiest and most favoured of her children.
+
+Chief Justice Reeves, on the other hand, did not enter the world, as
+Douglass had done, heir to a lot of intellectual darkness and
+legalized social and political proscription.  Associated from
+adolescence with S. J. Prescod, the greatest leader of popular
+opinion whom Barbados has yet produced, Mr. Reeves possessed in his
+nature the material to assimilate and reflect in his own principles
+and conduct the salient characteristics of his distinguished Mentor.
+Arrived in England to study law, he had there the privilege of the
+personal acquaintance of Lord Brougham, then one of the Nestors of
+the great Emancipation conflict.  On returning to his native island,
+which he did immediately after his call to the bar, Mr. Reeves sprung
+at once into the foremost place, and retained his precedence till his
+labours and aspirations were crowned by his obtaining the highest
+judicial post in that Colony.  For long years before becoming Chief
+Justice, Mr. Reeves had conquered for himself the respect and
+confidence [141] of all Barbadians--even including the ultra
+exclusive "Anglo-West-Indians" of Mr. Froude--by the manful
+constitutional stand which, sacrificing official place, he had
+successfully made against the threatened abrogation of the Charter of
+the Colony, which every class and colour of natives cherish and
+revere as a most precious, almost sacred, inheritance.  The
+successful champion of their menaced liberties found clustering
+around him the grateful hearts of all his countrymen, who, in their
+hour of dread at the danger of their time-honoured constitution, had
+clung in despair to him as the only leader capable of heading the
+struggle and leading the people, by wise and constitutional guidance,
+to the victory which they desired but could not achieve for
+themselves.
+
+Sir William Robinson, who was sent out as pacificator, saw and took
+in at a glance the whole significance of the condition of affairs,
+especially in their relation to Mr. Reeves, and vice versa.  With the
+unrivalled pre-eminence and predominant personal influence of the
+latter, the Colonial Office had possessed more than ample means of
+being perfectly familiar.  What, then, could be more natural and
+consonant with [142] sound policy than that the then acknowledged,
+but officially unattached, head of the people (being an eminent
+lawyer), should, on the occurrence of a vacancy in the highest
+juridical post, be appointed to co-operate with the supreme head of
+the Executive?  Mr. Reeves was already the chief of the legal body of
+the Colony; his appointment, therefore, as Chief Justice amounted to
+nothing more than an official ratification of an accomplished and
+unalterable fact.  Of course, it was no fault of England's that the
+eminent culture, political influence, and unapproached legal status
+of Mr. Reeves should have coincided exactly with her political
+requirements at that crisis, nor yet that she should have utilized a
+coincidence which had the double advantage of securing the permanent
+services, whilst realizing at the same time the life's aspiration, of
+a distinguished British subject.  But that Mr. Froude should be
+dinning in our ears this case of benefited self-interest, gaining the
+amplest reciprocity, both as to service and serviceableness, with the
+disinterested spontaneity of America's elevation of Mr. Douglass, is
+but another proof of the obliquity of the moral medium through [143]
+which he is wont to survey mankind and their concerns.
+
+The distinction between the two marvellous careers which we have been
+discussing demands, as it is susceptible of, still sharper
+accentuation.  In the final success of Reeves, it is the man himself
+who confronts one in the unique transcendency and victoriousness of
+personal merit.  On the other hand, a million times the personal
+merit of Reeves combined with his own could have availed Douglass
+absolutely nothing in the United States, legal and social proscript
+that he was, with public opinion generally on the side of the laws
+and usages against him.  The very little countries of the world are
+proverbial for the production of very great men.  But, on the other
+hand, narrowness of space favours the concentration and coherence of
+the adverse forces that might impede, if they fail of utterly
+thwarting, the success which may happen to be grudged by those
+possessing the will and the power for its obstruction.  In Barbados,
+so far as we have heard, read, and seen ourselves of the social ins
+and outs of that little sister-colony, the operation of the above
+mentioned [144] influences has been, may still be, to a certain
+extent, distinctly appreciable.  Although in English jurisprudence
+there is no law ordaining the proscription, on the ground of race or
+colour, of any eligible candidate for social or political
+advancement, yet is it notorious that the ethics and practices of the
+"Anglo-West Indians"--who, our author has dared to say, represent the
+higher type of Englishmen--have, throughout successive generations,
+effectually and of course detrimentally operated, as though by a
+positive Medo-Persian edict, in a proscriptive sense.  It therefore
+demanded extraordinary toughness of constitutional fibre, moral,
+mental, and, let us add, physical too, to overcome the obstacles
+opposed to the progress of merit, too often by persons in
+intelligence below contempt, but, in prosperity and accepted
+pretension, formidable indeed to fight against and overcome.  We
+shudder to think of the petty cabals, the underbred indignities,
+direct and indirect, which the present eminent Judge had to watch
+against, to brush aside, to smile at, in course of his epic strides
+towards the highest local pinnacle of his profession.  But [145] with
+him, as Time has shown, it was all sure and safe.
+
+Providence had endowed him with the powers and temperament that break
+down, when opportunity offers, every barrier to the progress of the
+gifted and strong and brave.  That opportunity, in his particular
+case, offered itself in the Confederation crisis.  Distracted and
+helpless "Anglo-West Indians" thronged to him in imploring crowds,
+praying that their beloved Charter should be saved by the exertion of
+his incomparable abilities.  Save and except Dr. Carrington, there
+was not a single member of the dominant section in Barbados whom it
+would not be absurd to name even as a near second to him whom all
+hailed as the Champion of their Liberties.  In the contest to be
+waged the victory was not, as it never once has been, reserved to the
+SKIN or pedigree of the combatants.  The above two matters, which in
+the eyes of the ruling "Bims" had, throughout long decades of
+undisturbed security, been placed before and above all possible
+considerations, gravitated down to their inherent insignificance when
+Intellect and Worth were destined to fight out the issue.  Mr. [146]
+Reeves, whose possession of the essential qualifications was
+admittedly greater than that of every colleague, stood, therefore, in
+unquestioned supremacy, lord of the political situation, with the
+result above stated.
+
+To what we have already pointed out regarding the absolute
+impossibility of such an opportunity ever presenting itself in
+America to Mr. Douglass, in a political sense, we may now add that,
+whereas, in Barbados, for the intellectual equipment needed at the
+crisis, Mr. Reeves stood quite alone, there could, in the bosom of
+the Union, even in respect of the gifts in which Mr. Douglass was
+most brilliant, be no "walking over the course" by him.  It was in
+the country and time of Bancroft, Irving, Whittier, Longfellow,
+Holmes, Bryant, Motley, Henry Clay, Dan Webster, and others of the
+laureled phalanx which has added so great and imperishable a lustre
+to the literature of the English tongue.
+
+We proceed here another step, and take up a fresh deliverance of our
+author's in reference to the granting of the franchise to the black
+population of these Colonies.  "It is," says Mr. James Anthony
+Froude, who is just as prophetic [147] as his prototypes, the slave-
+owners of the last half-century, "it is as certain as anything future
+can be, that if we give the negroes as a body the political
+privileges which we claim for ourselves, they will use them only to
+their own injury."  The forepart of the above citation reads very
+much as if its author wrote it on the principle of raising a ghost
+for the mere purpose of laying it.  What visionary, what dreamer of
+impossible dreams, has ever asked for the Negroes as a body the same
+political privileges which are claimed for themselves by Mr. Froude
+and others of his countrymen, who are presumably capable of
+exercising them?  No one in the West Indies has ever done so silly a
+thing as to ask for the Negroes as a body that which has not, as
+everybody knows, and never will be, conceded to the people of Great
+Britain as a body.  The demand for Reform in the Crown Colonies--a
+demand which our author deliberately misrepresents--is made neither
+by nor for the Negro, Mulatto, White, Chinese, nor East Indian.  It
+is a petition put forward by prominent responsible colonists--the
+majority of whom are Whites, and mostly Britons besides.
+
+[148] Their prayer, in which the whole population in these Colonies
+most heartily join, is simply and most reasonably that we, the said
+Colonies, being an integral portion of the British Empire, and
+having, in intelligence and every form of civilized progress,
+outgrown the stage of political tutelage, should be accorded some
+measure of emancipation therefrom.  And thereby we--White, Black,
+Mulatto, and all other inhabitants and tax-payers--shall be able to
+protect ourselves against the self-seeking and bold indifference to
+our interests which seem to be the most cherished expression of our
+rulers' official existence.  It may be possible (for he has attempted
+it), that our new instructor in Colonial ethics and politics, under
+the impulsion of skin-superiority, and also of confidence in the
+probable success of experiments successfully tried fifty years
+before, does really believe in the sensibleness of separating
+COLOURS, and representing the wearers of them as being generally
+antagonistic to one another in Her Majesty's West Indian Dominions.
+How is it then, we may be permitted to ask Mr. Froude, that no
+complaint of the sort formulated by him as against the Blacks has
+ever been put [149] forward by the thousands of Englishmen,
+Scotchmen, Irishmen, and other Europeans who are permanent
+inhabitants, proprietors, and tax-payers of these Colonies?  The
+reason is that Anglo-West Indianism, or rather Colonialism, is the
+creed of a few residents sharply divisible into two classes in the
+West Indies.  Labouring conjointly under race-madness, the first
+believes that, as being of the Anglo-Saxon race, they have a right to
+crow and dominate in whatever land they chance to find themselves,
+though in their own country they or their forefathers had had to be
+very dumb dogs indeed.  The Colonial Office has for a long time been
+responsible for the presence in superior posts of highly salaried
+gentry of this category, who have delighted in showing themselves off
+as the unquestionable masters of those who supply them with the pay
+that gives them the livelihood and position they so ungratefully
+requite. These fortunate folk, Mr. Froude avers, are likely to
+leave our shores in a huff, bearing off with them the civilizing
+influences which their presence so surely guarantees.  Go tell to the
+marines that the seed of Israel flourishing in the borders of
+[150] Misraim will abandon their flourishing district of Goshen
+through sensitiveness on account of the idolatry of the devotees of
+Isis and Osiris!
+
+The second and less placable class of "Englishmen in the West
+Indies," whose final departure our author would have us to believe
+would complete the catastrophe to progress in the British Antilles,
+is very impalpable indeed.  We cannot feel them.  We have failed to
+even see them.  True, Mr. Froude scouts on their behalf the bare
+notion of their condescending to meet, on anything like equality, us,
+whom he and they pretend (rather anachronistically, at least) to have
+been their former slaves, or servants.  But where, in the name of
+Heaven, where are these sortis de la cuisse de Jupiter, Mr. Froude?
+If they are invisible, mourning in impenetrable seclusion over the
+impossibility of having, as their fathers had before them, the luxury
+of living at the Negroes' expense, shall we Negroes who are in the
+sunshine of heaven, prepared to work and win our way, be anywise
+troubled in our Jubilee by the drivelling ineptitude which insanely
+reminds us of the miseries of those who went before us?  We have thus
+arrived at the cardinal, [151] essential misrepresentation, out of
+scores which compose "The Bow of Ulysses," and upon which its phrases
+mainly hinge.  Semper eadem--"Always the same"--has been the proud
+motto of the mightiest hierarchy that has controlled human action and
+shaped the destinies of mankind, no less in material than in ghostly
+concerns.  Yet is a vast and very beneficial change, due to the
+imperious spirit of the times, manifest in the Roman Church.  No
+longer do the stake, the sword, and the dismal horrors of the
+interdict figure as instruments for assuring conformity and
+submission to her dogmas.  She is now content to rest her claims on
+herbeneficence in the past, as attested by noble and imperishable
+memorials of her solicitude for the poor and the ignorant, and in
+proclaiming the gospel without those ghastly coercives to its
+acceptance.  Surely such a change, however unpalatable to those who
+have been compelled to make it, is most welcome to the outside world
+at large.  "Always the same" is also, or should be, the device of the
+discredited herd whose spokesman Mr. Froude is so proud to be.  In
+nothing has their historical.  character, as shown in the published
+literature of their [152] cause up to 1838, exhibited any sign of
+amelioration.  It cannot be affected by the spirit and the lessons of
+the times.  Mendacity and a sort of judicial blindness seem to be the
+two most salient characteristics by which are to be distinguished
+these implacable foes and would-be robbers of human rights and
+liberty.  But, gracious heavens! what can tempt mortals to incur this
+weight of infamy?  Wealth and Power?  To be (very improbably) a
+Croesus or (still more improbably) a Bonaparte, and to perish at the
+conventional age, and of vulgar disease, like both?  Turpitudes on
+the part of sane men, involving the sacrifice of the priceless
+attributes of humanity, can be rendered intelligible by the supreme
+temporal gains above indicated, but only if exemption from the common
+lot of mankind--in the shape of care, disease, and death--were
+accompaniments of those prizes.
+
+In favour of slavery, which has for so many centuries desolated the
+African family and blighted its every chance of indigenous progress--
+of slavery whose abolition our author so ostentatiously regrets--only
+one solitary permanent result, extending in every case over [153] a
+natural human life, has been paraded by him as a respectable
+justification.  At page 246, speaking of Negroes met by him during a
+stroll which he took at Mandeville, Jamaica, he tells us:--
+
+"The people had black faces; but even they had shaped their manners
+in the old English models.  The men touched their hats respectfully
+(as they eminently did not in Kingston and its environs).  The women
+smiled and curtsied, and the children looked shy when one spoke to
+them.  The name of slavery is a horror to us; but there must have
+been something human and kindly about it, too, when it left upon the
+character the marks of courtesy and good breeding"!
+
+Alas for Africa and the sufferings of her desolated millions, in view
+of so light-hearted an assessment as this!  Only think of the ages of
+outrage, misery, and slaughter--of the countless hecatombs that
+Mammon is hereby absolved from having directly exacted, since the
+sufficing expiatory outcome of it all has been only "marks of
+courtesy and good breeding"!  Marks that are displayed, forsooth, by
+the survivors of the ghastly experiences or by [154] their
+descendants!  And yet, granting the appreciable ethical value of the
+hat-touching, the smirking and curtseyings of those Blacks to persons
+whom they had no reason to suspect of unfriendliness, or whose white
+face they may in the white man's country have greeted with a civility
+perhaps only prudential, we fail to discover the necessity of the
+dreadful agency we have adverted to, for securing the results on
+manners which are so warmly commended.  African explorers, from Mungo
+Park to Livingstone and Stanley, have all borne sufficient testimony
+to the world regarding the natural friendliness of the Negro in his
+ancestral home, when not under the influence of suspicion, anger, or
+dread.
+
+It behoves us to repeat (for our detractor is a persistent repeater)
+that the cardinal dodge by which Mr. Froude and his few adherents
+expect to succeed in obtaining the reversal of the progress of the
+coloured population is by misrepresenting the elements, and their
+real attitude towards one another, of the sections composing the
+British West Indian communities.  Everybody knows full well that
+Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Irishmen (who are not officials), as [155]
+well as Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, and other
+nationalities, work in unbroken harmony and, more or less, prosper in
+these Islands.  These are no cherishers of any vain hankering after a
+state of things in which men felt not the infamy of living not only
+on the unpaid labour, but at the expense of the sufferings, the
+blood, and even the life of their fellow-men.  These men, honourable
+by instinct and of independent spirit, depend on their own resources
+for self-advancement in the world--on their capital either of money
+in their pockets or of serviceable brains in their heads, energy in
+their limbs, and on these alone, either singly or more or less in
+combination.  These reputable specimens of manhood have created homes
+dear to them in these favoured climes; and they, at any rate, being
+on the very best terms with all sections of the community in which
+their lot is cast, have a common cause as fellow-sufferers under the
+regime of Mr. Froude's official "birds of passage."  The agitation in
+Trinidad tells its own tale.  There is not a single black man--though
+there should have been many--among the leaders of the movement for
+Reform.  Nevertheless the honourable [156] and truthful author of
+"The English in the West Indies," in order to invent a plausible
+pretext for his sinister labours of love on behalf of the poor pro-
+slavery survivals, and despite his knowledge that sturdy Britons are
+at the head of the agitation, coolly tells the world that it is a
+struggle to secure "negro domination."
+
+The further allegation of our author respecting the black man is
+curious and, of course, dismally prophetic.  As the reader may
+perhaps recollect, it is to the effect that granting political power
+to the Negroes as a body, equal in scope "to that claimed by Us"
+(i.e., Mr. Froude and his friends), would certainly result in the use
+of these powers by the Negroes to their own injury.  And wherefore?
+If Mr. Froude professes to believe--what is a fact--that there is "no
+original or congenital difference of capacity" between the white and
+the African races, where is the consistency of his urging a
+contention which implies inferiority in natural shrewdness, as
+regards their own affairs, on the part of black men?  Does this
+blower of the two extremes of temperature in the same breath pretend
+that the average British voter is better informed, can see more
+clearly what is for his own advantage, [157] is better able to
+assess the relative merits of persons to be entrusted with the
+spending of his taxes, and the general management of his interests?
+If Mr. Froude means all this, he is at issue not only with his own
+specific declaration to the contrary, but with facts of overwhelming
+weight and number showing precisely the reverse.  We have personally
+had frequent opportunities of coming into contact, both in and out of
+England, with natives of Great Britain, not of the agricultural order
+alone, but very often of the artisan class, whose ignorance of the
+commonest matters was as dense as it was discreditable to the land of
+their birth and breeding.  Are these people included (on account of
+having his favourite sine qua non of a fair skin) in the US of this
+apostle of skin-worship, in the indefeasible right to political power
+which is denied to Blacks by reason, or rather non-reason, of their
+complexion?
+
+The fact is, that, judging by his own sentiments and those of his
+Anglo-West Indian friends, Mr. Froude calculated on producing an
+impression in favour of their discreditable views by purposely
+keeping out of sight the numerous European and other sufferers under
+the yoke [158] which he sneers at seeing described by its proper
+appellation of "a degrading tyranny."  The prescriptive unfavourable
+forecast of our author respecting political power in the hands of the
+Blacks may, in our opinion, be hailed as a warrant for its bestowal
+by those in whose power that bestowal may be.  As a pro-slavery
+prophecy, equally dismal and equally confident with the hundreds that
+preceded it, this new vaticination may safely be left to be
+practically dealt with by the Race, victimized and maligned, whose
+real genius and character are purposely belied by those who expect to
+be gainers by the process.  Invested with political power, the
+Negroes, Mr. Froude goes on to assure his readers, "will slide back
+into their old condition, and the chance will be gone of lifting them
+to the level to which we have no right to say they are incapable of
+rising."  How touchingly sympathetic!  How transcendently liberal and
+righteous!  But, to speak the truth, is not this solicitude of our
+cynical defamer on our behalf, after all, a useless waste of emotion
+on his part?  Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.+  The tears of the
+crocodile are most copious in close view of the banquet on his prey.
+This [159] reiterated twaddle of Mr. Froude, in futile and
+unseasonable echo of the congenial predictions of his predecessors in
+the same line, might be left to receive not only the answer of his
+own book to the selfsame talk of the slavers fifty years ago, but
+also that of the accumulated refutations which America has furnished
+for the last twenty-five years as to the retrograde tendency so
+falsely imputed.  But, taking it as a serious contention, we find
+that it involves a suggestion that the according of electoral votes
+to citizens of a certain complexion would, per se and ipso facto,
+produce a revulsion and collapse of the entire prevailing
+organization and order of a civilized community.
+
+What talismanic virtue this prophet of evil attributes to a vote in
+the hand of a Negro out of Barbados, where for years the black man's
+vote has been operating, harmlessly enough, Heaven knows, we cannot
+imagine.  At all events, as sliding back on the part of a community
+is a matter which would require some appreciable time, however brief,
+let us hope that the authorities charged "to see that the state
+receive no detriment" would be vigilant enough and in time to arrest
+the evil and vindicate [160] the efficiency of the civilized methods
+of self-preservation.
+
+Our author concludes by another reference to Chief Justice Reeves:
+"Let British authority die away, and the average black nature, such
+as it now is, be left free to assert itself, there will be no more
+negroes like him in Barbadoes or anywhere."  How the dying away of
+British authority in a British Colony is to come to pass, Mr. Froude
+does not condescend here explicitly to state.  But we are left free
+to infer from the whole drift of "The English in the West Indies"
+that it will come through the exodus en masse said to be threatened
+by his "Anglo-West Indians."  Mr. Froude sympathetically justifies
+the disgust and exasperation of these reputable folk at the presence
+and progress of the race for whose freedom and ultimate elevation
+Britain was so lavish of the wealth of her noblest intellects,
+besides paying the prodigious money-ransom of TWENTY MILLION pounds
+sterling.  With regard to our author's talk about "the average black
+nature, such as it now exists, being left free to assert itself," and
+the dire consequences therefrom to result, we can only feel pity at
+the desperate straits to [161] which, in his search for a pretext for
+gratuitous slander, a man of our author's capacity has been so
+ignominiously reduced.  All we can say to him with reference to this
+portion of his violent suppositions is that "the average black
+nature, such as it now exists," should NOT, in a civilized community,
+be left free to assert itself, any more than the average white, the
+average brown, the average red, or indeed any average colour of human
+nature whatsoever.  As self-defence is the first law of nature, it
+has followed that every condition of organized society, however
+simple or primitive, is furnished with some recognized means of self-
+protection against the free assertion of itself by the average nature
+of any of its members.
+
+Of course, if things should ever turn out according to Mr. Froude's
+desperate hypothesis, it may also happen that there will be no more
+Negroes like Mr. justice Reeves in Barbados.  But the addition of the
+words "or anywhere" to the above statement is just another of those
+suppressions of the truth which, absolutely futile though they are,
+constitute the only means by which the policy he writes to promote
+can possibly be made to [162] appear even tolerable.  The assertion
+of our author, therefore, standing as it actually does, embracing the
+whole world, is nothing less than an audacious absurdity, for there
+stand the United States, the French and Spanish islands--not to speak
+of the Central and South American Republics, Mexico, and Brazil--all
+thronged with black, mixed blood, and even half-breed high officials,
+staring him and the whole world in the face.
+
+The above noted suppression of the truth to the detriment of the
+obnoxious population recalls a passage wherein the suggestion of what
+is not the truth has been resorted to for the same purpose.  At page
+123 we read: "The disproportion of the two races--always dangerously
+large--has increased with ever-gathering velocity since the
+emancipation.  It is now beyond control on the old lines."  The use
+of the expletive "dangerously," as suggestive of the truculence of
+the people to whom it refers, is critically allowable in view of the
+main intention of the author.  But what shall we say of the
+suggestion contained in the very next sentence, which we have
+italicized?  We are required by it to understand that in slavery-time
+the [163] planters had some organized method, rendered impracticable
+by the Emancipation, of checking, for their own personal safety, the
+growth of the coloured population.  If we, in deference to the
+superior mental capacity of our author, admit that self-interest was
+no irresistible motive for promoting the growth of the human
+"property" on which their prosperity depended, we are yet at liberty
+to ask what was the nature of the "old lines" followed for
+controlling the increase under discussion.  Was it suffocation of the
+babes by means of sulphur fumes, the use of beetle-paste, or exposure
+on the banks of the Caribbean rivers?  In the later case History
+evidently lost a chance of self-repetition in the person of some
+leader like Moses, the Hebra-Egyptian Spartacus, arising to avenge
+and deliver his people.
+
+We now shall note how he proceeds to descant on slavery itself:--
+"Slavery," says he, "was a survival from a social order which had
+passed away, and slavery could not be continued.  IT DOES NOT FOLLOW
+THAT per se IT WAS A CRIME.  The negroes who were sold to the dealers
+in the factories were most of them either slaves already to worse
+masters or were servi, servants [164] in the old meaning of the
+word, or else criminals, servati or reserved from death.  They would
+otherwise have been killed, and since the slave trade has been
+abolished, are again killed in the too celebrated customs. . . ."
+
+Slavery, as Mr. Froude and the rest of us are bound to discuss it at
+present, is by no means susceptible of the gloss which he has
+endeavoured, in the above extract, to put on it.  The British nation,
+in 1834, had to confront and deal with the only species of slavery
+which was then within the cognizance of public morals and practical
+politics.  Doubtless our author, learned and erudite as he is, would
+like to transport us to those patriarchal ages when, under theocratic
+decrees, the chosen people were authorized to purchase (not to
+kidnap) slaves, and keep them as an everlasting inheritance in their
+posterity.  The slaves so purchased, we know, became members of the
+families to which their lot was attached, and were hedged in from
+cruel usage by distinct and salutary regulations.  This is the only
+species of slavery which--with the addition of the old Germanic self-
+enslavements and the generally prevailing ancient custom of pledging
+one's personal services [165] in liquidation of indebtedness--can be
+covered by the singular verdict of noncriminality which our author
+has pronounced.  He, of course, knows much better than we do what the
+condition of slaves was in Greece as well as in Rome.  He knows, too,
+that the "wild and guilty phantasy that man could hold property in
+man," lost nothing of its guilt or its wildness with the lapse of
+time and the changes of circumstances which overtook and affected
+those reciprocal relations.  Every possibility of deterioration,
+every circumstance wherein man's fallen nature could revel in its
+worst inspirations, reached culmination at the period when the
+interference of the world, decreed by Providence, was rendered
+imperative by the sufferings of the bondsmen.  It is this crisis of
+the history of human enslavement that Mr. Froude must talk about, if
+he wishes to talk to any purpose on the subject at all.  His scoffs
+at British "virtuous benevolence," and his imputation of ingratitude
+to the Negro in respect of that self-same benevolence, do not refer
+to any theocratic, self-contracted, abstract, or idyllic condition of
+servitude.  They pin his meaning down [166] to that particular phase
+when slavery had become not only "the sum," but the very
+quintessence, "of all human villainies."
+
+At its then phase, slavery had culminated into being a menace,
+portentous and far encroaching, to not only the moral life but the
+very civilization of the higher types of the human family, so
+debasing and blighting were its effects on those who came into even
+tolerating contact with its details.  The indescribable atrocities
+practised on the slaves, the deplorable sapping of even respectable
+principles in owners of both sexes--all these stood forth in their
+ineffable hideousness before the uncorrupted gaze of the moral
+heroes, sons of Britain and America, and also of other countries,
+who, buckling on the armour of civilization and right, fought for the
+vindication of them both, through every stern vicissitude, and won
+the first grand, ever-memorable victory of 1838, whereof we so
+recently celebrated the welcome Jubilee!  Oh! it was a combat of
+archangels against the legions that Mammon had banded together and
+incited to the conflict.  But though it was Sharp, Clarkson,
+Wilberforce, and the rest [167] of that illustrious host of cultured,
+lofty-souled, just, merciful, and beneficent men, who were thus the
+saviours, as well as the servants, of society, yet have we seen it
+possible for an Englishman of to-day to mouth against their memory
+the ineptitudes of their long-vanquished foes, and to flout the
+consecrated dead in their graves, as the Boeotian did the living
+Pericles in the market-place of Athens!
+
+Why waste words and time on this defamer of his own countrymen, who,
+on account of the material gain and the questionable martial glory of
+the conquest, eulogizes Warren Hastings, the viceregal plunderer of
+India, whilst, in the same breath, he denounces Edmund Burke for
+upholding the immutable principles of right and justice!  These
+principles once, and indubitably now, so precious in their fullest
+integrity to the normal British conscience, must henceforth, say Mr.
+Froude and his fellow-colonialists, be scored off the moral code of
+Britain, since they "do not pay" in tangible pelf, in self-
+aggrandisement, or in dazzling prestige.
+
+The statement that many negroes who were sold to the dealers in the
+factories were "slaves [168] already to worse masters" is, in the
+face of facts which could not possibly have been unknown to him, a
+piece of very daring assertion.  But this should excite no wonder,
+considering that precise and scrupulous accuracy would be fatal to
+the discreditable cause to which he so shamelessly proclaims his
+adhesion.  As being familiar since early childhood with members of
+almost every tribe of Africans (mainly from or arriving by way of the
+West Coast) who were brought to our West Indies, we are in a position
+to contradict the above assertion of Mr. Froude's, its unfaltering
+confidence notwithstanding.  We have had the Madingoes, Foulahs,
+Houssas, Calvers, Gallahs, Karamenties, Yorubas, Aradas, Cangas,
+Kroos, Timnehs, Veis, Eboes, Mokoes, Bibis, and Congoes, as the most
+numerous and important of the tribal contribution of Africa to the
+population of these Colonies.  Now, from what we have intimately
+learned of these people (excepting the Congoes, who always appeared
+to us an inferior tribe to all the others), we unhesitatingly deny
+that even three in ten of the whole number were ever slaves in their
+own country, in the sense of having been born under any organized
+[169] system of servitude.  The authentic records relating to the
+enslavement of Africans, as a regular systematized traffic, do not
+date further back than five centuries ago.  It is true that a great
+portion of ancient literature and many monuments bear distinct
+evidence, all the more impressive because frequently only casual,
+that, from the earliest ages, the Africans had shared, in common with
+other less civilized peoples, the doom of having to furnish the
+menial and servile contingents of the more favoured sections of the
+human family.  Now, dating from, say, five hundred years ago, which
+was long indeed after the disappearance of the old leading empires of
+the world, we have (save and except in the case of Arab incursionists
+into the Eastern and Northern coasts) no reliable authority for
+saying, or even for supposing, that the tribes of the African
+interior suffered from the molestations of professional man-hunters.
+
+It was the organization of the West Coast slave traffic towards the
+close of the sixteenth century, and the extermination of the
+Caribbean aborigines by Spain, soon after Columbus had discovered the
+Western Continent, which [170] gave cohesion, system, impetus, and
+aggressiveness to the trade in African flesh and blood.  Then the
+factory dealers did not wait at their seaboard mart, as our author
+would have us suppose, for the human merchandize to be brought down
+to them.  The auri sacra fames, the accursed craving for gain, was
+too imperious for that.  From the Atlantic border to as far inland as
+their emissaries could penetrate, their bribes, in every species of
+exchangeable commodities, were scattered among the rapacious chiefs
+on the river banks; while these latter, incited as well by native
+ferocity as by lust of gain, rushed forth to "make war" on their
+neighbours, and to kidnap, for sale to the white purchaser, every
+man, woman, and child they could capture amidst the nocturnal flames,
+confusion, tumult, and terror resulting from their unexpected
+irruption.  That the poor people thus captured and sold into foreign
+on age were under worse masters than those under whom they, on being
+actually bought and becoming slaves, were doomed to experience all
+the atrocities that have thrilled with horror the conscience of the
+civilized Christian world, is a statement of worse than [171]
+childish absurdity.  Every one, except Mr. Froude and his fellow-
+apologists for slavery, knows that the cruelty of savage potentates
+is summary, uncalculating, and, therefore, merciful in its
+ebullitions.  A head whisked off, brains dashed out, or some other
+short form of savage dispatch, is the preferential method of
+destruction.  With our author's better masters, there was the long,
+dreary vicissitude, beginning from the horrors of the capture, and
+ending perhaps years upon years after, in some bush or under the lash
+of the driver.  The intermediate stages of the starvation life of
+hunger, chains, and hideous exposure at the barancoon, the stowing
+away like herrings on board the noisome ship, the suffocation, the
+deck-sores wrought into the body by the attrition of the bonier parts
+of the system against the unyielding wood--all these, says Mr.
+Froude, were more tolerable than the swift doing away with life under
+an African master!  Under such, at all events, the care and comfort
+suitable to age were strictly provided for, and cheered the advanced
+years of the faithful bondsman.
+
+After a good deal of talk, having the same logical value, our author,
+in his enthusiasm for [172] slavery, delivers himself thus: "For
+myself, I would rather be the slave of a Shakespeare or a Burghley,
+than the slave of a majority in the House of Commons, or the slave of
+my own folly."  Of the four above specified alternatives of
+enslavement, it is to be regretted that temperament, or what is more
+likely, perhaps, self-interest, has driven him to accept the fourth,
+or the latter of the two deprecated yokes, his book being an
+irrefutable testimony to the fact.  For, most assuredly, it has not
+been at the prompting of wisdom that a learned man of unquestionably
+brilliant talents and some measure of accorded fame could have
+prostituted those talents and tarnished that fame by condescending to
+be the literary spokesman of the set for whose miserable benefit he
+recommends the statesmen of his country to perjure and compromise
+themselves, regardless of inevitable consequences, which the value of
+the sectional satisfaction to be thereby given would but very poorly
+compensate.  Possibly a House of Commons majority, whom this
+dermatophilist evidently rates far lower than his "Anglo-West
+Indians," might, if he were their Slave, have protected their own
+self- [173] respect by restraining him from vicariously scandalizing
+them by his effusions.
+
+After this curious boast about his preferences as a hypothetic
+bondsman, Mr. Froude proceeds gravely to inform his readers that
+"there may be authority yet not slavery; a soldier is not a slave, a
+wife is not a slave. . ." and he continues, with a view of utilizing
+these platitudes against the obnoxious Negro, by telling us that
+persons sustaining the above specified and similar relations "may not
+live by their own wills, or emancipate themselves at their own
+pleasure from positions in which nature has placed them, or into
+which they have themselves voluntarily entered.  The negroes of the
+West Indies are children, and not yet disobedient children. . . . If
+you enforce self-government upon them when they are not asking for
+it, you may . . . wilfully drive them back into the condition of
+their ancestors, from which the slave-trade was the beginning of
+their emancipation."!  The words which we have signalized by italics
+in the above extract could have been conceived only by a bigot--such
+an atrocious sentiment being possible only as the product of mind or
+morals [174] wrenched hopelessly out of normal action.  All the
+remainder of this hashing up of pointless commonplaces has for its
+double object a suggestio falsi against us Negroes as a body, and a
+diverting of attention, as we have proved before, from the numerous
+British claimants of Reform, whose personality Mr. Froude and his
+friends would keep out of view, provided their crafty policy has the
+result of effectually repressing the hitherto irrepressible, and, as
+such, to the "Anglo-West Indian," truly detestable Negro.
+
+NOTES
+
+158. +Translation: "I fear the Greeks even when they bear gifts."
+
+
+
+BOOK III: WEST INDIAN CONFEDERATION
+
+[175] In heedless formulation of his reasons, if such they should be
+termed, for urging tooth and nail the non-according of reform to the
+Crown-governed Colonies, our author puts forth this dogmatic
+deliverance (p. 123):--
+
+"A West Indian self-governing dominion is possible only with a full
+Negro vote.  If the whites are to combine, so will the blacks.  It
+will be a rule by the blacks and for the blacks."
+
+That a constitution for any of our diversely populated Colonies which
+may be fit for it is possible only with "a full Negro vote" (to the
+extent within the competence of such voting), goes without saying, as
+must be the case with every section of the Queen's subjects eligible
+for the franchise.  The duly qualified Spaniard, [176] Coolie,
+Portuguese, or man of any other non-British race, will each thus have
+a vote, the same as every Englishman or any other Briton.  Why, then,
+should the vote of the Negro be so especially a bugbear?  It is
+because the Negro is the game which our political sportsman is in
+full chase of, and determined to hunt down at any cost.  Granted,
+however, for the sake of argument, that black voters should
+preponderate at any election, what then?  We are gravely told by this
+latter-day Balaam that "If the whites are to combine, so will the
+blacks," but he does not say for what purpose.
+
+His sentence, therefore, may be legitimately constructed in full for
+him in the only sense which is applicable to the mutual relations
+actually existing between those two directly specified sections of
+British subjects who he would fain have the world believe live in a
+state of active hostility:--"If the whites are to combine for the
+Promotion of the general welfare, as many of the foremost of them
+have done before and are doing now, so will the blacks also combine
+in the support of such whites, and as staunch auxiliaries equally
+interested in the furtherance of the same ameliorative [177]
+objects."  Except in the sense embodied in the foregoing sentence, we
+cannot, in these days, conceive with what intent persons of one
+section should so specially combine as to compel combination on the
+part of persons of any other.  The further statement that a
+confederation having a full black voting-power would be a government
+"by the blacks and for the blacks," is the logical converse of the
+now obsolete doctrine of Mr. Froude's inspirers--"a government by
+whites should be only for whites."  But this formula, however
+strenuously insisted on by those who gave it shape, could never,
+since even before three decades from the first introduction of
+African slaves, be thoroughly put in practice, so completely had
+circumstances beyond man's devising or control compelled the altering
+of men's minds and methods with regard to the new interests which had
+irresistibly forced themselves into importance as vital items in
+political arrangements.  Nowadays, therefore, that Mr. Froude should
+desire to create a state of feeling which had, and could have had, no
+existence with regard to the common interests of the inhabitants for
+upwards of two full centuries, is [178] evidently an excess of
+confidence which can only be truly described as amazing.  But, after
+all, what does our author mean by the words "a government by the
+blacks?"  Are we to understand him as suggesting that voting by black
+electors would be synonymous with electing black representatives?  If
+so, he has clearly to learn much more than he has shown that he
+lacks, in order to understand and appreciate the vital influences at
+work in West Indian affairs.  Undoubtedly, being the spokesman of few
+who (secretly) avow themselves to be particularly hostile to
+Ethiopians, he has done no more than reproduce their sentiments.
+For, conscious, as these hankerers after the old "institutions" are,
+of being utterly ineligible for the furthering of modern progressive
+ideas, they revenge themselves for their supersession on everybody
+and everything, save and except their own arrogant stolidity.  White
+individuals who have part and lot in the various Colonies, with their
+hearts and feelings swayed by affections natural to their birth and
+earliest associations; and Whites who have come to think the land of
+their adoption as dear to themselves as the land of their birth,
+entertain no such dread of [179] their fellow-citizens of any other
+section, whom they estimate according to intelligence and probity,
+and not according to any accident of exterior physique.  Every
+intelligent black is as shrewd regarding his own interests as our
+author himself would be regarding his in the following hypothetical
+case: Some fine day, being a youth and a bachelor, he gets wedded,
+sets up an establishment, and becomes the owner of a clipper yacht.
+For his own service in the above circumstances we give him the credit
+to believe that, on the persons specified below applying among others
+to him for employment, as chamber-maid and house-servant, and also as
+hands for the vessel, he would, in preference to any ordinarily
+recommended white applicants, at once engage the two black servant-
+girls at President Churchill's in Dominica, the droghermen there as
+able seamen, and as cabin-boy the lad amongst them whose precocious
+marine skill he has so warmly and justly extolled.  It is not because
+all these persons are black, but because of the soul-consciousness of
+the selector, that they each (were they even blue) had a title to
+preferential consideration, his experience and sense of fitness being
+[180] their most effectual supporters.  Similarly, the Negro voter
+would elect representatives whom he knew he could trust for
+competency in the management of his affairs, and not persons whose
+sole recommendation to him would be the possession of the same kind
+of skin.  Nor, from what we know of matters in the West Indies, do we
+believe that any white man of the class we have eulogized would
+hesitate to give his warmest suffrage to any black candidate who he
+knew would be a fitting representative of his interests.  We could
+give examples from almost every West Indian island of white and
+coloured men who would be indiscriminately chosen as their candidate
+by either section.  But the enumeration is needless, as the fact of
+the existence of such men is too notorious to require proof.
+
+Mr. Froude states plainly enough (p. 123) that, whereas a whole
+thousand years were needed to train and discipline the Anglo-Saxon
+race, yet "European government, European instruction, continued
+steadily till his natural tendencies are superseded by a higher
+instinct, may shorten the probation period of the negro."  Let it be
+supposed that this period of probation [181] for the Negro should
+extend, under such exceptionally favourable circumstances, to any
+period less than that which is alleged to have been needed by the
+Anglo-Saxon to attain his political manhood--what then are the
+prospects held out by Mr. Froude to us and our posterity on our
+mastering the training and discipline which he specially recommends
+for Blacks?  Our author, in view, doubtless, of the rapidity of our
+onward progress, and indeed our actual advancement in every respect,
+thus answers (pp. 123-4):--"Let a generation or two pass by and carry
+away with them the old traditions, and an English governor-general
+will be found presiding over a black council, delivering the speeches
+made for him by a black prime minister; and how long could this
+endure?  No English gentleman would consent to occupy so absurd a
+situation."
+
+And again, more emphatically, on the same point (p. 285):--"No
+Englishman, not even a bankrupt peer, would consent to occupy such
+position; the blacks themselves would despise him if he did; and if
+the governor is to be one of their own race and colour, how long
+would such a connection endure?"
+
+[182] It is plainly to be seen from the above two extracts that the
+political ethics of our author, being based on race and colour
+exclusively, would admit of no conceivable chance of real elevation
+to any descendant of Africa, who, being Ethiopian, could not possibly
+change his skin.  The "old traditions" which Mr. Froude supposes to
+be carried away by his hypothetical (white) generations who have
+"passed by," we readily infer from his language, rendered impossible
+such incarnations of political absurdity as those he depicts.  But
+what should be thought of the sense, if not indeed the sanity, of a
+grave political teacher who prescribes "European government" and
+"European education" as the specifics to qualify the Negro for
+political emancipation, and who, when these qualifications are
+conspicuously mastered by the Negro who has undergone the training,
+refuses him the prize, because he is a Negro?  We see further that,
+in spite of being fit for election to council, and even to be prime
+ministers competent to indite governors' messages, the pigment under
+our epidermis dooms us to eventual disappointment and a life-long
+condition of contempt.  Even so is it [183] desired by Mr. Froude and
+his clients, and not without a spice of piquancy is their opinion
+that for a white ruler to preside and rule over and accept the best
+assistance of coloured men, qualified as above stated, would be a
+self-degradation too unspeakable for toleration by any Englishman--
+"even a bankrupt peer."  Unfortunately for Mr. Froude, we can point
+him to page 56 of this his very book, where, speaking of Grenada and
+deprecating the notion of its official abandonment, our author
+says:--
+
+"Otherwise they [Negroes] were quiet fellows, and if the politicians
+would only let them alone, they would be perfectly contented, and
+might eventually, if wisely managed, come to some good. . . . Black
+the island was, and black it would remain.  The conditions were never
+likely to arise which would bring back a European population; but a
+governor who was a sensible man, who would reside and use his natural
+influence, could manage it with perfect ease."
+
+Here, then, we see that the governor of an entirely black population
+may be a sensible man, and yet hold the post.  Our author, indeed,
+gives the Blacks over whom this sensible governor would hold rule as
+being in number [184] just 40,000 souls; and we are therefore bound
+to accept the implied suggestion that the dishonour of holding
+supremacy over persons of the odious colour begins just as their
+number begins to count onward from 40,000!  There is quite enough in
+the above verbal vagaries of our philosopher to provoke a volume of
+comment.  But we must pass on to further clauses of this precious
+paragraph.  Mr. Froude's talent for eating his own words never had a
+more striking illustration than here, in his denial of the utility of
+native experience as the safest guide a governor could have in the
+administration of Colonial affairs.  At page 91 he says:--"Among the
+public servants of Great Britain there are persons always to be found
+fit and willing for posts of honour and difficulty, if a sincere
+effort be made to find them."
+
+A post of honour and difficulty, we and all other persons in the
+British dominions had all along understood was regarded as such in
+the case of functionaries called upon to contend with adverse forces
+in the accomplishment of great ends conceived by their superiors.
+But we find that, according to Mr. Froude, all the credit that has
+hitherto redounded to those [185] who had succeeded in such tasks has
+been in reality nothing more than a gilding over of disgrace,
+whenever the exertions of such officials had been put forth amongst
+persons not wearing a European epidermis.  The extension of British
+influence and dominion over regions inhabited by races not white is
+therefore, on the part of those who promote it, a perverse opening of
+arenas for the humiliation and disgrace of British gentlemen, nay,
+even of those titled members of the "black sheep" family--bankrupt
+peers!  As we have seen, however, ample contradiction and refutation
+have been considerately furnished by the same objector in this same
+volume, as in his praises of the governor just quoted.
+
+The cavil of Mr. Froude about English gentlemen reading messages
+penned by black prime ministers applies with double force to English
+barristers (who are gentlemen by statute) receiving the law from the
+lips of black Judges.
+
+For all that, however, an emergency arose so pressing as to compel
+even the colonialism of Barbados to practically and completely refute
+this doctrine, by praying for, and submitting with gratitude to, the
+supreme headship of a [186] man of the race which our author so
+finically depreciates.  In addition it may be observed that for a
+governor to even consult his prime minister in the matter of
+preparing his messages might conceivably be optional, whilst it is
+obligatory on all barristers, whether English or otherwise, to defer
+to the judge's interpretation of the law in every case--appeal
+afterwards being the only remedy.  As to the dictum that "the two
+races are not equal and will not blend," it is open to the fatal
+objection that, having himself proved, with sympathizing pathos, how
+the West Indies are now well-nigh denuded of their Anglo-Saxon
+inhabitants, Mr. Froude would have us also understand that the
+miserable remnant who still complainingly inhabit those islands must,
+by doing violence to the understanding, be taken as the whole of the
+world-pervading Anglo-Saxon family.  The Negroes of the West Indies
+number a good deal more than two million souls.  Does this suggester
+of extravagances mean that the prejudices and vain conceit of the few
+dozens whom he champions should be made to override and overbear, in
+political arrangements, the serious and solid interests of so many
+[187] hundreds of thousands?  That "the two races are not equal" is a
+statement which no sane man would dispute, but acquiescence in its
+truth involves also a distinct understanding that the word race, as
+applied in the present case by our author, is a simple accommodation
+of terms--a fashion of speech having a very restricted meaning in
+this serious discussion.
+
+The Anglo-Saxon race pervades Great Britain, its cradle, and the
+Greater Britain extending almost all over the face of the earth,
+which is the arena of its activities and marvellous achievements.  To
+tell us, therefore, as Mr. Froude does, that the handful of
+malcontents whose unrespectable grievance he holds up to public
+sympathy represents the Anglo-Saxon race, is a grotesque facon de
+parler.  Taking our author's "Anglo-West Indians" and the people of
+Ethiopian descent respectively, it would not be too much to assert,
+nor in anywise difficult to prove by facts and figures, that for
+every competent individual of the former section in active civilized
+employments, the coloured section can put forward at least twenty
+thoroughly competent rivals.  Yet are these latter the people whom
+the classic Mr. [188] Froude wishes to be immolated, root and branch,
+in all their highest and dearest interests, in order to secure the
+maintenance of "old traditions" which, he tells us, guaranteed for
+the dominant cuticle the sacrifice of the happiness of down-trodden
+thousands!  Referring to his hypothetical confederation with its
+black officeholders, our author scornfully asks:---
+
+"And how long would this endure?"
+
+The answer must be that, granting the existence of such a state of
+things, its duration would be not more nor less than under white
+functionaries.  For according to himself (p. 124): "There is no
+original or congenital difference of capacity between" the white and
+black races, and "with the same chances and the same treatment, . . .
+distinguished men would be produced equally from both races."
+
+If, therefore, the black ministers whose hue he so much despises do
+possess the training and influence rendering them eligible and
+securing their election to the situations we are considering, it must
+follow that their tenure of office would be of equal duration with
+that of individuals of the white race under the same conditions.  Not
+content with making himself [189] the mouthpiece of English
+gentlemen in this matter, our author, with characteristic hardihood,
+obtrudes himself into the same post on behalf of Negroes; saying
+that, in the event of even a bankrupt peer accepting the situation of
+governor-general over them, "The blacks themselves would despise
+him"!
+
+Mr. Froude may pertinently be asked here the source whence he derived
+his certainty on this point, inasmuch as it is absolutely at variance
+with all that is sensible and natural; for surely it is both foolish
+and monstrous to suppose that educated men would infer the
+degradation of any one from the fact of such a one consenting to
+govern and co-operate with themselves for their own welfare.  He
+further asks on the same subject:--
+
+"And if the governor is to be one of their own race and colour, how
+long could such a connection endure?"
+
+Our answer must be the same as with regard to the duration of the
+black council and black prime minister carrying out the government
+under the same conditions.  It must be regretted that no indication
+in his book, so far as it professes to deal with facts and with [190]
+persons not within the circle of his clients, would justify a belief
+that its wanton misstatements have filtrated through a mind entitled
+to declare, with the authority of self-consciousness, what a
+gentleman would or would not do under given circumstances.
+
+In reiteration of his favourite doctrine of the antagonism between
+the black and white races, our author continues on the same page to
+say:---
+
+"No one, I presume, would advise that the whites of the island should
+govern.  The relations between the two populations are too
+embittered, and equality once established by law, the exclusive
+privilege of colour over colour cannot be restored.  While slavery
+continued, the whites ruled effectively and economically; the blacks
+are now as they."
+
+As far as could possibly be endeavoured, every proof has been crowded
+into this book in refutation of this favourite allegation of Mr.
+Froude's.  It is only an idle waste of time to be thus harping on his
+colour topic.  No one can deserve to govern simply because he is
+white, and no one is bound to be subject simply because he is black.
+The whole of West [191] Indian history, even after the advent of the
+attorney-class, proves this, in spite of the efforts to secure
+exclusive white domination at a time when crude political power might
+have secured it.
+
+"The relations between the two populations are too embittered," says
+Mr. Froude.  No doubt his talk on this point would be true, had any
+such skin-dominancy as he contemplates been officially established;
+but as at present most officials are appointed (locally at least)
+according to their merit, and not to their epidermis, nothing is
+known of the embittered relations so constantly dinned into our ears.
+Whatever bitterness exists is in the minds of those gentry who would
+like to be dominant on the cheap condition of showing a simple bodily
+accident erected by themselves into an evidence and proof of
+superiority.
+
+"The exclusive privilege of colour over colour cannot be restored."
+Never in the history of the British West Indies--must we again state-
+-was there any law or usage establishing superiority in privileges
+for any section of the community on account of colour.  This
+statement of fact is also and again an answer to, and refutation of,
+the succeeding allegation [192] that, "While slavery continued, the
+whites ruled effectively and economically."  It will be yet more
+clearly shown in a later part of this essay that during slavery, in
+fact for upwards of two centuries after its introduction, the West
+Indies were ruled by slave-owners, who happened to be of all colours,
+the means of purchasing slaves and having a plantation being the one
+exclusive consideration in the case.  It is, therefore, contrary to
+fact to represent the Whites exclusively as ruling, and the Blacks
+indiscriminately as subject.
+
+He goes on to say, "There are two classes in the community; their
+interests are opposite as they are now understood."  As regards the
+above, Mr. Froude's attention may be called to the fact that
+classification in no department of science has ever been based on
+colour, but on relative affinity in certain salient qualities.  To
+use his own figure, no horse or dog is more or less a horse or dog
+because it happens to be white or black.  No teacher marshals his
+pupils into classes according to any outward physical distinction,
+but according to intellectual approximation.  In like manner there
+has been wealth for hundreds of men of Ethiopic origin, [193] and
+poverty for hundreds of men of Caucasian origin, and the reverse in
+both cases.  We have, therefore, had hundreds of black as well as
+white men who, under providential dispensation, belonged to the
+class, rich men; while, on the other hand, we have had hundreds of
+white men who, under providential dispensation, belonged to the
+class, poor men.  Similarly, in the composition of a free mixed
+community, we have hundreds of both races belonging to the class,
+competent and eligible; and hundreds of both races belonging to the
+class, incompetent and ineligible: to both of which classes all
+possible colours might belong.  It is from the first mentioned that
+are selected those who are to bear the rule, to which the latter
+class is, in the very nature of things, bound to be subject.  There
+is no government by reason merely of skins.  The diversity of
+individual intelligence and circumstances is large enough to embrace
+the possibility of even children being, in emergencies, the most
+competent influencers of opinion and action.
+
+But let us analyse this matter for just a while more.  The fatal
+objection to all Mr. Froude's advocacy of colour-domination is that
+[194] it is futile from being morally unreasonable.  In view of the
+natural and absolute impossibility of reviving the same external
+conditions under which the inordinate deference and submission to
+white persons were both logically and inevitably engendered and
+maintained, his efforts to talk people into a frame of mind
+favourable to his views on this subject are but a melancholy waste of
+well-turned sentences.  Man's estimate of his fellow-man has not and
+never can have any other standard, save and except what is the
+outcome of actual circumstances influencing his sentiment.  In the
+primitive ages, when the fruits of the earth formed the absorbing
+object of attention and interest, the men most distinguished for
+successful culture of the soil enjoyed, as a consequence, a larger
+share than others of popular admiration and esteem.  Similarly, among
+nomadic tribes, the hunters whose courage coped victoriously with the
+wild and ferocious denizens of the forest became the idols of those
+who witnessed and were preserved by such sylvan exploits.  When men
+came at length to venture in ships over the trackless deep in pursuit
+of commerce and its gains, the mariner grew important in [195] public
+estimation.  The pursuit of commerce and its gains led naturally to
+the possession of wealth.  This, from the quasi-omnipotence with
+which it invests men--enabling them not only to command the best
+energies, but also, in many cases, to subvert the very principles of
+their fellows--has, in the vast majority of cases, an overpowering
+sway on human opinion: a sway that will endure till the Millennium
+shall have secured for the righteous alone the sovereignty of the
+world.  Likewise, as cities were founded and constitutions
+established, those who were foremost as defenders of the national
+interests, on the field of bodily conflict or in the intellectual
+arena, became in the eyes of their contemporaries worthiest of
+appreciation--and so on of other circumstances through which
+particular personal distinctions created claims to preference.
+
+In the special case of the Negroes kidnapped out of Africa into
+foreign bondage, the crowning item in their assessment of their alien
+enslavers was the utter superiority, over their most redoubtable "big
+men," which those enslavers displayed.  They actually subjugated and
+put in chains, like the commonest peasants, native [196] potentates
+at whose very names even the warriorhood of their tribes had been
+wont to blench.  But far surpassing even this in awful effect was the
+doom meted out to the bush-handlers, the medicine-men, the rain-
+compellers, erewhile so inscrutably potent for working out the bliss
+or the bale of friend or enemy.  "Lo, from no mountain-top, from no
+ceiba-hollow in the forest recesses, has issued any interposing sign,
+any avenging portent, to vindicate the Spirit of Darkness so foully
+outraged in the hitherto inviolate person of his chosen minister!
+Verily, even the powers of the midnight are impotent against these
+invaders from beyond the mighty salt-water!  Here, huddled together
+in confused, hopeless misery and ruin, lie, fettered and prostrate,
+even priest as well as potentate, undistinguishable victims of crude,
+unblenching violence, with its climax of nefarious sacrilege.  We,
+common mortals, therefore, can hope for no deliverance from, or even
+succour in, the woful plight thus dismally contrived for us all by
+the fair-skinned race who have now become our masters."  Such was
+naturally the train of thought that ran through those forlorn bosoms.
+The formidable death-dealing guns [197] of the invaders, the ships
+which had brought them to the African shores, and much besides in
+startling contrast to their own condition of utter helplessness, the
+Africans at once interpreted to themselves as the manifestation and
+inherent attributes of beings of a higher order than man.  Their
+skin, too, the difference whereof from their own had been accentuated
+by many calamitous incidents, was hit upon as the reason of so
+crushing an ascendency.
+
+White skin therefore became, in those disconsolate eyes, the symbol
+of fearful irresistible power: which impression was not at all
+weakened afterwards by the ineffable atrocities of the "middle-
+passage."  Backed ultimately by their absolute and irresponsible
+masterhood at home over the deported Blacks, the European abductors
+could easily render permanent in the minds of their captives the
+abject terror struck into them by the enormities of which they had
+been the victims.  Now, the impressions we touched upon before
+bringing forward the case of the Negro slaves were mainly produced by
+pleasurable circumstances.  But of a contrary nature and much more
+deeply graven are those sentiments which are the outcome of hopeless
+terror [198] and pain.  For whilst impressions of the former
+character glide into the consciousness through accesses no less
+normal than agreeable, the infusion of fear by means of bodily
+suffering is a process too violent to be forgotten by minds tortured
+and strained to unnatural tension thereby.  Such tension, oft-
+recurrent and scarcely endurable, leaves behind it recollections
+which are in themselves a source of sadness.  But time, favoured by a
+succession of pleasurable experiences, is a sovereign anodyne to
+remembrances of this poignant class.  No wonder, then, from our
+foregoing detail of facts, that whiteness of skin was both redoubted
+and tremblingly crouched to by Negroes on whom Europeans had wrought
+such unspeakable calamities.  Time, however, and the action of
+circumstances, especially in countries subject to Catholic dominion,
+soon began to modify the conditions under which this sentiment of
+terror had been maintained, and, with those conditions, the very
+sentiment itself.  For it was not long in the life of many of the
+expatriated Africans before numbers of their own race obtained
+freedom, and, eventually, wealth sufficient for purchasing black
+slaves on their [199] own account.  In other respects, too (outwardly
+at least), the prosperous career of such individual Blacks could not
+fail to induce a revulsion of thought, whereby the attribution of
+unapproachable powers exclusively to the Whites became a matter
+earnestly reconsidered by the Africans.  Centuries of such
+reconsideration have produced the natural result in the West Indies.
+With the daily competition in intelligence, refinement, and social
+and moral distinction, which time and events have brought about
+between individuals of the two races, nothing, surely, has resulted,
+nor has even been indicated, to re-infuse the ancient colour-dread
+into minds which had formerly been forced to entertain it; and still
+less to engender it in bosoms to which such a feeling cannot, in the
+very nature of things, be an inborn emotion.  Now, can Mr. Froude
+show us by what process he would be able to infuse in the soul of an
+entire population a sentiment which is both unnatural and beyond
+compulsion?
+
+The foregoing remarks roughly apply to preeminence given to outward
+distinction, and the conditions under which mainly it impresses and
+is accepted by men not yet arrived at the [200] essentially
+intellectual stage.  In the spiritual domain the conditions have ever
+been quite different.  A belief in the supernatural being inborn in
+man, the professors of knowledge and powers beyond natural attainment
+were by common consent accorded a distinct and superior
+consideration, deemed proper to the sacredness of their progression.
+Hence the supremacy of the priestly caste in every age and country of
+the world.  Potentate as well as peasant have bowed in reverence
+before it, as representing and declaring with authority the counsels
+of that Being whom all, priest, potentate and peasant alike,
+acknowledge and adore, each according to the measure of his inward
+illumination.
+
+
+
+BOOK III: THE NEGRO AS WORKER
+
+[201] The laziness, the incurable idleness, of the Negro, was, both
+immediately before their emancipation in 1838, and for long years
+after that event, the cuckoo-cry of their white detractors.  It was
+laziness, pure and simple, which hindered the Negro from exhausting
+himself under a tropical sun, toiling at starvation wages to ensure
+for his quondam master the means of being an idler himself, with the
+additional luxury of rolling in easily come-by wealth.  Within the
+last twenty years, however, the history of the Black Man, both in the
+West Indies and, better still, in the United States of America, has
+been a succession of achievements which have converted the charge of
+laziness into a baseless and absurd calumny.  The repetition of the
+charge referred to is, in these [202] waning days of the nineteenth
+century, a discredited anachronism, which, however, has no deterring
+features for Mr. Froude.  As the running down of the Negro was his
+cue, he went in boldly for the game, with what result we shall
+presently see.  At page 239, our author, speaking of the Negro
+garden-farms in Jamaica, says:--
+
+"The male proprietors were lounging about smoking.  Their wives, as
+it was market-day, were tramping into Kingston with their baskets on
+their heads.  We met them literally in thousands, all merry and
+light-hearted, their little ones with little baskets trudging at
+their side.  Of the lords of the creation we saw, perhaps, one to
+each hundred of the women, and he would be riding on mule or donkey,
+pipe in mouth and carrying nothing.  He would be generally sulky too,
+while the ladies, young and old, had a civil word for us, and
+curtsied under their loads.  Decidedly if there is to be a black
+constitution I will give my vote to the women."
+
+To the above direct imputation of indolence, heartlessness, and
+moroseness, Mr. Froude appends the following remarks on other moral
+characteristics of certain sable peasants at [203] Mandeville,
+Jamaica, given on the authority of a police official, who, our author
+says, described them as--
+
+"Good-humoured, but not universally honest.  They stole cattle, and
+would not give evidence against each other.  If brought into Court,
+they held a pebble in their mouth, being under the impression that
+when they were so provided, perjury did not count.  Their education
+was only skin-deep, and the schools which the Government provided had
+not touched their characters at all."
+
+But how could the education so provided be otherwise than futile when
+the administration of its details is entirely in the hands of persons
+unsympathizing with and utterly despising the Negro?  But of this
+more anon and elsewhere.  We resume Mr. Froude's evidence respecting
+the black peasantry.  Our author proceeds to admit, on the same
+subject, that his informant's duties (as a police official) "brought
+him in contact with the unfavourable specimens."  He adds:--
+
+"I received a far pleasanter impression from a Moravian minister. . . .
+I was particularly glad to see this gentleman, for of the Moravians
+[204] every one had spoken well to me.  He was not the least
+enthusiastic about his poor black sheep, but he said that if they
+were not better than the average English labourer, he did not think
+them worse.  They were called idle; they would work well enough if
+they had fair wages and if the wages were paid regularly; but what
+could be expected when women servants had but three shillings a week
+and found themselves, when the men had but a shilling a day and the
+pay was kept in arrear in order that if they came late to work, or if
+they came irregularly, it may be kept back or cut down to what the
+employer choose to give?  Under such conditions ANY man of ANY colour
+would prefer to work for himself if he had a garden, or would be idle
+if he had none."
+
+Take, again, the following extract regarding the heroism of the
+emigrants to the Canal :--
+
+"I walked forward" (on the steamer bound to Jamaica), "after we had
+done talking.  We had five hundred of the poor creatures on their way
+to the Darien pandemonium.  The vessel was rolling with a heavy beam
+sea.  I found the whole mass of them reduced to the condition of the
+pigs who used to occupy the fore decks on the Cork and Bristol
+packets.  They were [205] lying in a confused heap together,
+helpless, miserable, without consciousness, apparently, save a sense
+in each that he was wretched.  Unfortunate brothers-in-law! following
+the laws of political economy, and carrying their labour to the
+dearest market, where, before a year was out, half of them were to
+die.  They had souls, too, some of them, and honest and kindly
+hearts."
+
+It surely is refreshing to read the revelation of his first learning
+of the possession of a soul by a fellow-human being, thus artlessly
+described by one who is said to be an ex-parson.  But piquancy is Mr.
+Froude's strong point, whatever else he may be found wanting in.
+
+Still, apart from Mr. Froude's direct testimony to the fact that from
+year to year, during a long series of years, there has been a
+continuous, scarcely ever interrupted emigration of Negroes to the
+Spanish mainland, in search of work for a sufficing livelihood for
+themselves and their families--and that in the teeth of physical
+danger, pestilence, and death--there would be enough indirect
+exoneration of the Black Man from that indictment in the wail of Mr.
+Froude and his friends regarding the alarming absorption of the lands
+of Grenada [206] and Trinidad by sable proprietors.  Land cannot be
+bought without money, nor can money be possessed except through
+labour, and the fact that so many tens of thousand Blacks are now the
+happy owners of the soil whereon, in the days so bitterly regretted
+by our author, their forefathers' tears, nay, very hearts' blood, had
+been caused to flow, ought to silence for ever an accusation, which,
+were it even true, would be futile, and, being false, is worse than
+disgraceful, coming from the lips of the Eumolpids who would fain
+impose a not-to-be-questioned yoke on us poor helots of Ethiopia.  It
+is said that lying is the vice of slaves; but the ethics of West
+Indian would-be mastership assert, on its behalf, that they alone
+should enjoy the privilege of resorting to misrepresentation to give
+colour, if not solidity, to their pretensions.
+
+
+
+BOOK III: RELIGION FOR NEGROES
+
+[207] Mr. Froude's passing on from matters secular to matters
+spiritual and sacred was a transition to be expected in the course of
+the grave and complicated discussion which he had volunteered to
+initiate.  It was, therefore, not without curiosity that his views in
+the direction above indicated were sought for and earnestly
+scrutinized by us.  But worse than in his treatment of purely mundane
+subjects, his attitude here is marked by a nonchalant levity which
+excites our wonder that even he should have touched upon the
+spiritual side of his thesis at all.  The idea of the dove sent forth
+from the ark fluttering over the heaving swells of the deluge, in
+vain endeavour to secure a rest for the soles of its feet, represents
+not inaptly the unfortunate predicament of his spirit with regard to
+a solid [208] faith on which to repose amid the surges of doubt by
+which it is so evidently beset.  Yet although this is his obvious
+plight with regard to a satisfying belief, he nevertheless
+undertakes, with characteristic confidence, to suggest a creed for
+the moralization of West Indian Negroes.  His language is :--
+
+"A religion, at any rate, which will keep the West Indian blacks from
+falling back into devil-worship is still to seek.  In spite of the
+priests, child-murder and cannibalism have re-appeared in Hayti, but
+without them things might have been much worse than they are, and the
+preservation of white authority and influence in any form at all may
+be better than none."
+
+We discern in the foregoing citation the exercise of a charity that
+is unquestionably born of fetish-worship, which, whether it be obeah
+generally, or restricted to a mere human skin, can be so powerful an
+agent in the formation and retention of beliefs.  Hence we see that
+our philosopher relies here, in the domain of morals and spiritual
+ethics, on a white skin as implicitly as he does on its sovereign
+potency in secular politics.  The curiousness of the matter lies
+mainly in its application to natives [209] of Hayti, of all people in
+the world.  As a matter of fact we have had our author declaring as
+follows, in climax to his oft-repeated predictions about West Indian
+Negroes degenerating into the condition of their fellow-Negroes in
+the "Black Republic" (p. 285) :--
+
+"Were it worth while, one  might draw a picture of an English
+governor, with a black parliament and a black ministry, recommending,
+by advice of his constitutional ministers, some measure like the
+Haytian Land Law."
+
+Now, as the West Indies degenerating into so many white-folk-
+detesting Haytis, under our prophet's dreaded supremacy of the
+Blacks, is the burden of his book; and as the Land Law in question
+distinctly forbids the owning by any white person of even one inch of
+the soil of the Republic, it might, but for the above explanation,
+have seemed unaccountable, in view of the implacable distrust, not to
+say hatred, which this stern prohibition so clearly discloses, that
+our author should, nevertheless, rely on the efficacy of white
+authority and influence over Haytians.
+
+In continuation of his religious suggestions, he goes on to descant
+upon slavery in the [210] fashion which we have elsewhere noticed,
+but it may still be proper to add a word or two here regarding this
+particular disquisition of his.  This we are happy in being able to
+do under the guidance of an anterior and more reliable exponent of
+ecclesiastical as well as secular obedience on the part of all free
+and enlightened men in the present epoch of the world's history:--
+
+               "Dogma and Descent, potential twin
+     Which erst could rein submissive millions in,
+     Are now spent forces on the eddying surge
+     Of Thought enfranchised.  Agencies emerge
+     Unhampered by the incubus of dread
+     Which cramped men's hearts and clogged their onward tread.
+     Dynasty, Prescription! spectral in these days
+     When Science points to Thought its surest ways,
+     And men who scorn obedience when not free
+     Demand the logic of Authority!
+     The day of manhood to the world is here,
+     And ancient homage waxes faint and drear.
+        .      .      .      .      .      .
+     Vision of rapture!  See Salvation's plan
+     'Tis serving God through ceaseless toil for man!"
+
+The lines above quoted are by a West Indian Negro, and explain in
+very concise form the attitude of the educated African mind [211]
+with reference to the matters they deal with.  Mr. Froude is free to
+perceive that no special religion patched up from obsolete creeds
+could be acceptable to those with whose sentiments the thoughts of
+the writer just quoted are in true racial unison.  It is preposterous
+to expect that the same superstition regarding skin ascendency, which
+is now so markedly played out in our Colonies in temporal matters,
+could have any weight whatsoever in matters so momentous as morals
+and religion.  But granting even the possibility of any code of
+worldly ethics or of religion being acceptable on the dermal score so
+strenuously insisted on by him, it is to be feared that, through
+sheer respect for the fitness of things, the intelligent Negro in
+search of guidance in faith and morals would fail to recognize in our
+author a guide, philosopher, and friend, to be followed without the
+most painful misgivings.  The Catholic and the Dissenting Churches
+which have done so much for the temporal and spiritual advancement of
+the Negro, in spite of hindrance and active persecution wherever
+these were possible, are, so far as is visible, maintaining their
+hold on the adhesion of those who belong to them.
+
+[212] And it cannot be pretended that, among enlightened Africans as
+compared with other enlightened people, there have been more grievous
+failings off from the scriptural standard of deportment.  Possible it
+certainly is that considerations akin to, or even identical with,
+those relied upon by Mr. Froude might, on the first reception of
+Christianity in their exile, have operated effectually upon the minds
+of the children of Africa.  At that time the evangelizers whose
+converts they so readily became possessed the recommendation of
+belonging to the dominant caste.  Therefore, with the humility proper
+to their forlorn condition, the poor bondsmen requited with intense
+gratitude such beneficent interest on their behalf, as a
+condescension to which people in their hapless situation could have
+had no right.  But for many long years, the distinction whether of
+temporal or of spiritual superiority has ceased to be the monopoly of
+any particular class.  The master and employer has for far more than
+a century and a half been often represented in the West Indies by
+some born African or his descendant; and so also has the teacher and
+preacher.  It is not too much to say that [213] the behaviour of the
+liberated slaves throughout the British Antilles, as well as the
+deportment of the manumitted four million slaves of the Southern
+United States later on, bore glorious testimony to the humanizing
+effects which the religion of charity, clutched at and grasped in
+fragments, and understood with childlike incompleteness, had produced
+within those suffering bosoms.
+
+Nothing has occurred to call for a remodelling of the ordinary moral
+and spiritual machinery for the special behoof of Negroes.  Religion,
+as understood by the best of men, is purely a matter of feeling and
+action between man and man--the doing unto others as we would they
+should do unto us; and any creed or any doctrine which directly or
+indirectly subverts or even weakens this basis is in itself a danger
+to the highest welfare of mankind.  The simple conventional faith in
+God, in Jesus, and in a future state, however modified nowadays, has
+still a vitality which can restrain and ennoble its votaries,
+provided it be inculcated and received in a befitting spirit.  Our
+critic, in the plenitude of his familiarity with such matters,
+confidently asks :--
+
+[214] "Who is now made wretched by the fear of hell?"
+
+Possibly the belief in the material hell, the decadence of which he
+here triumphantly assumes to be so general, may have considerably
+diminished; but experience has shown that, with the advance of
+refinement, there is a concurrent growth in the intensity of moral
+sensibility, whereby the waning terrors of a future material hell are
+more than replaced by the agonies of a conscience self-convicted of
+wilful violation of the right.  The same simple faith has, in its
+practical results, been rich in the records of the humble whom it has
+exalted; of the poor to whom it has been better than wealth; of the
+rich whose stewardship of worldly prosperity it has sanctified; of
+the timid whom it has rendered bold; and of the valiant whom it has
+raised to a divine heroism--in fine, of miracles of transformation
+that have impelled to higher and nobler tendencies and uses the
+powers and gifts inherited or acquired by man in his natural state.
+They who possess this faith, and cherish it as a priceless
+possession, may calmly oppose to the philosophic reasoning against
+the existence of [215] a Deity and the rationalness of entreating Him
+in prayer, the simple and sufficient declaration, "I believe."
+Normal-minded men, sensible of the limitations of human faculties,
+never aspire to be wise beyond what is revealed.  Whatever might
+exist beyond the grave is, so far as man and man in their mutual
+relations are concerned, not a subject that discussion can affect or
+speculation unravel.  To believers it cannot matter whether the
+Sermon on the Mount embodies or does not embody the quality of ethics
+that the esoteric votaries of Mr. Froude's "new creed" do accept or
+even can tolerate.  Under the old creed man's sense of duty kindled
+in sympathy towards his brother, urging him to achieve by self-
+sacrifice every possibility of beneficence; hence the old creed
+insured an inward joy as well as "the peace which passeth all
+understanding."  There can be no room for desiring left, when
+receptiveness of blessings overflows; and it is the worthiest
+direction of human energy to secure for others that fulness of
+fruition.  Is not Duty the first, the highest item of moral
+consciousness; and is not promoting, according to our best ability,
+the welfare of our fellow creatures, the first and [216] most urgent
+call of human duty?  Can the urgency of such responsibility ever
+cease but with the capacity, on our own or on our brother's part, to
+do or be done by respectively?  Contemptuously ignoring his share of
+this solemn responsibility--solemn, whether regarded from a religious
+or a purely secular point of view--to observe at least the negative
+obligation never to wantonly do or even devise any harm to his
+fellows, or indeed any sentient creature, our new apostle affords, in
+his light-hearted reversal of the prescriptive methods of civilized
+ethics, a woful foretaste of the moral results of the "new, not as
+yet crystallized" belief, whose trusted instruments of spiritual
+investigation are the telescope and mental analysis, in order to
+satisfy the carpings of those who so impress the world with their
+superhuman strong-mindedness.
+
+The following is a profound reflection presenting, doubtless, quite a
+new revelation to an unsophisticated world, which had so long
+submitted in reverential tameness to the self-evident impossibility
+of exploring the Infinite:--
+
+"The tendency of popular thought is against [217] the supernatural in
+any shape.  Far into space as the telescope can search, deep as
+analysis can penetrate into mind and consciousness or the forces
+which govern natural things, popular thought finds only uniformity
+and connection of cause and effect; no sign anywhere of a personal
+will which is influenced by prayer or moral motives."
+
+How much to be pitied are the gifted esoterics who, in such a quest,
+vainly point their telescopes into the star-thronged firmament, and
+plunge their reasoning powers into the abyss of consciousness and
+such-like mysteries!  The commonplace intellect of the author of
+"Night Thoughts" was, if we may so speak, awed into an adoring
+rapture which forced from him the exclamation (may believers hail it
+as a dogma!)--
+
+"An undevout astronomer is mad!"
+
+Most probably it was in weak submission to some such sentiment as
+this that Isaac Newton nowhere in his writings suggests even the
+ghost of a doubt of there being a Great Architect of the Universe as
+the outcome of his telescopic explorations into the illimitable
+heavens.
+
+[218] It is quite possible, too, that he was, "on insufficient
+grounds," perhaps, perfectly satisfied, as a host of other
+intellectual mediocrities like himself have been, and even up to now
+rather provokingly continue to be, with the very "uniformity and
+connection of cause and effect" as visible evidence of there being
+not only "a personal will," but a creative and controlling Power as
+well.  In this connection comes to mind a certain old Book which,
+whatever damage Semitic Scholarship and Modern Criticism may succeed
+in inflicting on its contents, will always retain for the spiritual
+guidance of the world enough and to spare of divine suggestions.
+With the prescience which has been the heritage of the inspired in
+all ages, one of the writers in that Book, whom we shall now quote,
+foresaw, no doubt, the deplorable industry of Mr. Froude and his
+protege "popular thought," whose mouth-piece he has so
+characteristically constituted himself, and asks in a tone wherein
+solemn warning blends with inquiry: "Canst thou by searching find out
+God; canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection!"  The rational
+among the most loftily endowed of mankind have grasped [219] the
+sublime significance of this query, acquiescing reverently in its
+scarcely veiled intimation of man's impotence in presence of the task
+to which it refers.
+
+But though Mr. Froude's spiritual plight be such as we have just
+allowed him to state it, with regard to an object of faith and a
+motive of worship, yet let us hear him, in his anxiety to furbish up
+a special Negro creed, setting forth the motive for being in a hurry
+to anticipate the "crystallization" of his new belief :--
+
+"The new creed, however, not having crystallized as yet into a shape
+which can be openly professed, and as without any creed at all the
+flesh and the devil might become too powerful, we maintain the old
+names, as we maintain the monarchy."
+
+The allusion to the monarchy seems not a very obvious one, as it
+parallels the definitive rejection of a spiritual creed with the
+theoretical change of ancient notions regarding a concrete fact.  At
+any rate we have it that his special religion, when concocted and
+disseminated, will have the effect of preventing the flesh and the
+devil from having too much power over Negroes.  The objection to the
+[220] devil's sway seems to us to come with queer grace from one who
+owes his celebrity chiefly to the production of works teeming with
+that peculiar usage of language of which the Enemy of Souls is
+credited with the special fatherhood.
+
+No, sir, in the name of the Being regarding whose existence you and
+your alleged "popular thought" are so painfully in doubt, we protest
+against your right, or that of any other created worm, to formulate
+for the special behoof of Negroes any sort of artificial creed
+unbelieved in by yourself, having the function and effect of
+detective "shadowings" of their souls.  Away with your criminal
+suggestion of toleration of the hideous orgies of heathenism in Hayti
+for the benefit of our future morals in the West Indies, when the
+political supremacy which you predict and dread and deprecate shall
+have become an accomplished fact.  Were any special standard of
+spiritual excellence required, our race has, in Josiah Henson and
+Sojourner Truth, sufficing models for our men and our women
+respectively.  Their ideal of Christian life, which we take to be the
+true one, is not to be judged of with direct reference to the Deity
+whom we cannot [221] see, interrogate, or comprehend, but to its
+practical bearing in and on man, whom we can see and have cognizance
+of, not only with our physical senses, but by the intimations of the
+divinity which abides within us.*  We can see, feel, and appreciate
+the virtue of a fellow-mortal who consecrates himself to the Divine
+idea through untiring exertion for the bettering of the condition of
+the world around him, whose agony he makes it his duty, only to
+satisfy his burning desire, to mitigate.  The fact in its ghastly
+reality lies before us that the majority of mankind labour and are
+being crushed under the tremendous trinity of Ignorance, Vice, and
+Poverty.
+
+It is mainly in the succouring of those who thus suffer that the
+vitality of the old creed is manifested in the person of its
+professors.  Under this aspect we behold it moulding men, of all
+nations, countries, and tongues, whose virtues have challenged and
+should command on its behalf the unquestioning faith and adhesion of
+every rational observer.  "Evidences of Christianity,"
+"Controversies," "Exegetical Commentaries," have all proved [222]
+more or less futile--as perhaps they ought--with the Science and
+Modern Criticism which perverts religion into a matter of dialectics.
+But there is a hope for mankind in the fact that Science itself shall
+have ultimately to admit the limitations of human inquiry into the
+details of the Infinite.  Meanwhile it requires no technical
+proficiency to recognize the criminality of those who waste their
+brief threescore and ten years in abstract speculations, while the
+tangible, visible, and hideous soul-destroying trinity of Vice,
+Ignorance, and Poverty, above mentioned, are desolating the world in
+their very sight.  There are possessors of personal virtue,
+enlightenment, and wealth, who dare stand neutral with regard to
+these dire exigencies among their fellows.  And yet they are the
+logical helpers, as holders of the special antidote to each of those
+banes!  Infinitely more deserving of execration are such folk than
+the callous owner of some specific, who allows a suffering neighbour
+to perish for want of it.
+
+We who believe in the ultimate development of the Christian notion of
+duty towards God, as manifested in untiring beneficence to man, cling
+to this faith--starting from the [223] beginning of the New Testament
+dispensation--because Saul of Tarsus, transformed into Paul the
+Apostle through his whole-souled acceptance of this very creed with
+its practical responsibilities, has, in his ardent, indefatigable
+labours for the enlightenment and elevation of his fellows, left us a
+lesson which is an enduring inspiration; because Augustine, Bishop of
+Hippo, benefited, in a manner which has borne, and ever will bear,
+priceless fruit, enormous sections of the human family, after his
+definite submission to the benign yoke of the same old creed; because
+Vincent de Paul has, through the identical inspiration, endowed the
+world with his everlasting legacy of organized beneficence; because
+it impelled Francis Xavier with yearning heart and eager footsteps
+through thousands of miles of peril, to proclaim to the darkling
+millions of India what he had experienced to be tidings of great joy
+to himself; because Matthew Hale, a lawyer, and of first prominence
+in a pursuit which materializes the mind and nips its native candour
+and tenderness, escaped unblighted, through the saving influence of
+his faith, approving himself in the sight of all [224] an ideal
+judge, even according to the highest conception; because John Howard,
+opulent and free to enjoy his opulence and repose, was drawn thereby
+throughout the whole continent of Europe in quest of the hidden
+miseries that torture those whom the law has shut out, in dungeons,
+from the light and sympathy of the world; because Thomas Clarkson,
+animated by the spirit of its teachings, consecrated wealth, luxury,
+and the quiet of an entire lifetime on the altar of voluntary
+sacrifice for the salvation of an alien people; because Samuel
+Johnson, shut out from mirthfulness by disease and suffering, and
+endowed with an intellectual pride intolerant of froward ignorance,
+was, through the chastening power of that belief, transformed into
+the cheerful minister and willing slave of the weaklings whom he
+gathered into his home, and around whom the tendrils of his heart had
+entwined themselves, waxing closer and stronger in the moisture of
+his never-failing charity; because Henry Havelock, a man of the
+sword, whose duties have never been too propitious to the cultivation
+and fostering of the gentler virtues, lived and died a blameless
+hero, constrained by that faith to be one of its most illustrious
+exemplars; [225] because David Livingstone looms great and reverend
+in our mental sight in his devotion to a land and race embraced in
+his boundless fellow-feeling, and whose miseries he has commended to
+the sympathy of the civilized world in words the pathos whereof has
+melted thousands of once obdurate hearts to crave a share in applying
+a balm to the "open sore of Africa"--that slave-trade whose
+numberless horrors beggar description; and finally--one more example
+out of the countless varieties of types that blend into a unique
+solidarity in the active manifestation of the Christian life--we
+believe because Charles Gordon, the martyr-soldier of Khartoum, in
+trusting faith a very child, but in heroism more notable than any
+mere man of whom history contains a record, gathered around himself,
+through the sublime attractiveness of his faith-directed life, the
+united suffrages of all nations, and now enjoys, as the recompense
+and seal of his life's labours, an apotheosis in homage to which the
+heathen of Africa, the man-hunting Arab, the Egyptian, the Turk, all
+jostle each other to blend with the exulting children of Britain who
+are directly glorified by his life and history.
+
+[226] Here, then, are speaking evidences of the believers' grounds.
+Verily they are of the kind that are to be seen in our midst,
+touched, heard, listened to, respected, beloved--nay, honoured, too,
+with the glad worship our inward spirit springs forth to render to
+goodness so largely plenished from the Source of all Good.  Can
+Modern Science and Criticism explain them away, or persuade us of
+their insufficiency as incentives to the hearty acceptance of the
+religion that has received such glorious, yet simply logical,
+incarnation in the persons of weak, erring men who welcomed its
+responsibilities conjointly with its teachings, and thereby raised
+themselves to the spiritual level pictured to ourselves in our
+conception of angels who have been given the Divine charge concerning
+mankind.  Religion for Negroes, indeed!  White priests, forsooth!
+This sort of arrogance might, possibly, avail in quarters where the
+person and pretensions of Mr. Froude could be impressive and
+influential--but here, in the momentous concern of man with Him who
+"is no respecter of persons," his interference, mentally disposed as
+he tells us he is with reference to such a matter, is nothing less
+than profane intrusion.
+
+[227] We will conclude by stating in a few words our notion of the
+only agency by which, not Blacks alone, but every race of mankind,
+might be uplifted to the moral level which the thousands of examples,
+of which we have glanced at but a few, prove so indubitably the
+capacity of man to attain--each to a degree limited by the scope of
+his individual powers.  The priesthood whereof the world stands in
+such dire need is not at all the confederacy of augurs which Mr.
+Froude, perhaps in recollection of his former profession, so glibly
+suggests, with an esoteric creed of their own, "crystallized into
+shape" for profession before the public.  The day of priestcraft
+being now numbered with the things that were, the exploitation of
+those outside of the sacerdotal circle is no longer possible.
+Therefore the religion of mere talk, however metaphysical and
+profound; the religion of scenic display, except such display be
+symbolic of living and active verities, has lost whatever of efficacy
+it may once have possessed, through the very spirit and tendency of
+To-day.  The reason why those few whom we have mentioned, and the
+thousands who cannot possibly be recalled, have, as [228] typical
+Christians, impressed themselves on the moral sense and sympathy of
+the ages, is simply that they lived the faith which they professed.
+Whatever words they may have employed to express their serious
+thoughts were never otherwise than, incidentally, a spoken fragment
+of their own interior biography. In fine, success must infallibly
+attend this special priesthood (whether episcopally "ordained" or
+not) of all races, all colours, all tongues whatsoever, since their
+lives reflect their teachings and their teachings reflect their
+lives.  Then, truly, they, "the righteous, shall inherit the earth,"
+leading mankind along the highest and noblest paths of temporal
+existence.  Then, of course, the obeah, the cannibalism, the devil-
+worship of the whole world, including that of Hayti, which Mr. Froude
+predicts will be adopted by us Blacks in the West Indies, shall no
+more encumber and scandalize the earth.
+
+But Mr. Froude should, at the same time, be reminded that cannibalism
+and the hideous concomitants which he mentions are, after all,
+relatively minor and restricted dangers to man's civilization and
+moral soundness.  They can [229] neither operate freely nor expand
+easily.  The paralysis of horrified popular sentiment obstructs their
+propagation, and the blight of the death-penalty which hangs over the
+heads of their votaries is an additional guarantee of their being
+kept within bounds that minimize their perniciousness. But there are
+more fatal and further-reaching dangers to public morality and
+happiness of which the regenerated current opinion of the future will
+take prompt and remedial cognizance. Foremost among these will be the
+circulation of malevolent writings whereby the equilibrium of
+sympathy between good men of different races is sought to be
+destroyed, through misleading appeals to the weaknesses and
+prejudices of readers; writings in which the violation of actual
+truth cannot, save by stark stupidity, be attributed to innocent
+error; writings that scoff at humanitarian feeling and belittle the
+importance of achievements resulting therefrom; writings which strike
+at the root of national manliness, by eulogizing brute force directed
+against weaker folk as a fit and legitimate mode of securing the
+wishes of a mighty and enlightened people; writings, in fine, which
+ignore the divine principle [230] in man, and implicitly deny the
+possibility of a Divine Power existing outside of and above man, thus
+materializing the mind, and tending to render the earth a worse hell
+than it ever could have been with faith in the supremacy of a
+beneficent Power.
+
+NOTES
+
+221. *"Est deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo."--Ovid.
+
+
+
+BOOK IV: HISTORICAL SUMMARY
+
+[233] Thus far we have dealt with the main questions raised by Mr.
+Froude on the lines of his own choosing; lines which demonstrate to
+the fullest how unsuited his capacity is for appreciating--still less
+grappling with--the political and social issues he has so confidently
+undertaken to determine.  In vain have we sought throughout his
+bastard philosophizing for any phrase giving promise of an adequate
+treatment of this important subject.  We find paraded ostentatiously
+enough the doctrine that in the adjustment of human affairs the
+possession of a white skin should be the strongest recommendation.
+Wonder might fairly be felt that there is no suggestion of a
+corresponding advantage being accorded to the possession of a long
+nose or of auburn hair.  Indeed, little [234] or no attention that
+can be deemed serious is given to the interest of the Blacks, as a
+large and (out of Africa) no longer despicable section of the human
+family, in the great world-problems which are so visibly preparing
+and press for definitive solutions.  The intra-African Negro is
+clearly powerless to struggle successfully against personal
+enslavement, annexation, or volunteer forcible "protection" of his
+territory.  What, we ask, will in the coming ages be the opinion and
+attitude of the extra-African millions--ten millions in the Western
+Hemisphere--dispersed so widely over the surface of the globe, apt
+apprentices in every conceivable department of civilized culture?
+Will these men remain for ever too poor, too isolated from one
+another for grand racial combinations?  Or will the naturally opulent
+cradle of their people, too long a prey to violence and unholy greed,
+become at length the sacred watchword of a generation willing and
+able to conquer or perish under its inspiration?  Such large and
+interesting questions it was within the province and duty of a famous
+historian, laying confident claim to prophetic insight, not to
+propound alone, but also definitely to solve.  The sacred power [235]
+of forecast, however, has been confined to finical pronouncements
+regarding those for whose special benefit he has exercised it, and to
+childish insults of the Blacks whose doom must be sealed to secure
+the precious result which is aimed at.  In view of this ill-
+intentioned omission, we shall offer a few cursory remarks bearing
+on, but not attempting to answer, those grave inquiries concerning
+the African people.  As in our humble opinion these are questions
+paramount to all the petty local issues finically dilated on by the
+confident prophet of "The Bow of Ulysses," we will here briefly
+devote ourselves to its discussion.
+
+Accepting the theory of human development propounded by our author,
+let us apply it to the African race.  Except, of course, to
+intelligences having a share in the Councils of Eternity, there can
+be no attainable knowledge respecting the laws which regulate the
+growth and progress of civilization among the races of the earth.
+That in the existence of the human family every age has been marked
+by its own essential characteristics with regard to manifestations of
+intellectual life, however circumscribed, is a proposition too self-
+evident [236] to require more than the stating.  But investigation
+beyond such evidence as we possess concerning the past--whether
+recorded by man himself in the written pages of history, or by the
+Creator on the tablets of nature--would be worse than futile.  We see
+that in the past different races have successively come to the front,
+as prominent actors on the world's stage.  The years of civilized
+development have dawned in turn on many sections of the human family,
+and the Anglo-Saxons, who now enjoy preeminence, got their turn only
+after Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome, and others had
+successively held the palm of supremacy.  And since these mighty
+empires have all passed away, may we not then, if the past teaches
+aught, confidently expect that other racial hegemonies will arise in
+the future to keep up the ceaseless progression of temporal existence
+towards the existence that is eternal?  What is it in the nature of
+things that will oust the African race from the right to participate,
+in times to come, in the high destinies that have been assigned in
+times past to so many races that have not been in anywise superior to
+us in the qualifications, physical, moral, and intellectual, [237]
+that mark out a race for prominence amongst other races?
+
+The normal composition of the typical Negro has the testimony of ages
+to its essential soundness and nobility.  Physically, as an active
+labourer, he is capable of the most protracted exertion under
+climatic conditions the most exhausting.  By the mere strain of his
+brawn and sinew he has converted waste tracts of earth into fertile
+regions of agricultural bountifulness.  On the scenes of strife he
+has in his savage state been known to be indomitable save by the
+stress of irresistible forces, whether of men or of circumstances.
+Staunch in his friendship and tender towards the weak directly under
+his protection, the unvitiated African furnishes in himself the
+combination of native virtue which in the land of his exile was so
+prolific of good results for the welfare of the whole slave-class.
+But distracted at home by the sudden irruptions of skulking foes, he
+has been robbed, both intellectually and morally, of the immense
+advantage of Peace, which is the mother of Progress.  Transplanted to
+alien climes, and through centuries of desolating trials, this
+irrepressible race has [238] bated not one throb of its energy, nor
+one jot of its heart or hope.  In modern times, after his
+expatriation into dismal bondage, both Britain and America have had
+occasion to see that even in the paralysing fetters of political and
+social degradation the right arm of the Ethiop can be a valuable
+auxiliary on the field of battle.  Britain, in her conflict with
+France for supremacy in the West Indies, did not disdain the aid of
+the sable arms that struck together with those of Britons for the
+trophies that furnished the motives for those epic contests.
+
+Later on, the unparalleled struggle between the Northern and Southern
+States of the American Union put to the test the indestructible
+fibres of the Negro's nature, moral as well as physical.  The
+Northern States, after months of hesitating repugnance, and when
+taught at last by dire defeats that colour did not in any way help to
+victory, at length sullenly acquiesced in the comradeship, hitherto
+disdained, of the eager African contingent.  The records of Port
+Hudson, Vicksburg, Morris Island, and elsewhere, stand forth in
+imperishable attestation of the fact that the distinction of being
+laurelled during life as victor, or filling [239] in death a hero's
+grave, is reserved for no colour, but for the heart that can dare and
+the hand that can strike boldly in a righteous cause.  The experience
+of the Southern slave-holders, on the other hand, was no less
+striking and worthy of admiration.  Every man of the twelve seceding
+States forming the Southern Confederacy, then fighting desperately
+for the avowed purpose of perpetuating slavery, was called into the
+field, as no available male arm could be spared from the conflict on
+their side.  Plantation owner, overseer, and every one in authority,
+had to be drafted away from the scene of their usual occupation to
+the stage whereon the bloody drama of internecine strife was being
+enacted.  Not only the plantation, but the home and the household,
+including the mistress and her children, had to be left, not
+unprotected, it is glorious to observe, but, with confident assurance
+in their loyalty and good faith, under the protection of the four
+million of bondsmen, who, through the laws and customs of these very
+States, had been doomed to lifelong ignorance and exclusion from all
+moralizing influences.  With what result?  The protraction of the
+conflict on the part of the South would [240] have been impossible
+but for the admirable management and realization of their resources
+by those benighted slaves.  On the other hand, not one of the
+thousands of Northern prisoners escaping from the durance of a
+Southern captivity ever appealed in vain for the assistance and
+protection of a Negro.  Clearly the head and heart of those bondsmen
+were each in its proper place.  The moral effect of these experiences
+of the Negroes' sterling qualities was not lost on either North or
+South.  In the North it effaced from thousands of repugnant hearts
+the adverse feelings which had devised and accomplished so much to
+the Negro's detriment.  In the South--but for the blunders of the
+Reconstructionists--it would have considerably facilitated the final
+readjustment of affairs between the erewhile master and slave in
+their new-born relations of employer and employed.
+
+Reverting to the Africans who were conveyed to places other than the
+States, it will be seen that circumstances amongst them and in their
+favour came into play, modifying and lightening their unhappy
+condition.  First, attention must be paid to the patriotic solidarity
+existing [241] amongst the bondsmen, a solidarity which, in the case
+of those who had been deported in the same ship, had all the sanctity
+of blood-relationship.  Those who had thus travelled to the "white
+man's country" addressed and considered each other as brothers and
+sisters.  Hence their descendants for many generations upheld, as if
+consanguineous, the modes of address and treatment which became
+hereditary in families whose originals had travelled in the same
+ship.  These adopted uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, were so united
+by common sympathies, that good or ill befalling any one of them
+intensely affected the whole connection.  Mutual support commensurate
+with the area of their location thus became the order among these
+people.  At the time of the first deportation of Africans to the West
+Indies to replace the aborigines who had been decimated in the mines
+at Santo Domingo and in the pearl fisheries of the South Caribbean,
+the circumstances of the Spanish settlers in the Antilles were of
+singular, even romantic, interest.
+
+The enthusiasm which overflowed from the crusades and the Moorish
+wars, upon the discovery and conquest of America, had occasioned
+[242]  the peopling of the Western Archipelago by a race of men in
+whom the daring of freebooters was strangely blended with a fierce
+sort of religiousness.  As holders of slaves, these men recognized,
+and endeavoured to their best to give effect to, the humane
+injunctions of Bishop Las Casas.  The Negroes, therefore, male and
+female, were promptly presented for admission by baptism into the
+Catholic Church, which always had stood open and ready to welcome
+them.  The relations of god-father and god-mother resulting from
+these baptismal functions had a most important bearing on the
+reciprocal stations of master and slave.  The god-children were,
+according to ecclesiastical custom, considered in every sense
+entitled to all the protection and assistance which were within the
+competence of the god-parents, who, in their turn, received from the
+former the most absolute submission.  It is easy to see that the
+planters, as well as those intimately connected with them, in
+assuming such obligations with their concomitant responsibilities,
+practically entered into bonds which they all regarded as, if
+possible, more solemn than the natural ties of secular parentage.
+The duty [243] of providing for these dependents usually took the
+shape of their being apprenticed to, and trained in the various arts
+and vocations that constitute the life of civilization.  In many
+cases, at the death of their patrons, the bondsmen who were deemed
+most worthy were, according to the means of the testator, provided
+for in a manner lifting them above the necessity of future
+dependence.  Manumission, too, either by favour or through purchase,
+was allowed the fullest operation.  Here then was the active
+influence of higher motives than mere greed of gain or the pride of
+racial power mellowing the lot and gilding the future prospects of
+the dwellers in the tropical house of bondage.
+
+The next, and even more effectual agency in modifying and harmonizing
+the relations between owner and bondspeople was the inevitable
+attraction of one race to the other by the sentiment of natural
+affection.  Out of this sprang living ties far more intimate and
+binding on the moral sense than even obligations contracted in
+deference to the Church.  Natural impulses have often diviner sources
+than ecclesiastical mandates.  Obedience to the former not seldom
+brings down the penalties of the Church; but [244] the culprit finds
+solace in the consciousness that the offence might in itself be a
+protection from the thunders it has provoked.  Under these
+circumstances the general body of planters, who were in the main
+adventurers of the freest type, were fain to establish connections
+with such of the slave-women as attracted their sympathy, through
+personal comeliness or aptitude in domestic affairs, or, usually,
+both combined.  There was ordinarily in this beginning of the
+seventeenth century no Vashti that needed expulsion from the abode of
+a plantation Ahasuerus to make room for the African Esther to be
+admitted to the chief place within the portals.  One great natural
+consequence of this was the extension to the relatives or guardians
+of the bondswoman so preferred of an amount of favour which, in the
+case of the more capable males, completes the parallel we have been
+drawing by securing for each of them the precedence and
+responsibilities of a Mordecai.  The offspring of these natural
+alliances came in therefore to cement more intimately the union of
+interests which previous relations had generated.  Beloved by their
+fathers, and in many cases destined by them to a lot superior [245]
+to that whereto they were entitled by formal law and social
+prescription, these young procreations--Mulattos, as they were
+called--were made the objects of special and careful provisions on
+the fathers' part.  They were, according to the means of their
+fathers in the majority of cases, sent for education and training to
+European or other superior institutions.  After this course they were
+either formally acknowledged by their fathers, or, if that was
+impracticable, amply and suitably provided for in a career out of
+their native colony.  To a reflecting mind there is something that
+interests, not to say fascinates, in studying the action and reaction
+upon one another of circumstances in the existence of the Mulatto.
+As a matter of fact, he had much more to complain of under the slave
+system than his pure-blooded African relations.  The law, by
+decreeing that every child of a freeman and a slave woman must follow
+the fortune of the womb, thus making him the property of his mother
+exclusively, practically robbed him before his very birth of the
+nurture and protection of a father.  His reputed father had no
+obligation to be even aware of his procreation, and nevertheless
+[246] --so inscrutable are the ways of Providence!--the Mulatto was
+the centre around which clustered the outraged instincts of nature in
+rebellion against the desecrating mandates that prescribed treason to
+herself.  Law and society may decree; but in our normal humanity
+there throbs a sentiment which neutralizes every external impulse
+contrary to its promptings.
+
+In meditating on the varied history of the Negro in the United
+States, since his first landing on the banks of the James River in
+1619 till the Emancipation Act of President Lincoln in 1865, it is
+curious to observe that the elevation of the race, though in a great
+measure secured, proceeded from circumstances almost the reverse of
+those that operated so favourably in the same direction elsewhere.
+The men of the slave-holding States, chiefly Puritans or influenced
+by Puritanic surroundings, were not under the ecclesiastical sway
+which rendered possible in the West Indies and other Catholic
+countries the establishment of the reciprocal bonds of god-parents
+and god-children.  The self-same causes operated to prevent any large
+blending of the two races, inasmuch as the immigrant from Britain who
+[247] had gone forth from his country to better his fortune had not
+left behind him his attachment to the institutions of the mother-
+land, among which marrying, whenever practicable, was one of the most
+cherished.  Above all, too, as another powerful check at first to
+such alliances between the ruling and servile races of the States,
+there existed the native idiosyncracy of the Anglo-Saxon.  That class
+of them who had left Britain were likelier than the more refined of
+their nation to exhibit in its crudest and cruellest form the innate
+jealousy and contempt of other races that pervades the Anglo-Saxon
+bosom.  It is but a simple fact that, whenever he condescended
+thereto, familiarity with even the loveliest of the subject people
+was regarded as a mighty self-unbending for which the object should
+be correspondingly grateful.  So there could, in the beginning, be no
+frequent instances of the romantic chivalry that gilded the quasi-
+marital relations of the more fervid and humane members of the Latin
+stock.
+
+But this kind of intercourse, which in the earlier generation was
+undoubtedly restricted in North America by the checks above adverted
+to, and, presumably, also by the mutual unintelligibility [248] in
+speech, gradually expanded with the natural increase of the slave
+population.  The American-born, English-speaking Negro girl, who had
+in many cases been the playmate of her owner, was naturally more
+intelligible, more accessible, more attractive--and the inevitable
+consequence was the extension apace of that intercourse, the
+offspring whereof became at length so visibly numerous.
+
+Among the Romans, the grandest of all colonizers, the individual's
+Civis Romanus sum--I am a Roman citizen--was something more than
+verbal vapouring; it was a protective talisman--a buckler no less
+than a sword.  Yet was the possession of this noble and singular
+privilege no barrier to Roman citizens meeting on a broad
+humanitarian level any alien race, either allied to or under the
+protection of that world-famous commonwealth.  In the speeches of the
+foremost orators and statesmen among the conquerors of the then known
+world, the allusions to subject or allied aliens are distinguished by
+a decorous observance of the proprieties which should mark any
+reference to those who had the dignity of Rome's [249] friendship, or
+the privilege of her august protection.  Observations, therefore,
+regarding individuals of rank in these alien countries had the same
+sobriety and deference which marked allusions to born Romans of
+analogous degree.  Such magnanimity, we grieve to say, is not
+characteristic of the race which now replaces the Romans in the
+colonizing leadership of the world.  We read with feelings akin to
+despair of the cheap, not to say derogatory, manner in which, in both
+Houses of Parliament, native potentates, especially of non-European
+countries, are frequently spoken of by the hereditary aristocracy and
+the first gentlemen of the British Empire.  The inborn racial
+contempt thus manifested in quarters where rigid self-control and
+decorum should form the very essence of normal deportment, was not
+likely, as we have before hinted, to find any mollifying ingredient
+in the settlers on the banks of the Mississippi.  Therefore should we
+not be surprised to find, with regard to many an illicit issue of
+"down South," the arrogance of race so overmastering the promptings
+of nature as to render not unfrequent at the auction-block the sight
+of many a chattel of mixed blood, the offspring [250] of some planter
+whom business exigency had forced to this commercial transaction as
+the readiest mode of self-release.  Yet were the exceptions to this
+rule enough to contribute appreciably to the weight and influence of
+the mixed race in the North, where education and a fair standing had
+been clandestinely secured for their children by parents to whom law
+and society had made it impossible to do more, and whom conscience
+rendered incapable of stopping at less.
+
+From this comparative sketch of the history of the slaves in the
+States, in the West Indies and countries adjacent, it will be
+perceived that in the latter scenes of bondage everything had
+conspired to render a fusion of interests between the ruling and the
+servile classes not only easy, but inevitable.  In the very first
+generation after their introduction, the Africans began to press
+upward, a movement which every decade has accelerated, in spite of
+the changes which supervened as each of the Colonies fell under
+British sway.  Nearly two centuries had by this time elapsed, and the
+coloured influence, which had grown with their wealth, education,
+numbers, and unity, though [251] circumscribed by the emancipation of
+the slaves, and the consequent depression in fortune of all slave-
+owners, never was or could be annihilated.  In the Government service
+there were many for whom the patronage of god-parents or the sheer
+influence of their family had effected an entrance.  The prevalence
+and potency of the influences we have been dilating upon may be
+gauged by the fact that personages no less exalted than Governors of
+various Colonies--of Trinidad in three authentic cases--have been
+sharers in the prevailing usages, in the matter of standing sponsors
+(by proxy), and also of relaxing in the society of some fascinating
+daughter of the sun from the tension and wear of official duty.  In
+the three cases just referred to, the most careful provision was made
+for the suitable education and starting in life of the issues.  For
+the god-children of Governors there were places in the public
+service, and so from the highest to the lowest the humanitarian
+intercourse of the classes was confirmed.
+
+Consequent on the frequent abandonment of their plantations by many
+owners who despaired of being able to get along by paying [252] their
+way, an opening was made for the insinuation of Absenteeism into our
+agricultural, in short, our economic existence.  The powerful sugar
+lords, who had invested largely in the cane plantations, were fain to
+take over and cultivate the properties which their debtors doggedly
+refused to continue working, under pretext of the entire absence, or
+at any rate unreliability, of labour.  The representatives of those
+new transatlantic estate proprietors displaced, but never could
+replace, the original cultivators, who were mostly gentlemen as well
+as agriculturists.  It was from this overseer class that the
+vituperations and slanders went forth that soon became stereotyped,
+concerning the Negro's incorrigible laziness and want of ambition--
+those gentry adjusting the scale of wages, not according to the
+importance and value of the labour done, but according to the
+scornful estimate which they had formed of the Negro personally.  And
+when the wages were fixed fairly, they almost invariably sought to
+indemnify themselves for their enforced justice by the insulting
+license of their tongues, addressed to males and females alike.  The
+influence of such men on local legislation, in which they [253] had a
+preponderating share, either as actual proprietors or as the
+attorneys of absentees, was not in the direction of refinement or
+liberality.  Indeed, the kind of laws which they enacted, especially
+during the apprenticeship (1834-8), is thus summarized by one, and
+him an English officer, who was a visitor in those agitated days of
+the Colonies:--
+
+"It is demonstrated that the laws which were to come into operation
+immediately on expiration of the apprenticeship are of the most
+objectionable character, and fully established the fact not only of a
+future intention to infringe the rights of the emancipated classes,
+but of the actual commencement and extensive progress of a Colonial
+system for that purpose.  The object of the laws is to circumscribe
+the market for free labour--to prohibit the possession or sale of
+ordinary articles of produce on sale, the obvious intention of which
+is to confine the emancipated classes to a course of agricultural
+servitude--to give the employers a monopoly of labour, and to keep
+down a free competition for wages--to create new and various modes of
+apprenticeship for the purpose of prolonging predial service,
+together with many evils of the [254] late system--to introduce
+unnecessary restraint and coercion, the design of which is to create
+a perpetual surveillance over the liberated negroes, and to establish
+a legislative despotism.  The several laws passed are based upon the
+most vicious principles of legislation, and in their operation will
+be found intolerably oppressive and entirely subversive of the just
+intentions of the British Legislature."
+
+These liberal-souled gentry were, in sooth, Mr. Froude's
+"representatives" of Britain, whose traditions steadily followed in
+their families, he has so well and sympathetically set forth.
+
+We thus see that the irritation and rancour seething in the breast of
+the new plantocracy, of whom the majority was of the type that then
+also flourished in Barbados, Jamaica, and Demerara, were nourished
+and kept acute in order to crush the African element.  Harm was done,
+certainly; but not to the ruinous extent sometimes declared.  It was
+too late for perfect success, as, according to the Negroes' own
+phrase, people of colour had by that time already "passed the lock-
+jaw"* stage (at which trifling misadventures [255] might have nipped
+the germ of their progress in the bud.)  In spite of adverse
+legislation, and in spite of the scandalous subservience of certain
+Governors to the Colonial Legislatures, the Race can point with
+thankfulness and pride to the visible records of their success
+wherever they have permanently sojourned.
+
+Primary education of a more general and undiscriminating character,
+especially as to race and colour, was secured for the bulk of the
+West Indies by voluntary undertakings, and notably through the
+munificent provision of Lady Mico, which extended to the whole of the
+principal islands.
+
+Thanks to Lord Harris for introducing, and to Sir Arthur Gordon for
+extending to the secondary stage, the public education of Trinidad,
+there has been since Emancipation, that is, during the last thirty-
+seven years, a more effective bringing together in public schools of
+various grades, of children of all races and ranks.  Rivals at home,
+at school and college, in books as well as on the playground, they
+have very frequently gone abroad together to learn the professions
+they have selected.  In this way there is an intercommunion between
+all the [256] intelligent sections of the inhabitants, based on a
+common training and the subtle sympathies usually generated in
+enlightened breasts by intimate personal knowledge.  In mixed
+communities thus circumstanced, there is no possibility of
+maintaining distinctions based on mere colour, as advocated by Mr.
+Froude.
+
+The following brief summary by the Rev. P. H. Doughlin, Rector of St.
+Clement's, Trinidad, a brilliant star among the sons of Ham, embodies
+this fact in language which, so far as it goes, is as comprehensive
+as it is weighty:--
+
+"Who could, without seeming to insult the intelligence of men, have
+predicted on the day of Emancipation that the Negroes then released
+from the blight and withering influence of ten generations of cruel
+bondage, so weakened and half-destroyed--so denationalized and
+demoralized--so despoiled and naked, would be in the position they
+are now?  In spite of the proud, supercilious, and dictatorial
+bearing of their teachers, in spite of the hampering of
+unsympathetic, alien oversight, in spite of the spirit of dependence
+and servility engendered by slavery, not only have individual members
+of the race entered into all the offices of dignity in [257] Church
+and State, as subalterns--as hewers of wood and drawers of water--but
+they have attained to the very highest places.  Here in the West
+Indies, and on the West Coast of Africa, are to be found Surgeons of
+the Negro Race, Solicitors, Barristers, Mayors, Councillors,
+Principals and Founders of High Schools and Colleges, Editors and
+Proprietors of Newspapers, Archdeacons, Bishops, Judges, and Authors-
+-men who not only teach those immediately around them, but also teach
+the world.  Members of the race have even been entrusted with the
+administration of Governments.  And it is not mere commonplace men
+that the Negro Race has produced.  Not only have the British
+Universities thought them worthy of their honorary degrees and
+conferred them on them, but members of the race have won these
+University degrees.  A few years back a full-blooded Negro took the
+highest degree Oxford has to give to a young man.  The European world
+is looking with wonder and admiration at the progress made by the
+Negro Race--a progress unparalleled in the annals of the history of
+any race."
+
+To this we may add that in the domain [258] of high literature the
+Blacks of the United States, for the twenty-five years of social
+emancipation, and despite the lingering obstructions of caste
+prejudice, have positively achieved wonders.  Leaving aside the
+writings of men of such high calibre as F. Douglass, Dr. Hyland
+Garnet, Prof. Crummell, Prof. E. Blyden, Dr. Tanner, and others, it
+is gratifying to be able to chronicle the Ethiopic women of North
+America as moving shoulder to shoulder with the men in the highest
+spheres of literary activity.  Among a brilliant band of these our
+sisters, conspicuous no less in poetry than in prose, we single out
+but a solitary name for the double purpose of preserving brevity and
+of giving in one embodiment the ideal Afro-American woman of letters.
+The allusion here can scarcely fail to point to Mrs. S. Harper.  This
+lady's philosophical subtlety of reasoning on grave questions finds
+effective expression in a prose of singular precision and vigour.
+But it is as a poet that posterity will hail her in the coming ages
+of our Race.  For pathos, depth of spiritual insight, and magical
+exercise of a rare power of self-utterance, it will hardly be
+questioned that she has surpassed every competitor [259] among
+females--white or black--save and except Elizabeth Barett Browning,
+with whom the gifted African stands on much the same plane of poetic
+excellence.
+
+The above summary of our past vicissitudes and actual position shows
+that there is nothing in our political circumstances to occasion
+uneasiness.  The miserable skin and race doctrine we have been
+discussing does not at all prefigure the destinies at all events of
+the West Indies, or determine the motives that will affect them.
+With the exception of those belonging to the Southern states of the
+Union, the vast body of African descendants now dispersed in various
+countries of the Western Hemisphere are at sufficient peace to begin
+occupying themselves, according to some fixed programme, about
+matters of racial importance.  More than ten millions of Africans are
+scattered over the wide area indicated, and possess amongst them
+instances of mental and other qualifications which render them
+remarkable among their fellow-men.  But like the essential parts of a
+complicated albeit perfect machine, these attainments and
+qualifications so widely dispersed await, it is evident, some
+potential [260] agency to collect and adjust them into the vast
+engine essential for executing the true purposes of the civilized
+African Race.  Already, especially since the late Emancipation
+Jubilee, are signs manifest of a desire for intercommunion and
+intercomprehension amongst the more distinguished of our people.
+With intercourse and unity of purpose will be secured the means to
+carry out the obvious duties which are sure to devolve upon us,
+especially with reference to the cradle of our Race, which is most
+probably destined to be the ultimate resting-place and headquarters
+of millions of our posterity.  Within the short time that we had to
+compass all that we have achieved, there could not have arisen
+opportunities for doing more than we have effected.  Meanwhile our
+present device is: "Work, Hope, and Wait!"
+
+Finally, it must be borne in mind that the abolition of physical
+bondage did not by any means secure all the requisite conditions of
+"a fair field and no favour" for the future career of the freedmen.
+The remnant of Jacob, on their return from the Captivity, were
+compelled, whilst rebuilding their Temple, literally to labour with
+the working tool in one hand [261] and the sword for personal defence
+in the other.  Even so have the conditions, figuratively, presented
+themselves under which the Blacks have been obliged to rear the
+fabric of self-elevation since 1838, whilst combating ceaselessly the
+obstacles opposed to the realizing of their legitimate aspirations.
+Mental and, in many cases, material success has been gained, but the
+machinery for accumulating and applying the means required for
+comprehensive racial enterprises is waiting on Providence, time, and
+circumstances for its establishment and successful working.
+
+NOTES
+
+254. *"Yo te'ja passe mal machoe"--in metaphorical allusion to new-
+born infants who have lived beyond a certain number of days.
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of Froudacity, by J. J. Thomas
+