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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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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 Rsum: 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] employs 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,  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.  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 Augan 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 4000 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 2"!!!

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 fte 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 form 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 rgime 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
20,000,000 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 blass 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 vers.  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
rgime 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 qu 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 faon 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
protg "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 t'ja pass mal macho"--in metaphorical allusion to new-
born infants who have lived beyond a certain number of days.



End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Froudacity, by J. J. Thomas

