[95] It was not unnatural that in the obscurity they should have concluded that the latter was present with her altera ego, when in reality she was not there.

The participants in the brawl were charged at the station, and summonses, including one to L. B., were duly issued. On her return to Port of Spain a day or two after the occurrence, the wrongly incriminated woman received from the landlady her key, along with the magisterial summons that had resulted from the error of the constables. The day of the trial came on, and L. B. stood before Mr. Mayne, strong in her innocence, and supported by the sworn testimony of her landlady as well as of her uncle from the country, with whom and with his family she had been uninterruptedly staying up to one or two days after the occurrence in which she had been thus implicated. The evidence of the old lady, who, like thousands of her advanced age in the Colony, had never even once had occasion to be present in any court of justice, was to the following effect: That the defendant, who was a tenant of hers, had, on a certain morning (naming days before the affray occurred), [96] come up to her door well dressed, and followed by a porter carrying her luggage. L. B., she continued, then handed her the key of the apartment, informing her at the same time that she was going for some days into the country to her relatives, for a change, and requesting also that the witness should on no account deliver the key to any person who should ask for it during her absence. This witness further deposed to receiving the summons from the police, which she placed along with the key for delivery to L. B. on the latter's return home.

The testimony of the uncle was also decisively corroborative of that of the preceding witness, as to the absence from Port of Spain of L. B. during the days embraced in the defence. The alibi was therefore unquestionably made out, especially as none of the police witnesses would venture to swear to having actually seen L. B. at the brawl. The magistrate had no alternative but that of acquiescing in the proof of her innocence; so he dismissed the charge against the accused, who stood down from among the rest, radiant with satisfaction. The other defendants were duly [97] convicted, and sentenced to a term of imprisonment with hard labour. All this was quite correct; but here comes matter for consideration with regard to the immaculate dispensation of justice as vaunted so confidently by Mr. Froude.

On receiving their sentence the women all stood down from the dock, to be escorted to prison, except "Lady," who, by the way, had preserved a rigid silence, while some of the other defendants had voluntarily and, it may be added, generously protested that L. B. was not present on the occasion of this particular row. "Lady," whether out of affection or from a less respectable motive, cried out to the stipendiary justice. "But, sir, it ain't fair. How is it every time that L. B. and me come up before you, you either fine or send up the two of us together, and to-day you are sending me up alone?" Moved either by the logic or the pathos of this objurgation, the magistrate, turning towards L. B., who had lingered after her narrow escape to watch the issue of the proceedings, thus addressed her:—"L. B., upon second thoughts I order you to the same term of hard labour at the Royal Gaol with the [98] others." The poor girl, having neither money nor friends intelligent enough to interfere on her behalf, had to submit, and she underwent the whole of this iniquitous sentence.

The last typical case that we shall give illustrates the singular application by this more than singular judge of the legal maxim caveat emptor. A free coolie possessed of a donkey resolved to utilize the animal in carting grass to the market. He therefore called on another coolie living at some distance from him, whom he knew to own two carts, a small donkey-cart and an ordinary cart for mule or horse. He proposed the purchase of the smaller cart, stating his reason for wishing to have it. The donkey-cart was then shown to the intending purchaser, who, along with two Creole witnesses brought by him to make out and attest the receipt on the occasion, found some of the iron fittings defective, and drew the vendor's attention thereto. He, on his side, engaged, on receiving the amount agreed to for the cart, to send it off to the blacksmith for immediate repairs, to be delivered to the purchaser next morning at the latest. On this understanding the purchase money was paid down, and the [99] receipt, specifying that the sum therein mentioned was for a donkey-cart, passed from the vendor to the purchaser of the little vehicle. Next day at about noon the man went with his donkey for the cart. Arrived there, his countryman had the larger of the two carts brought out, and in pretended innocence said to the purchaser of the donkey-cart, "Here is your cart." On this a warm dispute arose, which was not abated by the presence and protests of the two witnesses of the day before, who had hastily been summoned by the victim to bear out his contention that it was the donkey-cart and not the larger cart which had been examined, bargained for, purchased, and promised to be delivered, the day before.

The matter, on account of the sturdiness of the rascal's denials, had to be referred to a court of law. The complainant engaged an able solicitor, who laid the case before Mr. Mayne in all its transparent simplicity and strength. The defendant, although he had, and as a matter of fact could have, no means of invalidating the evidence of the two witnesses, and above all of his receipt with his signature, relied upon the fact that the cart which he [100] offered was much larger than the one the complainant had actually bought, and that therefore complainant would be the gainer by the transaction. Incredible as it may sound, this view of the case commended itself to the magistrate, who adopted it in giving his judgment against the complainant. In vain did the solicitor protest that all the facts of the case were centred in the desire and intention of the prosecutor to have specifically a donkey-cart, which was abundantly proved by everything that had come out in the proceedings. In vain also was his endeavour to show that a man having only a donkey would be hopelessly embarrassed by having a cart for it which was entirely intended for animals of much larger size. The magistrate solemnly reiterated his decision, and wound up by saying that the victim had lost his case through disregard of the legal maxim caveat emptor—let the purchaser be careful. The rascally defendant thus gained his case, and left the court in defiant triumph.

The four preceding cases are thoroughly significant of the original method in which thousands of cases were decided by this model magistrate, to the great detriment, pecuniary, [101] social, and moral, during more than ten years, of between 60,000 and 70,000 of the population within the circle of his judicial authority. What shall we think, therefore, of the fairness of Mr. Froude or his informants, who, prompt and eager in imputing unworthy motives to gentlemen with characters above reproach, have yet been so silent with regard to the flagrant and frequent abuses of more than one of their countrymen by whom the honour and fair fame of their nation were for years draggled in the mire, and whose misdeeds were the theme of every tongue and thousands of newspaper-articles in the West Indian Colonies?

MR. ARTHUR CHILD, S.J.P.

We now take San Fernando, the next most important magisterial district after Port of Spain. At the time of Mr. Froude's visit, and for some time before, the duties of the magistracy there were discharged by Mr. Arthur Child, an "English barrister" who, of course, had possessed the requisite qualification of being hopelessly briefless. For the ideal justice which Mr. Froude would have Britons believe is meted out to the weaker classes by their fellow-countrymen [102] in the West Indies, we may refer the reader to the conduct of the above-named functionary on the memorable occasion of the slaughter of the coolies under Governor Freeling, in October, 1884. Mr. Child, as Stipendiary justice, had the duty of reading the Riot Act to the immigrants, who were marching in procession to the town of San Fernando, contrary, indeed, to the Government proclamation which had forbidden it; and he it was who gave the order to "fire," which resulted fatally to many of the unfortunate devotees of Hosein. This mandate and its lethal consequences anticipated by some minutes the similar but far more death-dealing action of the Chief of Police, who was stationed at another post in the vicinity of San Fernando. The day after the shooting down of a total of more than one hundred immigrants, the protecting action of this magistrate towards the weaker folk under his jurisdiction had a striking exemplification, to which Mr. Froude is hereby made welcome. Of course there was a general cry of horror throughout the Colony, and especially in the San Fernando district, at the fatal outcome of the proclamation, which had mentioned only "fine" and "imprisonment," [103] but not Death, as the penalty of disregarding its prohibitions. For nearly forty years, namely from their very first arrival in the Colony, the East Indian immigrants had, according to specific agreement with the Government, invariably been allowed the privilege of celebrating their annual feast of Hosein, by walking in procession with their Pagodas through the public roads and streets of the island, without prohibition or hindrance of any kind from the authorities, save and except in cases where rival estate pagodas were in danger of getting into collision on the question of precedence. On such occasions the police, who always attended the processions, usually gave the lead to the pagodas of the labourers of estates according to their seniority as immigrants.

In no case up to 1884, after thirty odd years' inauguration in the Colony, was the Hosein festival ever pretended to be any cause of danger, actual or prospective, to any town or building. On the contrary, business grew brisker and solidly improved at the approach of the commemoration, owing to the very considerable sale of parti-coloured paper, velvet, calico, and similar articles used in the construction [104] of the pagodas. Governor Freeling, however, was, it may be presumed, compelled to see danger in an institution which had had nearly forty years' trial, without a single accident happening to warrant any sudden interposition of the Government tending to its suppression. At all events, the only action taken in 1884, in prospect of their usual festival, was to notify the immigrants by proclamation, and, it is said, also through authorized agents, that the details of their fete were not to be conducted in the usual manner; and that their appearance with pagodas in any public road or any town, without special license from some competent local authority, would entail the penalty of so many pounds fine, or imprisonment for so many months with hard labour. The immigrants, to whom this unexpected change on the part of the authorities was utterly incomprehensible, both petitioned and sent deputations to the Governor, offering guarantees for the, if possible, more secure celebration of the Hosein, and praying His Excellency to cancel the prohibition as to the use of the roads, inasmuch as it interfered with the essential part of their religious rite, which was the "drowning," or casting into [105] the sea, of the pagodas. Having utterly failed in their efforts with the Governor, the coolies resolved to carry out their religious duty according to prescriptive forms, accepting, at the same time, the responsibility in the way of fine or imprisonment which they would thus inevitably incur. A rumour was also current at the time that, pursuant to this resolution, the head men of the various plantations had authorized a general subscription amongst their countrymen, for meeting the contingency of fines in the police courts. All these things were the current talk of the population of San Fernando, in which town the leading immigrants, free as well as indentured, had begun to raise funds for this purpose.

All that the public, therefore, expected would have resulted from the intended infringement of the Proclamation was an enormous influx of money in the shape of fines into the Colonial Treasury; as no one doubted the extreme facility which existed for ascertaining exactly, in the case of persons registered and indentured to specific plantations, the names and abodes of at least the chief offenders against the proclamation. Accordingly, on the [106] occurrence of the bloody catastrophe related above, every one felt that the mere persistence in marching all unarmed towards the town, without actually attempting to force their way into it, was exorbitantly visited upon the coolies by a violent death or a life-long mutilation. This sentiment few were at any pains to conceal; but as the poorer and more ignorant classes can be handled with greater impunity than those who are intelligent and have the means of self-defence, Mr. Justice Child, the very day after the tragedy, and without waiting for the pro forma official inquiry into the tragedy in which he bore so conspicuous a part, actually caused to be arrested, sat to try and sent to hard labour, persons whom the police, in obedience to his positive injunctions, had reported to him as having condemned the shooting down of the immigrants! Those who were arrested and thus summarily punished had, of course, no means of self-protection; and as the case is typical of others, as illustrative of "justice-made law" applied to "subject races" in a British colony, Mr. Froude is free to accept it, or not, in corroboration of his unqualified panegyrics.

[107]

MR. GROVE HUMPHREY CHAPMAN, S.J.P.

As Stipendary Magistrate of this self-same San Fernando district, Grove Humphrey Chapman, Esquire (another English barrister), was the immediate predecessor of Mr. Child. More humane than Mr. Mayne, his colleague and contemporary in Port of Spain, this young magistrate began his career fairly well. But he speedily fell a victim to the influences immediately surrounding him in his new position. His head, which later events proved never to have been naturally strong, began to be turned by the unaccustomed deference which he met with on all hands, from high and low, official and non-official, and he himself soon consummated the addling of his brain by persistent practical revolts against every maxim of the ancient Nazarenes in the matter of potations. His decisions at the court, therefore, became perfect emulations of those of Mr. Mayne, as well in perversity as in harshness, and many in his case also were the appeals for relief made to the head of the executive by the inhabitants of the district—but of course in vain. Governor Irving was at this time in office, and the unfortunate [108] victims of perverse judgments—occasionally pronounced by this magistrate in his cups—were only poor Negroes, coolies, or other persons whose worldly circumstances placed them in the category of the "weaker" in the community. To these classes of people that excellent ruler unhappily denied—we dare not say his personal sympathy, but—the official protection which, even through self-respect, he might have perfunctorily accorded. Bent, however, on running through the whole gamut of extravagance, Mr. Chapman—by interpreting official impunity into implying a direct license for the wildest of his caprices—plunged headlong with ever accelerating speed, till the deliverance of the Naparimas became the welcome consequence of his own personal action. On one occasion it was credibly reported in the Colony that this infatuated dispenser of British justice actually stretched his official complaisance so far as to permit a lady not only to be seated near him on the judicial bench, but also to take a part—loud, boisterous and abusive—in the legal proceedings of the day. Meanwhile, as the Governor could not be induced to interfere, things went [109] on from bad to worse, till one day, as above hinted, the unfortunate magistrate so publicly committed himself as to be obliged to be borne for temporary refuge to the Lunatic Asylum, whence he was clandestinely shipped from the Colony on "six months' leave of absence," never more to resume his official station.

The removal of two such magistrates as those whose careers we have so briefly sketched out—Mr. Mayne having died, still a magistrate, since Mr. Froude's departure—has afforded opportunity for the restoration of British protecting influence. In the person of Mr. Llewellyn Lewis, as magistrate of Port of Spain, this opportunity has been secured. He, it is generally rumoured, strives to justify the expectations of fair play and even-handed justice which are generally entertained concerning Englishmen. It is, however, certain that with a Governor so prompt to hear the cry of the poor as Sir William Robinson has proved himself to be, and with a Chief Justice so vigilant, fearless, and painstaking as Sir John Gorrie, the entire magistracy of the Colony must be so beneficially influenced as to preclude [110] the frequency of appeals being made to the higher courts, or it may be to the Executive, on account of scandalously unjust and senseless decisions.

So long, too, as the names of T. S. Warner, Captain Larcom, and F. H. Hamblin abide in the grateful remembrance of the entire population, as ideally upright, just, and impartial dispensers of justice, each in his own jurisdiction, we can only sigh at the temporal dispensation which renders practicable the appointment and retention in office of such administrators of the Law as were Mr. Mayne and Mr. Chapman. The widespread and irreparable mischiefs wrought by these men still affect disastrously many an unfortunate household; and the execration by the weaker in the community of their memory, particularly that of Robert Dawson Mayne, is only a fitting retribution for their abuse of power.

NOTES

85. *A West Indian official superstition professes to believe that a British barrister must make an exceptionally good colonial S.J.P., seeing that he is ignorant of everything, save general English law, that would qualify him for the post! In this, to acquit oneself tolerably, some acquaintance with the language, customs, and habits of thought of the population is everywhere else held to be of prime importance,—native conscientiousness and honesty of purpose being definitively presupposed.



BOOK III: SOCIAL REVOLUTION

[113] Never was the Knight of La Mancha more convinced of his imaginary mission to redress the wrongs of the world than Mr. James Anthony Froude seems to be of his ability to alter the course of events, especially those bearing on the destinies of the Negro in the British West Indies. The doctrinaire style of his utterances, his sublime indifference as to what Negro opinion and feelings may be, on account of his revelations, are uniquely charming. In that portion of his book headed "Social Revolution" our author, with that mixture of frankness and cynicism which is so dear to the soul of the British esprit fort of to-day, has challenged a comparison between British Colonial policy on the [114] one hand, and the Colonial policy of France and Spain on the other. This he does with an evident recklessness that his approval of Spain and France involves a definite condemnation of his own country. However, let us hear him:—

"The English West Indies, like other parts of the world, are going through a silent revolution. Elsewhere the revolution, as we hope, is a transition state, a new birth; a passing away of what is old and worn out, that a fresh and healthier order may rise in its place. In the West Indies the most sanguine of mortals will find it difficult to entertain any such hope at all."

As Mr. Froude is speaking dogmatically here of his, or rather our, West Indies, let us hear him as he proceeds:—

"We have been a ruling power there for two hundred and fifty years; the whites whom we planted as our representatives are drifting into ruin, and they regard England and England's policy as the principal cause of it. The blacks whom, in a fit of virtuous benevolence, we emancipated, do not feel particularly obliged to us. They think, if they think at all, that they were [115] ill-treated originally, and have received no more than was due to them."

Thus far. Now, as to "the whites whom we planted as our representatives," and who, Mr. Froude avers, are drifting into ruin, we confess to a total ignorance of their whereabouts in these islands in this jubilee year of Negro Emancipation. Of the representatives of Britain immediately before and after Emancipation we happen to know something, which, on the testimony of Englishmen, Mr. Froude will be made quite welcome to before our task is ended. With respect to Mr. Froude's statement as to the ingratitude of the emancipated Blacks, if it is aimed at the slaves who were actually set free, it is utterly untrue; for no class of persons, in their humble and artless way, are more attached to the Queen's majesty, whom they regard as incarnating in her gracious person the benevolence which Mr. Froude so jauntily scoffs at. But if our censor's remark under this head is intended for the present generation of Blacks, it is a pure and simple absurdity. What are we Negroes of the present day to be grateful for to the US, personified by Mr. Froude and the Colonial [116] Office exportations? We really believe, from what we know of Englishmen, that very few indeed would regard Mr. Froude's reproach otherwise than as a palpable adding of insult to injury. Obliged to "us," indeed! Why, Mr. Froude, who speaks of us as dogs and horses, suggests that the same kindliness of treatment that secures the attachment of those noble brutes would have the same result in our case. With the same consistency that marks his utterances throughout his book, he tells his readers "that there is no original or congenital difference between the capacity of the White and the Negro races." He adds, too, significantly: "With the same chances and with the same treatment, I believe that distinguished men would be produced equally from both races." After this truthful testimony, which Pelion upon Ossa of evidence has confirmed, does Mr. Froude, in the fatuity of his skin-pride, believe that educated men, worthy of the name, would be otherwise than resentful, if not disgusted, at being shunted out of bread in their own native land, which their parents' labours and taxes have made desirable, in order to afford room to blockheads, vulgarians, [117] or worse, imported from beyond the seas? Does Mr. Froude's scorn of the Negroes' skin extend, inconsistently on his part, to their intelligence and feelings also? And if so, what has the Negro to care—if let alone and not wantonly thwarted in his aspirations? It sounds queer, not to say unnatural and scandalous, that Englishmen should in these days of light be the champions of injustice towards their fellow-subjects, not for any intellectual or moral disqualification, but on the simple account of the darker skin of those who are to be assailed and thwarted in their life's career and aspirations. Really, are we to be grateful that the colour difference should be made the basis and justification of the dastardly denials of justice, social, intellectual, and moral, which have characterized the regime of those who Mr. Froude boasts were left to be the representatives of Britain's morality and fair play? Are the Negroes under the French flag not intensely French? Are the Negroes under the Spanish flag not intensely Spanish? Wherefore are they so? It is because the French and Spanish nations, who are neither of them inferior in origin or the [118] nobility of the part they have each played on the historic stage, have had the dignity and sense to understand the lowness of moral and intellectual consciousness implied in the subordination of questions of an imperial nature to the slaveholder's anxiety about the hue of those who are to be benefited or not in the long run. By Spain and France every loyal and law-abiding subject of the Mother Country has been a citizen deemed worthy all the rights, immunities, and privileges flowing from good and creditable citizenship. Those meriting such distinction were taken into the bosom of the society which their qualifications recommended them to share, and no office under the Government has been thought too good or too elevated for men of their stamp. No wonder, then, that Mr. Froude is silent regarding the scores of brilliant coloured officials who adorn the civil service of France and Spain, and whose appointment, in contrast with what has usually been the case in British Colonies, reflects an abiding lustre on those countries, and establishes their right to a foremost place among nations.

Mr. Froude, in speaking of Chief Justice [119] Reeves, ventures upon a smart truism which we can discuss for him, but of course not in the sense in which he has meant it. "Exceptions," our author remarks, "are supposed proverbially to prove nothing, or to prove the very opposite of what they appear to prove. When a particular phenomenon occurs rarely, the probabilities are strong against the recurrence of it." Now, is it in ignorance, or through disingenuousness, that Mr. Froude has penned this argument regarding exceptions? Surely, in the vast area of American life, it is not possible that he could see Frederick Douglass alone out of the cluster of prominent Black Americans who are doing the work of their country so worthily and so well in every official department. Anyhow, Mr. Froude's history of the Emancipation may here be amended for him by a reminder that, in the British Colonies, it was not Whites as masters, and Blacks as slaves, who were affected by that momentous measure. In fact, 1838 found in the British Colonies very nearly as many Negro and Mulatto slave-owners as there were white. Well then, these black and yellow planters received their quota, it may be presumed, of [120] the L20,000,000 sterling indemnity. They were part and parcel of the proprietary body in the Colonies, and had to meet the crisis like the rest. They were very wealthy, some of these Ethiopic accomplices of the oppressors of their own race. Their sons and daughters were sent, like the white planter's children, across the Atlantic for a European education. These young folk returned to their various native Colonies as lawyers and doctors. Many of them were also wealthy planters. The daughters, of course, became in time the mothers of the new generation of prominent inhabitants. Now, in America all this was different. No "nigger," however alabaster fair, was ever allowed the privileges of common citizenship, let alone the right to hold property in others. If possessed by a weakness to pass for white men, as very many of them could easily have contrived to do, woe unto the poor impostors! They were hunted down from city to city as few felons would be, and finally done to death—"serve them right!" being the grim commentary regarding their fate for having sought to usurp the ineffable privilege of whitemanship! All this, Mr. Froude, was [121] the rule, the practice, in America, with regard to persons of colour up to twenty-five years ago. Now, sir, what is the phenomenon which strikes your vision in that mighty Republic to-day, with regard to those self-same despised, discountenanced, persecuted and harried descendants of Ham? We shall tell you of the change that has taken place in their condition, and also some of the reasons of that beneficent revolution.

The Proclamation of Emancipation on January 1st, 1863, was, by President Lincoln, frankly admitted to have been a war necessity. No abstract principle of justice or of morals was of primary consideration in the matter. The saving of the Union at any cost,—that is, the stern political emergency forced forth the document which was to be the social salvation of every descendant of Ham in the United States of America. Close upon the heels of their emancipation, the enfranchisement of the Negroes was pushed forward by the thorough-going American statesmen. They had no sentimentality to defer to. The logic of events—the fact not only of the coloured race being freedmen, but also of their having been effective [122] comrades on the fields of battle, where the blood of eager thousands of them had flowed on the Union side, pointed out too plainly that men with such claims should also be partners in the resulting triumph.

Mr. Froude, being so deferential to skin prejudice, will doubtless find it strange that such a measure as the Civil Rights Bill should have passed a Congress of Americans. Assuredly with the feeling against the coloured race which custom and law had engrafted into the very nature of the vast majority, this was a tremendous call to make on the national susceptibilities. But it has been exactly this that has brought out into such vivid contrast the conduct of the British statesman, loudly professing to be unprejudiced as to colour, and fair and humane, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the dealings of the politicians of America, who had, as a matter of fact, sucked in aversion and contempt towards the Negro together with their mother's milk. Of course no sane being could expect that feelings so deeply ingrained and nourished could be rooted out by logic or by any legislative enactment. But, indeed, it is sublimely creditable to [123] the American Government that, whatever might be the personal and private sentiments of its individual members as regards race, palmam ferat qui meruit—"let him bear the palm who has deserved it"—has been their motto in dealing generally with the claims of their Ethiopic fellow-citizens. Hence it is that in only twenty-five years America can show Negro public officers as thick as blackberries, while Mr. Froude can mention only Mr. Justice Reeves in FIFTY years as a sample of the "exceptional" progress under British auspices of a man of African descent! Verily, if in fifty long years British policy can recognize only one single exception in a race between which and the white race there is no original or congenital difference of capacity, the inference must be that British policy has been not only systematically, but also too successfully, hostile to the advancement of the Ethiopians subject thereto; while the "fair field and no favour" management of the strong-minded Americans has, by its results, confirmed the culpability of the English policy in its relation to "subject races."

The very suggestive section of "the English [124] in the West Indies," from which we have already given extracts, and which bears the title "Social Revolution," thus proceeds:—

"But it does not follow that what can be done eventually can be done immediately, and the gulf which divides the colours is no arbitrary prejudice, but has been opened by the centuries of training and discipline which have given us the start in the race" (p. 125 [Froude]).

The reference in the opening clause of the above citation, as to what is eventually possible not being immediately feasible, is to the elevation of Blacks to high official posts, such as those occupied by Judge Reeves in Barbados, and by Mr. F. Douglass in the United States. We have already disposed by anticipation of the above contention of Mr. Froude's, by showing that in only twenty-five years America has found hundreds of eminent Blacks to fill high posts under her government. Our author's futile mixture of Judge Reeves' exceptional case with that of Fred. Douglass, which he cunningly singles out from among so many in the United States, is nothing but a subterfuge, of the same queer and flimsy description with which the literature of the cause now championed [125] by his eloquence has made the world only too familiar. What can Mr. Froude conceive any sane man should see in common between the action of British and of American statesmanship in the matter now under discussion? If his utterance on this point is that of a British spokesman, let him abide by his own verdict against his own case, as embodied in the words, "the gulf which divides the two COLOURS is no arbitrary prejudice," which, coupled with his contention that the elevation of the Blacks is not immediately feasible, discloses the wideness of divergence between British and American political opinion on this identical subject.

Mr. Froude is pathetically eloquent on the colour question. He tells of the wide gulf between the two colours—we suppose it is as wide as exists between his white horse and his black horse. Seriously, however, does not this kind of talk savour only too much of the slave-pen and the auction-block of the rice-swamp and the cotton-field; of the sugar-plantation and the driver's lash? In the United States alone, among all the slave-holding Powers, was the difference of race and colour invoked openly and boldly to justify all the enormities that [126] were the natural accompaniments of those "institutions" of the Past. But is Mr. Froude serious in invoking the ostracizing of innocent, loyal, and meritorious British subjects on account of their mere colour? Physical slavery—which was no crime per se, Mr. Froude tells us—had at least overwhelming brute power, and that silent, passive force which is even more potential as an auxiliary, viz., unenlightened public opinion, whose neutrality is too often a positive support to the empire of wrong.

But has Mr. Froude, in his present wild propaganda on behalf of political and, therefore, of social repression, anything analogous to those two above-specified auxiliaries to rely on? We trow not. Then why this frantic bluster and shouting forth of indiscreet aspirations on be half of a minority to whom accomplished facts, when not agreeable to or manipulated by themselves, are a perpetual grievance, generating life-long impotent protestations? Presumably there are possibilities the thoughts of which fascinate our author and his congeners in this, to our mind, vain campaign in the cause of social retrogression. But, be the incentives what they may, it might not be amiss on our [127] part to suggest to those impelled by them that the ignoring of Negro opinion in their calculations, though not only possible but easily practised fifty years ago, is a portentous blunder at the present time. Verbum sapienti.

Mr. Froude must see that he has set about his Negro-repression campaign in too blundering a fashion. He evidently expects to be able to throw dust into the eyes of the intelligent world, juggler-wise, through the agency of the mighty pronoun US, as representing the entire Anglo-Saxon race, in his advocacy of the now scarcely intelligible pretensions of a little coterie of Her Majesty's subjects in the West Indies. These gentry are hostile, he urges, to the presence of progressive Negroes on the soil of the tropics! Yet are these self-same Negroes not only natives, but active improvers and embellishers of that very soil. We cannot help concluding that this impotent grudge has sprung out of the additional fact that these identical Negroes constitute also a living refutation of the sinister predictions ventured upon generally against their race, with frantic recklessness, even within the last three decades, by affrighted slave-holders, of whose ravings Mr. Froude's book is only a [128] diluted echo, out of season and outrageous to the conscience of modern civilization.

It is patent, then, that the matters which Mr. Froude has sought to force up to the dignity of genetic rivalship, has nothing of that importance about it. His US, between whom and the Negro subjects of Great Britain the gulf of colour lies, comprises, as he himself owns, an outnumbered and, as we hope to prove later on, a not over-creditable little clique of Anglo-Saxon lineage. The real US who have started ahead of the Negroes, "through the training and discipline of centuries," are assuredly not anything like "represented" by the few pretentious incapables who, instead of conquering predominance, as they who deserve it always do, like men, are whimpering like babies after dearly coveted but utterly unattainable enjoyments—to be had at the expense of the interests of the Negroes whom they, rather amusingly, affect to despise. When Mr. Froude shall have become able to present for the world's contemplation a question respecting which the Anglo-Saxon family, in its grand world-wide predominance, and the African family, in its yet feeble, albeit promising, incipience of self-adjustment, shall [129] actually be competitors, then, and only then, will it be time to accept the outlook as serious. But when, as in the present case, he invokes the whole prestige of the Anglo-Saxon race in favour of the untenable pretensions of a few blases of that race, and that to the social and political detriment of tens of thousands of black fellow-subjects, it is high time that the common sense of civilization should laugh him out of court. The US who are flourishing, or pining, as the case may be, in the British West Indies—by favour of the Colonial Office on the former hypothesis, or, on the second, through the misdirection of their own faculties—do not, and, in the very nature of things, cannot in any race take the lead of any set of men endowed with virile attributes, the conditions of the contest being on all sides identical.

Pass we onward to extract and comment on other passages in this very engaging section of Mr. Froude's book. On the same page (125) he says:—

"The African Blacks have been free enough for thousands, perhaps for ten thousands of years, and it has been the absence of restraint which has prevented them from becoming civilized."

[130] All this, perhaps, is quite true, and, in the absence of positive evidence to the contrary of our author's dogmatic assertions, we save time by allowing him all the benefit he can derive from whatever weight they might carry.

"Generation has followed generation, and the children are as like their fathers as the successive generations of apes."

To this we can have nothing to object; especially in view of what the writer goes on to say, and that on his own side of the hedge—somewhat qualified though his admission may be:—"The whites, it is likely enough, succeeded one another with the same similarity for a series of ages." Our speculator grows profoundly philosophic here; and in this mood thus entertains his readers in a strain which, though deep, we shall strive to find clear:—

"It is now supposed that human race has been on the planet for a hundred thousand years at least; and the first traces of civilization cannot be thrown back at furthest beyond six thousand. During all this time mankind went on treading in the same steps, century after century making no more advance than the birds and beasts."

[131] In all this there is nothing that can usefully be taken exception to; for speculation and conjecture, if plausible and attractive, are free to revel whenever written documents and the unmistakable indications of the earth's crust are both entirely at fault. Warming up with his theme, Mr. Froude gets somewhat ambiguous in the very next sentence. Says he:—

"In Egypt or India or one knows not where, accident or natural development quickened into life our moral and intellectual faculties; and these faculties have grown into what we now experience, not in the freedom in which the modern takes delight, but under the sharp rule of the strong over the weak, of the wise over the unwise."

Our author, as we see, begins his above quoted deliverance quite at a loss with regard to the agency to which the incipience, growth, and fructification of man's faculties should be attributed. "Accident," "natural development," he suggests, quickened the human faculties into the progressive achievements which they have accomplished. But then, wherefore is this writer so forcible, so confident in his prophecies regarding Negroes and their future temporal condition [132] and proceedings, since it is "accident," and "accident" only, that must determine their fulfilment? Has he so securely bound the fickle divinity to his service as to be certain of its agency in the realization of his forecasts? And if so, where then would be the fortuitousness that is the very essence of occurrences that glide, undesigned, unexpected, unforeseen, into the domain of Fact, and become material for History? So far as we feel capable of intelligently meditating on questions of this inscrutable nature, we are forced to conclude that since "natural development" could be so regular, so continuous, and withal so efficient, in the production of the marvellous results that we daily contemplate, there must be existent and in operation—as, for instance, in the case of the uniformity characterizing for ages successive generations of mankind, as above adduced by our philosopher himself—some controlling LAW, according and subject to which no check has marred the harmonious progression, or prevented the consummations that have crowned the normal exercise of human energy, intellectual as well as physical.

The sharp rule of the strong over the [133] weak, is the first clause of the Carlylean-sounding phrase which embodies the requisite conditions for satisfactory human development. The terms expressive of these conditions, however, while certainly suggesting and embracing the beneficent, elevating influence and discipline of European civilization, such as we know and appreciate it, do not by any means exclude the domination of Mr. Legree or any other typical man-monster, whose power over his fellow-creatures is at once a calamity to the victims and a disgrace to the community tolerating not only its exercise, but the very possibility of its existence. The sharp rule of "the wise over the unwise," is the closing section of the recommendation to ensure man's effective development. Not even savages hesitate to defer in all their important designs to the sought-for guidance of superior judgments. But in the case of us West Indian Blacks, to whom Mr. Froude's doctrine here has a special reference, is it suggested by him that the bidders for predominance over us on the purely epidermal, the white skin, ground, are ipso facto the monopolists of directing wisdom? It surely cannot be so; for Mr. Froude's own chapters regarding both the [134] nomination by Downing Street of future Colonial office-holders and the disorganized mental and moral condition of the indigenous representatives—as he calls them!—of his country in these climes, preclude the possibility that the reference regarding the wise can be to them. Now since this is so, we really cannot see why the pains should have been taken to indite the above truism, to the truth whereof, under every normal or legitimate circumstance, the veriest barbarian, by spontaneously resorting to and cheerfully abiding by it, is among the first to secure practical effect.

"Our own Anglo-Saxon race," continues our author, "has been capable of self-government only after a thousand years of civil and spiritual authority. European government, European instruction, continued steadily till his natural tendencies are superseded by higher instincts, may shorten the probation period of the negro. Individual blacks of exceptional quality, like Frederick Douglass in America, or the Chief Justice of Barbados, will avail themselves of opportunities to rise, and the freest opportunity OUGHT TO BE offered them." Here we are reminded of the dogma laid down by a certain [135] class of ethnologists, to the effect that intellectuality, when displayed by a person of mixed European and African blood, must always be assigned to the European side of the parentage; and in the foregoing citation our author speaks of two personages undoubtedly belonging to the class embraced in the above dogma. Three specific objections may, therefore, be urged against the statements which we have indicated in the above quotation. First and foremost, neither Judge Reeves nor Mr. Fred Douglass is a black man, as Mr. Froude inaccurately represents each of them to be. The former is of mixed blood, to what degree we are not adepts enough to determine; and the latter, if his portrait and those who have personally seen him mislead us not, is a decidedly fair man.

We, of course, do not for a moment imagine that either of those eminent descendants of Ham cares a jot about the settlement of this question, which doubtless would appear very trivial to both. But as our author's crusade is against the Negro—by which we understand the undiluted African descendant, the pure Negro, as he singularly describes Chief Justice Reeves—our anxiety is to show that there exist, both [136] in the West Indies and in the United States, scores of genuine black men to whom neither of these two distinguished patriots would, for one instant, hesitate to concede any claim to equality in intellectual and social excellence. The second exception which we take is, as we have already shown in a previous page, to the persistent lugging in of America by Mr. Froude, doubtless to keep his political countrymen in countenance with regard to the Negro question. We have already pointed out the futility of this proceeding on our author's part, and suggested how damaging it might prove to the cause he is striving to uphold. "Blacks of exceptional quality," like the two gentlemen he has specially mentioned, "will avail themselves of opportunities to rise." Most certainly they will, Mr. Froude—but, for the present, only in America, where those opportunities are really free and open to all. There no parasitical non-workers are to be found, eager to eat bread, but in the sweat of other people's brows; no impecunious title-bearers; no importunate bores, nor other similar characters whom the Government there would regard it as their duty "to provide for"—by quartering them on the revenues [137] of Colonial dependencies. But in the British Crown—or rather "Anglo-West Indian"—governed Colonies, has it ever been, can it ever be, thus ordered? Our author's description of the exigencies that compel injustice to be done in order to requite, or perhaps to secure, Parliamentary support, coupled with his account of the bitter animus against the coloured race that rankles in the bosom of his "Englishmen in the West Indies," sufficiently proves the utter hypocrisy of his recommendation, that the freest opportunities should be offered to Blacks of the said exceptional order. The very wording of Mr. Froude's recommendation is disingenuous. It is one stone sped at two birds, and which, most naturally, has missed them both.

Mr. Froude knew perfectly well that, twenty-five years before he wrote his book, America had thrown open the way to public advancement to the Blacks, as it had been previously free to Whites alone. His use of "should be offered," instead of "are offered," betrays his consciousness that, at the time he was writing, the offering of any opportunities of the kind he suggests was a thing still to be desired under British jurisdiction. The third objection [138] which we shall take to Mr. Froude's bracketing of the cases of Mr. Fred Douglass and of Judge Reeves together, is that, when closely examined, the two cases can be distinctly seen to be not in any way parallel. The applause which our author indirectly bids for on behalf of British Colonial liberality in the instance of Mr. Reeves would be the grossest mockery, if accorded in any sense other than we shall proceed to show. Fred Douglass was born and bred a slave in one of the Southern States of the Union, and regained his freedom by flight from bondage, a grown man, and, of course, under the circumstances, solitary and destitute. He reached the North at a period when the prejudice of the Whites against men of his race was so rampant as to constitute a positive mania.

The stern and cruelly logical doctrine, that a Negro had no rights which white men were bound to respect, was in full blast and practical exemplification. Yet amidst it all, and despite of it all, this gifted fugitive conquered his way into the Temple of Knowledge, and became eminent as an orator, a writer, and a lecturer on political and general subjects. Hailed abroad [139] as a prodigy, and received with acclamation into the brotherhood of intelligence, abstract justice and moral congruity demanded that such a man should no longer be subject to the shame and abasement of social, legal, and political proscription. The land of his birth proved herself equal to this imperative call of civilized Duty, regardless of customs and the laws, written as well as unwritten, which had doomed to life-long degradation every member of the progeny of Ham. Recognizing in the erewhile bondman a born leader of men, America, with the unflinching directness that has marked her course, whether in good or in evil, responded with spontaneous loyalty to the inspiration of her highest instincts. Shamed into compunction and remorse at the solid fame and general sympathy secured for himself by a son of her soil, whom, in the wantonness of pride and power, she had denied all fostering care (not, indeed, for any conscious offending on his part, but by reason of a natural peculiarity which she had decreed penal), America, like a repentant mother, stooped from her august seat, and giving with enthusiasm both hands to the outcast, she helped him to stand forward and erect, [140] in the dignity of untrammeled manhood, making him, at the same time, welcome to a place of honour amongst the most gifted, the worthiest and most favoured of her children.

Chief Justice Reeves, on the other hand, did not enter the world, as Douglass had done, heir to a lot of intellectual darkness and legalized social and political proscription. Associated from adolescence with S. J. Prescod, the greatest leader of popular opinion whom Barbados has yet produced, Mr. Reeves possessed in his nature the material to assimilate and reflect in his own principles and conduct the salient characteristics of his distinguished Mentor. Arrived in England to study law, he had there the privilege of the personal acquaintance of Lord Brougham, then one of the Nestors of the great Emancipation conflict. On returning to his native island, which he did immediately after his call to the bar, Mr. Reeves sprung at once into the foremost place, and retained his precedence till his labours and aspirations were crowned by his obtaining the highest judicial post in that Colony. For long years before becoming Chief Justice, Mr. Reeves had conquered for himself the respect and confidence [141] of all Barbadians—even including the ultra exclusive "Anglo-West-Indians" of Mr. Froude—by the manful constitutional stand which, sacrificing official place, he had successfully made against the threatened abrogation of the Charter of the Colony, which every class and colour of natives cherish and revere as a most precious, almost sacred, inheritance. The successful champion of their menaced liberties found clustering around him the grateful hearts of all his countrymen, who, in their hour of dread at the danger of their time-honoured constitution, had clung in despair to him as the only leader capable of heading the struggle and leading the people, by wise and constitutional guidance, to the victory which they desired but could not achieve for themselves.

Sir William Robinson, who was sent out as pacificator, saw and took in at a glance the whole significance of the condition of affairs, especially in their relation to Mr. Reeves, and vice versa. With the unrivalled pre-eminence and predominant personal influence of the latter, the Colonial Office had possessed more than ample means of being perfectly familiar. What, then, could be more natural and consonant with [142] sound policy than that the then acknowledged, but officially unattached, head of the people (being an eminent lawyer), should, on the occurrence of a vacancy in the highest juridical post, be appointed to co-operate with the supreme head of the Executive? Mr. Reeves was already the chief of the legal body of the Colony; his appointment, therefore, as Chief Justice amounted to nothing more than an official ratification of an accomplished and unalterable fact. Of course, it was no fault of England's that the eminent culture, political influence, and unapproached legal status of Mr. Reeves should have coincided exactly with her political requirements at that crisis, nor yet that she should have utilized a coincidence which had the double advantage of securing the permanent services, whilst realizing at the same time the life's aspiration, of a distinguished British subject. But that Mr. Froude should be dinning in our ears this case of benefited self-interest, gaining the amplest reciprocity, both as to service and serviceableness, with the disinterested spontaneity of America's elevation of Mr. Douglass, is but another proof of the obliquity of the moral medium through [143] which he is wont to survey mankind and their concerns.

The distinction between the two marvellous careers which we have been discussing demands, as it is susceptible of, still sharper accentuation. In the final success of Reeves, it is the man himself who confronts one in the unique transcendency and victoriousness of personal merit. On the other hand, a million times the personal merit of Reeves combined with his own could have availed Douglass absolutely nothing in the United States, legal and social proscript that he was, with public opinion generally on the side of the laws and usages against him. The very little countries of the world are proverbial for the production of very great men. But, on the other hand, narrowness of space favours the concentration and coherence of the adverse forces that might impede, if they fail of utterly thwarting, the success which may happen to be grudged by those possessing the will and the power for its obstruction. In Barbados, so far as we have heard, read, and seen ourselves of the social ins and outs of that little sister-colony, the operation of the above mentioned [144] influences has been, may still be, to a certain extent, distinctly appreciable. Although in English jurisprudence there is no law ordaining the proscription, on the ground of race or colour, of any eligible candidate for social or political advancement, yet is it notorious that the ethics and practices of the "Anglo-West Indians"—who, our author has dared to say, represent the higher type of Englishmen—have, throughout successive generations, effectually and of course detrimentally operated, as though by a positive Medo-Persian edict, in a proscriptive sense. It therefore demanded extraordinary toughness of constitutional fibre, moral, mental, and, let us add, physical too, to overcome the obstacles opposed to the progress of merit, too often by persons in intelligence below contempt, but, in prosperity and accepted pretension, formidable indeed to fight against and overcome. We shudder to think of the petty cabals, the underbred indignities, direct and indirect, which the present eminent Judge had to watch against, to brush aside, to smile at, in course of his epic strides towards the highest local pinnacle of his profession. But [145] with him, as Time has shown, it was all sure and safe.

Providence had endowed him with the powers and temperament that break down, when opportunity offers, every barrier to the progress of the gifted and strong and brave. That opportunity, in his particular case, offered itself in the Confederation crisis. Distracted and helpless "Anglo-West Indians" thronged to him in imploring crowds, praying that their beloved Charter should be saved by the exertion of his incomparable abilities. Save and except Dr. Carrington, there was not a single member of the dominant section in Barbados whom it would not be absurd to name even as a near second to him whom all hailed as the Champion of their Liberties. In the contest to be waged the victory was not, as it never once has been, reserved to the SKIN or pedigree of the combatants. The above two matters, which in the eyes of the ruling "Bims" had, throughout long decades of undisturbed security, been placed before and above all possible considerations, gravitated down to their inherent insignificance when Intellect and Worth were destined to fight out the issue. Mr. [146] Reeves, whose possession of the essential qualifications was admittedly greater than that of every colleague, stood, therefore, in unquestioned supremacy, lord of the political situation, with the result above stated.

To what we have already pointed out regarding the absolute impossibility of such an opportunity ever presenting itself in America to Mr. Douglass, in a political sense, we may now add that, whereas, in Barbados, for the intellectual equipment needed at the crisis, Mr. Reeves stood quite alone, there could, in the bosom of the Union, even in respect of the gifts in which Mr. Douglass was most brilliant, be no "walking over the course" by him. It was in the country and time of Bancroft, Irving, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, Bryant, Motley, Henry Clay, Dan Webster, and others of the laureled phalanx which has added so great and imperishable a lustre to the literature of the English tongue.

We proceed here another step, and take up a fresh deliverance of our author's in reference to the granting of the franchise to the black population of these Colonies. "It is," says Mr. James Anthony Froude, who is just as prophetic [147] as his prototypes, the slave-owners of the last half-century, "it is as certain as anything future can be, that if we give the negroes as a body the political privileges which we claim for ourselves, they will use them only to their own injury." The forepart of the above citation reads very much as if its author wrote it on the principle of raising a ghost for the mere purpose of laying it. What visionary, what dreamer of impossible dreams, has ever asked for the Negroes as a body the same political privileges which are claimed for themselves by Mr. Froude and others of his countrymen, who are presumably capable of exercising them? No one in the West Indies has ever done so silly a thing as to ask for the Negroes as a body that which has not, as everybody knows, and never will be, conceded to the people of Great Britain as a body. The demand for Reform in the Crown Colonies—a demand which our author deliberately misrepresents—is made neither by nor for the Negro, Mulatto, White, Chinese, nor East Indian. It is a petition put forward by prominent responsible colonists—the majority of whom are Whites, and mostly Britons besides.

[148] Their prayer, in which the whole population in these Colonies most heartily join, is simply and most reasonably that we, the said Colonies, being an integral portion of the British Empire, and having, in intelligence and every form of civilized progress, outgrown the stage of political tutelage, should be accorded some measure of emancipation therefrom. And thereby we—White, Black, Mulatto, and all other inhabitants and tax-payers—shall be able to protect ourselves against the self-seeking and bold indifference to our interests which seem to be the most cherished expression of our rulers' official existence. It may be possible (for he has attempted it), that our new instructor in Colonial ethics and politics, under the impulsion of skin-superiority, and also of confidence in the probable success of experiments successfully tried fifty years before, does really believe in the sensibleness of separating COLOURS, and representing the wearers of them as being generally antagonistic to one another in Her Majesty's West Indian Dominions. How is it then, we may be permitted to ask Mr. Froude, that no complaint of the sort formulated by him as against the Blacks has ever been put [149] forward by the thousands of Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, and other Europeans who are permanent inhabitants, proprietors, and tax-payers of these Colonies? The reason is that Anglo-West Indianism, or rather Colonialism, is the creed of a few residents sharply divisible into two classes in the West Indies. Labouring conjointly under race-madness, the first believes that, as being of the Anglo-Saxon race, they have a right to crow and dominate in whatever land they chance to find themselves, though in their own country they or their forefathers had had to be very dumb dogs indeed. The Colonial Office has for a long time been responsible for the presence in superior posts of highly salaried gentry of this category, who have delighted in showing themselves off as the unquestionable masters of those who supply them with the pay that gives them the livelihood and position they so ungratefully requite. These fortunate folk, Mr. Froude avers, are likely to leave our shores in a huff, bearing off with them the civilizing influences which their presence so surely guarantees. Go tell to the marines that the seed of Israel flourishing in the borders of [150] Misraim will abandon their flourishing district of Goshen through sensitiveness on account of the idolatry of the devotees of Isis and Osiris!

The second and less placable class of "Englishmen in the West Indies," whose final departure our author would have us to believe would complete the catastrophe to progress in the British Antilles, is very impalpable indeed. We cannot feel them. We have failed to even see them. True, Mr. Froude scouts on their behalf the bare notion of their condescending to meet, on anything like equality, us, whom he and they pretend (rather anachronistically, at least) to have been their former slaves, or servants. But where, in the name of Heaven, where are these sortis de la cuisse de Jupiter, Mr. Froude? If they are invisible, mourning in impenetrable seclusion over the impossibility of having, as their fathers had before them, the luxury of living at the Negroes' expense, shall we Negroes who are in the sunshine of heaven, prepared to work and win our way, be anywise troubled in our Jubilee by the drivelling ineptitude which insanely reminds us of the miseries of those who went before us? We have thus arrived at the cardinal, [151] essential misrepresentation, out of scores which compose "The Bow of Ulysses," and upon which its phrases mainly hinge. Semper eadem—"Always the same"—has been the proud motto of the mightiest hierarchy that has controlled human action and shaped the destinies of mankind, no less in material than in ghostly concerns. Yet is a vast and very beneficial change, due to the imperious spirit of the times, manifest in the Roman Church. No longer do the stake, the sword, and the dismal horrors of the interdict figure as instruments for assuring conformity and submission to her dogmas. She is now content to rest her claims on herbeneficence in the past, as attested by noble and imperishable memorials of her solicitude for the poor and the ignorant, and in proclaiming the gospel without those ghastly coercives to its acceptance. Surely such a change, however unpalatable to those who have been compelled to make it, is most welcome to the outside world at large. "Always the same" is also, or should be, the device of the discredited herd whose spokesman Mr. Froude is so proud to be. In nothing has their historical character, as shown in the published literature of their [152] cause up to 1838, exhibited any sign of amelioration. It cannot be affected by the spirit and the lessons of the times. Mendacity and a sort of judicial blindness seem to be the two most salient characteristics by which are to be distinguished these implacable foes and would-be robbers of human rights and liberty. But, gracious heavens! what can tempt mortals to incur this weight of infamy? Wealth and Power? To be (very improbably) a Croesus or (still more improbably) a Bonaparte, and to perish at the conventional age, and of vulgar disease, like both? Turpitudes on the part of sane men, involving the sacrifice of the priceless attributes of humanity, can be rendered intelligible by the supreme temporal gains above indicated, but only if exemption from the common lot of mankind—in the shape of care, disease, and death—were accompaniments of those prizes.

In favour of slavery, which has for so many centuries desolated the African family and blighted its every chance of indigenous progress—of slavery whose abolition our author so ostentatiously regrets—only one solitary permanent result, extending in every case over [153] a natural human life, has been paraded by him as a respectable justification. At page 246, speaking of Negroes met by him during a stroll which he took at Mandeville, Jamaica, he tells us:—

"The people had black faces; but even they had shaped their manners in the old English models. The men touched their hats respectfully (as they eminently did not in Kingston and its environs). The women smiled and curtsied, and the children looked shy when one spoke to them. The name of slavery is a horror to us; but there must have been something human and kindly about it, too, when it left upon the character the marks of courtesy and good breeding"!

Alas for Africa and the sufferings of her desolated millions, in view of so light-hearted an assessment as this! Only think of the ages of outrage, misery, and slaughter—of the countless hecatombs that Mammon is hereby absolved from having directly exacted, since the sufficing expiatory outcome of it all has been only "marks of courtesy and good breeding"! Marks that are displayed, forsooth, by the survivors of the ghastly experiences or by [154] their descendants! And yet, granting the appreciable ethical value of the hat-touching, the smirking and curtseyings of those Blacks to persons whom they had no reason to suspect of unfriendliness, or whose white face they may in the white man's country have greeted with a civility perhaps only prudential, we fail to discover the necessity of the dreadful agency we have adverted to, for securing the results on manners which are so warmly commended. African explorers, from Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley, have all borne sufficient testimony to the world regarding the natural friendliness of the Negro in his ancestral home, when not under the influence of suspicion, anger, or dread.

It behoves us to repeat (for our detractor is a persistent repeater) that the cardinal dodge by which Mr. Froude and his few adherents expect to succeed in obtaining the reversal of the progress of the coloured population is by misrepresenting the elements, and their real attitude towards one another, of the sections composing the British West Indian communities. Everybody knows full well that Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Irishmen (who are not officials), as [155] well as Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, and other nationalities, work in unbroken harmony and, more or less, prosper in these Islands. These are no cherishers of any vain hankering after a state of things in which men felt not the infamy of living not only on the unpaid labour, but at the expense of the sufferings, the blood, and even the life of their fellow-men. These men, honourable by instinct and of independent spirit, depend on their own resources for self-advancement in the world—on their capital either of money in their pockets or of serviceable brains in their heads, energy in their limbs, and on these alone, either singly or more or less in combination. These reputable specimens of manhood have created homes dear to them in these favoured climes; and they, at any rate, being on the very best terms with all sections of the community in which their lot is cast, have a common cause as fellow-sufferers under the regime of Mr. Froude's official "birds of passage." The agitation in Trinidad tells its own tale. There is not a single black man—though there should have been many—among the leaders of the movement for Reform. Nevertheless the honourable [156] and truthful author of "The English in the West Indies," in order to invent a plausible pretext for his sinister labours of love on behalf of the poor pro-slavery survivals, and despite his knowledge that sturdy Britons are at the head of the agitation, coolly tells the world that it is a struggle to secure "negro domination."

The further allegation of our author respecting the black man is curious and, of course, dismally prophetic. As the reader may perhaps recollect, it is to the effect that granting political power to the Negroes as a body, equal in scope "to that claimed by Us" (i.e., Mr. Froude and his friends), would certainly result in the use of these powers by the Negroes to their own injury. And wherefore? If Mr. Froude professes to believe—what is a fact—that there is "no original or congenital difference of capacity" between the white and the African races, where is the consistency of his urging a contention which implies inferiority in natural shrewdness, as regards their own affairs, on the part of black men? Does this blower of the two extremes of temperature in the same breath pretend that the average British voter is better informed, can see more clearly what is for his own advantage, [157] is better able to assess the relative merits of persons to be entrusted with the spending of his taxes, and the general management of his interests? If Mr. Froude means all this, he is at issue not only with his own specific declaration to the contrary, but with facts of overwhelming weight and number showing precisely the reverse. We have personally had frequent opportunities of coming into contact, both in and out of England, with natives of Great Britain, not of the agricultural order alone, but very often of the artisan class, whose ignorance of the commonest matters was as dense as it was discreditable to the land of their birth and breeding. Are these people included (on account of having his favourite sine qua non of a fair skin) in the US of this apostle of skin-worship, in the indefeasible right to political power which is denied to Blacks by reason, or rather non-reason, of their complexion?

The fact is, that, judging by his own sentiments and those of his Anglo-West Indian friends, Mr. Froude calculated on producing an impression in favour of their discreditable views by purposely keeping out of sight the numerous European and other sufferers under the yoke [158] which he sneers at seeing described by its proper appellation of "a degrading tyranny." The prescriptive unfavourable forecast of our author respecting political power in the hands of the Blacks may, in our opinion, be hailed as a warrant for its bestowal by those in whose power that bestowal may be. As a pro-slavery prophecy, equally dismal and equally confident with the hundreds that preceded it, this new vaticination may safely be left to be practically dealt with by the Race, victimized and maligned, whose real genius and character are purposely belied by those who expect to be gainers by the process. Invested with political power, the Negroes, Mr. Froude goes on to assure his readers, "will slide back into their old condition, and the chance will be gone of lifting them to the level to which we have no right to say they are incapable of rising." How touchingly sympathetic! How transcendently liberal and righteous! But, to speak the truth, is not this solicitude of our cynical defamer on our behalf, after all, a useless waste of emotion on his part? Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.+ The tears of the crocodile are most copious in close view of the banquet on his prey. This [159] reiterated twaddle of Mr. Froude, in futile and unseasonable echo of the congenial predictions of his predecessors in the same line, might be left to receive not only the answer of his own book to the selfsame talk of the slavers fifty years ago, but also that of the accumulated refutations which America has furnished for the last twenty-five years as to the retrograde tendency so falsely imputed. But, taking it as a serious contention, we find that it involves a suggestion that the according of electoral votes to citizens of a certain complexion would, per se and ipso facto, produce a revulsion and collapse of the entire prevailing organization and order of a civilized community.

What talismanic virtue this prophet of evil attributes to a vote in the hand of a Negro out of Barbados, where for years the black man's vote has been operating, harmlessly enough, Heaven knows, we cannot imagine. At all events, as sliding back on the part of a community is a matter which would require some appreciable time, however brief, let us hope that the authorities charged "to see that the state receive no detriment" would be vigilant enough and in time to arrest the evil and vindicate [160] the efficiency of the civilized methods of self-preservation.

Our author concludes by another reference to Chief Justice Reeves: "Let British authority die away, and the average black nature, such as it now is, be left free to assert itself, there will be no more negroes like him in Barbadoes or anywhere." How the dying away of British authority in a British Colony is to come to pass, Mr. Froude does not condescend here explicitly to state. But we are left free to infer from the whole drift of "The English in the West Indies" that it will come through the exodus en masse said to be threatened by his "Anglo-West Indians." Mr. Froude sympathetically justifies the disgust and exasperation of these reputable folk at the presence and progress of the race for whose freedom and ultimate elevation Britain was so lavish of the wealth of her noblest intellects, besides paying the prodigious money-ransom of TWENTY MILLION pounds sterling. With regard to our author's talk about "the average black nature, such as it now exists, being left free to assert itself," and the dire consequences therefrom to result, we can only feel pity at the desperate straits to [161] which, in his search for a pretext for gratuitous slander, a man of our author's capacity has been so ignominiously reduced. All we can say to him with reference to this portion of his violent suppositions is that "the average black nature, such as it now exists," should NOT, in a civilized community, be left free to assert itself, any more than the average white, the average brown, the average red, or indeed any average colour of human nature whatsoever. As self-defence is the first law of nature, it has followed that every condition of organized society, however simple or primitive, is furnished with some recognized means of self-protection against the free assertion of itself by the average nature of any of its members.

Of course, if things should ever turn out according to Mr. Froude's desperate hypothesis, it may also happen that there will be no more Negroes like Mr. justice Reeves in Barbados. But the addition of the words "or anywhere" to the above statement is just another of those suppressions of the truth which, absolutely futile though they are, constitute the only means by which the policy he writes to promote can possibly be made to [162] appear even tolerable. The assertion of our author, therefore, standing as it actually does, embracing the whole world, is nothing less than an audacious absurdity, for there stand the United States, the French and Spanish islands—not to speak of the Central and South American Republics, Mexico, and Brazil—all thronged with black, mixed blood, and even half-breed high officials, staring him and the whole world in the face.

The above noted suppression of the truth to the detriment of the obnoxious population recalls a passage wherein the suggestion of what is not the truth has been resorted to for the same purpose. At page 123 we read: "The disproportion of the two races—always dangerously large—has increased with ever-gathering velocity since the emancipation. It is now beyond control on the old lines." The use of the expletive "dangerously," as suggestive of the truculence of the people to whom it refers, is critically allowable in view of the main intention of the author. But what shall we say of the suggestion contained in the very next sentence, which we have italicized? We are required by it to understand that in slavery-time the [163] planters had some organized method, rendered impracticable by the Emancipation, of checking, for their own personal safety, the growth of the coloured population. If we, in deference to the superior mental capacity of our author, admit that self-interest was no irresistible motive for promoting the growth of the human "property" on which their prosperity depended, we are yet at liberty to ask what was the nature of the "old lines" followed for controlling the increase under discussion. Was it suffocation of the babes by means of sulphur fumes, the use of beetle-paste, or exposure on the banks of the Caribbean rivers? In the later case History evidently lost a chance of self-repetition in the person of some leader like Moses, the Hebra-Egyptian Spartacus, arising to avenge and deliver his people.

We now shall note how he proceeds to descant on slavery itself:—"Slavery," says he, "was a survival from a social order which had passed away, and slavery could not be continued. IT DOES NOT FOLLOW THAT per se IT WAS A CRIME. The negroes who were sold to the dealers in the factories were most of them either slaves already to worse masters or were servi, servants [164] in the old meaning of the word, or else criminals, servati or reserved from death. They would otherwise have been killed, and since the slave trade has been abolished, are again killed in the too celebrated customs...."

Slavery, as Mr. Froude and the rest of us are bound to discuss it at present, is by no means susceptible of the gloss which he has endeavoured, in the above extract, to put on it. The British nation, in 1834, had to confront and deal with the only species of slavery which was then within the cognizance of public morals and practical politics. Doubtless our author, learned and erudite as he is, would like to transport us to those patriarchal ages when, under theocratic decrees, the chosen people were authorized to purchase (not to kidnap) slaves, and keep them as an everlasting inheritance in their posterity. The slaves so purchased, we know, became members of the families to which their lot was attached, and were hedged in from cruel usage by distinct and salutary regulations. This is the only species of slavery which—with the addition of the old Germanic self-enslavements and the generally prevailing ancient custom of pledging one's personal services [165] in liquidation of indebtedness—can be covered by the singular verdict of noncriminality which our author has pronounced. He, of course, knows much better than we do what the condition of slaves was in Greece as well as in Rome. He knows, too, that the "wild and guilty phantasy that man could hold property in man," lost nothing of its guilt or its wildness with the lapse of time and the changes of circumstances which overtook and affected those reciprocal relations. Every possibility of deterioration, every circumstance wherein man's fallen nature could revel in its worst inspirations, reached culmination at the period when the interference of the world, decreed by Providence, was rendered imperative by the sufferings of the bondsmen. It is this crisis of the history of human enslavement that Mr. Froude must talk about, if he wishes to talk to any purpose on the subject at all. His scoffs at British "virtuous benevolence," and his imputation of ingratitude to the Negro in respect of that self-same benevolence, do not refer to any theocratic, self-contracted, abstract, or idyllic condition of servitude. They pin his meaning down [166] to that particular phase when slavery had become not only "the sum," but the very quintessence, "of all human villainies."

At its then phase, slavery had culminated into being a menace, portentous and far encroaching, to not only the moral life but the very civilization of the higher types of the human family, so debasing and blighting were its effects on those who came into even tolerating contact with its details. The indescribable atrocities practised on the slaves, the deplorable sapping of even respectable principles in owners of both sexes—all these stood forth in their ineffable hideousness before the uncorrupted gaze of the moral heroes, sons of Britain and America, and also of other countries, who, buckling on the armour of civilization and right, fought for the vindication of them both, through every stern vicissitude, and won the first grand, ever-memorable victory of 1838, whereof we so recently celebrated the welcome Jubilee! Oh! it was a combat of archangels against the legions that Mammon had banded together and incited to the conflict. But though it was Sharp, Clarkson, Wilberforce, and the rest [167] of that illustrious host of cultured, lofty-souled, just, merciful, and beneficent men, who were thus the saviours, as well as the servants, of society, yet have we seen it possible for an Englishman of to-day to mouth against their memory the ineptitudes of their long-vanquished foes, and to flout the consecrated dead in their graves, as the Boeotian did the living Pericles in the market-place of Athens!

Why waste words and time on this defamer of his own countrymen, who, on account of the material gain and the questionable martial glory of the conquest, eulogizes Warren Hastings, the viceregal plunderer of India, whilst, in the same breath, he denounces Edmund Burke for upholding the immutable principles of right and justice! These principles once, and indubitably now, so precious in their fullest integrity to the normal British conscience, must henceforth, say Mr. Froude and his fellow-colonialists, be scored off the moral code of Britain, since they "do not pay" in tangible pelf, in self-aggrandisement, or in dazzling prestige.

The statement that many negroes who were sold to the dealers in the factories were "slaves [168] already to worse masters" is, in the face of facts which could not possibly have been unknown to him, a piece of very daring assertion. But this should excite no wonder, considering that precise and scrupulous accuracy would be fatal to the discreditable cause to which he so shamelessly proclaims his adhesion. As being familiar since early childhood with members of almost every tribe of Africans (mainly from or arriving by way of the West Coast) who were brought to our West Indies, we are in a position to contradict the above assertion of Mr. Froude's, its unfaltering confidence notwithstanding. We have had the Madingoes, Foulahs, Houssas, Calvers, Gallahs, Karamenties, Yorubas, Aradas, Cangas, Kroos, Timnehs, Veis, Eboes, Mokoes, Bibis, and Congoes, as the most numerous and important of the tribal contribution of Africa to the population of these Colonies. Now, from what we have intimately learned of these people (excepting the Congoes, who always appeared to us an inferior tribe to all the others), we unhesitatingly deny that even three in ten of the whole number were ever slaves in their own country, in the sense of having been born under any organized [169] system of servitude. The authentic records relating to the enslavement of Africans, as a regular systematized traffic, do not date further back than five centuries ago. It is true that a great portion of ancient literature and many monuments bear distinct evidence, all the more impressive because frequently only casual, that, from the earliest ages, the Africans had shared, in common with other less civilized peoples, the doom of having to furnish the menial and servile contingents of the more favoured sections of the human family. Now, dating from, say, five hundred years ago, which was long indeed after the disappearance of the old leading empires of the world, we have (save and except in the case of Arab incursionists into the Eastern and Northern coasts) no reliable authority for saying, or even for supposing, that the tribes of the African interior suffered from the molestations of professional man-hunters.

It was the organization of the West Coast slave traffic towards the close of the sixteenth century, and the extermination of the Caribbean aborigines by Spain, soon after Columbus had discovered the Western Continent, which [170] gave cohesion, system, impetus, and aggressiveness to the trade in African flesh and blood. Then the factory dealers did not wait at their seaboard mart, as our author would have us suppose, for the human merchandize to be brought down to them. The auri sacra fames, the accursed craving for gain, was too imperious for that. From the Atlantic border to as far inland as their emissaries could penetrate, their bribes, in every species of exchangeable commodities, were scattered among the rapacious chiefs on the river banks; while these latter, incited as well by native ferocity as by lust of gain, rushed forth to "make war" on their neighbours, and to kidnap, for sale to the white purchaser, every man, woman, and child they could capture amidst the nocturnal flames, confusion, tumult, and terror resulting from their unexpected irruption. That the poor people thus captured and sold into foreign on age were under worse masters than those under whom they, on being actually bought and becoming slaves, were doomed to experience all the atrocities that have thrilled with horror the conscience of the civilized Christian world, is a statement of worse than [171] childish absurdity. Every one, except Mr. Froude and his fellow-apologists for slavery, knows that the cruelty of savage potentates is summary, uncalculating, and, therefore, merciful in its ebullitions. A head whisked off, brains dashed out, or some other short form of savage dispatch, is the preferential method of destruction. With our author's better masters, there was the long, dreary vicissitude, beginning from the horrors of the capture, and ending perhaps years upon years after, in some bush or under the lash of the driver. The intermediate stages of the starvation life of hunger, chains, and hideous exposure at the barancoon, the stowing away like herrings on board the noisome ship, the suffocation, the deck-sores wrought into the body by the attrition of the bonier parts of the system against the unyielding wood—all these, says Mr. Froude, were more tolerable than the swift doing away with life under an African master! Under such, at all events, the care and comfort suitable to age were strictly provided for, and cheered the advanced years of the faithful bondsman.

After a good deal of talk, having the same logical value, our author, in his enthusiasm for [172] slavery, delivers himself thus: "For myself, I would rather be the slave of a Shakespeare or a Burghley, than the slave of a majority in the House of Commons, or the slave of my own folly." Of the four above specified alternatives of enslavement, it is to be regretted that temperament, or what is more likely, perhaps, self-interest, has driven him to accept the fourth, or the latter of the two deprecated yokes, his book being an irrefutable testimony to the fact. For, most assuredly, it has not been at the prompting of wisdom that a learned man of unquestionably brilliant talents and some measure of accorded fame could have prostituted those talents and tarnished that fame by condescending to be the literary spokesman of the set for whose miserable benefit he recommends the statesmen of his country to perjure and compromise themselves, regardless of inevitable consequences, which the value of the sectional satisfaction to be thereby given would but very poorly compensate. Possibly a House of Commons majority, whom this dermatophilist evidently rates far lower than his "Anglo-West Indians," might, if he were their Slave, have protected their own self- [173] respect by restraining him from vicariously scandalizing them by his effusions.

After this curious boast about his preferences as a hypothetic bondsman, Mr. Froude proceeds gravely to inform his readers that "there may be authority yet not slavery; a soldier is not a slave, a wife is not a slave..." and he continues, with a view of utilizing these platitudes against the obnoxious Negro, by telling us that persons sustaining the above specified and similar relations "may not live by their own wills, or emancipate themselves at their own pleasure from positions in which nature has placed them, or into which they have themselves voluntarily entered. The negroes of the West Indies are children, and not yet disobedient children.... If you enforce self-government upon them when they are not asking for it, you may ... wilfully drive them back into the condition of their ancestors, from which the slave-trade was the beginning of their emancipation."! The words which we have signalized by italics in the above extract could have been conceived only by a bigot—such an atrocious sentiment being possible only as the product of mind or morals [174] wrenched hopelessly out of normal action. All the remainder of this hashing up of pointless commonplaces has for its double object a suggestio falsi against us Negroes as a body, and a diverting of attention, as we have proved before, from the numerous British claimants of Reform, whose personality Mr. Froude and his friends would keep out of view, provided their crafty policy has the result of effectually repressing the hitherto irrepressible, and, as such, to the "Anglo-West Indian," truly detestable Negro.

NOTES

158. +Translation: "I fear the Greeks even when they bear gifts."



BOOK III: WEST INDIAN CONFEDERATION

[175] In heedless formulation of his reasons, if such they should be termed, for urging tooth and nail the non-according of reform to the Crown-governed Colonies, our author puts forth this dogmatic deliverance (p. 123):—

"A West Indian self-governing dominion is possible only with a full Negro vote. If the whites are to combine, so will the blacks. It will be a rule by the blacks and for the blacks."

That a constitution for any of our diversely populated Colonies which may be fit for it is possible only with "a full Negro vote" (to the extent within the competence of such voting), goes without saying, as must be the case with every section of the Queen's subjects eligible for the franchise. The duly qualified Spaniard, [176] Coolie, Portuguese, or man of any other non-British race, will each thus have a vote, the same as every Englishman or any other Briton. Why, then, should the vote of the Negro be so especially a bugbear? It is because the Negro is the game which our political sportsman is in full chase of, and determined to hunt down at any cost. Granted, however, for the sake of argument, that black voters should preponderate at any election, what then? We are gravely told by this latter-day Balaam that "If the whites are to combine, so will the blacks," but he does not say for what purpose.

His sentence, therefore, may be legitimately constructed in full for him in the only sense which is applicable to the mutual relations actually existing between those two directly specified sections of British subjects who he would fain have the world believe live in a state of active hostility:—"If the whites are to combine for the Promotion of the general welfare, as many of the foremost of them have done before and are doing now, so will the blacks also combine in the support of such whites, and as staunch auxiliaries equally interested in the furtherance of the same ameliorative [177] objects." Except in the sense embodied in the foregoing sentence, we cannot, in these days, conceive with what intent persons of one section should so specially combine as to compel combination on the part of persons of any other. The further statement that a confederation having a full black voting-power would be a government "by the blacks and for the blacks," is the logical converse of the now obsolete doctrine of Mr. Froude's inspirers—"a government by whites should be only for whites." But this formula, however strenuously insisted on by those who gave it shape, could never, since even before three decades from the first introduction of African slaves, be thoroughly put in practice, so completely had circumstances beyond man's devising or control compelled the altering of men's minds and methods with regard to the new interests which had irresistibly forced themselves into importance as vital items in political arrangements. Nowadays, therefore, that Mr. Froude should desire to create a state of feeling which had, and could have had, no existence with regard to the common interests of the inhabitants for upwards of two full centuries, is [178] evidently an excess of confidence which can only be truly described as amazing. But, after all, what does our author mean by the words "a government by the blacks?" Are we to understand him as suggesting that voting by black electors would be synonymous with electing black representatives? If so, he has clearly to learn much more than he has shown that he lacks, in order to understand and appreciate the vital influences at work in West Indian affairs. Undoubtedly, being the spokesman of few who (secretly) avow themselves to be particularly hostile to Ethiopians, he has done no more than reproduce their sentiments. For, conscious, as these hankerers after the old "institutions" are, of being utterly ineligible for the furthering of modern progressive ideas, they revenge themselves for their supersession on everybody and everything, save and except their own arrogant stolidity. White individuals who have part and lot in the various Colonies, with their hearts and feelings swayed by affections natural to their birth and earliest associations; and Whites who have come to think the land of their adoption as dear to themselves as the land of their birth, entertain no such dread of [179] their fellow-citizens of any other section, whom they estimate according to intelligence and probity, and not according to any accident of exterior physique. Every intelligent black is as shrewd regarding his own interests as our author himself would be regarding his in the following hypothetical case: Some fine day, being a youth and a bachelor, he gets wedded, sets up an establishment, and becomes the owner of a clipper yacht. For his own service in the above circumstances we give him the credit to believe that, on the persons specified below applying among others to him for employment, as chamber-maid and house-servant, and also as hands for the vessel, he would, in preference to any ordinarily recommended white applicants, at once engage the two black servant-girls at President Churchill's in Dominica, the droghermen there as able seamen, and as cabin-boy the lad amongst them whose precocious marine skill he has so warmly and justly extolled. It is not because all these persons are black, but because of the soul-consciousness of the selector, that they each (were they even blue) had a title to preferential consideration, his experience and sense of fitness being [180] their most effectual supporters. Similarly, the Negro voter would elect representatives whom he knew he could trust for competency in the management of his affairs, and not persons whose sole recommendation to him would be the possession of the same kind of skin. Nor, from what we know of matters in the West Indies, do we believe that any white man of the class we have eulogized would hesitate to give his warmest suffrage to any black candidate who he knew would be a fitting representative of his interests. We could give examples from almost every West Indian island of white and coloured men who would be indiscriminately chosen as their candidate by either section. But the enumeration is needless, as the fact of the existence of such men is too notorious to require proof.