Froudacity; West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Part 3

[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 p.r.o.nounced by this magistrate in his cups--were only poor Negroes, coolies, or other persons whose worldly circ.u.mstances placed them in the category of the "weaker" in the community. To these cla.s.ses 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 s.h.i.+pped 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 superst.i.tion 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 pa.s.sing 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 princ.i.p.al cause of it. The blacks whom, in a fit of virtuous benevolence, we emanc.i.p.ated, 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 Emanc.i.p.ation. Of the representatives of Britain immediately before and after Emanc.i.p.ation 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 ingrat.i.tude of the emanc.i.p.ated Blacks, if it is aimed at the slaves who were actually set free, it is utterly untrue; for no cla.s.s 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 n.o.ble 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 a.s.sailed 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] n.o.bility 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 citizens.h.i.+p. 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 l.u.s.tre 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 Dougla.s.s alone out of the cl.u.s.ter 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 Emanc.i.p.ation may here be amended for him by a reminder that, in the British Colonies, it was not Whites as masters, and Blacks as slaves, who were affected by that momentous measure. In fact, 1838 found in the British Colonies very nearly as many Negro and Mulatto slave-owners as there were white. Well then, these black and yellow planters received their quota, it may be presumed, of [120] the 20,000,000 sterling indemnity.

They were part and parcel of the proprietary body in the Colonies, and had to meet the crisis like the rest. They were very wealthy, some of these Ethiopic accomplices of the oppressors of their own race. Their sons and daughters were sent, like the white planter's children, across the Atlantic for a European education. These young folk returned to their various native Colonies as lawyers and doctors. Many of them were also wealthy planters. The daughters, of course, became in time the mothers of the new generation of prominent inhabitants. Now, in America all this was different. No "n.i.g.g.e.r," however alabaster fair, was ever allowed the privileges of common citizens.h.i.+p, let alone the right to hold property in others. If possessed by a weakness to pa.s.s 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 whitemans.h.i.+p! 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 Emanc.i.p.ation 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 doc.u.ment which was to be the social salvation of every descendant of Ham in the United States of America. Close upon the heels of their emanc.i.p.ation, the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sed a Congress of Americans. a.s.suredly 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 t.i.tle "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. Dougla.s.s in the United States.

We have already disposed by antic.i.p.ation 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. Dougla.s.s, 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 statesmans.h.i.+p 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 "inst.i.tutions" 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, pa.s.sive 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 a.n.a.logous to those two above-specified auxiliaries to rely on? We trow not. Then why this frantic bl.u.s.ter 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.

Verb.u.m sapienti.

Mr. Froude must see that he has set about his Negro-repression campaign in too blundering a fas.h.i.+on. He evidently expects to be able to throw dust into the eyes of the intelligent world, juggler-wise, through the agency of the mighty p.r.o.noun 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 const.i.tute 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 rivals.h.i.+p, 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 a.s.suredly 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 compet.i.tors, 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 flouris.h.i.+ng, 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.

Pa.s.s we onward to extract and comment on other pa.s.sages 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 a.s.sertions, 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 doc.u.ments 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 circ.u.mstance, 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 Dougla.s.s 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] cla.s.s of ethnologists, to the effect that intellectuality, when displayed by a person of mixed European and African blood, must always be a.s.signed to the European side of the parentage; and in the foregoing citation our author speaks of two personages undoubtedly belonging to the cla.s.s 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 Dougla.s.s 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 t.i.tle-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 Dougla.s.s 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 Dougla.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances, solitary and dest.i.tute. He reached the North at a period when the prejudice of the Whites against men of his race was so rampant as to const.i.tute 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 abas.e.m.e.nt of social, legal, and political proscription.