J. J. Thomas

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whilst those relations subsisted, the white masters inflicted, and the black slaves had to endure, the hideous atrocities that are inseparable from the system of slavery. Since Emancipation, the enormous strides made in self-advancement by the ex-slaves have only had the effect of provoking a resentful uneasiness in the bosoms of the ex-masters. The former bondsmen, on their side, and like their brethren of Hayti, are eaten up with implacable, blood-thirsty rancour against their former lords and owners. ”

“ Yes, if Mr. Froude had, throughout his volume, spoken in this strain, his occasional want of patience and fairness with regard to our male kindred might have found condonation in his even more than chivalrous appreciation of our womankind. But it has been otherwise. So we are forced to try conclusions with him in the arena of his own selection—unreflecting spokesman that he is of British colonialism, which, we grieve to learn through Mr. Froude's pages, has, like the Bourbon family, not only forgotten nothing, but, unfortunately for its own peace, learnt nothing also. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Religion, as understood by the best of men, is purely a matter of feeling and action between man and man—the doing unto others as we would they should do unto us; and any creed or any doctrine which directly or indirectly subverts or even weakens this basis is in itself a danger to the highest welfare of mankind. The simple conventional faith in God, in Jesus, and in a future state, however modified nowadays, has still a vitality which can restrain and ennoble its votaries, provided it be inculcated and received in a befitting spirit. ”

“ Froude's was not as baseless as we have shown it to be, and that the leaders of the Reform agitation were impelled by the desire which our author seeks to discredit them with, what then? Have they who have borne the heat and the burden of the day in making the Colonies what they are no right to the enjoyment of the fruits of their labours? The local knowledge, the confidence and respect of the population, which such men enjoy, and can wield for good or evil in the community, are these matters of small account in the efficient government of the Colony? ”

“ Sir Sanford Freeling, by the will and pleasure of Downing Street, was the next successor, after Governor Irving, to the chief ruler-ship of Trinidad. Incredible as it may sound, he was a yet more disadvantageous bargain for the Colony's £4000 a year. A better man in many respects than his predecessor, he was in many more a much worse Governor. The personal affability of a man can be known only to those who come into actual contact with him—the public measures of a ruler over a community touches it, mediately or immediately, throughout all its sections. ”

“ Within the last twenty years, however, the history of the Black Man, both in the West Indies and, better still, in the United States of America, has been a succession of achievements which have converted the charge of laziness into a baseless and absurd calumny. The repetition of the charge referred to is, in these [202] waning days of the nineteenth century, a discredited anachronism, which, however, has no deterring features for Mr. Froude. As the running down of the Negro was his cue, he went in boldly for the game, with what result we shall presently see. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the scenes of strife he has in his savage state been known to be indomitable save by the stress of irresistible forces, whether of men or of circumstances. Staunch in his friendship and tender towards the weak directly under his protection, the unvitiated African furnishes in himself the combination of native virtue which in the land of his exile was so prolific of good results for the welfare of the whole slave-class. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Verily, it requires an eye rendered more than microscopic by prejudice to discern the difference between the gambols of juveniles of any colour under similar conditions. It is true that it might just be the difference between the friskings of white lambs and the friskings of lambs that are not white. That any black pupil should be taught to despise his own people through being lifted above them by education, seems a reckless statement, and far from patriotic withal; inasmuch as the education referred to here was European, and the place from which it was obtained presumably England. ”

“ What is it in the nature of things that will oust the African race from the right to participate, in times to come, in the high destinies that have been assigned in times past to so many races that have not been in anywise superior to us in the qualifications, physical, moral, and intellectual, [237] that mark out a race for prominence amongst other races?
The normal composition of the typical Negro has the testimony of ages to its essential soundness and nobility. Physically, as an active labourer, he is capable of the most protracted exertion under climatic conditions the most exhausting. ”

“ 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? ”

“ In modern times, after his expatriation into dismal bondage, both Britain and America have had occasion to see that even in the paralysing fetters of political and social degradation the right arm of the Ethiop can be a valuable auxiliary on the field of battle. Britain, in her conflict with France for supremacy in the West Indies, did not disdain the aid of the sable arms that struck together with those of Britons for the trophies that furnished the motives for those epic contests. ”

“ It is, therefore, contrary to fact to represent the Whites exclusively as ruling, and the Blacks indiscriminately as subject.
He goes on to say, "There are two classes in the community; their interests are opposite as they are now understood." As regards the above, Mr. Froude's attention may be called to the fact that classification in no department of science has ever been based on colour, but on relative affinity in certain salient qualities. To use his own figure, no horse or dog is more or less a horse or dog because it happens to be white or black. ”

“ Colonial administrators of the mighty British Empire, the lesson which History has taught and yet continues to teach you in Hayti as to the best mode of dealing with your Ethiopic colonists lies patent, blood-stained and terrible before you, and should be taken definitively to heart. But if you are willing that Civilization and Religion—in short, all the highest developments of individual and social life—should at once be swept away by a desolating vandalism of African birth ”

“ The marrying of a black wife, on the other hand, by a West Indian White was an event of frequent occurrence at a period in regard to which our historian seems to be culpably uninformed. In slavery days, when all planters, black and white alike, were fused in a common solidarity of interests, the skin-distinction which Mr. Froude so strenuously advocates, and would fain risk so much to promote, did not, so far as matrimony was concerned, exist in the degree that it now does. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Froude must join us in thinking that a man whose mind could be warped by external influences from the softest commiseration for the sufferings of his kind, one year, into being the cold-blooded deviser of the readiest method for slaughtering unarmed holiday-makers, the very next year, is not the kind of ruler whom he and we so cordially desiderate. ”

“ The years of civilized development have dawned in turn on many sections of the human family, and the Anglo-Saxons, who now enjoy preeminence, got their turn only after Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome, and others had successively held the palm of supremacy. And since these mighty empires have all passed away, may we not then, if the past teaches aught, confidently expect that other racial hegemonies will arise in the future to keep up the ceaseless progression of temporal existence towards the existence that is eternal? ”

“ As to the dictum that "the two races are not equal and will not blend," it is open to the fatal objection that, having himself proved, with sympathizing pathos, how the West Indies are now well-nigh denuded of their Anglo-Saxon inhabitants, Mr. Froude would have us also understand that the miserable remnant who still complainingly inhabit those islands must, by doing violence to the understanding, be taken as the whole of the world-pervading Anglo-Saxon family. The Negroes of the West Indies number a good deal more than two million souls. ”

“ But what should be thought of the sense, if not indeed the sanity, of a grave political teacher who prescribes "European government" and "European education" as the specifics to qualify the Negro for political emancipation, and who, when these qualifications are conspicuously mastered by the Negro who has undergone the training, refuses him the prize, because he is a Negro? ”