Thomas West, 2nd Baron De La Warr

“ Whether this was the result of the paucity, or incongruity, of his materials, or whether, from feelings of delicacy he might not choose to declare all he knew, are points into which I have neither right nor inclination to enquire. There seems every reason to conclude that, from youth, West had an elegant and well-directed taste in matters of literature and the fine arts. As early as the year 1720, he shewed the munificence of his disposition, in these respects, by befriending Hearne with a plate for his Antiquities of Glastonbury ”

“ The scuttler of the eighties finds a more wholesome outlet for his energy to-day in the boxing competitions at the lads’ club or in the battalions of the Boy Scouts. On all occasions where West had to deal with questions having a moral and social as well as a legal aspect, his judgments were always healthy in tone and liberal and enlightened in policy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Still Jack did not move. Through a haze of his own blood he stared, the fate of his enemy forgotten. All about the kiosk bodies which had laid so still for the past week were moving. The little figures, not much larger than ants from that height, yawned, sat up and stretched as though it was the commonest thing in the world to take a nap in the midst of Fifth Avenue. It was as if the last swoop of that batlike figure had returned them to consciousness.
"The world is alive! The world is alive!" Baron croaked wildly as he felt his senses slipping from him. "We have won, June! We have won!" ”

“ 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? ”

“ Todd,” the new agent continued savagely, puffing rapidly at his cigarette, which winked brightly in the shadows, “it’s only leather bellies like you and me who should be sent up to the lonely stations where all the people one sees are negroes. I tell you, they’ve got to come to it. I never knew but one youngster who came through decently. That was Charles Markley. ’Member him?”
“Well, rather,” chuckled the captain. “I was just reading in the Times about his success as a radio wizard back home. Seems he’s succeeded in eliminating static, or something.” ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I know not how long my residing here may be useful to others, nor whom I may yet be able to reclaim, by shewing that I can bear injury and encounter opposition without renouncing my own principles, or calumniating my opponents; but this I know, I am labouring at my post like a faithful subject, and had all men done the same, our good King would not now have been seen snatching his meal under a hedge like a common mendicant, nor would the great seal of England have had to be secretly carried to him like the booty of a cut-purse. ”

“ What, we ask, will in the coming ages be the opinion and attitude of the extra-African millions—ten millions in the Western Hemisphere—dispersed so widely over the surface of the globe, apt apprentices in every conceivable department of civilized culture? Will these men remain for ever too poor, too isolated from one another for grand racial combinations? Or will the naturally opulent cradle of their people, too long a prey to violence and unholy greed, become at length the sacred watchword of a generation willing and able to conquer or perish under its inspiration? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The last of his political squibs and short poems were given to the world in the columns of the Morning Chronicle; and referred principally to the earlier struggles of the Anti-Corn Law League—the verses having in most cases been suggested by pasting political events.
Thomas Moore died at the ripe age of seventy-two. He was born on the 28th of May, 1780, in Angier-street, Dublin, where his father, a strict Roman Catholic, carried on a grocery and spirit business. As a child, he is said to have been remarkable for personal beauty ”

“ Few men, indeed, have passed more pleasantly through the world than Thomas Moore. His day of life was one continual sunshine, just sufficiently tempered and shaded by passing clouds—"mere crumpling of the rose-leaves"—as to soften and enhance its general gayety and brightness. ”

“ King George III also greatly admired the painting, and said, “There! I am cheated out of a fine canvas by listening to other people. But you shall make a copy of it for me.”
And yet the critics tell us that West, with all his love for truth in dress, took even a greater artist’s license when he painted this picture. He represented men as standing near Wolfe (the two generals, Monckton and Barré) who were not there at all. These two men were fatally wounded in the same battle, but in another part of the field. ”

“ But no more of politics. I am sure you must have more than sufficient at home.
"I will turn to a more pleasant subject and give you a slight history of the American artists now in London.
"At the head stands Mr. West. He stands and has stood so long preëminent that I could relate but little of his history that would be new to you, so that I shall confine myself only to what has fallen under my own observation, and, of course, my remarks will be few.
"As a painter Mr. West can be accused of as few faults as any artist of ancient or modern times. ”

“ Tanner, and others, it is gratifying to be able to chronicle the Ethiopic women of North America as moving shoulder to shoulder with the men in the highest spheres of literary activity. Among a brilliant band of these our sisters, conspicuous no less in poetry than in prose, we single out but a solitary name for the double purpose of preserving brevity and of giving in one embodiment the ideal Afro-American woman of letters. ”

“ Here, huddled together in confused, hopeless misery and ruin, lie, fettered and prostrate, even priest as well as potentate, undistinguishable victims of crude, unblenching violence, with its climax of nefarious sacrilege. We, common mortals, therefore, can hope for no deliverance from, or even succour in, the woful plight thus dismally contrived for us all by the fair-skinned race who have now become our masters. ”

“ West returned to his home in Springfield, in 1754, to discuss the question of his future vocation. He had an inclination for military life, and volunteered as a recruit in the old French war; but military attractions vanished (p. 257) among the hardships involved, and in 1756, when eighteen years old, he established himself in Philadelphia as a portrait-painter, his price being "five guineas a head." Two years later he went to New York, where he passed eleven months, and was liberally employed by the merchants and others. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Much, he said, depended on the personal character of a King of England, who was not, like an Eastern sovereign, shown from a distant eminence to be worshipped with prostrations, or, like a Grand Monarque, to be flattered and implicitly obeyed. He ruled over a nation of freemen; he lived in the observation of his subjects, not as a despot coercing slaves and parasites, but as the administrator of public justice, and the conservator of the national rights. ”

“ For the first time, in the glare of the bright morning light, West took stock of the fellow, and realized his true nature. Instinctively he felt that here was the particular antagonist he was to be pitted against. Whatever might be the truth as to a strange woman, this man must be the controlling factor in any conspiracy. ”

“ I venture to believe that no serious work in defence of an [22] important cause or community can lose much, if anything, of its intrinsic value through some delay in its issue; especially when written in the vindication of Truth, whose eternal principles are beyond and above the influence of time and its changes.
At any rate, this attempt to answer some of Mr. Froude's main allegations against the people of the West Indies cannot fail to be of grave importance and lively interest to the inhabitants of those Colonies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I'm afraid!"
"There, there, Tom." Although his heart was breaking, it warmed to this display of humanness in the old man. "We'll lick this thing yet. Tell you what.... Tonight we'll go to the factory, barricade the doors and windows ... keep the fools out until they come to their senses."
"It won't be any use." Tom rose slowly, his fat old face drawn in stern lines. "Nevertheless, we'll fight it out together, if you wish."
"Very well, Tom." Jonathan stretched out his hand and grasped that of the other over the body of the dead girl. ”

“ The strange possession which a vivid fancy may take of a lonely and imaginative mind is a phenomenon not unfamiliar to those who have studied the lives of men of fervid temperament; and the whim to which West now gave himself up was no more extravagant than many another which has had consequences far more serious. For days he went on, becoming more and more completely engrossed by the folly he was following. His writing-table was covered with papers upon which he had memoranda of stocks, of sales, of investments, calculations of commissions, and all the rest of it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How much to be pitied are the gifted esoterics who, in such a quest, vainly point their telescopes into the star-thronged firmament, and plunge their reasoning powers into the abyss of consciousness and such-like mysteries! ”