His sentence, therefore, may be legitimately constructed in full for

him in the only sense which is applicable to the mutual relations

actually existing between those two directly specified sections of

British subjects who he would fain have the world believe live in a

state of active hostility:--"If the whites are to combine for the

Promotion of the general welfare, as many of the foremost of them have

done before and are doing now, so will the blacks also combine in the

support of such whites, and as staunch auxiliaries equally interested

in the furtherance of the same ameliorative [177] objects." Except in

the sense embodied in the foregoing sentence, we cannot, in these days,

conceive with what intent persons of one section should so specially

combine as to compel combination on the part of persons of any other.

The further statement that a confederation having a full black

voting-power would be a government "by the blacks and for the blacks,"

is the logical converse of the now obsolete doctrine of Mr. Froude's

inspirers--"a government by whites should be only for whites." But

this formula, however strenuously insisted on by those who gave it

shape, could never, since even before three decades from the first

introduction of African slaves, be thoroughly put in practice, so

completely had circumstances beyond man's devising or control compelled

the altering of men's minds and methods with regard to the new

interests which had irresistibly forced themselves into importance as

vital items in political arrangements. Nowadays, therefore, that Mr.

Froude should desire to create a state of feeling which had, and could

have had, no existence with regard to the common interests of the

inhabitants for upwards of two full centuries, is [178] evidently an

excess of confidence which can only be truly described as amazing.

But, after all, what does our author mean by the words "a government by

the blacks?" Are we to understand him as suggesting that voting by

black electors would be synonymous with electing black representatives?

If so, he has clearly to learn much more than he has shown that he

lacks, in order to understand and appreciate the vital influences at

work in West Indian affairs. Undoubtedly, being the spokesman of few

who (secretly) avow themselves to be particularly hostile to

Ethiopians, he has done no more than reproduce their sentiments. For,

conscious, as these hankerers after the old "institutions" are, of

being utterly ineligible for the furthering of modern progressive

ideas, they revenge themselves for their supersession on everybody and

everything, save and except their own arrogant stolidity. White

individuals who have part and lot in the various Colonies, with their

hearts and feelings swayed by affections natural to their birth and

earliest associations; and Whites who have come to think the land of

their adoption as dear to themselves as the land of their birth,

entertain no such dread of [179] their fellow-citizens of any other

section, whom they estimate according to intelligence and probity, and

not according to any accident of exterior physique. Every intelligent

black is as shrewd regarding his own interests as our author himself

would be regarding his in the following hypothetical case: Some fine

day, being a youth and a bachelor, he gets wedded, sets up an

establishment, and becomes the owner of a clipper yacht. For his own

service in the above circumstances we give him the credit to believe

that, on the persons specified below applying among others to him for

employment, as chamber-maid and house-servant, and also as hands for

the vessel, he would, in preference to any ordinarily recommended white

applicants, at once engage the two black servant-girls at President

Churchill's in Dominica, the droghermen there as able seamen, and as

cabin-boy the lad amongst them whose precocious marine skill he has so

warmly and justly extolled. It is not because all these persons are

black, but because of the soul-consciousness of the selector, that they

each (were they even blue) had a title to preferential consideration,

his experience and sense of fitness being [180] their most effectual

supporters. Similarly, the Negro voter would elect representatives

whom he knew he could trust for competency in the management of his

affairs, and not persons whose sole recommendation to him would be the

possession of the same kind of skin. Nor, from what we know of matters

in the West Indies, do we believe that any white man of the class we

have eulogized would hesitate to give his warmest suffrage to any black

candidate who he knew would be a fitting representative of his

interests. We could give examples from almost every West Indian island

of white and coloured men who would be indiscriminately chosen as their

candidate by either section. But the enumeration is needless, as the

fact of the existence of such men is too notorious to require proof.

Mr. Froude states plainly enough (p. 123) that, whereas a whole

thousand years were needed to train and discipline the Anglo-Saxon

race, yet "European government, European instruction, continued

steadily till his natural tendencies are superseded by a higher

instinct, may shorten the probation period of the negro." Let it be

supposed that this period of probation [181] for the Negro should

extend, under such exceptionally favourable circumstances, to any

period less than that which is alleged to have been needed by the

Anglo-Saxon to attain his political manhood--what then are the

prospects held out by Mr. Froude to us and our posterity on our

mastering the training and discipline which he specially recommends for

Blacks? Our author, in view, doubtless, of the rapidity of our onward

progress, and indeed our actual advancement in every respect, thus

answers (pp. 123-4):--"Let a generation or two pass by and carry away

with them the old traditions, and an English governor-general will be

found presiding over a black council, delivering the speeches made for

him by a black prime minister; and how long could this endure? No

English gentleman would consent to occupy so absurd a situation."

And again, more emphatically, on the same point (p. 285):--"No

Englishman, not even a bankrupt peer, would consent to occupy such

position; the blacks themselves would despise him if he did; and if the

governor is to be one of their own race and colour, how long would such

a connection endure?"

[182] It is plainly to be seen from the above two extracts that the

political ethics of our author, being based on race and colour

exclusively, would admit of no conceivable chance of real elevation to

any descendant of Africa, who, being Ethiopian, could not possibly

change his skin. The "old traditions" which Mr. Froude supposes to be

carried away by his hypothetical (white) generations who have "passed

by," we readily infer from his language, rendered impossible such

incarnations of political absurdity as those he depicts. But what

should be thought of the sense, if not indeed the sanity, of a grave

political teacher who prescribes "European government" and "European

education" as the specifics to qualify the Negro for political

emancipation, and who, when these qualifications are conspicuously

mastered by the Negro who has undergone the training, refuses him the

prize, because he is a Negro? We see further that, in spite of being

fit for election to council, and even to be prime ministers competent

to indite governors' messages, the pigment under our epidermis dooms us

to eventual disappointment and a life-long condition of contempt. Even

so is it [183] desired by Mr. Froude and his clients, and not without a

spice of piquancy is their opinion that for a white ruler to preside

and rule over and accept the best assistance of coloured men, qualified

as above stated, would be a self-degradation too unspeakable for

toleration by any Englishman--"even a bankrupt peer." Unfortunately

for Mr. Froude, we can point him to page 56 of this his very book,

where, speaking of Grenada and deprecating the notion of its official

abandonment, our author says:--

"Otherwise they [Negroes] were quiet fellows, and if the politicians

would only let them alone, they would be perfectly contented, and might

eventually, if wisely managed, come to some good.... Black the island

was, and black it would remain. The conditions were never likely to

arise which would bring back a European population; but a governor who

was a sensible man, who would reside and use his natural influence,

could manage it with perfect ease."

Here, then, we see that the governor of an entirely black population

may be a sensible man, and yet hold the post. Our author, indeed,

gives the Blacks over whom this sensible governor would hold rule as

being in number [184] just 40,000 souls; and we are therefore bound to

accept the implied suggestion that the dishonour of holding supremacy

over persons of the odious colour begins just as their number begins to

count onward from 40,000! There is quite enough in the above verbal

vagaries of our philosopher to provoke a volume of comment. But we

must pass on to further clauses of this precious paragraph. Mr.

Froude's talent for eating his own words never had a more striking

illustration than here, in his denial of the utility of native

experience as the safest guide a governor could have in the

administration of Colonial affairs. At page 91 he says:--"Among the

public servants of Great Britain there are persons always to be found

fit and willing for posts of honour and difficulty, if a sincere effort

be made to find them."

A post of honour and difficulty, we and all other persons in the

British dominions had all along understood was regarded as such in the

case of functionaries called upon to contend with adverse forces in the

accomplishment of great ends conceived by their superiors. But we find

that, according to Mr. Froude, all the credit that has hitherto

redounded to those [185] who had succeeded in such tasks has been in

reality nothing more than a gilding over of disgrace, whenever the

exertions of such officials had been put forth amongst persons not

wearing a European epidermis. The extension of British influence and

dominion over regions inhabited by races not white is therefore, on the

part of those who promote it, a perverse opening of arenas for the

humiliation and disgrace of British gentlemen, nay, even of those

titled members of the "black sheep" family--bankrupt peers! As we have

seen, however, ample contradiction and refutation have been

considerately furnished by the same objector in this same volume, as in

his praises of the governor just quoted.

The cavil of Mr. Froude about English gentlemen reading messages penned

by black prime ministers applies with double force to English

barristers (who are gentlemen by statute) receiving the law from the

lips of black Judges.

For all that, however, an emergency arose so pressing as to compel even

the colonialism of Barbados to practically and completely refute this

doctrine, by praying for, and submitting with gratitude to, the supreme

headship of a [186] man of the race which our author so finically

depreciates. In addition it may be observed that for a governor to

even consult his prime minister in the matter of preparing his messages

might conceivably be optional, whilst it is obligatory on all

barristers, whether English or otherwise, to defer to the judge's

interpretation of the law in every case--appeal afterwards being the

only remedy. As to the dictum that "the two races are not equal and

will not blend," it is open to the fatal objection that, having himself

proved, with sympathizing pathos, how the West Indies are now well-nigh

denuded of their Anglo-Saxon inhabitants, Mr. Froude would have us also

understand that the miserable remnant who still complainingly inhabit

those islands must, by doing violence to the understanding, be taken as

the whole of the world-pervading Anglo-Saxon family. The Negroes of

the West Indies number a good deal more than two million souls. Does

this suggester of extravagances mean that the prejudices and vain

conceit of the few dozens whom he champions should be made to override

and overbear, in political arrangements, the serious and solid

interests of so many [187] hundreds of thousands? That "the two races

are not equal" is a statement which no sane man would dispute, but

acquiescence in its truth involves also a distinct understanding that

the word race, as applied in the present case by our author, is a

simple accommodation of terms--a fashion of speech having a very

restricted meaning in this serious discussion.

The Anglo-Saxon race pervades Great Britain, its cradle, and the

Greater Britain extending almost all over the face of the earth, which

is the arena of its activities and marvellous achievements. To tell

us, therefore, as Mr. Froude does, that the handful of malcontents

whose unrespectable grievance he holds up to public sympathy represents

the Anglo-Saxon race, is a grotesque façon de parler. Taking our

author's "Anglo-West Indians" and the people of Ethiopian descent

respectively, it would not be too much to assert, nor in anywise

difficult to prove by facts and figures, that for every competent

individual of the former section in active civilized employments, the

coloured section can put forward at least twenty thoroughly competent

rivals. Yet are these latter the people whom the classic Mr. [188]

Froude wishes to be immolated, root and branch, in all their highest

and dearest interests, in order to secure the maintenance of "old

traditions" which, he tells us, guaranteed for the dominant cuticle the

sacrifice of the happiness of down-trodden thousands! Referring to his

hypothetical confederation with its black officeholders, our author

scornfully asks:--

"And how long would this endure?"

The answer must be that, granting the existence of such a state of

things, its duration would be not more nor less than under white

functionaries. For according to himself (p. 124): "There is no

original or congenital difference of capacity between" the white and

black races, and "with the same chances and the same treatment, ...

distinguished men would be produced equally from both races."

If, therefore, the black ministers whose hue he so much despises do

possess the training and influence rendering them eligible and securing

their election to the situations we are considering, it must follow

that their tenure of office would be of equal duration with that of

individuals of the white race under the same conditions. Not content

with making himself [189] the mouthpiece of English gentlemen in this

matter, our author, with characteristic hardihood, obtrudes himself

into the same post on behalf of Negroes; saying that, in the event of

even a bankrupt peer accepting the situation of governor-general over

them, "The blacks themselves would despise him"!

Mr. Froude may pertinently be asked here the source whence he derived

his certainty on this point, inasmuch as it is absolutely at variance

with all that is sensible and natural; for surely it is both foolish

and monstrous to suppose that educated men would infer the degradation

of any one from the fact of such a one consenting to govern and

co-operate with themselves for their own welfare. He further asks on

the same subject:--

"And if the governor is to be one of their own race and colour, how

long could such a connection endure?"

Our answer must be the same as with regard to the duration of the black

council and black prime minister carrying out the government under the

same conditions. It must be regretted that no indication in his book,

so far as it professes to deal with facts and with [190] persons not

within the circle of his clients, would justify a belief that its

wanton misstatements have filtrated through a mind entitled to declare,

with the authority of self-consciousness, what a gentleman would or

would not do under given circumstances.

In reiteration of his favourite doctrine of the antagonism between the

black and white races, our author continues on the same page to say:--

"No one, I presume, would advise that the whites of the island should

govern. The relations between the two populations are too embittered,

and equality once established by law, the exclusive privilege of colour

over colour cannot be restored. While slavery continued, the whites

ruled effectively and economically; the blacks are now as they."

As far as could possibly be endeavoured, every proof has been crowded

into this book in refutation of this favourite allegation of Mr.

Froude's. It is only an idle waste of time to be thus harping on his

colour topic. No one can deserve to govern simply because he is white,

and no one is bound to be subject simply because he is black. The whole

of West [191] Indian history, even after the advent of the

attorney-class, proves this, in spite of the efforts to secure

exclusive white domination at a time when crude political power might

have secured it.

"The relations between the two populations are too embittered," says

Mr. Froude. No doubt his talk on this point would be true, had any

such skin-dominancy as he contemplates been officially established; but

as at present most officials are appointed (locally at least) according

to their merit, and not to their epidermis, nothing is known of the

embittered relations so constantly dinned into our ears. Whatever

bitterness exists is in the minds of those gentry who would like to be

dominant on the cheap condition of showing a simple bodily accident

erected by themselves into an evidence and proof of superiority.

"The exclusive privilege of colour over colour cannot be restored."

Never in the history of the British West Indies--must we again

state--was there any law or usage establishing superiority in

privileges for any section of the community on account of colour. This

statement of fact is also and again an answer to, and refutation of,

the succeeding allegation [192] that, "While slavery continued, the

whites ruled effectively and economically." It will be yet more

clearly shown in a later part of this essay that during slavery, in

fact for upwards of two centuries after its introduction, the West

Indies were ruled by slave-owners, who happened to be of all colours,

the means of purchasing slaves and having a plantation being the one

exclusive consideration in the case. It is, therefore, contrary to

fact to represent the Whites exclusively as ruling, and the Blacks

indiscriminately as subject.

He goes on to say, "There are two classes in the community; their

interests are opposite as they are now understood." As regards the

above, Mr. Froude's attention may be called to the fact that

classification in no department of science has ever been based on

colour, but on relative affinity in certain salient qualities. To use

his own figure, no horse or dog is more or less a horse or dog because

it happens to be white or black. No teacher marshals his pupils into

classes according to any outward physical distinction, but according to

intellectual approximation. In like manner there has been wealth for

hundreds of men of Ethiopic origin, [193] and poverty for hundreds of

men of Caucasian origin, and the reverse in both cases. We have,

therefore, had hundreds of black as well as white men who, under

providential dispensation, belonged to the class, rich men; while, on

the other hand, we have had hundreds of white men who, under

providential dispensation, belonged to the class, poor men. Similarly,

in the composition of a free mixed community, we have hundreds of both

races belonging to the class, competent and eligible; and hundreds of

both races belonging to the class, incompetent and ineligible: to both

of which classes all possible colours might belong. It is from the

first mentioned that are selected those who are to bear the rule, to

which the latter class is, in the very nature of things, bound to be

subject. There is no government by reason merely of skins. The

diversity of individual intelligence and circumstances is large enough

to embrace the possibility of even children being, in emergencies, the

most competent influencers of opinion and action.

But let us analyse this matter for just a while more. The fatal

objection to all Mr. Froude's advocacy of colour-domination is that

[194] it is futile from being morally unreasonable. In view of the

natural and absolute impossibility of reviving the same external

conditions under which the inordinate deference and submission to white

persons were both logically and inevitably engendered and maintained,

his efforts to talk people into a frame of mind favourable to his views

on this subject are but a melancholy waste of well-turned sentences.

Man's estimate of his fellow-man has not and never can have any other

standard, save and except what is the outcome of actual circumstances

influencing his sentiment. In the primitive ages, when the fruits of

the earth formed the absorbing object of attention and interest, the

men most distinguished for successful culture of the soil enjoyed, as a

consequence, a larger share than others of popular admiration and

esteem. Similarly, among nomadic tribes, the hunters whose courage

coped victoriously with the wild and ferocious denizens of the forest

became the idols of those who witnessed and were preserved by such

sylvan exploits. When men came at length to venture in ships over the

trackless deep in pursuit of commerce and its gains, the mariner grew

important in [195] public estimation. The pursuit of commerce and its

gains led naturally to the possession of wealth. This, from the

quasi-omnipotence with which it invests men--enabling them not only to

command the best energies, but also, in many cases, to subvert the very

principles of their fellows--has, in the vast majority of cases, an

overpowering sway on human opinion: a sway that will endure till the

Millennium shall have secured for the righteous alone the sovereignty

of the world. Likewise, as cities were founded and constitutions

established, those who were foremost as defenders of the national

interests, on the field of bodily conflict or in the intellectual

arena, became in the eyes of their contemporaries worthiest of

appreciation--and so on of other circumstances through which particular

personal distinctions created claims to preference.

In the special case of the Negroes kidnapped out of Africa into foreign

bondage, the crowning item in their assessment of their alien enslavers

was the utter superiority, over their most redoubtable "big men," which

those enslavers displayed. They actually subjugated and put in chains,

like the commonest peasants, native [196] potentates at whose very

names even the warriorhood of their tribes had been wont to blench.

But far surpassing even this in awful effect was the doom meted out to

the bush-handlers, the medicine-men, the rain-compellers, erewhile so

inscrutably potent for working out the bliss or the bale of friend or

enemy. "Lo, from no mountain-top, from no ceiba-hollow in the forest

recesses, has issued any interposing sign, any avenging portent, to

vindicate the Spirit of Darkness so foully outraged in the hitherto

inviolate person of his chosen minister! Verily, even the powers of the

midnight are impotent against these invaders from beyond the mighty

salt-water! Here, huddled together in confused, hopeless misery and

ruin, lie, fettered and prostrate, even priest as well as potentate,

undistinguishable victims of crude, unblenching violence, with its

climax of nefarious sacrilege. We, common mortals, therefore, can hope

for no deliverance from, or even succour in, the woful plight thus

dismally contrived for us all by the fair-skinned race who have now

become our masters." Such was naturally the train of thought that ran

through those forlorn bosoms. The formidable death-dealing guns [197]

of the invaders, the ships which had brought them to the African

shores, and much besides in startling contrast to their own condition

of utter helplessness, the Africans at once interpreted to themselves

as the manifestation and inherent attributes of beings of a higher

order than man. Their skin, too, the difference whereof from their own

had been accentuated by many calamitous incidents, was hit upon as the

reason of so crushing an ascendency.

White skin therefore became, in those disconsolate eyes, the symbol of

fearful irresistible power: which impression was not at all weakened

afterwards by the ineffable atrocities of the "middle-passage." Backed

ultimately by their absolute and irresponsible masterhood at home over

the deported Blacks, the European abductors could easily render

permanent in the minds of their captives the abject terror struck into

them by the enormities of which they had been the victims. Now, the

impressions we touched upon before bringing forward the case of the

Negro slaves were mainly produced by pleasurable circumstances. But of

a contrary nature and much more deeply graven are those sentiments

which are the outcome of hopeless terror [198] and pain. For whilst

impressions of the former character glide into the consciousness

through accesses no less normal than agreeable, the infusion of fear by

means of bodily suffering is a process too violent to be forgotten by

minds tortured and strained to unnatural tension thereby. Such

tension, oft-recurrent and scarcely endurable, leaves behind it

recollections which are in themselves a source of sadness. But time,

favoured by a succession of pleasurable experiences, is a sovereign

anodyne to remembrances of this poignant class. No wonder, then, from

our foregoing detail of facts, that whiteness of skin was both

redoubted and tremblingly crouched to by Negroes on whom Europeans had

wrought such unspeakable calamities. Time, however, and the action of

circumstances, especially in countries subject to Catholic dominion,

soon began to modify the conditions under which this sentiment of

terror had been maintained, and, with those conditions, the very

sentiment itself. For it was not long in the life of many of the

expatriated Africans before numbers of their own race obtained freedom,

and, eventually, wealth sufficient for purchasing black slaves on their

[199] own account. In other respects, too (outwardly at least), the

prosperous career of such individual Blacks could not fail to induce a

revulsion of thought, whereby the attribution of unapproachable powers

exclusively to the Whites became a matter earnestly reconsidered by the

Africans. Centuries of such reconsideration have produced the natural

result in the West Indies. With the daily competition in intelligence,

refinement, and social and moral distinction, which time and events

have brought about between individuals of the two races, nothing,

surely, has resulted, nor has even been indicated, to re-infuse the

ancient colour-dread into minds which had formerly been forced to

entertain it; and still less to engender it in bosoms to which such a

feeling cannot, in the very nature of things, be an inborn emotion.

Now, can Mr. Froude show us by what process he would be able to infuse

in the soul of an entire population a sentiment which is both unnatural

and beyond compulsion?

The foregoing remarks roughly apply to preeminence given to outward

distinction, and the conditions under which mainly it impresses and is

accepted by men not yet arrived at the [200] essentially intellectual

stage. In the spiritual domain the conditions have ever been quite

different. A belief in the supernatural being inborn in man, the

professors of knowledge and powers beyond natural attainment were by

common consent accorded a distinct and superior consideration, deemed

proper to the sacredness of their progression. Hence the supremacy of

the priestly caste in every age and country of the world. Potentate as

well as peasant have bowed in reverence before it, as representing and

declaring with authority the counsels of that Being whom all, priest,

potentate and peasant alike, acknowledge and adore, each according to

the measure of his inward illumination.

BOOK III: THE NEGRO AS WORKER

[201] The laziness, the incurable idleness, of the Negro, was, both

immediately before their emancipation in 1838, and for long years after

that event, the cuckoo-cry of their white detractors. It was laziness,

pure and simple, which hindered the Negro from exhausting himself under

a tropical sun, toiling at starvation wages to ensure for his quondam

master the means of being an idler himself, with the additional luxury

of rolling in easily come-by wealth. Within the last twenty years,

however, the history of the Black Man, both in the West Indies and,

better still, in the United States of America, has been a succession of

achievements which have converted the charge of laziness into a

baseless and absurd calumny. The repetition of the charge referred to

is, in these [202] waning days of the nineteenth century, a discredited

anachronism, which, however, has no deterring features for Mr. Froude.

As the running down of the Negro was his cue, he went in boldly for the

game, with what result we shall presently see. At page 239, our

author, speaking of the Negro garden-farms in Jamaica, says:--

"The male proprietors were lounging about smoking. Their wives, as it

was market-day, were tramping into Kingston with their baskets on their

heads. We met them literally in thousands, all merry and

light-hearted, their little ones with little baskets trudging at their

side. Of the lords of the creation we saw, perhaps, one to each

hundred of the women, and he would be riding on mule or donkey, pipe in

mouth and carrying nothing. He would be generally sulky too, while the

ladies, young and old, had a civil word for us, and curtsied under

their loads. Decidedly if there is to be a black constitution I will

give my vote to the women."

To the above direct imputation of indolence, heartlessness, and

moroseness, Mr. Froude appends the following remarks on other moral

characteristics of certain sable peasants at [203] Mandeville, Jamaica,

given on the authority of a police official, who, our author says,

described them as--

"Good-humoured, but not universally honest. They stole cattle, and

would not give evidence against each other. If brought into Court,

they held a pebble in their mouth, being under the impression that when

they were so provided, perjury did not count. Their education was only

skin-deep, and the schools which the Government provided had not

touched their characters at all."

But how could the education so provided be otherwise than futile when

the administration of its details is entirely in the hands of persons

unsympathizing with and utterly despising the Negro? But of this more

anon and elsewhere. We resume Mr. Froude's evidence respecting the

black peasantry. Our author proceeds to admit, on the same subject,

that his informant's duties (as a police official) "brought him in

contact with the unfavourable specimens." He adds:--

"I received a far pleasanter impression from a Moravian minister.... I

was particularly glad to see this gentleman, for of the Moravians [204]

every one had spoken well to me. He was not the least enthusiastic

about his poor black sheep, but he said that if they were not better

than the average English labourer, he did not think them worse. They

were called idle; they would work well enough if they had fair wages

and if the wages were paid regularly; but what could be expected when

women servants had but three shillings a week and found themselves,

when the men had but a shilling a day and the pay was kept in arrear in

order that if they came late to work, or if they came irregularly, it

may be kept back or cut down to what the employer choose to give?

Under such conditions ANY man of ANY colour would prefer to work for

himself if he had a garden, or would be idle if he had none."

Take, again, the following extract regarding the heroism of the

emigrants to the Canal:--

"I walked forward" (on the steamer bound to Jamaica), "after we had

done talking. We had five hundred of the poor creatures on their way

to the Darien pandemonium. The vessel was rolling with a heavy beam

sea. I found the whole mass of them reduced to the condition of the

pigs who used to occupy the fore decks on the Cork and Bristol packets.

They were [205] lying in a confused heap together, helpless, miserable,

without consciousness, apparently, save a sense in each that he was

wretched. Unfortunate brothers-in-law! following the laws of political

economy, and carrying their labour to the dearest market, where, before

a year was out, half of them were to die. They had souls, too, some of

them, and honest and kindly hearts."

It surely is refreshing to read the revelation of his first learning of

the possession of a soul by a fellow-human being, thus artlessly

described by one who is said to be an ex-parson. But piquancy is Mr.

Froude's strong point, whatever else he may be found wanting in.

Still, apart from Mr. Froude's direct testimony to the fact that from

year to year, during a long series of years, there has been a

continuous, scarcely ever interrupted emigration of Negroes to the

Spanish mainland, in search of work for a sufficing livelihood for

themselves and their families--and that in the teeth of physical

danger, pestilence, and death--there would be enough indirect

exoneration of the Black Man from that indictment in the wail of Mr.

Froude and his friends regarding the alarming absorption of the lands

of Grenada [206] and Trinidad by sable proprietors. Land cannot be

bought without money, nor can money be possessed except through labour,

and the fact that so many tens of thousand Blacks are now the happy

owners of the soil whereon, in the days so bitterly regretted by our

author, their forefathers' tears, nay, very hearts' blood, had been

caused to flow, ought to silence for ever an accusation, which, were it

even true, would be futile, and, being false, is worse than

disgraceful, coming from the lips of the Eumolpids who would fain

impose a not-to-be-questioned yoke on us poor helots of Ethiopia. It

is said that lying is the vice of slaves; but the ethics of West Indian

would-be mastership assert, on its behalf, that they alone should enjoy

the privilege of resorting to misrepresentation to give colour, if not

solidity, to their pretensions.

BOOK III: RELIGION FOR NEGROES

[207] Mr. Froude's passing on from matters secular to matters spiritual

and sacred was a transition to be expected in the course of the grave

and complicated discussion which he had volunteered to initiate. It

was, therefore, not without curiosity that his views in the direction

above indicated were sought for and earnestly scrutinized by us. But

worse than in his treatment of purely mundane subjects, his attitude

here is marked by a nonchalant levity which excites our wonder that

even he should have touched upon the spiritual side of his thesis at

all. The idea of the dove sent forth from the ark fluttering over the

heaving swells of the deluge, in vain endeavour to secure a rest for

the soles of its feet, represents not inaptly the unfortunate

predicament of his spirit with regard to a solid [208] faith on which

to repose amid the surges of doubt by which it is so evidently beset.

Yet although this is his obvious plight with regard to a satisfying

belief, he nevertheless undertakes, with characteristic confidence, to

suggest a creed for the moralization of West Indian Negroes. His

language is:--

"A religion, at any rate, which will keep the West Indian blacks from

falling back into devil-worship is still to seek. In spite of the

priests, child-murder and cannibalism have re-appeared in Hayti, but

without them things might have been much worse than they are, and the

preservation of white authority and influence in any form at all may be

better than none."

We discern in the foregoing citation the exercise of a charity that is

unquestionably born of fetish-worship, which, whether it be obeah

generally, or restricted to a mere human skin, can be so powerful an

agent in the formation and retention of beliefs. Hence we see that our

philosopher relies here, in the domain of morals and spiritual ethics,

on a white skin as implicitly as he does on its sovereign potency in

secular politics. The curiousness of the matter lies mainly in its

application to natives [209] of Hayti, of all people in the world. As

a matter of fact we have had our author declaring as follows, in climax

to his oft-repeated predictions about West Indian Negroes degenerating

into the condition of their fellow-Negroes in the "Black Republic" (p.

285):--

"Were it worth while, one might draw a picture of an English governor,

with a black parliament and a black ministry, recommending, by advice

of his constitutional ministers, some measure like the Haytian Land

Law."

Now, as the West Indies degenerating into so many white-folk-detesting

Haytis, under our prophet's dreaded supremacy of the Blacks, is the

burden of his book; and as the Land Law in question distinctly forbids

the owning by any white person of even one inch of the soil of the

Republic, it might, but for the above explanation, have seemed

unaccountable, in view of the implacable distrust, not to say hatred,

which this stern prohibition so clearly discloses, that our author

should, nevertheless, rely on the efficacy of white authority and

influence over Haytians.

In continuation of his religious suggestions, he goes on to descant

upon slavery in the [210] fashion which we have elsewhere noticed, but

it may still be proper to add a word or two here regarding this

particular disquisition of his. This we are happy in being able to do

under the guidance of an anterior and more reliable exponent of

ecclesiastical as well as secular obedience on the part of all free and

enlightened men in the present epoch of the world's history:--

"Dogma and Descent, potential twin

Which erst could rein submissive millions in,

Are now spent forces on the eddying surge

Of Thought enfranchised. Agencies emerge

Unhampered by the incubus of dread

Which cramped men's hearts and clogged their onward tread.

Dynasty, Prescription! spectral in these days

When Science points to Thought its surest ways,

And men who scorn obedience when not free

Demand the logic of Authority!

The day of manhood to the world is here,

And ancient homage waxes faint and drear.

. . . . . .

Vision of rapture! See Salvation's plan

'Tis serving God through ceaseless toil for man!"

The lines above quoted are by a West Indian Negro, and explain in very

concise form the attitude of the educated African mind [211] with

reference to the matters they deal with. Mr. Froude is free to

perceive that no special religion patched up from obsolete creeds could

be acceptable to those with whose sentiments the thoughts of the writer

just quoted are in true racial unison. It is preposterous to expect

that the same superstition regarding skin ascendency, which is now so

markedly played out in our Colonies in temporal matters, could have any

weight whatsoever in matters so momentous as morals and religion. But

granting even the possibility of any code of worldly ethics or of

religion being acceptable on the dermal score so strenuously insisted

on by him, it is to be feared that, through sheer respect for the

fitness of things, the intelligent Negro in search of guidance in faith

and morals would fail to recognize in our author a guide, philosopher,

and friend, to be followed without the most painful misgivings. The

Catholic and the Dissenting Churches which have done so much for the

temporal and spiritual advancement of the Negro, in spite of hindrance

and active persecution wherever these were possible, are, so far as is

visible, maintaining their hold on the adhesion of those who belong to

them.

[212] And it cannot be pretended that, among enlightened Africans as

compared with other enlightened people, there have been more grievous

failings off from the scriptural standard of deportment. Possible it

certainly is that considerations akin to, or even identical with, those

relied upon by Mr. Froude might, on the first reception of Christianity

in their exile, have operated effectually upon the minds of the

children of Africa. At that time the evangelizers whose converts they

so readily became possessed the recommendation of belonging to the

dominant caste. Therefore, with the humility proper to their forlorn

condition, the poor bondsmen requited with intense gratitude such

beneficent interest on their behalf, as a condescension to which people

in their hapless situation could have had no right. But for many long

years, the distinction whether of temporal or of spiritual superiority

has ceased to be the monopoly of any particular class. The master and

employer has for far more than a century and a half been often

represented in the West Indies by some born African or his descendant;

and so also has the teacher and preacher. It is not too much to say

that [213] the behaviour of the liberated slaves throughout the British

Antilles, as well as the deportment of the manumitted four million

slaves of the Southern United States later on, bore glorious testimony

to the humanizing effects which the religion of charity, clutched at

and grasped in fragments, and understood with childlike incompleteness,

had produced within those suffering bosoms.

Nothing has occurred to call for a remodelling of the ordinary moral

and spiritual machinery for the special behoof of Negroes. Religion,

as understood by the best of men, is purely a matter of feeling and

action between man and man--the doing unto others as we would they

should do unto us; and any creed or any doctrine which directly or

indirectly subverts or even weakens this basis is in itself a danger to

the highest welfare of mankind. The simple conventional faith in God,

in Jesus, and in a future state, however modified nowadays, has still a

vitality which can restrain and ennoble its votaries, provided it be

inculcated and received in a befitting spirit. Our critic, in the

plenitude of his familiarity with such matters, confidently asks:--

[214] "Who is now made wretched by the fear of hell?"

Possibly the belief in the material hell, the decadence of which he

here triumphantly assumes to be so general, may have considerably

diminished; but experience has shown that, with the advance of

refinement, there is a concurrent growth in the intensity of moral

sensibility, whereby the waning terrors of a future material hell are

more than replaced by the agonies of a conscience self-convicted of

wilful violation of the right. The same simple faith has, in its

practical results, been rich in the records of the humble whom it has

exalted; of the poor to whom it has been better than wealth; of the

rich whose stewardship of worldly prosperity it has sanctified; of the

timid whom it has rendered bold; and of the valiant whom it has raised

to a divine heroism--in fine, of miracles of transformation that have

impelled to higher and nobler tendencies and uses the powers and gifts

inherited or acquired by man in his natural state. They who possess

this faith, and cherish it as a priceless possession, may calmly oppose

to the philosophic reasoning against the existence of [215] a Deity and

the rationalness of entreating Him in prayer, the simple and sufficient

declaration, "I believe." Normal-minded men, sensible of the

limitations of human faculties, never aspire to be wise beyond what is

revealed. Whatever might exist beyond the grave is, so far as man and

man in their mutual relations are concerned, not a subject that

discussion can affect or speculation unravel. To believers it cannot

matter whether the Sermon on the Mount embodies or does not embody the

quality of ethics that the esoteric votaries of Mr. Froude's "new

creed" do accept or even can tolerate. Under the old creed man's sense

of duty kindled in sympathy towards his brother, urging him to achieve

by self-sacrifice every possibility of beneficence; hence the old creed

insured an inward joy as well as "the peace which passeth all

understanding." There can be no room for desiring left, when

receptiveness of blessings overflows; and it is the worthiest direction

of human energy to secure for others that fulness of fruition. Is not

Duty the first, the highest item of moral consciousness; and is not

promoting, according to our best ability, the welfare of our fellow

creatures, the first and [216] most urgent call of human duty? Can the

urgency of such responsibility ever cease but with the capacity, on our

own or on our brother's part, to do or be done by respectively?

Contemptuously ignoring his share of this solemn

responsibility--solemn, whether regarded from a religious or a purely

secular point of view--to observe at least the negative obligation

never to wantonly do or even devise any harm to his fellows, or indeed

any sentient creature, our new apostle affords, in his light-hearted

reversal of the prescriptive methods of civilized ethics, a woful

foretaste of the moral results of the "new, not as yet crystallized"

belief, whose trusted instruments of spiritual investigation are the

telescope and mental analysis, in order to satisfy the carpings of

those who so impress the world with their superhuman strong-mindedness.

The following is a profound reflection presenting, doubtless, quite a

new revelation to an unsophisticated world, which had so long submitted

in reverential tameness to the self-evident impossibility of exploring

the Infinite:--

"The tendency of popular thought is against [217] the supernatural in

any shape. Far into space as the telescope can search, deep as

analysis can penetrate into mind and consciousness or the forces which

govern natural things, popular thought finds only uniformity and

connection of cause and effect; no sign anywhere of a personal will

which is influenced by prayer or moral motives."

How much to be pitied are the gifted esoterics who, in such a quest,

vainly point their telescopes into the star-thronged firmament, and

plunge their reasoning powers into the abyss of consciousness and

such-like mysteries! The commonplace intellect of the author of "Night

Thoughts" was, if we may so speak, awed into an adoring rapture which

forced from him the exclamation (may believers hail it as a dogma!)--

"An undevout astronomer is mad!"

Most probably it was in weak submission to some such sentiment as this

that Isaac Newton nowhere in his writings suggests even the ghost of a

doubt of there being a Great Architect of the Universe as the outcome

of his telescopic explorations into the illimitable heavens.

[218] It is quite possible, too, that he was, "on insufficient

grounds," perhaps, perfectly satisfied, as a host of other intellectual

mediocrities like himself have been, and even up to now rather

provokingly continue to be, with the very "uniformity and connection of

cause and effect" as visible evidence of there being not only "a

personal will," but a creative and controlling Power as well. In this

connection comes to mind a certain old Book which, whatever damage

Semitic Scholarship and Modern Criticism may succeed in inflicting on

its contents, will always retain for the spiritual guidance of the

world enough and to spare of divine suggestions. With the prescience

which has been the heritage of the inspired in all ages, one of the

writers in that Book, whom we shall now quote, foresaw, no doubt, the

deplorable industry of Mr. Froude and his protégé "popular thought,"

whose mouth-piece he has so characteristically constituted himself, and

asks in a tone wherein solemn warning blends with inquiry: "Canst thou

by searching find out God; canst thou find out the Almighty unto

perfection!" The rational among the most loftily endowed of mankind

have grasped [219] the sublime significance of this query, acquiescing

reverently in its scarcely veiled intimation of man's impotence in

presence of the task to which it refers.

But though Mr. Froude's spiritual plight be such as we have just

allowed him to state it, with regard to an object of faith and a motive

of worship, yet let us hear him, in his anxiety to furbish up a special

Negro creed, setting forth the motive for being in a hurry to

anticipate the "crystallization" of his new belief:--

"The new creed, however, not having crystallized as yet into a shape

which can be openly professed, and as without any creed at all the

flesh and the devil might become too powerful, we maintain the old

names, as we maintain the monarchy."

The allusion to the monarchy seems not a very obvious one, as it

parallels the definitive rejection of a spiritual creed with the

theoretical change of ancient notions regarding a concrete fact. At

any rate we have it that his special religion, when concocted and

disseminated, will have the effect of preventing the flesh and the

devil from having too much power over Negroes. The objection to the

[220] devil's sway seems to us to come with queer grace from one who

owes his celebrity chiefly to the production of works teeming with that

peculiar usage of language of which the Enemy of Souls is credited with

the special fatherhood.

No, sir, in the name of the Being regarding whose existence you and

your alleged "popular thought" are so painfully in doubt, we protest

against your right, or that of any other created worm, to formulate for

the special behoof of Negroes any sort of artificial creed unbelieved

in by yourself, having the function and effect of detective

"shadowings" of their souls. Away with your criminal suggestion of

toleration of the hideous orgies of heathenism in Hayti for the benefit

of our future morals in the West Indies, when the political supremacy

which you predict and dread and deprecate shall have become an

accomplished fact. Were any special standard of spiritual excellence

required, our race has, in Josiah Henson and Sojourner Truth, sufficing

models for our men and our women respectively. Their ideal of

Christian life, which we take to be the true one, is not to be judged

of with direct reference to the Deity whom we cannot [221] see,

interrogate, or comprehend, but to its practical bearing in and on man,

whom we can see and have cognizance of, not only with our physical

senses, but by the intimations of the divinity which abides within us.*

We can see, feel, and appreciate the virtue of a fellow-mortal who

consecrates himself to the Divine idea through untiring exertion for

the bettering of the condition of the world around him, whose agony he

makes it his duty, only to satisfy his burning desire, to mitigate.

The fact in its ghastly reality lies before us that the majority of

mankind labour and are being crushed under the tremendous trinity of

Ignorance, Vice, and Poverty.

It is mainly in the succouring of those who thus suffer that the

vitality of the old creed is manifested in the person of its

professors. Under this aspect we behold it moulding men, of all

nations, countries, and tongues, whose virtues have challenged and

should command on its behalf the unquestioning faith and adhesion of

every rational observer. "Evidences of Christianity," "Controversies,"

"Exegetical Commentaries," have all proved [222] more or less

futile--as perhaps they ought--with the Science and Modern Criticism

which perverts religion into a matter of dialectics. But there is a

hope for mankind in the fact that Science itself shall have ultimately

to admit the limitations of human inquiry into the details of the

Infinite. Meanwhile it requires no technical proficiency to recognize

the criminality of those who waste their brief threescore and ten years

in abstract speculations, while the tangible, visible, and hideous

soul-destroying trinity of Vice, Ignorance, and Poverty, above

mentioned, are desolating the world in their very sight. There are

possessors of personal virtue, enlightenment, and wealth, who dare

stand neutral with regard to these dire exigencies among their fellows.

And yet they are the logical helpers, as holders of the special

antidote to each of those banes! Infinitely more deserving of

execration are such folk than the callous owner of some specific, who

allows a suffering neighbour to perish for want of it.

We who believe in the ultimate development of the Christian notion of

duty towards God, as manifested in untiring beneficence to man, cling

to this faith--starting from the [223] beginning of the New Testament

dispensation--because Saul of Tarsus, transformed into Paul the Apostle

through his whole-souled acceptance of this very creed with its

practical responsibilities, has, in his ardent, indefatigable labours

for the enlightenment and elevation of his fellows, left us a lesson

which is an enduring inspiration; because Augustine, Bishop of Hippo,

benefited, in a manner which has borne, and ever will bear, priceless

fruit, enormous sections of the human family, after his definite

submission to the benign yoke of the same old creed; because Vincent de

Paul has, through the identical inspiration, endowed the world with his

everlasting legacy of organized beneficence; because it impelled

Francis Xavier with yearning heart and eager footsteps through

thousands of miles of peril, to proclaim to the darkling millions of

India what he had experienced to be tidings of great joy to himself;

because Matthew Hale, a lawyer, and of first prominence in a pursuit

which materializes the mind and nips its native candour and tenderness,

escaped unblighted, through the saving influence of his faith,

approving himself in the sight of all [224] an ideal judge, even

according to the highest conception; because John Howard, opulent and

free to enjoy his opulence and repose, was drawn thereby throughout the

whole continent of Europe in quest of the hidden miseries that torture

those whom the law has shut out, in dungeons, from the light and

sympathy of the world; because Thomas Clarkson, animated by the spirit

of its teachings, consecrated wealth, luxury, and the quiet of an

entire lifetime on the altar of voluntary sacrifice for the salvation

of an alien people; because Samuel Johnson, shut out from mirthfulness

by disease and suffering, and endowed with an intellectual pride

intolerant of froward ignorance, was, through the chastening power of

that belief, transformed into the cheerful minister and willing slave

of the weaklings whom he gathered into his home, and around whom the

tendrils of his heart had entwined themselves, waxing closer and

stronger in the moisture of his never-failing charity; because Henry

Havelock, a man of the sword, whose duties have never been too

propitious to the cultivation and fostering of the gentler virtues,

lived and died a blameless hero, constrained by that faith to be one of

its most illustrious exemplars; [225] because David Livingstone looms

great and reverend in our mental sight in his devotion to a land and

race embraced in his boundless fellow-feeling, and whose miseries he

has commended to the sympathy of the civilized world in words the

pathos whereof has melted thousands of once obdurate hearts to crave a

share in applying a balm to the "open sore of Africa"--that slave-trade

whose numberless horrors beggar description; and finally--one more

example out of the countless varieties of types that blend into a

unique solidarity in the active manifestation of the Christian life--we

believe because Charles Gordon, the martyr-soldier of Khartoum, in

trusting faith a very child, but in heroism more notable than any mere

man of whom history contains a record, gathered around himself, through

the sublime attractiveness of his faith-directed life, the united

suffrages of all nations, and now enjoys, as the recompense and seal of

his life's labours, an apotheosis in homage to which the heathen of

Africa, the man-hunting Arab, the Egyptian, the Turk, all jostle each

other to blend with the exulting children of Britain who are directly

glorified by his life and history.

[226] Here, then, are speaking evidences of the believers' grounds.

Verily they are of the kind that are to be seen in our midst, touched,

heard, listened to, respected, beloved--nay, honoured, too, with the

glad worship our inward spirit springs forth to render to goodness so

largely plenished from the Source of all Good. Can Modern Science and

Criticism explain them away, or persuade us of their insufficiency as

incentives to the hearty acceptance of the religion that has received

such glorious, yet simply logical, incarnation in the persons of weak,

erring men who welcomed its responsibilities conjointly with its

teachings, and thereby raised themselves to the spiritual level

pictured to ourselves in our conception of angels who have been given

the Divine charge concerning mankind. Religion for Negroes, indeed!

White priests, forsooth! This sort of arrogance might, possibly, avail

in quarters where the person and pretensions of Mr. Froude could be

impressive and influential--but here, in the momentous concern of man

with Him who "is no respecter of persons," his interference, mentally

disposed as he tells us he is with reference to such a matter, is

nothing less than profane intrusion.

[227] We will conclude by stating in a few words our notion of the only

agency by which, not Blacks alone, but every race of mankind, might be

uplifted to the moral level which the thousands of examples, of which

we have glanced at but a few, prove so indubitably the capacity of man

to attain--each to a degree limited by the scope of his individual

powers. The priesthood whereof the world stands in such dire need is

not at all the confederacy of augurs which Mr. Froude, perhaps in

recollection of his former profession, so glibly suggests, with an

esoteric creed of their own, "crystallized into shape" for profession

before the public. The day of priestcraft being now numbered with the

things that were, the exploitation of those outside of the sacerdotal

circle is no longer possible. Therefore the religion of mere talk,

however metaphysical and profound; the religion of scenic display,

except such display be symbolic of living and active verities, has lost

whatever of efficacy it may once have possessed, through the very

spirit and tendency of To-day. The reason why those few whom we have

mentioned, and the thousands who cannot possibly be recalled, have, as

[228] typical Christians, impressed themselves on the moral sense and

sympathy of the ages, is simply that they lived the faith which they

professed. Whatever words they may have employed to express their

serious thoughts were never otherwise than, incidentally, a spoken

fragment of their own interior biography. In fine, success must

infallibly attend this special priesthood (whether episcopally

"ordained" or not) of all races, all colours, all tongues whatsoever,

since their lives reflect their teachings and their teachings reflect

their lives. Then, truly, they, "the righteous, shall inherit the

earth," leading mankind along the highest and noblest paths of temporal

existence. Then, of course, the obeah, the cannibalism, the

devil-worship of the whole world, including that of Hayti, which Mr.

Froude predicts will be adopted by us Blacks in the West Indies, shall

no more encumber and scandalize the earth.

But Mr. Froude should, at the same time, be reminded that cannibalism

and the hideous concomitants which he mentions are, after all,

relatively minor and restricted dangers to man's civilization and moral

soundness. They can [229] neither operate freely nor expand easily.

The paralysis of horrified popular sentiment obstructs their

propagation, and the blight of the death-penalty which hangs over the

heads of their votaries is an additional guarantee of their being kept

within bounds that minimize their perniciousness. But there are more

fatal and further-reaching dangers to public morality and happiness of

which the regenerated current opinion of the future will take prompt

and remedial cognizance. Foremost among these will be the circulation

of malevolent writings whereby the equilibrium of sympathy between good

men of different races is sought to be destroyed, through misleading

appeals to the weaknesses and prejudices of readers; writings in which

the violation of actual truth cannot, save by stark stupidity, be

attributed to innocent error; writings that scoff at humanitarian

feeling and belittle the importance of achievements resulting

therefrom; writings which strike at the root of national manliness, by

eulogizing brute force directed against weaker folk as a fit and

legitimate mode of securing the wishes of a mighty and enlightened

people; writings, in fine, which ignore the divine principle [230] in

man, and implicitly deny the possibility of a Divine Power existing

outside of and above man, thus materializing the mind, and tending to

render the earth a worse hell than it ever could have been with faith

in the supremacy of a beneficent Power.

NOTES

221. *"Est deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo."--Ovid.

BOOK IV: HISTORICAL SUMMARY

[233] Thus far we have dealt with the main questions raised by Mr.

Froude on the lines of his own choosing; lines which demonstrate to the

fullest how unsuited his capacity is for appreciating--still less

grappling with--the political and social issues he has so confidently

undertaken to determine. In vain have we sought throughout his bastard

philosophizing for any phrase giving promise of an adequate treatment

of this important subject. We find paraded ostentatiously enough the

doctrine that in the adjustment of human affairs the possession of a

white skin should be the strongest recommendation. Wonder might fairly

be felt that there is no suggestion of a corresponding advantage being

accorded to the possession of a long nose or of auburn hair. Indeed,

little [234] or no attention that can be deemed serious is given to the

interest of the Blacks, as a large and (out of Africa) no longer

despicable section of the human family, in the great world-problems

which are so visibly preparing and press for definitive solutions. The

intra-African Negro is clearly powerless to struggle successfully

against personal enslavement, annexation, or volunteer forcible

"protection" of his territory. What, we ask, will in the coming ages

be the opinion and attitude of the extra-African millions--ten millions

in the Western Hemisphere--dispersed so widely over the surface of the

globe, apt apprentices in every conceivable department of civilized

culture? Will these men remain for ever too poor, too isolated from one

another for grand racial combinations? Or will the naturally opulent

cradle of their people, too long a prey to violence and unholy greed,

become at length the sacred watchword of a generation willing and able

to conquer or perish under its inspiration? Such large and interesting

questions it was within the province and duty of a famous historian,

laying confident claim to prophetic insight, not to propound alone, but

also definitely to solve. The sacred power [235] of forecast, however,

has been confined to finical pronouncements regarding those for whose

special benefit he has exercised it, and to childish insults of the

Blacks whose doom must be sealed to secure the precious result which is

aimed at. In view of this ill-intentioned omission, we shall offer a

few cursory remarks bearing on, but not attempting to answer, those

grave inquiries concerning the African people. As in our humble

opinion these are questions paramount to all the petty local issues

finically dilated on by the confident prophet of "The Bow of Ulysses,"

we will here briefly devote ourselves to its discussion.

Accepting the theory of human development propounded by our author, let

us apply it to the African race. Except, of course, to intelligences

having a share in the Councils of Eternity, there can be no attainable

knowledge respecting the laws which regulate the growth and progress of

civilization among the races of the earth. That in the existence of the

human family every age has been marked by its own essential

characteristics with regard to manifestations of intellectual life,

however circumscribed, is a proposition too self-evident [236] to

require more than the stating. But investigation beyond such evidence

as we possess concerning the past--whether recorded by man himself in

the written pages of history, or by the Creator on the tablets of

nature--would be worse than futile. We see that in the past different

races have successively come to the front, as prominent actors on the

world's stage. The years of civilized development have dawned in turn

on many sections of the human family, and the Anglo-Saxons, who now

enjoy preeminence, got their turn only after Egypt, Assyria, Babylon,

Greece, Rome, and others had successively held the palm of supremacy.

And since these mighty empires have all passed away, may we not then,

if the past teaches aught, confidently expect that other racial

hegemonies will arise in the future to keep up the ceaseless

progression of temporal existence towards the existence that is

eternal? What is it in the nature of things that will oust the African

race from the right to participate, in times to come, in the high

destinies that have been assigned in times past to so many races that

have not been in anywise superior to us in the qualifications,

physical, moral, and intellectual, [237] that mark out a race for

prominence amongst other races?

The normal composition of the typical Negro has the testimony of ages

to its essential soundness and nobility. Physically, as an active

labourer, he is capable of the most protracted exertion under climatic

conditions the most exhausting. By the mere strain of his brawn and

sinew he has converted waste tracts of earth into fertile regions of

agricultural bountifulness. On the scenes of strife he has in his

savage state been known to be indomitable save by the stress of

irresistible forces, whether of men or of circumstances. Staunch in his

friendship and tender towards the weak directly under his protection,

the unvitiated African furnishes in himself the combination of native

virtue which in the land of his exile was so prolific of good results

for the welfare of the whole slave-class. But distracted at home by the

sudden irruptions of skulking foes, he has been robbed, both

intellectually and morally, of the immense advantage of Peace, which is

the mother of Progress. Transplanted to alien climes, and through

centuries of desolating trials, this irrepressible race has [238] bated

not one throb of its energy, nor one jot of its heart or hope. In

modern times, after his expatriation into dismal bondage, both Britain

and America have had occasion to see that even in the paralysing

fetters of political and social degradation the right arm of the Ethiop

can be a valuable auxiliary on the field of battle. Britain, in her

conflict with France for supremacy in the West Indies, did not disdain

the aid of the sable arms that struck together with those of Britons

for the trophies that furnished the motives for those epic contests.

Later on, the unparalleled struggle between the Northern and Southern

States of the American Union put to the test the indestructible fibres

of the Negro's nature, moral as well as physical. The Northern States,

after months of hesitating repugnance, and when taught at last by dire

defeats that colour did not in any way help to victory, at length

sullenly acquiesced in the comradeship, hitherto disdained, of the

eager African contingent. The records of Port Hudson, Vicksburg,

Morris Island, and elsewhere, stand forth in imperishable attestation

of the fact that the distinction of being laurelled during life as

victor, or filling [239] in death a hero's grave, is reserved for no

colour, but for the heart that can dare and the hand that can strike

boldly in a righteous cause. The experience of the Southern

slave-holders, on the other hand, was no less striking and worthy of

admiration. Every man of the twelve seceding States forming the

Southern Confederacy, then fighting desperately for the avowed purpose

of perpetuating slavery, was called into the field, as no available

male arm could be spared from the conflict on their side. Plantation

owner, overseer, and every one in authority, had to be drafted away

from the scene of their usual occupation to the stage whereon the

bloody drama of internecine strife was being enacted. Not only the

plantation, but the home and the household, including the mistress and

her children, had to be left, not unprotected, it is glorious to

observe, but, with confident assurance in their loyalty and good faith,

under the protection of the four million of bondsmen, who, through the

laws and customs of these very States, had been doomed to lifelong

ignorance and exclusion from all moralizing influences. With what

result? The protraction of the conflict on the part of the South would

[240] have been impossible but for the admirable management and

realization of their resources by those benighted slaves. On the other

hand, not one of the thousands of Northern prisoners escaping from the

durance of a Southern captivity ever appealed in vain for the

assistance and protection of a Negro. Clearly the head and heart of

those bondsmen were each in its proper place. The moral effect of

these experiences of the Negroes' sterling qualities was not lost on

either North or South. In the North it effaced from thousands of

repugnant hearts the adverse feelings which had devised and

accomplished so much to the Negro's detriment. In the South--but for

the blunders of the Reconstructionists--it would have considerably

facilitated the final readjustment of affairs between the erewhile

master and slave in their new-born relations of employer and employed.

Reverting to the Africans who were conveyed to places other than the

States, it will be seen that circumstances amongst them and in their

favour came into play, modifying and lightening their unhappy

condition. First, attention must be paid to the patriotic solidarity

existing [241] amongst the bondsmen, a solidarity which, in the case of

those who had been deported in the same ship, had all the sanctity of

blood-relationship. Those who had thus travelled to the "white man's

country" addressed and considered each other as brothers and sisters.

Hence their descendants for many generations upheld, as if

consanguineous, the modes of address and treatment which became

hereditary in families whose originals had travelled in the same ship.

These adopted uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, were so united by common

sympathies, that good or ill befalling any one of them intensely

affected the whole connection. Mutual support commensurate with the

area of their location thus became the order among these people. At

the time of the first deportation of Africans to the West Indies to

replace the aborigines who had been decimated in the mines at Santo

Domingo and in the pearl fisheries of the South Caribbean, the

circumstances of the Spanish settlers in the Antilles were of singular,

even romantic, interest.

The enthusiasm which overflowed from the crusades and the Moorish wars,

upon the discovery and conquest of America, had occasioned [242] the

peopling of the Western Archipelago by a race of men in whom the daring

of freebooters was strangely blended with a fierce sort of

religiousness. As holders of slaves, these men recognized, and

endeavoured to their best to give effect to, the humane injunctions of

Bishop Las Casas. The Negroes, therefore, male and female, were

promptly presented for admission by baptism into the Catholic Church,

which always had stood open and ready to welcome them. The relations

of god-father and god-mother resulting from these baptismal functions

had a most important bearing on the reciprocal stations of master and

slave. The god-children were, according to ecclesiastical custom,

considered in every sense entitled to all the protection and assistance

which were within the competence of the god-parents, who, in their

turn, received from the former the most absolute submission. It is

easy to see that the planters, as well as those intimately connected

with them, in assuming such obligations with their concomitant

responsibilities, practically entered into bonds which they all

regarded as, if possible, more solemn than the natural ties of secular

parentage. The duty [243] of providing for these dependents usually

took the shape of their being apprenticed to, and trained in the

various arts and vocations that constitute the life of civilization.

In many cases, at the death of their patrons, the bondsmen who were

deemed most worthy were, according to the means of the testator,

provided for in a manner lifting them above the necessity of future

dependence. Manumission, too, either by favour or through purchase,

was allowed the fullest operation. Here then was the active influence

of higher motives than mere greed of gain or the pride of racial power

mellowing the lot and gilding the future prospects of the dwellers in

the tropical house of bondage.

The next, and even more effectual agency in modifying and harmonizing

the relations between owner and bondspeople was the inevitable

attraction of one race to the other by the sentiment of natural

affection. Out of this sprang living ties far more intimate and

binding on the moral sense than even obligations contracted in

deference to the Church. Natural impulses have often diviner sources

than ecclesiastical mandates. Obedience to the former not seldom

brings down the penalties of the Church; but [244] the culprit finds

solace in the consciousness that the offence might in itself be a

protection from the thunders it has provoked. Under these

circumstances the general body of planters, who were in the main

adventurers of the freest type, were fain to establish connections with

such of the slave-women as attracted their sympathy, through personal

comeliness or aptitude in domestic affairs, or, usually, both combined.

There was ordinarily in this beginning of the seventeenth century no

Vashti that needed expulsion from the abode of a plantation Ahasuerus

to make room for the African Esther to be admitted to the chief place

within the portals. One great natural consequence of this was the

extension to the relatives or guardians of the bondswoman so preferred

of an amount of favour which, in the case of the more capable males,

completes the parallel we have been drawing by securing for each of

them the precedence and responsibilities of a Mordecai. The offspring

of these natural alliances came in therefore to cement more intimately

the union of interests which previous relations had generated. Beloved

by their fathers, and in many cases destined by them to a lot superior

[245] to that whereto they were entitled by formal law and social

prescription, these young procreations--Mulattos, as they were

called--were made the objects of special and careful provisions on the

fathers' part. They were, according to the means of their fathers in

the majority of cases, sent for education and training to European or

other superior institutions. After this course they were either

formally acknowledged by their fathers, or, if that was impracticable,

amply and suitably provided for in a career out of their native colony.

To a reflecting mind there is something that interests, not to say

fascinates, in studying the action and reaction upon one another of

circumstances in the existence of the Mulatto. As a matter of fact, he

had much more to complain of under the slave system than his

pure-blooded African relations. The law, by decreeing that every child

of a freeman and a slave woman must follow the fortune of the womb,

thus making him the property of his mother exclusively, practically

robbed him before his very birth of the nurture and protection of a

father. His reputed father had no obligation to be even aware of his

procreation, and nevertheless [246] --so inscrutable are the ways of

Providence!--the Mulatto was the centre around which clustered the

outraged instincts of nature in rebellion against the desecrating

mandates that prescribed treason to herself. Law and society may

decree; but in our normal humanity there throbs a sentiment which

neutralizes every external impulse contrary to its promptings.

In meditating on the varied history of the Negro in the United States,

since his first landing on the banks of the James River in 1619 till

the Emancipation Act of President Lincoln in 1865, it is curious to

observe that the elevation of the race, though in a great measure

secured, proceeded from circumstances almost the reverse of those that

operated so favourably in the same direction elsewhere. The men of the

slave-holding States, chiefly Puritans or influenced by Puritanic

surroundings, were not under the ecclesiastical sway which rendered

possible in the West Indies and other Catholic countries the

establishment of the reciprocal bonds of god-parents and god-children.

The self-same causes operated to prevent any large blending of the two

races, inasmuch as the immigrant from Britain who [247] had gone forth

from his country to better his fortune had not left behind him his

attachment to the institutions of the mother-land, among which

marrying, whenever practicable, was one of the most cherished. Above

all, too, as another powerful check at first to such alliances between

the ruling and servile races of the States, there existed the native

idiosyncracy of the Anglo-Saxon. That class of them who had left

Britain were likelier than the more refined of their nation to exhibit

in its crudest and cruellest form the innate jealousy and contempt of

other races that pervades the Anglo-Saxon bosom. It is but a simple

fact that, whenever he condescended thereto, familiarity with even the

loveliest of the subject people was regarded as a mighty self-unbending

for which the object should be correspondingly grateful. So there

could, in the beginning, be no frequent instances of the romantic

chivalry that gilded the quasi-marital relations of the more fervid and

humane members of the Latin stock.

But this kind of intercourse, which in the earlier generation was

undoubtedly restricted in North America by the checks above adverted

to, and, presumably, also by the mutual unintelligibility [248] in

speech, gradually expanded with the natural increase of the slave

population. The American-born, English-speaking Negro girl, who had in

many cases been the playmate of her owner, was naturally more

intelligible, more accessible, more attractive--and the inevitable

consequence was the extension apace of that intercourse, the offspring

whereof became at length so visibly numerous.

Among the Romans, the grandest of all colonizers, the individual's

Civis Romanus sum--I am a Roman citizen--was something more than verbal

vapouring; it was a protective talisman--a buckler no less than a

sword. Yet was the possession of this noble and singular privilege no

barrier to Roman citizens meeting on a broad humanitarian level any

alien race, either allied to or under the protection of that

world-famous commonwealth. In the speeches of the foremost orators and

statesmen among the conquerors of the then known world, the allusions

to subject or allied aliens are distinguished by a decorous observance

of the proprieties which should mark any reference to those who had the

dignity of Rome's [249] friendship, or the privilege of her august

protection. Observations, therefore, regarding individuals of rank in

these alien countries had the same sobriety and deference which marked

allusions to born Romans of analogous degree. Such magnanimity, we

grieve to say, is not characteristic of the race which now replaces the

Romans in the colonizing leadership of the world. We read with

feelings akin to despair of the cheap, not to say derogatory, manner in

which, in both Houses of Parliament, native potentates, especially of

non-European countries, are frequently spoken of by the hereditary

aristocracy and the first gentlemen of the British Empire. The inborn

racial contempt thus manifested in quarters where rigid self-control

and decorum should form the very essence of normal deportment, was not

likely, as we have before hinted, to find any mollifying ingredient in

the settlers on the banks of the Mississippi. Therefore should we not

be surprised to find, with regard to many an illicit issue of "down

South," the arrogance of race so overmastering the promptings of nature

as to render not unfrequent at the auction-block the sight of many a

chattel of mixed blood, the offspring [250] of some planter whom

business exigency had forced to this commercial transaction as the

readiest mode of self-release. Yet were the exceptions to this rule

enough to contribute appreciably to the weight and influence of the

mixed race in the North, where education and a fair standing had been

clandestinely secured for their children by parents to whom law and

society had made it impossible to do more, and whom conscience rendered

incapable of stopping at less.

From this comparative sketch of the history of the slaves in the

States, in the West Indies and countries adjacent, it will be perceived

that in the latter scenes of bondage everything had conspired to render

a fusion of interests between the ruling and the servile classes not

only easy, but inevitable. In the very first generation after their

introduction, the Africans began to press upward, a movement which

every decade has accelerated, in spite of the changes which supervened

as each of the Colonies fell under British sway. Nearly two centuries

had by this time elapsed, and the coloured influence, which had grown

with their wealth, education, numbers, and unity, though [251]

circumscribed by the emancipation of the slaves, and the consequent

depression in fortune of all slave-owners, never was or could be

annihilated. In the Government service there were many for whom the

patronage of god-parents or the sheer influence of their family had

effected an entrance. The prevalence and potency of the influences we

have been dilating upon may be gauged by the fact that personages no

less exalted than Governors of various Colonies--of Trinidad in three

authentic cases--have been sharers in the prevailing usages, in the

matter of standing sponsors (by proxy), and also of relaxing in the

society of some fascinating daughter of the sun from the tension and

wear of official duty. In the three cases just referred to, the most

careful provision was made for the suitable education and starting in

life of the issues. For the god-children of Governors there were

places in the public service, and so from the highest to the lowest the

humanitarian intercourse of the classes was confirmed.

Consequent on the frequent abandonment of their plantations by many

owners who despaired of being able to get along by paying [252] their

way, an opening was made for the insinuation of Absenteeism into our

agricultural, in short, our economic existence. The powerful sugar

lords, who had invested largely in the cane plantations, were fain to

take over and cultivate the properties which their debtors doggedly

refused to continue working, under pretext of the entire absence, or at

any rate unreliability, of labour. The representatives of those new

transatlantic estate proprietors displaced, but never could replace,

the original cultivators, who were mostly gentlemen as well as

agriculturists. It was from this overseer class that the vituperations

and slanders went forth that soon became stereotyped, concerning the

Negro's incorrigible laziness and want of ambition--those gentry

adjusting the scale of wages, not according to the importance and value

of the labour done, but according to the scornful estimate which they

had formed of the Negro personally. And when the wages were fixed

fairly, they almost invariably sought to indemnify themselves for their

enforced justice by the insulting license of their tongues, addressed

to males and females alike. The influence of such men on local

legislation, in which they [253] had a preponderating share, either as

actual proprietors or as the attorneys of absentees, was not in the

direction of refinement or liberality. Indeed, the kind of laws which

they enacted, especially during the apprenticeship (1834-8), is thus

summarized by one, and him an English officer, who was a visitor in

those agitated days of the Colonies:--

"It is demonstrated that the laws which were to come into operation

immediately on expiration of the apprenticeship are of the most

objectionable character, and fully established the fact not only of a

future intention to infringe the rights of the emancipated classes, but

of the actual commencement and extensive progress of a Colonial system

for that purpose. The object of the laws is to circumscribe the market

for free labour--to prohibit the possession or sale of ordinary

articles of produce on sale, the obvious intention of which is to

confine the emancipated classes to a course of agricultural

servitude--to give the employers a monopoly of labour, and to keep down

a free competition for wages--to create new and various modes of

apprenticeship for the purpose of prolonging predial service, together

with many evils of the [254] late system--to introduce unnecessary

restraint and coercion, the design of which is to create a perpetual

surveillance over the liberated negroes, and to establish a legislative

despotism. The several laws passed are based upon the most vicious

principles of legislation, and in their operation will be found

intolerably oppressive and entirely subversive of the just intentions

of the British Legislature."

These liberal-souled gentry were, in sooth, Mr. Froude's

"representatives" of Britain, whose traditions steadily followed in

their families, he has so well and sympathetically set forth.

We thus see that the irritation and rancour seething in the breast of

the new plantocracy, of whom the majority was of the type that then

also flourished in Barbados, Jamaica, and Demerara, were nourished and

kept acute in order to crush the African element. Harm was done,

certainly; but not to the ruinous extent sometimes declared. It was

too late for perfect success, as, according to the Negroes' own phrase,

people of colour had by that time already "passed the lock-jaw"* stage

(at which trifling misadventures [255] might have nipped the germ of

their progress in the bud.) In spite of adverse legislation, and in

spite of the scandalous subservience of certain Governors to the

Colonial Legislatures, the Race can point with thankfulness and pride

to the visible records of their success wherever they have permanently

sojourned.

Primary education of a more general and undiscriminating character,

especially as to race and colour, was secured for the bulk of the West

Indies by voluntary undertakings, and notably through the munificent

provision of Lady Mico, which extended to the whole of the principal

islands.

Thanks to Lord Harris for introducing, and to Sir Arthur Gordon for

extending to the secondary stage, the public education of Trinidad,

there has been since Emancipation, that is, during the last

thirty-seven years, a more effective bringing together in public

schools of various grades, of children of all races and ranks. Rivals

at home, at school and college, in books as well as on the playground,

they have very frequently gone abroad together to learn the professions

they have selected. In this way there is an intercommunion between all

the [256] intelligent sections of the inhabitants, based on a common

training and the subtle sympathies usually generated in enlightened

breasts by intimate personal knowledge. In mixed communities thus

circumstanced, there is no possibility of maintaining distinctions

based on mere colour, as advocated by Mr. Froude.

The following brief summary by the Rev. P. H. Doughlin, Rector of St.

Clement's, Trinidad, a brilliant star among the sons of Ham, embodies

this fact in language which, so far as it goes, is as comprehensive as

it is weighty:--

"Who could, without seeming to insult the intelligence of men, have

predicted on the day of Emancipation that the Negroes then released

from the blight and withering influence of ten generations of cruel

bondage, so weakened and half-destroyed--so denationalized and

demoralized--so despoiled and naked, would be in the position they are

now? In spite of the proud, supercilious, and dictatorial bearing of

their teachers, in spite of the hampering of unsympathetic, alien

oversight, in spite of the spirit of dependence and servility

engendered by slavery, not only have individual members of the race

entered into all the offices of dignity in [257] Church and State, as

subalterns--as hewers of wood and drawers of water--but they have

attained to the very highest places. Here in the West Indies, and on

the West Coast of Africa, are to be found Surgeons of the Negro Race,

Solicitors, Barristers, Mayors, Councillors, Principals and Founders of

High Schools and Colleges, Editors and Proprietors of Newspapers,

Archdeacons, Bishops, Judges, and Authors--men who not only teach those

immediately around them, but also teach the world. Members of the race

have even been entrusted with the administration of Governments. And

it is not mere commonplace men that the Negro Race has produced. Not

only have the British Universities thought them worthy of their

honorary degrees and conferred them on them, but members of the race

have won these University degrees. A few years back a full-blooded

Negro took the highest degree Oxford has to give to a young man. The

European world is looking with wonder and admiration at the progress

made by the Negro Race--a progress unparalleled in the annals of the

history of any race."

To this we may add that in the domain [258] of high literature the

Blacks of the United States, for the twenty-five years of social

emancipation, and despite the lingering obstructions of caste

prejudice, have positively achieved wonders. Leaving aside the

writings of men of such high calibre as F. Douglass, Dr. Hyland Garnet,

Prof. Crummell, Prof. E. Blyden, Dr. Tanner, and others, it is

gratifying to be able to chronicle the Ethiopic women of North America

as moving shoulder to shoulder with the men in the highest spheres of

literary activity. Among a brilliant band of these our sisters,

conspicuous no less in poetry than in prose, we single out but a

solitary name for the double purpose of preserving brevity and of

giving in one embodiment the ideal Afro-American woman of letters. The

allusion here can scarcely fail to point to Mrs. S. Harper. This

lady's philosophical subtlety of reasoning on grave questions finds

effective expression in a prose of singular precision and vigour. But

it is as a poet that posterity will hail her in the coming ages of our

Race. For pathos, depth of spiritual insight, and magical exercise of

a rare power of self-utterance, it will hardly be questioned that she

has surpassed every competitor [259] among females--white or

black--save and except Elizabeth Barett Browning, with whom the gifted

African stands on much the same plane of poetic excellence.

The above summary of our past vicissitudes and actual position shows

that there is nothing in our political circumstances to occasion

uneasiness. The miserable skin and race doctrine we have been

discussing does not at all prefigure the destinies at all events of the

West Indies, or determine the motives that will affect them. With the

exception of those belonging to the Southern states of the Union, the

vast body of African descendants now dispersed in various countries of

the Western Hemisphere are at sufficient peace to begin occupying

themselves, according to some fixed programme, about matters of racial

importance. More than ten millions of Africans are scattered over the

wide area indicated, and possess amongst them instances of mental and

other qualifications which render them remarkable among their

fellow-men. But like the essential parts of a complicated albeit

perfect machine, these attainments and qualifications so widely

dispersed await, it is evident, some potential [260] agency to collect

and adjust them into the vast engine essential for executing the true

purposes of the civilized African Race. Already, especially since the

late Emancipation Jubilee, are signs manifest of a desire for

intercommunion and intercomprehension amongst the more distinguished of

our people. With intercourse and unity of purpose will be secured the

means to carry out the obvious duties which are sure to devolve upon

us, especially with reference to the cradle of our Race, which is most

probably destined to be the ultimate resting-place and headquarters of

millions of our posterity. Within the short time that we had to

compass all that we have achieved, there could not have arisen

opportunities for doing more than we have effected. Meanwhile our

present device is: "Work, Hope, and Wait!"

Finally, it must be borne in mind that the abolition of physical

bondage did not by any means secure all the requisite conditions of "a

fair field and no favour" for the future career of the freedmen. The

remnant of Jacob, on their return from the Captivity, were compelled,

whilst rebuilding their Temple, literally to labour with the working

tool in one hand [261] and the sword for personal defence in the other.

Even so have the conditions, figuratively, presented themselves under

which the Blacks have been obliged to rear the fabric of self-elevation

since 1838, whilst combating ceaselessly the obstacles opposed to the

realizing of their legitimate aspirations. Mental and, in many cases,

material success has been gained, but the machinery for accumulating

and applying the means required for comprehensive racial enterprises is

waiting on Providence, time, and circumstances for its establishment

and successful working.

NOTES

254. *"Yo té'ja passé mal machoè"--in metaphorical allusion to new-born

infants who have lived beyond a certain number of days.