Froudacity; West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Part 4

The land of his birth proved herself equal to this imperative call of civilized Duty, regardless of customs and the laws, written as well as unwritten, which had doomed to life-long degradation every member of the progeny of Ham. Recognizing in the erewhile bondman a born leader of men, America, with the unflinching directness that has marked her course, whether in good or in evil, responded with spontaneous loyalty to the inspiration of her highest instincts. Shamed into compunction and remorse at the solid fame and general sympathy secured for himself by a son of her soil, whom, in the wantonness of pride and power, she had denied all fostering care (not, indeed, for any conscious offending on his part, but by reason of a natural peculiarity which she had decreed penal), America, like a repentant mother, stooped from her august seat, and giving with enthusiasm both hands to the outcast, she helped him to stand forward and erect, [140] in the dignity of untrammeled manhood, making him, at the same time, welcome to a place of honour amongst the most gifted, the worthiest and most favoured of her children.

Chief Justice Reeves, on the other hand, did not enter the world, as Dougla.s.s had done, heir to a lot of intellectual darkness and legalized social and political proscription. a.s.sociated from adolescence with S.

J. Prescod, the greatest leader of popular opinion whom Barbados has yet produced, Mr. Reeves possessed in his nature the material to a.s.similate and reflect in his own principles and conduct the salient characteristics of his distinguished Mentor. Arrived in England to study law, he had there the privilege of the personal acquaintance of Lord Brougham, then one of the Nestors of the great Emanc.i.p.ation conflict. On returning to his native island, which he did immediately after his call to the bar, Mr. Reeves sprung at once into the foremost place, and retained his precedence till his labours and aspirations were crowned by his obtaining the highest judicial post in that Colony.

For long years before becoming Chief Justice, Mr. Reeves had conquered for himself the respect and confidence [141] of all Barbadians--even including the ultra exclusive "Anglo-West-Indians" of Mr. Froude--by the manful const.i.tutional stand which, sacrificing official place, he had successfully made against the threatened abrogation of the Charter of the Colony, which every cla.s.s and colour of natives cherish and revere as a most precious, almost sacred, inheritance. The successful champion of their menaced liberties found cl.u.s.tering around him the grateful hearts of all his countrymen, who, in their hour of dread at the danger of their time-honoured const.i.tution, had clung in despair to him as the only leader capable of heading the struggle and leading the people, by wise and const.i.tutional guidance, to the victory which they desired but could not achieve for themselves.

Sir William Robinson, who was sent out as pacificator, saw and took in at a glance the whole significance of the condition of affairs, especially in their relation to Mr. Reeves, and vice versa. With the unrivalled pre-eminence and predominant personal influence of the latter, the Colonial Office had possessed more than ample means of being perfectly familiar. What, then, could be more natural and consonant with [142] sound policy than that the then acknowledged, but officially unattached, head of the people (being an eminent lawyer), should, on the occurrence of a vacancy in the highest juridical post, be appointed to co-operate with the supreme head of the Executive? Mr.

Reeves was already the chief of the legal body of the Colony; his appointment, therefore, as Chief Justice amounted to nothing more than an official ratification of an accomplished and unalterable fact. Of course, it was no fault of England's that the eminent culture, political influence, and unapproached legal status of Mr. Reeves should have coincided exactly with her political requirements at that crisis, nor yet that she should have utilized a coincidence which had the double advantage of securing the permanent services, whilst realizing at the same time the life's aspiration, of a distinguished British subject. But that Mr. Froude should be dinning in our ears this case of benefited self-interest, gaining the amplest reciprocity, both as to service and serviceableness, with the disinterested spontaneity of America's elevation of Mr. Dougla.s.s, is but another proof of the obliquity of the moral medium through [143] which he is wont to survey mankind and their concerns.

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

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

To what we have already pointed out regarding the absolute impossibility of such an opportunity ever presenting itself in America to Mr. Dougla.s.s, in a political sense, we may now add that, whereas, in Barbados, for the intellectual equipment needed at the crisis, Mr.

Reeves stood quite alone, there could, in the bosom of the Union, even in respect of the gifts in which Mr. Dougla.s.s was most brilliant, be no "walking over the course" by him. It was in the country and time of Bancroft, Irving, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, Bryant, Motley, Henry Clay, Dan Webster, and others of the laureled phalanx which has added so great and imperishable a l.u.s.tre to the literature of the English tongue.

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

It is a pet.i.tion put forward by prominent responsible colonists--the majority of whom are Whites, and mostly Britons besides.

[148] Their prayer, in which the whole population in these Colonies most heartily join, is simply and most reasonably that we, the said Colonies, being an integral portion of the British Empire, and having, in intelligence and every form of civilized progress, outgrown the stage of political tutelage, should be accorded some measure of emanc.i.p.ation therefrom. And thereby we--White, Black, Mulatto, and all other inhabitants and tax-payers--shall be able to protect ourselves against the self-seeking and bold indifference to our interests which seem to be the most cherished expression of our rulers' official existence. It may be possible (for he has attempted it), that our new instructor in Colonial ethics and politics, under the impulsion of skin-superiority, and also of confidence in the probable success of experiments successfully tried fifty years before, does really believe in the sensibleness of separating COLOURS, and representing the wearers of them as being generally antagonistic to one another in Her Majesty's West Indian Dominions. How is it then, we may be permitted to ask Mr.

Froude, that no complaint of the sort formulated by him as against the Blacks has ever been put [149] forward by the thousands of Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, and other Europeans who are permanent inhabitants, proprietors, and tax-payers of these Colonies? The reason is that Anglo-West Indianism, or rather Colonialism, is the creed of a few residents sharply divisible into two cla.s.ses in the West Indies.

Labouring conjointly under race-madness, the first believes that, as being of the Anglo-Saxon race, they have a right to crow and dominate in whatever land they chance to find themselves, though in their own country they or their forefathers had had to be very dumb dogs indeed.

The Colonial Office has for a long time been responsible for the presence in superior posts of highly salaried gentry of this category, who have delighted in showing themselves off as the unquestionable masters of those who supply them with the pay that gives them the livelihood and position they so ungratefully requite. These fortunate folk, Mr. Froude avers, are likely to leave our sh.o.r.es in a huff, bearing off with them the civilizing influences which their presence so surely guarantees. Go tell to the marines that the seed of Israel flourishing in the borders of [150] Misraim will abandon their flourishing district of Goshen through sensitiveness on account of the idolatry of the devotees of Isis and Osiris!

The second and less placable cla.s.s of "Englishmen in the West Indies,"

whose final departure our author would have us to believe would complete the catastrophe to progress in the British Antilles, is very impalpable indeed. We cannot feel them. We have failed to even see them. True, Mr. Froude scouts on their behalf the bare notion of their condescending to meet, on anything like equality, us, whom he and they pretend (rather anachronistically, at least) to have been their former slaves, or servants. But where, in the name of Heaven, where are these sortis de la cuisse de Jupiter, Mr. Froude? If they are invisible, mourning in impenetrable seclusion over the impossibility of having, as their fathers had before them, the luxury of living at the Negroes'

expense, shall we Negroes who are in the sunshine of heaven, prepared to work and win our way, be anywise troubled in our Jubilee by the drivelling inept.i.tude which insanely reminds us of the miseries of those who went before us? We have thus arrived at the cardinal, [151]

essential misrepresentation, out of scores which compose "The Bow of Ulysses," and upon which its phrases mainly hinge. Semper eadem--"Always the same"--has been the proud motto of the mightiest hierarchy that has controlled human action and shaped the destinies of mankind, no less in material than in ghostly concerns. Yet is a vast and very beneficial change, due to the imperious spirit of the times, manifest in the Roman Church. No longer do the stake, the sword, and the dismal horrors of the interdict figure as instruments for a.s.suring conformity and submission to her dogmas. She is now content to rest her claims on herbeneficence in the past, as attested by n.o.ble and imperishable memorials of her solicitude for the poor and the ignorant, and in proclaiming the gospel without those ghastly coercives to its acceptance. Surely such a change, however unpalatable to those who have been compelled to make it, is most welcome to the outside world at large. "Always the same" is also, or should be, the device of the discredited herd whose spokesman Mr. Froude is so proud to be. In nothing has their historical character, as shown in the published literature of their [152] cause up to 1838, exhibited any sign of amelioration. It cannot be affected by the spirit and the lessons of the times. Mendacity and a sort of judicial blindness seem to be the two most salient characteristics by which are to be distinguished these implacable foes and would-be robbers of human rights and liberty. But, gracious heavens! what can tempt mortals to incur this weight of infamy? Wealth and Power? To be (very improbably) a Croesus or (still more improbably) a Bonaparte, and to perish at the conventional age, and of vulgar disease, like both? Turpitudes on the part of sane men, involving the sacrifice of the priceless attributes of humanity, can be rendered intelligible by the supreme temporal gains above indicated, but only if exemption from the common lot of mankind--in the shape of care, disease, and death--were accompaniments of those prizes.

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

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

Alas for Africa and the sufferings of her desolated millions, in view of so light-hearted an a.s.sessment as this! Only think of the ages of outrage, misery, and slaughter--of the countless hecatombs that Mammon is hereby absolved from having directly exacted, since the sufficing expiatory outcome of it all has been only "marks of courtesy and good breeding"! Marks that are displayed, forsooth, by the survivors of the ghastly experiences or by [154] their descendants! And yet, granting the appreciable ethical value of the hat-touching, the smirking and curtseyings of those Blacks to persons whom they had no reason to suspect of unfriendliness, or whose white face they may in the white man's country have greeted with a civility perhaps only prudential, we fail to discover the necessity of the dreadful agency we have adverted to, for securing the results on manners which are so warmly commended.

African explorers, from Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley, have all borne sufficient testimony to the world regarding the natural friendliness of the Negro in his ancestral home, when not under the influence of suspicion, anger, or dread.

It behoves us to repeat (for our detractor is a persistent repeater) that the cardinal dodge by which Mr. Froude and his few adherents expect to succeed in obtaining the reversal of the progress of the coloured population is by misrepresenting the elements, and their real att.i.tude towards one another, of the sections composing the British West Indian communities. Everybody knows full well that Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Irishmen (who are not officials), as [155] well as Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, and other nationalities, work in unbroken harmony and, more or less, prosper in these Islands. These are no cherishers of any vain hankering after a state of things in which men felt not the infamy of living not only on the unpaid labour, but at the expense of the sufferings, the blood, and even the life of their fellow-men. These men, honourable by instinct and of independent spirit, depend on their own resources for self-advancement in the world--on their capital either of money in their pockets or of serviceable brains in their heads, energy in their limbs, and on these alone, either singly or more or less in combination. These reputable specimens of manhood have created homes dear to them in these favoured climes; and they, at any rate, being on the very best terms with all sections of the community in which their lot is cast, have a common cause as fellow-sufferers under the regime of Mr. Froude's official "birds of pa.s.sage." The agitation in Trinidad tells its own tale.

There is not a single black man--though there should have been many--among the leaders of the movement for Reform. Nevertheless the honourable [156] and truthful author of "The English in the West Indies," in order to invent a plausible pretext for his sinister labours of love on behalf of the poor pro-slavery survivals, and despite his knowledge that st.u.r.dy Britons are at the head of the agitation, coolly tells the world that it is a struggle to secure "negro domination."

The further allegation of our author respecting the black man is curious and, of course, dismally prophetic. As the reader may perhaps recollect, it is to the effect that granting political power to the Negroes as a body, equal in scope "to that claimed by Us" (i.e., Mr.

Froude and his friends), would certainly result in the use of these powers by the Negroes to their own injury. And wherefore? If Mr.

Froude professes to believe--what is a fact--that there is "no original or congenital difference of capacity" between the white and the African races, where is the consistency of his urging a contention which implies inferiority in natural shrewdness, as regards their own affairs, on the part of black men? Does this blower of the two extremes of temperature in the same breath pretend that the average British voter is better informed, can see more clearly what is for his own advantage, [157] is better able to a.s.sess the relative merits of persons to be entrusted with the spending of his taxes, and the general management of his interests? If Mr. Froude means all this, he is at issue not only with his own specific declaration to the contrary, but with facts of overwhelming weight and number showing precisely the reverse. We have personally had frequent opportunities of coming into contact, both in and out of England, with natives of Great Britain, not of the agricultural order alone, but very often of the artisan cla.s.s, whose ignorance of the commonest matters was as dense as it was discreditable to the land of their birth and breeding. Are these people included (on account of having his favourite sine qua non of a fair skin) in the US of this apostle of skin-worship, in the indefeasible right to political power which is denied to Blacks by reason, or rather non-reason, of their complexion?

The fact is, that, judging by his own sentiments and those of his Anglo-West Indian friends, Mr. Froude calculated on producing an impression in favour of their discreditable views by purposely keeping out of sight the numerous European and other sufferers under the yoke [158] which he sneers at seeing described by its proper appellation of "a degrading tyranny." The prescriptive unfavourable forecast of our author respecting political power in the hands of the Blacks may, in our opinion, be hailed as a warrant for its bestowal by those in whose power that bestowal may be. As a pro-slavery prophecy, equally dismal and equally confident with the hundreds that preceded it, this new vaticination may safely be left to be practically dealt with by the Race, victimized and maligned, whose real genius and character are purposely belied by those who expect to be gainers by the process.

Invested with political power, the Negroes, Mr. Froude goes on to a.s.sure his readers, "will slide back into their old condition, and the chance will be gone of lifting them to the level to which we have no right to say they are incapable of rising." How touchingly sympathetic! How transcendently liberal and righteous! But, to speak the truth, is not this solicitude of our cynical defamer on our behalf, after all, a useless waste of emotion on his part? Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.+ The tears of the crocodile are most copious in close view of the banquet on his prey. This [159] reiterated twaddle of Mr.

Froude, in futile and unseasonable echo of the congenial predictions of his predecessors in the same line, might be left to receive not only the answer of his own book to the selfsame talk of the slavers fifty years ago, but also that of the acc.u.mulated refutations which America has furnished for the last twenty-five years as to the retrograde tendency so falsely imputed. But, taking it as a serious contention, we find that it involves a suggestion that the according of electoral votes to citizens of a certain complexion would, per se and ipso facto, produce a revulsion and collapse of the entire prevailing organization and order of a civilized community.

What talismanic virtue this prophet of evil attributes to a vote in the hand of a Negro out of Barbados, where for years the black man's vote has been operating, harmlessly enough, Heaven knows, we cannot imagine.

At all events, as sliding back on the part of a community is a matter which would require some appreciable time, however brief, let us hope that the authorities charged "to see that the state receive no detriment" would be vigilant enough and in time to arrest the evil and vindicate [160] the efficiency of the civilized methods of self-preservation.

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

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

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

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

Slavery, as Mr. Froude and the rest of us are bound to discuss it at present, is by no means susceptible of the gloss which he has endeavoured, in the above extract, to put on it. The British nation, in 1834, had to confront and deal with the only species of slavery which was then within the cognizance of public morals and practical politics. Doubtless our author, learned and erudite as he is, would like to transport us to those patriarchal ages when, under theocratic decrees, the chosen people were authorized to purchase (not to kidnap) slaves, and keep them as an everlasting inheritance in their posterity.

The slaves so purchased, we know, became members of the families to which their lot was attached, and were hedged in from cruel usage by distinct and salutary regulations. This is the only species of slavery which--with the addition of the old Germanic self-enslavements and the generally prevailing ancient custom of pledging one's personal services [165] in liquidation of indebtedness--can be covered by the singular verdict of noncriminality which our author has p.r.o.nounced. He, of course, knows much better than we do what the condition of slaves was in Greece as well as in Rome. He knows, too, that the "wild and guilty phantasy that man could hold property in man," lost nothing of its guilt or its wildness with the lapse of time and the changes of circ.u.mstances which overtook and affected those reciprocal relations.

Every possibility of deterioration, every circ.u.mstance wherein man's fallen nature could revel in its worst inspirations, reached culmination at the period when the interference of the world, decreed by Providence, was rendered imperative by the sufferings of the bondsmen. It is this crisis of the history of human enslavement that Mr. Froude must talk about, if he wishes to talk to any purpose on the subject at all. His scoffs at British "virtuous benevolence," and his imputation of ingrat.i.tude to the Negro in respect of that self-same benevolence, do not refer to any theocratic, self-contracted, abstract, or idyllic condition of servitude. They pin his meaning down [166] to that particular phase when slavery had become not only "the sum," but the very quintessence, "of all human villainies."

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

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

The statement that many negroes who were sold to the dealers in the factories were "slaves [168] already to worse masters" is, in the face of facts which could not possibly have been unknown to him, a piece of very daring a.s.sertion. But this should excite no wonder, considering that precise and scrupulous accuracy would be fatal to the discreditable cause to which he so shamelessly proclaims his adhesion.

As being familiar since early childhood with members of almost every tribe of Africans (mainly from or arriving by way of the West Coast) who were brought to our West Indies, we are in a position to contradict the above a.s.sertion of Mr. Froude's, its unfaltering confidence notwithstanding. We have had the Madingoes, Foulahs, Houssas, Calvers, Gallahs, Karamenties, Yorubas, Aradas, Cangas, Kroos, Timnehs, Veis, Eboes, Mokoes, Bibis, and Congoes, as the most numerous and important of the tribal contribution of Africa to the population of these Colonies. Now, from what we have intimately learned of these people (excepting the Congoes, who always appeared to us an inferior tribe to all the others), we unhesitatingly deny that even three in ten of the whole number were ever slaves in their own country, in the sense of having been born under any organized [169] system of servitude. The authentic records relating to the enslavement of Africans, as a regular systematized traffic, do not date further back than five centuries ago.

It is true that a great portion of ancient literature and many monuments bear distinct evidence, all the more impressive because frequently only casual, that, from the earliest ages, the Africans had shared, in common with other less civilized peoples, the doom of having to furnish the menial and servile contingents of the more favoured sections of the human family. Now, dating from, say, five hundred years ago, which was long indeed after the disappearance of the old leading empires of the world, we have (save and except in the case of Arab incursionists into the Eastern and Northern coasts) no reliable authority for saying, or even for supposing, that the tribes of the African interior suffered from the molestations of professional man-hunters.

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

After a good deal of talk, having the same logical value, our author, in his enthusiasm for [172] slavery, delivers himself thus: "For myself, I would rather be the slave of a Shakespeare or a Burghley, than the slave of a majority in the House of Commons, or the slave of my own folly." Of the four above specified alternatives of enslavement, it is to be regretted that temperament, or what is more likely, perhaps, self-interest, has driven him to accept the fourth, or the latter of the two deprecated yokes, his book being an irrefutable testimony to the fact. For, most a.s.suredly, it has not been at the prompting of wisdom that a learned man of unquestionably brilliant talents and some measure of accorded fame could have prost.i.tuted those talents and tarnished that fame by condescending to be the literary spokesman of the set for whose miserable benefit he recommends the statesmen of his country to perjure and compromise themselves, regardless of inevitable consequences, which the value of the sectional satisfaction to be thereby given would but very poorly compensate.

Possibly a House of Commons majority, whom this dermatophilist evidently rates far lower than his "Anglo-West Indians," might, if he were their Slave, have protected their own self- [173] respect by restraining him from vicariously scandalizing them by his effusions.

After this curious boast about his preferences as a hypothetic bondsman, Mr. Froude proceeds gravely to inform his readers that "there may be authority yet not slavery; a soldier is not a slave, a wife is not a slave..." and he continues, with a view of utilizing these plat.i.tudes against the obnoxious Negro, by telling us that persons sustaining the above specified and similar relations "may not live by their own wills, or emanc.i.p.ate themselves at their own pleasure from positions in which nature has placed them, or into which they have themselves voluntarily entered. The negroes of the West Indies are children, and not yet disobedient children.... If you enforce self-government upon them when they are not asking for it, you may ...

wilfully drive them back into the condition of their ancestors, from which the slave-trade was the beginning of their emanc.i.p.ation."! The words which we have signalized by italics in the above extract could have been conceived only by a bigot--such an atrocious sentiment being possible only as the product of mind or morals [174] wrenched hopelessly out of normal action. All the remainder of this hashing up of pointless commonplaces has for its double object a suggestio falsi against us Negroes as a body, and a diverting of attention, as we have proved before, from the numerous British claimants of Reform, whose personality Mr. Froude and his friends would keep out of view, provided their crafty policy has the result of effectually repressing the hitherto irrepressible, and, as such, to the "Anglo-West Indian," truly detestable Negro.

NOTES

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

BOOK III: WEST INDIAN CONFEDERATION

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

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

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

His sentence, therefore, may be legitimately constructed in full for him in the only sense which is applicable to the mutual relations actually existing between those two directly specified sections of British subjects who he would fain have the world believe live in a state of active hostility:--"If the whites are to combine for the Promotion of the general welfare, as many of the foremost of them have done before and are doing now, so will the blacks also combine in the support of such whites, and as staunch auxiliaries equally interested in the furtherance of the same ameliorative [177] objects." Except in the sense embodied in the foregoing sentence, we cannot, in these days, conceive with what intent persons of one section should so specially combine as to compel combination on the part of persons of any other.

The further statement that a confederation having a full black voting-power would be a government "by the blacks and for the blacks,"

is the logical converse of the now obsolete doctrine of Mr. Froude's inspirers--"a government by whites should be only for whites." But this formula, however strenuously insisted on by those who gave it shape, could never, since even before three decades from the first introduction of African slaves, be thoroughly put in practice, so completely had circ.u.mstances 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 "inst.i.tutions" 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 a.s.sociations; 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 circ.u.mstances 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 t.i.tle 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 cla.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 pa.s.s 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."