Whether a man be a pirate is a matter of fact. Whether he be a misleader of the people is a matter of opinion. "Whom shall we hang?" would become a party question, and perhaps a general amnesty for mere debaters is the most practical solution of the problem.
Barbados, which has since suffered severely from the want of a market for its sugar, seemed to Froude's eyes to present in a sort of comic picture the summit of human felicity. "Swarms of niggers on board—delightful fat woman in blue calico with a sailor straw hat, and a pipe in her mouth. All of them perfectly happy, without a notion of morality—piously given too—psalm-singing, doing all they please without scruple, rarely married, for easiness of parting, looking as if they never knew a care …. Niggerdom perfect happiness. Schopenhauer should come here." Schopenhauer would perhaps have said that "niggers" were happier than other men because they come nearer to the beasts.
As Froude has been accused of injustice to the Church of Rome, it may be as well to quote an entry from his journal at Trinidad:* "Went to Roman Catholic Cathedral—saw a few men and women on their knees at solitary prayers—much better for them than Methodist addresses on salvation." In another place he says:+ "Religion as a motive alters the aspect of everything—so much of the world rescued from Rome and the great enemy. Yet the Roman Church after all is something. It is a cause and a home everywhere—something to care for outside oneself—an something which does not change."
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* January 15th, 1887.
+ February 1st.
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Again at Barbados, on the 17th of February he writes: "By far the most prosperous of the upper classes that I have seen in the islands are the Roman Catholic priests and bishops. They stand, step, and speak out with as fine a consciousness of power as in Ireland itself …. Large, authoritative, dignified, with their long sweeping robes. The old thing is getting fast on its feet again. The philosophers and critics have done for Protestantism as a positive, manly, and intellectually credible explanation of the world. The old organism and old superstition steps into its ancient dominion- finding it swept and garnished."
In San Domingo at sunrise Froude's meditations were far from cheerful: "The sense of natural beauty is nothing where man is degraded." So far Bishop Heber in a well-known couplet.
Froude proceeds: "The perception of beauty is the perception of something which is acting upon and elevating the intellectual nature. . . It is connected with hope, connected with the consciousness of the noble element in the human soul; and where it is unperceived, or where there is none to perceive it, or where it falls dead, and fails in its effect, the solitary eye which gazes will find no pleasure, no joy—only distress—as for something calling to him out of a visionary world from which his own race is shut out. We cannot feel healthily alone. The sense of worship, the sense of beauty, the sense of sight, is only alive and keen when shared by others …. It is something not alone, but generated by the action of the object on the soul. Thus in these islands there is only sadness. In New Zealand there was hope and life."
A passage from the diary concerning the appointment of Colonial
Governors will be regarded by all official persons as obsolete.
"The English nation, if they wish to keep the Colonies, ought to insist on proper men being chosen as Governors …. The Colonial Office is not to blame and will only be grateful for an expression of opinion which will enable them to answer pressure upon them with a peremptory 'Impossible.' Court influence, party influence, party convenience, all equally injurious. A noble lord is out at elbows; give him a Governorship of a Colony. A party politician must be disappointed in arrangements at home; console him with a Colony. The Colonists feel that no respect is felt for them; anybody will do for a Colony; and whether it is a Crown Colony, or a with responsible government of its own, the effect is equally mischievous. In fact, while they continue liable, and occasionally subject, to treatment of this kind, the feelings insensibly generate which will lead in the end to separation."
The immediate consequence of Froude's West Indian travels was his well-known book The English in the West Indies, to which he gave a second title, one that he himself preferred, The Bow of Ulysses. It was illustrated from his own sketches, for he had inherited that gift from his father. Being often controversial in tone, and not always accurate in description, it provoked numerous criticisms, though not of the sort which interfere with success. In everything Froude wrote, though least of all in his History, allowance has to be made for the personal equation. He had not Carlyle's memory, nor his unfailing accuracy of eye. Where he wrote from mere recollection, deserting the safe ground of his diary, he was liable to error, and few men of letters have been less capable of producing a trustworthy guide book. The value of Oceana and The Bow of Ulysses is altogether different. They are the characteristic reflections of an intensely vivid, highly cultivated mind, bringing out of its treasure-house things new and old. "The King knows your book," it was said to Montaigne, "and would like to know you." "If the King knows my book," replied the philosopher, "he knows me." Froude is in his books, especially in his books of travel, for in them, more than anywhere else, he thinks aloud. There are strange people in the world. One of them criticised Froude in an obituary notice because, when he went to Jamaica, he sat in the shade reading Dante while he might have been studying the Jamaican Constitution. There may be those who would study the Jamaican Constitution, what there is of it, in the sun, while they might, if they could, read Dante in the shade, and the necrologist in question may be one of them. Froude did not go to study Constitutions, which he could have studied at home. He went to see for himself what the West Indian Colonies were like, and his incorrigible habit of reading the best literature did not forsake him even in tropical climates. He cared only too little for Constitutions even when they were his proper business, as they certainly were not in Jamaica. The object of The English in the West Indies is to make people at home feel an interest in their West Indian fellow-subjects, and that it did by the mere fact of its circulation. His belief that the West Indies should be governed, like the East Indies, despotically, is a subsidiary matter, and the quaint parody of the Athanasian Creed in which he epitomised what he supposed to be the Radical faith is merely an intellectual amusement. On the virtues of Rodney, and the future of the Colonies, he is serious, though scarcely practical.