As Mr. Froude is speaking dogmatically here of his, or rather our, West Indies, let us hear him as he proceeds:—
"We have been a ruling power there for two hundred and fifty years; the whites whom we planted as our representatives are drifting into ruin, and they regard England and England's policy as the principal cause of it. The blacks whom, in a fit of virtuous benevolence, we emancipated, do not feel particularly obliged to us. They think, if they think at all, that they were [115] ill-treated originally, and have received no more than was due to them."
Thus far. Now, as to "the whites whom we planted as our representatives," and who, Mr. Froude avers, are drifting into ruin, we confess to a total ignorance of their whereabouts in these islands in this jubilee year of Negro Emancipation. Of the representatives of Britain immediately before and after Emancipation we happen to know something, which, on the testimony of Englishmen, Mr. Froude will be made quite welcome to before our task is ended. With respect to Mr. Froude's statement as to the ingratitude of the emancipated Blacks, if it is aimed at the slaves who were actually set free, it is utterly untrue; for no class of persons, in their humble and artless way, are more attached to the Queen's majesty, whom they regard as incarnating in her gracious person the benevolence which Mr. Froude so jauntily scoffs at. But if our censor's remark under this head is intended for the present generation of Blacks, it is a pure and simple absurdity. What are we Negroes of the present day to be grateful for to the US, personified by Mr. Froude and the Colonial [116] Office exportations? We really believe, from what we know of Englishmen, that very few indeed would regard Mr. Froude's reproach otherwise than as a palpable adding of insult to injury. Obliged to "us," indeed! Why, Mr. Froude, who speaks of us as dogs and horses, suggests that the same kindliness of treatment that secures the attachment of those noble brutes would have the same result in our case. With the same consistency that marks his utterances throughout his book, he tells his readers "that there is no original or congenital difference between the capacity of the White and the Negro races." He adds, too, significantly: "With the same chances and with the same treatment, I believe that distinguished men would be produced equally from both races." After this truthful testimony, which Pelion upon Ossa of evidence has confirmed, does Mr. Froude, in the fatuity of his skin-pride, believe that educated men, worthy of the name, would be otherwise than resentful, if not disgusted, at being shunted out of bread in their own native land, which their parents' labours and taxes have made desirable, in order to afford room to blockheads, vulgarians, [117] or worse, imported from beyond the seas? Does Mr. Froude's scorn of the Negroes' skin extend, inconsistently on his part, to their intelligence and feelings also? And if so, what has the Negro to care—if let alone and not wantonly thwarted in his aspirations? It sounds queer, not to say unnatural and scandalous, that Englishmen should in these days of light be the champions of injustice towards their fellow-subjects, not for any intellectual or moral disqualification, but on the simple account of the darker skin of those who are to be assailed and thwarted in their life's career and aspirations. Really, are we to be grateful that the colour difference should be made the basis and justification of the dastardly denials of justice, social, intellectual, and moral, which have characterized the régime of those who Mr. Froude boasts were left to be the representatives of Britain's morality and fair play? Are the Negroes under the French flag not intensely French? Are the Negroes under the Spanish flag not intensely Spanish? Wherefore are they so? It is because the French and Spanish nations, who are neither of them inferior in origin or the [118] nobility of the part they have each played on the historic stage, have had the dignity and sense to understand the lowness of moral and intellectual consciousness implied in the subordination of questions of an imperial nature to the slaveholder's anxiety about the hue of those who are to be benefited or not in the long run. By Spain and France every loyal and law-abiding subject of the Mother Country has been a citizen deemed worthy all the rights, immunities, and privileges flowing from good and creditable citizenship. Those meriting such distinction were taken into the bosom of the society which their qualifications recommended them to share, and no office under the Government has been thought too good or too elevated for men of their stamp. No wonder, then, that Mr. Froude is silent regarding the scores of brilliant coloured officials who adorn the civil service of France and Spain, and whose appointment, in contrast with what has usually been the case in British Colonies, reflects an abiding lustre on those countries, and establishes their right to a foremost place among nations.
Mr. Froude, in speaking of Chief Justice [119] Reeves, ventures upon a smart truism which we can discuss for him, but of course not in the sense in which he has meant it. "Exceptions," our author remarks, "are supposed proverbially to prove nothing, or to prove the very opposite of what they appear to prove. When a particular phenomenon occurs rarely, the probabilities are strong against the recurrence of it." Now, is it in ignorance, or through disingenuousness, that Mr. Froude has penned this argument regarding exceptions? Surely, in the vast area of American life, it is not possible that he could see Frederick Douglass alone out of the cluster of prominent Black Americans who are doing the work of their country so worthily and so well in every official department. Anyhow, Mr. Froude's history of the Emancipation may here be amended for him by a reminder that, in the British Colonies, it was not Whites as masters, and Blacks as slaves, who were affected by that momentous measure. In fact, 1838 found in the British Colonies very nearly as many Negro and Mulatto slave-owners as there were white. Well then, these black and yellow planters received their quota, it may be presumed, of [120] the £20,000,000 sterling indemnity. They were part and parcel of the proprietary body in the Colonies, and had to meet the crisis like the rest. They were very wealthy, some of these Ethiopic accomplices of the oppressors of their own race. Their sons and daughters were sent, like the white planter's children, across the Atlantic for a European education. These young folk returned to their various native Colonies as lawyers and doctors. Many of them were also wealthy planters. The daughters, of course, became in time the mothers of the new generation of prominent inhabitants. Now, in America all this was different. No "nigger," however alabaster fair, was ever allowed the privileges of common citizenship, let alone the right to hold property in others. If possessed by a weakness to pass for white men, as very many of them could easily have contrived to do, woe unto the poor impostors! They were hunted down from city to city as few felons would be, and finally done to death—"serve them right!" being the grim commentary regarding their fate for having sought to usurp the ineffable privilege of whitemanship! All this, Mr. Froude, was [121] the rule, the practice, in America, with regard to persons of colour up to twenty-five years ago. Now, sir, what is the phenomenon which strikes your vision in that mighty Republic to-day, with regard to those self-same despised, discountenanced, persecuted and harried descendants of Ham? We shall tell you of the change that has taken place in their condition, and also some of the reasons of that beneficent revolution.
The Proclamation of Emancipation on January 1st, 1863, was, by President Lincoln, frankly admitted to have been a war necessity. No abstract principle of justice or of morals was of primary consideration in the matter. The saving of the Union at any cost,—that is, the stern political emergency forced forth the document which was to be the social salvation of every descendant of Ham in the United States of America. Close upon the heels of their emancipation, the enfranchisement of the Negroes was pushed forward by the thorough-going American statesmen. They had no sentimentality to defer to. The logic of events—the fact not only of the coloured race being freedmen, but also of their having been effective [122] comrades on the fields of battle, where the blood of eager thousands of them had flowed on the Union side, pointed out too plainly that men with such claims should also be partners in the resulting triumph.
Mr. Froude, being so deferential to skin prejudice, will doubtless find it strange that such a measure as the Civil Rights Bill should have passed a Congress of Americans. Assuredly with the feeling against the coloured race which custom and law had engrafted into the very nature of the vast majority, this was a tremendous call to make on the national susceptibilities. But it has been exactly this that has brought out into such vivid contrast the conduct of the British statesman, loudly professing to be unprejudiced as to colour, and fair and humane, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the dealings of the politicians of America, who had, as a matter of fact, sucked in aversion and contempt towards the Negro together with their mother's milk. Of course no sane being could expect that feelings so deeply ingrained and nourished could be rooted out by logic or by any legislative enactment. But, indeed, it is sublimely creditable to [123] the American Government that, whatever might be the personal and private sentiments of its individual members as regards race, palmam ferat qui meruit—"let him bear the palm who has deserved it"—has been their motto in dealing generally with the claims of their Ethiopic fellow-citizens. Hence it is that in only twenty-five years America can show Negro public officers as thick as blackberries, while Mr. Froude can mention only Mr. Justice Reeves in FIFTY years as a sample of the "exceptional" progress under British auspices of a man of African descent! Verily, if in fifty long years British policy can recognize only one single exception in a race between which and the white race there is no original or congenital difference of capacity, the inference must be that British policy has been not only systematically, but also too successfully, hostile to the advancement of the Ethiopians subject thereto; while the "fair field and no favour" management of the strong-minded Americans has, by its results, confirmed the culpability of the English policy in its relation to "subject races."
The very suggestive section of "the English [124] in the West Indies," from which we have already given extracts, and which bears the title "Social Revolution," thus proceeds:—
"But it does not follow that what can be done eventually can be done immediately, and the gulf which divides the colours is no arbitrary prejudice, but has been opened by the centuries of training and discipline which have given us the start in the race" (p. 125 [Froude]).
The reference in the opening clause of the above citation, as to what is eventually possible not being immediately feasible, is to the elevation of Blacks to high official posts, such as those occupied by Judge Reeves in Barbados, and by Mr. F. Douglass in the United States. We have already disposed by anticipation of the above contention of Mr. Froude's, by showing that in only twenty-five years America has found hundreds of eminent Blacks to fill high posts under her government. Our author's futile mixture of Judge Reeves' exceptional case with that of Fred. Douglass, which he cunningly singles out from among so many in the United States, is nothing but a subterfuge, of the same queer and flimsy description with which the literature of the cause now championed [125] by his eloquence has made the world only too familiar. What can Mr. Froude conceive any sane man should see in common between the action of British and of American statesmanship in the matter now under discussion? If his utterance on this point is that of a British spokesman, let him abide by his own verdict against his own case, as embodied in the words, "the gulf which divides the two COLOURS is no arbitrary prejudice," which, coupled with his contention that the elevation of the Blacks is not immediately feasible, discloses the wideness of divergence between British and American political opinion on this identical subject.
Mr. Froude is pathetically eloquent on the colour question. He tells of the wide gulf between the two colours—we suppose it is as wide as exists between his white horse and his black horse. Seriously, however, does not this kind of talk savour only too much of the slave-pen and the auction-block of the rice-swamp and the cotton-field; of the sugar-plantation and the driver's lash? In the United States alone, among all the slave-holding Powers, was the difference of race and colour invoked openly and boldly to justify all the enormities that [126] were the natural accompaniments of those "institutions" of the Past. But is Mr. Froude serious in invoking the ostracizing of innocent, loyal, and meritorious British subjects on account of their mere colour? Physical slavery—which was no crime per se, Mr. Froude tells us—had at least overwhelming brute power, and that silent, passive force which is even more potential as an auxiliary, viz., unenlightened public opinion, whose neutrality is too often a positive support to the empire of wrong.