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. Douglass, 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. Douglass 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 lustre 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 petition 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 emancipation 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 classes 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 shores 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 class 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 ineptitude 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 assuring conformity and submission to her dogmas. She is now content to rest her claims on herbeneficence in the past, as attested by noble 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 assessment 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 attitude 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 régime of Mr. Froude's official "birds of passage." 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 sturdy 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 assess 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 class, 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 quâ 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?