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 assure 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 accumulated 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 assert 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 pass, 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 masse 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 noblest 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 assert 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 assert 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 assertion 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, constitute the only means by which the policy he writes to promote can possibly be made to [162] appear even tolerable. The assertion 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 passage 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 emancipation. 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 Emancipation, 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-repetition 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 passed 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 pronounced. 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 circumstances which overtook and affected those reciprocal relations. Every possibility of deterioration, every circumstance 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 ingratitude 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 sexes—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 illustrious 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 ineptitudes 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-aggrandisement, 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 assertion. 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 assertion 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.