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 lust 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 barancoon, 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 assuredly, 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 prostituted 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 platitudes against the obnoxious Negro, by telling us that persons sustaining the above specified and similar relations "may not live by their own wills, or emancipate 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 emancipation."! 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 constitution 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.