“Well, really, Nevins! Let’s be a bit more specific. A black make a powerful speech—something of an exaggeration, surely!”
“He’s not really a black, sir,” Nevins answered surprisingly.
“Good Lord! What is he then?”
“I couldn’t rightly say, sir.” There was a dogged stubbornness about Nevins this morning. The Colonial Secretary shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, well. What did he talk about?”
A lucid thought flashed across Nevins’ mind.
“He talked about cotton, sir.”
“About cotton?” The Colonial Secretary stared. “What on earth did he say about cotton?”
“He said that better cotton could be raised in India than in America.”
The lucid moment passed, and Nevins could tell no more. But the young Colonial Secretary saw the newspaper accounts of Douglass’s talk before he returned to London. He took out his notebook and on a clean, fresh page he wrote a name, “Frederick Douglass.” Then he thoughtfully drew a circle around it. William Gladstone’s mind had projected itself into the future, when there might be no more cheap cotton coming from America. The Colonial Secretary was a solid young man with no nonsense about him.