ion starting a national life, really and truly equipped with the
requisites and essentials of civilized existence. But such a reference
would have been fatal to Mr. Froude's object: the annals of Liberia
being a persistent refutation of the old pro-slavery prophecies which
our author so feelingly rehearses.

Let us revert, however, to Grenada and the newly-published "Bow of
Ulysses," which had come into my hands in April, 1888.

It seemed to me, on reading that book, and deducing therefrom the
foregoing essential summary, that a critic would have little more to
do, in order to effectually exorcise this negrophobic political
hobgoblin, than to appeal to [13] impartial history, as well as to
common sense, in its application to human nature in general, and to the
actual facts of West Indian life in particular.

History, as against the hard and fast White-master and Black-slave
theory so recklessly invented and confidently built upon by Mr. Froude,
would show incontestably--(a) that for upwards of two hundred years
before the Negro Emancipation, in 1838, there had never existed in one
of those then British Colonies, which had been originally discovered
and settled for Spain by the great Columbus or by his successors, the
Conquistadores, any prohibition whatsoever, on the ground of race or
colour, against the owning of slaves by any free person possessing the
necessary means, and desirous of doing so; (b) that, as a consequence
of this non-restriction, and from causes notoriously historical,
numbers of blacks, half-breeds, and other non-Europeans, besides such
of them as had become possessed of their "property" by inheritance,
availed themselves of this virtual license, and in course of time
constituted a very considerable proportion of the slave-holding section
of those communities; (c) that these [14] dusky plantation-owners
enjoyed and used in every possible sense the identical rights and
privileges which were enjoyed and used by their pure-blooded Caucasian
brother-slaveowners. The above statements are attested by written
documents, oral tradition, and, better still perhaps, by the living
presence in those islands of numerous lineal representatives of those
once opulent and flourishing non-European planter-families.

Common sense, here stepping in, must, from the above data, deduce some
such conclusions as the following. First that, on the hypothesis that
the slaves who were freed in 1838--full fifty years ago--wer