groes was pushed forward by the thorough-going
American statesmen. They had no sentimentality to defer to. The logic
of events--the fact not only of the coloured race being freedmen, but
also of their having been effective [122] comrades on the fields of
battle, where the blood of eager thousands of them had flowed on the
Union side, pointed out too plainly that men with such claims should
also be partners in the resulting triumph.

Mr. Froude, being so deferential to skin prejudice, will doubtless find
it strange that such a measure as the Civil Rights Bill should have
passed a Congress of Americans. Assuredly with the feeling against the
coloured race which custom and law had engrafted into the very nature
of the vast majority, this was a tremendous call to make on the
national susceptibilities. But it has been exactly this that has
brought out into such vivid contrast the conduct of the British
statesman, loudly professing to be unprejudiced as to colour, and fair
and humane, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the dealings of
the politicians of America, who had, as a matter of fact, sucked in
aversion and contempt towards the Negro together with their mother's
milk. Of course no sane being could expect that feelings so deeply
ingrained and nourished could be rooted out by logic or by any
legislative enactment. But, indeed, it is sublimely creditable to
[123] the American Government that, whatever might be the personal and
private sentiments of its individual members as regards race, palmam
ferat qui meruit--"let him bear the palm who has deserved it"--has been
their motto in dealing generally with the claims of their Ethiopic
fellow-citizens. Hence it is that in only twenty-five years America
can show Negro public officers as thick as blackberries, while Mr.
Froude can mention only Mr. Justice Reeves in FIFTY years as a sample
of the "exceptional" progress under British auspices of a man of
African descent! Verily, if in fifty long years British policy can
recognize only one single exception in a race between which and the
white race there is no original or congenital difference of capacity,
the inference must be that British policy has been not only
systematically, but also too successfully, hostile to the advancement
of the Ethiopians subject thereto; while the "fair field and no favour"
management of the strong-minded Americans has, by its results,
confirmed the culpability of the English policy in i