ts relation to
"subject races."
The very suggestive section of "the English [124] in the West Indies,"
from which we have already given extracts, and which bears the title
"Social Revolution," thus proceeds:--
"But it does not follow that what can be done eventually can be done
immediately, and the gulf which divides the colours is no arbitrary
prejudice, but has been opened by the centuries of training and
discipline which have given us the start in the race" (p. 125 [Froude]).
The reference in the opening clause of the above citation, as to what
is eventually possible not being immediately feasible, is to the
elevation of Blacks to high official posts, such as those occupied by
Judge Reeves in Barbados, and by Mr. F. Douglass in the United States.
We have already disposed by anticipation of the above contention of Mr.
Froude's, by showing that in only twenty-five years America has found
hundreds of eminent Blacks to fill high posts under her government.
Our author's futile mixture of Judge Reeves' exceptional case with that
of Fred. Douglass, which he cunningly singles out from among so many in
the United States, is nothing but a subterfuge, of the same queer and
flimsy description with which the literature of the cause now
championed [125] by his eloquence has made the world only too familiar.
What can Mr. Froude conceive any sane man should see in common between
the action of British and of American statesmanship in the matter now
under discussion? If his utterance on this point is that of a British
spokesman, let him abide by his own verdict against his own case, as
embodied in the words, "the gulf which divides the two COLOURS is no
arbitrary prejudice," which, coupled with his contention that the
elevation of the Blacks is not immediately feasible, discloses the
wideness of divergence between British and American political opinion
on this identical subject.
Mr. Froude is pathetically eloquent on the colour question. He tells
of the wide gulf between the two colours--we suppose it is as wide as
exists between his white horse and his black horse. Seriously,
however, does not this kind of talk savour only too much of the
slave-pen and the auction-block of the rice-swamp and the cotton-field;
of the sugar-plantation and the driver's lash? In the United States
alone, among all the slave-holding Powers, was the difference of race
and colour invoked openly and boldly to justify all the enormities that
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