erance of our
author's in reference to the granting of the franchise to the black
population of these Colonies. "It is," says Mr. James Anthony Froude,
who is just as prophetic [147] as his prototypes, the slave-owners of
the last half-century, "it is as certain as anything future can be,
that if we give the negroes as a body the political privileges which we
claim for ourselves, they will use them only to their own injury." The
forepart of the above citation reads very much as if its author wrote
it on the principle of raising a ghost for the mere purpose of laying
it. What visionary, what dreamer of impossible dreams, has ever asked
for the Negroes as a body the same political privileges which are
claimed for themselves by Mr. Froude and others of his countrymen, who
are presumably capable of exercising them? No one in the West Indies
has ever done so silly a thing as to ask for the Negroes as a body that
which has not, as everybody knows, and never will be, conceded to the
people of Great Britain as a body. The demand for Reform in the Crown
Colonies--a demand which our author deliberately misrepresents--is made
neither by nor for the Negro, Mulatto, White, Chinese, nor East Indian.
It is a petition put forward by prominent responsible colonists--the
majority of whom are Whites, and mostly Britons besides.

[148] Their prayer, in which the whole population in these Colonies
most heartily join, is simply and most reasonably that we, the said
Colonies, being an integral portion of the British Empire, and having,
in intelligence and every form of civilized progress, outgrown the
stage of political tutelage, should be accorded some measure of
emancipation therefrom. And thereby we--White, Black, Mulatto, and all
other inhabitants and tax-payers--shall be able to protect ourselves
against the self-seeking and bold indifference to our interests which
seem to be the most cherished expression of our rulers' official
existence. It may be possible (for he has attempted it), that our new
instructor in Colonial ethics and politics, under the impulsion of
skin-superiority, and also of confidence in the probable success of
experiments successfully tried fifty years before, does really believe
in the sensibleness of separating COLOURS, and representing the wearers
of them as being generally antagonistic to one another in Her Majesty's
West Indian Dominions. How is it then, we may be permitted to ask Mr.
Froude, that no compl