ok
at Mandeville, Jamaica, he tells us:--

"The people had black faces; but even they had shaped their manners in
the old English models. The men touched their hats respectfully (as
they eminently did not in Kingston and its environs). The women smiled
and curtsied, and the children looked shy when one spoke to them. The
name of slavery is a horror to us; but there must have been something
human and kindly about it, too, when it left upon the character the
marks of courtesy and good breeding"!

Alas for Africa and the sufferings of her desolated millions, in view
of so light-hearted an assessment as this! Only think of the ages of
outrage, misery, and slaughter--of the countless hecatombs that Mammon
is hereby absolved from having directly exacted, since the sufficing
expiatory outcome of it all has been only "marks of courtesy and good
breeding"! Marks that are displayed, forsooth, by the survivors of the
ghastly experiences or by [154] their descendants! And yet, granting
the appreciable ethical value of the hat-touching, the smirking and
curtseyings of those Blacks to persons whom they had no reason to
suspect of unfriendliness, or whose white face they may in the white
man's country have greeted with a civility perhaps only prudential, we
fail to discover the necessity of the dreadful agency we have adverted
to, for securing the results on manners which are so warmly commended.
African explorers, from Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley, have all
borne sufficient testimony to the world regarding the natural
friendliness of the Negro in his ancestral home, when not under the
influence of suspicion, anger, or dread.

It behoves us to repeat (for our detractor is a persistent repeater)
that the cardinal dodge by which Mr. Froude and his few adherents
expect to succeed in obtaining the reversal of the progress of the
coloured population is by misrepresenting the elements, and their real
attitude towards one another, of the sections composing the British
West Indian communities. Everybody knows full well that Englishmen,
Scotchmen, and Irishmen (who are not officials), as [155] well as
Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, and other nationalities, work
in unbroken harmony and, more or less, prosper in these Islands. These
are no cherishers of any vain hankering after a state of things in
which men felt not the infamy of living not only on the unpaid labour,
but at the expense of the sufferings, the blood