logical value, our author,
in his enthusiasm for [172] slavery, delivers himself thus: "For
myself, I would rather be the slave of a Shakespeare or a Burghley,
than the slave of a majority in the House of Commons, or the slave of
my own folly." Of the four above specified alternatives of
enslavement, it is to be regretted that temperament, or what is more
likely, perhaps, self-interest, has driven him to accept the fourth, or
the latter of the two deprecated yokes, his book being an irrefutable
testimony to the fact. For, most assuredly, it has not been at the
prompting of wisdom that a learned man of unquestionably brilliant
talents and some measure of accorded fame could have prostituted those
talents and tarnished that fame by condescending to be the literary
spokesman of the set for whose miserable benefit he recommends the
statesmen of his country to perjure and compromise themselves,
regardless of inevitable consequences, which the value of the sectional
satisfaction to be thereby given would but very poorly compensate.
Possibly a House of Commons majority, whom this dermatophilist
evidently rates far lower than his "Anglo-West Indians," might, if he
were their Slave, have protected their own self- [173] respect by
restraining him from vicariously scandalizing them by his effusions.

After this curious boast about his preferences as a hypothetic
bondsman, Mr. Froude proceeds gravely to inform his readers that "there
may be authority yet not slavery; a soldier is not a slave, a wife is
not a slave..." and he continues, with a view of utilizing these
platitudes against the obnoxious Negro, by telling us that persons
sustaining the above specified and similar relations "may not live by
their own wills, or emancipate themselves at their own pleasure from
positions in which nature has placed them, or into which they have
themselves voluntarily entered. The negroes of the West Indies are
children, and not yet disobedient children.... If you enforce
self-government upon them when they are not asking for it, you may ...
wilfully drive them back into the condition of their ancestors, from
which the slave-trade was the beginning of their emancipation."! The
words which we have signalized by italics in the above extract could
have been conceived only by a bigot--such an atrocious sentiment being
possible only as the product of mind or morals [174] wrenched
hopelessly out of normal action. All the remainder of this hashi