e. In the spiritual domain the conditions have ever been quite
different. A belief in the supernatural being inborn in man, the
professors of knowledge and powers beyond natural attainment were by
common consent accorded a distinct and superior consideration, deemed
proper to the sacredness of their progression. Hence the supremacy of
the priestly caste in every age and country of the world. Potentate as
well as peasant have bowed in reverence before it, as representing and
declaring with authority the counsels of that Being whom all, priest,
potentate and peasant alike, acknowledge and adore, each according to
the measure of his inward illumination.

BOOK III: THE NEGRO AS WORKER

[201] The laziness, the incurable idleness, of the Negro, was, both
immediately before their emancipation in 1838, and for long years after
that event, the cuckoo-cry of their white detractors. It was laziness,
pure and simple, which hindered the Negro from exhausting himself under
a tropical sun, toiling at starvation wages to ensure for his quondam
master the means of being an idler himself, with the additional luxury
of rolling in easily come-by wealth. Within the last twenty years,
however, the history of the Black Man, both in the West Indies and,
better still, in the United States of America, has been a succession of
achievements which have converted the charge of laziness into a
baseless and absurd calumny. The repetition of the charge referred to
is, in these [202] waning days of the nineteenth century, a discredited
anachronism, which, however, has no deterring features for Mr. Froude.
As the running down of the Negro was his cue, he went in boldly for the
game, with what result we shall presently see. At page 239, our
author, speaking of the Negro garden-farms in Jamaica, says:--

"The male proprietors were lounging about smoking. Their wives, as it
was market-day, were tramping into Kingston with their baskets on their
heads. We met them literally in thousands, all merry and
light-hearted, their little ones with little baskets trudging at their
side. Of the lords of the creation we saw, perhaps, one to each
hundred of the women, and he would be riding on mule or donkey, pipe in
mouth and carrying nothing. He would be generally sulky too, while the
ladies, young and old, had a civil word for us, and curtsied under
their loads. Decidedly if there is to be a black constitution I will
give my vote to the women."

To