But
worse than in his treatment of purely mundane subjects, his attitude
here is marked by a nonchalant levity which excites our wonder that
even he should have touched upon the spiritual side of his thesis at
all. The idea of the dove sent forth from the ark fluttering over the
heaving swells of the deluge, in vain endeavour to secure a rest for
the soles of its feet, represents not inaptly the unfortunate
predicament of his spirit with regard to a solid [208] faith on which
to repose amid the surges of doubt by which it is so evidently beset.
Yet although this is his obvious plight with regard to a satisfying
belief, he nevertheless undertakes, with characteristic confidence, to
suggest a creed for the moralization of West Indian Negroes. His
language is:--

"A religion, at any rate, which will keep the West Indian blacks from
falling back into devil-worship is still to seek. In spite of the
priests, child-murder and cannibalism have re-appeared in Hayti, but
without them things might have been much worse than they are, and the
preservation of white authority and influence in any form at all may be
better than none."

We discern in the foregoing citation the exercise of a charity that is
unquestionably born of fetish-worship, which, whether it be obeah
generally, or restricted to a mere human skin, can be so powerful an
agent in the formation and retention of beliefs. Hence we see that our
philosopher relies here, in the domain of morals and spiritual ethics,
on a white skin as implicitly as he does on its sovereign potency in
secular politics. The curiousness of the matter lies mainly in its
application to natives [209] of Hayti, of all people in the world. As
a matter of fact we have had our author declaring as follows, in climax
to his oft-repeated predictions about West Indian Negroes degenerating
into the condition of their fellow-Negroes in the "Black Republic" (p.
285):--

"Were it worth while, one might draw a picture of an English governor,
with a black parliament and a black ministry, recommending, by advice
of his constitutional ministers, some measure like the Haytian Land
Law."

Now, as the West Indies degenerating into so many white-folk-detesting
Haytis, under our prophet's dreaded supremacy of the Blacks, is the
burden of his book; and as the Land Law in question distinctly forbids
the owning by any white person of even one inch of the soil of the
Republic, it might, but for the above ex