Froude's scorn of the Negroes' skin extend,
inconsistently on his part, to their intelligence and feelings also?
And if so, what has the Negro to care--if let alone and not wantonly
thwarted in his aspirations? It sounds queer, not to say unnatural
and scandalous, that Englishmen should in these days of light be the
champions of injustice towards their fellow-subjects, not for any
intellectual or moral disqualification, but on the simple account of
the darker skin of those who are to be assailed and thwarted in their
life's career and aspirations. Really, are we to be grateful that
the colour difference should be made the basis and justification of
the dastardly denials of justice, social, intellectual, and moral,
which have characterized the regime of those who Mr. Froude boasts
were left to be the representatives of Britain's morality and fair
play? Are the Negroes under the French flag not intensely French?
Are the Negroes under the Spanish flag not intensely Spanish?
Wherefore are they so? It is because the French and Spanish nations,
who are neither of them inferior in origin or the [118] nobility of
the part they have each played on the historic stage, have had the
dignity and sense to understand the lowness of moral and intellectual
consciousness implied in the subordination of questions of an
imperial nature to the slaveholder's anxiety about the hue of those
who are to be benefited or not in the long run.
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