Verbum sapienti.
Mr. Froude must see that he has set about his Negro-repression
campaign in too blundering a fashion. He evidently expects to be
able to throw dust into the eyes of the intelligent world, juggler-
wise, through the agency of the mighty pronoun US, as representing
the entire Anglo-Saxon race, in his advocacy of the now scarcely
intelligible pretensions of a little coterie of Her Majesty's
subjects in the West Indies. These gentry are hostile, he urges, to
the presence of progressive Negroes on the soil of the tropics! Yet
are these self-same Negroes not only natives, but active improvers
and embellishers of that very soil. We cannot help concluding that
this impotent grudge has sprung out of the additional fact that these
identical Negroes constitute also a living refutation of the sinister
predictions ventured upon generally against their race, with frantic
recklessness, even within the last three decades, by affrighted
slave-holders, of whose ravings Mr. Froude's book is only a [128]
diluted echo, out of season and outrageous to the conscience of
modern civilization.
It is patent, then, that the matters which Mr.
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