But when, as in the present case, he
invokes the whole prestige of the Anglo-Saxon race in favour of the
untenable pretensions of a few blases of that race, and that to the
social and political detriment of tens of thousands of black fellow-
subjects, it is high time that the common sense of civilization
should laugh him out of court. The US who are flourishing, or
pining, as the case may be, in the British West Indies--by favour of
the Colonial Office on the former hypothesis, or, on the second,
through the misdirection of their own faculties--do not, and, in the
very nature of things, cannot in any race take the lead of any set of
men endowed with virile attributes, the conditions of the contest
being on all sides identical.
Pass we onward to extract and comment on other passages in this very
engaging section of Mr. Froude's book. On the same page (125) he
says:--
"The African Blacks have been free enough for thousands, perhaps for
ten thousands of years, and it has been the absence of restraint
which has prevented them from becoming civilized."
[130] All this, perhaps, is quite true, and, in the absence of
positive evidence to the contrary of our author's dogmatic
assertions, we save time by allowing him all the benefit he can
derive from whatever weight they might carry.
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