Warming up with his theme, Mr. Froude gets somewhat ambiguous
in the very next sentence. Says he:--
"In Egypt or India or one knows not where, accident or natural
development quickened into life our moral and intellectual faculties;
and these faculties have grown into what we now experience, not in
the freedom in which the modern takes delight, but under the sharp
rule of the strong over the weak, of the wise over the unwise."
Our author, as we see, begins his above quoted deliverance quite at a
loss with regard to the agency to which the incipience, growth, and
fructification of man's faculties should be attributed. "Accident,"
"natural development," he suggests, quickened the human faculties
into the progressive achievements which they have accomplished. But
then, wherefore is this writer so forcible, so confident in his
prophecies regarding Negroes and their future temporal condition
[132] and proceedings, since it is "accident," and "accident" only,
that must determine their fulfilment? Has he so securely bound the
fickle divinity to his service as to be certain of its agency in the
realization of his forecasts? And if so, where then would be the
fortuitousness that is the very essence of occurrences that glide,
undesigned, unexpected, unforeseen, into the domain of Fact, and
become material for History? So far as we feel capable of
intelligently meditating on questions of this inscrutable nature, we
are forced to conclude that since "natural development" could be so
regular, so continuous, and withal so efficient, in the production of
the marvellous results that we daily contemplate, there must be
existent and in operation--as, for instance, in the case of the
uniformity characterizing for ages successive generations of mankind,
as above adduced by our philosopher himself--some controlling LAW,
according and subject to which no check has marred the harmonious
progression, or prevented the consummations that have crowned the
normal exercise of human energy, intellectual as well as physical.
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