" The forepart of the above citation reads very
much as if its author wrote it on the principle of raising a ghost
for the mere purpose of laying it. What visionary, what dreamer of
impossible dreams, has ever asked for the Negroes as a body the same
political privileges which are claimed for themselves by Mr. Froude
and others of his countrymen, who are presumably capable of
exercising them? No one in the West Indies has ever done so silly a
thing as to ask for the Negroes as a body that which has not, as
everybody knows, and never will be, conceded to the people of Great
Britain as a body. The demand for Reform in the Crown Colonies--a
demand which our author deliberately misrepresents--is made neither
by nor for the Negro, Mulatto, White, Chinese, nor East Indian. It
is a petition put forward by prominent responsible colonists--the
majority of whom are Whites, and mostly Britons besides.
[148] Their prayer, in which the whole population in these Colonies
most heartily join, is simply and most reasonably that we, the said
Colonies, being an integral portion of the British Empire, and
having, in intelligence and every form of civilized progress,
outgrown the stage of political tutelage, should be accorded some
measure of emancipation therefrom.
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