Of course, if things should ever turn out according to Mr. Froude's desperate hypothesis, it may also happen that there will be no more Negroes like Mr. justice Reeves in Barbados. But the addition of the words "or anywhere" to the above statement is just another of those suppressions of the truth which, absolutely futile though they are, constitute the only means by which the policy he writes to promote can possibly be made to [162] appear even tolerable. The assertion of our author, therefore, standing as it actually does, embracing the whole world, is nothing less than an audacious absurdity, for there stand the United States, the French and Spanish islands--not to speak of the Central and South American Republics, Mexico, and Brazil--all thronged with black, mixed blood, and even half-breed high officials, staring him and the whole world in the face.
The above noted suppression of the truth to the detriment of the obnoxious population recalls a passage wherein the suggestion of what is not the truth has been resorted to for the same purpose. At page 123 we read: "The disproportion of the two races--always dangerously large--has increased with ever-gathering velocity since the emancipation. It is now beyond control on the old lines." The use of the expletive "dangerously," as suggestive of the truculence of the people to whom it refers, is critically allowable in view of the main intention of the author. But what shall we say of the suggestion contained in the very next sentence, which we have italicized? We are required by it to understand that in slavery-time the [163] planters had some organized method, rendered impracticable by the Emancipation, of checking, for their own personal safety, the growth of the coloured population. If we, in deference to the superior mental capacity of our author, admit that self-interest was no irresistible motive for promoting the growth of the human "property" on which their prosperity depended, we are yet at liberty to ask what was the nature of the "old lines" followed for controlling the increase under discussion. Was it suffocation of the babes by means of sulphur fumes, the use of beetle-paste, or exposure on the banks of the Caribbean rivers? In the later case History evidently lost a chance of self-repetition in the person of some leader like Moses, the Hebra-Egyptian Spartacus, arising to avenge and deliver his people.