up
short, and waken him out of his dream, soon enough and sharply
enough--a 'judgment' by which the wise will profit and be preserved,
while the fools only will be destroyed. And meanwhile, what if in
these Saturnalia (as in Rome of old) the new sense of independence
manifests itself in somewhat of self-assertion and rudeness, often
in insolence, especially disagreeable, because deliberate? What if
'You call me black fellow? I mash you white face in,' were the
first words one heard at St. Thomas's from a Negro, on being asked,
civilly enough, by a sailor to cast off from a boat to which he had
no right to be holding on? What if a Negro now and then addresses
you as simple 'Buccra,' while he expects you to call him 'Sir'; or
if a Negro woman, on being begged by an English lady to call to
another Negro woman, answers at last, after long pretences not to
hear, 'You coloured lady! you hear dis white woman a wanting of
you'? Let it be. We white people bullied these black people quite
enough for three hundred years, to be able to allow them to play
(for it is no more) at bullying us. As long as the Negroes are
decently loyal and peaceable, and do not murder their magistrates
and drink their brains mixed with rum, nor send delegates to the
President of Hayti to ask if he will assist them, in case of a
general rising, to exterminate the whites--tricks which the harmless
Negroes of Trinidad, to do them justice, never have played, or had a
thought of playing--we must remember that we are very seriously in
debt to the Negro, and must allow him to take out instalments of his
debt, now and then, in his own fashion. After all, we brought him
here, and we have no right to complain of our own work. If, like
Frankenstein, we have tried to make a man, and made him badly; we
must, like Frankenstein, pay the penalty.

So much for the Negro. As for the coloured population--especially
the educated and civilised coloured population of the towns--they
stand to us in an altogether different relation. They claim to be,
and are, our kinsfolk, on another ground than that of common
humanity. We are bound to them by a tie more sacred, I had almost
said more stern, than we are to the mere Negro. They claim, and
justly, to be considered as our kinsfolk and equals; and I believe,
from what I have seen of them, that they will prove themselves such,
whenever they are treated as they are in Trinidad. Wha