can be done eventually can be done immediately, and
the gulf which divides the colours is no arbitrary prejudice, but has
been opened by the centuries of training and discipline which have given
us the start in the race. We set it down to slavery. It would be far
truer to set it down to freedom. The African blacks have been free
enough for thousands, perhaps for tens of thousands of years, and it has
been the absence of restraint which has prevented them from becoming
civilised. Generation has followed generation, and the children are as
like their father as the successive generations of apes. The whites, it
is likely enough, succeeded one another with the same similarity for a
long series of ages. It is now supposed that the human race has been
upon the planet for a hundred thousand years at least, and the first
traces of civilisation cannot be thrown back at farthest beyond six
thousand. During all those ages mankind went on treading in the same
steps, century after century making no more advance than the birds and
beasts. In Egypt or in 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 own
Anglo-Norman race has become capable of self-government only after a
thousand years of civil and spiritual authority. European government,
European instruction, continued steadily till his natural tendencies are
superseded by a higher instinct, may shorten the probation period of the
negro. Individual blacks of exceptional quality, like Frederick Douglas
in America, or the Chief Justice of Barbadoes, will avail themselves of
opportunities to rise, and the freest opportunities ought to be offered
them. But it is as certain as any future event can be that if we give
the negroes as a body the political powers which we claim for ourselves,
they will use them only to their own injury. They will slide back into
their old condition, and the chance will be gone of lifting them to the
level to which we have no right to say that they are incapable of
rising.

Chief Justice R---- owes his elevation to his English environment and
his English legal training. He would not pretend that he could have made
himself what he is in Hayti or in Dahomey. Let English authority die
away, a