colour difference should be made the basis and justification of the
dastardly denials of justice, social, intellectual, and moral, which
have characterized the regime of those who Mr. Froude boasts were left
to be the representatives of Britain's morality and fair play? Are the
Negroes under the French flag not intensely French? Are the Negroes
under the Spanish flag not intensely Spanish? Wherefore are they so?
It is because the French and Spanish nations, who are neither of them
inferior in origin or the [118] nobility of the part they have each
played on the historic stage, have had the dignity and sense to
understand the lowness of moral and intellectual consciousness implied
in the subordination of questions of an imperial nature to the
slaveholder's anxiety about the hue of those who are to be benefited or
not in the long run. By Spain and France every loyal and law-abiding
subject of the Mother Country has been a citizen deemed worthy all the
rights, immunities, and privileges flowing from good and creditable
citizenship. Those meriting such distinction were taken into the bosom
of the society which their qualifications recommended them to share,
and no office under the Government has been thought too good or too
elevated for men of their stamp. No wonder, then, that Mr. Froude is
silent regarding the scores of brilliant coloured officials who adorn
the civil service of France and Spain, and whose appointment, in
contrast with what has usually been the case in British Colonies,
reflects an abiding lustre on those countries, and establishes their
right to a foremost place among nations.

Mr. Froude, in speaking of Chief Justice [119] Reeves, ventures upon a
smart truism which we can discuss for him, but of course not in the
sense in which he has meant it. "Exceptions," our author remarks, "are
supposed proverbially to prove nothing, or to prove the very opposite
of what they appear to prove. When a particular phenomenon occurs
rarely, the probabilities are strong against the recurrence of it."
Now, is it in ignorance, or through disingenuousness, that Mr. Froude
has penned this argument regarding exceptions? Surely, in the vast
area of American life, it is not possible that he could see Frederick
Douglass alone out of the cluster of prominent Black Americans who are
doing the work of their country so worthily and so well in every
official department. Anyhow, Mr. Froude's history of the Emancipation
may he