ontention,
we find that it involves a suggestion that the according of electoral
votes to citizens of a certain complexion would, per se and ipso facto,
produce a revulsion and collapse of the entire prevailing organization
and order of a civilized community.

What talismanic virtue this prophet of evil attributes to a vote in the
hand of a Negro out of Barbados, where for years the black man's vote
has been operating, harmlessly enough, Heaven knows, we cannot imagine.
At all events, as sliding back on the part of a community is a matter
which would require some appreciable time, however brief, let us hope
that the authorities charged "to see that the state receive no
detriment" would be vigilant enough and in time to arrest the evil and
vindicate [160] the efficiency of the civilized methods of
self-preservation.

Our author concludes by another reference to Chief Justice Reeves: "Let
British authority die away, and the average black nature, such as it
now is, be left free to assert itself, there will be no more negroes
like him in Barbadoes or anywhere." How the dying away of British
authority in a British Colony is to come to pass, Mr. Froude does not
condescend here explicitly to state. But we are left free to infer
from the whole drift of "The English in the West Indies" that it will
come through the exodus en masse said to be threatened by his
"Anglo-West Indians." Mr. Froude sympathetically justifies the disgust
and exasperation of these reputable folk at the presence and progress
of the race for whose freedom and ultimate elevation Britain was so
lavish of the wealth of her noblest intellects, besides paying the
prodigious money-ransom of TWENTY MILLION pounds sterling. With regard
to our author's talk about "the average black nature, such as it now
exists, being left free to assert itself," and the dire consequences
therefrom to result, we can only feel pity at the desperate straits to
[161] which, in his search for a pretext for gratuitous slander, a man
of our author's capacity has been so ignominiously reduced. All we can
say to him with reference to this portion of his violent suppositions
is that "the average black nature, such as it now exists," should NOT,
in a civilized community, be left free to assert itself, any more than
the average white, the average brown, the average red, or indeed any
average colour of human nature whatsoever. As self-defence is the
first law of nature, it has followed