ldren being, in emergencies, the
most competent influencers of opinion and action.

But let us analyse this matter for just a while more. The fatal
objection to all Mr. Froude's advocacy of colour-domination is that
[194] it is futile from being morally unreasonable. In view of the
natural and absolute impossibility of reviving the same external
conditions under which the inordinate deference and submission to white
persons were both logically and inevitably engendered and maintained,
his efforts to talk people into a frame of mind favourable to his views
on this subject are but a melancholy waste of well-turned sentences.
Man's estimate of his fellow-man has not and never can have any other
standard, save and except what is the outcome of actual circumstances
influencing his sentiment. In the primitive ages, when the fruits of
the earth formed the absorbing object of attention and interest, the
men most distinguished for successful culture of the soil enjoyed, as a
consequence, a larger share than others of popular admiration and
esteem. Similarly, among nomadic tribes, the hunters whose courage
coped victoriously with the wild and ferocious denizens of the forest
became the idols of those who witnessed and were preserved by such
sylvan exploits. When men came at length to venture in ships over the
trackless deep in pursuit of commerce and its gains, the mariner grew
important in [195] public estimation. The pursuit of commerce and its
gains led naturally to the possession of wealth. This, from the
quasi-omnipotence with which it invests men--enabling them not only to
command the best energies, but also, in many cases, to subvert the very
principles of their fellows--has, in the vast majority of cases, an
overpowering sway on human opinion: a sway that will endure till the
Millennium shall have secured for the righteous alone the sovereignty
of the world. Likewise, as cities were founded and constitutions
established, those who were foremost as defenders of the national
interests, on the field of bodily conflict or in the intellectual
arena, became in the eyes of their contemporaries worthiest of
appreciation--and so on of other circumstances through which particular
personal distinctions created claims to preference.

In the special case of the Negroes kidnapped out of Africa into foreign
bondage, the crowning item in their assessment of their alien enslavers
was the utter superiority, over their most redoubt