n are those sentiments
which are the outcome of hopeless terror [198] and pain. For whilst
impressions of the former character glide into the consciousness
through accesses no less normal than agreeable, the infusion of fear by
means of bodily suffering is a process too violent to be forgotten by
minds tortured and strained to unnatural tension thereby. Such
tension, oft-recurrent and scarcely endurable, leaves behind it
recollections which are in themselves a source of sadness. But time,
favoured by a succession of pleasurable experiences, is a sovereign
anodyne to remembrances of this poignant class. No wonder, then, from
our foregoing detail of facts, that whiteness of skin was both
redoubted and tremblingly crouched to by Negroes on whom Europeans had
wrought such unspeakable calamities. Time, however, and the action of
circumstances, especially in countries subject to Catholic dominion,
soon began to modify the conditions under which this sentiment of
terror had been maintained, and, with those conditions, the very
sentiment itself. For it was not long in the life of many of the
expatriated Africans before numbers of their own race obtained freedom,
and, eventually, wealth sufficient for purchasing black slaves on their
[199] own account. In other respects, too (outwardly at least), the
prosperous career of such individual Blacks could not fail to induce a
revulsion of thought, whereby the attribution of unapproachable powers
exclusively to the Whites became a matter earnestly reconsidered by the
Africans. Centuries of such reconsideration have produced the natural
result in the West Indies. With the daily competition in intelligence,
refinement, and social and moral distinction, which time and events
have brought about between individuals of the two races, nothing,
surely, has resulted, nor has even been indicated, to re-infuse the
ancient colour-dread into minds which had formerly been forced to
entertain it; and still less to engender it in bosoms to which such a
feeling cannot, in the very nature of things, be an inborn emotion.
Now, can Mr. Froude show us by what process he would be able to infuse
in the soul of an entire population a sentiment which is both unnatural
and beyond compulsion?

The foregoing remarks roughly apply to preeminence given to outward
distinction, and the conditions under which mainly it impresses and is
accepted by men not yet arrived at the [200] essentially intellectual
stag