e shall now contemplate him under
circumstances where his feelings are quite other than those of a
partisan.

BOOK I: VOYAGE OUT

[34] That Mr. Froude, despite his professions to the contrary, did not
go out on his explorations unhampered by prejudices, seems clear enough
from the following quotation:--

"There was a small black boy among us, evidently of pure blood, for his
hair was wool and his colour black as ink. His parents must have been
well-to-do, for the boy had been to Europe to be educated. The
officers on board and some of the ladies played with him as they would
play with a monkey. He had little more sense than a monkey, perhaps
less, and the gestures of him grinning behind gratings and perching out
his long thin arms between the bars were curiously suggestive of the
original from whom we are told now that all of us came. The worst of
it was that, being lifted above his own people, he had been taught to
despise them. He was spoilt as a black and could not be made into a
white, and this I found afterwards was the invariable and dangerous
consequence whenever a superior negro contrived to raise himself. He
might do well enough himself, but his family feel their blood as
degradation. His [35] children will not marry among their own people,
and not only will no white girl marry a negro, but hardly any dowry can
be large enough to tempt a West Indian white to make a wife of a black
lady. This is one of the most sinister features in the present state
of social life there."

We may safely assume that the playing of "the officers on board and
some of the ladies" with the boy, "as they would play with a monkey,"
is evidently a suggestion of Mr. Froude's own soul, as well as the
resemblance to the simian tribe which he makes out from the frolics of
the lad. Verily, it requires an eye rendered more than microscopic by
prejudice to discern the difference between the gambols of juveniles of
any colour under similar conditions. It is true that it might just be
the difference between the friskings of white lambs and the friskings
of lambs that are not white. That any black pupil should be taught to
despise his own people through being lifted above them by education,
seems a reckless statement, and far from patriotic withal; inasmuch as
the education referred to here was European, and the place from which
it was obtained presumably England. At all events, [36] the difference
among educated black men in