admit the reasonableness of applying to the affairs of Negroes
the principles of common equity, or even of common sense. To sum up
practically our argument on this head, we shall suppose West Indians to
be called upon to imagine that the less distinguished relations
respectively of, say, the late Solicitor-General of Trinidad and the
present Chief Justice of Barbados could be otherwise than legitimately
elated at the conspicuous position won by a member of their own
household.

Mr. Froude further ventures to declare, in this connection, that the
children of educated coloured folk "will not marry among their own
people." Will he tell us, then, whom the daughters marry, or if they
ever do marry at all, since he asserts, with regard to West Indian
Whites, that "hardly any dowry can be large enough to tempt them to
make a wife of a black lady"? Our author evidently does not feel or
care that the suggestion he here induces is a hideous slander against a
large body of respectable people of whose affairs he is absolutely
ignorant. Full [39] of the "go" imparted to his talk by a
consciousness of absolute license with regard to Negroes, our dignified
narrator makes the parenthetical assertion that no white girl (in the
West Indies) will "marry a Negro." But has he been informed that cases
upon cases have occurred in those Colonies, and in very high
"Anglo-West Indian" families too, where the social degradation of being
married to Negroes has been avoided by the alternative of forming base
private connections even with menials of that race?

The marrying of a black wife, on the other hand, by a West Indian White
was an event of frequent occurrence at a period in regard to which our
historian seems to be culpably uninformed. In slavery days, when all
planters, black and white alike, were fused in a common solidarity of
interests, the skin-distinction which Mr. Froude so strenuously
advocates, and would fain risk so much to promote, did not, so far as
matrimony was concerned, exist in the degree that it now does.
Self-interest often dictated such unions, especially on the part of
in-coming Whites desiring to strengthen their position and to increase
their influence in [40] the land of their adoption by means of
advantageous Creole marriages. Love, too, sheer uncalculating love,
impelled not a few Whites to enter the hymeneal state with the dusky
captivators of their affections. When rich, the white planter not
seldom paid