History has taught and yet continues to teach you in Hayti
as to the best mode of dealing with your Ethiopic colonists lies
patent, blood-stained and terrible before you, and should be taken
definitively to heart. But if you are willing that Civilization and
Religion--in short, all the highest developments of individual and
social life--should at once be swept away by a desolating vandalism of
African birth; if you do not recoil from the blood-guiltiness that
would stain your consciences through the massacre of our
fellow-countrymen in the West Indies, on account of their race,
complexion and enlightenment; finally, if you desire those modern
Hesperides to revert into primeval jungle, horrent lairs wherein the
Blacks, who, but a short while before, had been ostensibly civilized,
shall be revellers, as high-priests and [9] devotees, in orgies of
devil-worship, cannibalism, and obeah--dare to give the franchise to
those West Indian Colonies, and then rue the consequences of your
infatuation!...

Alas, if the foregoing summary of the ghastly imaginings of Mr. Froude
were true, in what a fool's paradise had the wisest and best amongst us
been living, moving, and having our being! Up to the date of the
suggestion by him as above of the alleged facts and possibilities of
West Indian life, we had believed (even granting the correctness of his
gloomy account of the past and present positions of the two races) that
to no well-thinking West Indian White, whose ancestors may have,
innocently or culpably, participated in the gains as well as the guilt
of slavery, would the remembrance of its palmy days be otherwise than
one of regret. We Negroes, on the other hand, after a lapse of time
extending over nearly two generations, could be indebted only to
precarious tradition or scarcely accessible documents for any knowledge
we might chance upon of the sufferings endured in these Islands of the
West by those of our race who have gone before us. Death, with
undiscriminating hand, had gathered [10] in the human harvest of
masters and slaves alike, according to or out of the normal laws of
nature; while Time had been letting down on the stage of our existence
drop-scene after drop-scene of years, to the number of something like
fifty, which had been curtaining off the tragic incidents of the past
from the peaceful activities of the present. Being thus circumstanced,
thought we, what rational elements of mutual hatred should now cont