inue
to exist in the bosoms of the two races?

With regard to the perpetual reference to Hayti, because of our oneness
with its inhabitants in origin and complexion, as a criterion for the
exact forecast of our future conduct under given circumstances, this
appeared to us, looking at actual facts, perversity gone wild in the
manufacture of analogies. The founders of the Black Republic, we had
all along understood, were not in any sense whatever equipped, as Mr.
Froude assures us they were, when starting on their self-governing
career, with the civil and intellectual advantages that had been
transplanted from Europe. On the contrary, we had been taught to
regard them as most unfortunate in the circumstances under which [11]
they so gloriously conquered their merited freedom. We saw them free,
but perfectly illiterate barbarians, impotent to use the intellectual
resources of which their valour had made them possessors, in the shape
of books on the spirit and technical details of a highly developed
national existence. We had learnt also, until this new interpreter of
history had contradicted the accepted record, that the continued
failure of Hayti to realize the dreams of Toussaint was due to the
fatal want of confidence subsisting between the fairer and darker
sections of the inhabitants, which had its sinister and disastrous
origin in the action of the Mulattoes in attempting to secure freedom
for themselves, in conjunction with the Whites, at the sacrifice of
their darker-hued kinsmen. Finally, it had been explained to us that
the remembrance of this abnormal treason had been underlying and
perniciously influencing the whole course of Haytian national history.
All this established knowledge we are called upon to throw overboard,
and accept the baseless assertions of this conjuror-up of inconceivable
fables! He calls upon us to believe that, in spite of being free,
educated, progressive, and at peace with [12] all men, we West Indian
Blacks, were we ever to become constitutionally dominant in our native
islands, would emulate in savagery our Haytian fellow-Blacks who, at
the time of retaliating upon their actual masters, were tortured
slaves, bleeding and rendered desperate under the oppressors' lash--and
all this simply and merely because of the sameness of our ancestry and
the colour of our skin! One would have thought that Liberia would have
been a fitter standard of comparison in respect of a coloured
populat