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 deportment towards their unenlightened fellow-blacks, can be
proved to have nothing of that cynicism which often marks the bearing
of Englishmen in an analogous case with regard to their less favoured
countrymen. The statement that a black person can be "spoilt" for
such by education, whilst he cannot be made white, is one of the
silly conceits which the worship of the skin engenders in ill-
conditioned minds. No sympathy should be wasted on the negro
sufferer from mortification at not being able to "change his skin."
The Ethiopian of whatever shade of colour who is not satisfied with
being such was never intended to be more than a mere living figure.
Mr. Froude further confidently states that whilst a superior Negro
"might do well himself," yet "his family feel their blood as a