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