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 continue 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