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 population starting a national life, really
and truly equipped with the requisites and essentials of civilized
existence. But such a reference would have been fatal to Mr.
Froude's object: the annals of Liberia being a persistent refutation