West Indian Islands. Sugar may fail the planter, but cocoa, which each peasant can grow with small effort for himself, does not fail and will not. He may 'better his condition,' if he has any such ambition, without stirring beyond his own ground, and so far, perhaps, his ambition may extend, if it is not turned off upon politics. Even the necessary evils of the tropics are not many or serious. His skin is proof against mosquitoes. There are snakes in Trinidad as there were snakes in Eden. 'Plenty snakes,' said one of them who was at work in his garden, 'plenty snakes, but no bitee.' As to costume, he would prefer the costume of innocence if he was allowed. Clothes in such a climate are superfluous for warmth, and to the minds of the negroes, unconscious as they are of shame, superfluous for decency.
We made several similar small expeditions into the settled parts of the neighbourhood, seeing always (whatever else we saw) the boundless happiness of the black race. Under the rule of England in these islands the two million of these poor brothers-in-law of ours are the most perfectly contented specimens of the human race to be found upon the planet. Even Schopenhauer,2 could he have known them, would have admitted that there were some of us who were not hopelessly wretched. If happiness be the satisfaction of every conscious desire, theirs is a condition which admits of no improvement: were they
1. A reference to Sir Walter Scott's novel Waverley position by its end. (1814). The baron's battlements are adorned with 2. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), German carved stone bears that are torn down during the philosopher who emphasized the tragedy of life. course of the novel and restored to their original
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FROUDE: THE ENGLISH IN THE WEST INDIES / 1623
independent, they might quarrel among themselves, and the weaker become the bondmen' of the stronger; under the beneficent despotism of the English Government, which knows no difference of colour and permits no oppression, they can sleep, lounge, and laugh away their lives as they please, fearing no danger. If they want money, work and wages are waiting for them. No one can say what may be before them hereafter. The powers which envy human beings too perfect felicity may find ways one day of disturbing the West Indian negro; but so long as the English rule continues, he may be assured of the same tranquil existence.
As life goes he has been a lucky mortal. He was taken away from Dahomey and Ashantee4?to be a slave indeed, but a slave to a less cruel master than he would have found at home. He had a bad time of it occasionally, and the plantation whip and the branding irons are not all dreams, yet his owner cared for him at least as much as he cared for his cows and his horses. Kind usage to animals is more economical than barbarity, and Englishmen in the West Indies were rarely inhuman. Lord Rodney5 says:
'I have been often in all the West India Islands, and I have often made my observations on the treatment of the negro slaves, and can aver that I never knew the least cruelty inflicted on them, but that in general they lived better than the honest day-labouring man in England, without doing a fourth part of his work in a day, and I am fully convinced that the negroes in our islands are better provided for and five better than when in Guinea.'6
Rodney, it is true, was a man of facts and was defective in sentiment. Let us suppose him wrong, let us believe the worst horrors of the slave trade or slave usage as fluent tongue of missionary or demagogue has described them, yet nevertheless, when we consider what the lot of common humanity has been and is, we shall be dishonest if we deny that the balance has been more than redressed; and the negroes who were taken away out of Africa, as compared with those who were left at home, were as the 'elect to salvation,'7 who after a brief purgatory are secured an eternity of blessedness. The one condition is the maintenance of the authority of the English crown. The whites of the islands cannot equitably rule them. They have not shaken off the old traditions. If, for the sake of theory or to shirk responsibility, we force them to govern themselves, the state of Hayti8 stands as a ghastly example of the condition into which they will then inevitably fall. If we persist, we shall be sinning against light?the clearest light that was ever given in such affairs. The most hardened believers in the regenerating effects of political liberty cannot be completely blind to the ruin which the infliction of it would necessarily bring upon the race for whose interests they pretend particularly to care.
1886-87
3. Bondsmen, slaves. 4. Also Asante, Ashanti (now part of Ghana), like Dahomey an area of western Africa that prospered in the 18th and 19th centuries and engaged in the slave trade. 5. George Brydges Rodney (1719- 1792), British admiral who commanded several naval campaigns against Britain's rival colonial powers in the West Indies. 6. Region of western Africa involved in the slave trade until the middle of the 19th century (the 1888
transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed by Britain and the United States in 1807 and 1808, respectively).
7. Cf. 2 Thessalonians 2.13. In Calvinist Protestantism, the 'elect' are those people chosen by God to be saved from eternal damnation. 8. Haiti, which gained its independence following a slave revolt that began in 1791. Through much of the 19th century, it experienced rapid and sometimes violent changes of leadership.
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1 1624
JOHN JACOB THOMAS
Thomas (ca. 1840?1889), a descendant of slaves, was born into poverty on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. Primarily a self-educated intellectual, he became a linguist, folklorist, teacher, civil servant, editor, and author. His Froudacity (1889) is a spirited book-length rebuttal of James Anthony Froude's English in the West Indies (1888), challenging its assumptions about the inferiority of nonwhite people and exposing its mistakes and its misrepresentations of his native land.
From Froudacity
From Social Revolution
Never was the Knight of La Mancha1 more convinced of his imaginary mission to redress the wrongs of the world than Mr. James Anthony Froude seems to be of his ability to alter the course of events, especially those bearing on the destinies of the Negro in the British West Indies. The doctrinaire style of his utterances, his sublime indifference as to what Negro opinion and feelings may be, on account of his revelations, are uniquely charming. In that portion of his book headed 'Social Revolution' our author, with that mixture of frankness and cynicism which is so dear to the soul of the Rritish esprit fort1 of today, has challenged a comparison between British Colonial policy on the one hand, and the Colonial policy of France and Spain on the other. This he does with an evident recklessness that his approval of Spain and France involves a definite condemnation of his own country. However, let us hear him:?
'The English West Indies, like other parts of the world, are going through a silent revolution. Elsewhere the revolution, as we hope, is a transition state, a new birth; a passing away of what is old and worn out, that a fresh and healthier order may rise in its place. In the West Indies the most sanguine of mortals will find it difficult to entertain any such hope at all.'
