The Negro in the West Indies. 



By the Revd, J. G. Pearson. 



|HE twang of * Ulysses' Bow' has startled a good 

 many slumberers, and frantic efforts to prove 

 that Mr. FroUDE has missed the mark in the 

 case of the Negro in the West Indies may not be un- 

 expe6led. Indeed we are beginning to hear of good 

 people shocked and of others giving expression to grave 

 doubts as to the worth of his remarks on the descendants 

 of our former slaves ; and yet were the majority of his 

 critics doomed to live a few years in the West Indies, 

 the last thing to occur to them would be to differ from 

 him in his main assertion that the black is relapsing into 

 his natural state. 



Negrophiles, and those who accept their opinions, 

 too often suffer kindness to stifle reason, and debar 

 themselves the pleasure of being just because it would 

 seem to be unkind. Nevertheless unkind justice is a 

 greater boon, even for the negro, than unjust kindness. 

 " The negro is a man and a brother" is the text we hear, 

 ad nauseam, from every philanthropist's platform, and 

 we believe the preachers are quite earnest because they 

 are so refreshingly irrational. The blacks exported from 

 Africa to till the sugar plantations were barbarians. 

 Nothing but the wildest flight of poetical imagination 

 could represent their Afric homes as peaceful or happy. 

 No well built towns, or national monuments of science, 

 art, or religion, ever excited pride in their race. Dire6l 

 personal affe6lions alone bound them to the land of 



