Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/644

624 Froude at heart, if not in act—England's best and greatest on the spiritualistic side; men to whom the distance between the white and the colored races was infinite, investing the former with absolute rights. With them were the military and official classes, high churchmen and conservatives generally. '

Sometimes there is a humanitarian sentiment in the air, as in that same year when a chief justice could charge violently against the Jamaica authorities, and the Tory leader (then Lord Robert Cecil) was so far carried away as to lament that white men held the lives of others cheap because they had a black skin. It is far otherwise now. High-handed modes of building up an empire enlist many defenders. "You can not make an omelette without breaking the eggs," cynically quotes M. Cherbuliez. Clive would find few calumniators in our days. Hastings would run no risk of impeachment. Dupleix would not be sacrificed. Frere would not be recalled. The protests of the Aborigines Protection Society against Stanley's "wading through slaughter to" Emin raise no echo. The humianitarian wave of the last generation is spent.

The devil's advocate has always plenty to say for himself. The savages practiced sanguinary rites, like the Ashantis and the Dahomans. They were the allies of our enemies, like the Hurons (say the English), like the Iroquois (say the Erench). They were already exterminating themselves, like the red Indians and Maoris, when we interposed and saved the remnant. They were being destroyed by strong drink and swindled by landsharks, like these same Maoris. They were a disturbing element on our frontier, like the Afridis. They were naked and bestial and a gang of murderers, like all the East Africans. They were a hindrance to the occupation of the soil—in short, they kept the land we wanted to take. "The starving white man must be satisfied," frankly confesses Mr. Stanley, "or he will grow ugly."

The would-be saint's advocate has some difficulty in replying. He condemns, even now, the fraud, injustice, and oppression that are the foundation stones of British India. At a far greater distance of time he still condemns the ruthless exterminating war against man and beast which the Hebrew's waged in Canaan. He listens with sympathy to Emerson's manly protest against the deportation of the Cherokees, and to Richard Howitt's and William Howitt's diatribes against colonization as giving the lie to Christianity. He reads (with an effort) the earnest plaidoyer in behalf of the Maoris which Mr. Rusden calls a History of New Zealand. He acknowledges it to be the glory of the sex that the three most powerful appeals ever made for justice to a native race have been made by women—in world-famous Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson's pathetic Ramona,