The Proclamation of Emancipation on January 1st, 1863, was, by President Lincoln, frankly admitted to have been a war necessity. No abstract principle of justice or of morals was of primary consideration in the matter. The saving of the Union at any cost,--that is, the stern political emergency forced forth the document which was to be the social salvation of every descendant of Ham in the United States of America. Close upon the heels of their emancipation, the enfranchisement of the Negroes was pushed forward by the thorough-going American statesmen. They had no sentimentality to defer to. The logic of events--the fact not only of the coloured race being freedmen, but also of their having been effective [122] comrades on the fields of battle, where the blood of eager thousands of them had flowed on the Union side, pointed out too plainly that men with such claims should also be partners in the resulting triumph.
Mr. Froude, being so deferential to skin prejudice, will doubtless find it strange that such a measure as the Civil Rights Bill should have passed a Congress of Americans. Assuredly with the feeling against the coloured race which custom and law had engrafted into the very nature of the vast majority, this was a tremendous call to make on the national susceptibilities. But it has been exactly this that has brought out into such vivid contrast the conduct of the British statesman, loudly professing to be unprejudiced as to colour, and fair and humane, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the dealings of the politicians of America, who had, as a matter of fact, sucked in aversion and contempt towards the Negro together with their mother's milk. Of course no sane being could expect that feelings so deeply ingrained and nourished could be rooted out by logic or by any legislative enactment. But, indeed, it is sublimely creditable to [123] the American Government that, whatever might be the personal and private sentiments of its individual members as regards race, palmam ferat qui meruit--"let him bear the palm who has deserved it"--has been their motto in dealing generally with the claims of their Ethiopic fellow-citizens. Hence it is that in only twenty-five years America can show Negro public officers as thick as blackberries, while Mr. Froude can mention only Mr. Justice Reeves in FIFTY years as a sample of the "exceptional" progress under British auspices of a man of African descent! Verily, if in fifty long years British policy can recognize only one single exception in a race between which and the white race there is no original or congenital difference of capacity, the inference must be that British policy has been not only systematically, but also too successfully, hostile to the advancement of the Ethiopians subject thereto; while the "fair field and no favour" management of the strong-minded Americans has, by its results, confirmed the culpability of the English policy in its relation to "subject races."