Ah, well: there is no use in fruitless comparisons; and it is no reason that one should grudge the Negro what he has, because others, who deserve it certainly as much as he, have it not.

After all, the ancestors of these Negroes have been, for centuries past, so hard-worked, ill- fed, ill-used too--sometimes worse than ill-used--that it is hard if the descendants may not have a holiday, and take the world easy for a generation or two.
The perpetual Saturnalia in which the Negro, in Trinidad at least, lives, will surely give physical strength and health to the body, and something of cheerfulness, self-help, independence to the spirit.

If the Saturnalia be prolonged too far, and run, as they seem inclined to run, into brutality and licence, those stern laws of Nature which men call political economy will pull the Negro up short, and waken him out of his dream, soon enough and sharply enough--a 'judgment' by which the wise will profit and be preserved, while the fools only will be destroyed.

And meanwhile, what if in these Saturnalia (as in Rome of old) the new sense of independence manifests itself in somewhat of self-assertion and rudeness, often in insolence, especially disagreeable, because deliberate?
What if 'You call me black fellow?
I mash you white face in,' were the first words one heard at St.Thomas's from a Negro, on being asked, civilly enough, by a sailor to cast off from a boat to which he had no right to be holding on?
What if a Negro now and then addresses you as simple 'Buccra,' while he expects you to call him 'Sir'; or if a Negro woman, on being begged by an English lady to call to another Negro woman, answers at last, after long pretences not to hear, 'You coloured lady! you hear dis white woman a wanting of you'?
Let it be.

We white people bullied these black people quite enough for three hundred years, to be able to allow them to play (for it is no more) at bullying us.