Hasnain says:

“Several years later, the Scottish polemicist Thomas Carlyle jumped into the fray, in an article with the viciously racist title you might assume. With a few changes, the substance of its argument could appear in National Review today:

The West Indies, it appears, are short of labour. … Where a Black man, by working about half-an-hour a-day … can supply himself, aid of sun and soil, with as much pumpkin as will suffice, he is likely to be a little stiff to raise into hard work! … Sunk to the ears in pumpkin, imbibing saccharine juices, and much at ease in his creation, he can listen to the less fortunate white man’s “demand,” and take his own time in supplying it. Higher wages, massa; higher, for your cane crop cannot wait; — still higher, til no conceivable opulence of cane crop will cover such wages.”

Posted on 2021-05-10T17:41:09+0000