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334 DOUGLASS’ MONTHLY. SEPTEMBER, 1860
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[[bold]] THE NEGRO IN THE STATISTICAL CONGRESS. [[/bold]]
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LORD BROUGHAM AND MR. DALLAS. 
  The fourth session of the Statistical Congress, comprised of delegates from almost all the countries on the globe, was opened in London, July 16th, in the great hall of King’s College, Somerset House.  Prince Albert opened the session in an extended address.—Toward the close of the session, Lord Brougham, seeing Mr. Dallas, the American Minister, present, said: 'I hope my friend Mr. Dallas will forgive me reminding him that there is a negro present, a member of the Congress.'  (Loud laughter and vociferous cheering.)
  After the cheering had subsided, Mr. Dallas made no sign, but the negro in question, who happened to be Dr. Martin R. Delany, from Canada, rose, amid loud cheers, and said: 'I pray your Royal Highness will allow me to thank his lordship, who is always a most unflinching friend of the negro, for the observation he has made, and I assure your Royal Highness and his lordship that I am a man.'
  This novel and unexpected incident elicited a round of cheering very extraordinary for an assembly of sedate statisticians.
  On the 18th, Lord Brougham, being then in the chair, said: 'I exceedingly regret that the observations I made on the first day have been interpreted into something disrespectful to the United States. No one who has known me will accuse me of such an intention. I respect our brethren of the United States even when I differ from them.  When I called attention, in the presence of our friend, Mr. Dallas, to the, in my opinion, important statistical fact that a most respectable colored gentleman, from Canada, was a member of the Congress, I only called his attention to it just as I would the attention of our excellent friend the representative of the Brazils, who is here to-day; and, God knows, I do not entertain the slightest disrespect for the Brazils. I ought also to have called the attention of the Count de Ripalda (the Spanish representative) to the same subject; they have colonies, and they have persons of various colors in their possessions.  I call his attention to it hereby.’  (Applause)) 
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              [From the London Star.]  
  A Statistical Congress can scarcely fail at any time to be a source of positive advantage; but that which has just opened its sittings possesses a ground for special congratulation. Here we see, assembled in peaceful conclave, the representatives of all the civilized peoples of the earth; delegates from nations whose chief ambition has been, in times past, to cut each other’s throats to as great an extent as possible, sit side by side, and exchange greetings of frank good will.  The metaphor of the lion lying down with the lamb must henceforth be regarded as weak and inexpressive; when poets wish to typify the highest triumph of humanizing influences over civil tendencies, they will point to the day when the negro, Dr. Delany, took his place in the same Congress  with Mr. Dallas, the representative of that slaveholding Republic of the West, and was greeted with a cordial shout of welcome. Our hearts glow with pride at the recollection of that noble outburst of sympathy, which was once a vigorous protest and a timely warning to those who still outrage Christianity by grinding the African under their heel. Would that Sir Samuel Cunard—that knight, neither [[italics]] sans peur [[/italics]] nor [[italics]] sans reproche, [[/italics]] since he has been led, by the fear of losing the favor of some profitable customers, to truckle to the infamously  snobbish  prejudice of a race, and has prostituted the subsidy which he receives from English taxpayers to the service of that detestable aristocracy of color, which every Englishman abhors—had been there to listen to the ringing cheer which arose when Lord Brougham pointed out the negro to his brother members, and directed the special attention of Mr. Dallas to the fact that he was present. He might have gathered some wholesome instruction, which would have led him at once to  
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abrogate the disgraceful regulations which he has lately put in force on board his ocean steamers—unless, indeed, he is anxious that Parliament should cancel his contract in obedience to the indignant demand of his countrymen.  
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PUBLIC HUMILIATION OF AN AMERICAN MINISTER.

[From the N.Y. Evening Post  [[/centered in column]]
  At a meeting of the International Statistical Society in London the other day, where were assembled all that was most distinguished in the English world of science and letters, presided over by the man of highest position, socially and politically, in the kingdom, Lord Brougham availed himself of the occasion to go a little out of his way then and there to make an example of our minister at the Court of St. James. Just as the exercises of the day were closed, the old gentleman arose and hoped 'his friend Mr. Dallas would forgive him for reminding him that there was a negro present, a member of the Congress.'  Under ordinary circumstances, and if addressed to any other man in the assembly, such a remark would have had no significance; but addressed to the representative of the American Government, which denies to the negro the privilege of citizenship or the capacity to acquire it; addressed to Mr. Dallas, who refuses colored people wishing to visit the Old World the protection of his country’s flag, the simple testimonial of a passport that they are Americans, the remark of Lord Brougham was certainly one of the most humiliating rebukes ever administered by one statesman to another.
  According to the report as given in the London [[italics]] Times, [[/italics]] the remark elicited loud laughter and cheers; every one enjoyed it but Mr. Dallas, who was silent, and properly so—for what had he to say?  It was a very deliberate insult, but what was he to do?— He could not deny the fact that there was a negro there; and the laughter which the remark elicited showed that the audience tho’t the arrow well directed. The assembly was not a political one and therefore the case admits of no call for explanations nor agitations of the cotton market. The occasion had evidently been deliberately chosen by Lord Brougham for the purpose of making Mr. Dallas feel the disgust with which the course pursued by his Government toward colored people in Europe has inspired other nations, and especially the class in England with which Mr. Dallas’s official position brings him the most in contact; it was chosen to make a public spectacle of our Minister; 'to roast him,' as people sometime 'roast' a person whose manners they wish to improve, or whose society they wish to have less of. As a peer, or as a member of the British Government, he could not reach Mr. Dallas, but as a private gentleman, assembled with other gentlemen, the most distinguished in the kingdom, he could, if the provocation was sufficient, put Mr. Dallas into coventry, and that was evidently the purpose of this speech. The occasion and the circumstances all conspire to convict him of malice aforethought.
  It is painful to have our country, through its representatives, so humiliated; but what better method has a foreign gentleman of bringing public opinion to bear upon those we send to associate with them than was adopted by Lord Brougham? He showed to Mr. Dallas, in an instant, by a remark in itself perfectly true and perfectly inoffensive, that every member of that distinguished assembly resented his treatment of colored people, and enjoyed his public humiliation. A few such scenes would soon either make a foreign minister modify the regulations of his office or drive him out of society. One or the other of these results, no doubt, Lord Brougham had in contemplation when he thus made a public spectacle of the American minister. 
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    [From the Philadelphia Ledger.]
  The power of silence was never more admirably illustrated than in the recent conduct of Mr. Dallas to Lord Brougham. The latter was so clearly and grossly in the wrong, that it was difficult properly to notice it.  It
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was not merely Mr. Dallas as a private gentleman whose character had to be maintained, but the representative of the United States, whose peculiar situation in regard to the African race was directly aimed at. It would, no doubt, have been highly edifying to the Statistical Society to have drawn out one of those philippics for which Lord Brougham is so famous. But there is no replying to silence, and what Sidney Smith calls an eloquent flash of this was the most powerful of all cuts upon the garrulous old peer.
  Some years ago, when first removed to the Upper House, he was completely silenced and put down by this very mode of treatment previously agreed upon, and well carried out by the House of Lords. All persons of that peculiar mixture of talkativeness and bitterness of which Lord Brougham is the representative, seem to dread nothing else but to be left without an enemy to combat. A quiet reserve is the least disturbing to public peace, opens the way for explanation or apologies, and appeals at once to the good sense of the whole community. In this case Lord Brougham, who belongs to the privileged class in England, attacked Mr. Dallas for having an unprivileged class in America. If Mr. Dallas had attacked the English peerage, attempted to turn it to ridicule, in public remarks to Lord Brougham, as a relic of a barbarous age. And opposed the rights of man, it would not have been in worse taste. 
  To say that Lord Brougham did not [[italics]] intend [[/italics]] any insult, while at the same time uttering an unquestionable truth, does not mend the matter much.  Of course he did not. But had he been a man of proper and gentlemanly feelings, and had he been as well posted up in American feelings and their causes as he pretended to be, he would have known that he was offering just the same kind of insult to the United States that an American would commit who should treat any of the English hereditary distinctions or customs in regard to royalty with open ridicule. There is no country on the globe that can exhibit a population of four million negroes, that have increased so rapidly, and become civilized and Christianized to the degree that the colored population of this country have. Already a colony of them has become a nation of high intelligence on the shores of Africa.  The Statistical Society should have taught him this. But the colored race, brought from a state of barbarism, have been elevated only by passing through a state of slavery.  They have had all those prepossessions against their being equal to the whites to overcome, which are the more strong because founded on such obvious and important facts. It makes those who have surmounted these difficulties more meritorious. But there is no country and no age in which a servile race has suddenly risen in public estimation to be the equals of the dominant race.     
  Lord Brougham’s ancestors were Saxon serfs probably, or of the original Celtic stock, and he has pushed his way up into the Scotch peerage. Mr. Dallas, in point of family, is kin to that of Lord Byron, and therefore of the Norman stock that came over at the time of the conquest. He has of course never assumed anything on that account in this country, and is, on the contrary, as all know, the representative of our [[italics]] democratic [[/italics]] Government abroad.  Nor has he ever declined to accord to Lord Brougham any of the customary respect in the land to which he has thus gone. But all nations have their peculiarities of social organization—caste rules in India, hereditary nobility or the result of serfdom in England, as we have color in America. If the Prince of Wales comes to this country every effort will be made so to welcome him as not to offend the peculiar feelings of an Englishman as to rank, and it is only the inveterate narrow-mindedness and insular prejudice against color, while respecting and endorsing the old feudal, hereditary and foolish (because obsolete) prejudices of Europe.
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  —Don’t fail to read the proceedings at the grave of John Brown on the 4th of July.     
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