The Colstonoclasm Avenged

Adherents of patriotic relativism - the idea that all the master race's historical figures, with the possible exceptions of Nurse Cavell and Boris Johnson, should be judged by the standards of their times - will rejoice at the initiative of some Fourth of July celebrants in New York who commemorated the re-opening of the mainland's pubs by pulling down a statue of Frederick Douglass. Notoriously disrespectful of the free world's attitude to property rights and human resources management, Douglass not only deprived his legal owners of his labour but compounded this un-Christian subversion by conspiring to help others do the same. In a speech in 1852 he even went so far as to imply that the standards of our own time - siding with the strong against the weak and with the oppressor against the oppressed - might somehow have room for improvement. Certainly, by any profitable reckoning he was a very bad man indeed.