The Brothers' War Part 20

When the quarrel is over, when the broil and the feud have been fought out and the survivors have shaken hands, when the lawsuit has become a thing of the past and the litigants have renewed their old relations, no wise and good man keeps repeating the accusations of bad faith and of unrighteous conduct which he pa.s.sionately hurled against his adversary during the variance. Rather he confesses to himself, "I wronged him when I said those hot words;" and his repentance does not bring complete peace until he has found his brother and taken all of them back.

If it only could be, the nation ought to have a great reunion, a feast of reconcilement, where, with proper solemnities, the people of each section, with their forefathers and leaders, should be fully and finally exculpated as to everything done for or against slavery by the people of the other section. It is plain that both ought to forget and forgive. They ought to do still more. They ought to compete each in utmost effort to vindicate the favorites and loved ones of the other the more intelligently, and to admire and praise them the more enthusiastically. This would be to bring the millennium nearer, and give our country "a n.o.bleness in record upon"

all others. It only needs for this consummation to cast aside the remnant of greatly diminished prejudice, and make a brief study of a small volume of material evidence and of the ordinary principles which guide the conduct of the good citizen. Such study will show that southerner and northerner throughout their fell encounter have each the very highest claims to the respect and love of the entire nation.

What a golden deed it was of President McKinley when, December 14, 1898, fully using a rare opportunity, he spake in his high place to the members of the Georgia legislature this message of reunion:

"Sectional lines no longer mar the map of the United States. Sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we bear each other. Fraternity is the national anthem, sung by a chorus of forty-five States and our Territories at home and beyond the seas. The union is once more the common altar of our love and loyalty, our devotion and sacrifice. The old flag again waves over us in peace with new glories, which your sons and ours have this year added to its sacred folds. What cause we have for rejoicing, saddened only because so many of our brave men fell on the field or sickened and died from hards.h.i.+p and exposure, and others returning bring wounds and disease from which they will long suffer. The memory of the dead will be a precious legacy, and the disabled will be the nation's care.

Every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor. And while when those graves were made we differed widely about the nature of this government, these differences have been settled by the arbitrament of arms. The time has now come, in the evolution of sentiment and feeling, under the providence of G.o.d, when in the spirit of fraternity we should share with you the care of the graves of the confederate soldiers. The cordial feeling now happily existing between the north and south prompts this gracious act. If it needs further justification, it is found in the gallant loyalty to the union and the flag so conspicuously shown in the year just pa.s.sed by the sons and grandsons of these heroic dead."

By the favor given Fitzhugh Lee, Joe Wheeler, and other old confederates, and his earnest and successful efforts for universal amnesty to all who had helped our cause, Mr. McKinley had already won the hearts of the southern people. This speech increased our love a hundred fold. We repeated the "soft words" over and over, companioning them with

"O they banish our anger forever When they laurel the graves of our dead."

On each one of our three subsequent Memorial Days during his life he was thought of as tenderly as the precious dead. And since the death of Jefferson Davis there has been no sorrow of the south equal to that over his a.s.sa.s.sination. This is the age of funerals that crown with supreme popular honor the doers of high deeds for country and race. The imposing obsequies given the president, the demonstrations in his own section, and those in foreign lands, have rarely been outdone. But he had a greater glory. It was the genuine lamentation over him that day by reconciled brothers and sisters in every southern household. You that know history better, tell me when and where a whiter and sweeter flower was ever laid upon a coffin.

Let all of us on each side of the old dividing line strive without ceasing to give the good work which the great peacemaker begun so well its fit consummation.

And replacing hate and anger with love, fiction with fact, and false doctrine with true, let the people of the north and the people of the south join heads, consciences, and hearts to ascertain what is our duty both to negro and white, and then join hands and do that duty.

CHAPTER XVI

THE RACE QUESTION--GENERAL AND INTRODUCTORY

1. Dense fogs from various sources have settled over this subject. The root-and-branch abolitionists have made many believe that emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves was the great object of the north in the brothers' war. The authors and defenders of the three amendments--especially of the fifteenth--have made many others believe that the inferiority of the southern negro is the effect of American slavery; that the cause having been removed by emanc.i.p.ation he became at once ready and well prepared for the exercise of political privileges; and that the practical denial to him of this exercise is a heinous crime of the southern whites. Politicians want southern negro ballots in national conventions and the northern negro vote in elections. The bounty, both public and private, founding, sustaining, and multiplying colleges, schools, and other negro educational inst.i.tutions, finds a growing host of beneficiaries--such as site-owners, who scheme to sell for two prices, those who want to be presidents, princ.i.p.als, professors, teachers, even janitors and floor-scrubbers, schoolbook publishers, and still others--who would keep it copiously flowing; and so they all magnify the ability of the typical negro and the benefit to him of the inst.i.tutions mentioned. Respectable and influential magazines and newspapers, with an increasing number of negro readers, really believe that very many more can be added by a little effort, and so they champion what these readers favor. Persuasive speakers and writers like Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy, unconsciously influenced either by employers who would always have a wage-depressing lever at command, or by those who would have Cuffee do what they ought themselves to do, overrate the importance of negro labor as a southern resource. And the last fog makers whom I shall mention are the inveterate optimists--amiable beyond expression--who will not admit that there is now any serious menace to either race in the south.

The several fogs enumerated overlay one another in an aggregate too opaque for the uncleared eye to pierce. As examples of their obscuring effect, consider anything said in the census as to the negro, and the articles "Negro Education," "Negro in America," and especially "Hayti" in the Encyclopedia Americana lately published. The authors of the fifteenth amendment, in making voters and rulers of late negro slaves, repeated what had been done in Hayti. It seems therefore that the Encyclopedia must tell nothing of the island but what is good. So we read in the relevant article that it abolished slavery in 1804, being "the first country to rid humanity of such a sad practice;" that there education "is compulsory and gratuitous," a sixth of the revenues being devoted to it, and the most pleasant things concerning religion, liberal naturalization practice, natural and artificial products, railroads, telegraph, and telephone. One without other information would surely think the community greatly advanced and blessed. Its true condition is thus told in Brockhaus by somebody who does not swear by the fifteenth amendment: "It may be said in general that the country is spa.r.s.ely populated, partly because of incessant civil wars, partly because of a high infant death rate."[147]

These fogs must be lifted. Great harm to each race will follow if we persist in keeping the facts concealed.

2. Do not confound the feeling that you are different from Jew, European, protestant, catholic, absolutist, socialist, anarchist, or any other white, with the feeling that you are different from negroes; for to do this is to keep you from all clear thinking upon our present subject. The former are all of our own race, and we can and do intermarry with them to the improvement of our population. If the per cent of negroes was no greater in the south than in the north, fusion could not be a very grave matter; for should it become complete, our lily-white would not be diminished by the fraction of a shade. But to absorb the eight millions of them now in our section would make us chocolate, if not mulatto. Their color is the smallest racial objection. Although their schooling for two centuries and more in American slavery has elevated them--as Mr.

Tillinghast proves--far above what they were in native slavery, still their cranial capacity, brain convolutions, and moral, intellectual, and social development--inherited without fault of theirs--from West African ancestors, are still greatly inferior to ours. Remote generations of our forefathers were much lower than the present American negroes, as Darwin admits in the oft quoted pa.s.sage, describing his first sight of the Fuegians. We should never forget that the Caucasian was once on a level with those Fuegians. The negroes when they came to America were little better. And yet they have gone up so much higher, it is plain that evolution, if only permitted to work in a proper environment, will do for them what it has done for us.

But the whites cannot consent to intermarriage. That would greatly benefit the negroes. While some who have never had good opportunity of actual observation confidently contend that there are no backward or lower races, we southerners have noted all our lives that a very great majority of the negroes who climb above the level and prosper in occupation, have a large admixture of white blood. It would be an enormous rise for the ma.s.s if fusion were a.s.sured. But for us--why, we should disinherit our children of their share in the grand destiny of the Caucasian race if we made average negroes their fathers or mothers.

Southern dread of amalgamation is not to be scouted as a mere bugbear.

Think of the half-breeds that lined all the border between the States and the Indians; of how the whites have mixed with native races in Mexico, Central and South America; of white and negro intermingling in Cuba, Hayti, Jamaica, in the United States, and especially in the south. Think of whites and negroes now legally married and marrying in the neighboring States of the Union. In 1902, eight white women were living with negro husbands in Xenia, Ohio;[148] and there were children of all these mixed marriages except one.[149] Consider also that prominent negroes advocate these marriages. Dougla.s.s had a white wife. He preached that the American negro must set before himself a.s.similation as his true goal. Professor DuBois is really a disciple of Dougla.s.s, as appears from some of his utterances. We give in a footnote what another prominent negro has recently said in public.[150] The moment that the negro became an influential factor in southern politics, a real agitation against the anti-intermarriage laws would begin. There would come a small number of negroes, controlling votes, of so much property and respectability that their children would be regarded as eligible matches by some of the poorer and more dest.i.tute whites. Marriages between such, solemnized on a visit to a State permitting, would occur. And our laws last mentioned would be more and more evaded and their repeal become gradually more probable. When they had won political equality with the patricians, the Roman plebeians repealed the prohibition of intermarriage which the former had stubbornly maintained. These two orders were of the same race. Therefore intermarriage could not be the boon to the plebeians that it would now be to the southern negro, lifting him up as it would do. If he has opportunity, he will struggle for it more resolutely than the plebeians did. A small number of negroes have already been a.s.similated in America, and a few more are still to be a.s.similated, as I shall explain later on.

This sure deliverance from the destruction which now threatens is more and more sought after by the intelligent few. And if the vote of the negroes was allowed to count, it would not be long until, under the example and appeal of their leaders, all of them would be making for that haven of refuge. Mongrelism beats upon the border all around the south; it threatens to burst forth from an exhaustless source within. We know we must keep it out as Holland does the ocean. Subconsciously discerning that fusion would probably follow the entrance of the negro into government, the whites have made of the race primary and other measures _de facto_ disfranchising him, dikes against the filthy waters of mongrelism which they would not have to wash over themselves. This is not because we hate the negro. We love and cherish him. It is not to be demanded of us that we sacrifice ourselves, our children, and our children's children for his sake. We will gladly do all that friends--nay, that near relatives--can with justice ask of one another, to better his condition and rescue him.

We cannot give him political power at the cost of our degeneration.

I would enforce the foregoing contents of this section with these profoundly true and very forcible words of a northern man, now residing in Columbia, South Carolina:

"A word about race hatred, race revulsion, or race antipathy. Many people in the north believe the devil is the author of it, and some people in the south are more devoted to it than to religion. Race antipathy is really a race instinct, a moral anti-toxin developed by nature in the individual whose environment involves constant and close contact with an inferior race in large numbers. It works for the salvation of the purity of the superior race."[151]

Professor DuBois says that "legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage and prost.i.tution."[152] And some writers seem to think it would be well to coerce miscegenators to legitimate their relations by intermarrying. An innocent girl--a maid--undone; all good men and women are agreed that her seducer should be made to marry her.[153]

But that is only where the marriage would be tolerated by society. Thus it would not make man and wife of parties to an incestuous liaison. No moralist contends that one who has received a favor from a public woman is under obligation to become her husband. The miscegenation common is that between white men and promiscuous black women. How idle is the attempt to put these cases on a par with that of the ruin of a virtuous woman. And Professor DuBois could not have rightly weighed the words in which he represents them to be as criminal as those horrible offences which especially provoke lynching; that is, that the negro woman who consented most willingly to the embraces of her master was as foully wronged by him as her mistress would be by a slave who outraged her against her will.[154] No. Intermarriage of these mixed lovers is not demanded by any principle of justice. But the public weal does demand that such a tremendous evil as amalgamation be kept off by the surest and most decisive measures. It is playing with plague and curse unspeakable for us of the south to permit the existence of any condition which tends even in the slightest degree to legalize intermarriage.[155]

3. Writers still under the spell of the root-and-branch abolitionists who were wont to exalt Toussaint, the Haytian general, above our Was.h.i.+ngton, strain hard to conceal the real cause of the lamentable conditions now prevailing in Hayti and San Domingo. One tells us that because of the many mountains, there being no railroad system, separate communities are defended by almost impregnable natural barriers, and as neighboring peoples are hereditary enemies, there is always war somewhere. The remedy recommended is to build railroads in the island as the English have done in Jamaica. Another writer tells us that we must not jump to the conclusion that all the inhabitants of San Domingo are degraded negroes; that while the population of the interior are sunk in ignorance, superst.i.tion, and barbarism, yet in the capital and the coast towns there are some people of apparently lily-white strain, well educated, speaking two or three languages, who supply the mulatto republic with generals and political leaders. The ma.s.ses of these Dominicans are very patriotic, and would indeed do finely if they were not divided into hostile parties by self-seeking agitators. And you may consult many others who keep back the real explanation. There is one cardinal fact which stands forth in the history of Hayti as prominently as slavery does in the train of American events which brought on the brothers' war. It is this: soon after the outbreak of the French revolution the mulattoes were accorded political privileges, and then a little later--it was in 1794--France equalized the negroes of her colonies just freed with the whites in political and civil rights. This made the negroes of Hayti, who were in intelligence and development somewhat below those of the south when the latter were emanc.i.p.ated, full-fledged self-governing republicans. The whites were but few. What of them were not ma.s.sacred at once by the blacks fled for their lives. The history of both the Haytian and the Dominican republic (the latter achieving its independence in 1844) is the same. Their people make a h.e.l.l on earth of the most beautiful and fertile of islands. As slavery was plainly the cause of the southern confederacy, the grant of political power to the mulattoes and negroes not at all qualified to use it is just as plainly the cause and sole author of chronic civil war and anarchy in Hayti and San Domingo.

This enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of semi-barbarians was from the 'prentice hand of a new republic, without any experience in free inst.i.tutions. The English did far better when they emanc.i.p.ated the Jamaica negro by the act of 1833.

They gave him full protection of his liberty, person, and contract and property rights. Five sixths of the 800,000 of its present population are colored people or blacks. These--to quote the Encyclopedia Americana--"have no share in the government whatever." It further says: "The Jamaica negroes are fairly good laborers when well fed; the menial work of the island is performed by them, and they are regarded as cheerful, honest, and respectful servants."

This happy condition of quiet and content is not due to the fact that the railroads prevent settlement of the negroes in separate neighboring communities to quarrel and fight with one another; but it is because the English never allowed them to get the taste of blood as the French permitted to their brothers in Hayti; they have not been incited by unseasonable political power to license and riot.

The negroes of Jamaica are evidently bettering in condition slowly. They need only enough of Booker Was.h.i.+ngtons to rise much faster. I beg attention to this comparison of Jamaica and Hayti, made by a well-informed negro, a native of the former, who lived there until some nine years ago, and who has lately lived several years in Hayti:[156]

"They [the negroes of Jamaica] aim at rising, but many make the mistake of not rising, _in_ but _out_ of labor: the most intelligent flock to the professions, civil service, &c. Few turn their steps to what is for the real upbuilding of the country, agriculture, that for which it is best adapted.

"The people of Hayti and San Domingo are of a political turn of mind, and sacrifice everything for politics, or are made to do so. That island produces as fine coffee and cocoa as can be found anywhere, but the most intelligent keep out and deprive these crops of scientific cultivation."

The negroes of Hayti and San Domingo spurred by their politics into perpetual fighting and bloodshed; the negroes of Jamaica peaceful and ripe for industrial training, which it seems the English have resolved to give them--if Booker Was.h.i.+ngton had to choose one of the two islands for his future activity, do you not know that he would decide he could do great things in Jamaica and nothing in the other?

The thirteenth amendment emanc.i.p.ated the slaves instantly and not gradually, the fourteenth made them complete citizens of the United States and of the particular State wherein they reside, and the fifteenth practically conferred unlimited suffrage upon them. The Hayti, and not the Jamaica, precedent was followed. The brothers that had conquered were blind from civil fury: and they had been brought by the root-and-branch abolitionists into full persuasion that the southern negroes were ready for and ent.i.tled to these high privileges. By the amendments they confidently tried to railroad the African slave in one instant of time up the long steep to the topmost Caucasian who had established liberty and self-government over a continent, and made it perpetual. We pray that they be forgiven, for they knew not what they were doing. Had the white population of the south been at the time as disproportionate to the black as it was in Hayti in 1794, it would also have been ma.s.sacred. But the section was full of late confederate soldiers. When the fates had decided against the dear cause for which they had fought for four years they accepted peace in good faith. Now their conquerors turned loose a horde of black plunderers to despoil the little that war had left. When I read Professor Brown's inability to say whether the work of the Ku-Klux was justifiable or not,[157] I thought of Christ's asking if it was right to do good on the sabbath day.

The lesson to be learned here is that while it is now too late to make the thirteenth amendment what it ought to have been, and there is perhaps no need to alter the fourteenth, yet there must be abrogation of the fifteenth as to the great ma.s.s of southern negroes. In fact this has really come already through the white primary. Booker Was.h.i.+ngton is a great, a decisive authority on this question. He counsels the negroes to eschew politics. This is wise. It is the solid interest of the negro ma.s.ses that they accept the inevitable; just as the south gave up slavery when we could hold on to it no longer.

4. The southern negroes have split into what I shall roughly distinguish as an upper and a lower cla.s.s. The former includes property owners and such as are in higher occupations, trades, and professions. I do not believe that the entire cla.s.s contains three per cent, but I shall take it to be five per cent of the whole negroes in the section. Exact accuracy here is not important. It needs only to be remembered that the lower cla.s.s outnumbers the other many times over. They are moving in different directions. The dominant inclination of the upper cla.s.s is towards incorporation as citizens, exercising all the rights of the white. The dominant inclination of the lower cla.s.s is towards segregation in their own circles. A true representative of the former would always travel in a white railroad car, while a true representative of the other is perfectly content with the shabbiest Jim Crow, if the whites be kept out of it.

Thousands in the south never think of any negroes but those of the lower, thousands in the north never think of any but those in the upper cla.s.s.

The lower cla.s.s subsists mainly upon agricultural, domestic, and day labor. There is a rural and urban section of each one of the two. The rural section of the upper cla.s.s has little promise of permanence and growth, but its urban section seems to have securer foothold. For a while this urban section will probably increase and rise in condition--both slowly. This upper cla.s.s is now steadily sending some of its members from country and town, to settle in the north. As I read the signs its destiny is ultimate dispersion over the entire country and gradual disappearance.

The lower cla.s.s settles downwards steadily. The outlook for it is gloomy in the extreme.

5. Somewhere about 1890--which year we may regard as approximately beginning the manufacturing era of the South--many whites in the section had broken with the old ways and methods and resolved to subst.i.tute their own for negro labor as far as possible. These awakened men and women multiply. They are pus.h.i.+ng the lower cla.s.s out of all rural labor, and both cla.s.ses out of agriculture; and they are also pus.h.i.+ng some of the upper cla.s.s out of the trades and more important occupations in both town and country. Evidently the powers have decreed that the labor cla.s.s of the south shall be white and h.o.m.ogeneous with that of the north. These powers who delivered the white laborers of the west from the Chinese will also deliver the white laborers of the south from the negroes.

6. There is soon to be a New Industrial South, in which the most advanced machinery and laborers of the very highest skill are to be chief factors.

A little later there is to be a still more important New Agricultural South. In this, the empirical restorative methods of the Chinese, which Liebig, in his day, showed to be ahead of the world, must be far surpa.s.sed. Economy of the enormous ma.s.s of fertile elements now was.h.i.+ng into the sea; adequate exploitation of the nitrogen of the air and of all accessible mineral elements needed; scientific dairy industry, stock rearing, fruit culture, and all related branches; farmers of the most efficient training, and laborers whose deft hands are the proper instruments of the strongest brains--all these must combine to give the south that perfect intensive culture which she will add to her blessings of climate and soil in order to supply the fast growing demand of all the world outside for her especial products. Further, as everything now seems to indicate, the southern yield of the more important minerals and metals will lead that of the entire country. Further again, the bulk of transcontinental railroad traffic must be across the south on snow-free routes, and the upbuilding which in time will follow from this is as yet incalculable. And when the inter-ocean ca.n.a.l connects us with the Pacific trade--what new impetus will this give to our development! What needs and opportunities there will then be for skilled labor, for inventive talent, for managerial ability, for every element of a most highly organized community of unwontedly many diversified prospecting interests. The demand will be for a vast population of the very best strain and breed, knowing the best methods of physical, moral, and self-subsisting education of their children, out of whom will come the best of all workers and producers. To attempt to do the required tasks of the new south of the near future and hold our own against the compet.i.tion of the world--to try to do these with negro laborers, negro farmers, negro producers, negro employers, would be like subst.i.tuting the ox-wagon for the present railroad freight train. Nay, it would be more like one with a wooden leg, and a millstone around his neck, offering to run against a trained racer.

The negro laborer, farmer, manufacturer, and contractor show more clearly every day that they are hopelessly outcla.s.sed in the struggle with white compet.i.tors. As a body where they now are they are becoming useless and an incubus. They will soon be still more in the way, and a more serious hindrance to southern development. They keep back the immigration which is especially called for. That is the immigration of northern and European farmers, producers, and manufacturers of all kinds to teach us their advanced methods, and the most skilled labor in every department to stimulate with example our native white labor to its highest accomplishment. The northern people would come south very largely if there were no negroes here. Their desire to come increases steadily, and so does our desire to have them come. The whites of both sections naturally co-operate more and more earnestly to effect their joint wishes. The disinclination of the United States supreme court to overturn the recent anti-negro amendments of the const.i.tutions of southern States, and the palpably growing favor showed these amendments at the north are very significant signs that the south is to be made more to the liking of northern settlers.

Since the last sentence was written that court has ruled it to be a crime, punishable severely, to hold one to the performance of a contract to pay his debt by laboring for you.[158] The average negro has no resource but credit on the faith of such a contract. So soon as it becomes generally known that he cannot be lawfully held to its performance, the credit will be denied. As has been suggested to me by an observant and far-seeing man, the decision overturns the main pillar of the negro's subsistence. It will powerfully favor northern immigration, as well as the subst.i.tution of white for black labor--that is, if it is vigorously enforced.

7. I believe that the two races together, in the same community as they are now in the south, are oil and water. Meditate the course and portent of these facts. Immediately upon emanc.i.p.ation the negroes set up their own churches and schools; they manifested approval of the separate pa.s.senger car for themselves, politely hinting in season that the whites ought to be kept out of it; and they influenced the planter to remove their cabins out of sight and hearing of the Big House. They showed a great disinclination, the men to do agricultural work by the year for standing wages, the women to hire as house servants. It was some while before the whites really recognized this drift of the negro towards segregation, when many of them--especially the wives and mothers--gave the rein to much unreasonable resentment. Now, if you but know how to look, you will find everywhere the proofs of deepening antagonism. The black driver will not see even a white lady--not to mention a man--on the crossing, but he will always see a negro of either s.e.x. The face of the white inconveniently stepping aside flushes with momentary anger. If your colored servant tells you there is a lady at the door you may know it is a negro woman; he never calls a "white 'oman" a lady. A negro woman is p.r.o.ne to make the most prominent white lady give the street. In Atlanta, a negro man or a white boy cannot safely go at night the former through the factory white settlement, the latter through Summer Hill, a negro residence quarter. I have been informed that where the mill operatives of Anderson, South Carolina, have their cottages, there is conspicuously posted, "n.i.g.g.e.r, don't let the sun go down on you here." I hear that the same is true of certain places in the Texas Panhandle; also that a negro settlement in the Indian territory displays a similar warning to the white man.[159] Parties of black and white children meeting on unfrequented streets of Atlanta nearly always exchange opprobrious language, often throw stones at one another, and sometimes fight--a proof so significant that, whenever I see it, it always makes me serious. The most decided change from old times that I note is that white society everywhere proscribes mixed s.e.xual intercourse and the procreation of mulattoes with rapidly increasing severity. The advocate of mixed marriages is more and more regarded as a fiend. The white woman seized by a negro man--how gladly would she change place with the victim of the torturing savage or of the tiger that would mangle and eat her alive! This menace is everywhere, and naturally it is magnified by excited imagination. It increases in fact. The trial of negroes for capital offences was given the superior court of Georgia in 1850. From then until the end of the brothers' war but two cases of rape of white women by negroes are in the supreme court reports;[160] and I never heard of but two other cases occurring in that time. But there have been many since. It steadily becomes more frequent. Women more and more dread to be left alone. And now there is hardly a man in the Black Belt who, when he is to be a night away from wife, daughters, mother, and sisters, without help at call, does not have uncomfortable thoughts of the sooty desecrator. The increasing effect of these multiplying outrages and the increasing horror which they cause is proved by a fact which ought to receive more intelligent recognition from everybody. This fact is that lynching of a negro for rape, and lately for other crimes of violence against whites, whether in the south or in the north, seems to be every time marked with a greater outburst of popular fury. The public grows more decidedly anti-negro. They give as little heed to the appeals of the papers in these matters as they do to the editorials always advocating the projects of the machine and corporations. The mob sweeps aside the military. The military will not load its rifles. If they were loaded it would probably refuse to fire, or would fire into the air. A few exclaim against lawlessness, while it is plain that the great ma.s.s of the whites do not really condemn in their hearts.

Let us try to understand the real cause of these things. The plainest parallel that occurs to me is the riots and violence excited by attempts to execute the fugitive slave law. The greatest of our southern statesmen misunderstood. What they thought to be lawlessness was in fact the struggle of nature by which the social organism of the United States expelled all cause of dissolution. These hostile demonstrations of the day against negroes are, as they seem to me, far other than acts of unenlightened and ignorant race prejudice, to which some writers ascribe them. They indicate, I think, another struggle of nature to expel a foreign and death-breeding substance out of the American body politic; they are each the protest of the self-preserving instincts against keeping the negro with us to counteract our progress, to debase our politics, to corrupt our blood, to injure us more than even successful secession could have done. How aptly has Matthew Arnold said, "O man, how true are thine instincts, how overhasty thine interpretation of them!"

8. Plainly the disparity of the negro in the deadly struggle with the white over every resource of subsistence fast becomes greater; plainly does his stay in the south more and more injure both sections; plainly under the effects of hard life, growing idleness and growing crime, increasing ravages of disease, and the naturally engendered feeling of helplessness, the average negro in the lower cla.s.s gravitates downwards; plainly this negro ought to have, in a sphere of his own, opportunity and stimulus for self-recovery and progress. Plainly whites and negroes ought to be separated. The latter seriously clog the evolution of the desired southern labor cla.s.s, and the southern whites completely exclude the negroes from public life. The two are really each different communities in juxtaposition, but not united. You may think of them as plants, one of which has a diseased root, and the other has its top kept in the dark and out of the sun. Both these evils result unavoidably from keeping the two races together. So let us give the negro his own State in our union. That will allow the root of the one plant to get well, and it will give the top of the other permanently to the sun.

We are rich enough and have land enough to give the negro this State, which is his due from us. His especial need is to exercise political and civil privileges, in his own community, all the way up from town meeting to congress.

If something like this is not done it is extremely probable that the great ma.s.s of the lower cla.s.s of the negroes will die out. Let not this crime be committed by the American nation.

9. We should be extremely liberal to the negro in education--in primary, in industrial, and also in the higher. Especially ought we to combine the second with the first, and give it the lead for both races.

10. All the southern states should at once by proper const.i.tutional and legal provisions subst.i.tute judicial for mob lynching.