THE LIBRARY OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 NORTH CAROLINA 
 
 AT CHAPEL HILL 
 
 ENDOWED BY THE 
 
 DIALECTIC AND PHILANTHROPIC 
 
 SOCIETIES 
 
UNIVERSITY OF N.C. AT CHAPEL HILL 
 
 00023483464 
 

 ^^ 
 
 NEGRO QUESTION 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE W. CABLE 
 
 Author of "The Silent South" 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1903 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROUNA 
 
 AT CHAPEL HILL 
 
CorvRiGHT, 1890, by 
 CHARLES SCRIDNER'S SONS. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAOB 
 
 THE NEGRO QUESTION I 
 
 The Question^ 
 
 I. Have Colored AmericaDS in the South the same 
 
 Rights as Americans of Foreign Birth, .... I 
 
 II. C}lor Discrimination, 7 
 
 III. Inconsistencies, l6 
 
 The Answer — 
 
 I. The Social Basis of Slavery still Exists 24 
 
 II. Enfranchisement a Cause of Apprehension, .- . . 33 
 
 III, The Freedmen Loyal to Government 39 
 
 IV. Distinction Between Civil and Social Equality, . 43 
 V. Responsibility of Southern White Men 47 
 
 VI. Material Development in the South, ...... 51 
 
 Jt^ATIONAL AID TO SOUTHERN SCHOOLS, ... 59 
 
 WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO DO? 66 
 
 A SIMPLER SOUTHERN QUESTION, ...... 88 
 
 WHAT MAKES THE COLOR LINE? no 
 
 V 
 
VI CONTENTS. 
 
 FACI 
 
 THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOV- 
 ERNMENT IT* 
 
 I. A First Necessity, n6 
 
 II. Does the Negro Want Pure Government? . . .123 
 
 III. Supposing the Negro Unsuppressed, 128 
 
 IV. The Policy of Pure Government First, .... 133 
 V. The Industrial New South 139 
 
 VI. The Reign of the One- Party Idea .146 
 
 VII. The Inventions of Despair 154 
 
 VIII. A more Excellent Way, 162 
 
NOTE. 
 
 The following pages constitute a con- 
 tinuous development of a single subject. 
 The divisions of the work appear in the 
 form of separate papers only because of 
 the earlier publication of most of them as 
 magazine articles. 
 
 G. W. CABLE. 
 
The Negro Question. 
 
 THE QUESTION. 
 I. 
 
 The matter that is made the subject of these 
 pages is not to-day the most prominent, but it is 
 the gravest, in American affairs. It is one upon 
 which, of late years, as we might say, much 
 inattention has been carefully bestowed. It has 
 become a dreaded question. We are not politic- 
 ally indolent. We are dealing courageously with 
 many serious problems. We admit that no nation 
 has yet so shaken wrong and oppression from 
 its skirts that it may safely and honorably sit 
 down in a state of mercantile and aesthetical 
 pre-occupation. And yet the matter that gives 
 us daily the profoundest unrest goes daily by 
 default. The Nation's bitter experiences with 
 it in years past, the baffling complications that 
 men more cunning than wise have woven around 
 it, its proneness to swallow up all other questions 
 and the eruptions of rancor and strife that attend 
 every least sign of its spontaneous re-opening, 
 
2 THE NEGJiO QUESTION. 
 
 have made it such a weariness and offence to the 
 great majority, and especially to our commercial 
 impatience, that the public mind in large part 
 eagerly accepts the dangerous comfort of post- 
 ponement. 
 
 What is this question? Superficially, it is 
 whethi5i^ a certain seven millions of the people, 
 one-hinth of the whole, dwelling in and natives 
 to the Southern States of the Union, and by law 
 an undifferentiated part of the Nation, have or 
 have not the same full measure of the American 
 citizen's rights that they would have were they 
 entirely of European instead of wholly or partly 
 African descent. The seven millions concerning 
 whom the question is asked, answer as with one 
 voice, that they have not Millions in the North- 
 ern States, and thousands in the Southern, of 
 whites, make the same reply. While other mil- 
 lions of whites, in North and South, respond not 
 so often with a flat contradiction as with a decla- 
 ration far more disconcerting. For the " South- 
 erner " speaks truly when he retorts that nowhere 
 in the entire Union, either North or South, are 
 the disadvantages of being a black, or partly 
 black, man confined entirely to the relations of 
 domestic life and private society; but that in 
 every part there is a portion/at least, of the com- 
 munity that does not claim for, or even willingly 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION, 3 
 
 yield to, the negro the whole calendar of Amer- 
 ican rights in the same far-reaching amplitude 
 and sacredness that they do for, or to, the white 
 man. The Southern white man points to thou- 
 sands of Northern and Western factories, count- 
 ing-rooms, schools, hotels, churches and guilds, 
 and these attest the truth of his countercharge. 
 Nowhere in the United States is there a whole 
 community from which the black man, after his 
 physical, mental and moral character havQ been 
 duly weighed, if they be weighed at' all, is not 
 liable to suffer an unexplained discount for mere 
 color and race, which he would have to suffer 
 publicly in no other country of the enlightened 
 world. Thi? being the fact, then, in varying de- 
 grees according to locality, what does it prove? 
 Only that this cannot be the real point of issue 
 between North and South, and that this super- 
 ficial definition is not the true one. 
 
 Putting aside mere differences of degree, the 
 question is not. Are these things so? but, Ought 
 they so to be? To this a large fnajority in the 
 Northern States from all clasps, with a small 
 minority of the Southern whites, also from all 
 ranks of life, and the whole seven million blacks, 
 irrespective of party leanings, answer No, On 
 the other hand, a large majority of the whites in 
 the Southern States — large as to the white popu- 
 
4 THE NEORO QUESTION. 
 
 lation of those States, but a very small minority 
 in the Nation at large — answer a vehement "Yes; 
 these things should and shall be so." 
 
 But how does this small minority maintain 
 itself? It does so owing to the familiar fact that, 
 although by our scheme of government there is 
 a constant appeal to the majority of the whole 
 people, the same scheme provides, also, for the 
 defence of local interests against rash actions of 
 national majorities by a parallel counter-appeal 
 (constantly through its Senate and at times in 
 other ways) to the majority, not of the people 
 en masse, but of the States in their corporate 
 capacity. Now a very large minority in the 
 Northern States, whose own private declara- 
 tion would be against a difference between white 
 men's rights and other men's rights, nevertheless 
 refuse now, as they refused before the Civil War, 
 to answer with a plain yes or no, but maintain, 
 with the Southern white-rule party, thstwhether 
 these things ought so to be or not is a question that 
 every State must be allowed to answer for, and to, 
 itself alone; thus so altering the voice of the 
 Nation, when it speaks by States, as virtually to 
 nullify that negative answer which would be 
 given by a majority of the whole people. In the 
 Civil Rights bill the verdict of the States was 
 once given against all race discrimination in all 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 5 
 
 matters of public rights whatsoever, and for 
 confining it within that true domain — of private 
 choice — to which the judgment of other Chris- 
 tian nations consigns it. But the Civil Rights 
 bill, never practically effective in the communi- 
 ties whose upper ranks were hostile to it, has at 
 last perished in the inner citadel of our govern- 
 ment's strong conservatism, the national Supreme 
 Court, and the Senate majority that passed the 
 bill was long ago lost by revolutions in the 
 Southern States. Thus, by a fundamental pro- 
 vision in the National Government, intended for 
 the very purpose of protecting the. weak from 
 the strong, a small national minority has for 
 twenty-five years been enabled to withstand the 
 pressure of an immense majority. 
 
 Whether this is by a right or wrong use of the 
 provision is part of the open question. The weak 
 are protected from the strong, but the still weaker 
 are delivered into the hands of the strong. Seven 
 millions of the Nation, mostlypoor, ignorant and 
 degraded, are left for the definition and enjoyment 
 of rights, worth more than safety or property, to 
 the judgment of some ten other millions of un- 
 questioned intelligence and virtue, but whose 
 intelligence and virtue were not materially less 
 when, with a courage and prowess never sur- 
 passed, they drenched their own land with their 
 
6 THE NEGRO QUESTION. 
 
 own blood to keep these darker millions in 
 slavery. However, be it a use or an abuse of the 
 Nation's scheme of order; be it right or wrong ; 
 this is politically the stronghold of the conserva- 
 tive party in the Southern States ; and it is made 
 stronger still, steel-clad and turreted, as it were, 
 with the tremendous advantage of the status quo 
 — that established order of things which, good 
 or bad, until it becomes intolerable to themselves, 
 men will never attack with an energy equal to 
 that with which it is defended. 
 
 But political strength is little by itself The 
 military maxim, that no defences are strong with- 
 out force enough in them to occupy their line, 
 is true of civil affairs. Entrenchment in the letter 
 of a constitution avails little with the people at 
 large on either side of a question, unless the line 
 of that entrenchment is occupied by a living 
 conviction of being in the right. The most 
 ultra-Southern position on th«? negro question 
 has an element of strength close akin to this. 
 To be right is the only real necessity ; but where 
 is the community that will not make and defend 
 with treasure and blood the assumption that what 
 is necessary is right? "Southerners," in the 
 political sense of the term, may sometimes lack 
 a clear, firm-founded belifef that they are right ; 
 they may have no more than a restless confidence 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. / 
 
 that others are as wrong as they ; but they have 
 at least a profound conviction that they are 
 moved by an imminent, unremitting, imperative 
 necessity. Not that this is all; hundreds of 
 thousands of them, incapacitated b/. this very 
 conviction from falling into sympathy with the 
 best modern thought, have been taught, and are 
 learning and teaching, not only on the hustings, 
 but in school, in college, at the fireside, through 
 the daily press, in the social circle and in church, 
 that in their attitude on the negro question they 
 are legally, morally and entirely right. 
 
 II. 
 
 Now, specifically, what are these things that 
 the majority of a free nation says ought not to 
 be, while a sectional majority triumphantly main- 
 tains they must, will, ought to and shall be? 
 Give an example of an actual grievance. One 
 commonly esteemed the very least on the list is 
 this : Suppose a man, his wife and their child, 
 decent in person, dress and deportment, but 
 visibly of African or mixed blood, to take pass- 
 age on a railway train from some city of the 
 Eastern States, as Boston, or of the Western, as 
 Chicago. They will be thrown publicly into 
 company with many others, for an ordinary 
 American railway passenger coach seats fifty per- 
 
8 THE NEGRO QUESTION. 
 
 sons, and a sleeping-car accommodates twenty- 
 five ; and they will receive the same treatment 
 from railway employes and passengers as if, 
 being otherwise just what they are, they were of 
 pure European descent. Only they will be much 
 less likely than white persons to seek, or be 
 offered, new acquaintanceships. Arriving in New 
 York, Philadelphia, or any other Northern city, 
 they will easily find accommodations in some 
 hotel of such grade as they would be likely to 
 choose if, exactly as they are, they were white. 
 They may chance upon a house that will refuse, 
 on account of their color, to receive them ; but 
 such action, if made known, will be likely to 
 receive a wide public reprobation, and scant ap- 
 plause even -from the press of the Southern 
 States. If the travelers choose to continue their 
 journey through the night, they will be ffee to 
 hire and occupy berths in a sleeping-car, and to 
 use all its accessories— basins, towels, pillows, 
 etc. — without the least chance of molestation in 
 act or speech from any one of the passengers or 
 employes, let such passengers or employes be 
 from any State of the Union, Northern or 
 Southern. 
 
 But, on reaching the Southern States, the three 
 travelers will find themselves at every turn under 
 special and offensive restrictions, laid upon them 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. g 
 
 not for any demerit of person, dress or manners, 
 but solely and avowedly on account of the 
 African tincture in their blood, however slight 
 that may be. They may still be enjoying the 
 comforts of the sleeping-car, by virtue of the 
 ticket bought in a Northern State and not yet fully 
 redeemed. But they will find that while in one 
 Southern State they may still ride in an ordinary 
 first-class railway coach without hindrance, in 
 another they will find themselves turned away 
 from the door of one coach and required to limit 
 themselves to another, equal, it may be, to the 
 first in appointments, and inferior only in the 
 social rank of its occupants. They may protest 
 that in America there are no public distinctions 
 of social rank ; but this will avail tjaem nothing. 
 They may object that the passengers in the car 
 from which they are excluded are not of one, but 
 palpably of many and widely different social 
 ranks, and that in the car to which they are 
 assigned are people not of their grade only but 
 of all sorts ; they will be told with great plain- 
 ness that there is but one kind of negro. They 
 will be told that they are assigned equal but sepa- 
 rate accommodation because the presence of a 
 person of wholly, or partly, African blood in the 
 same railway car on terms of social equality with 
 the white passengers is to those white passengers 
 
lO THE NESRO QUESTION. 
 
 an intolerable oflfence ; and if the husband and 
 father replies that it is itself the height of vul- 
 garity to raise the question of private social rank 
 among strangers in railway cars, he will be for- 
 tunate if he is only thrust without more ado into 
 the "colored car," and not kicked and beaten by 
 two or three white men whose superior gentility 
 has been insulted, and he and his wife and child 
 put off at the next station to appeal in vain to 
 the courts. For in court he will find that rail- 
 way companies are even required by the laws of 
 the State to maintain this ignominious separation 
 of all who betray an African tincture, refined or 
 unrefined, clean or unclean, from the presence 
 of the white passengers in the first-class cars, be 
 those passengers ever so promiscuous a throng. 
 Such is an example of one of the least griev- 
 ances of the colored man under the present re- 
 gime in the Southern States; and so dull isthe 
 common perception of wrongs committed at a 
 distance, that hundreds of thousands of intelli- 
 gent, generous, sensitive people in the Northern 
 States are daily confessing their inability to see 
 any serious hardship in such a case, if only the 
 "colored car" be really equal in its appointments 
 to the one in which only white people of every 
 sort are admitted; as if a permanent ignominious 
 distinction on account of ancestry, made in pub- 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 1 1 
 
 lie, by strangers and in the enjoyment of com- 
 mon public rights were not an insult or dn injury 
 unless joined to some bodily discomfort. 
 
 Let it be plainly understood that though at least 
 scores of thousands are intelligent and genteel, 
 yet the vast majority of colored people in the 
 United States are neither refined in mind nor very 
 decent in person. Their race has never had "a 
 white man's chance." In America it has been 
 under the iron yoke of a slavery that allowed no 
 distinction of worth to cross race lines ; and in 
 Africa it has had to contend for the mastery of 
 wild nature on a continent so unconquerable 
 that for thousands of years the white race has 
 striven in vain to subdue it, and is only now at 
 last strong enough to pierce it, enriched, en- 
 lightened and equipped by the long conquest 
 of two others less impregnable. For all that is 
 known the black is "an inferior race," though 
 how, or how permanently inferior, remains un- 
 proved. But the core of the colored man's 
 grievance is that the individual, in matters of 
 right that do not justly go by race, is treated, 
 whether man or child, without regard to person, 
 dress, behavior, character or aspirations, in public 
 and by law, as though the African tincture, much 
 or little, were- itself stupidity, squalor and vice. 
 But let us see whether the grievance grows. 
 
12 THE NEGRO QUESTION. 
 
 On passing into a third Southern State, the 
 three travelers, though still holders of first-class 
 tickets, will be required to confine themselves to 
 the so-called second-class car, a place never 
 much better than a dram shop. When the 
 train stops for meals, and the passengers, men, 
 women and children, the rough, the polished, all 
 throng into one common eating-room to receive 
 a common fare and attention, those three must 
 eat in the kitchen or go hungry. Nor can they 
 even await the coming of a train, in some rail- 
 way stations, except in a separate "colored 
 room." If they tarry in some Southern city 
 they will encounter the most harassing and 
 whimsical treatment of their most ordinary pub- 
 lic rights as American citizens. They may ride 
 in any street car, however crowded, seated be- 
 side, or even crammed in among, white men or 
 women of any, or every, station of life ; but at 
 the platform of the railway train, or at the 
 threshold of any theatre, or concert, or lecture 
 hall, they will be directed to the most undesir- 
 able part of the house, and compelled to take 
 that or nothing. They will find that the word 
 "public" rarely means public to them; that 
 they may not even draw books from the public 
 libraries or use their reading rooms. 
 
 Should' the harried and exasperated man be 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 1 3 
 
 SO fierce or indiscreet as to quarrel with, and 
 strike, some white man, he will stand several 
 chances to a white man's one of being killed on 
 the spot. If neither killed nor half-killed, but 
 brought into court, he will have ninety-nine 
 chances in a hundred of confronting a jury from 
 which, either by, or else in spite of, legal pro- 
 vision, men of African tincture have been wholly 
 or almost wholly excluded. If sent to prison he 
 must come under a penal system which the re- 
 port of the National Commissioner of Prisons 
 officially pronounces " a blot upon civilization." 
 He will find the population of the State prisons 
 often nine-tenths colored, divided into chain- 
 gangs, farmed out to private hands, even sub- 
 leased, and worked in the mines, quarries, in 
 railway construction and on turnpikes, under 
 cordons of Winchester rifles; veritable quarry 
 slaves. He will find most of the few white con- 
 victs under this system suffering the same out- 
 rages ; but he will also find that the system itself 
 disappears wherever this general attitude toward 
 the black race disappears, and that where it and 
 its outrages continue, the race line in prison is 
 obliterated only when the criminal becomes a 
 negotiable commodity and it costs the lessee 
 money to maintain the absurd distinction. He 
 would find the number of colored men within 
 
14 THE NEGRO QUESTION, 
 
 those deadly cordons out of all proportion to 
 the colored population outside, as compared with 
 the percentages of blacks in and out of prison in 
 States not under this regime. There are State 
 prisons in which he would find the colored con- 
 victs serving sentences whose average is nearly 
 twice that of the white convicts in the same 
 places for the same crimes. In the same or 
 other prisons he would find colored youths 
 and boys by scores, almost by hundreds, con- 
 sorting with older criminals, and under sentences 
 of seven, ten, twenty years, while the State Leg- 
 islatures vote down year after year the efforts of 
 a few courageous and humane men either to 
 establish reformatories for colored youth, 6x to 
 introduce the element of reform into their so- 
 called penitentiaries. 
 
 But suppose he commits no offence against 
 person or property ; he will make another list of 
 discoveries. He will find that no select school, 
 under "Southern" auspices, will receive his 
 child. That if he sends the child to a public 
 school, it must be, as required by law, to a school 
 exclusively for colored children, even if his child 
 is seven times more white than colored. Though 
 his child be gentle, well-behaved, cleanly and 
 decorously dressed, and the colored school so 
 situated as to be naturally and properly the 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 1 5 
 
 choice of the veriest riff-raff of the school popu- 
 lation, he will have no more liberty than before ; 
 he will be told again, " We know but one kind 
 of negro." The child's father and mother may 
 themselves be professional instructors ; but how- 
 ever highly trained ; of whatever reputation for 
 moral and religious character ; however talented 
 as teachers or disciplinarians; holding the di- 
 ploma of whatever college or university, Welles- 
 ley, Vassar, Yale, Cornell ; and of whatever age 
 or experience, they will find themselves shut out 
 by law from becoming teachers in any public 
 school for white children, whether belonging to, 
 and filled from, the " best neighborhood," or in, 
 and for, the lowest quarter of alleys and shanties. 
 They will presently learn that in many hundreds 
 of Southern school-districts where the popula- 
 tions are too sparse and poor to admit of sepa- 
 rate schools for the two races, the children of 
 both are being brought up in ignorance of the 
 very alphabet rather than let them enjoy a com- 
 mon public right under a common root They 
 will find that this separation is not really based 
 on any incapacity of children to distinguish be- 
 tween public and private social relations; but 
 that the same separation is enforced among 
 adults ; and that while ^\qty Southern State is 
 
l6 THE NEGRO QUESTION. 
 
 lamenting its inability to make anything like an 
 adequate outlay for public education, and hun- 
 dreds of thousands of colored children are grow- 
 ing up in absolute illiteracy largely for lack of 
 teachers and school-houses, an expensive isola- 
 tion of race from race is kept up even in the 
 normal schools and teachers' institutes. Even 
 in the house of worship and the divinity school 
 they would find themselves pursued by the same 
 invidious distinctions and separations that had 
 followed them at every step, and would follow 
 and attend them still to, and in, the very alms- 
 house and insane asylum. 
 
 III. 
 
 And then they would make one more discov- 
 ery. They would find that not only were they 
 victims of bolder infractions of the most obvious 
 common rights of humanity than are offered to 
 any peoplp elsewhere in Christendom, save only 
 the Chinaman in the far West, but that to make 
 the oppression more exasperating still, there is 
 not a single feature of it in any one State, though 
 justifiable on the plea of stern necessity, that 
 does not stand condemned by its absence, under 
 the same or yet more pronounced conditions, in 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION, 1/ 
 
 some other State. Sometimes even one part of 
 a State will utterly stultify the attitude held in 
 another part. In Virginia or South Carolina a 
 colored person of decent appearance or beha- 
 vior may sit in any first-class railway car, but 
 in Georgia the law forbids it, and in Kentucky 
 the law leaves him to the caprice of railway man- 
 agements, some of which accord and others with- 
 hold the right. In some States he is allowed in 
 the jury box, in some he is kept out by the letter 
 of statutes, and in some by evasion of tliem ; 
 while in Tennessee some counties admit him to 
 jury duty and others exclude him from it. In 
 one or two Southern cities, the teachers in col- 
 ored public schools must be white. In certain 
 others they must be colored ; and in still others 
 they may be either. In Louisiana certain rail- 
 way trains and steamboats run side by side, 
 within a mile of one another, where in the trains 
 a negro or mulatto may sit where he will, and on 
 the boats he must confine himself to a separate 
 quarter called the " freedman's bureau." 
 
 The Civil Rights bill was fought for years and 
 finally destroyed, with the plea that it infringed 
 the right of common carriers and entertainers to 
 use their own best judgment in distributing their 
 passengers and guests with an equitable consid- 
 eration for the comfort of all. In fact, it only 
 
I8 THE NEGRO QUESTION. 
 
 forbade distributions that, so far from consulting 
 the common comfort, humor the demand of one 
 crudely self-assorted private social class for an 
 invariable, ignominious isolation or exclusion 
 of another. Yet the same States and persons 
 who so effectually made this plea, either allow 
 and encourage its use as a cover for this tyran- 
 nous inequity, or else themselves ignore their 
 own plea, usurp the judgment of common car- 
 riers and entertainers, and force them by law 
 to make this race distribution, whether they deem 
 it best or not. 
 
 And yet again, all over the South there are 
 scattered colleges, academies and tributary gram- 
 mar schools, established and maintained at the 
 expense of individuals and societies in the North- 
 ern States, for the education, at low rates of tui- 
 tion and living, of the aspiring poor, without 
 hindrance as to race or sex. For more than 
 twenty years these establishments have flourished 
 and been a boon to the African-American, as well 
 as to the almost equally noted " poor whites " of 
 the Southern mountain regions, sandhills and 
 "pauper counties," and through both (hese classes 
 to the ultra-Southern white man of the towns and 
 plantations — a boon the national value of which 
 neither he nor one in a thousand of its hundreds 
 of thpusands of Northern supporters has an ade- 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. I9 
 
 quate conception, else these establishments would 
 receive seven times their present pecuniary sup- 
 port. These institutions have graduated some 
 hundreds of colored students as physicians and 
 lawyers. At one time lately they had more than 
 eight hundred divinity students, nearly all of 
 them colored. Their pupils of all grades aggre- 
 gate over seventeen thousand, and the sixteen 
 thousand colored teachers in the public schools 
 of the South have come almost entirely from 
 them. But now in these institutions there is a 
 complete ignoring of those race distinctions in 
 the enjoyment of common public rights so relig- 
 iously enforced on every side beyond their bor- 
 ders ; and yet none of those unnamable disasters 
 have come to or from them which the advocates 
 of these onerous public distinctions and separa- 
 tions predict and dread. On scores of Southern 
 hilltops these schools stand out almost totally 
 without companions or competitors in their pecu- 
 liar field, so many refutations, visible and com- 
 plete, of the idea that any interest requires the' 
 colored American citizen to be limited in any of 
 the civil rights that would be his withotft ques- 
 tion if the same man were white. Virtually, the 
 whole guild of educators in the Southern States, 
 from once regarding these institutions with un- 
 qualified condemnation and enmity, are now 
 
20 THE NEGltO QUESTION. 
 
 becoming their friends and, in some notable 
 cases, their converts. So widely have the larger 
 colleges demonstrated their unique beneficence 
 that in some cases Southern State Governments, 
 actively hostile to the privileges of civil liberty 
 they teach and apply, are making small annual ap- 
 propriations in contribution toward their support 
 
 So bristling with inconsistencies, good and 
 bad, would our three travelers find this( tyran- 
 nous and utterly unrepublican regime.") Nowhere 
 else in enlightened lands and in this day do so 
 many millions see their own fellow-citizens so 
 play football with their simplest public rights ; for 
 the larger part of the Southern white people do 
 with these laws of their own making what they 
 please, keeping or breaking them as convenient. 
 
 But their discoveries would still go on. They 
 would hear these oppressions justified by South- 
 em white people of the highest standing, and 
 '■ — more's the shame — by Northern tourists in 
 the South, on the ground that the people upon 
 whom they are laid are a dull, vicious, unclean 
 race, contact with which would be physically, 
 intellectually and morally offensive and mis- 
 chievous to a higher race. (And when they 
 might ask why the lines of limited rights are not 
 drawn around the conspicuously dull, vicious 
 and unclean of both races for the protection of 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 21 
 
 the opposite sort in both, they would come face 
 to face upon the amazing assumption that the 
 lowest white man is somehow a little too good 
 for even so much contact with the highest black 
 as may be necessary for a common enjoyment of 
 public rights ;Jand, therefore, that no excellence, 
 moral, mental or physical, inborn or attained, 
 can buy for a " man of color " from these sepa- 
 rationists any distinction between the restrictions 
 of his civil liberty and those of the stupidest 
 and squalidest of his race, or bring him one step 
 nearer to the enjoyment of the rights of a white 
 man ; or, if at all, then only as a matter of the 
 white man's voluntary condescension and with 
 the right disguised as a personal privilege. They 
 would find that the race line is not a line of 
 physical, moral or intellectual excellence at all. 
 Stranger yet, they would learn that no propor- 
 tion of white men's blood in their own veins 
 unless it washes out the very memory of their 
 African tincture, can get them abatement of those 
 deprivations decreed for a dull, vicious and un- 
 clean race, but that — men, women and children 
 alike — hundreds and thousands of mixed race 
 are thus daily and publicly punished by their 
 brothers for the sins of their fathers. They 
 would find the race line not a race line at all. 
 They would find that the mere contact of race 
 
22 THE NEGRO QUESTION. 
 
 with race is not the matter objected to, but only 
 any and every sort of contact on an equal foot- 
 ing. They would find that what no money, no 
 fame, no personal excellence and no fractional 
 preponderance of European blood can buy, can 
 nevertheless be bought instantly and without 
 one of these things by the simple surrender of 
 the attitude of public equality. They would 
 find that the entire essence of the offence, any 
 and everywhere where the race line is insisted 
 on, is the apparition of the colored man or 
 woman as his or her own master ; that master- 
 hood is all that all this tyranny is intended to pre- 
 serve, and that the moment the relation of master 
 and servant is visibly established between race 
 and race there is the hush of peace. 
 
 "What is that negro — what is that mulat- 
 tress — doing in here ?" asks one private indi- 
 vidual of another in some public place, and the 
 other replies : — 
 
 "That's nothing; he is the servant of that 
 white man just behind him ; she is the nurse of 
 those children in front of her." 
 
 " Oh, all right" And the " cordial relation" 
 is restored. Such conversation, or equivalent 
 soliloquy, occurs in the South a hundred times 
 a day. 
 
 The surrender of this one point by the colored 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 23 
 
 man or woman buys more than peace — it buys 
 amity ; an amity clouded only by a slight but 
 distinct and constant air and tone of command 
 on the one part, a very gross and imperfect 
 attitude of deference on the other, and the per- 
 petual unrest that always accompanies forcible 
 possession of anything. But since no people 
 ever compelled another to pay too much for 
 peace without somehow paying too much for it 
 themselves, the master-caste tolerates, with un- 
 surpassed supineness and unconsciousness, a 
 more indolent, inefficient, slovenly, unclean, 
 untrustworthy, ill-mannered, noisy, disrespect- 
 ful, disputatious, and yet servile domestic and 
 public menial service than is tolerated by any 
 other enlightened people. Such is but one of 
 the smallest of many payments which an intel- 
 ligent and refined community has to make for 
 maintaining the lines of master and servant-hood 
 on caste instead of on individual ambition and 
 capacity, and for the forcible equalization of mil- 
 lions of unequal individuals under one common 
 public disdain. Other and greater payments and 
 losses there are, moral, political, industrial, com- 
 mercial, as we shall see when we turn, as now 
 we must, to the other half of this task, and 
 answer the two impatient questions that jostle 
 each other for precedence as they spring from 
 
24 THE NEGHO question. 
 
 this still incomplete statement of the condition 
 of affairs. 
 
 The two questions are these : If the case is so 
 plain, then, in the first place, how can the mil- 
 lions of intelligent and virtuous white people of 
 the South make such a political, not to say such 
 a moral, mistake ? And, in the second place, 
 how can the overwhelming millions of the North, 
 after spending the frightful costs they spent in 
 the war of '61-65, tolerate this emasculation of 
 the American freedom which that war is sup- 
 posed to have secured to all alike ? 
 
 THE ANSWER. 
 I. 
 
 As to the Southern people the answer is that, 
 although the Southern master-class now cordi- 
 ally and unanimously admit the folly of slave- 
 holding, yet the fundamental ?irticle of political 
 faith on which slavery rested has not been dis- 
 placed. As to the people of the North the 
 answer is simpler still : the Union is saved. 
 
 The Northern cause in our civil war was not 
 primarily the abolition of slavery, although 
 many a Northern soldier and captain fought 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION 2$ 
 
 mainly for this and cared for no other issue 
 while this remained. The Southern cause was 
 not merely for disunion, though many a South- 
 ern soldier and captain would never have taken 
 up the sword to defend slave-holding stripped of 
 the disguise of State sovereignty. The Northern 
 cause was preeminently the National unity. 
 Emancipation — the emancipation of the negroes 
 — was not what the North fought for, but only 
 what it fought with. The right to secede was 
 not what the South fought for, but only what it 
 fought with. The great majority of tlje Southern 
 white people loved the Union, and consented to 
 its destruction only when there seemed to be no 
 other way to save slavery ; the great bulk of the 
 North consented to destroy slavery only when 
 there seemed no other way to save the Union. 
 To put in peril the Union on one side and 
 slavery on the other was enough, when nothing 
 else was enough, to drench one of the greatest 
 and happiest lands on earth with the blood of 
 hundreds of thousands of her own children. 
 Now, what thing of supreme value rested on 
 this Union, and what on this slavery, that they 
 should have been defended at such cost ? There 
 rested on, or more truly there underlay, each a 
 fundamental principle, conceived to be absolutely 
 essential to the safety, order, peace, fortune and 
 
26 THE nex;ro question. 
 
 honor of society ; and these two principles were 
 antagonistic. 
 
 They were more than antagonistic ; they were 
 antipodal and irreconcilable. No people that 
 hold either of these ideas as cardinal in their 
 political creed will ever allow the other to be 
 forced upon them from without so long as blood 
 and lives will buy deliverance. Both were 
 brought from the mother country when Amer- 
 ica was originally colonized, and both have their 
 advocates in greater or less number in the North- 
 ern States, in the Southern, and wherever there 
 is any. freedom of thought and speech. 
 
 The common subject of the two is the great 
 lower mass of society. The leading thought of 
 the one is that mass's elevation, of the other its 
 subjugation. The one declares the only perma- 
 nent safety of public society, and its highest de- 
 velopment, to require the constant elevation of 
 the lower, and thus of the whole mass, by the 
 free self-government of all under one common 
 code of equal civil rights. It came from Eng- 
 land, but it was practically, successfully, benefi- 
 cently applied on a national scale first in the 
 United States, and Americans claim the right to 
 call it, and it preeminently, the American idea, 
 promulgated and established, not by Northerners 
 or Southerners, one greatly more than anotherj 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 2/ 
 
 but by the unsectional majority of a whole new 
 Nation born of the idea. The other principle 
 declares public safety and highest development 
 to require the subjugation of the lower tnass 
 under the arbitrary protective supremacy of an 
 untitled but hereditary privileged class, a civil 
 caste. Not, as it is commonly miscalled, an aris- 
 tocracy, for within one race it takes in all ranks 
 of society ; not an aristocracy, for an aristocracy 
 exists, presumably, at least, with the wide con- 
 sent of all classes, and men in any rank of life 
 may have some hope to attain to it by extraor- 
 dinary merit and service ; but a caste ; not the 
 embodiment of a modern European idea, but the 
 resuscitation of an ancient Asiatic one. 
 
 That one of these irreconcilable ideas should 
 by-and-by become all-dominant in the formation 
 of public society in one region, and its opposite 
 in the other region, is due to original differences 
 in the conditions under which the colonies were 
 settled. In the South, the corner-stone of the 
 social structure was made the plantation idea — 
 wide lands, an accomplished few, and their rapid 
 aggrandizement by the fostering oversight and 
 employment of an unskilled many. In the 
 North, it was the yiHage and town idea — the 
 notion of farm and factory, skilled labor, an 
 intelligent many, and ultimate wealth through an 
 
28 THE NEGRO QUESTION: 
 
 assured public tranquillity. Nothing could be 
 more natural than for African slavery, once in- 
 troduced, to flourish and spread under the one 
 idea, and languish and die under the other. It 
 is high time to be done saying that the South 
 retained slavery and the North renounced it 
 merely because to the one it was, and to the 
 other it was not, lucrative. It was inevitable that 
 the most conspicuous feature of one civilization 
 should become the public schoolhouse, and of 
 the other the slave yard. Who could wish to 
 raise the equally idle and offensive question of 
 praise and blame? When Northerners came 
 South by thousands and made their dwelling 
 there, ninety-nine hundredths of them fell into 
 our Southern error up to the eyes, and there is 
 nothing to prove that had the plantation idea, to 
 the exclusion of the village idea, been planted 
 in all the colonies, we should not by this time 
 have had a West Indian civilization from Florida 
 to Oregon. But it was not to be so. Wherever 
 the farm village became the germinal unit of 
 social organization, there was developed in its 
 most comprehensive integrity, that American 
 idea of our Northern and Southern fathers, the 
 representative self-government of the, whole 
 people by the constant free consent of all to .the, 
 frequently reconsidered choice of the majority. : 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 29 
 
 Such a scheme can be safe only when it in- 
 cludes inherently the continual and diligent ele- 
 vation of that lower mass which human society 
 everywhere is constantly precipitating. But 
 slave-holding on any large scale could not make 
 even a show of public safety without the con- 
 tinual and diligent debasement of. its enslaved 
 lower millions. Wherever it prevailed it was 
 bound by the natural necessities of its own ex- 
 istence to undermine and corrode the National 
 scheme. It mistaught the new generations of 
 the white South that the slave-holding fathers of 
 the Republic were approvers and advocates of 
 that sad practice, which by their true histories 
 we know they would gladly have destroyed.' It 
 mistaught us to construe the right of a uniform 
 government of all by fill, not as a common and 
 inalienable right of man, but as a privilege that 
 became a right only by a people's merit, and 
 which our forefathers bought with the blood of 
 the Revolution in i776-'83, and which our slaves 
 did not and should not be allowed to acquire. 
 It mistaught us to seek prosperity in the con- 
 centration instead of the diffusion of wealth, to 
 seek public safety in a state of siege rather than 
 in. a state of peace ; it gave us subjects instead 
 of fellow-citizens, and falsely threatened us with 
 theptter shipwreck of public and private society 
 
30 THE NEGRO QUESTION. 
 
 if we dared accord civil power to the degraded 
 millions to whom we had forbidden patriotism. 
 Thus, it could not help but misteach us also to 
 subordinate to its preservation the maintenance 
 of a National union with those Northern com- 
 munities to whose whole scheme of order slave- 
 holding was intolerable, and to rise at length 
 against the will of the majority and dissolve the 
 Union when that majority refused to give slave- 
 holding the National sanction. 
 
 The other system taught the inherent right of 
 all human society to self-government. It taught 
 the impersonal civil equality of all. It admitted 
 that the private, personal inequality of individuals 
 is inevitable, necessary, right and good; but con- 
 demned its misuse to set up arbitrary > public 
 inequalities. It declared public equality to be, on 
 the one hand, the only true and j^deqiiate coun- 
 terpoise against private inequalities, andj-fc"^ the 
 other, the best protector and prOmotor>ot just 
 private inequalities against unjust. It Held that 
 virtue, intelligence and wealth are their, own 
 sufficient advantage, and need for- self-protection 
 no arbitrary civil preponderance; that their 
 powers of self-protection • are never inadequate 
 save when by forgetting equity they mass and 
 exasperate ignorance, vice and poverty against 
 them; It insisted that there is no safe {protection 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 31 
 
 but self-protection ; that poverty needs at least 
 as much civil equipment for "self-protection as 
 property needs; that the right and liberty to 
 acquire intelligence, virtue and wealth are just 
 as precious as the right and liberty to maintain 
 them, and need quite a9 much self-protection; 
 that the secret of public order and highest pros- 
 perity is the common and equal right of all law- 
 fully to acquire as well as retain every equitable 
 means of self-aggrandizement, and that this right 
 is assured to all only through the consent of all 
 to the choice of the majority frequently appealed 
 to without respect of persons. And last, it truly 
 taught that a government founded on these prin- 
 ciples, and holding them essential to public peace 
 and safety might comfortably bear, the proximity 
 of alien neighbors, whosauidea? of right and 
 order vvere not implacably hostile ; but that it 
 had no power to abide unless it could put down 
 any !intemal mutiny against that, choice of the 
 majority which was, as it were, the Nation's first 
 commancjment. 
 
 The war was fought and the Union saved. 
 Fought as it was, on the issue of the cpnsent pf 
 all to the choice of the majpi-ity, the conviction 
 forced its way that the strife would never end in 
 peace until the liberty of self-government was 
 guar^teed to the entire people, ^nd slavery, as 
 
32 THE NEGRO QUESTION. 
 
 standing for the doctrine of public safety by sub- 
 jugation, destroyed. Hence, first, emancipation, 
 and then, enfranchisement. And now even the 
 Union saved is not the full measure of the Na- 
 tion's triumphs; but, saved once by arms, it 
 seems at length to have achieved a better and 
 fuller salvation still ; for the people of the once 
 seceded States, with a sincerity that no generous 
 mind can question, have returned to their old 
 love of this saved Union, and the great North, 
 from East to utmost West, full of elation, and 
 feeling what one may call the onus of the win- 
 ning side, cries "Enough!" and asks no more. 
 
 II. 
 
 Thus stands the matter to-day. Old foes are 
 clasping hands on fields where once they met in 
 battle, and touching glasses across the banqueting 
 board, pledging long life to the Union and pros- 
 perity ta. the South, but at every feast there is 
 one empty seat. 
 
 Why should one seat be ever empty, and every 
 guest afraid to look that way? Because the 
 Southern white man swears upon his father's 
 sword that none but a ghost shall ever sit there. 
 And a ghost is there; the ghost of that old 
 heresy of public safety by the mass's subjugation. 
 This is what the Northern people cannot under- 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 33 
 
 stand. This is what makes the Southern white 
 man an enigma to all the world beside, if not 
 also to himself. To-day the pride with which he 
 boasts himself a citizen of the United States and 
 the sincerity with which he declares for free gov- 
 ernment as the only safe government cannot be 
 doubted ; to-morrow comes an explosion, fol- 
 lowed by such a misinterpretation of what free 
 government requires and forbids that it is hard 
 to identify him with the nineteenth century. 
 Emancipation destroyed domestic bondage; en- 
 franchisement, as nearly as its mere decree can, 
 has abolished public servitude; how, then, does 
 this old un-American, undemocratic idea of-sub- 
 jugation, which our British mother country and 
 Europe as well are so fast repudiating — how 
 does it remain? Was it not founded in these 
 two forms of slavery? The mistake lies just 
 there: They were founded in it, and removing 
 them has not removed it. 
 
 It has always been hard for the North to 
 understand the alacrity with which the ex-slave- 
 holder learned to condemn as a moral and eco- 
 nomic error that slavery in defense of which he 
 endured four years of desolating war. But it 
 was genuine, and here is the explanation: He 
 believed personal enslavement essential to subju- 
 gation. Emancipation at one stroke proved it 
 
34 THE NEGRO QUESTION, 
 
 was not But it proved no more. Unfortunately 
 for the whole Nation there was already before 
 emancipation came, a defined status, a peculiar 
 niche, waiting for freed negroes. They were 
 nothing new. Nor was it new to lose personal 
 ownership in one's slave. When, under emanci- 
 pation, rio one else could own him, we quickly 
 saw he was not lost at all. There he stood, beg- 
 gar to iis for room for the sole of his foot, the 
 land and all its appliances ours, and he, by the 
 stress of his daily needs, captive to the land. 
 The moment he fell to work of his own free will, 
 we saw that emancipation was even more ours 
 than his; public order stood fast, our homes 
 were safe, our firesides uninvaded ; he still served, 
 we still ruled ; all need of holding him in private 
 bondage was disproved, and when the notion of 
 necessity vanished the notion of right vanished 
 with it. Emancipation had destroyed private, but 
 it had not disturbed public subjugation. ' The 
 ex-slave was not a free man ; he was only a free 
 negro. 
 
 Then the winners of the war saw that the 
 great issue which had jeopardized the Union was 
 not settled. The Government's foundation prin- 
 ciple was not reestablished, and could not be 
 while millions of the country's population were 
 without a voice as to who should rule, who 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 35 
 
 should judge, and what should be law. But, as 
 we have seen, the absolute civil equality of pri- 
 vately and socially unequal men was not the 
 whole American idea. It was counterbalanced 
 by an enlarged application of the same principle 
 in the absolute equality of unequal States in the 
 Federal Union, one of the greatest willing con- 
 cessions ever made by stronger political bodies 
 to weaker ones in the history of government. 
 Now manifestly this great concessioij of equality 
 among the unequal States becomes inordinate, 
 unjust and dangerous when millions of the peo- 
 ple in one geographical section, native to the 
 soil, of native parentage, having ties of interest 
 and sympathy with no other land, are arbitrarily 
 denied that political equality within the States 
 which obtains elsewhere throughout the Union. 
 This would make us two countries. But we can- 
 not be two merely federated countries without 
 changing our whole plan of government; and 
 we cannot be one without a common foundation. 
 Hence the freedman's enfranchisement. It was 
 given him not only because enfranchisement was 
 his only true emancipation, but also because it 
 was, and is, impossible to withhold it and carry 
 on American government on American ground 
 principles. Neither the Nation's honor nor its 
 safety could allow the restoration of revolted 
 
36 THE NEGRQ QUESTIOf^. 
 
 States to their autonomy with their populations 
 divided by lines of status abhorrent to the whole 
 National structure. 
 
 Northern men often ask perplexedly if the 
 freedman's enfranchisement was not, as to the 
 South, premature and inexpedient; while South- 
 ern men as often call it the one vindictive act of 
 the conqueror, as foolish as. it was cruel. It was 
 cruel. Not by intention, and, it may be, unavoid- 
 ?ibly, but certainly it was not cruel for its haste, 
 but foHtS tardiness. Had enfi*anchisement come 
 into effect, as emancipation did, while the smoke 
 of the war's last shot was still in the air, when 
 force still ruled unquestioned, and civil order 
 and system had not yet superseded martial law, 
 the agonies, the shame and the incalculable 
 losses of the Reconstruction period that followed 
 might have been spared the South and the 
 Nation, Instead there came two unlucky post- 
 ponements, the slow doling out of re-enfranchise- 
 ment to the best intelligence of Southern white 
 society and the delay of the freedman's enfran- 
 chisement — his civil emancipation — until the 
 " Old South," instead of reorganizing public 
 society in harmony with the National idea, 
 largely returned to its entrenchments in the 
 notion of exclusive white rule. Then, too late 
 to avert a new strife, and as little more than a 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 3/ 
 
 defensive offset, the freedman was invested with 
 citizenship, and the experiment begun of trying 
 to establish a form of public order, wherein, 
 under a political equality accorded by all citizens, 
 to all citizens, new and old, intelligence and vir- 
 tue would be so free to combine, and ignorance 
 and vice feel so free to divide, as to insure the 
 majority's free choice of rulers of at least enough 
 intelligence and virtue to secure safety, order 
 and progress. This experience, the North be- 
 lieved, would succeed, and since this was the 
 organic embodiment of the American idea for 
 which it had just shed seas of blood, it stands to 
 reason the North would not have allowed it to 
 fail. But the old South, still bleeding from her 
 thoysand wounds, but as brave as when she fired 
 her first gun, believed not only that the experi- 
 ment would fail, but also that it was dangerous 
 and dishonorable. And to-day, both in North 
 and South, a widespread impression prevails that 
 this is the experiment which was made and did 
 in fact fail. Whereas it is just what the Old 
 South never allowed to be tried. 
 
 This is the whole secret of the Negro Ques~ 
 tion's vital force to-day. And yet the struggle 
 in the Southern States has never been by the 
 blacks for and by the whites against a black 
 supremacy, but only for and against an arbitrary 
 
38 THE NEGRO QUESTION. 
 
 pure white supremacy. From the very first until 
 this day, in all the freedman's intellectual crudity, 
 he has held fast to the one true, National doc- 
 trine of the absence of privilege and the rule of 
 all by all, through the common and steadfast 
 consent of all to the free and frequent choice of 
 the majority. He has never rejected white men's 
 political fellowship or leadership because it was 
 white, but only and always when it was unsound 
 in this doctrine. His party has never been a 
 purely black party in fact or principle. The 
 " solid black vote " is only by outside pressure 
 solidified about a principle of American liberty, 
 which is itself against solidity and destroys the 
 political solidity of classes wherever it has free 
 play. But the " solid white vote " — which is not 
 solid by including all whites, but because no 
 colored man can truly enter its ranks, much less 
 its councils, without accepting an emasculated 
 emancipation — the solid white vote is solid, not 
 by outside pressure biit by inherent principle. 
 Solid twice over ; first, in each State, from sincere 
 motives of self-preservation, solid in keeping the 
 old servile class, by arbitrary classification, ser- 
 vile ; and then solid again by a tacit league of 
 Southern States around the assumed right of 
 each State separately to postpone a true and com- 
 plete emancipation as long as the fear remains 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 39 
 
 that, with full American liberty — this and no 
 more — to all alike, the freedman would himself 
 usurp the arbitrary domination now held over 
 him and plunder and destroy society. 
 
 So, then, the Southern question at its root is 
 simply whether there is any real ground suffi- 
 cient to justify this fear and the attitude taken 
 against it. Only remove this fear, which rests 
 on a majority of the whole white South despite 
 all its splendid, well-proved courage, and the 
 question of right, in law. and in morals, will van- 
 ish along with the notion of necessity. 
 
 Whoever attempts to remove this apprehen- 
 sion must meet it in two forms : First, fear of a 
 hopeless wreck of public government by a com- 
 plete supremacy of the lower mass ; and second, 
 fear of a yet more dreadful wreck of private 
 society in a deluge of social equality. 
 
 III. 
 Now, as to public government, the freedman, 
 whatever may be said of his mistakes, has never 
 shown an intentional preference for anarchy. 
 Had he such a bent he would have betrayed 
 something of it when our civil war offered as 
 wide an opportunity for its indulgence as any 
 millions in bondage ever had. He has shown at 
 least as prompt a choice for peace and order as 
 
40 THE NEGRO QUESTION 
 
 any " lower million " ever showed. The vices 
 said to be his in inordinate degree are only such 
 as always go with degradation, and especially 
 with a degraded status; and when, in Recon- 
 struction years, he held power to make and un- 
 make laws, amid all his degradation, all the 
 efforts to confine him still to an arbitrary servile 
 status, and all his vicious special legislation, he 
 never removed the penalties from anything that 
 the world at large calls a crime. Neither did he 
 ever show any serious disposition to establish 
 race rule. The whole spirit of his emancipation 
 and enfranchisement, and his whole struggle, 
 was, and is, to put race rule of all sorts under 
 foot, and set up the common rule of all. The 
 fear of anarchy in the Southern States, then, is 
 only that perfectly natural and largely excusable 
 fear that besets the upper ranks of society every- 
 where, and often successfully tempts them to 
 commit inequitable usurpations ; and yet a fear 
 of which no amount of power or privilege ever 
 relieves them — the fear that the stupid, the des- 
 titute and the vicious will combine against them 
 and rule by sheer weight of numbers. 
 
 Majority rule is an unfortunate term, in that it 
 falsely implies this very thing ; whereas its mis- 
 sion in human affairs is to remove precisely this 
 danger. In fact a minority always rules. At least 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 4 1 
 
 it always can. All the great majority ever strives 
 for is the power to choose by what, and what 
 kind of, a minority it shall be ruled. What that 
 choosing majority shall consist of, and hence the 
 wisdom and public safety of its choice, will 
 depend mainly upon the attitude of those who 
 hold, against the power of mere numbers, the 
 far greater powers of intelligence, of virtue and 
 of wealth. If these claim, by virtue of their 
 own self-estimate, an arbitrary right to rule and 
 say who shall rule, the lower elements of society 
 will be bound together by a just sense of griev- 
 ance and a well-grounded reciprocation of dis- 
 trust; the forced rule will continue only till it 
 can be overturned, and while it lasts will be 
 attended by largely uncounted but enormous 
 losses, moral and material, to all ranks of society. 
 But if the wise, the upright, the wealthy, com- 
 mand the courage of our American fathers to 
 claim for all men a common political equality, 
 without rank, station or privilege, and give their 
 full and free adherence to government by the con- 
 sent of all to the rule of a minority empowered by 
 the choice of the majority frequently appealed to 
 without respect of persons, then ignorance, des- 
 titution and vice will not combine to make the 
 choosing majority. They cannot. They carry 
 in themselves the very principle of disintegra- 
 
4i THE NEGRO QUESTION. 
 
 tion. Without the outside pressure of common 
 and sore grievance, they have no lasting powers 
 of cohesion. The. minority always may rule. 
 It need never rule by force if it will rule by 
 equity. This is the faith of our fathers of the 
 Revolution, and no community in America that 
 ha^ built sqUarely and only upon it has found it 
 unwise or unsafe. 
 
 This is asserted with all the terrible misrule 
 of Reconstruction days in full remembrance. 
 For, first be it said again, that sad history came 
 not by a reign of equal rights and majority rule, 
 but through an attempt to establish them while 
 the greater part of the wealth and intelligence of 
 the region involved held out sincerely, stead- 
 fastly and desperately against them, and for the 
 preservation of unequal privileges and class 
 domination. ) The Reconstruction party, even 
 with all its taxing, stealing and defrauding, and 
 with the upper ranks of society at war as fiercely 
 against its best principles as against its bad prac- 
 tices, planted the whole South with public schools 
 for the poor and illiterate of both races, welcomed 
 and cherished the missionaries of higher educa- 
 tion, and, when it fell, left them still both systems, 
 with the master-class converted to a belief in 
 their use and necessity. The history of Recon- 
 struction dispassionately viewed, is a final, trium- 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 43 
 
 phant proof that all our Americam scheme needs 
 to make it safe and good, in the South as else- 
 where, is consent to it and participation in it by 
 the law-abiding, intelligent portions of the people, 
 with one common freedom, in and between high 
 life and low, to combine, in civil matters, against 
 ignorance and vice, in high life and low, across, 
 yet without disturbing, the lines of race or any 
 other line of private rank or predilection. 
 
 There are hundreds of thousands in the South- 
 ern States who, denying this, would promptly 
 concede it all in theory and in practice, but for 
 the second form of their fear: the belief that 
 there would result a confusion of the races in 
 private society, followed by intellectual and moral 
 debasement and by a mongrel posterity. Unless 
 this can be shown to be an empty fear, our 
 Southern problem cannot be solved. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The mere ambiguity of a term here h'els cost 
 much loss. The double meaning of the words 
 " social " and " society " seems to have been a real 
 drawback on the progress of political ideas amc ig., 
 tjie white people of the South. The clear and 
 dehni^e term, civil equality, they have made 
 synonymous with the very vague and indefinite 
 term, social equality, and then turned and totally 
 
44 THE NEGRO QUESTION, 
 
 misapplied it to the sacred domains of private 
 society. If the idea of civil equality had rightly 
 any such application, their horrbr would certainly 
 be just. To a forced private social equality the 
 rest of the world has the same aversion, but it 
 knows and feels that such a thing is as impossible 
 in fact as it is monstrous in thought. Americans, 
 in general, know by a century's experience, that 
 civil equality makes no such proposal, bears no 
 such results. They know that public society — 
 civil society — comprises one distinct group of 
 mutual relations, and private society entirely 
 another, and that it is simply and only evil to 
 confuse the two. (They see that public society 
 comprises all those relations that are impersonal, 
 unselective, and in which all men, of whatever 
 personal inequality, should stand equal. They 
 recognize Jthat private society is its .opposite 
 hemisphere; that it is personal, selective, assort- 
 ive, ignores civil equality without violating it, 
 and forms itself entirely upon mutual private 
 preferences and affinities. They agree that civil 
 status has of right no special value in private 
 society, and that their private social status has 
 rightly no special value in their public social — 
 i. e., their merely civil — relations. Evfen the 
 Southern freedman is perfectly clear on these 
 points ; and Northern minds are often puzzled to 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 45 
 
 know why the whites of our Southern States, 
 almost alone, should be beset by a confusion of 
 ideas that costs them all the tremendous differ- 
 ences, spiritual and material, between a state of 
 truce and a state of peace. 
 
 But the matter has a very natural explanation. 
 Slavery was both public and private, domestic as 
 well as civil. By the plantation system the 
 members of the master-class were almost con- 
 stantly brought into closer contact with slaves 
 than with their social equals. The defensive 
 line of private society in its upper ranks was an 
 attenuated one ; hence there was a constant, 
 well-grounded fear that social confusion — for we 
 may cast aside the term " social equality" as pre- 
 posterous — that social confusion would be 
 wrought by the powerful temptation of close 
 and continual contact between two classes — the 
 upper powerful and bold, the under helpless and 
 sensual, and neither one socially responsible to the 
 other, either publicly or privately. It had already 
 brought about the utter confusion of race and 
 corruption of society in the West Indies and in 
 Mexico, and the only escape from a similar fate 
 seemed to our Southern master-class to be to 
 annihilate and forget the boundaries between 
 public right and private choice, and treat the 
 appearance anywhere of any one visibly of 
 
46 THE NEGRO QUESTION. 
 
 African tincture and not visibly a servant, as an 
 assault upon the purity of private society, to be 
 repelled on the instant, without question of law 
 or authority, as one would fight fire. Now, 
 under slavery, though confessedly inadequate, 
 this was after all the only way ; and all that the 
 whites in the Southern States have overlooked 
 is that the conditions are changed, and that this 
 policy has become unspeakably worse than use- 
 less. Dissimilar races are not inclined to mix 
 spontaneously. The common enjoyment of equal 
 civil rights never mixed two stjich races ; it has 
 always been some oppressive distinction between 
 them that, by holding out temptations to vice 
 instead of rewards to virtue, has done it ; and 
 because slavery is the foulest of oppressions it 
 makes the mixture of races in morally foulest 
 form. Race fusion is not essential to National 
 unity; such unity requires only civil and political, 
 not private social, homogeneity. The contact of 
 superior and inferior is not of nepessity degrad- 
 ing ; it is the kind of contact that degrades or 
 elevates; and public equality ^ — equal public 
 rights, common public liberty, equal mutual 
 responsibility — this is the great essential to be- 
 neficent contact across the lines of physical, intel- 
 lectual and moral difference, and the greatest 
 safeguard of private society that human law or 
 custom can provide. 
 
THE NEGRO Q UESTION. 47 
 
 V. 
 
 Thus we see that, so far from a complete eman- 
 cipation of the freedman bringing those results 
 in the Southern States which the white people 
 there so justly abhor, but so needlessly fear, it is 
 the only safe and effectual preventive of those 
 results, and final cure of a state of inflammation 
 which nothing but the remaining vestiges of an 
 incompletely abolished slavery perpetuates. The 
 abolition of the present stage of siege rests with 
 the Southern white man. He can abolish it, if 
 he will, with safety and at once. The results 
 will not be the return of Reconstruction days, 
 nor the incoming of any sort of black rule, nor 
 the supremacy of the lower mass — either white, 
 black or mixed ; nor the confusion of ranks and 
 races in private society; nor the thronging of 
 black children into white public schools, which 
 never happened even in the worst Reconstruc- 
 tion days ; nor any attendance at all of colored 
 children in white schools or of white in colored, 
 save where exclusion would work needless hard- 
 ship ; nor any new necessity to teach children — 
 what they already know so well — that the public 
 school relation is not a private social relation; 
 nor any greater or less necessity for parents to 
 oversee their children's choice of companions in 
 
48 THE NEGRO QUESTION. 
 
 school or out ; nor a tenth as much or as mis- 
 chievous playmating of white and colored chil- 
 dren as there was in the days of slavery ; nor any 
 new obstruction of civil or criminal justice; nor 
 any need of submitting to any sort ^f oflensive 
 contact from a colored person, that it would be 
 right to resent if he were white. But seven dark 
 American-born millions would find themselves 
 freed from their constant liability to public, legal- 
 ized indignity. They would find themselves, for 
 the first time in their history, holding a patent, 
 with the seal of public approval, for all the aspi- 
 rations of citizenship and all the public rewards 
 of virtue and intelligence. Not merely would 
 their million voters find themselves admitted to, 
 and faithfully counted at, the polls — whether 
 they are already or not is not here discussed — 
 but they would find themselves, as never before, 
 at liberty to choose between political parties. 
 These are some of the good — and there need be 
 no ill — changes that will come whenever a ma- 
 jority of the Southern whites are willing to vote 
 for them. 
 
 There is a vague hope.'much commoner in 
 the North than in the South, that somehow, if 
 everybody will sit still, "time" will bring these 
 changes. A large mercantile element, especially, 
 would have the South " let politics alone." It is 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 49 
 
 too busy to understand that whatever people lets 
 politics alone is doomed. There are things that 
 mere time can do, but only vigorous agitation 
 can be trusted to change the fundamental convic- 
 tions on which a people has built society. Time 
 rnay do it at last, but it is likely to make bloody 
 work of it. For either foundation idea on which 
 society may build must, if Xei, alone, multiply 
 upon itself The elevation idea brings safety, 
 and safety constantly commends and intensifies 
 itself and the elevation idea. The subjugation 
 idea brings danger, and the sense of danger con- 
 stantly intensifies the subjugation idea. Time 
 may be counted on for such lighter things as the 
 removal of animosities and suspicions, and this 
 in our Nation's case it has done. Neither North 
 nor South now holds, or suspects the other of 
 holding, any grudge for the late war. But trust- 
 ing time to do more than this is but trusting to 
 luck, and trusting to luck is a crime. 
 
 What is luck doing? Here is the exclusive 
 white party in the Southern States calling itself, 
 and itself only, "The South," praying the Nation 
 to hold ofif, not merely its interference, but its 
 counsel — even its notice — while it, not removes, 
 but refines, polishes, decorates and disguises to 
 its own and the Nation's eyes, this corner-stone 
 of all its own and the South's, the whole South's 
 
50 THE NEGRe QUESTION. 
 
 woes ; pleading the inability of any but itself to 
 " understand the negro," when, in fact, itself has 
 had to correct more, and more radical mistakes 
 about the negro since the war than all the Nation 
 beside; failing still, more than twenty years since 
 Reconstruction began and more than ten since 
 its era closed, to offer any definition of the freed- 
 man's needs and desires which he can accept; 
 making daily statements of his preferences which 
 the one hundred newspapers published for his 
 patronage, and by himself, daily and unanimously 
 repudiate; trying to settle affairs on the one only 
 false principle of public social order that keeps 
 them unsettled ; proposing to settle upon a sine 
 qua non that shuts out of its councils the whole 
 opposite side of the only matter in question; 
 and holding out for a settlement which, whether 
 effected or not, can but perpetuate a disturbance 
 of inter-state equality fatal to the Nation's peace 
 — a settlement which is no more than a refusal 
 to settle at all. 
 
 Meanwhile, over a million American citizens, 
 with their wives and children, suffer a suspension 
 of their full citizenship, and are virtually subjects 
 and not citizens, peasants instead of freemen. 
 They cannot seize their rights by force, and the 
 Nation would never allow it if they could. But 
 they are learning one of the worst lessons class. 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 5 1 
 
 rule can teach them — exclusive, even morbid, 
 pre-occupation in their rights as a class, and 
 inattention to the general affairs of their com- 
 munities, their States and the Nation. Mean- 
 while, too, the present one-sided effort at settle- 
 ment by subjugation is not only debasing to the 
 under mass, but corrupting to the upper. For 
 it teaches these to set aside questions of right 
 and wrong for questions of expediency ; to wink 
 at and at times to defend and turn to account 
 evasions, even bold infractions, of their own laws, 
 when done to preserve arbitrary class domina- 
 tion; to vote confessedly for bad men and meas- 
 ures as against better, rather than jeopardize the 
 white man's solid party and exclusive power ; to 
 regard virtue and intelligence, vice and igno- 
 rance, as going by race, and to extenuate and 
 let go unprosecuted the most frightful crimes 
 against the under class, lest that class, being 
 avenged, should gather a boldness inconsistent 
 with its arbitrarily fixed status. Such results as 
 these are contrary to our own and to all good 
 government. 
 
 VI. 
 
 There is now going on in several parts of the 
 South a remarkable development of material 
 wealth. Mills, mines, furnaces, quarries, railways 
 are multiplying rapidly. The eye that cannot 
 
52 THE NEGltO QUESTION. 
 
 see the value of this aggrandizement must be 
 dull rndeed. But many an eye, in North and 
 South, , and to the South's loss, is crediting it 
 with values that it has not. To many the " New 
 South "we long for means only this industrial 
 and commercial expansion, and our eager mer- 
 cantile spirit forgets that even for making a 
 people rich in goods a civil order pn sound 
 foundations is of greater value than* coal or 
 metals, or spindles and looms. May the South 
 grow rich ! But every wise friend of the South 
 will wish, besides, to see wealth built upon pub- 
 lic provisions for securing through it that gen- 
 eral beneficence, without which it is not really 
 wealth. He would not wish those American 
 States a wealth like that which once was Spain's. 
 He would not wish to see their society more 
 diligent for those conditions that concentrate 
 wealth than for those that disseminate it. Yet 
 he must see it. That is the situation, despite 
 the assurances of a host of well-meaning flatterers 
 that a New South is laying the foundations of a 
 permanent prosperity. They cannot be laid on 
 the old plantation idea, and much of that which 
 is loosely called the New South to-day is farthest 
 from it — it is only the Old South readapting the 
 old plantation idea to a peasant labor and min- 
 eral products. Said a mine owner of the far 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 53 
 
 North lately: "We shall never fear their com- 
 petition till they get rid of that idea." A lasting 
 prosperity cannot be hoped for without a dis- 
 seminated wealth, and public social conditions 
 to keep it from congestion. But this dissemina- 
 tion cannot be got save by a disseminated intel- 
 ligence, nor intelligence be disseminated without 
 a disseminated education, nor this be brought to 
 any high value, without liberty, responsibility, 
 private inequality, public equality, self-regard, 
 virtue, aspirations and their rewards. 
 
 Many ask if this new material development of 
 the South will not naturally be followed by ade- 
 quate public provisions for this dissemination by- 
 and-by. There is but one safe answer : That it 
 has never so happened in America. From our 
 furthest East to our furthest West, whenever a 
 community has established social order in the 
 idea of the elevation of the masses, it has planned, 
 not for education and liberty to follow from 
 >vealth and intelligence, but for wealth and intel- 
 ligence to follow from education and liberty; and 
 the community whose intelligent few do not 
 make the mass's elevation by public education 
 and equal public liberty the corner-stone of a 
 projected wealth, is not more likely to provide it 
 after wealth is achieved and mostly in their own 
 hands. 
 
54 THE NEGRd QUESTION. 
 
 Our American public-school idea — American 
 at least in contrast with any dissimilar notion — 
 is that a provision for public education adequate 
 for the whole people, is not a benevolent conces- 
 sion but a paying investment, constantly and 
 absolutely essential to confirm the safety of a 
 safe scheme of government. The maintenance 
 and growth of public education in the Southern 
 States, as first established principally under re- 
 construction rule, sadly insufficient as it still is, 
 is mainly due to the partial triumph of this idea 
 in the minds of the Southern whites, and its eager 
 acceptance, with or without discordant condi- 
 tions, by the intelligent blacks, and in no region 
 is rightly attributable to an exceptionable increase 
 of wealth. Much less is it attributable, as is often 
 conjectured, to the influx of Northern capital and 
 capitalists, bringing Northern ideas with them. 
 It ought to go without saying, that immigration, 
 with or without capital, will always try to assim- 
 ilate itself to the state of society into which it 
 comes. Ev'ery impulse of commerce is not to 
 disturb any vexed issue until such issue throws 
 itself imfnediately across the path. It never pur- 
 posely molests a question of social order. So it 
 is in the South. 
 
 Certain public men in both North and South 
 have of late years made, with the kindest inten- 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 55 
 
 tions, an unfortunate misuse of statistical facts to 
 make it appear that public society in the South 
 is doing, not all that should be done, but all it 
 can do, for the establishment of permanent safety 
 and harmony through the elevation of the lower 
 masses especially, in the matter of public educa- 
 tion. -'jln truth, these facts do not prove the state- 
 ment they are called upon to prove, and do the 
 Southern States no kindness in lulling them to a 
 belief in it.* It is said, for instance, that certain 
 Southern States are now spending more annually 
 for public education, in proportion to their tax- 
 able wealth, than certain Northern States rioted 
 for the completeness of their public school sys- 
 tems. Mississippi may thus be compared with 
 Massachusetts. But really the comparison is a 
 sad injustice to the Southern State, for a 'century 
 of public education has helped to make Massa- 
 chusetts so rich that she is able to spend annu- 
 ally twenty dollars per head upon the children 
 in her public schools, while Mississippi, laying 
 a heavier tax, spends upon hers but two dollars 
 per head. Manifestly it is unfair to a State whose 
 public-school system is new to compare it with 
 any whose system is old. The public school 
 
 * For a treatment of the queslion of National aid to Southern 
 education, see the short article printed supplementary to this. 
 
56 THE NEGRO QUESTION. 
 
 property of Ohio, whose population is one mil- 
 lion, is over twice as great as that of ten States 
 of the New South, whose population is three and 
 a half times as large.* And yet one does not 
 need to go as far as the " new West " to find 
 States whose tax-payers spend far more for pub- 
 lic education than Southern communities thus 
 far see" the wisdom or need of investing. With 
 onethir^ more wealth than Virginia, and but 
 one-tenth the percentage of illiteracy, Iowa 
 spends over four times as much per year for 
 public instruction. With one-fourth less wealth 
 than Alabama, and but one-fourteenth the per- 
 centage of illiteracy, Nebraska spends three and 
 a half times as much per year for public instruc- 
 tion. With about the same wealth as North Car- 
 olina and less than one-eighth the percentage of 
 illiteracy, Kansas spends over five times as much 
 per year for public education. If the comparison 
 be moved westward again into new regions, the 
 Territory of Dakota is seen making an " expen- 
 diture in the year per capita on average attend- 
 ance in the public schools " of 1^25.77, being more 
 than the sum of the like per capita expenditures 
 by Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, North 
 
 * See Report of United States Commissioner of Education, 
 1883-84, page 21, last column of table. 
 
THE NEGRO QUESTION. 57 
 
 Carolina, Alabama and Georgia combined. In 
 Colorado it is about the same as in Dakota, while 
 in Nevada it is much greater and in Arizona twice 
 as large. As to comparative wealth, the taxable 
 wealth of Dakota in 1880, at least, was but one 
 two-thousandth partof that of the six States with 
 which it is compared. 
 
 Now what is the real truth in these facts ? 
 That the full establishment of this American 
 public-school idea and of that elevation idea of 
 which it is an exponent, and which has had so 
 much to do toward making the people of the 
 Northern States the wealthiest people in the 
 world, waits in the South not mainly an increase 
 of wealth, but rather the simple consent of the 
 Southern white man to see society's best and 
 earliest safety, the quickest, greatest and most 
 lasting aggrandizement, in that public equality 
 of all men, that national citizenship, wider than 
 race and far wider than the lines of private 
 society, which makes the elevation of the masses, 
 by everything that tends to moral, aesthetical 
 and intellectual education, in school and out of 
 school, the most urgejit and fruitful investment 
 of public wealth and trust. Just this sincere 
 confession. All the rest will follow. The black 
 man will not merely be tolerated in his civil and 
 political rights as now sometimes he is and 
 
58 THE NEGRO QUESTION. 
 
 sometimes. he is not; but he will be welcomed 
 into, and encouraged and urged to a true un- 
 derstanding, valuation and acceptance of every 
 public duty and responsibility of citizenship, ac- 
 cording to his actual personal ability to respond. 
 To effect this is not the herculean and danger- 
 ous task it is sometimes said to be. The North 
 has 20,000,000 foreign immigrants to American- 
 ize, and only this way to do it. The South, for 
 all her drawbacks, has this comparative advan- 
 tage ; that her lower mass, however ignorant 
 and debased, is as yet wholly American in its 
 notions of order and government. All that is 
 wanting is to more completely Americanize her 
 upper class, a class that is already ruling and 
 will still rule when the change is made ; that 
 wants to rule wisely and prosperously, and that 
 has no conscious intention of being un-Ameri- 
 can. Only this : To bring the men of best 
 blood and best brain in the South to-day, not to 
 a new and strange doctrine, but back to the 
 faith of their fathers. Let but this be done, and 
 there may be far less cry of Peace, Peace, than 
 now, but there will be a peace and a union be- 
 tween the Nation's two great historic sections 
 such as they have not seen since Virginia's 
 Washington laid down his sword, and her Jeffer- 
 son his pen. 
 
NATIONAL AID TO SOUTHERN 
 SCHOOLS. 
 
 Should the National Government make ap- 
 propriations for public schools ? This seems to 
 be the right form of the question ; not may it ? 
 but should it? If it may, it may ; but if it should, 
 it must. The Civil War taught us what it can 
 cost to answer " we should " with " we may not." 
 
 We ought to recognize that the constitution- 
 ality of one or another Congressional bill is but 
 a small part of the question. A bill, however 
 fine its intention may be, will never become 
 operative if burdened with conditions which State 
 majorities consider imperious and inquisitorial. 
 Moreover, to base the plea for national aid upon 
 the presence of a surplus in the National Treas- 
 ury strikes me is in principle extremely mis- 
 chievous, and in policy fatal to the measure. 
 As long as this is made the reason why, it seems 
 to me the scheme will fail. 
 
 And yet I certainly think the National Gov- 
 ernment should make appropriations for pub- 
 lic schools in destitute parts of the country, at 
 least in the South. On the general principle 
 I have made in my own mind these points ; 
 59 
 
6o NATIONAL AID 
 
 First, that the constitutionality of national aid to 
 education is not the question that properly comes 
 first in order. The nation should first ask itself, 
 " Do we in this direction owe a national debt?" — 
 for if so, there must he, and we are bound in 
 honor and common honesty to find, some con- 
 stitutional way to liquidate it. If we owed a debt 
 to a foreign nation, we should cut a sorry figure 
 pleading that we could not make it constitutional 
 to pay it. Shall we not treat our own citizens 
 as well as we would have to treat the citizens of 
 a foreign government ? 
 
 I think we are confronted here with a distinctly 
 national debt. The educational destitution in 
 the South, so contrary to our American scheme 
 of social order, is distinctly the result of gross 
 defects in that social order inevitably accom- 
 panying the institutional establishment of African 
 slavery. It was certainly the Nation's crime. 
 
 It is not enough for the Isforth to point to her 
 bloody expiation in war, nor the South to her 
 proportionately greater sacrifice. Expiations, 
 however awful, are not restitutions. ' Expiations 
 do not pay damages. Here is one of the vast 
 evils resulting from the Nation's error still un- 
 removed. If it had not been for the politi- 
 cal complicity of millions of Northern voters we 
 never need have had a war, and slavery must 
 
TO SOUTHERN SCHOOLS. 6 1 
 
 have perished without one. I think, therefore, 
 that beyond question, the removal of our vast 
 Southern illiteracy is an obligation resting upon 
 the whole Nation, yet one which the States of 
 the North and West cannot meet effectively 
 except through the action of the National Gov- 
 ernment. 
 
 Let national aid to education be supplied not 
 as a national condescension or charity, but as 
 the one final payment of a national obligation, 
 so regarded by payer and payee, and no com- 
 munity will be pauperized. It is absurd to fear 
 that the payment of a just debt, and its payment 
 in education^ is going to pauperize a community 
 and make it content to .bring up the next gener- 
 ation in ignorance. It is hardly convincing to 
 draw large inferences from small examples in 
 exceptional comm'unities, as has been done too 
 frequently in this debate. Our whole wide 
 knowledge of human history and human nature 
 makes it axiomatic, that a free and educated 
 generation under self-government will not fail to 
 educate its children at its own cost. 
 
 We need to make one distinction very plain 
 here — ^between adults and children. To bestow 
 a professional education gratuitously upon an 
 adult certainly does have some tendency to pau- 
 perize him, for it puts advantages of life into his 
 
62 NATIONAL AID 
 
 hands at a lower price than manhood ought to 
 pay. But the case of a child in school is just 
 the reverse. Under gratuitous aid he still gets 
 education at no abatement of price to him, but 
 finds himself, instead, filled with needs which call 
 forth his finest manhood to supply. Let the 
 nation pay its debt of public education to South- 
 ern illiteracy in one generation of school chil- 
 dren. It is true that the Southern States could 
 do more for public education if they would, 
 and he is no friend of the South who flatters her 
 I people into the delusion that they are doing all 
 \they can. To show this, one need only compare 
 these States with the new States and Territories 
 of the West, where the people invest not only 
 much more per capita of school population, but 
 a very much larger proportion of their taxable 
 wealth, even when they are poorer and more pre- 
 occupied in establishing the preliminary frame- 
 work of society, and are burdened with a constant 
 inflow of alien immigrants. In short, they treat 
 public education as the very first of preferred 
 claims. But the supreme fact is not that the 
 South is or is not doing all it can for education. 
 It is that hundreds and thousands of children, 
 white and black, as the result of the nation's 
 crime, of which they are only the innocent 
 victims, are growing up in an ignorance more 
 
TO SOUTHERN SCHOOLS. 6^ 
 
 pauperizing than education, however paid for. To 
 those who rest their argument against national 
 aid upon isolated examples in an exceptional 
 State here and there, we might ask one question : 
 Which are the paupers, the tens of thousands 
 who have received Northern aid and even remote 
 individual aid, the most hazardous of all aids, or 
 those who have grown up in ignorance without 
 it ? Is it not the fact that most parts of the 
 South have learned the value and applied the 
 lesson of public education from the aid, gratui- 
 tous as to them, of Northern missionary socie- 
 ties ? I do not consider the education of the 
 lower masses in the South a cure for all the ills 
 of Southern society, but I fail to see how they 
 can be cured without it, and I fail to see any 
 excellence in the policy that is content to with- 
 hold it. 
 
 But, again, our national scheme, in recognizing 
 the right of every man to vote as a necessary 
 part of the universal right of self-government, 
 forces upon us, as a correspondingly imperative 
 public necessity, to see that no part of the public 
 mass is left without the means to vote intelli- 
 gently. The one idea stands for freedom, the 
 other for safety. 
 
 I am not of those who consider that when the 
 nation enfranchised the Negro it created a new 
 
64 NATIONAL AID 
 
 danger. The range of history, even within our 
 own times, gives proof enough that the illiterate 
 Negro is neither as dangerous nor as much feared 
 enfranchised as he was enslaved. But I do insist 
 that enfranchisement — which my mind emphati- 
 cally approves — was only half the essential na- 
 tional provision for permanent safety. In other 
 words, I recognize civil freedom as an element 
 of public safety, not danger, yet an inadequate 
 element demanding the establishment and main- 
 tenance of intelligence to complete the provision. 
 To pay the world what it had borrowed, was 
 one part of the nation's obligation. To liberate 
 bodily, politically and civilly the slave, was and 
 is another. There are others. But to loose the 
 bonds of the Negro's ignorance is still another. 
 To banquet, toast and embrace the men who 
 conscientiously fought for the destruction of the 
 Union and the perpetuation of slavery is gener- 
 ous, inspiring and largely admirable; but it pays 
 no part of the national debt to either side; and I 
 sincerely believe that North and South would 
 think more of one another if one common, noble 
 sentiment would recognize the fact that feasting 
 and, embracing cannot of themselves pay the 
 debts of either party. Let us have the banquet, 
 by all means ; but let us have the wedding first 
 and the banquet afterward. 
 
TO SOUTHERN SCHOOLS. 65 
 
 Whatever we say with regard to illiteracy of 
 blacks in the South applies to the illiteracy of 
 whites also, since they are both the fruit of the 
 same tree, whose root drew its nourishment 
 from a moral error as wide as the nation. Let 
 us be constitutional ; but I think no reasonable 
 mind will doubt that when the nation recognizes 
 this matter as a national debt, it will find or will 
 make a constitutional way to mend it. 
 
 We are told by the opponents of national aid 
 to education that it would incur the risk of pau- 
 perizing the communities aided ; but surely we 
 cannot run a more glaring risk than to go on 
 leaving the reduction of an enormous mass of 
 illiteracy to communities that believe themselves, 
 and are widely believed, to be doing all they can, 
 while they are hardly performing half the entire 
 bulk of the task. There is not in the range of 
 our choice any condition or possible attitude free 
 from risks, and the maxim is as true in politics 
 and government as in commerce and finance — 
 " Nothing venture, nothing have." Another 
 maxim is to the point, that" Forewarned is fore- 
 armed." And certainly all hazards in national 
 aid would be reduced to trivial proportions when 
 made conditional upon at least the full mainte- 
 nance of the present degree of self-help supplied 
 by the States themselves. 
 
WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO DO? 
 
 I. This paper is addressed directly to the col- 
 ored people of the United States. A large mass 
 of them, of course, will not see it; yet others of 
 them will. Nothing more forcibly illustrates the 
 great progress of our times than the fact that 
 already one may safely count on reaching a con- 
 siderable body of readers, wholly or partly of 
 Negro blood, through the pages of a monthly 
 publication adapted to the highest popular intel- 
 ligence of the Anglo-Saxon race. The explana- 
 tion of this is, that although the colored man in 
 America enters the second quarter-century of his 
 emancipation without yet having attaifted the 
 full measure of American freedom decreed to 
 him, he has, nevertheless, enjoyed, for at least 
 twenty years, a larger share of private, public, re- 
 ligious and political liberty than falls to thejlot of 
 any but a few peoples — the freest in the world. 
 
 It would be far from the truth to say that other 
 men everywhere, or even that all white men, are 
 freer than he. No subject of the Czar, be he 
 peasant or prince, however rich in pfivileges, 
 dares claim the rights actually enjoyed by an 
 American freedman. The Negro's grievance is 
 66 
 
WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO Dot 6/ 
 
 not that his liberties are few ; it is that, in a land 
 and nation whose measure of every man's free- 
 dom is all the freedom any one can attain with- 
 out infringing upon a like freedom in others, and 
 where all the competitions of life are keyed on 
 this idea, his tenure of almost every public right 
 is somehow mutilated by arbitrary discrimina- 
 tions against him. Not that he is in slave's 
 shackles and between prison walls, or in a Rus- 
 sian's danger of them, but that, being entered 
 in the race for the prize of American citizen^ 
 ship, in accordance with all the rules of the 
 course, and being eager to run, he is first de- 
 clared an inferior competitor, and then, without 
 gain to any, but with only loss to all, is handir 
 capped and hobbled. 
 
 Without gain to any and with loss to all. For 
 in this contest no one truly wins by another's 
 loss ; no one need lose by another's gain ; the 
 prize is for every one that reaches the goal, and 
 the more winners there are the better for each 
 and all. The better public citizen the Negro 
 can be the better it will be for the white man. 
 But the Negro's grievance is, that the discrimina- 
 tions made against him are more and more un- 
 bearable the better public citizen he is or tries to 
 be ; that they are impediments, not to the grovel- 
 ings of his lower nature, but to the aspirations 
 
68 WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO Dot 
 
 of his higher ; that as long as he is content to 
 travel and lodge as a ragamuffin, frequent the 
 vilest places of amusement, laze about the streets, 
 shun the public library and the best churches 
 and colleges, and neglect every political duty of 
 his citizenship, no white man could be much 
 freer than he finds himself; but that the farther 
 he rises above such life as this the more he is 
 galled and tormented with ignominious dis- 
 criminations made against him as a public citi- 
 zen, both by custom and by law ; and finally, 
 that as to his mother, his wife, his sister, his 
 daughter, these encouragements to ignoble, and 
 discouragements to nobler, life are only crueler 
 in their case than in his own. 
 
 2. What large enjoyment of rights, with what 
 strange suffering of wrongs I Yet to explain 
 the incongruity is easy ; the large enjoyment of 
 rights belongs to a new order of things, which 
 has only partly driven out the old order, of 
 which these wrongs are, by comparison, but a 
 slender remnant. To explain is easy, but to re- 
 move, to remove these sad and profitless wrongs, 
 what shall the nation do ? 
 
 There are many answers. We are reminded 
 of what the nation has done, and the record is 
 a great one. For forty years of this nineteenth 
 century, one of whose years counts for a score 
 
WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO DOf 69 
 
 of any other century's, it made the condition of 
 the Negro' the absorbing national question, to 
 which it sacrificed its peace and repose. Admit- 
 ting much intermixture of motives of selfish 
 power and of self-preservation, yet the funda- 
 mental matter was a moral conviction that moved 
 the majority of the nation to refuse to hold slaves 
 or countenance slave-holding by State legisla- 
 tion. To have waived this conviction would have 
 avoided a frightful civil war. The freedom of 
 the Negro was bought at a higher price, in white 
 men's blood and treasure, than any people ever 
 paid, of their own blood and treasure, for their 
 own liberty. Since the close of the war, many 
 millions of dollars have been spent by private 
 benevolence in the North to qualify the Southern 
 Negro, morally and intellectually, for his new 
 freedom, and the outlay continues still undimin- 
 ished. No equal number of people elsewhere on 
 earth receives so great an amount of missionary 
 educational aid. In the South itself a great change 
 has taken — is taking — place in popular senti- 
 ment concerning certain aspects of the Negro's 
 case. In 1885-86 over 58 per cent, of the col- 
 ored school population in seven great Southern 
 States were enrolled in State public schools, in 
 recognition of the necessity and advantage of 
 the Negro's elevation. 
 
70 WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO D07 
 
 These things are not enumerated to remind 
 the Negro of his obligations. His property, as 
 far as it goes, is taxed equally with the white 
 man's for public education and the maintenance 
 of the State ; and all the benefactions he has 
 received, added to all the peculations of which 
 he stood accused in the days of his own misrule, 
 are not yet equal to the just dues of a darker 
 past still remaining, and that must ever remain, 
 unpaid to him. They are enumerated not to 
 exhaust the record, but merely to indicate the 
 range of what has been done in the past, and is 
 being done in the present, by white men concern- 
 ing the Negro's rights and wrongs. The great 
 national political party that first rose to! power, 
 and for almost a quarter of a century held gov- 
 ernmental control, by its espousal and main- 
 tenance of the Negro's cause, still declares that 
 cause a living issue in the national interest. The 
 great party now in power,* with one or more dis- 
 affected" wings from the opposition, though it 
 dqes not propose to do anything, as to the Negro, 
 that has thus far been left undone, at least con- 
 sents not to undo anything that has been done. 
 Yet other important issues have been pushed to 
 the front by both parties, and the " Negro ques- 
 
 * The Democratic Party, 1887, 
 
iy//A T SHALL THE NEGRO DO? Jl 
 
 tion," however preeminent in the nation's true 
 interest, is not paramount in the public atten- 
 tion. 
 
 But what has the Negro done ? What is he 
 doing? The trite answer is, that he has in- 
 creased from four millions to seven, and is still 
 multiplying faster by natural increase than any 
 other race on the continent. But, also, he has 
 accepted his freedom in the spirit of those who 
 bestowed it ; that is, limited by, and only by, the 
 civil and political rights and duties of American 
 citizenship equally devoid of special privileges 
 and special restrictions. He fought in no mean 
 numbers in the great army that achieved his 
 liberation, and he has laid dpwn, since then, 
 many a life rather than waive the rights guaran- 
 teed to him by the American Constitution. In 
 the infancy of his citizenship, steeped in moral 
 and intellectual ignorance, with some of his 
 former masters disfranchised and the rest op- 
 posed to almost the whole list of his civil rights, 
 he fell into the arms of unscrupulous leaders and 
 covered not a few pages of history with a record 
 of atrociously corrupt government; yet, as the 
 present writer has lately asserted elsewhere, the 
 freedman never by legislation removed the penal- 
 ties from anything that the world at large calls a 
 crime, and here it may be added that he never 
 
72 WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO DOT 
 
 put Upon the statute book a law hostile to the 
 universal enjoyment of American liberty. In 
 the darkest day of his power he established the 
 public school system. He has exceeded expec- 
 tation in his display of industry, his purchase of 
 land, his accumulation of wealth, his eagerness 
 and capability for education, and even in his po- 
 litical intelligence and parliamentary skill. Even 
 under the artificial and undiscriminating pressure 
 of public caste he is developing social ranks with 
 wide moral and intellectual differences, from the 
 stupid, idle, criminal, and painfully numerous 
 minority at the bottom, to a wealth-holding, edu- 
 cated minority at the top ; each emerging, or half 
 emerging, from a huge middle majority of peace- 
 keeping, but uneducated and unskilled farmers, 
 mechanics, and laborers, yet a majority un- 
 estranged from the more cultured and prosperous 
 minority of their own race by any differences of 
 religion, conflict of traditions, or rivalry of capi- 
 tal and labor, and hearkening to their counsels 
 more tractably than the mass listens to the few 
 among any other people on the continent. He 
 is not open to the charges urged against the 
 Indian or the Chinamen ; he does not choose to 
 be a savage, as the one, nor a civil alien and a 
 heathen, as the other, is supposed to choose. 
 He accepts education, sometimes under offensive, 
 
WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO DO? 73 
 
 and sometimes under expensive, conditions He 
 proposes to stay in this country, and is eager to 
 be in all things a citizen. His religion is Christi- 
 anity; and if it is often glaringly emotional and 
 superficial, so, confessedly, is the Christianity of 
 his betters the world over. He only shares the 
 fault, after all, in large and gross degree, amply 
 explained by his past and present conditions; 
 and in many leading features a description of his 
 faith and practice, worship and works, would 
 differ but little from the history of religion 
 among our white settlers of the Mississippi Val- 
 ley scarcely seventy-five years ago. 
 
 3. Thus far has the nation cogie, and in view 
 of these developments the old but still anxious 
 question. What shall be done with the Negro ? 
 makes room beside it for this : What shall the 
 Negro do? For, as matters stand, it seems 
 only too probable that until the Negro does 
 something further, nothing further will be done. 
 And, indeed, are not the times and the question 
 saying, themselves, by mute signs, that the day 
 has come when the Negro, not the rice-field sav- 
 age, but you, the educated, the law-abiding, tax- 
 paying Negro, must push more strenuously to the 
 front in his — in your — own behalf, and thus in the 
 behalf of all your race in the land ? In partic- 
 ular, then, What can — what shall — the Negro do ? 
 
74 WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO DO 7 
 
 You ^can 'make the most of the liberty you 
 have. You have large liberty of speech, much 
 freedom of the press, of petition, of organization, 
 of public meeting, liberty to hold property, to 
 prosecute civil and criminal lawsuits, a perfect 
 freedom to use the mails, and a certain — or must 
 we say an uncertain — freedom of the ballot. All 
 these are inestimable liberties, and have been, 
 and are being, used by you. But are they being 
 used faithfully to their utmost extent ? 
 
 Freedom of public organization, for instance. 
 From the earliest days of his emancipation the 
 Negro has shown a zest and gift for organiza- 
 tion, and to-day his private, public, and secret 
 societies, which cost him money to maintain, 
 have thousands of members. Yet only here and 
 there among them is there a club or league for 
 the advocacy and promotion of his civil rights. 
 There is probably no other great national ques- 
 tion so nearly destitute of the championship of 
 an active national organization, with officers, 
 treasury, and legal counsel. The causes of this 
 are plain enough. As long as it was the supreme 
 political issue it was left, after our American 
 fashion, entirely to the heated treatment of the 
 daily press, the stump, and the national and 
 State legislatures: From them a large part 
 of the question passed Mnto a long period of 
 
WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO DOT 75 
 
 suspense in the Supreme Court. Only the 
 matter of casting and counting votes kept, and 
 keeps, the attention of parties, and this with a 
 constant loss of power, showing that partisan 
 treatment is no longer the question's only or 
 chief need. 
 
 In the politics of a great nation even the great- 
 est questions must take their turns, according as 
 now one and now another gains the lead in the 
 public attention, and the more sagaciously and 
 diligently any worthy question is pressed to the 
 front by the forces that dictate to the daily press, 
 the stump, and the national and State legisla- 
 tures, the sooner and oftener will its turn come 
 round to lay uppermost hold upon the national 
 conscience and policy. There always was good 
 reason, but now there is the greatest need, that 
 you give and get this kind of backing for the 
 question of your civil and political rights. We 
 say give and get, because every endeavor should 
 be used to secure by personal solicitation not the 
 condescension — there has been enough of that — 
 but the friendly countenance and active coopera- 
 tion of white men well known in their communi- 
 ties forintelligence and integrity. A certain local 
 civil rights club of colored men that had thought 
 this impracticable at length tried it, and soon 
 numbered among its active members some of the 
 
•J^ WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO DO t 
 
 best white citizens of its town. And naturally, 
 for it declared only such aims as any good citizen 
 ought gladly to encourage and aid any other to 
 seek by all lawful means.* 
 
 You can as urgently claim the liberty to per- 
 form all your civil duties as the liberty to enjoy 
 all your civil rights. The two must be sought 
 at the same time and by the same methods. 
 They should never be divided. You must feel 
 and declare yourself no longer the nation's, much 
 less any political party's, still less your old mas- 
 ter's, mere nursling; but one bound by the 
 duties of citizenship to study, and actively to 
 seek, all men's rights, and the public welfare of 
 
 * Afler stating that any adult male citizen of the United States 
 may become a member, it declares its object to be " to foster and 
 promote, by every lawful use of the pen, the press, the mails, Ihe 
 laws, and the courts, by public assemblage and petition, and by all 
 proper stimulation of public sentiment : I. Both the legal and 
 the conventional recognition, establishment, and protection of all 
 men in the common rights of humanity and of all citizens of the 
 United States in the full enjoyment of every civil right, without 
 distinction on account of birth, race, or private social status. 2. 
 The like recognition of every man's inviolable right to select and 
 reject his social companions and acquaintances according to liis 
 own private pleasure and conscience, limited in the family rela- 
 tionship only by laws made under the full enjoyment of equal 
 civil rights throughout the whole community copiing under such 
 laws ; apd in the social circle only by the same inviolable right 
 In others." 
 
WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO DO f J J 
 
 the nation, and of every lesser community — 
 State, county, city, village — to which he belongs. 
 Nothing else can so hasten the acquisition of all 
 your rights as for you to make it plain that your 
 own rights and welfare are not all you are striv- 
 ing for, but that you are, at least equally with 
 the white man, the student of your individual 
 duty toward every public question in the light 
 of the general good. 
 
 Holding this attitude, you can make many 
 things clear, concerning the cause of civil rights, 
 that greatly need to be made so. For instance, 
 that this cause is not merely yours, but is a great 
 fundamental necessity of all free government, 
 in which every Arherican citizen is interested, 
 knowing that they who neglect to defend any 
 principle of liberty may well expert to lose its 
 substance. 
 
 Or, for another instance, that the demand for 
 equal civil, including political, rights, is by no 
 means a demand for supremacy, much less for 
 the supremacy of one race over another. 
 
 Or, again, that this demand is not for a share 
 in the popular power by a mass knowing and 
 caring nothing about the popular welfare. 
 
 Or, yet again, that it is not the demand of an 
 irresponsible herd deaf to the counsels of its 
 own intelligent few and of any other. 
 
78 WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO DO f 
 
 Or, that the demand for equal unpolitical civil 
 rights is not a demand that public indecency and 
 unrespectability shall enjoy all the rights of de- 
 cency and respectability, but that mere color be 
 not made the standard of public decency and 
 respectability. 
 
 Or, that equality in these unpolitical civil 
 rights is urged, not for the difference in comfort, 
 but for the effect upon the inward character of 
 those qualified to enjoy it, and for its power to 
 awaken, even in those yet without them, aspira- 
 tions that should not be lacking in the mind of 
 any citizen. 
 
 Or, lastly, you can make it clear that the 
 Negro is not the morally and mentally nerve- 
 less infant he was fifteen years ago. 
 
 But there is a negative side to what the Negro 
 may do. 
 
 4. You can proclaim what you do not want. 
 We have already implied this in what goes just 
 before. There are tens of thousands of intelli- 
 gent people who to-day unwittingly exaggerate 
 the demands made by and in behalf of the Negro 
 into a vast and shapeless terror. Neither he, his 
 advocates rtor his opponents have generally 
 realized how widely his claims have been, some- 
 times by and sometimes without intention, mis- 
 construed. He needs still to make innumerable 
 
WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO DO f 79 
 
 reiterations of facts that seem to him too plain 
 for repetition ; as, for example, that he does not 
 want "Negro supremacy," or any supremacy 
 save that of an intelligent and upright minority, 
 be it white, black or both, ruling, out of office, 
 by the sagacity of their counsels and their 
 loyalty to the common good, and in office by 
 the choice of the majority of the whole people; 
 that, as to private society, he does not want any 
 man's company who does not want his ; or that, 
 as to suffi-age, he does not want to vote solidly, 
 unless he must in order to maintain precious 
 rights and duties denied to, and only to, him 
 and all his. 
 
 There is another thing which the Negro must 
 learn to say, and feel, that he does not want. It 
 is hard for a white man to name it, for it is prin- 
 cipally the fault of white men that it is hard for 
 the Negro to say it. It is our— the white man's 
 — fault that the only even partial outlet for the 
 colored man from a menial public status, in the 
 eyes of the white man, is political office. Even 
 when he attains a learned profession he attains 
 no such consideration as he gains iq political 
 office, superficial and tawdry though it be. Yet, 
 self-regard has grown ; scholarly callings win for 
 him more and more regard from both whites and 
 blacks; in the whole national mind the idea has 
 
80 WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO DO? 
 
 wonderfully grown — scarcely current at all when 
 the Negro began his "political life — that public 
 office is not the legitimate spoils of party and 
 the legitimate reward of mere partisan loyalty 
 and activity, to be apportioned, pro rata, to each 
 and every race, class, and clique among the par- 
 tisan victors ; and the time has come when the 
 Negro, for his own interest, must learn to say: 
 " My full measure of citizenship I must and will 
 have; but I yield no right of public office or 
 emolument to any man because he is white, nor 
 claim any because I am black ; and I do not 
 Want any office that does not want me." Such 
 an attitude will win better rewards than the 
 keeping of doors and sweeping of corridors. 
 
 But it is equally important to say that there 
 are other things for the Negi'o to do that must 
 by no means be either negative or passive. 
 
 5. You must keep your vote aliv4 This means 
 several things. It means that, without venality 
 or servility, you must hold your vote up for the 
 honorable competitive bid of political parties. A 
 vote which one party can count on, as a matter 
 of course, and the opposite party cannot hope to 
 win at any price, need expect nothing from either. 
 In no campaign ought the Negro to know cer- 
 tainly how he will vote before he has seen both 
 platforms and weighed the chances of their 
 
IV//A T SHALL THE NEGRO DO? 8 1 
 
 words being made good. You will never get 
 your rights until the white man does not know 
 how you are going to vote. You must let him 
 see that the " Negro vote " can divide whenever 
 it may, and come together solidly again when- 
 ever it must. 
 
 Keeping your vote alive means, also, that 
 while to be grateful is right and to be ungrateful 
 is base, you must nevertheless stop voting for 
 gratitude. The debts of gratitude are sacred, 
 but no unwise vote can lighten them. A vote 
 is not a free-will offering to the past; it. is a 
 debt to the present 
 
 Again, keeping your vote alive means voting 
 on all questions. What makes great parties if 
 it be not the combination of men of various 
 political interests consenting to concern them- 
 selves in one another's aims and claims for the 
 better promotion of those desigiis in the order 
 of their urgency and practicability? Now, here 
 is the Negro charged, at least, with rarely — almost 
 never — making himself seen or heard in any wide- 
 spread interest except his own. Small wonder 
 if other men do not more hotly insist upon his 
 vote being cast and counted. The Negro may 
 be not the first or principal one to blame in this 
 matter, but he is largely the largest loser. 
 
 Last, keeping the vote 'alive means casting it. 
 
82 WHAT SHALL TIfE NEGRO DO? 
 
 You must vote. You must practically recognize 
 two facts, which if white men had not recognized 
 in their own case long ago, you would be in 
 slavery still to-day : that there is an enormous 
 value in having votes cast ; first, even though 
 they cannot win; and, secondly, even though 
 they are not going to be counted. A good 
 cause and a stubborn fight are a combination 
 almost as good as victory itself; better than vic- 
 tory without them ; the seed of certain victory 
 at last Even if you have to cope with fraud, 
 make it play its infamous part so boldly and so 
 fast that it shall work its own disgrace and destruc- 
 tion, asi many a time it has done before negroes 
 ever voted. Votel^ Cast your vote though 
 taxed for it. Cast your vote though defrauded 
 of it, as many a white man is to-day. Cast your 
 vote though you die for it. Let tio man cry, 
 "Liberty or blood;" leave that for Socialists 
 and Parisian mobs ; but when liberty means duty, 
 and death means one's own extinction, then the 
 cry of" Liberty or death " is a holy cry, and the 
 man who will not make it his own, even in free- 
 dom is not free. Seek not to buy liberty with 
 the blood either of friends or of enemies ; it is 
 only men's own blood at last that counts in the 
 purchase of liberty. Whatever may have been 
 the true philosophy for more ferocious times, 
 
WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO DO? 83 
 
 this is the true philosophy for ours. Cast your 
 votes, then, even though many of you die for it. 
 Some of you have died, but in comparison how few; 
 three hundred thousand white men poured out 
 their blood to keep you bound, other three hun- 
 dred thousand died to set you free, and still the 
 full measure of American freedom is not yours. 
 A fiftieth as rpuch of your own blood shed in the 
 inoffensive activities of public duty will buy it. 
 Keep your vote alive; better nine free men than 
 ten half free. In most of the Southern States 
 the negro vote has been diminishing steadily for 
 years, to the profound satisfaction of those white 
 men whose suicidal policy is to keep you in alien- 
 ism. In the name of the dead, black and white, 
 of the living, and of your children yet unborn, 
 not as of one party or another, but as American 
 freemen, vote I For in this free land the people 
 that do not vote do not get and do not deserve 
 their rights. 
 
 6. And you must spend your own money. No 
 full use of the liberties you now have can be made 
 without cooperation, however loose that coopera- 
 tion may have to be ; and no cooperation can be 
 very wide, active, or effective without the use of 
 money. This tax cannot be laid anywhere 
 upon a few purses. Falling upon many, it will 
 rest too lightly to be counted a burden. White 
 
84 fVHAr SHALL TliE NEGRO DO? 
 
 men may and should help to bear it ; but if so, 
 then all the more the Negro must spend his own 
 money. Half the amount now idled away on 
 comparatively useless societies and secret orders 
 will work wonders. 
 
 Money is essential, especially for two matters. 
 First, for the stimulation, publication, and wide 
 distribution of a literature of the facts, equities, 
 and exigencies of the negro question in all its 
 practical phases. This would naturally include 
 a constant and diligent keeping of the whole 
 question pruned clear of its dead matter. From 
 nothing else has the question suffered so much, at 
 the hands both of friends and of foes, as from lack 
 of this kind of attention. And, secondly, money 
 is essential for the unofficial, unpartisan, prompt, 
 and thorough investigation and exposure of 
 crimes against civil and political rights. 
 
 You must press the contest for equal civil 
 rights and duties in your separate States. The 
 claim need by no means be abated that the na- 
 tional government has rights and duties in the 
 matter that have not yet been fully established ; 
 but for all that you can urge the question's recog- 
 nition in State political platforms, and, having 
 made your vote truly and honorably valuable to 
 all parties, can bestow it where there is largest 
 prospect of «uch recognition being carried into 
 
WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO DO f 8$ 
 
 legislation and such legislation being carried into 
 effect. 
 
 There is a strong line of cleavage already run- 
 ning through the white part of the population in 
 every Southern State. On one side of this line 
 the trend of conviction is toward the establish- 
 ment of the common happiness and security 
 through the uplifting of the whole people by the 
 widest possible distribution of moral effects and 
 wealth-producing powers. It favors, for exam- 
 ple, the expansion of the public-school system, 
 and is strongest among men of professional call- 
 ings and within sweep of the influence of colleges 
 and universities. It antagonizes such peculiar 
 institutions as the infamous convict-lease system, 
 with that system's enormous political powers. 
 It condemns corrupt elections at home or abroad. 
 It revolts against the absolutism of political par- 
 ties. In a word, it stands distinctively for the 
 New South of American ideas, including the idea 
 of material development, as against a New South 
 with no ideas except that of material develop- 
 ment for the aggrandizement of the few, and tlje 
 holding of the whole Negro race in the South to 
 a servile public status, cost what it may to justice, 
 wealth, or morals. Let the Negro, in every State 
 and local issue, strive with a dauntless persever- 
 ance intelligently, justly, and honorably to make 
 
86 WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO DO? 
 
 his vote at once too cheap ami loo vahiahle for 
 tlie friends of justice and a common freedom to 
 despise it or allow their enemies to suppress it. 
 Remember, your power in the nation at large 
 must always be measured almost entirely by your 
 power in your own State. 
 
 And, finally, you must see the power and ne- 
 cessity of individual thought and action. It is 
 perfectly natural that the Negro, his history being 
 what it is, should magnify the necessity of cooper- 
 ating in multitudinous numbers to effect any pub- 
 lic result. He has not only been treated, but has 
 treated himself too much, as a mere mass. While 
 he has too often lacked in his organized efforts 
 that disinterested zeal, or even that semblance of 
 it which far-sighted shrewdness puts on, to insure 
 wide and harmonious cooperation, he has, on the 
 other hand, overlooked the power of the indi- 
 vidual and the necessity of individual power to 
 give power to numbers. 
 
 You rightly think it atrocious that you should 
 lose your vote by its fraudulent suppression. 
 But what can your vote when counted procure 
 you ? Legislation ? Probably. But what can 
 legislation procure you if it is contrary to public 
 sentiment? And how are public sentiment and 
 action, in the main, shaped ? By the supremacy 
 of individual minds; by the powers of intellect, 
 
WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO DO ? 8/ 
 
 will, argument, and persuasion vested by nature 
 in a few individuals here and there, holding no 
 other commission but these powers, and every 
 such individual worth from a hundred to a hun- 
 dred thousand votes. Without this element and 
 without its recognition there is little effective 
 power even in organized masses. Do not wait 
 for the mass to move. The mass waits for the 
 movement of that.individual who cannot and will 
 not wait for the mass. You may believe your 
 powers to be, or they may actually be, humble; 
 but even so, there are all degrees of leadership 
 and need of all degrees. There is work to be done 
 which it is not in the nature of violence or votes 
 or any mere mass power, organized or unorgan- 
 ized, to accomplish. 
 
 An attempt has been made here to enumerate 
 a few of its prominent features. They are things 
 that the Negro can do so profitably and honora- 
 bly to all, of whatever race, class, or region, 
 that no white citizen can justly refuse his public, 
 active cooperation. The times demand these 
 things. The changes already going on in the 
 South are just what call for promptness and 
 vigor in this work, for they mark the supreme 
 opportunity that lies in a formative stage of pub- 
 lic affairs. What will the Negro do ? 
 
A SIMPLER SOUTHERN QUESTION. 
 
 I. To bring any public question fairly into the 
 open field of literary debate is always a long 
 step toward its final adjustment. It is across 
 that field that the question must go to be so 
 purged of its irrelevancies, misinterpretations, 
 and misuses, personal, partisan, or illogical, and 
 so clarified and simplified, as to make it easy for 
 the popular mind to take practical and final action 
 on it and settle it once for all by settling it right 
 
 It is in this field that the Negro problem still 
 forces itself to the front as a living and urgent 
 national question. Such distinguished and hon- 
 ored men as Messrs. Hampton, Chandler, Col- 
 quitt, Foraker, Halstead, Edmunds, and Watter- 
 son are engaged in its debate, and in the October 
 (1888) number of the Forum Senator Eustis writes 
 that "this Negro question is still a running sore 
 in our body politic," and that among the prob- 
 lems of this country it "promises to be the 
 most serious of all," and "is still far from being 
 solved." 
 
 Now, it is only fair to assume that each and 
 all the writers who have turned aside from the 
 more effective partisan media of the daily news- 
 88 
 
A SIMPLER SOUTHERN QUESTION. 89 
 
 paper, legislative halls, the public platform, and 
 the "stump," to the pages of the magazines and 
 reviews, have done so in the desire to help the 
 question along toward its final solution by aiding 
 to make it in each case clearer and simpler than 
 it was before. If so, then we may assume also 
 that writers, editors, and readers will not repel 
 an effort, if it be intelligent and sincere, to gather 
 from several of these writers' utterances some 
 conclusive replies to questions whose answer and 
 removal from the debate will greatly reduce the 
 intricacies of the problem. 
 
 II. Can the Southern question be solved? 
 There are men in the North and South, who say 
 no, and, without being at all able to tell what 
 they mean by the phrase, think it must be "left 
 to solve itself." But careful thinkers, on either 
 side of the question, never so reply. Their ad- 
 mission, whether tacit or expressed, is that " can 
 be " is out of the debate; it viusi be solved. It 
 is a running, not a self-healing sore ; one of those 
 great problems " whose solution," as Mr. Eustis 
 says, " strains the bonds of society and taxes the 
 wisest statesmanship ;" that kind of problems 
 with some one of which " every nation must 
 deal." We must solve it. 
 
 Is it being solved ? We look in vain for any 
 one's direct yes or no. Governor Colquitt seems 
 
90 u4 SIMPLER SOUTHERN QUESTION. 
 
 to come nearest to the distinct affirmation when 
 he says : " A sense of moral and religious 
 responsibility is restraining and directing us in 
 our State polity and practice ; and ... I think 
 we have had more than an average success in 
 discharging the obligations imposed upon us." 
 Among these he includes pointedly the assuring 
 of the Negro in the full enjoyment of his politi- 
 cal rights. But setting out to speak for the 
 South, he speaks in fact only for Georgia, and 
 makes no plain claim that, even so, the Negro 
 question in Georgia is really being pushed 
 toward its settlement. On the other hand, when 
 Senator Chandler says : " The political control 
 of the United States is now in the hands of 
 a Southern oligarchy as persistent and relent- 
 less as was that which plunged the nation into, 
 the slaveholders* rebellion ;" and when Senator 
 Eustis falls short only by a slender " if" of the 
 blunt assertion that "the Negro problem still 
 exists in its original relations," these gentlemen 
 surely are not to be understood as implying that 
 the question has made or is making no advance 
 toward solution. Both of them yield a recogni- 
 tion of facts which make it unreasonable so to 
 construe their meaning. In truth, it is indisput- 
 able facts that we need from which to draw our 
 final ansyrer to this important query, rather than 
 
A SIMPLER SOUTHERN QUESTION. 9 1 
 
 any person's or any multitude of persons* general 
 assurances or ever so profound beliefs. And for 
 some such facts we are indebted to these gentle- 
 men as well as to others. 
 
 in. The Negro question is three-quarters of a 
 century old. Within that period a vast major- 
 ity of the nation have totally changed their con- 
 victions as to what are the Negro's public rights. 
 Within that period the sentiment of every com- 
 munity and the laws of every State in the Union, 
 as well as the Federal Government, have been 
 radically altered concerning him. In their di- 
 mensions, in their scope, in their character, the 
 problem's original relations have passed through 
 a great and often radical change. So far from 
 the problem still existing in its original rela- 
 tions, only two or three of those original rela- 
 tions any longer exist. Within the memory of 
 men still in active life there was not a foot of soil 
 under the American flag where a Negro detected 
 fleeing from slavery was safe from violence. Now, 
 it is several months since it Was asserted in the 
 Forum ♦ that the Negro in rh6 United States " has 
 enjoyed for at least twenty years a larger share 
 of private, public, religious and political liberty 
 than falls to the lot of any but a few people — the 
 
 * Sec " What Shall the Negro Do ?" Page 66. 
 
92 A SIMPLER SOUTHERN QUESTION. 
 
 freest in the world," and thus far no writer, black 
 or white, has challenged the statement. And the 
 vast changes that have been effected — not by 
 time, mark it, but by men, sometimes at peril, 
 sometimes at cost, of their lives, in Northern 
 States as well as in Southern — have been very 
 uniformly in the direction of the great problem's 
 simplification and solution. The problem is being 
 solved ; slowly, through the years, it is true ; in 
 pain, in sweat, in blood, with many a mistake, 
 many a discouragement, many an enemy, and, 
 saddest of all, many a neutral friend in North 
 and South ; yet it is being solved, and it is only 
 by misconceiving the motive of those who have 
 effected these changes that Mr. Eustis, for in- 
 stance, can call the long, fruitful and still persist- 
 ent and determined effort an " unsuccessful ex- 
 periment" For it is not, and never has been, an 
 effort " to balance or equalize the condition of 
 the white and Negro races in this country," but 
 only to balance or equalize their enjoyment of 
 their public and political rights to establish a 
 common and uniform public justice and equity, 
 and trust the untrammeled selections of private 
 societj^ and "the laws of nature and nature's 
 God " still to maintain all proper equalities and 
 inequalities of race and condition. The fact 
 must be admitted by all fair mindslo be estab- 
 
A SIMPLEX SOUTHERN QUESTION. 93 
 
 lished and removed from debate, that in some 
 aspects, at least, the Negro problem's " original " 
 relations are altered, when men like Governor 
 Colquitt, men in the front ranks of political life, 
 their political fortunes largely dependent on what 
 they say, eagerly choose to deny with indigna- 
 tion that either they or their constituents, in 
 States where once it was against the law to teach 
 a colored child to read, now either practice or 
 believe in the entire or partial suppression of the 
 Negro vote, and as eagerly boast — with statistical 
 figures to back them — that their public schools 
 are educating twice as many thousands of colored 
 youth now as they were educating hundreds 
 fifteen years ago. True, there are men in the 
 South who talk very differently. Aye, and in 
 the North, too. When there are none such left 
 in the Southern States they will be far ahead, at 
 least of where the Northern are now, toward the 
 whole question's final solution. 
 
 IV. One of the most conclusive proofs that 
 the changes that have been made in the Negro's 
 status have been generally in the direction of 
 true progress, is that wherever and whenever 
 these changes have been made complete and 
 operative, opposition to them has disappeared 
 and they have dropped out of the main problem, 
 leaving it by so much the lighter and simpler. 
 
94 ^ SIMPLER SOUTHERN QUESTION. 
 
 The most notable instance, of course, is the abo- 
 lition of slavery; but there are many lesser 
 examples in the history of both Northern and 
 Southern States: the teaching of Negroes in 
 private schools; their admission into public 
 schools; their sitting on juries; their acceptance 
 as court witnesses; their riding in street cars; 
 their enlistment in the militia; their appointment 
 on the policej etc. It is a fact worthy of more 
 consideration than it gets from the debaters on 
 either sfde of the Negro question, that such 
 changes as these, which nobody finds any reason 
 for undoing in any place where they have been 
 fully established, were, until they were made, as 
 fiercely opposed and esteemed as dishonorable, 
 humiliating, unjust, and unsafe to white men and 
 women, as those changes which, in many regions 
 of our country, not all of them Southern, still 
 remain to be made before the Negro question 
 will let itself be dismissed. This fact no one will 
 dispute. Yet thousands shut their eyes and ears, 
 or let others shut them, to the equal though not 
 as salient truth of this fact's corollary, to wit: 
 that every step toward the perfecting of one 
 common public liberty for all American citizens 
 is opposed and postponed only where it never 
 has been fairly tried. 
 
 Even the various public liberties intended to 
 
A SIMPLER SOUTHERN- QUESTION-, 9$ 
 
 be secured to all men alike' by the Civil Rights 
 Bill have rarely if ever, in any place, been actu- 
 ally secured and made operative and afterward 
 withdrawn and lost. Only where they have been 
 merely legalized and not practically established, 
 but bitterly fought and successfully nullified 
 throughout reconstruction days, have they since 
 been unlegalized, condemned, and falsely pror 
 claimed to have been fairly tried and found want- 
 ing. The infamous Glenn bill, in the Georgia 
 legislature, may be thrust before us by debaters 
 of the passionate sort on either side as a glaring 
 exception; but its fate, its final suffocation, makes 
 it more an example than an exception, even 
 though this was effected by a compromise which 
 will hardly be brought forward as evidence of "a 
 sensibility of honor that would 'feel a stain like 
 a wound.' "* 
 
 V. But the Negro vote. Surely, many will 
 say, that was abundantly tried, and earned its 
 own condemnation in the corruptions and disas- 
 ters of the reconstruction period. Now this 
 would be a fair statement only if the ultimate 
 purpose of the reconstruction scheme had been 
 simply to secure the Negro in his right to vote. 
 We shall see that it was not. Much less was it 
 
 ♦Governor Colquitt, in the Forum, November, 1887. 
 
96 A SIMPLER SOUTHERN QUESTION. 
 
 to establish, to use Senator Hampton's phrase, 
 "the political supremacy of the Negro," or, as Mr. 
 Watterson charges, to erect " a black oligarchy 
 at the South," or, as Governor Colquitt puts it, " to 
 Africanize the States of the South." These defi- 
 nitions belong — to borrow again Mr. Watterson's 
 thought — to the hysterics of the question. That 
 fervid writer more than half refutes the charge 
 when he follows it closely with the assertion that 
 " the scheme was preposterous in its failure to re- 
 cognize the simplest operation of human nature 
 upon human affairs, and in its total lack of fore- 
 sight." But surely, whatever may be said of 
 Sumner, Stevens, and the men who gathered 
 around them, they were not a herd of perfect 
 fools with a "total lack of foresight." Not the 
 scheme was, but the charge that this was the 
 scheme is, "preposterous." The scheme included 
 the establishment of the Negro in his right to 
 vote ;> but , its greater design was, as we have 
 stated in an earlier paper,* "to put race rule of 
 all sorts under foot, and set up the common rule 
 of all," or rather "the consent of all to the rule 
 of a minority the choice of the majprity, fre- 
 quently appealed to without respect of persons." 
 As to the Negro in particular, the design, 
 
 •The Negro Question; pages 40, 41. 
 
A SIMPLER SOUTHERN QUESTION, 97 
 
 even at its extreme, was to enable him — and 
 here we are indebted to Mr. Eustis for a phrase 
 — "to share with the white man the political 
 responsibility of governing; " or, more exactly, 
 Ihe political responsibility of choosing governors. 
 This scheme was never allowed a fair trial in 
 any of the once seceding States. Every efibrt 
 to give it such was powerfully opposed by one 
 great national political party throughout the 
 whole Union, "while" — to quote again from the 
 same earlier paper — "the greater part of the 
 wealth and intelligence of the region directly in- 
 volved held out sincerely, steadfastly, and des- 
 perately against it and for the preservation of 
 unequal public privileges and class domination." 
 " We thought we saw," says Governor Colquitt, 
 speaking for that Southern wealth and intelli- 
 gence for which he has so large a right to speak, 
 "a determined effort so completely to Africanize," 
 etc. But Senator Eustis, who also has his right 
 to speak for them, treats that thought as an 
 absurdity worthy only the utterance of "that 
 foul bird of prey, the carpet-bagger," who, he 
 writes, " encouraged the deluded Negro to be- 
 lieve that the Federal Government intended that 
 he should govern the white race in the South." 
 The thought w«i an absurdity; an absurdity so 
 
98 A SIMPLEX SOUTHERN QUESTION. 
 
 palpable that an intelligent people must have 
 rejected it but for the conviction behind it that, 
 whatever might be the experiment's design, 
 " Negro supremacy " would be the result. And 
 here Messrs. Eustis, Colquitt, Hampton, and the 
 rest seem to agree. This seems to be the poten- 
 tial conviction of all who speak or write on that 
 side of the debate ; and we dwell upon the fact 
 because it furnishes such weighty evidence of 
 the entire truth of our earlier statement that this 
 conviction, this fear, is the whole tap-root of the 
 Negro question to-day. Man elsewhere may 
 hold some conjectural belief in "race antago- 
 nisms," or even in their divine appointment 
 Nowhere in the world do the laws forbid a man 
 this belief In every land, be it Massachusetts, 
 Martinique, or Sierra Leone, he may indulge it 
 to his heart's content in every private relation. 
 It is only where a people are moved by the fear 
 of " Negro supremacy " that the simple belief in 
 a divinely ordered race antagonism is used to 
 justify the withholding of impersonal public 
 rights which belong to every man because he is 
 a man, and with which race and its real or im- 
 agined antagonisms have nothing whatever to do. 
 It is only under that fear that men stand up 
 before the intelligent and moral world saying, 
 
A SIMPLER SOUTHERN QUESTION. 99 
 
 " If this instinct does not exist it is necessary to 
 invent it."* There is a Negro question which 
 belongs to private society and morals and to the 
 individual conscience : the question what to do 
 to and with the Negro within that realm of our 
 own private choice where public law does not 
 and dare not come. But the Negro question 
 which appeals to the Nation, to the laws, and to 
 legislation, is only, and is bound to be only, the 
 question of public — civil and political — rights. 
 Mr. Eustis says truly, "Our plain duty should 
 be not to make its solution more difficult;" but 
 when he occupies eleven pages of the Forum with 
 a recriminative entanglement of these two mat- 
 ters, one entirely within, the other entirely be- 
 yond, the province of legislation, he is wasting 
 his own and his readers' time and impeding the 
 solution of the public question; and we here 
 challenge him, or any writer of his way of think- 
 ing, to show from the pen of any Negro of na- 
 tional reputation, Douglass, Lynch, Bruce, Down- 
 ing, Williams, Grimke, Matthews, Fortune^ pr 
 any other, anything but their repudiation of this 
 — blind, let us believe, rather than wilful — at- 
 tempt to make a " Siamese union," as Mr. Glad- 
 
 ♦ See Century Magazine, April, 1 885, page 9U, "In Plaio 
 Black and White," by H. W. Grady. 
 
lOO A SIMPLER SOUTHERN QUESTION. 
 
 stone would say, between these two distinct 
 issues. As far as it is or of right can be a muni- 
 cipal, State, inter-State, or national problem at 
 all, the question to-day, pruned of all its dead 
 wood, is this : Shall the Negro, individually, 
 enjoy equally, and only equally, with the white 
 man individually, that full measure of an Ameri- 
 can citizen's (public rights, civil and political^ de- 
 creed to him both as his and as an essential to 
 the preservation of equal rights between the 
 States; or shall he be compelled to abandon 
 thesemialienable human rights' to the custody of 
 Mr, Eiistis's exclusively " white man's govern- 
 ment," and " rely implicitly upon the magnanim- 
 ity of his white fellow-citizens of the South to 
 treat him with the justice and generosity due to 
 his unfortunate condition ?" Shall or shall not 
 this second choice be forced upon him for fear 
 that otherwise these seven (million) black and 
 lean kine may, so to speak, devour the twelve 
 (million) white, fat kine, and " the torches of 
 Caucasian civilization be extinguished" in the 
 South, despite the "race antagonism" of the 
 most powerful fifty-three million whites on earth? 
 Is it not almost time for a really- intrepid people 
 to be getting ashamed of such a-re^r.* But that 
 
 * For a special consideration of the question of " race instinct," 
 and the^ maintenance of the color line, see the short article 
 printed supplementary to this. 
 
A SIMPLER SOUTHER J^ QUESTION. lOI 
 
 this fear is the main root of the whole Southern 
 problem is further proved by the fact that^ no 
 speaker or writer on that side of the debate, 
 North or South, ever denies it. And neither 
 does any attempt to prove that it is well 
 grounded. Like Senator Hampton, all these 
 debaters content themselves with the absurd 
 assumption that the peaceable enjoyment, by the 
 white man and the Negro, of an equal and common 
 civil and political citizenship was fairly tried in 
 the reconstruction period, and that "a large 
 class at the North " have believed in and still 
 want " Negro supremacy " wherever the Negro is 
 in the majority. Challenged to actual argument, 
 they are silent, until some one asks some subor- 
 dinate question: Is the Negro contented and 
 prosperous? Is he allowed to vote? Is his 
 vote fairly counted ? Has he all his civil rights ? 
 Are outbreaks due to political causes? Then 
 their answers are abundant again ; and as final 
 proof that not these, but the earlier question, is 
 truly the main issue now, there are scarcely any 
 two who do not contradict themselves and one 
 another. 
 
 VI. The least discordance of statement on these 
 minor points is on that of " race antagonism." 
 And for the obvious reason that, attributed to 
 the Negro, who always denies it, it excuses the 
 
I02 A SIMPLE J? SOUTHERN QUESTION. 
 
 bald assumption that no matter what he says, he 
 must want to establish a "black oligarchy;" 
 while, attributed to the white race, it excuses the 
 theory that the white man cannot, even by way 
 of experiment give the black man white men's 
 rights, because natural instinct will not let him. 
 " But you must ! " says conscience. " But I can't! " 
 says fear. Yet even on this point there is not 
 full concord. Mr. Eustis " believes " — he counts 
 it quite enough to " believe " and needless to prove 
 — that this instinctive antagonism justifies the 
 subjection of the Negro, forcible if need be, to a 
 " white man's government ; " while, as far back 
 as 1867, General Hampton "recognized that in 
 a republic such as ours no citizen ought to be 
 excluded from any of the rights of citizenship 
 because of his color or of any other arbitrary 
 distinction." Where was and where is the gen- 
 tleman's instinctive race antagonism ? It is not 
 in his list of necessities. He believed " a large 
 class " was bent on establishing " race suprem- 
 acy," and if there was to be race supremacy," 
 then, of course, and naturally enough, it must 
 be the supremacy of the white race, instinct or 
 no instinct; while Mr. Eustis regarded the race- 
 supremacy scheme as a carpet-bagger's lie, and 
 could justify the subjugation of the Negro mainly 
 on the belief ^zt to protest against it is "an inso- 
 
A SIMPLER SOUTHERN QUESTION. IO3 
 
 lent demand for the revision of the laws of na- 
 ture." But under neither philosophy does the 
 Negro get a white man's public rights. 
 
 We find still wider variances on some other 
 points. " Is the Negro vote suppressed ? " 
 Messrs. Foraker, Edmunds, Chandler and Hal- 
 stead still roundly make the charge. But they 
 are all of one party and are hurf^an ; what is the 
 reply of the other side ? Human, too, of course ; 
 but it is also what Mr. Silas Wegg might call 
 "human warious." Says Governor Colquitt: 
 " We therefore will not suffer the charge . . . 
 of defrauding the Negro out of his vote to gp 
 unchallenged. We deny, as roundly as our 
 enemies make the charge, that the Negro is 
 denied a right to vote." 
 
 He speaks for the whole South. He addresses 
 himself to the " alleged suppression of the Negro 
 vote in the South," just as Mr. Watterson ad- 
 dresses himself to "a claim . . . that the 
 Negro vote is suppressed ... by the white 
 people of the South." True, Governor Colquitt 
 speaks especially for Georgia, but he distinctly 
 offers Georgia as a fair sample of all the Southern 
 States, and claims for the men on " the roll of 
 members elect from Georgia to the next Con- 
 gress, and in fact that from any other Southern 
 State," " a love of truth and honesty that would 
 
I04 A SIMPLER SOUTHERN QUESTION. 
 
 cause them to refuse the presidency if it had to 
 be won .by fraud on any one, black or white." 
 And Governor Colquitt ought to know. But 
 who ought to know better than Mr. Watterson ? 
 And Mr. Watterson, not some time before, but 
 six months later, writes : " I should be entitled 
 to no respect or credit if I pretended that there 
 is either a fair poll or count of the vast overflow 
 of black votes in States where there is a negro 
 majority, or that in the nature of things present 
 there can be." Now, the worst about these flat 
 contradictions, in a matter confessedly involving 
 the right to the nation's " respect and credit," and 
 to a reputation for " love of truth and honesty," 
 is that they will remain amicably unsettled. Each 
 respondent will sincerely believe what he has 
 stated, and the whole circle of party managers 
 on their side of the issue will go on playing 
 " thimble, thimble," with the tormented question. 
 Other secondary questions fare no better. Are 
 outbreaks between the two races in the South 
 frequently due to political causes ? For twenty 
 years we have heard that they are and that they 
 are not. What says Senator Eustis ? He has a 
 divinely ordered race antagonism to assert, and 
 so tells us that, this being the cause, almost any- 
 thing may be the occasion. "Some sudden 
 unforeseen incident, political, religious, educa- 
 
A SIMPLER SOUTHERN QUESTION. I05 
 
 tional, social, or what not, may at any moment 
 arouse the passions of race hatred and convulse 
 society by the outbreak of race conflicts." To 
 him the real cause of amazement is " that these 
 conflicts are not more frequent and more bloody." 
 Exactly; the race antagonism theory does not 
 half work. What says Governor Colquitt? 
 " Friendly relations habitually exist between our 
 white and black citizens, and are never disturbed 
 except on those occasions when the exigencies 
 of party politics call for an agitation of race 
 prejudices." 
 
 VII. Such discrepancies are broad ; but they 
 shrink to narrowness when compared with 
 Senator Eustis's contradictions of himself Is 
 the Negro contented and prospering ? There 
 are actually millions of citizens wanting to know. 
 Let Mr. Eustis answer : i. " His [the Negro's] 
 craving for federal tutorship is still unsatisfied. 
 The white man's patience is to-day taxed as ever 
 by the unending complaints of the Negro ai^d 
 his friends. ... He still yearns for this fruitless 
 agitation touching his right and his status.'* 
 2, "This total want of possible assimilation pro- 
 duces antipathy, ^«aj/ hostility, between the two 
 races. North as well as South," whose manifesta- 
 tions " both races regard as the incidents of a 
 struggle for supremacy and domination." 3. 
 
io6 j4 simpler southern question: 
 
 " If this [race antagonism] were not the case the 
 Negro would have the right to appeal to the 
 enlightened judgment and to the sense of justice 
 of the American people, to protect him against 
 the unfeeling arrogance and relentless proscrip- 
 tion which he has so long endured as the result 
 of the white man's intolerance." 4. "In the 
 South to-day he is happy, contented and satis- 
 fied! " Mr, Eustis is almost as violently out of 
 tune with himself as to the Negro's acceptance 
 of his private social status, but we shall not 
 quote ; the question of the Negro's entrance into 
 private white society, we again protest, is en- 
 tirely outside the circle of his civil rights. No 
 intelligent advocate of a common enjoyment of 
 all civil rights by both races has argued to the 
 contrary, and the present writer has never written 
 a line in favor of it As a moral and personal 
 question it admits, no doubt, of public discussion, 
 but as to its connection with any problem of 
 political or civil rights between the two races, all 
 that needs recognition is that it is completely out 
 of that question. 
 
 Such is the conflict of testimony from the 
 choicest "witnesses on one side of the case. It is 
 a common saying on that side, that communities 
 at a distance cannot understand this Negro 
 problem. The fact is quite overlooked that a 
 
A SIMPLER SOUTHERN QUESTION. I07 
 
 large majority of these communities no great 
 while back held the very same views nboufc it 
 that are still held so largely in the South ; and 
 the very feminine argument that opp9sing de- 
 baters " cannot understand " because of " pro- 
 found ignorance," etc., is only an unconscious 
 way of admitting that one's own side cannot 
 agree upon one full and clear explanation. 
 
 Fortunately we need not insist upon uniform 
 answers to these questions. They are second- 
 ary. Let us only push on to the problem's 
 main citadel. Whenever it falls all really depend- 
 ent questions must surrender. And many others ; 
 as, for instance, Must the average mental and 
 moral calibre of the whole Negro race in America 
 equal that of the white race, before any Negro 
 in a Southern State is entitled to the civil and 
 political standing decreed to all citizens of the 
 United States except the criminal and insane? 
 Or this : Does the Negro throughout the domain 
 of civil rights enjoy impersonal but individual 
 consideration, or is he subjected to a merely class 
 treatment ? The nation is tired of contradictory 
 answers to these questions. We can waive them, 
 if only such chosen witnesses as these Southern 
 writers in the Forum will answer this : Do you, 
 or your State party, recognize as civil rights, 
 whatever rights belong to any and every person 
 
I08 A SIMPLE/! S0U7VIERN QUESTION. 
 
 simply as a unit in the civil community or in any 
 public part of it ; and do you advocate the 
 Negro's enjoyment of each and every one of 
 these rights under only and exactly the same 
 protections and limitations he would be under if, 
 just as he is in everything else, he were white ? 
 This is not a national party question. The 
 Democratic Party is answering both yea and nay 
 to this in various parts of the Union. The 
 national party question is, whether the federal 
 government may compel the people of a State to 
 answer contrary to their will. We waive that 
 question. Will you, gentlemen, answer the 
 question we ask ? 
 
 If your answer is that you favor a separated 
 but equivalent enjoyment pf civil rights by the 
 two races, consider this : That equal civil rights 
 inhere in the individual and by virtue of indi- 
 vidual conditions and conduct. Equivalent civil 
 rights are fictitiously vested in classes and with- 
 out regard to individual conditions or conduct. 
 They cannot be even truly equivalent when sub- 
 stituted for equal civil rights on the ground of 
 the offensiveness of one class to the other and 
 without regard to the conditions and conduct of 
 the individual Do you not see that such pre- 
 tended equivalence establishes unequal civil lib- 
 erties, and do you favor, or do you condemn it ? 
 
A SIMPLER SOUTHERN QUESTION. IO9 
 
 Or answer a yet simpler question : If a free 
 ballot and a fair count should seem about to 
 decide in your State that equivalent civil rights 
 must give place to equal civil rights as the two 
 are above defined, would you or your State party 
 protect that free ballot and fair count and stand 
 by its decision ? 
 
 Look at this question closely. It is not one 
 upon which American political parties can hon- 
 estly divide. It is the question whether the 
 American government shall or shall not be a 
 government " of the people, by the people, for 
 the people," according to the Constitution's defi- 
 nition of who the people are. We beg to be 
 believed that every word here written is uttered 
 in a spirit of kindness and civil fraternity. We 
 believe that to these two questions a true Amer- 
 ican loyalty can in calm reflection give but one 
 answer. But we as sincerely believe that these 
 gentlemen on the other side are as honorable 
 and loyal in their intentions and are as sincere 
 lovers of their State's and the nation's common 
 welfare as they certainly are courteous in debate. 
 We trust that loyalty and courtesy for'an answer. 
 
WHAT MAKES THE COLOR LINE? 
 
 The popular assumption that a certain antag- 
 onisni between the white and black races is 
 natural, inborn, ineradicable, has never been 
 scientifically proved or disproved. Even if it 
 were, that would not necessarily fix a complete 
 and sufficient rule of conduct. To be governed 
 hierely by instincts is pure savagery. AH" 
 civilization is the result of the subordination of 
 instinct to reason, and to the necessities of peace, 
 amity and righteousness. To surrender to in- 
 stinct would destroy all civilization in three days. 
 If, then, the color line is the result of natural 
 instincts, the commonest -daily needs of the 
 merest civilization require that we should ask 
 ourselves, is it better or worse to repress or cher- 
 ish this instinct and this color line? Wherein 
 and how far is its repression, or its maintenance, 
 the better ? If we decide that in civil and polit- 
 ical matters the color line is bad, the next ques- 
 tion must be, who makes the color line in poli- 
 tics, and what will break it ? The fact is, certain 
 men are continually swinging between two state- 
 ments : First, that the color line in everything 
 else but politics is an imperative necessity; and, 
 no 
 
WHAT MAKES THE COLOR LINE f III 
 
 second, that the color line in politics is the source 
 of all their trouble, and is drawn by the black 
 man, against the white man's choice. But poli- 
 tics is not and cannot be a thing by itself; with- 
 out the other provinces of life, politics is no more 
 than the ciphers of an arithmetical number. 
 Politics is what we do or propose to do in and 
 for the various relations of public society. So, 
 then, no progress can be made in the solution of 
 Southern troubles until we settle the question, 
 not who makes, but wfiat makes the color line 
 in politics. For, obviously, one set of people 
 may be compelled to draw a line in politics for 
 which another set of people is morally respon- 
 sible. But when we settle what draws the color 
 line in politics, we are preparing ourselves to* say 
 whether the line need be drawn or not. ' How- 
 ever, to inquire carefully who draws the color 
 line, may be the easiest way to demonstrate what 
 draws it. Let us point out the strictly artificial 
 character of certain things, now existing and 
 active, which would compel the drawing of race 
 lines by any race under heaven that might be 
 subjected to them. 
 
 Some of these, says a recent Southern writer, 
 are just as strictly of white men's own making 
 as they are artificial. To deny, abridge or jeop- 
 ardize a negro's right to vote, to hold office, to 
 
1 1 2 WHyi T MAKES THE COL OR LINE ? 
 
 sit on jury, or to enjoy any of the public advan- 
 tages around him on the same terms as others, 
 without any consideration of his own individual 
 values — good, bad or indifferent — except that he 
 is an individual of a certain race^ is 'making an 
 entirely artificial and irrelevant use of a limited 
 natural distinction. But, says this writer, the 
 Negroes obtained all these " cardinal arid essen- 
 tial rights in spite of our [Southern white men's] 
 most determined and bitter opposition." Speak- 
 ing as an old citizen of Virginia, he says that the 
 poll-tax as a qualification for voting was a meas- 
 ure aimed solely at the negro, and was finally 
 abolished because it was found to keep more 
 whites than blacks from the polls. In North Caro- 
 lina, by laws expressly and avowedly enacted for 
 that purpose, the form of government is central- 
 ized, the county officers are appointed by the 
 Governor, and the Negroes are deprived of the 
 local self-government which county majorities of 
 their race might give them. In South Caroling, 
 the system of electoral machinery is especially 
 and confessedly designed, and effectually ope- 
 rated, to deprive the Negroes of a voice in politics. 
 He quotes from a leading Southern newspaper, 
 that " as long as a white man capable of holding 
 office can be found, no negro, however worthy 
 and capable, shall be appointed." 
 
WHA T MAKES THE COL OR LINE f 1 1 3 
 
 The Negroes never did and do not now draw 
 a strict color line in politics. Even in recon- 
 struction days, when everything favored Negro 
 supremacy, the Negroes generally entrusted the 
 public offices of county and State to white men. 
 And speaking for Virginia, even as late as 1878- 
 82, when the party of which the Negroes were 
 the main strength had absolute control of the 
 State, almost every office, from United States 
 Senator to clerks in the State Capitol, were given 
 to white men, and white men were elected to 
 Congress, and to the State Legislature, by un- 
 questioned Negro majorities. Even to this day, 
 in the so-called " Black Q^unii^s," the negroes 
 generally yield to the whites all but the smallest 
 and least desirable offices. "Whatever their other 
 defects," says the writer quoted, "the Negroes, as 
 a rule, have sense enough to select for office- 
 holders the best whites they can find in their 
 own party, and in default of them they select the 
 best Democrats obtainable." If the negroes are 
 too ignorant to fill the offices themselves, surely 
 no better testimony than this to their wisdom 
 and public spirit could be asked for. And if they 
 do this because of their own incompetency to 
 govern, all the more from this example, Southern 
 white people "should dismiss, as unmanly and 
 unwarrantable, the fear that ruin and disaster 
 
1 1 4 fV//A T MAKES THE COL OR LINE f 
 
 will follow in the train of the free suffrage of the 
 blacks." 
 
 The adherence of the Negro to what the South 
 calls the " Radical " party is the only result that 
 could be expected, in view of the attitude of the 
 two parties in the South toward him. The one 
 gave him freedom and citizenship, and promises, 
 at least, to do what it can to secure him in the 
 exercise of his rights. The other still says to 
 him not only that he belongs to a degraded and 
 inferior race, but that in all his public relations 
 he must be judged and treated according to his 
 race's merits and demerits, while his white fellow- 
 citizen monopolizes the ennobling liberty of being 
 judged and treated according to what he is him- 
 self " With these facts before us, how caa we 
 expect the Negroes to be anythirig but our politi- 
 cal opponents and the adherents of our political 
 adversaries ?" 
 
 " To break this dark and ominous color line, 
 rests with us ; but we can only obliterate it by 
 treating the Negroes with equity and impar- 
 tiality, and by according them cheerfully all the 
 rights that we ourselves enjoy." 
 
 The sum is this: — 
 
 I. That where the color line is drawn arbi- 
 trarily and artificially in any merely civil relation 
 in the South, it is drawn by the white man. 
 
IVJ/A T MAKES THE COL OR LINE f 1 1 5 
 
 2. That even by the white man the black 
 man is not charged with drawing the color line 
 contmrj' to the while man's wish, s.uv only \\\ 
 politics. 
 
 3. That even in politics the black man draws 
 the color line only where any man would draw 
 it if he were colored ; that is, only against those 
 white men who draw the color line inexorably 
 in every other public relation. 
 
 Why, then, In strictly public relations should 
 not this incalculably expensive color line be 
 removed ? 
 
THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FOR 
 PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 I. 
 
 The world has ceased to look to imperial rule 
 for pure government. Men may at times still 
 couple the two, but it is only in momentary 
 resentment of the fact that nowhere yet is there 
 a people under electoral rule whose government 
 is entirely pure. 
 
 Yet, excepting Russia, there is hardly a people 
 of European origin on5arth that has not secured 
 in some valuable degree the enjoyment of elec- 
 toral representative government; and although 
 the impurities remaining in such governments lie 
 mainly in their defective electoral methods, yet 
 the world refuses to look back to imperial rule 
 for refuge or remedy. Not the suffocation, but 
 the purification, of the ballot is recognized as 
 the key to the purification of government. 
 
 But how shall we purify the ballot? We can- 
 not say only the pure shall vote, and then decide, 
 on crude generalizations who, or what sorts, are 
 pure. That would be as if instead of making a 
 filter work thoroughly, we should forbid that any 
 Ii6 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. U/ 
 
 but pure water be put into the filter. No class or 
 party is so pure but its vote needs the filtration 
 of effective electoral methods ; methods so effec- 
 tive as to bear the whole strain of a genuinely- 
 popular. vote. For any class to say, " The pure- 
 shall constitute the State, and we are the pure," 
 is itself imperial tyranny. But we can say the 
 vote shall be pure, and trust ultimately to see a 
 purified ballot purify the balloters. Not the 
 banishment of all impure masses from the polls, 
 but the equal and complete emancipation of all 
 balloters from all impure temptations or con- 
 straints, is the key to the purification of the ballot. 
 It stands to reason that most men want good 
 government. If without constraints they choose 
 bad government it is by mistake. Society dis- 
 franchises the felon, the idiot, the pauper, the 
 lunatic, because it is fair to infer, as it is not of 
 men in general, that they have no clear choice 
 for good government. The only trouble is that 
 though most men want good government, they 
 want it, mostly, for themselves. From these two 
 truths rise the wisdom and necessity of self- 
 government. Men can never safely depend upon 
 others to supply them benevolently with good 
 government. " No man is good enough to 
 govern another without his consent ; " the only 
 free government is self-government. But the 
 
Il8 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 only practicable self-government on any large 
 scale being electoral and representative, the 
 purity of the ballot becomes a vital necessity. 
 For the only true end of self-government is 
 free government, and pf free government, pure 
 government, as of pure government it is the 
 purity, no less than the prosperity, of the whole 
 people. No government or political party has 
 ever yet attained complete purity, because ends 
 must wait on means and pure government can- 
 not be got except through free government, nor 
 free government except by self-government 
 
 Indeed, purity and freedom are so interwoven 
 and identified with one another that to distinguish 
 between them scarcely separates them in the 
 mind. But a pure government is especially one 
 where all the people are wholly and equally pro- 
 tected from the possible corruptness of officials ; 
 while a free government is one in which all civil 
 classes, in office or out of office, and all political 
 parties, in power or out of power, are fully and 
 equally protected from each other. Obviously, 
 there can be no united and effective effort for 
 such pure government, while an insecurity of 
 free government keeps classes or parties pre- 
 occupied with one another's actual or possible 
 aggressions. Probity is the one absolute essen- 
 tial of society's happiness. An impure govern- 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT, flQ 
 
 ment makes an impure people, and pure govern- 
 ment would be society's transcendent necessity 
 were it not that to lose free government is to 
 lose both. The end must wait on the means. 
 Pure government is pure gold ; but to get gold 
 in continuous supply you must first have iron. 
 Free government is iron — ^tron and steel. So 
 first of all free government, and then pure 
 government. 
 
 Yet we must confront the opposite truth. A 
 government not free, nor trying to become free, 
 must become corrupt — cannot become pure ; but 
 even a free government cannot remain corrupt 
 and continue free. True freedom is liberty with 
 equity; corruption is liberty without equity ; and 
 no man gets a freedom he ought not to have, 
 without paying for it some other freedom he 
 cannot afford to lose. The Reconstruction State 
 governments in the South after the Civil War 
 were set up on very broad and commendable 
 foundations of free government ; but not using 
 free government as an end to pure government, 
 they fell, owing their fall largely to the cor- 
 ruption of the ballot, and actually overthrown 
 by a party whose opposing policy was the im- 
 practicable proposition of pure government first, 
 free government afterward. 
 
 And now, as to these things, where do we, 
 
120 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 of America, stand ? The answer is not inspiring. 
 There is probably not a State in our Union whose 
 good citizens do not confess and lament corrup- 
 tion in its elections. What the Governor of New 
 York writes of his own State is true of the whole 
 Union. " Bribery and intimidation are not con- 
 fined to any locality." How is this ? 
 
 For one thing, overlooking the degree of 
 freedom attained by other countries since we 
 declared ours, we have learned to lay upon our 
 freedom the false charge of having: produced 
 our political corruption. Many countries have 
 become almost or quite as free as we, even in 
 the matter of suffrage, and are pressing forward, 
 while among us voices are heard repenting our 
 rashness, as though in manhood suffrage we had 
 made a mistake which the rest of the world was 
 condemning. Whether of the French, the Ger- 
 mans, the Italians, we admit or deny that they 
 are as free as we, we have to confess that such 
 freedom as they enjoy is not a gift bestowed 
 upon them by the purity of "strong" govern- 
 ments. It is a prize snatched by them from cor- 
 rupt governments, and such purification as they 
 have wrought is the product of freedom. Even 
 if they have, with less freedom than we, effected 
 some larger purifications of government — this 
 of the ballot, for instance — still they have done 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVER!^MENT. 121 
 
 it on the plan of free government the means, 
 pure government the end. They teach us not 
 that we are too free, but only that we have been 
 too well pleased with freedom as an ultimate 
 end. 
 
 But our fathers had not only to establish free 
 States and free institutions without models- before 
 them ; they had other great tasks. For instance, 
 they had to learn State and national banking and 
 general public financiering; and they learned 
 them in a series of gigantic blunders in com- 
 parison with whose devastating results those of 
 the Southern Reconstruction governments of 
 i868-'77 sink into insignificance. In other 
 words, they had to learn how to vote wisely ; 
 and no people ever learned how to vote except 
 by voting. 
 
 Moreover, while for over a hundred years we 
 have had great freedom, for three-fourths of that 
 time we had also a great slavery, which con- 
 stantly threatened the destruction of true free- 
 dom. Not that even the pro-slavery party, what- 
 ever its leaders may have been, wanted govern- 
 ment to be bad, or free men to be less free ; they 
 even looked forward — though with more longing 
 than hope — to some indefinite day, when their 
 own slaves might somehow enter into freedom. 
 Beyond dispute, then, as to-day, a vast majority 
 
122 STRUGGLE FOR FVRE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 of the whole people in every State of the Union 
 wanted both free and pure government; but we 
 were divided into two opposing hosts ; one for 
 pure government through free government, the 
 other for pure government before free govern- 
 ment. Out of the resulting strife has come the 
 nation's declaration for all time, that pure govern- 
 ment cannot come before free government, and 
 that not even in the name of pure government 
 shall true freedom be abridged. 
 
 Another obvious truth : pure and free govern- 
 ments advance by alternating steps. Men will 
 not help others to set up pure government who 
 refuse them free government. Nor will men 
 help those to advance free government who 
 refuse them'pufe government ; and if each school 
 holds out hostilely against the other, ruin must 
 follow'; but if not, a patriotic and entirely noble 
 political commerce may spring up between the 
 two. A nfttion so doing may have to see itself 
 outstripped for a moment in the direction of 
 free government by others less pure, or of pure 
 government by others less free, or of material 
 wealth by others neither so pure nor so free ; 
 but it is, nevertheless, on a broader, higher road 
 to perfect freedom, purity, and prosperity at last, 
 than any different sort can possibly be. 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 1 23 
 
 II. 
 
 There is a part of our country, however, where 
 conditions are seemingly so peculiar and excep- 
 tional that to innumerable minds both there and 
 throughout the nation, no theorizing on the rela- 
 tions and necessities of pure and free government 
 can be made to appear practicably applicable. 
 We must grapple with the very facts in this 
 specific case, or else our theorizings are of no 
 use to those who, in the North or South, stand 
 distraught between two seemingly antagonistic 
 necessities, the one for pure, the other for free, 
 governments in our Southern States. 
 
 Even the initial axiom, that most men want 
 good government, is denied. Most white men, 
 yes; but here is the whole lower m^ss made up 
 of an inferior race which, we are assured, neither 
 knows nor cares anything about good govern- 
 ment. So ignorant, unintelligent, and base are 
 they, it is said, that to give them any larger free- 
 dom than they are now allowed would only be 
 to make them easily and certainly the tools of 
 the most vicious misleaders of popular cupidity, 
 vanity and passion. To offer by genuine proffers 
 of fuller civil freedom to buy their cooperation 
 for measures looking to purer government, it is 
 maintained, would make them drunk with self- 
 
124 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT, 
 
 importance, and would be a suicidal confession 
 that the present ruling class is not stfqng and 
 pure enough to establish and maintain pure 
 government without the aid of the ruled. To 
 give the Negro the same full civil and political 
 freedom that the white man has, would, they 
 say, be fatal, because in that case white men 
 would never divide on questions of public policy, 
 lest the blacks, if not already united should at 
 once unite, and under corrupt leaders seize the 
 reins of power. 
 
 Now to these things what can we answer? 
 
 Let us take them seriatim. First, then, as to 
 the statement that virtually the whole mass of 
 Negroes in the South care nothing for good 
 government, we say, that to establish such a vast 
 exception to so general a truth requires exhaus- 
 tive proofs. Where are they? Reconstruction 
 times do not furnish them. They may show 
 that the Reconstruction party, white and Negro, 
 constantly and formidably opposed by a party 
 exclusively white and hostile to the equal civil 
 liberties of whites and Negroes, did not achieve, 
 may be did not often earnestly try to achieve, 
 purity in government. But they do not prove 
 that the Negroes would not have been well 
 pleased to join pure government with free. They 
 only prove our premise, that there can be no 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 1 2$ 
 
 effective effort for pure government, while an in- 
 security of free government keeps classes or 
 parties occupied with one another's actual or 
 possible aggressions. The great majority of the 
 Negroes are illiterate, improvident, reckless and 
 degraded. But so is the Irish peasant. So is 
 the Russian serf The fact is proof presumptive 
 that Irish, Russian, or Negro — they are far more 
 concerned for a better freedom, whether eco- 
 nomic, civil or political, than for pure govern- 
 ment; but not that pure government is some- 
 thing they would rather not have. 
 
 How could it be? Tens of thousands of them 
 own the land they till, the houses they live in. 
 With scarcely a very rich man among them, they 
 own to-day certainly not less than |!ic»,ooo,ocx), 
 some say ^160,000,000 worth of taxable wealth. 
 Over 1,000,000 of their children, half their total 
 school population, are enrolled in the public 
 schools, where their average daily attendance is 
 more than 600,000. Their principal industry is 
 agriculture, the most peaceable and peace-pro- 
 moting labor of the hand known to mankind. 
 Their crops in the year 1889, unless high jour- 
 nalistic authority is in error, aggregated the value 
 of $900,000,000. Is it to be believed that the 
 whole mass, or any preponderating fraction of 
 such a people as this is so supinely indifferent to, 
 
126 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 or so abjectly ignorant of, the advantages of 
 pure over corrupt government, that they prefer 
 the corrupt, other things being equal ? And are 
 we to credit this statement on the bare, emo- 
 tional declaration of communities that a few 
 years ago — claiming to be the only people who 
 are in a position to understand the Negro — -hon- 
 estly believed he would not earn his bread in a 
 state of freedom, and was mentally incapable of 
 receiving an ordinary common school education ? 
 Must we go even further and believe that none 
 of them, not even a moderate number, care 
 enough for the purification of the governments 
 over them to vote for pure measures and good 
 rulers, even if these should boldly declare for a 
 removal of unjust encroachments upon their 
 public rights and liberties ? Hundreds of thous- 
 ands of them take pains— not a few take risks^ 
 to vote, voting far oflener for white men than 
 for colored. Do these prefer corrupt rulers and 
 measures, and for mere corruption'? sake? The 
 answer is familiar. Their leaders, it is said, do 
 actually want corruption for its own sake, to 
 fatten on it, and in vast solid masses the great 
 black herd blindly follows these leaders. But 
 wherein lies the strange power of these leaders ? 
 In consanguinity ? They are oflener white than 
 colored. In promises of official patronage? 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 12/ 
 
 There are not places enough to go half around 
 among the leaders. How then ? By the literal 
 buying of the ballots ? Ballot buying may turn 
 the fortune of a close election, but it can never 
 make whole vast masses of people vote all one 
 way. How then do they lead them ? They lead 
 them by means that prevail, not because these 
 masses are of Negro race, nor because they are 
 ignorant and degraded, but because they are 
 human; by means of promises of deliverance 
 from oppressive or offensive public conditions, 
 from which they see other men profitably free, 
 and long themselves to be delivered. That men 
 should be willing to follow whoever is for their 
 induction into all and only the full measure of 
 American freedom, and count that their supreme 
 necessity, is the poorest proof in the world that 
 they are all opposed to pure government. It is 
 rarely, if ever, said that the Negroes have no 
 patriotism. But patriotism inevitably implies 
 some worthy-measure of desire for pure govern- 
 ment. Can any one suppose there is no patriot- 
 ism anywhere among 8,000,000 of people who 
 cannot be worried out of the country of their 
 birlh ? The assertion that the whole mass of 
 Negroes in the South is inimical to pure govern- 
 ment, is emotional, not rational. 
 
128 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 III. 
 
 But we have next the assertion that they 
 would become so if the hand of suppression 
 were withdrawn. This is a very ancient argu- 
 ment. A century ago it was believed and prac- 
 tically applied against millions of white men, just 
 as it isn6w urged against millions of Negroes, 
 and was based on the same specious assumption, 
 that the ignorant, unintelligent and unmoneyed 
 man is virtually in all cases dangerous to society 
 and government, and most dangerous when in- 
 vested with civil and political liberty. Nor was 
 its repudiation any rash leap taken initially by 
 our own country in the heat /of revolution. 
 Manhood suffrage, even for white citizens of the 
 United Stktes, is barely seventy-five years old, 
 and of all the earlier States of the Union, is 
 youngest in New England. To-day, except only 
 Russia and one or two others less notable, every 
 white man's government in the world has either 
 reached or is steadily moving toward manhood 
 suffrage. The republics of South and Central 
 America, some of which are not purely white 
 men's governments at all, are well along on the 
 same road, and wherever they have also shaken 
 off the slavery of slaveholding and the fetters of 
 ecclesiastical tyranny, are rising into commer- 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 1 29 
 
 cial and political greatness. Yet we must still 
 meet the same argument, long overturned as to 
 white men, but readapted and made special 
 against Negroes as so far exceeding white 
 men in cupidity, vanity and passion, that what 
 political experiment may have proved even as to 
 ignorant, unintelligent and unmoneyed white 
 men, is not thereby made even supposably pos- 
 sible as to Negroes. 
 
 The loose assertions offered to support this 
 assumption we deny. We deny that this utter 
 and manifest unfitness of the Negro is believed 
 by all respectable Southern white men. All 
 through the South there are worthy white men 
 who deny that the experiment need be futile 
 or disastrous. We deny that Southern white 
 men by virtue of close daily contact with the 
 Negro in multitude are so exclusively able to 
 decide this point, that their word ought to be 
 final. Some men may be too far off, but just as 
 certainly others may be too near, to decide it 
 uncounselled ; and in fact every great step thus 
 far taken towards the Negro's real betterment 
 has been first proposed by those remote from 
 him while it has been condemned as idle or 
 dangerous by those nearest him. We deny that 
 the experiment of full civil and political liberty 
 has ever been fairly tried on the Negroes of the 
 
I30 STRUGGLE FOR PlTRE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 South. One thing has always been lacking, the 
 want of which has made the experiment a false 
 and unfair trial. It always lacked the consent — 
 it had the constant vehement opposition — of 
 almost the whole upper class of society in the 
 commonwealth where the freedman's new and 
 untried citizenship rested. Without land-owner- 
 ship, commerce, credit, learning, political or 
 financial experience, the world's acquaintance 
 and esteem, the habit of organization, or any 
 other element of political power except the naked 
 ballot and the ability to appeal at last resort to 
 the Federal authority, and with almost the 
 whole upper class of society, and well nigh all 
 these elements of power skillfully arrayed against 
 them, the Negroes, accepting the party leader- 
 ship and fellowship of any and every sort of 
 white man vjho would only recognize their new 
 tenure of rights, took up the task, abandoned to 
 them in confident derision by their former mas- 
 ters, of establishing equal free government for all, 
 in the States whose governments had never be- 
 fore been free to other than white men. The 
 resulting governments were lamentably corrupt. 
 But it was the day of Tweed, rings and Credit 
 Mobiliers, great and small, the climacteric hour 
 of official corruption throughout a whole nation 
 hitherto absorbed in the rougher work of estab- 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT, I3I. 
 
 lishing a complete freedom. Even so they began 
 to rise on broader, truer foundations of political 
 liberty and equity than had ever been laid in 
 those States before : and certainly no people, even 
 when not antagonized by the great bulk of a 
 powerful class above them, ever set up both free 
 and pure government in the first twelve years of 
 their bodily emancipation or the first nine years 
 of their enfranchisement. Another twelve years 
 has passed,* with the Negroes' political power 
 nullified, and the white, intelligent, wealth hold- 
 ing class in uninterrupted control ; and still that 
 class is longing and groping in vain for pure 
 government, and is confessedly farther from it at 
 the end of its twelfth year of recovered control 
 than it was at the end of its first, while the prin- 
 ciples of free government are crowded back to 
 where they were twenty years ago. No, it is 
 not the admission of, it is the refusal to admit, 
 the Negro into political co-partnership — not 
 monopoly — on the basis of a union of free and 
 pure governments, that has produced the very 
 conditions which it was argued such admission 
 would precipitate. 
 
 It was this refusal that threw him, intoxicated^ 
 with more importance and power than either 
 friend or foe intended him to have, into the arms 
 of political hypocrites and thieves. It is this 
 
132 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 refusal that has demolished with ghastly clear- 
 ness the truth, counted suicidal to confess, that 
 even the present ruling class is not strong enough 
 or pure enough to establish and maintain pure 
 government without the aid and consent of the 
 governed. J admit the Negro problem iS not al- 
 ways and only political. No problfem can be. 
 It is not in the nature of politics for any ques- 
 tion to be only political. The Negro (question is 
 fundamentally a question of civil rights, includ- 
 ing political rights as the fortress of all the others. 
 It is not always a peculiarly African proneness to 
 anarchy; nor is it always race instinct; it is 
 often only the traditional pride of a master-class, 
 that remands the Negro to a separate and in- 
 vidious tenure of his civil rights; but it is to 
 perpetuate this alienism that he is excluded from 
 the political co-partnership ; and it is the struggle 
 to maintain this exclusion that keeps the colored 
 vote solid, prevents its white antagonists from 
 dividing where they differ as to other measures, 
 and holds them under a fatal One-Party idea 
 that rules them with a rod of iron. 
 
 We see then how far the facts of history and 
 present conditions are from proving the South- 
 ern States an exception to the rule that pure 
 government cannot be got by setting its claims 
 before and above free government. Rather, they 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 1 33 
 
 present these States as striking examples of free 
 government itself falling into decay through the 
 well-meant but fatal policy of seeking its puri- 
 fication by constricting the rights and liberties of 
 the weaker and inferior ranks of society. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Washington, bidding a last farewell to public 
 office, and uttering his parental warnings to the 
 people, pronounced, not largeness or universality 
 of freedom, nor illiteracy, nor unintelligence, but 
 a rankness of party spirit the worst enemy of 
 popular government. If he could characterize 
 "the alternate domination of one faction over 
 another " as " itself a frightful despotism," what 
 would he have said of an arbitrarily permanent 
 domination of one party over another and a cul- 
 mination of party spirit into the One-Party idea ; 
 the idea that a certain belief and policy are so 
 entirely, surely and exclusively right that men 
 who do not assent to them are incendiary, vile, 
 outrageous, and not morally entitled to an equal 
 liberty and security under the laws with those 
 from whom they dissent? A State ruled by 
 such a sentiment is no longer under a free 
 government. A people seeking pure govern- 
 ment under that idea are trifling with destiny 
 and hurrying towards disaster, and in simple 
 
134 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 humanity, if not in their own involved interest, 
 those who see their error ought to stop them if 
 there is a way to do it consistent with righteous 
 law. 
 
 Is there any such way ? Let us look at the 
 situation. The Reconstruction governments in 
 the South; while still holding, not for Negro 
 domination, which they never held for, but for 
 .equal fi-eo gove»nnie1\t for All, lost in large mea- 
 sure the nation's respect and good-will by an 
 acute moral and financial defalcation. They were 
 allowed to be overturned by measures often 
 severely revolutionary, on the assurance of their 
 opponents to the nation and to the world that 
 their only 'desire and design was pure govern- 
 ment, and that they were more than willing and 
 amply able to furnish it at once and follow it 
 closely with the amplest measure of free govern- 
 ment contemplated in the Amendments to the 
 Constitution. Some Southern men may deny 
 that this was the understanding on which their 
 party was allowed to retake the monopoly of its 
 State governments. The question is not impor- 
 tant, for it is not proposed here to mourn the 
 extinction of the Reconstruction governments 
 as one mourns the death of the righteous, nor 
 to lay upon the men who destroyed them the 
 whole blame of the error committed. Whatever 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 1 35 
 
 one or another's understanding was, it cannot 
 for a moment be denied that this was the hope 
 and expectation of the great North and West. 
 The blame — if blame were worthy of count — 
 was on those — whether in North or South, in 
 the Republican, or Democratic, or any third or 
 fourth party — who comforted themselves with 
 the delusion that a policy of pure government 
 first, iVcc j^ovcrnmcnt altervvard, couM produce 
 either free or pure government. Seeing atJ last 
 that this delusion is what was and is to blame, 
 the question who was to blame — where no side 
 was wrong by choice — is a question we may 
 sink, with its answer, forever beneath the sea 
 of oblivion. 
 
 Through twelve weary and distressful years 
 this fallacy has been given as fair a trial as any- 
 thing ever had, and to-day more manifestly than 
 ever before it is weighed in the balances and found 
 wanting. For years the show and promise of 
 better things joined themselves with a faith in 
 the all-healing power of time, peace and material 
 prosperity, to soothe the nation's solicitude and 
 sustain its hope. 
 
 The Southern State governments had hardly, 
 changed hands, when their financial credit began 
 to rise with a buoyancy which proved — if such 
 proof had been needed— that it was only th^ 
 
136 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 governments repudiated and antagonized by the 
 wealth-holding portion of the people that were 
 bankrupt, and, whether their action was justi- 
 fiable or not, it was nearer the truth to say 
 the people had bankrupted the governments 
 than that the governments had bankrupted the 
 people. 
 
 For a long time the sincerity and earnest dili- 
 gence of the more intelligent and liberal wing 
 of the Southern Conservatives bent itself to a 
 most commendable progressive measure ; one 
 which had already been irrevocably begun under 
 the Reconstruction governments as an indispen- 
 sable adjunct to the extension of civil or politi- 
 cal freedom. This measure was the expansion 
 of the public school system, a system which, 
 wherever it has found large establishment — in 
 America, England, or elsewhere — has always 
 followed; hot produced, the extension of the suf- 
 frage, This measure was, and is, practicable 
 even under the rule of the One-Party idea, 
 because, while public education is the own child 
 of the scheme of free government first, it is 
 almost the only important factor of that scheme 
 which does not obviously antagonize the oppo- 
 site policy. And yet this opposite policy of pure 
 government first is not, and by nature cannot be, 
 the zealous promoter of the free school system 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 1 37 
 
 that a free government policy is sure to be. A 
 policy of freedom first inevitably precipitates and 
 perpetuates an immediate and imperative exi- 
 gency which can be met only by an entirely 
 ample provision for the whole people's education. 
 The policy of pure government first, assum- 
 ing that ignorance and impurity are much the 
 same thing, promises that ignorance shall there- 
 fore not participate in government, and casting 
 about, now on the right hand and now on the 
 left, for expedients to prevent it, accepts free 
 schools as one, but with a divided credence and 
 a tame enthusiasm. This is why the Southern 
 States to-day have only schools enough for half 
 their school population, and believe they are 
 bearing as heavy a burden of school tax as any 
 people of equal means can, while the States and 
 territories of the West, under the ideas of free g6v- 
 ernment first and of two parties of equal rights, 
 are taxing themselves far heavier, even where 
 they have less wealth. The example of some of 
 these Western communities is complete proof 
 that the only sense in which it can be said that 
 the South is doing all it can for public education 
 is that Southern State legislators may be levying 
 as heavy a school tax as they can reasonably hope 
 to collect from a people lulled by the assurances 
 and methods of a policy of pure government 
 
138 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 first* It has been much reiterated in the South 
 and re-echoed in the North that the task of 
 public education in the Southern States suffers 
 a unique and unparalleled drawback in the fact 
 that while the Negroes enjoy nearly half the out- 
 lay of the school funds, almost the entire amount 
 of those funds is paid by white taxpayers. 
 But assuming this to be quite true in every other 
 regard, there are two points in which it is not so. 
 First, the very alphabet of economics teaches us 
 that all taxes do not rest entirely on those from 
 whom they are collected, but that hundreds of 
 thousands of men who are too poor to be found 
 enumerated on the tax-rolls are for all that 
 reached by taxation through the medium of rents 
 and similar indirections. And, second, that the 
 fact quoted is far from being unique and unpar- 
 alleled. The only thing peculiar about it is 
 that this lower and unmoneyed mass, which, as 
 
 * The Donaldionville {La.) Chief, of Feb. — , 1890, sayss 
 " We have 38 public schools in this parish and 9855 scholars lo 
 educate in them, or about 260 pupils to the teacher I 
 
 " Taking the maximum number of pupik fixed by the law, it 
 would require no less than 250 teachers to do justice to the 
 educational subjects of the parish. The • vast improvement ' is 
 mere brain figment. The whole yearly school income for our 
 parish is not much more than enough to conduct properly a suf- 
 ficient number of schools presided over by competent instructors 
 for thirty days. It is all that we can pay, however." 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 1 39 
 
 a matter of good investment in the whole public 
 interest, is in every State in the Union freely 
 accorded an enjoyment of the school funds out 
 of all proportion to its money contributions, 
 happens in the South to be a distinct race which 
 has been working for the last one hundred and 
 fifty years, but has been drawing wages only for 
 the last twenty-five. 
 
 V. 
 
 Another great progressive measure which 
 accompanied and still accompanies the policy 
 of pure-government-first, though it, too, began 
 under the opposite regime, was one which no 
 policy save absolute anarchy can ever resent. 
 This was the development of natural resources, 
 the multiplication of industries, the -increase of 
 material wealth. The party that represented 
 the bulk of society's landed and personal 
 wealth, inspired by the only policy it could 
 believe to be honorable or safe, entered into 
 entirely new relations to the public credit of 
 their towns, counties and States, and gave the 
 energy of a new hope to the making of private 
 fortunes. The successes of this movement have 
 been positively brilliant. The unadorned true 
 stories of Anniston and Chattanooga and Bir- 
 mingham, of Memphis and Nashville, and At- 
 
I40 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 lanta and Richmond, are almost as romantic as 
 they are inspiring, a theme lingered upon by 
 Northern tongues and a Northern press with a 
 warmth that indicates a proper recognition of the 
 North's own great gain in the South's prosperity. 
 Nevertheless, the very fullness and renown of this 
 success has wrought two grave errors. A saga- 
 cious and enterprising few may get rich in any 
 country blessed with natural resources; but no 
 country ever won or can win a large and perma- 
 nent prosperity save by the prosperity of its poor. 
 No country can ever build a sound prosperity 
 while it tolerates conditions that keep a large 
 lower mass on low wages and long hours. This 
 is the word, not of politicians alone, but of 
 economists and financiers, and this is a fact which 
 the sunburst of a sudden great material develop- 
 ment in many regions of the South has hidden in 
 deep shadow. That Southern men, still so largely 
 under the stress of Southern traditions, should 
 overlook this is largely natural and excusable; 
 but that the North, too, with its so wide and 
 fortunate experience of better conditions, should 
 not see and point out the oversight seems strange. 
 It may be doubted that there is a high-school 
 between Boston and Denver whose pupils are 
 not taught that the greatest source of the decay 
 of nations is the congestion of wealth and degra- 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. I4I 
 
 dation of poverty. No sufficient offsets for it 
 have yet been found in any scheme of public 
 society, but the search for them is the great 
 quest of the age, and the safety, peace and pros- 
 perity of Europe, the Americas, and the great 
 Australasian colonies is mainly due to the adop- 
 tion of such noble, though incomplete, offsets 
 as have been found. These are equal rights and 
 protection to opposing parties, free schools for 
 the whole people, manhood suffrage, and a pure, 
 free ballot. 
 
 Such is one of the two great errors that have 
 fastened themselves upon the otherwise entirely 
 admirable material development of the " New 
 South." The other is twin to it. It is that this 
 material development is not only economically 
 sound, but that it has also a political potentiality, 
 and can of itself solve, and is solving, the Southern 
 problem. Where is its solution ? The claim is 
 absurd. It is simply fantastical to expect i. mere 
 aggregation of private movements for the build- 
 ing of private fortunes to unravel the snarled 
 thread of civil and political entanglements in a 
 commonwealth. It may in self-defence rally to 
 the support of public financial credit ; but farther 
 it is not in its nature to go. What has this one 
 done? We are reminded that "in the South 
 there are Negro lawyers, teachers, editors, den- 
 
142 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 tists, doctors and preachers working in peace 
 and multiplying with the increasing ability of 
 their race to support them,", But whence 
 came they? Nine-tenths of those teachers and 
 preachers and ninety-nine hundredths of those 
 lawyers, editors, dentists and doctors have got 
 their professions in colleges built and sustained by 
 Northern money, and taught by Northern mis- 
 sionary teachers whom the great bulk of this New 
 South rewards with social ostracism. They work 
 in peace. But what a peace ! A peace bought by 
 silent endurance of a legalized system of arrogant 
 incivilities that make them, in almost every public 
 place, conspicuous objects of a public disdain 
 which is not always even silent. What single 
 one of those tyrannous and vulgar intrusions 
 of private social selection into purely public 
 places, has this New South of iron and coal 
 mines, and new railways and cotton mills, and 
 oil-presses removed ? Not one ! From the en- 
 nobling relaxations of the drama, the opera, the 
 oratorio, the orchestral symphony and sonata ; 
 from the edifying diversions of the popular lec- 
 ture, the picture gallery, and even the sacred 
 service and sermon of the popular preacher; 
 from the refining comforts of the first-class rail- 
 way coach and the public restaurant; from the 
 character making labors, disciplines and rewards 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 1 43 
 
 of every academy, college and even law, medical 
 and divinity school, supported by Southern 
 money and attended by white youth ; arid from 
 the popular respect paid to thase who ehjoy these 
 things and withheld from those to .whom they 
 are forbidden, these " Negro lawyers, teachers, 
 editors, dentists, doctors and preachers, working 
 in peace and multiplying with the increasing 
 ability of their race to support them," are shut 
 out by rules sustained by State legislation, 
 which refuses to share even the Decalogue on 
 equal terms with the Negro, but annexes to it 
 an eleventh and "colored" commandment — 
 " Thou shalt try to become a g^ntjeman." Where 
 has this New South movement Opened to colored 
 people, paying taxes or not, professionally edu- 
 cated or not, the privileges of a single public 
 library ? 
 
 Our attention is challenged to ^900,000,000 
 worth of crops raised in the South last year. 
 We are not told that the producers of this vast 
 abundance enjoy in one full and common mea- 
 sure all the public rights declared to be theirs by 
 the national Constitution. That falsehood so 
 long believed by so many even of those who 
 uttered it in North and South, is utterly worn 
 out. But we are asked if we can doubt that 
 such a product came from peaceful fields and 
 
144 STRUGGLE FOR PURlS GOVERNMENT. 
 
 contented and duly remunerated labor. Yes, we 
 can ! Did the vast wheat crops of ancient 
 Egypt come from peaceful fields and a well-con- 
 tented husbandry ? Are her pyramids the pro- 
 duct of duly remunerated labor ? Did the great 
 crop of i860 — raised when the Negroes were 
 half their present numbers — come from men 
 satisfied with their wages? From the eastern 
 borders of Russia, a huge wave of material de- 
 velopment is at present rolling eastward across 
 Siberia with an energy and speed until lately 
 supposed by Americans to be found only in our 
 own great, free West. The commerce of the 
 Volga rivals that of the Mississippi. The vol- 
 ume of trade of the city of Nizhni Novogorod 
 rose from some ;^6o,ooo,ooo in 1868 to about 
 ;f[ 1 20,000,000 in 1881. A great through Siberian 
 railway, to be completed in from three to six 
 years, is now in various stages of survey and con- 
 struction, whose trunk line alone will stretch 
 eastward to the Japan Sea, Jibout 5000 miles be- 
 yond Moscow. It runs already through millions 
 of acres of fruitful fields tilled by an industrious 
 peasantry. But is Siberia a free country ? Spain 
 is a land of harvest and song. Have the laborers 
 in her vineyards and olive-yards a freedom that 
 ought to satisfy a citizen of the United States ? 
 Has America any class of society in which we 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 1 45 
 
 can afford to cultivate contentment with a Rus- 
 sian or a Spanish measure of civil or political 
 liberty ? There is a contentment which is more 
 intolerable to the order and interest of a free 
 country like ours, than a discontent that leaves 
 the ripened grain unharvested to guard the 
 rights of free man. Which of the two has thjs 
 industrial development, or any other outcome of 
 the policy of pure government first, cherished 
 and stimulated ? For twelve years it has per- 
 suaded an apparent majority of the nation to 
 leave to it the fitting of the Negro for citizenship, 
 even refusing national aid to lift the burden of 
 public education it counts insupportable; yet to 
 this day it has made not the slightest provision 
 for admitting any Negro to the full measure of 
 any civil or political right by virtue of acquired 
 fitness. The Neiv Orleans Times-Democrat of 
 Nov. 5th, says, " The race issue is a national an- 
 tagonism . . . and has nothing whatever to do 
 with education or the lack of education. To 
 the Negro varnished with such learning as he is 
 capable of acquiring, there is even a more pro- 
 nounced antipathy than to the Negro of the 
 cotton-field and kitchen." " The schools," says 
 the Atlanta Constitution barely six months ago, 
 "have been in active operation for over twenty- 
 five years, and it is estimated that several hun- 
 
146 STRUGGLE FOR PIJrE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 dred thousand of the colored voters can now 
 read and write. The difficulties, however, have 
 increased with the progress of education, and are 
 now more difficult than they ever were before. . . . 
 Not the slightest advancement toward an adjust- 
 ment of the two races on political grounds has 
 been made anywhere, and even the direction of 
 such advance is a matter of speculation." In 
 plain words, after twelve years of wandering 
 through a night of false political traditions, these 
 largely sincere guides to pure government first 
 and free government afterwards, acknowledge at 
 last that they are lost in the woods under a star- 
 less sky. 
 
 VL 
 
 The failure to get good government has been 
 absolutely abject. Not only has no material 
 advance been made toward free government, 
 but the governments that started out twelve 
 years ago full of honest intentions to be or 
 become pure, have grown confessedly corrupt, 
 and are now avowing with hardihood or shame 
 things that a few years ago they denied with 
 indignation. Let it be gladly admitted that open 
 personal bribery of officials is rarel And natu- 
 rally ; for where an upper and property holding 
 class holds secure and arbitrary power over an 
 illiterate and destitute laboring class, and really 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 1 47 
 
 desires pure government, personal official in- 
 tegrity will still be demanded after equity has 
 been overlooked in legislation ; and whereas in 
 the struggle of an under class for better freedom 
 against great odds, the personal impurities of 
 leaders may be for some time overlooked, in an 
 effort of an upper class for pure government the 
 personal dishonesty of officials will be the last 
 symptom of hopeless and corrupt failure. The 
 fact still stands that the Southern party, whidh 
 really started in quest of the higher grounds of 
 pure government, is moving in a mass of corrupt 
 measures. In the late Prohibition movement in 
 Georgia its wholesale bribery of ignorant Ndgro 
 voters was open and boastful. 
 
 In Alabama, Mississippi, and other cotton 
 States, under a domination which more and 
 more tends to become merely a taxpayers' 
 government, there has sprung up a system 
 of crop-lien laws, mainly if not wholly devoted 
 to the protection of landholders and store- 
 keepers against farm tenants, so barren of 
 counter protections for the tenant that they 
 have fairly earned the name given them by a 
 United States judge in Arkansas, of "anaconda 
 mortgages." Said this gentleman in an address 
 before the Arkansas State Bar Association, in 
 1886. "as a result of these defective and bad 
 
148 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 laws, the State is afflicted with a type of money 
 lenders, traders, and methods of doing business 
 the like of which was never seen before." Quot- 
 ing from a parliament report the statement that 
 a certain creditor in Ireland had charged a Con- 
 naught pcn,<nnt n rnte of interest «ggregatin|» 
 43/^ per cent, per annum, he asked, "What is 
 43 J4 per cent, compared to the profits charged 
 by the holders of anaconda mortgages on tenants 
 in Arkansas ? They would scorn 43 ^ per cent" 
 And another member of the Association had 
 already said of a signer of one of these mort- 
 gages, " a place where he could borrow money 
 at usury would be an asylum to him .... 
 I have known men — laboring men, farmers and 
 renters — to pay twenty and twenty-five per cent 
 interest for money and secure its payment, rather 
 than mortgage their property and buy supplies 
 on credit" If in the face of these facts Negroes 
 are moving by tens of thousands from North 
 and South Carolina to Mississippi and Arkansas, 
 that surely is something not for us, but forNorth 
 and South Carolina to explain. Probably the 
 best explanation, beyond the eaper enterprise of 
 railroad companies, is that these ignorant laborers, 
 like thousands of other immigrants, do not know 
 what they are going to. 
 
 It will be said that the burdens of this system 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 1 49 
 
 fall as heavily on a white man as if he were 
 black. That may be, but it is a system unknown 
 in our free land except in States where the tenant 
 class is mostly Negroes, and just as far as white 
 debtors fall under it, it illustrates a fact of which 
 it IS far from hoingf tho only r'oof; flu( Ihii 
 whole policy of the black man's repression under 
 a taxpayer's government is constantly escaping 
 from its intended bounds and running into a 
 fierce and general oppression of the laboring 
 classes, white or black. Yet the wealth-holding, 
 taxpaying citizens of these same Stalc'.'i,. slilt 
 really and untiringly bent upon a l.irp^e autl 
 noble renaissance in commerce, industry and 
 government, hold conventions and subscribe 
 money to promote immigration. Can no one 
 make them understand that a desirable immi- 
 gration will never come to a land of long hours, 
 low wages and "anaconda mortgages." The 
 only way to make the South a good place for 
 white men to come to is to make it a good 
 place for black men to stay in. 
 
 It belongs to the imperfections of human 
 society even at its best, that as yet, even under 
 the purest, freest conditions, the poor suffer 
 many times more chances than the rich of being- 
 legally punished for criminal errors. Moreover, 
 the poor man's home and neighborhood become 
 
150 STRUGGLE FOR Pt7RE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 the cesspool and garbage heap of the prisons' 
 discharges, pardons and escapes. The penal 
 systern of a country is therefore supremely the 
 very poor man's concern, if not even his supreme 
 concern. Hence it can never be stripped of a 
 political value. If there were no other reason 
 why the poor and ignorant should enjoy the 
 scant self-protection of manhood suffrage, this 
 would be enough. And with what clearness 
 has the Southern party of one-party-and-pu re- 
 government proved this? For twelve years 
 it has retained the Convict Lease System, a 
 prison system entirely peculiar to the Southern 
 States, and baffling comparison for corrupt and 
 mortal cruelty with any system of prisons be- 
 tween here and St. Petersburg. It has not merely 
 retained the system. Legislatures and governors 
 have, sometimes officially, sometimes unofficially, 
 allowed " penitentiary rings " to become financial 
 and political factors in the fortunes of their parties 
 and their States, while all the better elements of 
 the party and press, burning with righteous 
 shame and resentment, and crying out against 
 them, nevertheless endure the outrage clamped 
 and riveted upon them by the exigencies of a 
 One-party policy and the alienation of the great 
 bulk of the poor man's vote. Nowhere this side 
 of Russia and Turkey is there a region of country 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT, 151 
 
 of such ratio of wealth or population, so reck- 
 lessly, suicidally barren of reformatories for des- 
 titute and wayward boys and girls. 
 
 But there are other fruits of this well-meant 
 but vain policy. In 1868 the Reconstruction 
 party in North Carolina adopted, by a new con- 
 stitution, the township system so well and favor- 
 ably known in the States of the North and West. 
 When in 1875 the party of pure-government-first 
 gained power, however much personal corrup- 
 tion in office it may have found, it found ^Iso 
 as perfect a form of republican State government 
 as there was in the Union. Every provision 
 which any State enjoyed for the protection of 
 public society from its bad members and bad 
 impulses, was either provided or easily procur- 
 able under the constitution of the State. Yet 
 within a year this party, for the avowed purpose 
 of nullifying the power of their opponents in 
 every county where those opponents were still in 
 the majority, so amended the State constitution 
 as to take away the powers of self-government 
 from every county in the State and centralize 
 them in the legislature under a base counterfeit 
 of the system of government displaced by the 
 "radicals" in 1868. Under this system — un- 
 known to any other State — a preponderance of 
 power over elections and election returns is se- 
 
152 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 cured to the majority in the State legislature, so 
 great that no party retaining it can clear itself 
 of the charge of corrupt intentions. In South 
 Carolina this same party, now that rifle clubs 
 and ^tissue ballots have passed away, confesses, 
 with the pardonable buoyancy of a relieved con- 
 science, that those measures were intolerably 
 corrupt. Yet the eight-box system still stands 
 in their stead, raising the same blush of mortifi- 
 cation, yet commanding from them the same 
 subjection as do lynch law and the convict 
 lease system. 
 
 Such are the conditions after twelve years of ef- 
 forts by an intelligent, accomplished, determined, 
 persistent, heroic people to hold down free gov- 
 ernment with one hand till they can set up pure 
 government with the other. For twelve of our 
 modern years, each one worth an ancient century, 
 the cry of pure government first has prevailed, 
 not only among themselves but throughout the 
 nation. For its sake, this nation, almost as uni- 
 versally dazed as they by the bright plausibility 
 of the mistake, has endured more deadly out- 
 rages against its citizens within its own borders 
 than it would have tamely submitted to from all 
 the great powers of the earth combined. The 
 mass to be held in subjection has been the inferior 
 in numbers, prowess, intelligence, wealth and 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 1 53 
 
 every other element of military or political 
 strength; not turbulent and ferocious, but on 
 the Southern white man's testimoii)'. tractable, 
 amiable, dependent. The great national party 
 that, unhindered, might have lifted this subjec- 
 tion, has for twenty-five years found itself op- 
 posed, and for the last twelve ycar.s pinioned, 
 by another party quite or almost its match in 
 numbers, power, integrity, and skill, vehemently 
 charging it with rushing to the rescue of free- 
 dom too rashly for freedom's good. The class 
 proposing to rule the South alone, is honest 
 in purpose, still filled with the spirit of free- 
 dom that gave us Washington, and yet as im- 
 perial as ancient Rome. (It is not they, it is 
 only their policy, that is found wanting) If any 
 people on earth could have carried that policy 
 to success they could. They have proved for 
 all time and for all mankind that it can never 
 be done. 
 
 The day in which this truth becomes a popu- 
 lar conviction among our white brethren of the 
 South and among millions in the North whose 
 conversion waits only on theirs, will be the 
 brightest, gladdest, best day that ever dawned 
 on this continent. I believe that dawn is now' 
 breaking. 
 
154 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 VII. 
 
 True, we hear voices through the Southern 
 press crying new schemes for avoiding the sim- 
 ple necessities of free government: the establish- 
 ment of a Negro Territory; a disfranchisement 
 of over half the Negroes by an educational 
 .qualification at the polls; their total disfranchise- 
 ment by the repeal of the Fourteenth Amend- 
 ment; and in the very Senate a proposition to 
 deport the Negro to Africa at the national 
 expense, although at the same time and all over 
 the South, men in the same party from which 
 the project comes are stating with new frankness 
 their old doctrine, that though the country shall 
 never belong to the Negro, the Negro simply 
 shall belong to the country. But the very for- 
 lornness of these absurd projects, built, them- 
 selves, on open confessions that the past is a 
 failure and that something different must be done 
 with all speed, is a final admission that the party 
 pledged to solve the Negro Question without 
 consulting the Negro, feels that it must change 
 its policy or drop from under the nation's mis- 
 placed hopes. 
 
 The press of the nation almost with one voice 
 rejects the scheme of a Negro territory. We 
 have more Negro territories now than either 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 1 55 
 
 white men or Negroes want. Our Indian Terri- 
 tory and Indian deportations and reservations 
 have only wronged the savage, dishpnoted civil- 
 ization, complicated the whole Indian question, 
 and still hold it over us in costly and bloody sus- 
 pense until we shall muster humanity and com- 
 mon sense enough to do unto him as we would 
 that our Southern brother would do unto the 
 Negro — cease condescension, bounty, and fraud, 
 and show mercy, justice and human fraternity. 
 
 The proposition to repeal the Fourteenth 
 Amendment deserves as little respect and atten- 
 tion as it is receiving. It would disfranchise 
 thousands of taxpayers and thousands of men 
 able to read and write, still leaving the franchise 
 with hundreds of thousands of total illiterates 
 paying no direct taxes. It would simply re- 
 establish a system of irrational race discrimina- 
 tion. It is well for the honor of the good State 
 of Mississippi, where the proposition has arisen, 
 that along with it comes word that at last an 
 attempt has been made, with some hope of 
 permanent success, to abolish in that State the 
 Convict Lease System. 
 
 As to the South Carolina scheme to limit the 
 suffrage by an educational qualification, it seems 
 to have died at birth, smothered under the evi- 
 dent fact that a State, nearly half of whose people 
 
156 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 are illiterate and nearly half of whose population 
 of school age are without public provision against 
 illiteracy, has no reason, as it has no right, to 
 hope for an honest vote to disfranchise the illiter- 
 ate. Well for it that there is no such hope. For no 
 people ever escapes the incubus of a large illiter- 
 acy in its poorer classes except by providing a 
 system of public education ample for the whole 
 people ; the demand for ample free education is 
 created not by the contraction, but by the en- 
 largement, of the right of suffrage. The most 
 suicidal thing a party of free education can do is 
 to favor an educational qualification of the suf- 
 frage before free education is amply supplied ; for 
 whenever the issue is between adequate and 
 inadequate provision the vote that tips the scale 
 aright is just the bugbear itself — the illiterate 
 man's vote. 
 
 I hold that to prove the moral wrong of a 
 thing is to prove just so far its practical worth- 
 lessness. To disfranchise the illiterate is to make 
 the most defenceless part of a community more 
 defenceless still. There is, I know, an educa- 
 tional qualification in Massachusetts, and there 
 are a few illiterates. But there is no illiterate 
 class, and the educational qualification here is 
 not mainly for the protection of the suffrage, but 
 a correctional punishment for inexcusable igno- 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 1 57 
 
 ranee. The clangers of illiteracy have been 
 almost as much overstated as its economic loss 
 has been overlooked. Far the greatest danger 
 in a wide illiteracy is to the illiterate themselves, 
 and though there are reciprocal risks, the supreme 
 urgency for its removal is not their dangerous- 
 ness to the more fortunate and powerful classes, 
 but the dangerousness of those classes to them. 
 As for the Australian ballot system, wherever in 
 this great union of States it goes for the better 
 liberty of every honest voter, learned or ignorant, 
 rich or poor, and for the confusion of bribers and 
 bribe-takers, learned or ignorant, rich or poor, 
 may God give it good speed. But, alas I for pub- 
 lic liberty, purity or safety, wherever it is put 
 into use to abridge the right of suffrage. No 
 people is justly ready for a system of elections 
 that prevents the voting of the illiterate man 
 until it has first provided full public facility for 
 every such man to learn to read and write, and 
 has then given him fair warning and time to 
 learn. 
 
 The last and, it seems to me, the most irra- 
 tional scheme of all, is that embodied in the 
 Bill for the deportation of Negroes to Africa. 
 The graceful arguments of its advocates in the 
 Senate have been fully, ably, brilliantly answered 
 in the Senate, and there is no excuse for more 
 
158 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 than a word to the point here. The early admis- 
 sions and confessions of Abraham Lincoln have 
 been much used in this debate by excellent men, 
 who still repudiate and antagonize the conclu- 
 sions of his latest wisdom as they once did his 
 earlier. Let us in that wonderful spirit of more 
 than Washingtonian generosity which made him 
 impregnable and irresistible in debate, make 
 every supposition of the advocates of deporta- 
 tion that can be supposed. Say the bill is found 
 to be not unconstitutional ; that hundreds of 
 thousands of Negroes want to go, and that 
 Southern white men generally willjet them go, 
 despite the palpable fact that the men most 
 likely to go will be, to use an old Southern word, 
 the most "likely" men, the men of health, 
 strength, self-reliance, enterprise, and despite, 
 again, the fact that no large emigration can take 
 place without carrying away millions of ready 
 money with it. Every 100,000 of European 
 emigrants to this country bring about ^8,000,000 
 with them. The industrial value of 100,000 un- 
 skilled laborers is ^80,000,000. Is a white immi- 
 gration likely to make up such losses ? Let us 
 suppose even this, although no one ever yet 
 heard of one set of emigrants pouring into a 
 country from which a poorer set was pouring 
 out ; and although if they will come at all there 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 1 59 
 
 is abundance of room for them now, without 
 deporting a single Negro. 
 
 What shall we say ? We say pass your bill ; 
 get your ships ready ; proclaim free passage to 
 whomsoever will accept it. Only let there be 
 no compulsion. As a whole nation we are 
 branded with our fathers' sin of bringing these 
 people here ; let us not now add to that our own 
 sin of driving them back. Therefore, no compul- 
 sions. But the land is full of compulsions. The 
 main argument for the Negroes going is that we 
 are making their stay here intolerable to them. 
 Before we buy or hire one ship, whether these 
 compulsions are in South Carolina or Mississippi, 
 Illinois, Ohio or Massachusetts, let the compul- 
 sions be removed. When State and Federal gov- 
 ernments have exhausted, as neither has yet done, 
 all their powers of legislation and police to make 
 the Negro in America as free as the white man. 
 then, if the Negro cannot be content, and the peo- 
 ple choose to bear the expense of his deportation, 
 let the folly be charged to him, not us, of leav- 
 ing a free land to which better men were glad to 
 come and fill his voided place. But let this 
 nation never again open the Sacred Scriptures 
 on Independence Day, or on the birthday of 
 Washington lift up its hands to God, if, as mat- 
 ters now stand, it provides money or ships for 
 
l6o STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 the flight back to Africa of the victims of its 
 own tyrannies. This is not the way to settle, but 
 only to delay and hinder the settlement of the 
 Negro question. Emigrants have been pouring 
 out of Ireland for forty years, and their Govern- 
 ment has encouraged their going, and still Ire- 
 land is full of Irish and the Irish Question is 
 not settled. Pass your Deportation Bill. Help 
 hundreds of thousands of able-bodied Negroes 
 to sail to Africa. But unless you remove the 
 already existing compulsions upon which you 
 are counting to drive them on shipboard, the 
 white immigrant will not come to take his place, 
 and the Negro and the Negro Question will be 
 with lis still. 
 
 It is true, also, that the infatuation for buying 
 pure government at some other price than the 
 Negro's civil freedom and political cooperation 
 still maintain^ the iron rule of the one-party idea. 
 It is to liiis sentiment and policy that we owe 
 the dnqrraities of Lynch-law, with its record of 
 crimes beyond all cavil darker and fouler than 
 all the robberies of Carpet-bag Governments. 
 For these murderous deeds are committed only 
 because the lovers of order and pure government 
 make no serious effort to prevent them, and 
 these make no serious effort only because to 
 punish these murderers would break the solid 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. l6l 
 
 square of that one party which makes simple 
 dissent from its doctrines infamous and criminal, 
 the only party that ever has dared to declare 
 openly to this free nation that it must and will 
 rule, whether it represents a majority of the 
 people or not. Is not that the very germinating 
 and perpetuating principle of political corrup- 
 tion ? Under what strange skies, on what dis- 
 tant planet, can we believe that such a tree will 
 put forth the flowers and fruit of pure govern- 
 ment? 
 
 In Nashville lately a gentleman of the south- 
 ern political orthodoxy gave me this story as 
 strict fact : A traveller, similarly orthodox, sat 
 down at the large supper-table of an Arkansas 
 tavern. The landlord bearing two large steam- 
 ing covered vessels, identical in size and pattern, 
 one in each hand, passed from guest to guest 
 with always the same hospitable offer of Choice : 
 " Tea or Coffee ?" " Tea or Coffee." " Coffee," 
 said one. He poured coffee. " Coffee," said a 
 second. He poured coffee. "Coffee," said a 
 third, fourth and fifth. Again once, twice, 
 thrice, the tea-pot was deferentially drawn back 
 and the coffee-pot poured forth its strong, black 
 flood. So our traveller was reached. " Tea or 
 coffee ?" " Tea." The landlord drew back 
 bristling, but the next instant was gracious 
 
1 62 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 again. He brought the huge tea-pot nimbly 
 forward and poured from it the same hot, rank 
 " Rio " that he had been pouring from the 
 other pot, saying as he poured, "teal in Ar- 
 kansas I No sir. In Arkansas you take cof- 
 fee or you take nothing." Our traveller drank 
 it without milk. It was, after all, simply his 
 own one-party idea and he had to swallow it. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 But if the One-party idea still rules in the 
 South, men are longing and reaching out for 
 deliverance from it now as they have not done 
 before since thirty years ago it first laid its com- 
 plete bondage upon them. From out the South 
 itself has lately been heard a strange, new, most 
 worth)^ and most welcome sound, the voices of 
 southern white leaders of thought and action 
 charging upon the North the duty and necessity 
 of helping the South to solve the simple question 
 which the northern and southern seekers after 
 pure government through race-rule and post- 
 poned rights have snarled into a bewildering pro- 
 blem. This problem has been drawn into the 
 open field of literary debate, a field from which, 
 in these enlightened days, no practical question 
 can escape until it is solved. But the question 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 1 63 
 
 is no longer how this problem should be set- 
 tled ; it is only how to persuade men to settle it. 
 
 As to this, let us first of all, stop blaming one 
 another; let us blame things not men* ill Con- 
 ditions, false theories, bad schemes. Even among 
 these let us waste no more wrath, no more grief, 
 no more time, over such as are done and can 
 never be undone; but give ourselves faithfully, 
 fraternally, unflinchingly to the pursuit and de- 
 struction of every living evil in theory or prac- 
 tice. 
 
 In the second place the new material develop- 
 ment of the South must go on. If wealth does 
 not necessarily make a people free or virtuous, 
 neither does poverty. But thinking men in the 
 South must rouse themselves to the economic 
 and political necessity for a wider diffusion of 
 wealth and more prosperousconditions of manual 
 labor. The inattention to the study of Econ- 
 omics in most southern colleges amounts to a 
 calamity. To the spirit that prompts this is 
 largely owing a superficial treatment of com- 
 mercial and industrial conditions that character- 
 izes the greater part of the southern press, and 
 misleads a large class among the southern capi- 
 talists of commerce and the industries, who 
 count only themselves practical. 
 
 And again, the struggle for pure government 
 
l64 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMEtTT. 
 
 must be neither abandoned nor abated. Only 
 the efTort to procure it at the expense of free 
 government must be abandoned. Free govern- 
 ment, the equal freedom of all in all public rela- 
 tions,' must be recognized as its foremost and 
 supreme necessity. Yet we do not demand a 
 sudden and complete revolution of southern 
 sentiment and policy. All the nation is really 
 impatient for is to see the South once turn and 
 start in the right direction. 
 
 To this end let it be understood and declared 
 in southern circles, councils, newspapers, that 
 in the southern States, just as truly as in Kan- 
 sas, Ohio, or Massachusetts, a man can favor the 
 Negro's enjoyment of a white man's public 
 rights without being either a Republican or a 
 traitor. He can be an Equal-rights Democrat. 
 I venture to say that the great bulk of the Re- 
 publican party itself will look with more respect 
 and pleasure upon a band of southern opponents 
 declaring themselves Equal-rights Democrats, 
 than upon a like reenforcement to its own ranks 
 of Alabama protectionists trying to take the piti- 
 fully impossible pose of color-line Republicans. 
 
 If men cannot reconcile it to their self-regard 
 or sense of expediency to declare for equality in 
 all public rights at once, let them try a few at a 
 time. Since 1865 the South has found on ex- 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 165 
 
 periment, sometimes voluntary, sometimes other- 
 wise, a great many things consistent with honor, 
 safety and peace that they had looked upon with 
 loathing and alarm. Why not try a few more ? 
 Take, at random, any phase of the matter ; for 
 instance, railroad accommodation. If in every 
 southern town Negroes may ride in street-cars, 
 where people crowd one another and no separate 
 place offers to the rag-tag that refuge from the 
 better kept which they always covet, why not 
 try making first-class railway coaches equally 
 free to all kinds of people decent in person and 
 behavior, and require ail kinds of rag-tag to ac- 
 cept other accommodations ? There is no risk in 
 such a step ; nobody really believes there is an^, 
 it is purely a matter of pride. But be it pride or 
 be it risk, the street-cars offered the extreme 
 case, and in them the question has long been 
 settled. 
 
 Or take another case. Probably the most 
 indefensible, wanton, cruel deprivations suffered 
 by Southern colored people on the score of race 
 is their exclusion from the privileges of the 
 public libraries. Let these excommunications 
 from the pure wells of inspiration that are in 
 good books be withdrawn. Let decent white 
 Southerners say to decent colored Southerners, 
 These concessions — or such as these — will we 
 
1 66 STRUGGLE FOR PtJRE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 make to you if you will join with us politically 
 for pure men and purifying measures. That 
 were a buying of votes ' without dishonor to 
 either side; and tens of thousands of colored 
 votes, both of those that money can, and that 
 money cannot buy, can be bought at that price. 
 Only let it not be fancied that even Negroes are 
 going to be outwitted more than once or twice 
 by promises that if they will concede something 
 now, their white fellow-citizens will concede 
 something to them by-and-by. Says the Rev. 
 Dr. Thirkield, of Atlanta, in a late allusion to 
 the failure of the Prohibition movement in that 
 city, "The Negro was recognized as a factor in 
 the great civil contest; he was met as a man 
 and a brother ; promises were given him as to 
 his civil rights in the conduct of the city govern- 
 ment. Through his vote the campaign closed 
 in victory. Then the contact between the two 
 races was broken off; recognition and coopera- 
 tion in civil, moral and religious work ceased; 
 pledges as to his civil rights were broken. The 
 rum power saw its opportunity, .... organ- 
 ized for victory, and brought again the reign of 
 rum." So it may always be ; there is a vote that 
 divides but not destroys ; and there is another 
 that solidifies but does not save. 
 
 True, to influence the colored vote men must 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT, 1 6/ 
 
 influence its leaders. But such concessions as we 
 have mentioned are the daily spoken, written, and 
 printed demands of every sort of colored leader, 
 even of those who are accused of being influenced 
 by nothing except the prospect of public oflice 
 or its equivalent in cash. A full numerical 
 share of public offices, clerkships and contracts 
 is not, and never was, the ultimatum of the vast 
 colored vote, nor even of its colored leaders. 
 They certainly never got it. No party ever 
 promised them that all or half or one-fourth of 
 them should have offices or appointments, or 
 ever gave them all or half, if even a fourth of 
 the offices or appointments. But for the hostility 
 of the great majority of Southern white men to 
 an equality of public rights, no colored leader 
 need ever have been given an office or appoint- 
 ment which he could not reasonably have been 
 expected to fill with credit and honor. With 
 genuine and coveted concessions offei*ed to them 
 in the matter of civil rights, colored voters will 
 not be long finding leaders to whom it will be 
 enough to concede with sincere and practical 
 intent, that merely being a Negro is not an 
 insurmountable bar to the holding of office by 
 one otherwise qualified. 
 
 Let the lovers of pure government in the 
 South make such experiments. It can be made 
 
l68 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 in small or large. There are towns, townships, 
 counties, even States, one or two^ in the South, 
 where the two national parties are nearly equal 
 in numbers. There, as elsewhere^ the Negro 
 cares, as he should, far more about his own civil 
 and political rights than about who gets into 
 the White House. In such a region a party of 
 pure government ought, by reasonable and gen- 
 erous concessions to a better and more equal 
 freedom, to gain enough colored votes to enable 
 it advantageously to sacrifice some very bad 
 white ones. Only, these concessions must be 
 made in the spirit and guise, not of condescen- 
 sion and protection, but of civil and political 
 equality and fellowship, entering frankly and 
 fully into council with the Negro's recognized 
 leaders, white or colored, appealing to such as 
 are " out of politics," only when those who are 
 in politics will not listen to reason. Say what 
 you will of Jjarty leaders and managers, the great 
 Republican party itself would rather be hope- 
 lessly outnumbered and defeated in Mississippi 
 or South Carolina by fair means in the interest 
 of free government, than to see a Republican 
 majority tyrannously defrauded under the pre- 
 tence of procuring or upholding pure govern- 
 ment. Nor do I doubt the great Democratic 
 party also would, in its turn, rather be so out- 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 1 69 
 
 numbered and defeated, than to see its managers 
 win victory at the price of honor. 
 
 But if southern white men will not even yet of 
 their own motion give this method of healing 
 "the nation's running sore," a fair trial, there 
 are still two ways by which such a trial may be 
 had. One is a means which no generous mind 
 in this nation would make other than its last 
 choice. I mean, of course, Federal intervention^ 
 
 I earnestly protest I have learned too much 
 from the teachings of Washington ever to be a 
 partisan. On the race question I am a Republi- 
 can ; on some others I am a Democrat, and on 
 all questions I know and am ready to avow ex- 
 actly where I stand. The southern party for 
 pure government first has been given the best 
 twelve years that ever shone on earth, in which 
 to make Federal intervention unnecessary, and 
 has so utterly failed, that it is to-day seen asking 
 in the United States Senate for a species of 
 Federal intervention by no means the safest or 
 best or most constitutional, to help it to remove 
 bodily to Africa the problem whose obvious 
 solution it will not allow even to be tried. I do 
 not favor Federal intervention for the establish- 
 ment of equal civil and political rights in any 
 State whatever, except as. a last resort. As to 
 Federal elections, at least, it is a right placed 
 
I/O STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 beyond cavil by the plain letter of the Constitu- 
 tion. But even there the intention that it should 
 be never other than an unpreferred alternative is 
 plain. 
 
 Yet I see to-day only one alternative inter- 
 vening. Of it I shall speak in a moment. But 
 for this alternative, it seems to me totally in- 
 compatible with the dignity and honor of this 
 nation, that, after twelve years of amiable, hope- 
 ful waiting, it should let itself be kept indefinitely 
 waiting still for admission to its own simplest 
 rights by the plausible and eloquent door- 
 keepers of a do-nothing policy. A despair that 
 prompts to action and deliverance is better than 
 any false hope, and if such a despair moves this 
 nation, this year or next, to the action it has 
 borne so much to avoid, it can point to these 
 door-keepers, whether they be of North or South, 
 and say, the blame of it and the shame of it be 
 on you I 
 
 The only alternative I see, a hope of whose 
 adoption can rightly postpone Federal interven- 
 tion any longer, is for the Democratic party of 
 the wide North and West to withdraw its sup- 
 port from the southern policy now, as it did in 
 i860. Said one of the national Democratic 
 leaders to me a few years ago, " That is what 
 we have got to do. The votes we lose by it in 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 171 
 
 the South will be more than offset by those we 
 shall gain in the North." But I maintain the 
 case is better for them than this. They will gain 
 votes in the North ; but they will no more lose 
 the southern white vote than they lost it when 
 with cannon, bayonets and sabres they forced it 
 back into the Union from which it had seceded. 
 Who will say that promptness on this point now 
 may not save them from another such long va- 
 cation as procrastination cost them in i860? 
 
 We have yet two years and a half before the 
 next presidential election, in 1892. Let it be 
 hoped and urged that before then the believers 
 in pure government instead of, or before, free 
 government will of their own choice abandon 
 their utterly self-condemned and futile policy, and 
 make at least a visible and appreciable beginning 
 upon that experiment of equal rights for all men 
 and all parties, which, in the modern world, at 
 least, has never failed on fair trial. Has never 
 failed; no, and would not fail in Hayti or San 
 Domingo themselves, if they would once give it 
 the supremacy thus far held by the alternating 
 military tyrannies of opposing factions each de- 
 lirious with the poison of the one One-party 
 idea. 
 
 During these two years and a half let it be 
 made yet plainer than ever before, that Federal 
 
172 STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 intervention is no willing choice of the Republi- 
 can, or any party, and that what it, with the 
 whole nation, most covets for every southern 
 State is as large, as full, as universal, and as 
 prosperous a self-government as can be found in 
 any part of this Union. And then, in all kind- 
 ness, for the South's own sake as much as for 
 the sake of any, in the name of the common 
 welfare and the nation's honor, let the word be 
 spoken, that if by 1892 any State in this Union 
 has not at least begun, with good show of com- 
 pleting, the establishment of equal American 
 rights for all Americans, the men of this nation 
 who, in whatever party, believe in free govern- 
 ment first will strain their every nerve and sinew 
 to give the nation a president and a congress 
 that Will establish it peaceably, promptly and 
 forever. 
 
 The day in which that is done, whether by 
 a southern majority's own motion or by the 
 Government's intervention, will be a great birth- 
 day. It may date the birth of some momen- 
 tary and aimless strife, though this I doubt; 
 but it will certainly date the birth of a better 
 peace, a wider, richer prosperity, a happier 
 freedom of every citizen, and a freer, purer 
 government of this Union and of every State 
 in this Union, than this continent has ever yet 
 
STRUGGLE FOR PURE GOVERNMENT. IJl 
 
 seen. Yea, and complete fraternity between 
 North and South. For it shall not have been 
 long done ere the whole South will rejoice in 
 the day of its doing as now it rejoices in the day 
 when Lincoln freed the Negro, and in the day 
 when Washington by spurning the offer of royal 
 rank and authority declared that the only road 
 to pure government is free government.