fact, that while there are alleviations of the unpleasantness, the
relations between the negroes and their co-citizens of the Caucasian
race are strained and unsatisfactory. The friction, the prejudice, the
cleavage, is not between Teutonic and Latin on the one side and
Semitic on the other, nor between Saxon and Celt; it lies deeper,
yields less readily to palliatives and remedies, and seems a matter of
adjustment for the remotest future. It may help to understand the
situation if we analyze its causes.
The great revolution suddenly transformed the customs, traditions, and
conditions of the two races. Ownership gave way to freedom; compulsory
and wage-unrewarded labor to absolute control of person; inequality,
inferiority, subjection, to equality in the eye of the law; restrained
locomotion to license of movement; kindness, interest in life, wealth,
and physical welfare, to suspicion, distress, alienation. With
property in man, regulated and enforced by laws in the interest of the
master, labor was organized, directed by intelligent control to the
development of agricultural resources and to the building up of a
society which for refinement of manners, hospitality, and
administrative capacity, has elicited praise from disinterested
travelers and investigators. The negro, whatever he may have attained
from the discipline of slavery, was not cultivated in intelligence, in
manual skill, in forethought, power of initiative, in thrift, and the
comforts and graces of home life. When freed, many were deluded by
deceptive promises. They construed freedom to mean a division of
property. Release from bondage led to intemperance and extravagance.
Accustomed to control, unaccustomed to self-reliance, having others
to think, plan, buy, and sell for them, to supply wants, to watch over
them from the cradle to the coffin, many, when left to themselves,
reverted to primitive habits, and became idle and worthless. Slavery
had cursed the South with ignorant, unskilled, uninventive labor.
Freedom did not change its character. The war, liberation of slaves,
the sudden extinguishment of millions of property, bankrupted the
South. Subsistence, recovery of means of living, rehabilitation,
reorganization of those agencies, which are, with intelligent work,
the chief means of the wealth of civilized peoples, became the first
duty after hostilities ceased. This demanded steady, persistent
industry, the change of former methods of agriculture, subdivision of
farms, diversification of pursuits, opening of academies and colleges,
and establishment of public schools for free and universal education.
The contrast between the wealth and prosperity of the North and South
presents an appalling picture. Naturally, the Southern people were in
despair, and too often they vented their dissatisfaction, their rage,
upon the irresponsible and unoffending negro.
Slavery _per se_ is not conducive to self-restraint of the enslaved,
to high ethical standards, and the best types of human life. When the
interest and authority of owners were removed and former religious
instruction was crippled or withdrawn, the negroes fell rapidly from
what had been attained in slavery to a state of immorality, and, in
some cases, to original fetichism. Some remained immovable in their
former faith, but many, especially of the younger generation, of both
sexes, gave proof of what degeneracy can accomplish in a quarter of a
century. It is very common for them to divorce religion and piety.
Artificial excitement, passionate emotion, was substituted for a faith
which should be the product of a knowledge of and deep reverence for
the Word of God. The danger of doing harm, or injustice, restrains my
pen from disclosing a mass of disgusting material which could only
shock sensibilities and stagger credulity. It is, besides, very easy
to magnify our own virtues and others' vices. It is a prevalent mode
of religiousness to repent of other people's sins, and to get
superfluous merit by showing how others fall short of our attainments.
Lowell said, "Everybody has a mission (with a capital M) to attend to
everybody else's business," and "to make his own whim the law, and his
own range the horizon of the universe." We have all read of the
philanthropic Mrs. Jelliby neglecting home and children to sweeten the
lot of the unregenerate natives of Borrioboola Gha. Still, testimony,
to satisfy the most skeptical, could be adduced _ad nauseam_, from men
and women doing educational and missionary work among the colored
people, to show the deplorable depths into which multitudes have
sunk.
Under the Reconstruction Acts there was a deliberate, predetermined
attempt and purpose to put the freedmen in control of the Southern
States. The late slaves were enfranchised; the best class of white men
were disfranchised. The law presumes that a man or a State intends the
logical consequence of acts done. In South Carolina, Mississippi, and
Louisiana a majority of the voters, under the coerced policy, were
negroes. In other States they were so numerous that a combination with
a small fraction of white voters would give the ascendency. In
Virginia, a coalition between non-taxpaying white people and negroes,
under skilled and bold leadership, accomplished partial repudiation of
the State debt. Superadd to this undisguised Federal intent the hungry
adventurers who, as governors, judges, marshals, district attorneys,
etc., flocked like vultures around the carcass, the horde of persons
whose object was to pilfer and plunder, who played upon the ignorance,
the superstitions, and gratitude of the negro and made the credulous
victims believe that their former masters were not to be trusted in
elections, and you have a picture which imagination fails to realize.
The negroes, neither by apprenticeship, nor political education, not
intellectual culture, were prepared for the boon, and their
unscrupulous friends organized them into secret societies and inflamed
hopes and expectations of wealth and dominancy. Casper Hauser
transferred from a dungeon to a throne would be a fit illustration of
this defiance of all the teachings of the past. Suffrage was a wrong
to the nation, to the States, to the white and black races, and
especially to the negro. Negro suffrage is a farce, a burlesque on
elections, and only evil. The negroes generally vote as puppets, as
machines, and have not the remotest conception of the character or
effect of the act they are ignorantly performing, or of the issues
involved in the contest, or of the functions or duties of the officers
voted for. Huxley says, "Voting power as a means of giving effect to
opinion is more likely to prove a curse than a blessing to the voter,
unless that opinion is the result of a sound judgment operating upon
sound knowledge." This premature investiture of the negro with
suffrage reciprocally provoked alienation, bitterness, strife, and a
resolute purpose on the part of the white people not to submit to the
misrule and tyranny of ignorance and pauperism, but to resort to all
necessary methods to defeat such a result.
It is needless to recapitulate the facts of many thousand years in
order to raise the inference of racial difference between the
Caucasian and the negro. The immigration to our country is the proof
of antagonism of races. The foreigner stays away from the South; so in
a large degree does the Northern man. Notwithstanding the unsurpassed
climate, the rivers and gulf and mountains, the fertile soil, the
varied products, the hospitable welcome, the territory occupied by the
negro is persistently avoided. By the census of 1880 the proportion of
foreign-born in all the former slave States was 3.5 per cent; in the
Northern States about twenty per cent; in eight Southern States, where
the negroes abound, there was in 1880 only one and a third per cent
who were of foreign birth. Mr. Lincoln, in 1858, in accounting for the
repulsion, said: "There is a physical difference between the two races
which will probably forbid their living together upon the footing of
perfect equality.... I am not, or ever have been, in favor of making
voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office,
nor of intermarrying with white people." Absorption, assimilation, is
not to be dreamed of. The negro is no nearer common fellowship,
equality of association, than he was in 1865. Reconstruction measures,
constitutional amendments, sword and bayonet, ecclesiastical
anathemas, fulminations of press and pulpit, all power of church and
state and public opinion, have not altered, can not alter, what seems
ineradicable. Race antagonism reaches deeper than political
affiliation. If every negro at the South were to vote the Democratic
ticket in every subsequent election, the race division would remain
the same.
Can these differences be effaced, alienations be healed, and
overshadowing perils be averted? What concerns the patriot is to find
a solution for this gigantic and appalling problem. The statesman has
not yet arisen, disposed to grapple with the problem, or capable of
suggesting a feasible and efficacious remedy. With the least hardship
to the negro, proper recognition of his rights as a man, due regard to
the just ends of our Government, and the purposes of its founders,
some scheme, if possible, wise, adequate, and comprehensive, should be
devised. Whatever hitherto has been suggested has been met with
opposition and is justly liable to criticism. The most obvious remedy,
and which has been tried with some success, is to uplift the race by
means of public schools and proper religious instruction. All honor to
the schools that train the youth into self-respecting manhood and
womanhood! All honor for the efforts that are making to correct the
debasement of slavery, to unite faith and practice, to infuse
religious life with an ethical Christianity, and to form a moral basis
for life and character! The crimes of both races in the South, pushed
within the last few years to most brutal atrocities, show that there
can be no safety for free institutions, no guarding against savage
degradation, if either race be kept in crass ignorance. Both must
suffer. It would be some relief from ballot-box evils and perils if
the examples of New England and of Louisiana, Mississippi, and South
Carolina were followed by all the States. As "universal suffrage has
no anchorage except in the people's intelligence," Massachusetts
requires of voters a prepayment of taxes, and voting and
office-holding are limited to those who can read the Constitution in
the English language and write their names. What has been done by
States, denominations, and individuals through schools is not
discouraging to larger and better efforts, but is a stimulus to and an
assurance of excellent results. The plantation system of the South,
when land was in the hands of a few territorial magnates, was of very
doubtful utility. A bold peasantry is a country's pride, and a small
farmer should take the place of the large landed proprietor. If the
negroes should acquire and hold more real estate, they would be of
more value as citizens, and would have increased interest in the
stability of laws, enforcing of contracts, and the preservation of
State honor. An enlargement of the number of those who have a solid
stake in the well-being of the country would be adding to the ranks of
natural supporters of law and honor, and strengthening the true
foundations on which the stability of a republican government must
rest.
The congestion of the negroes aggravates the difficulties and dangers
of the problem. The area of the States holding slaves in 1860 was
901,740 square miles, and of the Northern States, excluding Alaska,
2,123,860 square miles. By the census of 1890, the total population of
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North
Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West
Virginia, was 37.3 per cent of negroes and 62.7 per cent of whites;
or, including Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, 30.7 per
cent of negroes and 69.3 per cent of whites. The African citizens are
localized within a narrow area. A French statesman said, "Cross the
Pyrenees and Africa begins." Cross Mason and Dixon's line, or the Ohio
and Potomac Rivers, and in a truer sense Africa begins, for south of
that line the negroes are massed. It has been nearly forty years since
slavery existed, for no one born since 1860 was ever practically a
slave, and yet freedom has not diffused the seven million and a half
of Africans. Despite all the traditions of bondage, all the
misrepresentations of modern literature, all the exaggerated accounts
of intimidation and cruelty, the South remains the home of the negro.
When he is told that equality, friendship, political sympathy, and
good wages may be secured by passing an invisible geographical line,
he persistently refuses to be seduced across. Senator Windom, of
Minnesota, advocated a plan for distributing by assisted emigration,
but nothing came of it. Senator Edmunds, in discussing the Chinese
question, said: "The people of Massachusetts would not be hungry for
an eruption of a million of the inhabitants of Africa, ... because
they believe, either by instinct or education, that it is not good for
the two races to be brought into that kind of contact in that
place.... The fundamental idea of a prosperous republic must be a
homogeneity of its people."
Colonization as a remedy has had many strong advocates. As early as
1800 the Assembly of Virginia, in secret session, instructed the
Governor to correspond with the President with the object of procuring
a colony to which the negroes could be sent. Jefferson began the
correspondence. The Legislature resumed the question, and expressed
its preference for "Africa or any of the Spanish or Portuguese
settlements in South America" as the place "to which free negroes or
mulattoes, and such negroes or mulattoes as may be emancipated," might
be sent or choose to remove. In 1805 the members of Congress were
instructed to endeavor to procure suitable territory in Louisiana. In
1811, being asked his opinion as to a settlement on the coast of
Africa, Jefferson replied that "nothing is more to be wished than that
the United States would themselves undertake to make such an
establishment on the coast of Africa." In 1813 the Legislature openly
and almost unanimously adopted, for the third time, resolutions
similar to those of 1800. The same year the Colonization Society was
formed, out of which grew the Republic of Liberia. President Lincoln,
in his first annual message, December, 1861, referring to the two
classes of liberated persons that might be thrown upon Congress for
their disposal, recommended "that in any event steps be taken for
colonizing both classes at some place or places in a climate congenial
to them. It might be well to consider, too, whether the free colored
people already in the United States could not be included in such
colonization." Congress responded by voting one hundred thousand
dollars for the voluntary emigration of freedmen from the District of
Columbia to Haiti or Liberia, and later, in July, 1862, gave five
hundred thousand dollars for the colonization of negroes in some
tropical country beyond the limits of the United States. Mr. Lincoln
continued to favor the policy of removal to another country, and five
days after signing the above act he read to his Cabinet a proposed
order for "the colonization of negroes in some tropical country."
Burdened with this great question, amid the exigencies of the mighty
war, he continued to push the matter, and had Secretary Seward send a
circular letter to England, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark, with
regard to colonizing the negroes in some of their tropical
possessions. Offers came from the Danish West Indies, Dutch Surinam,
British Guiana, Honduras, Haiti, New Granada, and Ecuador. Mr. Lincoln
considered the offers from New Granada and an island off Haiti, and
even sent a colony to the latter. Again, in his annual message in
1862, he argued for colonization, and asked for an appropriation,
but, under the passions of the terrible conflict then raging, the
Congress, instead of heeding the request, repealed the former act
appropriating five hundred thousand dollars.
The Indians, against their will, were transported, by coercive
measures, to allotted lands beyond the Mississippi, but that was
before the modern discovery that the United States should grant
"fraternity and assistance to all people" under other than republican
governments, and that universal suffrage was the infallible expedient
for civilizing semibarbarous peoples. President Harrison, in his
letter of acceptance, writing on another subject, says, "We are
already under a duty to defend our civilization by excluding alien
races whose ultimate assimilation with our people is neither possible
nor desirable."
Remedies, strong and adequate and feasible, may not be found readily,
but there are gentler and quieter agencies which may be used by both
races to mutual advantage. The white people, in accepting the
legitimate consequences of defeat, in vigorous efforts to restore
antebellum prosperity, in establishing schools, in reconstructing
shattered society, have done nobly, but they are not without sin.
Laws, general and wise and impartial, on the statute-book need for
their enforcement a sustaining public opinion, but this has not always
been forthcoming. Lawless and violent proceedings, always unnecessary
and demoralizing, sometimes as brutal as the crimes which excited
horror; harsh and unjust contracts; interferences in elections; false
registration and counting of votes, and other acts which the plea of
self-preservation did not justify, have evinced the harshness and
injustice of dominant power, and have not tended to soften prejudices
or make the situation more tolerable. Each race is fortunately
improving in intercourse and in dealings with the other, and time and
sober judgment are, in a sensible degree, removing causes of
alienation which are not inherent and incurable.
* * * * *
"What a blessing," said President Sir John Lubbock, at the late
meeting of the International Congress of Zoölogists, "it would be
for mankind if we could stop the enormous expenditure on engines
for the destruction of life and property, and spend the tenth,
the hundredth, even the thousandth part on scientific progress!
Few people seem to realize how much science has done for man, and
still fewer how much more it would still do if permitted. More
students would doubtless have devoted themselves to science if it
were not so systematically neglected in our schools; if men and
boys were not given the impression that the field of discovery is
well-nigh exhausted. We, gentlemen, know how far that is from
being the case. Much of the land surface of the globe is still
unexplored; the ocean is almost unknown; our collections contain
thousands of species waiting to be described; the life-histories
of many of our commonest species remain to be investigated, or
have only recently been discovered."
THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS AND AMERICAN CAPITAL.
BY J. RUSSELL SMITH.
That the Philippine Islands are of value as a place for investment is
an unexplained generalization that is now being used to tempt business
men. The object of this article is to discuss this generalization. The
idea that the Philippine Islands are of importance to us, as a new
field for our industrial developments, depends upon two assumptions:
First, that we need to go beyond the bounds of the United States;
second, that the Philippines offer the best available field for the
satisfaction of that need.
As to the first assumption, the occasion and origin of the demand for
the retention of the Philippines furnish presumptive evidence that it
represents no real economic want of the American people. No one ever
thought of it until we heard the boom of Dewey's guns at Manila. The
demands that then arose for Eastern territory were the natural result
of a just pride in the amazing triumph of our navy. Before the battle
of Manila a suggestion that we should take the Philippines and RECEIVE
$20,000,000 as a bonus we would have deemed preposterous. Before that
battle, one idea was uppermost in the minds of the American
people--namely, the development of the American continent. And yet,
along with the enthusiasm over the accomplishments of our army and
navy, the idea has crept into some minds that we are in need of more
land to develop, and that we must find it in the Eastern Hemisphere.
Examination of the internal condition of the United States does not
seem to indicate such need. Our exports are an index to our condition.
In 1872 we exported merchandise to the value of $522,000,000; in 1898
the amount had swelled to $1,230,000,000, an increase of two hundred
and thirty-five per cent. No European nation has shown such progress.
Despite their colonial empires, their armies and navies, their
chartered companies, their spheres of influence, and all their
elaborate paraphernalia, we are competing with them in their own
markets. We have pursued a policy the opposite of theirs and are
outstripping them in the race for a share of the world's trade. It is
not compatible with industrial wisdom to change and adopt the policy
of our less successful rivals just as the success of our own policy is
being fully demonstrated.
A nation's commercial supremacy rests upon the same principles as a
business man's leadership in his trade--namely, superiority of
production. It does not require a citation of evidence to say that the
producers of Europe are staggering under the burden of their armies
and navies. While they are thus handicapped, we have nothing to fear
unless we inflict upon ourselves a similar burden. We have succeeded
by attending to our own industries, by developing our natural
resources, by producing things that the people of other nations must
have. That development is but begun. Even England, the ruler of the
greatest colonial empire the world has ever known, the greatest
manufacturing nation, the mistress of the seas, stands with almost
stationary exports. The United States, the nation with a small navy,
the nation that never really had a colony, the so-called isolated
nation, has come by rapid strides to the point where she is the
leading exporter of the world.
There is no reason why the progress of the United States should be
checked. England has demonstrated the fact that the nation that has
the iron and coal is the commercial mistress of the world. The United
States is continuing, and will continue the demonstration. England has
but 900 square miles of much-used coal lands, and she gets her iron
ore from Spain. We have over 200,000 square miles[D] of untouched coal
lands; an almost continuous bed of iron ore, reaching from Lake
Ontario to Alabama.[E] Beside this great ore bed is the Appalachian
coal field, with coal mines in every State between New York and
Alabama. There are mountains of iron ore in Missouri and Michigan. By
the special lines of lake steamers the iron ore of Lake Superior is
taken to Chicago and Cleveland, and thence carried by rail to
Pittsburg. There the eastern coal completes the conditions for the
most economical production of iron and steel. That gives the United
States the basis for our export trade in iron, steel, and machinery.
We are capturing the iron markets of the world, and, judging by our
supplies, can hold them for ages. As our iron and coal are the basis
of all manufacturing industry, continued attention to them will give
us the control of the world's trade.
[Footnote D: The last United States census puts our coal lands at
something more than 225,000 square miles.]
[Footnote E: "This deposit occurs as far north as the southern shores
of Lake Ontario, and thence extends in an almost continuous manner
through Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee to central
Alabama."--_N. S. Shaler's The United States of America, vol. i, p.
432._]