be followed, among animals as among men, by effective occupation. The
Portuguese were roused into warlike excitement a few years ago by
the advance of the Chartered Company into Mashonaland, where their
settlements had long ceased to exist. Their claims to the basin of the
Congo were on the same ground equally disregarded--this time by all
the powers. A bit of seacoast can more easily be kept, and Delagoa
Bay was assured to them by the French arbitrator. Mere occupation has
at various times given a valid right to a territory. The Puritans
found several islands off the New England coast to be destitute of
inhabitants, and the shores so thinned of Indians by an epidemic as
to be practically uninhabited. Yet they were careful to assure their
title by purchase. The Manowolko Islands of the Malay Archipelago were
without indigenes when the first settlers arrived. Pitcairn and Norfolk
Islands were found by the mutineers of the Bounty and the convicts
from New South Wales to answer to Defoe’s notion of a desert island.
The first English settlers in Australia and the first French settlers
in New Caledonia met with no resistance from the blacks at the initial
stages of occupation. When the Boers trekked across the Vaal they
entered on a country that had been left, through exterminating native
wars, to the beasts of the field and the forest. The situation is very
different when a rival civilized power lays claims to the territory.
When Great Britain forcibly took possession of West Griqualand in
1871 she had to salve, without satisfying, the claims of the Orange
Free State to one of the richest diamond fields in the world by a
payment differently stated at £90,000 and over £100,000. Having to deal
with a European power, she was constrained to submit to arbitration
her pretensions to the so very useful and convenient Delagoa Bay.
In attempting to extend British Guiana, so as to gain command of
the Orinoco, she came into collision with the mightiest of American
peoples, which now guards the interests of all the others. The United
States refused to acknowledge the doctrine of ‘squatter sovereignty,’
and one of the preliminaries of the Venezuela arbitration was the
addition to international law of the rule that a period of fifty years’
uninterrupted occupancy was required to constitute valid sovereignty.
England has gone through the world, like Sir Tantalus’s man with
his iron flail, beating down the weak and robbing the helpless. Yet
few countries can show an equal record of honorable renunciations.
It long refused to annex New Zealand, now one of the finest of its
colonies. It long refused Fiji and Natal. It refused Samoa. It
refused Bechuanaland for a time. It refused Angra Pequena. It would
not listen to the discoverer who called on it to occupy equatorial
Africa. It disavowed the action of Queensland in annexing New Guinea.
It surrendered the Ionian Islands. Its constant injunction to its high
commissioner in South Africa was not to advance the line of conquest.
It surrendered, in 1854, its sovereignty over the Boers of the Orange
River. That surrender was condemned by British governors, is still
condemned by historians, and was disliked by the wealthier and more
intelligent Boers; how wise and just it was is shown by the jealousy
with which the republic has since watched over its independence. To
its eternal honor--or rather to that of Gladstone--it nobly gave
back the Transvaal to its stalwart farmers. France long relinquished
Algeria and Madagascar, which her missions and commercial stations
in the seventeenth century gave her a prescriptive right to occupy
two centuries later. It refused to support De La Tours, and abandoned
Labourdonnais and Dupleix. Through mere inertia Portugal has let slip
from her hands a grand inheritance. The Dutch repressed the extension
of their colony at the Cape. Java flourishes, but Dutch New Guinea lies
rotting.
A species, extending beyond its original habitat, has often to battle
with lower species already in possession of that portion of the earth
or water. So, except in rare cases, occupation means the necessity of
conquest. The Puritans, as they advanced into the interior, had to
fight for the possession of New England. The nomadic Australian blacks
offered no resistance to the earliest settlers, but as they were driven
inward they disputed, and are still fiercely disputing, every foot
of territory. As the indigenes rise in the scale, have clearings and
cultivate the soil, the resistance increases. No savage peoples have
cost the invaders so much in disturbance, blood and treasure as the
Indians, Maoris, Kaffirs and Algerian Arabs. Mashonaland was occupied
by the Chartered Company without firing a shot or losing a life, but
it had soon to fight for possession. The incessant turmoil, though the
waves of it spread to the remote mother country, affects the settlers
mainly. The blood shed is both colonial and metropolitan. The North
American settlers fought their own hard battles; though British troops
engaged, to their cost, with the Indians, it was against these as
allies of the French; in recent years the British garrison in Canada
has been employed against the half-castes. In New Zealand colonial
volunteers joined with the regular troops to defeat the Maoris, and the
former were sometimes found the more efficient.
The most picturesque conquests in history were effected by private
enterprise. Mexico was conquered by local recruits. Pizarro was
authorized to conquer Peru in the name of the Spanish crown, and,
besides various other encouragements, he received a modest sum from
the Spanish treasury. But it was again by local recruits, not one
of them furnished by the Spanish Government, that the conquest was
made and maintained. Algeria has a very different story to tell. The
troops employed in effecting a difficult conquest spread over thirty
years were French from first to last. In general, it may be said that
where there have been regular campaigns and pitched battles the
metropolitan troops bear the brunt of the fighting. Where there is a
guerrilla warfare, as with the Australian blacks, it is carried on
by the colonial police or by the settlers, sometimes with the aid of
the natives themselves. The Carthaginians built up their empire by
native auxiliaries. The French and English conquered Canada with the
Hurons and Iroquois as auxiliaries. The English mastered New Zealand
with Maoris for allies, and defeated the Kaffirs with the help of
the Fingoes (a related variety of the Bantu race). Rhodesia was won
by a force half Kaffir. Peruvians aided Pizarro. India has been made
British by armies of which four fifths were Indian. A people, like
a man, contributes to its own subjugation. The expense is likewise
distributed. Fifty years of intermittent war with the Kaffirs cost
Great Britain twelve million pounds, and it may safely be assumed
that a no smaller sum was expended in New Zealand. The colonists
honorably bear their share. The premier of the latter colony told a
London audience in jubilee year that it was now cheerfully paying the
interest on a debt of eleven millions incurred in “holding the colony
for the empire.” After a Kaffir war Cape Colony was saddled with a
debt of three or four millions. Other losses fall more directly on the
settlers. Probably none have borne such disasters and so much suffering
as the early colonists of North America. The destruction of property
in a single New Zealand campaign amounted to £150,000, and the farmers
on the frontiers of Cape Colony have suffered far more severely, as
those on the frontier of Queensland are suffering now. If blood and
money, poured forth like water, can furnish conquest with a valid title
to territory, not a few British and French colonies have been justly
annexed.
The expansion of an organism or a species is determined also by its
struggle with other equal organisms or species which conflict with it.
The hardest fight is with individuals of the same or similar species.
So are rival colonizing powers usually more formidable opponents to the
acquisition of a country than its indigenes. The Carthaginians were
robbed of some of their colonies by the more numerous Greeks, and the
Greeks of many of theirs by the all-conquering Romans. The Swedes lost
a colony to the Dutch. The short but decisive struggle between the
Dutch and the English was followed by the loss of the Dutch colonies
in North America and the West Indies. In the eighteenth century,
after every great war a group of colonies fell into the hands of the
victorious power. The West India Islands and those of the Indian Ocean
were for many years tossed as in a game of battledore and shuttlecock
between France and England. The possession of Canada was a bone of
contention between the two countries for several decades. Seeley
even maintains that the hundred years’ war ending in 1815 was a long
rivalry between France and England for the New World and India. If
so, it was marked by striking acts of generosity. Conquests made in
Canada by England, with the efficient aid of the American colonies,
were more than once given back to France. When all but two of the West
India colonies were surrendered in 1814 the Foreign Minister explained
that it was desired to open to France the means of peaceful expansion,
and it was not the interest of England to make her a military and
conquering power. The rivalry did not end with the Napoleonic wars.
According to one historian, Australia was saved to the English in 1788
by six days, and for long afterward there was a constant jealousy of
French occupation. Ships were sent by Australian governors to take
possession of Van Diemen’s Land, of southern, western and northern
Australia when it was believed that the French had designs on them.
An English war ship, sent by the governor of the North Island of New
Zealand to annex the rich and fertile South Island, anticipated by
only a few hours a French ship dispatched for the same purpose. The
rising of the French Canadians in 1838 has been described as “the last
convulsion of despair of a sinking nationality.” The English, French,
and now the Germans are still rivals in present and future colonizing
grounds in Africa, China, and the South Seas. But no British colonist
doubts that further pacific defeats (if only by being bought out of
their possessions) await the French in different quarters of the globe,
for it is the colonies that press forward. The North American colonies
were at all times more aggressive than the mother state, as the
Australasian are now. They are unconsciously on the way to become the
suns of new systems.
Conquests may be made on various pretexts. The Cape was twice seized by
the English to prevent it from falling into the hands of the French,
and a few years later the Dutch were constrained to cede the colony to
its temporary possessors. Gambetta schemed to annex and colonize the
whole North African coast from Egypt to Morocco, and thus to create a
_France nouvelle_ along the northern shores of the Mediterranean in
place of the New France lost in Canada more than a century before,
or of that still older New France on the shores of the Bosporus. In
pursuance of this policy, the powers at the Berlin Conference in 1878
permitted France to occupy (not to annex) Tunis, prohibiting her,
however, from fortifying its chief port. But no one doubts that the
‘regency’ there, as in Madagascar, will speedily give way to undisputed
sovereignty, and Bizerta is already fortified. Writers are said to
be dreamers, and Locke’s constitution for Carolina, Rousseau’s for
Corsica, Bentham’s for Russia, with many another quixotic proposal,
furnish proof of their simplicity or their wrong-headedness. It is
nevertheless a fact that most of the new ideas that are being carried
into effect are the suggestions of publicists--journalists who stand
midway between men of thought and men of action. Sometimes the former
contribute immediately practicable proposals. Russia, Germany, France,
and Great Britain--the four grasping powers--along with Italy and
Belgium, are now, after a digestive interval of thirty years, carrying
out a suggestion made by Renan in 1871. The Chinese, who threw off the
yoke of the conquering Mongols, belong (it appears) by ordination of
Nature to the subject races. The people that produced Confucius and
Lao-tze consist of laboring men who need direction and organization.
China, therefore, calls for conquest. The powers have obeyed the call,
and that vast and peaceful land is now undergoing dismemberment, with a
view to final wholesale partition. It is a parallel to the conquest of
Peru by the Spaniards. In both countries a more perfect civilization of
a lower type was or will be superseded by a less perfect civilization
of a higher type. In this alone lies its assumed justification.
Evidently the argument may be carried far. It would justify Russia in
occupying Turkey, the United States in conquering not only Spanish
colonies but Spain itself. It was the moral justification of the Gothic
invasions of the early Christian centuries. It is a sentence of death
or (it may be) of new life to all moribund nationalities.
Other modes of acquiring colonies are by cession and by purchase. The
former is often disguised conquest, like that of the Cape to England.
The latter may be so as well, like that of the African diamond fields
by England. Colbert bought, for less than a million francs, certain
of the West India Islands and the Antilles. The United States has
bought her last colonies from dying Spain for four million pounds. At
no distant time the Australian colonies will probably buy France and
Germany out of the Pacific, and Holland and Germany out of New Guinea.
It will be none the less a moral conquest. The right of the stronger,
or the more fit to colonize, will still be, as it ever has been, the
sole title to possess.
By these various means habitats have been found for future colonies,
spheres for future colonial expansion.
[_To be continued._]
THE FUTURE OF THE NEGRO IN THE SOUTHERN STATES.
BY PROFESSOR N. S. SHALER,
HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
Whatever danger there may be of serious conflict between the negroes
and whites in the Southern States--at most but slight--is likely to
arise from the fact that the old class of slaveholders, men accustomed
to hold a caretaking relation to the lower race, is passing away.
Already the greater number of the white people know the blacks only
as they are known by the Northern folk. Race prejudice, which in the
days of slavery was hardly more than formal, finding expression mainly
in certain rules as to the behavior of the inferior class, is likely
to increase in proportion as the two peoples become parted from one
another in interests. If the present movement to disfranchise the
negroes should lead to their general and permanent separation from
political life, or if in elections they should again array themselves
as they did immediately after the war--under the lead of white
adventurers against the property interests of the commonwealth--then
there may be disaster. The aim of the statesman--of every citizen in
his quality of a statesman--should be to make the present political
separation of the races, as far as possible, temporary. Their effort
should be to develop in the blacks the qualities which may make them
safe holders of the franchise, and to give that trust to all who become
worthy of it. We may at once put aside all the futile expedients for
other dispositions of the negroes than the simple plan of adopting
them into our national life. The ancient project of returning them to
Africa, the suggestions that they should be deported to some part of
the American tropics, or be segregated in some one of the Southern
States, are all too impracticable to deserve a moment’s attention. They
must be dismissed, if for no other reason, because the labor of the
negroes is needed where they now dwell. Their exodus would mean the
commercial ruin of half a dozen great States. It is hardly necessary to
suggest that any such action would involve a trespass upon the rights
of both the whites and blacks too great to be thought of in our day.
Assuming that the only thing to do with the negroes is to shape them
so that they may be fit for the place of citizens, the question is as
to the steps which may be taken to attain this end. It is evident that
it cannot quickly be done. Acting on the basis of our experience with
immigrants from Europe, a majority of Congress concluded that all the
negro needed to convert him from the slave to the truly free man was
the ballot. We failed to see that between the primitive station of our
race, two thousand years ago, and its present state there lay twenty
centuries of toil and pain, spent in winning the state of mind of the
citizen. We mocked the African with the gift of the franchise. We have
now to begin where we should have begun thirty-five years ago, with
measures that are proportionate to the need--with a system of education
that may serve to develop the saving qualities of the race. What should
this education be?
To most of us education begins with an alphabet and goes on to an
indetermined limit of things that are to be had from books. The method
is naturally esteemed, for we behold that the useful citizen comes
forth from such teaching. Yet, logically, we might as well attribute
the shape and quality of the body to the clothes it bears. The real
education of our race, that which gives the most of its value to the
trifle of instruction we give our children, is clearly a matter of race
experience; of training in the generations of deeds since it began to
pass from primitive savagery. First came the lessons in the art of
continually laboring. Fortunately this lesson of labor the negro either
brought with him, or learned so well in the generations of slavery that
it is safely acquired. Next came the training in the occupations above
the plane of simple agriculture--the industries of the forge, the loom,
the ship and of military service and with it the habits of associated
action. Along with these came the development of the commercial sense
with the enlargements of view it gives, and from this the common sense
of public affairs that makes a democracy possible. We assumed all this
race training in the African when we cast him the ballot. Now that he
has failed to profit by our folly, we begin to doubt whether there is,
after all, the making of a citizen in him. A reasonable view of the
facts leads us to conclude that he can be made a valuable citizen,
provided he has a fair share of real help in the task of becoming such.
The first need of the negro is the conviction that his salvation
depends upon himself. So long as he is deluded by the hope that some
great external power is to lift him to the social and economic level of
the whites, there is no chance that he will come to depend on himself
for advancement. From this point of view, at least, it is advantageous
that the attention of this country is for the time turned away from
them in a search for other, and less practicable endeavors, to lift
lowly peoples to the Saxon’s estate. The next is that the negroes be
as rapidly as possible employed in varied craft work--work in which
they may receive a larger training than the toil the fields afford. The
simple yet valuable lessons of the soil-tiller they have had. For the
greater number of their race, particularly those of the Guinea type,
this grade of employment is as high as they may be expected to attain.
Yet somewhere near one-third of the people of their color are fit for
employments demanding more skill and, because of that skill, giving a
better intellectual station. The mechanical employments of the day are
ever gaining in their culture-giving powers. The complication of the
machines which are used, and the mysterious nature of the powers which
they apply, seem to make them more effective means of enlargement than
the old simple tools. Those who have observed the process by which the
horse-car driver of a decade ago has been converted into the motor-man
of to-day have had a chance to see what the control of energies may do
for them. I feel safe in saying, from the basis of personal experience
with the negroes, that somewhere near one third of them are fit to be
trained for mechanical employment of a fairly high grade. They will
need more instruction than the average whites, but they will have a
keen interest in their work, and are more likely than the whites to
lead up their children in their own trades. For such employment the
types which, for lack of a better name, I have termed the Zulu and the
Semetic are clearly well fitted. Here and there in the South we find
these people of the abler stocks already so employed.
There seems no reason to believe that there is at present enough race
prejudice in the South to oppose any effective resistance to negroes
entering on any such employment as that of the engineer. It is true
that among the women operatives in spinning and weaving mills there has
been such objection already found as to make it impossible to employ
the negro and white in the same rooms. It is, however, improbable that
there would be any opposition to having the black women engaged in the
industry, provided the personal association with the whites was not
required. Whatever resistance it would be necessary to overcome in
order to make the negro free to engineering employments would proceed
from the poor white class or from Northern loom operators who brought
to the South the obdurate hatred of the negro which is so strong in the
regions where he is rarely seen. The old slave-holding class, and those
who inherit their motives, will, I am convinced, welcome the effort to
open such places to well-trained blacks. As an evidence of the state of
mind of this ruling class, I may relate an experience of a year or two
ago in one of the most remote corners of the extreme South:
I was lodged for some days in a small rustic inn whereto came, in the
evening, a dozen men of the planter class to spin yarns, smoke and
drink. They had all been Confederate soldiers--some of them were the
very remnants of war. Willingly they allowed the talk to be led to
the question as to the future of the black people. They showed their
interest in all the forms of trade schooling that could be given them,
and their contempt for the results of the literary education which
they have received. Repeated reference was made to the great work that
Booker Washington was doing at Tuskegee, and for it there was nothing
but praise. One of the men dwelt with pleasure on the fact that in
the nearest large town two negroes, trained at Tuskegee, were doing
all the contract building, having ‘run out’ some cheap, ill-trained
whites who had long been in the business. This talk was clearly not
shaped for Northern ears, for the double reason that the Southern folk
are not in the least moved to such deception, and also because I was
with them as one of their own people. Very many such occasions for
learning the temper of the ex-slaveholder class have convinced me that
at present, and until the Southern conditions are assimilated to those
of the North, there will be no difficulty in developing the technical
skill of the blacks arising from the disinclination of the people when
they are thus employed. It is true that the old slaveholder, with
his care-taking humor towards the blacks, is passing away; but his
motives are likely to be continued in his descendants at least for some
generations.
There are at present in the South many thousand places for which it
would be easy to train negroes--places which would give them a liberal
education of the kind most needed by their race. It is not too much
to reckon that each year, in the development of the industries of
that region, adds some thousand chances which can not well be filled
from the native white people, but are likely to go to men brought
from elsewhere. Every opportunity to establish a family supported by
a skilled mechanic is of value. With even five per cent of the male
negroes thus employed, the prospects of their future would be greatly
benefited. The means for attaining this end are not difficult to find.
What is needed is an extension of the system followed at Tuskegee,
where youths are trained with the intent that they shall be made ready
for high-grade manual labor, the general schooling being limited to
what is necessary to ensure success in such practical work. A system of
trade schools for negroes, sufficient to supply the present demand for
skilled mechanics, is now the gravest need of the South.