that we would estimate the value of any commodity on the market. Men are
not very unlike watches. We might estimate first the cost of material—is
it gold or silver or alloy, solid or plated, jewelled or sham paste.
Settle the relative value of your raw material, and next you want to
calculate how much this value has been enhanced by labor the delicacy
and fineness, the honesty and thoroughness of the workmanship; then the
utility and beauty of the product and its adaptability to the end and
purpose of its manufacture; and lastly is there a demand in the market
for such an article. Does it meet a want, _will it go_ and _go right_?
Is it durable and reliable. How often do you have to wind it before it
runs down, how often repair it. Does it keep good time and require but
little watching and looking after. And there is no radical difference,
after all, between the world’s way of estimating men and our usual way
of valuing watches. In both the fundamental item is the question of
material, and then the refining and enhancement of that material through
labor, and so on through the list.
What then can we say for our raw material?
Again I must preface an apology for anything unpalatable in our menu. I
promised, you remember, to leave out the sentiment—you may stir it in
afterwards, mixing thoroughly according to taste. We must discuss facts,
candidly and bluntly, without rhetoric or cant if we would have a clear
light on our problem.
Now whatever notions we may indulge on the theory of evolution and the
laws of atavism or heredity, all concede that no individual character
receives its raw material newly created and independent of the rock from
whence it was hewn. No life is bound up within the period of its
conscious existence. No personality dates its origin from its birthday.
The elements that are twisted into the cord did not begin their
formation when first the tiny thread became visible in the great warp
and filling of humanity. When first we saw the light many of the threads
undoubtedly were spun and the color and fineness of the weft determined.
The materials that go to make the man, the probabilities of his
character and activities, the conditions and circumstances of his
growth, and his quantum of resistance and mastery are the resultant of
forces which have been accumulating and gathering momentum for
generations. So that, as one tersely expresses it, in order to reform a
man, you must begin with his great grandmother.
A few years ago a certain social scientist was struck by a remarkable
coincidence in the name of a number of convicts in the State prison of
New York. There were found thirty-five or forty men, of the same name
with but slight modification in the spelling, all convicted of crimes
similar in character. Looking into the matter, he traced them every one
back to one woman of inferior character who had come from England in one
of the first colonial ships. _And that woman had been a convict and
charged with pretty nearly the same crime._
Rightly to estimate our material, then, it is necessary to go back of
the twenty or thirty years during which we have been in possession, and
find out the nature of the soil in which it has been forming and
growing.
There is or used to be in England a system of entail by which a lot of
land was fixed to a family and its posterity forever, passing always on
the death of the father to his eldest son. A man may misuse or abuse, he
may impoverish, mortgage, sterilize, eliminate every element of
value—but he can never sell. He may cut down every tree, burn every
fence and house, abstract by careless tillage, or by no tillage, every
nutritive element from the soil, encumber it to two or three times its
value and destroy forever its beauty and fertility—but he can never rid
himself of it. That land with all its encumbrances and liabilities, its
barrenness and squalidness, its poverty and its degradation is
inexorably, inevitably, inalienably his; and like a shattered and
debased personality it haunts him wherever he goes. An heir coming into
an estate is thus often poorer than if he had no inheritance. He is
chained to a life long possession of debt, toil, responsibility, often
disgrace. Happier were it for him if he could begin life with nothing—an
isolated but free man with no capital but his possibilities, with no
past and no pedigree. And so it often is with men. These bodies of ours
often come to us mortgaged to their full value by the extravagance,
self-indulgence, sensuality of some ancestor. Some man, generations
back, has encumbered his estate for strong drink, his descendants coming
into that estate have the mortgage to pay off, principal and interest.
Another cut down the fences of character by debauchery and vice,—and
these have to ward off attacks of the enemy without bulwarks or
embattlements. They have burnt their houses of purity and integrity,
have rendered the soil poor and unproductive by extravagance and
folly,—and the children have to shiver amid the storms of passion and
feed on husks till they can build for themselves a shelter and fertilize
their farms. Not very valuable estates, you will say. Well, no,—nothing
to boast of, perhaps. But an energetic heir can often pay off some of
the liabilities and leave the estate to his children less involved than
when he received it. At least he can arrest the work of destruction and
see to it that no further encumbrances are added through his folly and
mismanagement.
In estimating the value of our material, therefore, it is plain that we
must look into the deeds of our estates and ferret out their history.
The task is an individual one, as likewise its application. Certainly
the original timber as it came from the African forests was good enough.
No race of heathen are more noted for honesty and chastity than are the
tribes of Africa. For one of their women to violate the laws of purity
is a crime punishable with death; and so strictly honest are they, it is
said, that they are wont to leave their commodities at the place of
exchange and go about their business. The buyer coming up takes what he
wishes to purchase and leaves its equivalent in barter or money. A
returned missionary tells the story that certain European traders, when
at a loss as to the safe keeping of their wares, were told by a native
chief, “Oh just lay them down there. _They are perfectly safe, there are
no Christians here._”
Whatever may be said of its beauty, then, the black side of the stream
with us is pretty pure, and has no cause to blush for its honesty and
integrity. From the nature of the case the infusions of white blood that
have come in many instances to the black race in this country are not
the best that race afforded. And if anything further is needed to
account for racial irregularities—the warping and shrinking, the
knotting and cracking of the sturdy old timber, the two hundred and
fifty years of training here are quite sufficient to explain all. I have
often thought, since coming in closer contact with the Puritan element
in America, what a different planing and shaping this timber might have
received under their hands!
As I compare the Puritan’s sound, substantial, sanctified common sense
with the Feudal froth and foam of the South; the Puritan’s liberal,
democratic, ethical and at the same time calculating, economical,
stick-to-ative and go-ahead-ative spirit,—with the free and easy
lavishness, the aristocratic notions of caste and class distinctions,
the pliable consciences and unbending social bars amid which I was
reared;—I have wished that it might have been ordered that as my race
had to serve a term of bondage it might have been under the discipline
of the successors of Cromwell and Milton, rather than under the training
and example of the luxurious cavaliers. There is no doubt that the past
two hundred and fifty years of working up the material we now inherit,
has depreciated rather than enhanced its value. We find in it the
foolish ideas of aristocracy founded on anything else than a moral
claim; we find the contempt for manual labor and the horror of horny
palms, the love of lavish expenditure and costly display, and—alas, that
we must own it—the laxness of morals and easy-going consciences
inherited and imitated from the old English gentry of the reigns of
Charles and Anne. But to know our faults is one step toward correcting
them, and there are, I trust, no flaws in this first element of value,
_material_, which may not be planed and scraped and sand-papered out by
diligent and strenuous effort. One thing is certain, the flaws that are
simply ingrained in the timber are not our responsibility. A man is to
be praised primarily not for having inherited fine tools and faultless
materials but for making the most of the stuff he has, and doing his
best in spite of disadvantages and poor material. The individual is
responsible, not for what he has not, but for what he has; and the vital
part for us after all depends on the use we make of our material.
Many a passable article has by diligent workmanship been made even from
inferior material. And this brings us to our second item of value—Labor.
This is a most important item. It would seem sometimes that it is labor
that creates all value. A gold mine is worth no more than common clay
till it is worked. The simple element of labor bestowed on iron, the
cheapest and commonest of metals, multiplies its value four hundred
thousand times, making it worth sixty-five times its weight in gold, _e.
g._:
A pound of good iron is worth about 4 cts.
A pound of inch screws $1.00
A pound of steel wire from $3.00 to $7.00
A pound of sewing needles $14.00
A pound of fish hooks from $20.00 to $50.00
A pound of jewel screws for watches $3,500.00
A pound of hair springs for watches $16,000.00
While a pound of fine gold in standard coin is worth
only about $248.00
Now it is the same fundamental material in the hair springs valued at
$16,000.00 which was sold in the rough at 4 cts. per pound. It is labor
that has thus enhanced its value. Now let us see if there is a parallel
rise of value in the material of which men are made.
No animal, the scientists tell us, is in infancy so utterly helpless, so
completely destitute of the means of independent existence, so entirely
worthless in itself as the world estimates values, as is man. The chick
just out of the shell can pick up its own food and run away from
approaching danger. Touch a snapping turtle just a moment after its
birth, and it will bite at you. Cut off its head and it will still bite.
Break open the egg of the young and the vivacious little creature will,
even in the embryo, try to fight for its rights and maintain its
independence. But the human babe can for weeks and months, do nothing
but cry and feed and fear. It is a constant drain on the capital of its
parents, both physically and mentally. It is to be fed, and worked for,
and sheltered and protected. It cannot even defend itself against a
draft of wind.
What is it worth? Unsentimentally and honestly,—it is worth just as much
as a leak is worth to a ship, or what the mistletoe is worth to the oak.
He is a parasite, a thief, a destroyer of values. He thrives at
another’s expense, and filches from that other every atom of his own
existence. The infatuated mother, it is true, would not sell him, she
will tell you, for his weight in gold; but that is sentiment—not
business. Besides, there is no danger of her having the chance to make
such a bargain. No one will ever tempt her with any such offer. The
world knows too well what an outlay of time and money and labor must be
made before he is worth even his weight in ashes. His present worth no
one would accept even as a gift—and it is only the prospect of future
development of worth that could induce any one, save that mother, to
take up the burden. What an expenditure of toil and care, of heart power
and brain power, what planning, what working, what feeding, what
enriching, what sowing and sinking of values before one can tell whether
the harvest is worth the output. Yet, how gladly does the mother pour
out her strength and vitality, her energy, her life that the little
bankrupt may store up capital for its own use. How anxiously does she
hang over the lumpish little organism to catch the first awakening of a
soul. And when the chubby little hands begin to swing consciously before
the snapping eyes, and the great toe is caught and tugged towards the
open mouth, when the little pink fists for the first time linger
caressingly on her cheek and breast, and the wide open eyes say
distinctly “I know you, I love you,”—how she strains him to her bosom as
her whole soul goes out to this newly found intelligence in the
impassioned cry of Carlyle: “_Whence—and Oh Heavens, whither!_”
“How poor, how rich, how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful is man!”
It is labor, development, training, careful, patient, painful, diligent
toil that must span the gulf between this vegetating life germ (now
worth nothing but toil and care and trouble, and living purely at the
expense of another)—and that future consummation in which “the elements
are so mixed that Nature can stand up and say to all the world, ‘_This
is a man_.’”
It is a heavy investment, requires a large outlay of money on long time
and large risk, no end of labor, skill, pains. Education is the word
that covers it all—the working up of this raw material and fitting it
into the world’s work to supply the world’s need—the manufacture of men
and women for the markets of the world. But there is no other labor
which so creates value. The value of the well developed man has been
enhanced far more by the labor bestowed than is the iron in the watch
springs. The value of the raw material was far below zero to begin with;
but this “quintessence of dust” has become, _through labor_, “the beauty
of the world, the paragon of animals,—noble in reason and infinite in
faculty!”
What a piece of work, indeed!
Education, then, is the safest and richest investment possible to man.
It pays the largest dividends and gives the grandest possible product to
the world—a man. The demand is always greater than the supply—and the
world pays well for what it prizes.
Now what sort of workmanship are we putting on our raw material. What
are we doing for education? The man-factories among our people make, I
think, a fairly good showing. Figures are encouraging things to deal
with, and too they represent something tangible in casting up our
accounts. There are now 25,530 colored schools in the United States with
1,353,352 pupils; the colored people hold in landed property for
churches and schools $25,000,000. 2,500,000 colored children have
learned to read and most of these to write also. 22,956 colored men and
women are teaching in these schools. There are sixty-six academies and
high schools and one hundred and fifty schools for advanced education
taught by colored teachers, together with seven colleges administered by
colored presidents and faculties. There are now one thousand college
bred Negro ministers in the country, 250 lawyers, 749 physicians; while,
according to Dr. Rankin, there are 247 colored students preparing
themselves in the universities of Europe.
The African Methodists alone, representing the unassisted effort of the
colored people for self-development, have founded thirty-eight
institutes and colleges, with landed property valued at $502,650, and
134 teachers supported entirely by the self denying effort of the
colored people themselves.
This looks like an attempt, to say the least, to do the best we can with
our material. One feels there has not been much shirking here; the
workmanship may be crude sometimes, when measured by more finished
standards,—but they have done what they could; in their poverty and
inexperience, through self denial and perseverance, they are struggling
upward toward the light.
There is another item to be taken into account in estimating the value
of a product, to which we must give just a thought in passing, _i. e._,
the necessary waste of material in the making.
The Sultan of Turkey once sent to China to procure a _fac simile_ of
some elegant plates he had had, all of which were now broken but one and
that, unfortunately, was cracked. He sent this one as a pattern and
requested that the set be renewed exactly like the former ones. He was
surprised on receiving the plates to note the fabulous sum charged for
them,—but the Celestial explained that the cost was greatly increased by
having _to put in the crack_,—so many had been lost in the making.
The anecdote is not my own, but it suggests a thought that may be useful
to us and I borrow it for that purpose. They tell us that the waste of
material is greater in making colored men and women than in the case of
others—that a larger percentage of our children die under twenty-one
years of age, especially in large cities, and that a larger number who
reach that age and beyond, are to be classed among the world’s invalids
and paupers. According to the census of 1880 the average death rate
throughout the country was, among the whites 14.74 per 1000; among
colored 17.28 per 1000: the highest among whites being in New Mexico,
22.04, lowest in Arizona, 7.91 per 1000. Among colored, the mortality
ranges from 35.25 in the District of Columbia where it is the highest,
to 1.89 in Arizona, the lowest.
For 1889 the relative death-rate of the two races in the District of
Columbia was: whites, 15.96 per 1000; colored, 30.48, about double. In
1888 they stood 18+ to 30+; in 1886 and ’87, about 17 to 31; in ’85 and
’86, 17 to 32. Especially noticeable is the difference in the mortality
of children. This is simply alarming. The report for 1889 shows that out
of the 5,152 deaths occurring in the District of Columbia during that
year, 634 were white infants under one year old, while 834, an excess of
200, within the same limits were colored. Yet the white population of
the District outnumbers the colored two to one. The Health Commissioner,
in his report for that year, says: “This material difference in
mortality may be charged to a great extent to the massing of colored
people in alleys and unhealthy parts of the city and to their unsanitary
surroundings: while there is no doubt that a very large proportion of
these children die in consequence of being fed improper and unhealthy
food, especially cheap and badly prepared condensed milk, and cow’s milk
which has been allowed to stand to the point of acidity after having
been kept in vessels badly or unskillfully cleaned.” And he adds, “if
the general statistics of infant mortality seem astounding to the
public, the cause can most frequently be found in the reprehensible
custom of committing little impoverished waifs to hired nurses and foul
feeding bottles rather than allow them the food that nature has
provided.”
Now all this unquestionably represents a most wanton and flagrant
_waste_ of valuable material. By sapping out the possibilities of a
healthy and vigorous existence it is deliberately and flagitiously
breeding and multiplying paupers, criminals, idiots, drunkards,
imbeciles and lunatics to infest and tax the commonwealth. The number
spoiled in the making necessarily adds to the cost of those who survive.
It is like the Sultan’s cracked dinner-plates. It is no use to go into
hysterics and explode in Ciceronian phillippics against life insurance
companies for refusing to insure or charging a higher premium for
colored policies. With them it is simply a question of dollars and
cents. What are you worth? What are your chances, and what does it cost
to take your risks in the aggregate? If thirty-five colored persons out
of every thousand are, from any cause whatever, lost in the making, the
remaining nine hundred and sixty-five will have to share the loss among
them. This is an unavoidable law. No man can dissociate himself from his
kind. The colored gentleman who keeps his horses, fares sumptuously, and
lives in luxury is made to feel the death gasps of every squalid denizen
of the alley and poor-house. It is God’s own precaution to temper our
self-seeking by binding our sympathies and interests indissolubly with
the helpless and the wretched.
What our men of means need to do, then, is to devote their money, their
enlightened interest, their careful attention to the improvement of
sanitation among the poor. Let some of those who can command real estate
in healthful localities build sweet and clean and wholesome tenements
_on streets_ and rent them at reasonable rates to the worthy poor who
are at present forced into association with the vileness and foulness of
alleys and filthy courts by the unfeeling discrimination of white
dealers. Let some colored capitalists buy up a few of those immense
estates in the South, divide them into single farms with neat, cheery,
well-ventilated, healthsome cottages to be rented to the colored tenants
who are toiling all these weary years in the one-room log hut, like
their own cheerless mules—just to fodder themselves.
In cities, low priced houses on streets are almost uniformly kept for
the white poor. I know of numerous houses in Washington the rent of
which is no dearer than colored people are paying in alleys—but the
advertisement says, “not rented to colored people.” If the presence of a
colored tenant in a neighborhood causes property to depreciate, it may
be a question of sentiment,—it must be a question of business. The
former it is superfluous to inveigh against or even to take cognizance
of. It is possibly subject to enlightenment, and probably a sickness not
unto death. But the practical reason underlying it is directly our
concern and should command our energetic consideration. It is largely a
question of what are we worth—and as such, subject to our immediate
responsibility and amendment. If improvement is possible, if it is in
our power to render ourselves _valuable_ to a community or neighborhood,
it should be the work of the earnest and able men and women among us,
the moral physicians and reformers, to devise and apply a remedy. Sure
it is that the burden rests on all till the deliverance comes. The
richest and most highly favored cannot afford to be indifferent or to
rest quietly complacent.
In rural districts, the relative mortality of colored people is not so
excessive, still the poverty and destitution, the apparent dearth of
accumulation notwithstanding ceaseless drudging toil is something
phenomenal in labor statistics. I confess I have felt little enthusiasm
for the labor riots which seem epidemic at the North. Carnegie’s men at
Homestead, for instance, were among the best paid workmen in the
country, receiving many of them $240 per month, living luxuriously,
dictating their own terms as to who should work with them, how many
hours, and what special labor they will perform. Their employers are
forced to hire so many and such men—for these laboring despots insist on
an exact division of labor, no one must be called on to work outside his
specialty. Then they must share profits, but be excused from all concern
in losses—a patent adjustable sliding scale for wages which slides up
beautifully, but never down! If the Northern laboring man has not become
a tyrant, I would like to know what tyranny is.
But I wonder how many know that there are throughout the Southland able
bodied, hard working men, toiling year in and year out, from sunrise to
dusk, for fifty cents per day, out of which they must feed and shelter
and clothe themselves and their families! That they often have to take
their wage in tickets convertible into meat, meal and molasses at the
village grocery, owned by the same ubiquitous employer! That there are
tenants holding leases on farms who toil sixteen hours to the day and
work every chick and child in their possession, not sparing even the
drudging wife—to find at the end of the harvesting season and the
squaring up of accounts that their accumulations have been like
gathering water in a sieve.