_Solution of the Political Problem_
I have no faith in parties. In monarchical and imperial governments
they are always manipulated by royal boobies, who are in turn
manipulated by their empty-pated favorites and their women of
soporific virtue; while in republics they are always manipulated by
demagogues, tricksters, and corruptionists, who figure in the
newspapers as "bosses," "heelers" and "sluggers," and in history as
statesmen, senators and representatives. These gentlemen, who _rule_
our government and _ruin_ our people, comprise what Mr. Matthew Arnold
recently termed the "remnant" which should be permitted to run things
to suit themselves, the people, the great mass, being incapable of
taking care of themselves and the complex machinery of government. Of
course, Mr. Arnold, who is necessarily very British in his ideas of
government, intended that the "remnant" he had in his "mind's eye,"
should comprise men of the most exalted character and intelligence,
the very things which keep them out of the gutters of politics. Men of
exalted character are expected in our country to attend to their own
concerns, not the concerns of the people, and to give the "boys" a
chance; while the men of exalted intelligence are, by reason of the
great industry and seclusiveness necessary to their work, too much
wedded to their books and their quiet modes of life to rush into ward
meetings and contend for political preferment with the "Mikes" and
"Jakes" who make their bread and butter out of the spoils and
peculations of office. A Clay or Webster, a Seward or Sumner,
sometimes gets into politics, but it is by accident. There is not
enough money in our politics to cause honest men to make it an object,
while the corruption frequently necessary to maintain a political
position, is so disgusting as to deter honest men from making it a
business.
A love of power easily degenerates from patriotism into treason or
tyranny, or both. As it is easier to fall from virtue to vice than it
is to rise from vice to virtue, so it is easier to fall from
patriotism than to rise to it.
Before the war the men of the South engaged, at first, in politics as
an elegant pastime. They had plenty of leisure and plenty of money.
They did not take to literature and science, because these pursuits
require severe work and more or less of a strong bias, for a thorough
exposition of their profound penetralia. It may be, too, that their
assumed patrician sensitiveness shrank from entering into competition
with the plebeian fellows who had to study hard and write voluminously
for a few pennies to keep soul and body together. And your Southern
grandees, before the war, were not compelled to drudge for a
subsistence; they had to take little thought for the morrow. Their
vast landed estates and black slaves were things that did not
fluctuate; under the effective supervision of the viperous
slave-driver the black Samson rose before the coming of the sun, and
the land, nature's own flower garden and man's inalienable heritage,
brought forth golden corn and snowy cotton in their season. Southern
intelligence expended its odors in the avenues where brilliance, not
profundity, was the passport to popularity. Hence, Southern
hospitality (giving to others that which had been deliberately stolen)
became almost as proverbial in the _polite_ circles of America and
Europe as the long established suavity and condescension of the
French. And even unto the present time the hospitality of the South,
shorn of its profuseness and grandiloquence, is frequently the theme
of newspaper hacks and magazine penny-a-liners. But the shadow alone
remains; the substance has departed--"There are no birds in last
year's nest."
If the literary reputation of the United States had been rated, up to
the close of the Rebellion, on the contributions of Southern
men--fiction, prose and poetry, science, art, and invention--the
polite nations of the world would have regarded us as a nation of
semi-barbarians. But, happily, the rugged genius of New England made
up then and makes up now for the poverty of literary effort on the
part of the South. True, a few men since the war have placed the
South in a better light; but even their work, as an index of Southern
genius, is regarded as highly precocious and tentative.
The South has yet to demonstrate that she has capacity for high
literary effort. In the process of that demonstration, I am fully
persuaded that the Anglo-African--with his brilliant wit and humor,
his highly imaginative disposition and his innate fondness for
literary pursuits--will contribute largely to give the South an
enviable and honorable position.
What the South lacked in literary effort before the war she made up in
a magnificent galaxy of meteoric statesmen, who rushed into politics
with the instinct of ducks taking to water, and who were forgotten, in
the majority of cases, before they had run out their ephemeral career.
A few names have survived the earthquake, and are remembered for their
cleverness rather than their depth. A few more decades, and they will
be remembered only by the curious student who plods his weary way
through the labyrinth of Congressional records and the musty archives
of States, seeking for data of times which long ago passed into the
hazy vista of history and romance. Before the war the Southern man of
leisure took to politics more as a pastime than as a serious business.
But as the pastime was agreeable, and as it gave additional weight and
distinction, all those who could, strived to make it appear that they
were men of importance in the Nation. They were largely a nation of
politicians, always brilliant, shallow, bellicose and dogmatic, as
ready to decide an argument with the shotgun or saber as with reason
and logic.
This was the temper of the people who rushed into the war with the
confidence of a schoolboy and who limped out like a man overtaken in
his gymnastic exercise by a paralytic stroke. The war taught the South
a very useful lesson, but did not sufficiently convince it that it was
preëminently a supercilious, arrogant people, who did not and do not
possess all the virtue, intelligence, and courage of the country;
that its stock of these prime elements is woefully small considering
the long years it had posed as America's own patrician class.
But when the war was over, and the Southern nobility turned its
thoughts once more to social arrogance and political dominion, it
found that Othello's occupation was entirely gone. A revolution had
swept over the country more iconoclastic and merciless than that which
followed in the wake of the French revolution nearly a hundred years
before. The bottom rail had been violently placed upon the top;
industrial adjustments had been so completely metamorphosed as to defy
detection; while the basis and the method of political representation
and administration had been so altered as to confound both the old and
the new forces.
Aside from the ignorance of the black citizens and the insatiate greed
and unscrupulousness of their carpet-bag leaders--a band of vultures
more voracious and depraved than any which ever before imposed upon
and abused the confidence of a credulous people--the white men of the
South had been educated to regard themselves as, naturally, the
factors of power and the colored people as, naturally, the subject
class, no factor at all. It was these two things which produced that
exhibition of barbarity on the part of the South and impotence on the
part of the government which make us go to Roumania and the Byzantine
court for fit parallel.
But, as I have said, a love of power easily degenerates into treason.
If we may not call the violence, the assassinations, which have
disgraced the South, _treason_ by what fitter name, pray, shall we
call it? If the nullification of the letter and spirit of the
amendments of the Federal Constitution by the conquered South was not
renewed _treason_, what was it? What is it?
The white men of the South, to the "manor born," having shown their
superiority in the superlative excellencies of murder, usurpation and
robbery (and I maintain they have gone further in the execution of
these infamies than was true of the Negro-Carpet-bag _bacchanalia_);
having made majorities dwindle into iotas and vaulted themselves into
power at the point of the shot gun and dagger (regular bandit style);
having made laws which discriminate odiously against one class while
giving the utmost immunity to the other; having, after doing these
things, modeled the government they rule upon the pro-slavery doctrine
that it is a "white man's government"--having had time to become
sobered, the white men of the South should be open to reason, if not
to conviction.
The black men of the South know full well that they were disfranchised
by illegal and violent methods; they know that laws are purposely
framed to defraud and to oppress them. This is dangerous knowledge,
dangerous to the black and the white man. It will be decided by one of
two courses--wise and judicious statesmanship or bloody and disastrous
insurrection. When men are wronged they appeal either to the
arbitrament of reason or of violence. No man who loves his country
would sanction violence in the adjudication of rights save as a last
resort. Reason is the safest tribunal before which to arraign
injustice and wrong; but it is not always possible to reach this
tribunal.
The black and white citizens of the South must alter the lines which
have divided them since the close of the war. They are, essentially,
one people, and should be mutual aids instead of mutual hindrances to
each other. By "one people" I don't wish to be understood as implying
that the white and black man are one in an ethnological, but a generic
sense, having a common origin. Living in the same communities,
pursuing identical avocations, and subject to the same fundamental
laws, however these may differ in construction and application in the
several States, it is as much, if not even more, the interest of the
white man that the black should be given every possible opportunity to
better his mental, material and civil condition. Society is not
corrupted from the apex but from the base. It is not the pure rain
that falls from the heavens, but the stagnant waters of the pool, that
breed disease and death. The corruption of the ballot by white men of
the South is more pernicious than the misuse of it by black men; the
perversion of the law in the apprehension and punishment of criminals,
by being wielded almost exclusively against colored men, not only
brings law into contempt of colored men but encourages crime among
white men. Thus the entire society is corrupted. Mob law is the most
forcible expression of an abnormal public opinion; it shows that
society is rotten to the core. When men find that laws are purposely
framed to oppress and defraud them they become desperate and reckless;
and mob law, by usurping the rightful functions of the judiciary,
makes criminals of honest men. As Alexander Pope expressed it:
_Vice is a monster of such frightful mien,
That to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet, seen too oft, familiar with his face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace._
The South has nothing to gain and everything to lose in attempting to
repress the energies and ambition of the colored man. It is to the
safety as well as to the highest efficiency of society that all its
members should be allowed the same opportunities for moral,
intellectual and material development. "Do unto others as you would
have them do unto you." "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."
There is no escape from the law of God. You either deal justly or
suffer the evil effects of wrong-doing. The disorders which have made
the South a seething cauldron for fifteen years have produced the most
widespread contempt of lawful authority not only on the part of the
lawless whites but the law-abiding blacks, who have suffered patiently
the infliction of all manner of wrong _because they were a generation
of slaves, suddenly made freemen_. They permitted themselves to be
shot because they had been educated to bare their backs at the command
of the white oligarch. But that sort of pusillanimous cowardice cannot
be expected to last always. Men in a state of freedom instinctively
question the right of others to impose unequal burdens upon them, or
to deny to them equal and exact protection of the laws. When oppressed
people begin to murmur, grow restless and discontented, the opposer
had better change his tactics, or lock himself up, as does the
cowardly tyrant of Russia.
A new generation of men has come upon the stage of action in the
South. They know little or nothing of the regulations or the horrors
of the slave régime. They know they are freemen; they know they are
cruelly and unjustly defrauded; and they _question the right_ of their
equals to oppose and defraud them. A large number of these people have
enjoyed the advantage of common school education, and not a few of
academic and collegiate education, and a large number have "put money
in their purse." The entire race has so changed that they are almost a
different people from what they were when the exigencies of war made
their manumission imperative. Yet there has been but little change in
the attitude of the white men towards this people. They still
strenuously deny their right to participate in the administration of
justice or to share equally in the blessings of that justice.
There must be a change of policy. The progress of the black man
demands it; the interest of the white man compels it. The South cannot
hope to share in the industrious emigration constantly flowing into
our ports as long as it is scattered over the world that mob law and
race distractions constantly interrupt the industry of the people, and
put life and property in jeopardy of eminent disturbance; and she
cannot hope to encourage the investment of large capital in the
development of her industries or the extension of her national system.
Capital is timid. It will only seek investment where it is sure of
being let alone. Again, while the present state continues, no Southern
statesman, however capable he may be, can hope to enjoy the confidence
of the country or attain to high official position. Thoughtful, sober
people will not entrust power to men who sanction mob law, and who
rise to high honor by conniving at or participating in assassination
and murder. They have too much self-respect to do it.
Only a few weeks since, a narrow-minded senator from the State of
Alabama, speaking upon the question of "National Aid to Education,"
said he would rather vote for an appropriation to place the Southern
States in direct communication with the Congo than to vote money to
educate the blacks. There is no ingrate more execrable than the one
who lifts up his hand or his voice to wrong the man he has betrayed.
This senator from Alabama does not represent the majority of the
people of his state. Take away the shot gun and mob law and he would
be compelled to crawl back into the obscurity out of which he was
dragged by his accomplices in roguery.
The colored man is in the South to stay there. He will not leave it
voluntarily and he cannot be driven out. He had no voice in being
carried into the South, but he will have a very loud voice in any
attempt to put him out. The expatriation of 5,000,000 to 6,000,000
people to an alien country needs only to be suggested to create mirth
and ridicule. The white men of the South had better make up their
minds that the black men will remain in the South just as long as corn
will tassel and cotton will bloom into whiteness. The talk about the
black people being brought to this country to prepare themselves to
evangelize Africa is so much religious nonsense boiled down to a
sycophantic platitude. The Lord, who is eminently just, had no hand in
their forcible coming here; it was preëminently the work of the devil.
Africa will have to be evangelized _from within_, not _from without_.
The Colonization society has spent mints of money and tons of human
blood in the selfish attempt to plant an Anglo-African colony on the
West Coast of Africa. The money has been thrown away and the human
lives have been sacrificed in vain. The black people of this country
are Americans, not Africans; and any wholesale expatriation of them is
altogether out of the question.
The white men of the South should not deceive themselves: the blacks
are with them to remain. Whether they like it or not, it is a fact
that will not be rubbed out.
If this be true, what should be the policy of the whites towards the
blacks? The question should need no answer at my hands. If it were not
for the unexampled obtuseness of the editors, preachers and
politicians of that section, I should close this chapter here.
The white men and women of the South should get down from the
delectable mountain of delusive superiority which they have climbed;
and, recognizing that "of one blood God made all the children of men,"
take hold of the missionary work God has placed under their nose.
Instead of railing at the black man, let them take hold of him in a
Christian spirit and assist him in correcting those moral abscesses
and that mental enervation which they did so awfully much to infuse
into him; they should first take the elephant out of their own eyes
before digging at the gnat in their neighbor's eyes. They should
encourage him in his efforts at moral and religious improvement, not
by standing off and clapping their hands, but by going into his
churches and into his pulpits, showing him the "light and the way" not
only by precept but example as well. Can't do it, do you say? Then
take your religion and cast it to the dogs, for it is a living lie; it
comes not from God but from Beelzebub the Prince of Darkness. A
religion that divides Christians is unadulterated paganism; a minister
that will not preach the Gospel to sinners, be they black or white, is
a hypocrite, who "steals the livery of Heaven to serve the Devil in."
They should make liberal provision for the schools set apart for the
colored people, and they should visit these schools, not only to mark
the progress made, and to encourage teacher and pupil, but to show to
the young minds blossoming into maturity and usefulness that they are
friends and deeply interested in the progress made. In public, they
should seek first to inspire the confidence of colored men by just
laws and friendly overtures and by encouraging the capable, honest
and ambitious few by placing them in position of honor and trust. They
should show to colored men that they accept the Constitution as
amended, and are earnestly solicitous that they should prosper in the
world, and become useful and respected citizens. You can't make a
friend and partisan of a man by shooting him; you can't make a sober,
industrious, honest man by robbing and outraging him. These tactics
will not work to the uplifting of a people. "A soft answer turns away
wrath." Even a dog caresses the hand that pats him on the head.
The South must spend less money on penitentiaries and more money on
schools; she must use less powder and buckshot and more law and
equity; she must pay less attention to politics and more attention to
the development of her magnificent resources; she must get off the
"race line" hobby and pay more attention to the common man; she must
wake up to the fact that--
_Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow,_
and that it is to her best interest to place all men upon the same
footing before the law; mete out the same punishment to the white
scamp that is inexorably meted out to the black scamp, for a scamp is
a scamp any way you twist it; a social pest that should be put where
he will be unable to harm any one. In an honest acceptance of the new
conditions and responsibilities God has placed upon them, and in
mutual forebearance, toleration and assistance, the South will find
that panacea for which she has sought in vain down to this time.