UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 >- 
 
LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 Class 
 
THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 VILLARI, the critic of Italian letters, has repeated in his chapter 
 upon Settembrini an anecdote which had much moved the older 
 patriot. 
 
 "One summer night two goatherds who had been sentenced 
 to the galleys were pacing a terrace in the prison yard and gazing 
 ecstatically at the starlit sky. Said one of them to the other, 
 How I d like to have as many sheep as there are stars up above ! 
 Where would you pasture them? asked his companion. In 
 your meadow. . . . What! in my meadow? . . . Yes, 
 I tell you I d do it ! ... A few minutes later one of the two 
 men fell to the ground, stabbed to death by the other." 
 
 Villari repeats the familiar but striking story because Settem 
 brini himself and a scholarly fellow-prisoner, after long ethical 
 discussions upon the human significance of the incident, came, 
 within a few days and in the course of a like dispute, almost to 
 the very point of its reenactment. Indeed, how often in every 
 generation do the controversies which divide foe from foe and 
 the sadder quarrels which divide friend from friend arise out 
 of the issues involved in the pasturing of imaginary flocks upon 
 the plains of imaginary meadows ! 
 
 And yet, what, in the deeper sense, are the real sheep upon 
 the real meadow except a symbol, like the star, a symbol 
 temporary in its form but representative in the human mind of 
 an established, imperishable "interest"? And what is the 
 meadow of the inhospitable friend but the symbol also of an "in 
 terest"? And what are all our conflicts of individual or social 
 life but quarrels concerning the symbols of apparently conflicting 
 interests? It does not seem to make so much difference, after 
 all, whether the symbol itself be the flocks below or the stars on 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 high: the inward essential quarrel springs from an attitude of 
 mind, and involves those apparent oppositions of principle which 
 change their symbols but which persist, through action and re 
 action, in all the history of our progress. 
 
 The discussion of any of the issues of social conflict par- 
 ticula^ylEelssiies uf race ^ rnayrecall the incident of the Italian 
 prison. Men fight and die in behalf of the symbols of conflicting 
 interest. I fancy that from the eternal standpoint it is as unreason 
 able and as reasonable for men to quarrel about the sheep 
 as about the stars. I say "as reasonable," because while the 
 symbols are not important, the deeper issues which they involve 
 may be as persistent and as fundamental as the quarrel between 
 light and darkness in the soul. 
 
 These things we may not change. The issues between truth 
 and error will themselves remain. We may not postpone them 
 or disguise them. We may seek, however, to remember and to 
 learn; to see clearly; to be just; to gain something of that sense 
 of perspective which, not without the saving capacity of humor, 
 divides lesser things from greater. But we will also remember 
 that the symbols of the quarrel have often a significance as deep 
 as the peace of states; that their issues, according to the quality 
 of our stewardship, may descend in fortune or misfortune to 
 millions other than ourselves; that the real conflict is always 
 somewhat deeper than a quarrel lodged between the meadow and 
 the stars. 
 
 And yet that impulse of murder which made fraternity im 
 possible came not from this deeper conflict, nor from the meadow, 
 nor from the stars, but out of moods which we may change ; out 
 of that diseased frenzy for possession through which a man 
 turning upon even the partner of his imprisonment has been 
 known to destroy his one friend and his only wealth. 
 
 Through the self-conquests of a finer intelligence and a juster 
 temper he might have achieved the winning of both. Such posses 
 sions are destroyed within us by something lower than our prin 
 ciples. 
 
THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY 
 
 A DISCUSSION OF CERTAIN PRINCIPLES 
 
 OF PUBLIC POLICY INVOLVED IN 
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE 
 
 SOUTHERN STATES 
 
 BY 
 
 EDGAR GARDNER MURPHY 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THE PRESENT SOUTH" 
 
 OF THE 
 UNlVERs/TY 
 
 OF 
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 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 
 
 LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 
 
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 COPYRIGHT, 1909, 
 BY EDGAR GARDNER MURPHY. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 Plimpton. Press, Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 
 
TO MY MOTHER 
 JANIE GARDNER MURPHY 
 
PREFACE 
 
 IN the preface to the volume entitled "The Present 
 South," 1 1 expressed the hope that that series of chapters 
 might shortly be followed by another. The fulfilment 
 of the expectation has been delayed. Much of the 
 volume has been written, yet the conditions of per 
 sistent ill-health and the pressure of other responsi 
 bilities have compelled the postponement of its publi 
 cation. 
 
 In the meanwhile, and just as its completion came 
 clearly into view, it became evident to me that this 
 second volume of essays should be preceded by a more 
 explicit statement of those principles of fundamental 
 policy which both the collections of essays were in 
 tended to illustrate. From this decision the present 
 volume has resulted; and the second series of papers 
 is, therefore, again withheld. They are practically 
 ready, however, for the press; and their publication, 
 under the title of "Issues, Southern and National," 
 will ultimately follow. In this future volume (as also 
 in "The Present South," already published), there 
 will be found, moreover, a discussion of many specific 
 subjects such as agricultural education, the negro 
 school, the lynching problem, the problem of child 
 
 1 "Problems of the Present South," The Macmillan Co., 1904; 
 Longmans, Green, & Co.; New York and London, 1909. 
 
 xi 
 
 217090 
 
xii PREFACE 
 
 labor, compulsory education, suffrage restriction, the 
 new federalism, etc. which do not directly come 
 within the scope of the present publication, but which 
 bear more or less directly upon its thesis. 
 
 For the present volume is an attempt to deal with an 
 issue more general in its nature, but none the less 
 critical in its bearing upon the development of our 
 Southern States. Back of all the issues of the moment, 
 as they may express themselves in this or that phase 
 of definite legislation or of accepted custom, there lies 
 the question of fundamental attitude. Where two 
 social or racial groups a stronger and a weaker - 
 find themselves in inevitable contact upon the same 
 soil, what elementary principles shall ultimately de 
 termine the policies of the State? And by the State 
 I here mean no merely artificial political entity, but the 
 local organ and expression of our social responsibility. 
 Shall the principles of its policy, in relation to its weaker 
 racial or social groups, be repressive or constructive? 
 
 That, I cannot but think, is the real question. It is 
 because this question has seemed to me so fundamental 
 and so definitive in its nature, that many of the technical 
 issues of ethnology, and many of our controversial dis 
 cussions as to the ultimate significance of "race," 
 have seemed to me comparatively irrelevant. The 
 man who is apparently inclined to overestimate the 
 significance of "race," and the man who, upon the 
 other hand, is inclined to ignore the importance of 
 racial distinctions, are both as American citizens 
 of this immediate hour confronted by a definite 
 situation. How shall we deal with this situation? 
 To prove that all men, ages ago, were much alike and 
 
PREFACE xiii 
 
 that we may not declare dogmatically against the 
 ultimate parity of racial groups, does not abolish the 
 obvious consideration that we have now to deal with 
 the stubborn realities of a world in which races are not 
 upon a par either in their social or industrial effi 
 ciency and in which the respective families of men 
 are alike no longer. The State cannot base a present 
 policy upon prehistoric conditions. To do so would 
 but entail, aside from its injury to the stronger race and 
 to the social whole, an even deeper injury to the weak. 
 In its disappointment of expectations such a policy 
 could only increase the burden of their despair and set 
 to work within the stronger group the inevitable re 
 actions of a still greater social and political distrust. 
 
 While, therefore, I cannot concur in what have 
 seemed to me to be the assumptions involved in the v ^ 
 argument of Professor Royce, I am also unable, / 
 upon the other hand, to concur in the assumptions 
 which seem to me to underlie the recent volume from 
 Mr. Stone. 1 
 
 If the former seems to underestimate the meaning 
 of race, the latter seems to me to give to the fact of 
 
 1 See the article "Race Questions and Prejudices," by Josiah 
 Royce, LL.D., Professor of Philosophy in Harvard University, in 
 the International Journal of Ethics, April, 1906; reprinted in October, 
 1908, in his "Race Questions and Other American Problems," The 
 Macmillan Company; and also the volume by Mr. Alfred Holt Stone 
 and Mr. Walter F. Willcox, entitled "The American Race Problem," 
 Doubleday, Page & Co., 1908. It is impossible within the limitations 
 of a brief preface to enter fully upon the discussion of either book. 
 Each will find fuller consideration in the volume on "Issues, Southern 
 and National"; and I shall there attempt, in an essay entitled "Are 
 there Lessons in Jamaica?" to deal especially with Professor Royce s 
 suggestions as to that Island. 
 
xiv PREFACE 
 
 race a disproportionate significance. That the negro 
 group is relatively weaker than the white group within 
 (which it has become locally included is obvious indeed; 
 Ithat the negroes are, upon the whole, less efficient 
 lan the stronger race is also obvious. It is true, 
 >reover, that the facts as to their present moral and 
 economic situation are, in many respects, an occasion 
 of grave and increasing apprehension. But it is also 
 well, I think, to remember that there are other facts 
 of brighter omen; and that many of the facts which 
 are not so bright which constitute indeed some 
 of the most formidable occasions of discouragement - 
 lie partially at least within the category of "removable 
 obstacles." Nothing is more characteristic of the better 
 tendencies of contemporary opinion than the growing 
 appreciation of the economic bearing of ethical, political, 
 and social forces. 1 While it is true that a full and 
 accurate record of the facts will contribute to the 
 making of our policies, it is also true that our policies 
 constantly contribute to the making of the facts, the 
 
 1 See particularly "The Limits of Political Economy," by Fred 
 eric Harrison, in his "National and Social Problems," p. 263. I 
 am inclined to think, however, that Mr. Harrison s criticisms of the 
 average economist are less applicable to-day than in the year 1865, 
 when they were first printed. Marshall himself, the leading econo 
 mist of the conservative school, has said, "Ethical forces are among 
 those of which the economist has to take account. Attempts have been 
 made to construct an abstract science with regard to the actions of an 
 "economic man," who is under no ethical influences and who pur 
 sues pecuniary gain warily and energetically, but mechanically and 
 selfishly. But they have not been successful. . . . His normal 
 motives have always been tacitly assumed to include the family 
 affections. . . . But if they include these, why should they not 
 include all other altruistic motives the action of which is so far uni 
 form in any class at any time and place, that it can be reduced to a 
 
PREFACE xv 
 
 spontaneity, industry and resiliency of labor being in 
 timately responsive to the moral appreciation and the 
 legal and economic position accorded it in the general 
 social policy of the state. That the negro s powers are 
 not the powers of the white man, and that his present 
 capacities are at many points not equal to the economic 
 competition presented by the stronger race, is due in 
 part to the fact that the negro is a negro: but how 
 far is it also due to the fact that that sense of "security 
 as to his property and his person," which is the best 
 school of the economic virtues, has not alwaysT^en 
 adequately permitted him, and that that "hope," 
 without which, as Marshall declares, "there is no enter 
 prise," is as yet but partially enjoyed? The fact that 
 the negro is a negro, the State may not alter; but the 
 fact that trie negro quite as much at the North as 
 at the South has not been adequately accorded the 
 economic support of the profounder social forces of 
 security, opportunity, and hope, the State may largely 
 alter if it will. Will it do so? 
 
 general rule? There seems to be no reason. . . . This principle 
 is applied not only to the ethical quality of the motives by which a 
 man may be influenced in choosing his ends, but also to the sagacity, 
 the energy, and the enterprise with which he pursues those ends." 
 And as to the influences which awaken and strengthen the forces of 
 sagacity, energy, and enterprise, Marshall says, "Freedom and hope 
 increase not only man s willingness but also his power for work; 
 physiologists tell us that a given exertion consumes less of the store 
 of nervous energy if done under the stimulus of pleasure than of pain; 
 and without hope there is no enterprise. . . . Security of person 
 and property are two conditions of this hopefulness and free 
 dom." See "The Principles of Economics," by Alfred Marshall, 
 Professor of Political Economy in the University of Cambridge, 
 England, p. vi of the Preface, and p. 250, Vol. I. See also the quo 
 tation from Mill, on p. 146 of the present volume. 
 
xvi PREFACE 
 
 To present, at least in some degree, a basis for an 
 affirmative answer to that question, is the purpose of 
 this volume. For it is a question which directly con 
 cerns not merely the fate of the negro and the health 
 of the national life, but the fortunes of the stronger 
 race in our Southern States. I have written primarily, 
 therefore, as a Southerner to the South. And yet while 
 I cannot but think that the South has much to correct 
 and to overcome in her readjustment to the tragic fate 
 in which she has become involved, I trust that she will 
 never so far modify her feeling in reference to the 
 validity of social differentiations as to minimize the 
 significance of race. No sound assumption of democ 
 racy demands it. Every true interest of humanity 
 forbids it. When the Professor of Philosophy at Har 
 vard University speaks, as Southern men have often 
 spoken, of the morbid and excuseless exaggerations of 
 racial feeling so frequently exhibited in the relations 
 of racial groups, one who has long lived within a 
 scene of racial contrasts can understand the value of his 
 message; but when he seems to question the serious 
 basis of that feeling, declares that "our so-called race 
 problems are merely the problems caused by our an 
 tipathies," places the race antipathies of social groups 
 among "the childish phenomena of our lives," 1 and 
 assures us that they belong "on a level with a dread of 
 snakes and mice" ("phenomena that we share with 
 the cats and with the dogs"), the man who is familiar, 
 at first hand, with the complexities of race adjustment 
 under the conditions of a democracy must register 
 
 1 See page 48 of Professor Royce s " Race Questions," etc., to which 
 I have already referred on page xiii. 
 
PREFACE xvii 
 
 his protest. A sane and righteous and wholesome ad 
 justment of race relations is not advanced by a spuri 
 ous "catholicity of race" which would ignore the very 
 existence of the factors which give to our problem its 
 reality. An amity of inter-racial appreciation which 
 would not merely value and applaud (as we must) 
 the finer phases of the individuality of each, but which 
 would seem to find in that individuality itself something 
 to belittle or deny, is not, in its principle, either a counsel 
 of praise or a grace of healing. It is but a subtle way 
 of saying to the weaker group that it has nothing in 
 dividual, nothing peculiar to itself, which it must 
 sacredly conserve in the interest of all; it is also but 
 a subtle way of making it impossible to say to the 
 stronger group that its individuality is, in all its finer 
 and happier achievement, a thing too sacred, too in 
 dispensable to the service of the world, to be de 
 livered upon the one hand to the dragging pressure of 
 lower groups, or to be surrendered, upon the other 
 hand, to those self-corrupting antipathies to which 
 it is forever tempted. 
 
 There is, it seems to me, a racial cosmopolitanism 
 which is quite as morbid as the provincialism of the 
 mob, and quite as dangerous (were it ever given its 
 full institutional expression) to the peace of states 
 and the deeper interests of civilization. Men must 
 conduct the business of government not alone upon the 
 basis of their unity, but also upon the basis of their 
 diversities. We are confronted by vast accumulated 
 and entrenched realities of emotion and conviction, 
 of social instinct and historic tradition, of collective 
 necessity and of palpable experience, which cannot be 
 
xviii PREFACE 
 
 composed by placing the phenomena of race antipathy 
 "on a level with a dread of snakes and mice." That 
 may be the " psychology" of it, but that is not the daily 
 truth of it nor the broader wisdom of it, as we take 
 up the problems of public policy, and attempt the per 
 plexing task of democratic administration. And that 
 that is not even the psychology of it, I am inclined to 
 believe, as I weigh the passages in which another has 
 defined "the original and elementary subjective fact" 
 in society itself. These offer, at least in some_ measure, 
 not a justification of race antipathies, but an expla 
 nation of that instinctive consciousness of race and 
 of that persistent individuality of racial character 
 of which our antipathies are the aberrations. We 
 read : 
 
 "In the subjective interpretation [of society] it will be 
 necessary, as we already know, to start from that new datum 
 which has been sought for hitherto without success, but which 
 can now no longer remain unperceived in the narrowing 
 range of inquiry. . . . 
 
 " The original and elementary subjective fact in society is 
 the consciousness of kind. By this term I mean a state of 
 consciousness in which any being, whether low or high in 
 the scale of life, recognizes another conscious being as of 
 like kind with itself. Such a consciousness . . . acts 
 on conduct in many ways, and all the conduct that we can 
 properly call social is determined by it. ... 
 
 "In its widest extension the consciousness of kind marks 
 off the animate from the inanimate. Within the wide class 
 of the animate it next marks off species and races. Within 
 racial lines the consciousness of kind underlies the more 
 definite ethnical and political groupings, it is the basis of 
 class distinctions, of innumerable forms of alliance, of rules 
 
PREFACE xix 
 
 of intercourse, and of peculiarities of policy. Our conduct 
 toward those whom we feel to be most like ourselves is 
 instinctively and rationally different from our conduct 
 toward others, whom we believe to be less like ourselves. 
 
 "Again, it is the consciousness of kind, and nothing else, 
 which distinguishes social conduct, as such, from purely 
 economic, purely political, or purely religious conduct; 
 for it is precisely the consciousness of kind that, in actual 
 life, continually interferes with the theoretically perfect 
 operation of the economic, the political, or the religious 
 motive. . . . 
 
 "In a word, it is about the consciousness of kind, as a 
 determining principle, that all other motives organize them 
 selves in the evolution of social choice, social volition, or 
 social policy. . . . 
 
 "The consciousness of kind being the psychological 
 basis of social phenomena, it follows that the supreme 
 object of social value is the kind itself, or the type of con 
 scious life that is characteristic of the society. Each nation 
 supremely values its own characteristic qualities, and it is 
 this social self-valuation that we call national [or racial] 
 prejudice. It is the essence of the Briton s love of things 
 British, of the American s pride in things American. . . . 
 
 "Next to the type in social value is the social cohesion. 
 The existence of a society depends on its unity, and when 
 its integrity is threatened, the community shows itself ready 
 to make any sacrifice that may be necessary to save union. 
 The most splendid examples of social feeling have been 
 the patriotic enthusiasms that have been aroused by the 
 threatened disruption of nations [and races]. As a bond 
 of cohesion loyalty is valued in every community in which 
 social feeling is normally developed . . ." etc. 1 
 
 1 "The Principles of Sociology," by Franklin Henry Giddings, 
 Professor of Sociology in Columbia University in the city of New 
 York; pp. 17, 18 and pp. 147, 148; third edition, New York and 
 
xx PREFACE 
 
 That the consciousness of kind has often expressed 
 itself in irrational and exaggerated forms the author 
 of the paragraphs which I have quoted would probably 
 be the last to deny. The instinct of race has been a 
 destructive as well as an integrating influence. But 
 the correction of the false by-products of great elemental 
 social forces does not tome through the belittling of 
 those forces, but through their wiser discipline and 
 their true direction. 
 
 The consciousness of race we cannot deny, but we 
 can educate it into finer forms. By increasing both 
 the intelligence of its self-knowledge and the security 
 of its basis we may enlarge the scope of its sympathies 
 as well as the faculties of its self-control. For we learn 
 to sympathize with the race-struggle of other social 
 f groups, not through a denial of its reality or by depre 
 ciating its significance, but through the knowledge in 
 our own life of what a race-standpoint and a race- 
 struggle are, and through the revealing power of 
 that intenser social individuality within ourselves which 
 alone makes really possible an appreciation of the 
 individuality of others. This truer ground of inter 
 racial appreciation may not be at once attained. There 
 will be failures of administration and failures of reti 
 cence. But those who have followed Professor Royce 
 in his criticisms of these two phases of our delayed at 
 tainment will not altogether forget that the task of 
 administration, as it has devolved upon the South, is not 
 
 London, 1900. The words in brackets are inserted by myself 
 merely to indicate what seems to me to be the further bearing of the 
 passage on the phenomena of race. With both the Greek and the 
 Jew the patriotism of race preceded, and outlived, the existence of 
 the state. E. G. M. 
 
PREFACE xxi 
 
 yet wholly free of the embarrassments bequeathed from 
 an unfortunate period of maladministration which pre 
 ceded; and that even the task of reticence in view of the 
 by no means inflexible reticence of New England upon the 
 negro question will not improbably present its diffi 
 culties. And yet, while an acute self-consciousness, 
 racial as well as sectional, has naturally followed from 
 the fact that the South has been placed -go-largely -on 
 the defensive, and while the tendency of defensive 
 activities is to develop the negative rather than the 
 constructive capacities of social groups, the South is 
 beginning to stir with a freer and stronger spirit. But 
 it will not soon be possible to ignore the fact that hers 
 are all the problems of other sections and another 
 problem added; all the tasks, religious, educational, 
 economic, of other democratic peoples and another 
 task beside; a problem and a task which, like a new 
 term in a formula of chemical reactions, will give new 
 phases and an altered outline to many of the familiar 
 adjustments of more homogeneous groups. 
 
 Does any one suppose that the perplexities which 
 thus move us are chosen as a pastime ? There is much 
 that is suggestive in the new racial cosmopolitanism 
 which is so rightly (if somewhat raspingly) insistent 
 that we shall appreciate all the difficulties of the "back 
 ward races of mankind " ; but I trust that it is not too 
 much to hope that this cosmopolitanism will become 
 ultimately so comprehensive that from its broad and 
 genuine solicitude the strain and perplexities of the 
 white race will not be necessarily excluded. 
 
 For the South is just now immediately concerned 
 with a task of statesmanship, rather than with a 
 
xxii PREFACE 
 
 psychology of racial origins upon the one hand, or with 
 the subtle melancholy of economics upon the other. 
 Not that either is to be despised. Every truth of a just 
 psychology, every fact and inference of a sound body 
 of economic science, will directly bear upon the policies 
 of the state. And yet I can conceive of no truth from 
 either source that can alter the essential form of the 
 practical question with which we have to do. It is 
 the same for pessimist or optimist. Starting with the 
 fact that the negro is a negro and that his capacities, 
 upon the average, are not the capacities of the white 
 man, what shall be the policy of the state toward 
 such capacities as he has? Shall it be a policy of ne 
 gation or of development? 
 
 It is in the conviction that within the answer to this 
 question there lie, for our Southern States, the ulti 
 mate issues of social health and power that this volume 
 has been written. And the principles of public policy 
 which may well determine the course of our develop 
 ment possess a significance not wholly restricted within 
 
 the boundaries of our local task. 
 
 E. G. M. 
 
 MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA, 
 March 23, 1909. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE INDIVISIBLE INHERITANCE i 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE PROTEST OF OUR SELF-PROTECTION . . .13 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 THE IMPULSE OF RACE AGGRESSION .... 23 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 THE INADEQUACY OF REPRESSION AS A POLICY OF 
 
 ULTIMATE ADJUSTMENT 37 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 THE DOUBLE BASIS OF OUR RACE SECURITY . . 49 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 NEGRO RACE INTEGRITY: THE SCHOOL OF SELF-DIS 
 COVERY 7! 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 THE INTEGRATING FORCE OF OPPORTUNITY: DESPAIR 
 
 AS A FORCE OF DISINTEGRATION 95 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 THE FATE OF THE STRONG 119 
 
xxiv CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE EDUCATIVE POWER OF SOCIAL REACTIONS . .141 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 THE NEW COERCION ..... J 73 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 ASCENDANCY . 
 
 INDEX ....... 2 49 
 
THE INDIVISIBLE INHERITANCE 
 
THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE INDIVISIBLE INHERITANCE 
 
 IT is so frequently assumed that the most significant 
 factor in the history of our negro population is the 
 factor of its exploitation that a word of contradiction 
 is never quite out of place. Within its actual en 
 vironment, whether North or South, this population 
 has suffered much, but it has received more. It has 
 become involved so inextricably in the fate of a far more 
 efficient social group that the conditions of progress 
 within this stronger group have become the conditions 
 which must surround and advance the life and fortunes 
 of the weaker. 
 
 Some of the conditions of progress for the stronger 
 (such physical conditions as the influence of the colder 
 climate of our continent, such social tendencies as the 
 rapid development of our cities) may operate to the dis 
 advantage of the weaker ; but it is true, upon the whole, 
 that the negro and his children have become with us 
 and whether we will or no the joint beneficiaries 
 of our civil, educational, and political heritage. It is 
 the truth; and it is well for us at the South to face 
 it, just as it is also well for our friends at the North, 
 in fact for all who appreciate the institutional solidarity 
 of the Republic, to face it with us. For while its 
 history may be sectional, its consequences the subtle 
 
 3 
 
4 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 invasions of its good or its evil will necessarily be 
 general. 
 
 The negro has been subjected to intentional and^ 
 therefore, but partial discriminations, for it is ]n_ 
 vain that men plan to withhold advantages which no 
 man can escape. The suffrage of the blacks has 
 indeed been sharply limited by statute, but the very 
 act of limitation has involved a narrowing of the basis 
 of the whole electorate. Drastic declarations as to the 
 divisions of privilege on racial lines were everywhere 
 published. Indiscriminate immunities were proclaimed 
 for white men. Ruthless discriminations were pro 
 nounced against black men. The battle raged. The 
 clouds of conflict have rolled away. Within less than 
 ten years thousands of the worthier black men, 
 under our amended constitutions, have been admitted 
 to the ballot; and in Alabama alone, in the first 
 presidential election after the readjustment of the 
 suffrage, more than half of our adult white men did 
 not qualify and vote. Despite all the frank assertions 
 of discrimination on the part of the South, despite all 
 the imputations of discrimination from the side of the 
 North, the thing which the Southern majority declared 
 should happen and which the Northern majority de 
 nounced as having happened has not happened at all. 
 Many negroes have been admitted. Many white men 
 have been excluded. 
 
 Some measure of discrimination has been effected. 
 Everywhere there arise discriminations, in one form 
 or another, against the weak; and the race possessing 
 the most weakness has naturally suffered the greater 
 discriminations. But beneath and within these arti- 
 
I THE INDIVISIBLE INHERITANCE 5 
 
 ficial discriminations from without, there has worked 
 - by subtle, inexorable processes of self-administra 
 tion the levelling and equalizing force of individual 
 capacity. For, after all, the only permanent exclusion 
 from political influence in a democracy is self-ex 
 clusion, the self-exclusion of ignorance, indifference, 
 incapacity. Where these existed, the law could not 
 be framed so liberally as to enfranchise ; * where 
 these have not existed, where knowledge, interest, 
 capacity, have even measurably prevailed, the law 
 could not be framed so illiberally as to disfranchise. 
 I speak not narrowly or literally, within the perspective 
 of a day, but broadly and fundamentally within the 
 perspective of a generation. 
 
 This is that deeper fact of things upon which the 
 crude negro governments of the Reconstruction period 
 went to pieces ; this is also the fact in reference to which 
 every exaggerated righting of that reconstruction, every 
 undemocratic element in our more recent readjustments 
 of the suffrage, will find correction. There is no point 
 within the organic structure of American society at 
 which, or about which, an artificial or arbitrary politi 
 cal discrimination can intrench itself. Our common 
 institutions are a common freehold. 
 
 Let no man assert, moreover, that the possibilities 
 of discrimination have been defeated by the letter of 
 the Fifteenth Amendment. As I have observed its 
 political influence, it has operated chiefly as an irri- 
 
 1 See p. 1 29 of this volume, and, especially, the author s paper, 
 " Shall the Fourteenth Amendment be Enforced ? " in the North 
 American Review, January, 1905 ; to be reprinted in " Issues, South 
 ern and National," 
 
6 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 tation. It has provoked the distinctions it was os 
 tensibly established to defeat. As a formal enactment 
 it has accomplished little, except in so far as the truth 
 upon which we have just dwelt has begun to work, 
 with the power of its resistless equalizations, beneath 
 the arbitrary adjustments of the State. And this deep, 
 prevailing principle of things this remorseless equity 
 of nature, existing long before the enactment of the 
 Amendment, first operated, after its enactment, to 
 annul the intentions which many of its advocates 
 desired it to impose. 
 
 Its letter was first established to exclude and con 
 found the political capacity of white men, to strengthen 
 those discriminations which had already placed the 
 governments of the South in the hands of our negro 
 ignorance, venality, and incapacity, and to perpetuate 
 (under the guise of the federal protection of the weak) 
 the political proscription of the strong. 1 It declared 
 
 1 There were many generous spirits at the North who gave their 
 support to such policies as Thaddeus Stevens had represented, not 
 because they were moved by a partisan or vindictive animus, but be 
 cause they were persuaded that the negro would find in the ballot his 
 only effective protection. I am reluctantly forced to the conclusion, 
 however, that this was the motive of the minority (made up chiefly of 
 sincere philanthropists, and men of letters), and that the darker spirit 
 of Mr. Stevens seems to have been representative of the majority of 
 his party. Such an impression is not due so much to Southern tes 
 timony as to the records of the Congressional debates, to such North 
 ern witnesses as Mr. Elaine, the late Carl Schurz (see his speech in the 
 U.S. Senate, January, 1872, quoted on p. 178 of this volume), and Mr. 
 James Ford Rhodes, whose sixth and seventh volumes in his "His 
 tory of the United States "are of especial value: not that I would 
 make either Mr. Schurz or Mr. Rhodes the responsible author of my 
 impressions, any more than I should always literally concur in their 
 interpretation of the sources of the period. 
 
I THE INDIVISIBLE INHERITANCE 7 
 
 that no State should discriminate against any class 
 of its citizens upon the ground of race; yet the Recon 
 struction measures (by sweeping disabilities already 
 laid on the "disloyal," i.e. on all those who had par 
 ticipated in "the late rebellion") had so operated toward 
 the creation of a class citizenship that the practical 
 effect of the Amendment was but further to confirm 
 the discriminations which its letter now condemned. 1 
 Its immediate issue, taken in conjunction with the 
 legislation previously imposed, was a discrimination 
 against the white man in the interest of the black. 
 For, within a scene of political impartiality, the result 
 of a decree of non-discrimination is justice; but a 
 decree of non-discrimination imposed within a scene 
 of social distortion and of pre-established partiality 
 is something less than justice and something more than 
 restitution. 
 
 Yet the presumptive impartiality of the State, the equal 
 and even status of every class before the law, became, 
 as is the tendency in democracies, a force corrective of 
 the forms which had obscured it. The outward terms 
 of the Reconstruction adjustment were annulled by the 
 natural working of the truth which they were first 
 framed to express and then administered to defeat. 
 This truth lies, as we have seen, in the very equity of 
 nature, is of a piece with the intimate structure of so 
 ciety itself, is of the soul of constitutions, because it 
 
 1 The exclusion of practically the whole resident white population 
 as " the disloyal " could not but operate (automatically) as an arbi 
 trary exclusion of race (the white race), and was, in principle, the 
 precedent for the " grandfather clause " of a later period, a clause 
 which under a similar arbitrary device excluded so large a majority of 
 the blacks. 
 
8 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 is of the essence of social order, there being no legis 
 lative or arbitrary way to make those strong who are 
 not strong or to make those weak who are not weak. 
 Those with the capacity for government will govern. 
 
 It is this truth which overthrew the Republican 
 discriminations against the political privileges of white 
 men ; it is this truth not any attempted legislative 
 expression of it which has slowly modified the Demo 
 cratic discriminations against the political privileges of 
 the negro. In the long run our political proscriptions 
 in America are always defeated by forces deeper than 
 those of external inhibition, by the realities of inherent 
 right and power as these have obtained between man 
 and man, by that ignorance and helplessness in one 
 because of which he cannot rule (no matter by what 
 names we may exalt him or how low the obeisance 
 we may make to him), and by that interest and aptitude 
 in another because of which he cannot be enslaved. 
 It is a result which we may detest or may desire; it 
 is not a result which we may permanently change, 
 nor is it a result which a member of any stronger race 
 should care for one moment to have otherwise. By 
 reason of the inherent, unyielding processes which 
 ceaselessly adjust and readjust the fortunes and rela 
 tions of men it is inevitable in a democracy that political 
 prerogatives should slowly but surely fall from the hands 
 of those who are too ignorant or too indifferent to wield 
 them; that discriminations based upon arbitrary dis 
 tinctions should be written in water; that the only 
 way in which a particular class may hope to hold the 
 prerogatives of a superior race under the educa 
 tional or industrial or political conditions of our Ameri- 
 
I THE INDIVISIBLE INHERITANCE 9 
 
 can society is to be superior, and that however or 
 wherever we may hope to base the enduring ascendancy 
 of one race as against another, we shall in vain seek 
 such a basis in any artificial readjustment of our in 
 stitutions. The law that "His rain falleth on the just 
 and on the unjust " is not more inexorable than the 
 silent, implicit ordinance of our democracy that, though 
 there may be races many and classes many, yet that 
 class as class shall never rule. At the throne of power 
 our differentiations are abdicated ; it is humanity which 
 governs. 
 
 The suffrage, however, presents naturally the point 
 at which any weaker race will enter least fully into 
 that solidarity of our institutions of which we have 
 been thinking. Among all our common benefits the 
 benefits of prerogative will come last. How much the 
 negro shares, how much he has inherited in the abun 
 dance of our social fortunes, will appear still further, 
 as we note his more general advantages in contrast 
 .with those of any like number of the race elsewhere. 
 He enjoys his religious and civil freedom, but these 
 were won for him and not by him. In his past stands 
 no long history of spiritual adventure, of social strug 
 gle and civic education, no memories of a Martel 
 at Tours, of a Luther at Worms, of a Thomas More 
 at London. Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights 
 are the historic symbols of a collective struggle, of a 
 social and political achievement, to which he has not 
 contributed, but within which he has been adopted. 
 The very law which he now invokes has come up out 
 of the suffering and patience of another social group. 
 It is the flowering of the consciousness of another race, 
 
to THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 is in its genius and expression the white man s law - 
 made out of the texture of the white man s experience, 
 and shot through and through with the instinctive as 
 sumptions of a psychology to which the negro as a 
 negro is largely alien. This is one reason why he makes 
 no intimate response to it, why it is hard for the negro 
 as a negro to understand it and obey it. 
 
 And yet this law is his. It is about him from his 
 infancy. It is his heritage. It is not nicely adjusted 
 to his racial needs, to his native tendencies, but it is 
 the only law there is; and, exacting as it may appear, 
 it takes up his nature within the forms of its familiar 
 practice and shapes him in conformity with its human 
 type. That it does not destroy him wholly, that he, 
 in spite of much mental and moral catastrophe, 
 is slowly responding to its expectations, is evidence of 
 that adaptability of nature which is one of his strongest 
 characteristics. As time passes, the blessings to 
 him of the fate in which he is involved are likely 
 to become more evident. Even to-day it is obvious 
 that this strange contact presents to his race the su 
 preme opportunity in its history. The white man s 
 law stands about it not perfectly but more per 
 fectly than the law which surrounds any weaker race 
 at any other point within our world. The stronger 
 race may want to kill the representative of this weaker 
 group, but it cannot do so without destroying the law 
 which is its own protection; the white man may want to 
 rob him, but he cannot legally rob him without violence 
 to the safeguards of his own gain; the white man may 
 want to withhold from him the securities of trial by 
 jury or the benefits of legal process in the courts, but 
 
i THE INDIVISIBLE INHERITANCE n 
 
 the white man cannot do so without unsettling to 
 his own bitter disadvantage all the fundamental securi 
 ties of property and life. Social disorder will always 
 have its apologists, but they become a feebler and 
 feebler company as men clearly realize that in their 
 own interest they cannot adequately preserve their 
 institutions through the processes of flouting them. 
 The law which enfolds the weak with the strong be 
 comes a social necessity, rather than a loose and vol 
 untary compact. Its Saxon directness, its Latin, im 
 perious universality, are elements in the progress of 
 our administrative efficiency which the stronger race, 
 however great the burden, must increasingly attain, 
 must attain in the interest of its own welfare. It has 
 discovered it has always known at its heart of hearts 
 that a civilization not responsive to its own political 
 and social genius it itself cannot long endure. 
 
 And thus stands our situation throughout the range 
 of our social achievement in America. At every point 
 the negro inherits, receives. If public schools are 
 founded, he must share in them, whether we will or 
 no. He can be denied only by processes of deception 
 and self-deception which cost the stronger race a price 
 financially more laborious and intellectually more 
 stupefying than the burden of his schools; for there 
 is neither economy of purse nor largeness and happi 
 ness of mind in the presence and contact of the semi- 
 savage masses of our new generations of illiterate 
 blacks. It is idle to talk of the fineness _ of the old- 
 time negro who was illiterate. He, and the paternalis 
 tic conditions which created him, are gone forever. W 
 must train our present negroes through the churches 
 
12 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP, i 
 
 and the schools because we have nothing else through 
 which to train them. And yet, were there no schools 
 at all, they could not wholly be cut off from their part 
 in the inheritance of an educated world. Just as the 
 negro shares in the uses of every paved street, of every 
 well-constructed country road, of every railway, of 
 every public utility of every sort, facilities chiefly 
 demanded and supported by the commerce and inter 
 course of the stronger race, so he enters also, however 
 humbly or indirectly, into the heritage of every intel 
 lectual and moral asset of the country. If there be 
 freedom of the press ; if there be a press fit or unfit to 
 be free ; if there be a vital and spiritual religion ; if there 
 be books, artists, poets; if there be an historic and 
 responsive language ; if there be stable banks, equitable 
 markets, courts accessible and for the most part just; 
 physicians, hospitals, and by no means least 
 the kindly interest of the wisest and kindliest of a more 
 highly developed population, these are the negro s. 
 In so far as they are ours, they are his ; in so far as they 
 are not his, they tend, in subtle, inexorable fashions, 
 not to be our own. In the fundamental sense we can 
 no more make a bi-racial division of our civilization 
 than we can make a bi-racial division of the sunshine, 
 the rain, the returning seasons. It is the fate of the 
 land. It is the tragedy of those long ago, North and 
 South, who tried at its birth to divide their labors 
 without dividing their liberties. We but confront the 
 fiat of reversal. Labor and freedom are indivisible. 
 
THE PROTEST OF OUR SELF- 
 PROTECTION 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE PROTEST OF OUR SELF-PROTECTION 
 
 AGAINST such a reading of our conditions there has 
 been insistent protest. This protest has sprung, how 
 ever, not so much from a reasoned and articulate dissent 
 as from a sense of popular revulsion. The protest 
 has been instinctive, an emotional reaction and 
 therefore an implicit confession of the unalterable 
 fact to which it stands related. We have recoiled, 
 not because the fact can be denied but because it must 
 be admitted. It is but further recognition of that 
 solidarity of our institutions, of that indivisibility of our 
 heritage, which is the real basis of the racial repug 
 nancies arising within the legislative indirections of the 
 State and in the subtler and more powerful discrimina 
 tions of social custom. If the fact were not true to us 
 and were not accepted by us, it could create neither 
 revulsions nor reservations. 
 
 We sometimes imagine that "the cause of the negro" 
 is being thrust upon us by " the North," or in a con 
 troversial sense by the negro himself, or by this or 
 that political party; and such an interpretation of our 
 contemporary experience is occasionally true. But we 
 know, or ought to know, that that which really thrusts 
 the negro (or any other weaker factor in our American 
 environment) up into the consciousness of the majority 
 is something deeper and more inexorable than any 
 external power, it is the hidden and intimate hand 
 
 15 
 
i6 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 of our society itself; that silent, unyielding force of 
 civil equalization to which we have committed, and have 
 everywhere desired to commit, the keeping of our 
 ultimate ideals and of our fundamental institutions. 
 
 And yet it is inevitable that we should have protested 
 against what many have assumed to be its immediate 
 implications. Indeed, the truth itself appalled us; 
 and as we contemplated the spectacle of our social 
 faiths involved in the test and strain, not of the com 
 paratively homogeneous people which created them, 
 but of the contrasted populations to which they are 
 committed, our repugnances became deeper than our 
 enthusiasms. We moved impulsively to the rescue 
 both of our institutions and of ourselves. 
 
 There is little time, at the first, to enter into an 
 ultimate philosophy. There are no precedents to 
 guide. Whatever may be said as to the intentions of 
 those who stood for a mathematical and immediate 
 realization of all the literal implications of " equality" 
 (as the doctrine fell from the lips of Sumner), whatever 
 in New England may have been devoutly hoped as to 
 the political elevation of the negro per saltum from 
 nonentity to mastery, the South s instant and supreme 
 concern as she confronts the policies of Reconstruc 
 tion is not with the political education of the negro 
 (or of anybody else), but with the preservation of those 
 intelligible and orderly conditions of our experience 
 which we call civilization. The first duty of the hour 
 is the preservation, not of this or that institutional 
 organization of society, not even of democracy, but of 
 society itself. Doubtless it is in a sense true that "the 
 way to teach a man to use the ballot is to put the ballot 
 
ii THE PROTEST OF OUR SELF-PROTECTION 17 
 
 in his hands, 7 but as applied to the situation presented 
 to the South at the close of our Civil War, such a dec 
 laration is valid only upon the theory that the first 
 obligation of a democratic society is not the preserva 
 tion of society or of democracy, but the abandonment 
 of both in the interest of an educational experiment. 
 If it be indeed the supreme business of the State to 
 educate the incompetent at the expense of the compe 
 tent, and to sacrifice the political efficiency of the State 
 itself in the interest of the participation of the ineffi 
 cient, then it becomes somewhat difficult to perceive 
 just what even for themselves the inefficient 
 have secured. For the State itself, as an instrument of 
 social order, becomes impossible. That to which the 
 novitiates have been introduced is not a realization of 
 freedom, for it is the abrogation of security; nor is it 
 a participation in democracy, for there is no govern 
 ment of the people where government is itself dis 
 credited, "the people" not being in themselves a 
 government any more than a mob is a court or a river 
 is a water-power. Restraint, direction, discipline, order, 
 are of the essence of utilization. There is no tyranny 
 so pitiless in its exploitation of the ignorant as that 
 government of whatever time or place through 
 which mere ignorance attempts to know and to decide, 
 and through which the weak assume to rule. White 
 supremacy at this period in the development of the 
 South is a necessity to the preservation of those con 
 ditions upon which the progress of the negro is itself 
 dependent. Democracy, as the ignorant masses of 
 our colored population rise to seize it, goes to pieces 
 in their hands. 
 
1 8 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 Nor is that in which they are educated by their suffrage 
 the suffrage itself; it becomes rather that hard lesson 
 in the social and political reactions of modern states 
 by which the first prerogative to be formally bestowed 
 is so often the last to be actually enjoyed; for it is as 
 true in politics as in economics that no man can really 
 keep that which he cannot use. In vain are military 
 forces brought to the support of these negro masses 
 "to insure a republican form of government," for 
 it cannot be too often pointed out that such a policy 
 involving in the effort to protect one class, the 
 abandonment of republican conditions for all classes 
 - represents the final catastrophe of the "educational" 
 experiment. In the interest of the weak, in the very 
 interest of all that they may hope to inherit of demo 
 cratic institutions, in the interest of their practice in 
 free government, government itself must be freely 
 permitted to find its local basis, a local leverage for 
 administrative efficiency must be regained, the inter 
 ests and the competencies of society must be intrusted 
 with its primary responsibilities and must be enlisted 
 in the support of its processes and its forms. Not 
 until the stronger and more practised manhood of the 
 local scene (whatever its imperfections) was permitted 
 to assume its normal prerogatives, could the manhood 
 of the negro begin to have its education and its op 
 portunity. For ultimately, and in such a case, there 
 can be no education in society except society; no prac 
 tice in government except through government itself. 
 
 There are perhaps those who will retort that under 
 such a contention human society, in the beginning, 
 could never have been undertaken: To which I 
 
ii THE PROTEST OF OUR SELF-PROTECTION 19 
 
 would reply that this is not the beginning. This - 
 whatever its grave defects is not the era of political 
 or institutional origins. There is a residuum of ac 
 complished achievement, social and governmental; 
 nor may we abandon this achievement in the interest 
 of those who have not achieved. Kenan s observation * 
 that "the loftiness of a civilization is usually in inverse 
 ratio to the number of those who share in it and 
 that the crowd pouring into cultivated society almost 
 always depresses its level " is but a partial truth, and 
 would involve, in its implications, the rejection of democ 
 racy : the end of society is not the culture of the few, the 
 end of culture is the enlightenment and happiness of 
 society. Upon the other hand, when society allows the 
 inundation of its culture, when it permits the hard-won 
 gains of the past, together with the very instruments and 
 organs of social accumulation, to be submerged by the 
 morbid beneficence of its hospitality to the weak, the 
 weak are themselves betrayed, for they cannot enter 
 upon the enjoyment of that which they have been per 
 mitted to exploit. The multitudes of the novitiate 
 should have their social and political education; and 
 it is in a measure true that their best instruction in the 
 suffrage is in its exercise. This exercise of the suffrage 
 must be so guarded, however, through gradual processes 
 of participation, and so bestowed under ascending ap 
 proximations of influence, that the pupils in the school 
 of society may be effectually prevented from destroy 
 ing the school. The introduction of the politically in- 
 
 1 Ernest Renan, "Religious History and Criticism," translation 
 by O. B. Frothingham, New York, 1864, p. 325, on "Channing and 
 the Unitarian Movement in the United States." 
 
20 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 capable will indeed develop their political capacity, 
 if this introduction be effected under wise restraints 
 and through well-adjusted stages. So conducted, the 
 gains which result are a real possession both to the 
 novitiate and to the State. The ultimate end should 
 be an increasing political assimilation; not the progres 
 sive narrowing but the progressive broadening of the 
 basis of popular control. But when the introduction 
 of the incapacity of the weak is so precipitate and so 
 overwhelming as to submerge the capacity of the strong, 
 then all those rights of the weak which their new pre 
 rogatives were intended to protect are involved and 
 discredited in the common ruin. 
 
 Human society as it emerges above the scenes of 
 civil catastrophe must, in behalf of its very exist 
 ence, put the interests of restraint, of discipline, of 
 immediate practicability, before the subtler interests 
 of individual recognition. Such days are the days of 
 rough work. Men cannot wait upon delicate and 
 difficult distinctions as between this personality and 
 that. Moreover, if incapacity appears in the guise of 
 conspicuous human aggregates, in multitudes marked 
 off by traditional or observable characteristics, its 
 groupings are hurriedly marked and its proscriptions 
 are ruthlessly imposed. There was doubtless in all 
 this some fear and hatred of the negro, but there was 
 chiefly as the very necessities of the case will in 
 dicate a swift, intense, intolerant repudiation of 
 disorder, a demand for order, an imperious reaffirma- 
 tion of government, an assumption and exercise of 
 fundamental prerogatives, a reorganization of society 
 within which the institutional experience of the strong 
 
ii THE PROTEST OF OUR SELF-PROTECTION 21 
 
 is put at the service of the common progress. There 
 were wrought within this process of readjustment 
 certain social aversions and certain racial antipathies, 
 but these aversions were conservative and these an 
 tipathies were defensive. 
 
THE IMPULSE OF RACE AGGRESSION 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE IMPULSE OF RACE AGGRESSION 
 
 BUT the times and the conditions change. The 
 aversions which were so largely conservative have a 
 tendency to become destructive, and the antipathies 
 which were defensive become aggressive. The stronger 
 race begins to pay the tragic penalty of arbitrary pro 
 cesses. The rough and ready means of social rehabili 
 tation as they cease to be the methods of emergency 
 - begin to lose that dignity which the stress of accident 
 accorded them. The single instance of fraud, the one 
 deed of violence, which were justified in a struggle 
 almost military in its intensity, began to assume a lower 
 quality when the end in view was no longer the saving 
 of the State but the quite ordinary turn of partisan 
 advantage. Practices of evasion have a tendency to 
 pass back, by subtle but inevitable processes of reac 
 tion, into the will and habit of the authors, and the 
 bias of indirection slowly affects the whole body of the 
 electorate. Processes invented and tolerated for the 
 rescue of society against black men began to imperil, 
 by their employment among white men, the health and 
 freedom of the society which had been rescued. De 
 mand therefore arose for formal restrictions of the suf 
 frage, restrictions which should save society from the 
 curse of informal fraud. 
 
 The change was urged, moreover, not primarily as 
 a restriction upon the negro, but as a restriction of the 
 
 25 
 
26 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 factional advantages of certain white men, men, 
 who, living in the Black Belt and using the actual negro 
 population as an asset, claimed their representation 
 in the party counsels upon a basis proportionate to the 
 total theoretic strength of their respective counties. I 
 say "theoretic strength," for the negroes were no longer 
 voting. It was easier, however, to make a campaign 
 for reforms against negroes who were not voting at all 
 than against white men who might be voting both for 
 themselves and for the negro also! 
 
 Few political movements in history have been so little 
 understood as this campaign at the South for the formal 
 disfranchisement of the blacks. Conceived, first, as 
 a method for freeing the stronger race from the burdens 
 of personal indirection, and, secondly, as a method 
 for the equalization of factional power within the party, 
 it bore in its origin only the slightest animus against 
 either the negro or his fortunes. 
 
 But the habits of deception had not been the only 
 habits developed in the school of our political neces 
 sities. The sources of class suspicion, of intense and 
 cumulative prejudice, lay deep, upon both sides, 
 within the natures of these respective races, races so 
 different in type and so unfortunate in every phase of 
 their mutual contact. That slavery qualified them 
 for the understanding of their new situation, for par 
 ticipation in an intelligent and fruitful knowledge of one 
 another, is true only in a momentary sense. For its 
 own type of peace, for its own characteristic amenities 
 - mastery upon the one side and affectionate depend 
 ence upon the other slavery was an adequate school. 
 But as a school for freedom, for the mutual under- 
 
ill THE IMPULSE OF RACE AGGRESSION 27 
 
 standing and the common forbearances of independent 
 individuals or groups, it was necessarily inadequate. 
 For the peace of democracy, slavery is not a school; 
 and as time wore on, each group came inevitably to 
 stand more and more apart, to perceive its own inter 
 ests, to attain its own self-consciousness, and to define 
 the fortunes of the state in the terms of its own ex 
 clusive welfare. 
 
 It was upon these central founts of racial self-con 
 sciousness, deep-stored through centuries of divergent 
 interest and conflicting aspirations, troubled through 
 the long controversy preceding our Civil War, by that 
 war itself, and by the bitter injuries which followed it, 
 that there descended the rod of our recent suffrage 
 agitations. However meek the motive of that rod, the 
 answering flood has not yet ceased to flow. The 
 social aversions which were, as I have said, conservative, 
 have become increasingly destructive; and the an 
 tipathies which had been defensive, become, under 
 the exigencies of factional strife and of popular clamor, 
 increasingly aggressive. The new mood makes few 
 professions of conservatism. It does not claim to 
 be necessary to the state s existence. It does not 
 presume to say that society itself is in abeyance and 
 must be restored, or that the state is endangered by 
 the domination of the ignorant and must be saved. 
 These new antipathies are not defensive, but assertive 
 and combative ; this popular temper is not in its animus 
 protective, protective of civilization in need or of govern 
 ment in distress, but frankly and ruthlessly destructive. 
 Here, in the last analysis, is an attack upon the weak 
 rather than an attempted rescue of the strong. 
 
28 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 The temper of such a movement has found a broad 
 and responsive basis in the masses of the unprivileged 
 white population of the past. 1 The effort to exclude 
 the negro from the exercise of the suffrage has excluded 
 many of these also, but many, as we have already seen, 
 have been included. They are by no means the socially 
 and industrially "destitute," "the poor white trash" 
 of our legendary fiction, but the great masses of a 
 sturdy rural population; unprivileged in the sense that 
 they did not fully share in the slave-owners aristocracy 
 of wealth, but full of that eager wit, that homely 
 force, and that industrial resiliency which have wrought 
 the South s superb reaction from the catastrophe of 
 arms. Their larger access to political power has made 
 their influence numerically predominant. The very 
 struggles concerning the suffrage have given them a 
 political self-consciousness which perhaps is more 
 assertive than that of any other social group in our 
 American life ; and they have discovered what every 
 self-conscious class is quick to perceive that the bal 
 lot is an instrument of aggression as well as a weapon 
 of defence; a spear as well as a shield. 2 
 
 Having secured through its exercise the political 
 elimination of the larger fraction of the weaker race, 
 they have proceeded to an attack upon practically 
 every privilege it possesses. And yet we must use the 
 word "they" with careful reservations. A popu 
 lation so virile, even when drawn together by the arti- 
 
 1 See Chapter I of the author s "The Present South." 
 
 2 1 first find the familiar metaphor in a quotation from Sterne, in 
 
 "Democracy and Liberty," W. E. H. Lecky, London and New York, 
 
 Longmans, Green & Co., 1897, p. 101. 
 
in THE IMPULSE OF RACE AGGRESSION 29 
 
 ficial solidarity imposed by the presence of an alien and 
 weaker group, is by no means of one mind. The whole 
 electorate is, moreover, powerfully influenced by a 
 minority made up of the remnant of the older aris 
 tocracy and by many of the representatives of our 
 professional and commercial classes, a minority 
 powerful to restrain if not always powerful to accom 
 plish. Thus the movement of race aggression of 
 which I have just spoken has from point to point been 
 modified. It represents, as yet, a characteristic ten 
 dency of feeling, a natural and conspicuous activity of 
 opinion, but not at any point a consciously accepted 
 program. Its victories exist, its further victories are 
 inevitable, but it has suffered also its defeats. The 
 question as to how largely and how literally it shall be 
 permitted to establish itself in the practice and legisla 
 tion of our Southern States is still an open one; it is a 
 question which the future must determine. It is a 
 movement which has been checked at many points. 
 Many of its apparent victories have been neutralized 
 by later action. Many of its insistent proposals are so 
 impracticable as to be impossible of adoption; many, 
 by significant majorities of the white voters of the State, 
 have been deliberately rejected. 
 
 And yet this movement is among us. I have already 
 dwelt upon the significant intolerance of its logic 1 as it 
 has viewed the interests of our negro masses. Its more 
 radical spokesmen have proceeded by easy stages from 
 an undiscriminating attack upon the negro s ballot to a 
 
 1 See the paper on " Southern Leadership " in the Seivanee Review, 
 January, 1907 ; to be reprinted in the volume entitled "Issues, Southern 
 and National." 
 
30 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 like attack upon his schools, his labor, his life; from 
 the contention that no negro shall vote, to the conten 
 tions that no negro, shall learn, that no negro shall 
 labor, and (by implication) that no negro shall live. 
 Its spirit is that of an all-absorbing autocracy of race, an 
 animus of aggrandizement which makes, in the imagina 
 tion of the white man, an absolute identification of the 
 stronger race with the very being of the state, which 
 would eject with a pathetic but intelligible intolerance 
 every heterogeneous element from the body social, 
 which would include within its expulsive policies every 
 weaker group (for the very forces at the South which 
 would destroy the political parity of the negro are in 
 opposition also to the immigration of the Oriental 
 peoples), and would thus create a homogeneous society 
 upon the basis of homogeneity of race. Weaker groups, 
 if they remain at all, remain to serve rather than to share. 
 It is the old effort to begin where the land began, but to 
 ignore its history and to forget its sins; to erase its 
 tragedies by legislative resolution; to attain the ends 
 of our great adventure by force of doctrine rather than 
 through the stern realities of experience; to repeal, 
 indeed, the very force and arbitrament of Nature. 
 
 For what are the means by which such a conception 
 is to be established ? Again we must return to the con 
 siderations which in the opening pages of this volume 
 I have attempted to express. There are some things 
 which are not found among the established privileges 
 of men. No man may choose his parents, nor may he 
 choose his native soil. He cannot remake his country s 
 past, nor alter the assumptions or the principles which 
 
m THE IMPULSE OF RACE AGGRESSION 31 
 
 have become his civil heritage. More important still, 
 he may not put these principles into operation upon 
 Monday, repeal them or modify them upon Tuesday, 
 and reimpose them upon Wednesday. Nor may he at 
 the same time apply them as obligations and withdraw 
 them as privileges; nor may he ever so far forget the 
 divine inconveniences of a Republic, as to be able 
 securely to assume that his indirections of administra 
 tion will automatically so operate as to bestow only their 
 immunities upon one class and only their penalties upon 
 another. 
 
 The fundamental political constitution of a people 
 cannot be perpetually readjusted between meals by 
 devices of application. It cannot be so altered, from 
 instance to instance, as that it may "hit the negro" 
 in one case and in the next may let the white man off. 
 The thing cannot be done. "Accidents" will surely 
 happen. The man who declares boldly that we will 
 have one law for the white man and another law for the 
 negro would like us to believe that the only opposition 
 to his program lies in the negro, or in the "interfer 
 ence of the North," or in the Fifteenth Amendment to 
 the Federal Constitution. But the real obstacle is some 
 where else. It is in the very nature of things; it is in 
 the bone and being of his country ; and little as he 
 may at first believe it it is in himself. 
 
 No American, North or South, white or black or 
 yellow, wants that sort of country. We know if we 
 know anything at all that our own experience is, 
 somehow, the final authority against arbitrary methods. 
 The processes by which we may have taken an oblique 
 advantage of the black man, whether in the exercise of 
 
32 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 the suffrage, or in the support of the public schools, or 
 in the practice of the courts (even though the extent of the 
 discrimination may have been exaggerated by a hostile 
 and external criticism), are processes by which white 
 men have quickly learned to take oblique advantage 
 of one another. And we also know that what we do is 
 an offence against ourselves, that we do not like it, and 
 that from man to man we say so. For we know 
 that the process by which men have sometimes 
 cheated the negro out of his legitimate privileges, as 
 these privileges are written in our settled precedents 
 and our own established laws, is a process by which 
 they have cheated themselves, not infrequently, out of 
 their consciences and their peace. 
 
 Moreover, the very institutions which our discrimina 
 tions were at first invented to protect are soon, by the 
 increasing bias of these very discriminations, emas 
 culated of their proper power. If it is hard to convict 
 a white man of the murder of a negro, it soon becomes 
 equally hard to convict him of the murder of a white 
 man. Courts which find themselves unable to punish 
 the crimes of a stronger class against a weaker class 
 discover that the legal precedents and the social habit 
 which have stood between the strong and the weak are 
 likely to stand at the last between man and man through 
 all the classes of the strong. And the failure to punish 
 means the inability to protect. In any society, human 
 life in general tends to become as cheap as the life of 
 its humblest representative. Just as in our economic 
 experience there is a tendency of the collective wage to 
 respond more quickly to the reward of the poorest 
 than to the profit of the richest, so under the automatic 
 
in THE IMPULSE OF RACE AGGRESSION 33 
 
 adjustments of the forces of social order the standard 
 of the common safety has a tendency to respond to the 
 type of protection accorded to the weak rather than to 
 the type of protection provided for the strong. We are 
 all, upon the average, no safer so far as our legal 
 status is concerned than the lowliest of our citizens. 
 The defect of law or custom which gives immunity to 
 his murderer may give immunity to the murderer 
 of the great. Moreover, the twist of precedent, the 
 bias of opinion which may seem to unsettle only the 
 property or liberty of the helpless, will at length illus 
 trate the helplessness of the courts which permit the 
 traditions of discrimination; for a court which cannot 
 do justice except in relation to a man s race will soon find 
 justice impossible except in relation to a man s wealth, 
 or his party, or his family. Such an institution becomes 
 an organ of private convenience (or inconvenience) 
 rather than an organ of social right, and in those darker 
 hours of some more general crisis which involve the 
 fundamental securities of the common peace, men be 
 gin to understand in their despair that the equities 
 which have been day by day abolished in petty cases 
 involving a weaker social group, cannot, upon the in 
 stant, be reassembled and reenthroned for the protec 
 tion of society as a whole. 
 
 Just as a man s character in his Judgment Day will 
 respond in conformity with the deeds of his spirit and 
 the pieties of his private closet, so even the higher courts 
 of a people will tend, automatically, to become ex 
 pressive of their fundamental character. The ultimate 
 security of those common rights which we intrust to the 
 keeping of an incorruptible but representative judiciary 
 
34 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 are less and less dependent for their sway and efficacy 
 upon single individuals, such as a Marshall, a Chase, a 
 Taney, and are increasingly dependent upon the equity 
 of the social temper of society as a whole. The courts, 
 especially under democratic institutions, are at last but 
 subordinate and expressive organs of our civilization; 
 they are its strongest and finest protection, but they 
 cannot protect it against itself. 
 
 Thus the law which does not protect the weak, will 
 not and in the end cannot protect the strong. 
 That which our oblique processes and our tempera 
 mental discriminations whether in the letter of our 
 statutes, the administration of the police, the opinions 
 of the bench, or the verdicts of the jury must destroy 
 (if the zealots of race antipathy shall have their way), 
 is not the negro, nor the white man only, but society 
 itself, society as a sufficient instrument of equitable 
 and profitable relations between man and man. When, 
 accordingly, we cheat the weak out of his legitimate 
 protections, we not only despoil ourselves of our con 
 sciences and our peace, but we cheat our generation 
 and its children out of the heritage of our institutions. 
 It is idle to say that the man who thus protests against 
 the madness of some of the forms of our race antag 
 onism is "silly about the negro"; he is silly if such 
 concern be silliness about his State and its welfare. 
 He is struggling to save the ballot from degradation, 
 the courts from paralysis, the schools from the touch of 
 an ignorant and benumbing controversy, our industries 
 from the destitution of crude warfare or depleting irri 
 tations, the law from injustices which will blight the 
 wholesome progress of every class among us, our society 
 
in THE IMPULSE OF RACE AGGRESSION 35 
 
 itself from the reproach that its rights are partial and 
 that its efficiencies, so far as they may be founded on its 
 evasions, are based upon the sands. If to fight against 
 these things is to fight for the negro, then there are some 
 of us who wish it to be known that we are fighting for 
 the negro. 
 
THE INADEQUACY OF REPRESSION AS 
 A POLICY OF ULTIMATE ADJUSTMENT 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE INADEQUACY OF REPRESSION AS A POLICY OF 
 ULTIMATE ADJUSTMENT 
 
 AND yet one must be blind indeed if he fail to appreci 
 ate the instinctive basis of many of our policies of re 
 pression. A strong man struggling upward under the 
 consciousness of submergence and suffocation strikes 
 right and left with little thought of either principle or 
 policy. Upon every hand, precipitated into the issues 
 of every industrial or social movement are the black 
 masses of a less developed population. No one can 
 fully understand such a situation except the man who 
 has been reared right in it ; and no one can fully under 
 stand it, can quite perceive its deeper significance, its 
 profounder contrasts with other situations, its larger 
 consequences to our country as a whole, except the man 
 who for some definite period of his life has been com 
 pelled to live outside of it. When the processes of every 
 local institution the legislatures, the courts, the schools, 
 are clogged with abnormal masses of the ignorant 
 and the weak, and when these are the masses not simply 
 of a homogeneous group, but of an unassimilable and 
 recently subject race, the strain upon administrative 
 capacity and upon the administrative conscience be 
 comes inconceivably acute; the sense of social suffoca 
 tion becomes almost unendurable. Strongly as it may 
 protest, therefore, against his faults of temper or against 
 the dulness of his insight, the modern world has, I think, 
 
 39 
 
40 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 far greater personal sympathy upon the various 
 issues presented by the negro with the intolerant 
 extremist of the South than with the intolerant extre 
 mist of New England. It has been inclined to look 
 upon the struggle of the South, thus far, as a struggle 
 for breath and for time, an effort as of one who, beating 
 back the flood and shaking from his faculties the blind 
 ness and the roar of ocean, has as yet been hardly 
 able to view the land and to take his course. 
 
 For even the more violent of the aggressive an 
 tipathies upon which I have already dwelt have had a 
 partially defensive meaning. This meaning has been 
 sometimes perverted, just as normal social instincts 
 are often and everywhere perverted, by an ignorant 
 and selfish leadership; but it has had legitimately a 
 double basis : a basis, partly traditional, in the struggles 
 of our earlier history, in the habits of self-protection 
 imposed by the policies of Reconstruction ; and a basis 
 in our social and racial fears, our fears, not of any 
 definite political domination, but of a general en 
 croachment upon the white man s "blood." 
 
 By this the South has meant something more formi 
 dable, however, than the physical mixtures of the white 
 and negro strains. This it has indeed abhorred, de 
 spite the fact that its deeper instinct and its deliberate 
 ideal have been again and again betrayed (as is the fate 
 of social ideals elsewhere) by the base and the irrespon 
 sible of the stronger race. But this mixture of the races 
 has represented something more than a physical catas 
 trophe; to the thought of the South it has meant, 
 through the encroachments of one racial group upon 
 another, an encroachment of lower standards, of cruder 
 
iv THE INADEQUACY OF REPRESSION 41 
 
 instincts, of weaker will, not a reciprocal jointure 
 through which the culture of one human family 
 strikes hands with the culture of another; through 
 which the American, whatever his station, strikes 
 hands with the culture of England or Germany or 
 France ; but an alliance without an ally ; a jointure 
 in which the social achievement of one side stands com 
 paratively at zero. The American may thus unite 
 with the humQest Slav, but this Slav has his con 
 temporary heritage in the culture of the Slavonic peoples, 
 its symbols in Prague, in Posen, in Moscow, in St. 
 Petersburg. However illiterate or brutal the Slav may 
 be, his human possibilities have had their established 
 demonstration. The heights of historic, palpable achieve 
 ment have been forever won for himself and for his 
 children. His own problem therefore is chiefly indi 
 vidual. In answer to a collective conquest which may 
 inspire him and to which he may respond, he has but 
 to claim for himself an established heritage, already 
 devised and bequeathed, in the estate of the modern 
 world. The Japanese, too, have a culture (and by the 
 word " culture" I here chiefly mean a demonstrated 
 social efficiency) of rare power and charm ; and even the 
 Chinese poor and ignorant as are those who chiefly 
 visit us have such a culture also, crowned by a 
 large and powerful aristocracy of knowledge, wealth, 
 and pride. 
 
 But whereas the stronger race in the United States 
 may enter upon its accepted relationships with such 
 human groups, touching through their individuals, 
 however lowly, the potential units of a demonstrated 
 social achievement, it merges with the negro only upon 
 
42 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 the terms of tragic loss. The individual indeed may 
 get the strain of genius from negro blood. The future 
 may hold and I think does hold a noble and hap 
 pier promise for large numbers of the negro race. I 
 speak, however, not of the individual of to-day nor 
 of the many in the future, but of the collective and 
 established standards of social reciprocity. There are 
 more than one hundred and fifty millions of negroes 
 in the world, but there may be found among the 
 ambassadors at Washington no representative of any 
 creditable, efficient, self-determining negro group among 
 contemporary peoples. The fact at the background of 
 every Russian, however ignorant, is contemporary 
 Russia, with its vast brutalities, but with its history, 
 its art, its now conquering martyrdoms; the fact at the 
 background of every Pole, however desolate, is con 
 temporary Poland and its undismembered aspiration 
 a nationality even without a land ; l the fact at the back 
 ground of every German, however stolid, is contem 
 porary Germany, of every Frenchman, however 
 volatile, is contemporary France: but the fact at the 
 background of every negro, however wise, or well 
 educated, or brave, or good, is contemporary Africa. 
 At no point in the history of states or in the develop 
 ment of human families does a demonstration of his 
 social capacity or of his collective achievement in art 
 or letters or government look out from the familiar 
 possibilities of his genius. In the land where he has 
 accomplished most, his social achievement has been 
 either denied upon the one hand or bestowed upon the 
 
 1 Compare an interesting passage in Lord Acton s "The History 
 of Freedom," etc., Macmillan & Co., London, 1907, pp. 205, 206. 
 
iv THE INADEQUACY OF REPRESSION 43 
 
 other; it has hardly been self-attained ; and such blood 
 alliance as the stronger race has made with him it has 
 made not through its love and at its altars, but through 
 its weaknesses, and beyond the gateways of its self- 
 regard. The child is the child of the mother s house, 
 is born into the negro s life. There are millions of 
 mulattoes, but there is no mulatto home. 1 
 
 Let no one imagine that the hand which writes these 
 lines has moved under any but the tenderest impulse 
 for the tragic fate of the American of negro lineage, or 
 
 1 That mulattoes do not intermarry or that they do not have 
 orderly and happy homes is not in the least suggested. There is, 
 rather, a strong tendency for color to seek color, and for the mulatto 
 stock thus to find normal and honorable perpetuation. The phrase 
 of the text is intended to point out, however, that while, as to his blood, 
 the individual may be divided between the races, the home as a 
 social institution is not divided, but falls within the life of the one 
 race or the other. While to many it may seem inaccurate to call the 
 mulatto a negro, it is equally inaccurate to call him strictly white. 
 To create an intermediate classification as in Jamaica, and to divide 
 the population into "white," "negro," and "colored," is but to in 
 crease the confusions and complexities of the problem ; for there 
 thus arise, in fact, three groups instead of two, the irritation between 
 the colored and negro classes being often quite as great as that between 
 the negro and the white. With this general subject I am to deal 
 more fully in "Issues, Southern and National." In the present dis 
 cussion, and in relation to the immediate questions of our public 
 policy, I deal with the mulatto factor simply as a factor of the negro 
 group, the mulatto being assigned to that group by the public opinion 
 of both sections and both races, and by the general sentiment of the 
 mulatto element itself. This sentiment is partially due to the press 
 ure of the feeling of the stronger race; but it is due even more 
 largely to the fact that the child is the child of the mother s home 
 forming its earliest social and racial affiliations, its first and strongest 
 bonds of interest and participation, with the race into the life of which 
 its consciousness awakes. It instinctively claims the home of its birth 
 as its social basis. See, also, on the probable persistence of racial 
 divisions, the paper by Kelly Miller, in the Atlantic Monthly, to 
 which reference is made on p. 68. 
 
44 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 that in the writer s judgment, any human factor in our 
 modern society is more justly entitled to the fate of a 
 truer and more generous comprehension. If I dwell 
 upon it briefly, I do so not because there is so little to be 
 said, but because there is so much that words can never 
 say. And yet when we clearly face the immediate 
 questions presented by the conservative antipathies of 
 the South, the kindlier restrictions which without 
 needless rancor or captious intolerance have kept the 
 barriers against the social encroachment of this weaker 
 group, and have so drawn the circle of inviolate seclusion 
 about its women that no child of the weaker race has ever 
 been born into any home of the stronger, I think we are 
 bound to answer substantially as the South has answered. 
 
 Would it have been well, upon the other hand, for the 
 South to have adopted the counsel of the extremists of 
 New England ? Would it have been well not merely 
 in the interest of the white man but of humanity in its 
 broader sense for the merging of these peoples to 
 have been deliberately contemplated in the policy of the 
 State ? l The number of those who think that the South 
 should have answered in the affirmative has from year 
 to year, I think, grown smaller. 
 
 Does it then follow, it may be asked, that people will 
 intermarry merely because marriage is legally per 
 mitted, or that those who study in the same schools 
 or who eat at the same table will necessarily unite? 
 Not at all; yet in the adjustment of the relations of 
 two great populations and in first establishing the normal 
 
 1 The reader is also referred to "The Present South," Chap. II, 
 PP- 34 35> 3 6 > an d to "The Romanes Lecture," of 1902, by James 
 Bryce, LL.D., quoted on p. 330 of that volume. 
 
iv THE INADEQUACY OF REPRESSION 45 
 
 association of two huge and variant masses includ 
 ing the weak, the ignorant, the vicious of both races 
 the policies of the State and the customs of society have 
 necessarily their educative function. Put upon the 
 defensive not merely by the pressure of the negro popu 
 lation but by the North s aggressive alliance with the 
 negro s less wholesome aspirations, the stronger race 
 at the South was bound to intrench its protections with 
 all the emphasis, intensity, and finality which it could 
 command in the laws, the customs, and in even the more 
 trivial symbols of relationship as these have obtained 
 between group and group. Such divisions, viewed 
 in their larger meaning, were factors in the discipline 
 of multitudes, forces of social education. They marked 
 off the metes and bounds of orderly but distinct de 
 velopment. They were rough rules in the schooling 
 of readjustment, yet they were a help to peace and a 
 necessity of survival. Confusion, bewilderment, were 
 everywhere. It was not a time for parleying. It was 
 a time for the directive force of instant, imperious 
 demarcations. Such a policy may have involved, it 
 did partially involve, the denial of compassion to a few; 
 but it was the enactment of mercy for the many. If 
 certain of its details were debatable, its alternative was 
 unthinkable. 
 
 But the details of any policy of repression will, with 
 lapse of time, be increasingly open to debate. For the 
 policy of the South which began in a legitimate protest 
 against the repression of the white man, which in both 
 its defensive and its aggressive antipathies represented 
 an instinct of self-protection, has sometimes tended to 
 
46 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 represent, at least in the purpose of certain of its spokes 
 men, a mere policy of repression toward the negro. 
 That repression, so long as it seemed to be based upon 
 our own necessities of self-protection, was inevitable. 
 But its basis, with the passing of those necessities, is 
 slowly shifting. No modern state, much less a modern 
 democracy, can accept a policy of deliberate repression 
 as denning its permanent and essential relation toward 
 any racial or social group. The details of any such 
 proposal will necessarily be subjected, therefore, to 
 close and rigorous analysis in the interest of the group 
 in question, in the rightful interest of all the members 
 of the stronger race, and, above all, in the interest 
 of the nation as a whole. To this point I have again 
 and again recurred. As the South now emerges from 
 her period of acute catastrophe, from the abnormal 
 conditions of industrial and political revolution, she 
 will necessarily define the status of every faction or 
 element of her people in the terms of our fundamental 
 heritage. She will do so because she will realize that 
 whenever the stronger race attempts to base its relations 
 with the weaker race upon any arbitrary readjustment 
 of our institutions, the wrong committed is a wrong 
 against the strong as well as against the weak, a 
 compromise of their common inheritance for which 
 the oblique advantages of any favored class can offer 
 no adequate compensation. 
 
 But our new necessities what I may call our 
 permanent emergencies are not less difficult than 
 the old: they are, perhaps, even greater; for they call 
 for larger patience, closer and clearer thinking, and a 
 stouter will. It is always easier to hold down a man 
 
iv THE INADEQUACY OF REPRESSION 47 
 
 whom you fear than to achieve the mental acumen and 
 the moral steadiness to think out the problem as to 
 how, after your release of him, you are to manage to 
 get on with him. And yet the release of him is in 
 evitable. Our new necessities are more imperious 
 than his own. An attitude of unreasoning and per 
 manent repression is to us more intolerable than to 
 the negro. We are too busy, too much interested in 
 other things, too eager for larger enterprises and freer 
 minds, to be consumingly engaged in the business of 
 keeping some one down. The thing, moreover, is 
 impossible. Not only is the negro growing stronger, 
 but the whole world will daily add to his strength in 
 direct proportion to the repression which he suffers. 
 The universe like the peacemaker in the streets 
 cannot hear our quarrel till the strong man let the 
 weak man go. The South will never have its hearing 
 till the fury goes out of certain eyes and the noise of 
 certain of our public men is stilled. As the world takes 
 the negro s part, as the negro gains in strength, as the 
 South wearies of its more morbid preoccupations, as 
 the cruder policies of repression begin to tremble in the 
 rigid framework of their terms, the representatives of 
 our reactionary leadership in the honest but pitiful 
 hysteria of their fears would seek the remedy in 
 more repression, and would attempt by the shrieking 
 rancor of their appeals to galvanize into further life 
 the old terrors, and to banish into still fainter distances 
 the better angels of our age. For a brief period they 
 may prevail. But the South, as she grows more con 
 fidently into the new powers of her social self-posses 
 sion, as new supremacies invite her and a more varied 
 
48 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP, iv 
 
 ascendancy awaits her, will do, I think, that which 
 a strong people at length always succeeds in doing. 
 In redefining her relations to the negro she will, in 
 the first place, put her observation and her judgment 
 in control of her prepossessions will attempt to view 
 the facts and the forces of our life precisely as they 
 are. And in the second place she will, in learning 
 from those facts and those forces, resolve to fight with 
 them and not against them; will make no war upon 
 the fundamental realities of the situation; will co 
 operate with them, will take them up into the deliberate 
 structure of her policies, knowing that in the adjust 
 ments of social groups only the policies which are so 
 based only those which find their justifications deep 
 within the truth of things which are in alliance with 
 sound reason, with the equities of nature, with that 
 collective instinct of social right which is at length 
 appearing among mankind, will or can endure. 
 
THE DOUBLE BASIS OF OUR RACE 
 SECURITY 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE DOUBLE BASIS OF OUR RACE SECURITY 
 
 SUCH, at any rate, I believe to be the only ultimate 
 ground for either the policy or the philosophy of our 
 self-defence. Much of the instinctive protest against 
 the advance of the negro race has been due to the fear 
 that its development would contribute to its encroach 
 ment upon the white man s life. The leaning toward 
 arbitrary processes has largely sprung from no direct 
 hatred of the negro, but from the vague suspicion that 
 unless burdened with peculiar disabilities his progress 
 might oppose the progress of the stronger race. Many 
 have thus antagonized his education merely because 
 they have seen in it a peril to ourselves. They have 
 not cared, primarily, to keep any man in ignorance; 
 they have not personally desired the hopelessness of 
 any class ; but they have distrusted the bestowal of any 
 power upon this weaker group which might strengthen 
 its capacity for access into the life and destiny of the 
 stronger. 
 
 Such an attitude may seem to betray a lack of con 
 fidence upon the part of the white race in its power 
 to meet, upon its own resources and at any odds, the 
 encroachment of the black. Its alarm may seem at 
 first to indicate a defect of essential pride. And yet 
 the explanation is not far to seek. The imagined peril 
 of the situation is not the mere peril of the morbid 
 interests of the negro, but the peril which has seemed 
 
 5 
 
52 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 to lie in the two factors of that double alliance which 
 has thus far operated to support them. 
 
 One is the factor presented by the vicious elements 
 of the stronger group, by its own forces of irresponsi 
 bility and vice. Every social aggregate of whatever 
 sort carries within its own number the elements of its 
 possible self-betrayal. Much of the South s talk against 
 the negro has therefore been the South talking to itself; 
 has been its rebuke, by implication, of those corrupting 
 elements within the limits of its own life which answer 
 to no high policy of social self-respect, to no fine pur 
 pose of racial conservation, but which under the lowest 
 impulses would degrade the present and betray the 
 future. And the other alliance, the other support of 
 the suspected peril of the negro, has been from without, 
 from that undiscriminating sentiment in his behalf 
 which has so often seemed to govern the expressions 
 of our Northern States, States possessing for practically 
 two generations the prestige of political and party 
 power. That the North as a whole would now con 
 sciously and deliberately attack the racial security of the 
 South, I do not believe ; such a suspicion is not usually 
 shared by those who know the North at first hand. 
 The fact is, however, that the formative majority of 
 neither section can personally know the masses of the 
 other, that the greater number of those living in either 
 section must take their impressions, necessarily, at second 
 hand, and too often from an unrepresentative press and 
 from the unrepresentative exponents of sectional or poli 
 tical controversy. And in view of what through such 
 means the Southern majority is permitted to know of 
 the North, it is not strange that the North, viewed in 
 
v OUR RACE SECURITY 53 
 
 its political solidarity as a party force, should be the 
 subject of decreasing, but still evident distrust. 
 
 Yet as the common and familiar attitude of the North 
 becomes less controversial, and as the white South 
 gains stronger hold upon the weak and apostate ele 
 ments within its limits, the possibilities of encroach 
 ment from the side of the weaker race are seen to be 
 less formidable than has been supposed. It becomes 
 evident, indeed, that the sound development of the 
 negro so far from increasing the perils of that 
 encroachment is one of the policies upon which the 
 South must ultimately depend for the intelligent and 
 permanent differentiation of these racial groups. 
 
 Certainly there is no adequate or permanent defence 
 in a program of indiscriminate repression. Such a 
 course can only operate to destroy both the instincts 
 and the interests around which the solidarity and the 
 efficiency of racial groups are organized. Indeed, as 
 I have elsewhere said: 
 
 " The perils involved in the progress of the negro are 
 as nothing in comparison with the perils invited by 
 his failure. And yet if any race is to live, it must have 
 something to live for. It will hardly cling with pride 
 to its race integrity if its race world is a world wholly 
 synonymous with deprivation, and if the world of the 
 white man is the only generous and honorable world 
 of which it knows. It will hardly hold with tenacity 
 to its racial standpoint, it will hardly give any deep 
 spiritual or conscious allegiance to its racial future, if 
 its race life is to be forever burdened with contempt, 
 and denied the larger possibilities of thought and effort. 
 The true hope, therefore, of race integrity for the negro 
 
54 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 lies in establishing for him the possibilities of a broader 
 social differentiation within his own racial and social life. 
 "A race which must ever be tempted to go outside 
 of itself for any share in the largeness and the freedom 
 of experience will never be securely anchored in its racial 
 self-respect, can never achieve any legitimate racial 
 standpoint, and must be perpetually tempted as 
 its members rise to desert its own distinctive life 
 and its own distinctive service to the world. There 
 is no hope for a race which begins by despising itself. 
 The winning of generic confidence, of a legitimate 
 racial pride, will come with the larger creation for 
 the capable of opportunity within the race. The 
 clue to racial integrity for the negro is thus to be found, 
 not in race suppression, but in race sufficiency. For 
 the very reason that the race, in the apartness of its 
 social life, is to work out its destiny as the separate 
 member of a larger group, it must be accorded its own 
 leaders and thinkers, its own scholars, artists, prophets; 
 and while the development of this higher life may 
 come slowly, even blunderingly, it is distinctly to be 
 welcomed. As the race comes to have within itself, 
 within its own social resources, a world that is worth 
 living for, it will gain that individual foothold among 
 the families of men which will check the despairing 
 passion of its self-obliteration; and instead of the 
 temptation to abandon its place among the races of 
 the world it will begin to claim its own name and its 
 own life. That is the only real, the only permanent, 
 security of race integrity for the negro. Its assumption 
 is not degradation, but opportunity." 1 
 1 From the author s "The Present South," Chap. VIII, pp. 273, 274. 
 
v OUR RACE SECURITY 55 
 
 And such, in a profound and inevitable sense, is the 
 only security for the race integrity of the white man. 
 Two races, in ceaseless contact upon the same soil, 
 cannot be kept asunder, upon any rational and per 
 manent basis for their differentation, if we seek the 
 foundations for such a basis in the self-respect of but 
 one of the groups involved. Such a conception of our 
 cleavage may for a brief period find its security in the 
 passions of war, or in the immediate traditions of a poig 
 nant social readjustment; but an emotional revulsion is 
 not a policy. Like the moods produced by artificial 
 stimulation, the preservation of the intensity of a social 
 antagonism demands an increasing measure of ex 
 citation a demand which is as futile in its permanent 
 accomplishment as it is damaging in its social reactions. 
 It is worse than profitless. In the slow processes of 
 time, the powers of class animosity have always proven 
 inadequate for the protection of the integrity of one 
 group against the intrusion of another, unless the in 
 stincts of self-respect and of self-protection are pro 
 foundly intrenched upon both sides. 
 
 The South, as I have said, has made distinct prog 
 ress in its command over the lower elements of the 
 stronger race. And yet this stronger race unfortunately 
 will never be an absolute moral unit. No racial group 
 can ever wholly control its rebellious elements. It 
 has no power to constrain its members. No matter 
 how resolute its collective purpose or how imperious 
 the dogmatism of its social creed, it cannot enforce 
 this purpose or impose this creed except in so far as 
 its varied units are responsive to its general mind. 
 It can hold the obedient. It can do nothing with the 
 
56 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 lawless, the vicious, the irresponsible. Any human 
 society can control, within approximate limits, the 
 outward customs, the accepted fashions, the laws, the 
 institutions, the daily business, and even the average 
 ambitions of its personal units, but it cannot abolish 
 those forces of moral anarchy which lurk within the 
 shadows of them, the instincts of vice, of self-contempt, 
 of sheer animalism, or of secret and deliberate rebellion 
 by which every civilization is every day flouted and 
 undone. And just so long as there are all about us 
 the great masses of a weaker race to which we are in 
 part unwilling or in part unable to open the freest and 
 fullest opportunities of self-equipment and self-respect 
 (the two are fundamentally inseparable), these rebellious 
 minorities of our stronger race will extend their fusion 
 the tragic fusion of white and black without re 
 gard to the heritage they betray or to the miseries they 
 promote. 
 
 In vain will men try to increase the distance between 
 these masses by louder outcries and ever fiercer de 
 nunciation ; such devices are but a confession of the 
 increasing futility of the whole program of repression. 
 They are but the remedies of emergency, the expedients 
 of alarm. They achieve nothing. They offer no basis 
 of relief. They afford no permanent security. They 
 announce no theory of constructive betterment. They 
 are but the crude panacea of an itinerant philosophy, 
 living "from hand to mouth" on the exigencies or the 
 repugnances of the moment, and bankrupt of any 
 enduring social promise. 
 
 The instinctive statesmanship of our people will ere 
 long suspect that the extremists of the "anti-negro" 
 
v OUR RACE SECURITY 57 
 
 school are thus shrieking so loudly chiefly because they 
 have ceased to think. For every failure of their pro 
 gram of hate they have but one remedy more hate ; 
 and for every demonstrated evil of repression they have 
 but one corrective more repression. Surely we may 
 depend upon the South to see that such progress is 
 not progress, but retrogression; and just as Burke de 
 clared that no people can be said to be governed which 
 has perpetually to be conquered, so we may remind 
 ourselves that a civilization which has constantly to 
 be abandoned cannot be said to be established. We 
 may, if we will, seek the permanent adjustment of these 
 two races by setting up, perennially, a state of war or 
 a state of society. But if we choose the one, let us not 
 deceive ourselves into believing that we live in the 
 enjoyment of the other. 
 
 A confident, constructive policy of inter-racial ad 
 justment is peculiarly the thing of which the South 
 has need. We are moving out of the period in which 
 the theories created in the exigencies of war and of 
 Reconstruction can be longer justified. To us the 
 world looks for a program, a program which can be 
 defended not merely as the shrewd expedient of a pe 
 culiar crisis, but as a policy of permanent significance 
 and of fundamental validity. And that, moreover, is, 
 as we have seen, the deepest necessity of our self- 
 deliverance. 
 
 The whole situation must be brought under the 
 control of its higher rather than its lower forces. It is 
 then and only then that the elementary principles of 
 such a policy begin clearly to appear. The moment 
 
58 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 we pause to heed the deeper counsels of our better 
 moods, great formative generalizations begin to shape 
 themselves about us, as the friendly landmarks of a 
 freer spiritual country. And yet it is the same country. 
 It is all the more truly ours, our sense of possession is 
 only the more happily secure, when we begin to look 
 squarely at the immutable phenomena in relation to 
 which our habitations are henceforth to be reared. It 
 soon seems to be incredible to us that any one could 
 have ever hoped to rebuild the South as a permanent 
 institutional exception to all that has been known and 
 proved of human nature and of human societies. It 
 becomes natural to seek the solid ground of common 
 principles. It becomes strange to us that any one 
 should ever have imagined that we could promote the 
 self-respect of one race by weakening the self-respect 
 of the other. We see that under a situation of hourly 
 racial contact the symbol of race integrity is not the 
 pillar, rising upon its one foundation, but the arch. 
 We realize that, however unwelcome its implications, 
 the self-respect of either race, in the case of two con 
 tiguous social groups, must have a double basis a 
 basis in the self-respect of each; and, so far as these 
 two groups within the South are now concerned, we 
 come to see late and perhaps a little sadly that 
 there can be no permanent basis for even the very 
 conception of the integrity of race which ignores the 
 factor presented by the negro woman. It is at this 
 point that the instincts and interests of the negro s 
 racial life converge; for as with every race and with 
 every social group, the negro woman, implicitly or 
 actually, is the negro home. 
 
v OUR RACE SECURITY 59 
 
 It is just here, however, through the portal of this 
 negro home, and through the frail defences of its 
 violated self-esteem, that the stronger race descends 
 to leave the legacy of its alien blood. It may be that 
 the woman is at fault; it may be that she has at times 
 preferred the child of the white man s vice to the child 
 of the black man s love ; it may be that she is as shame 
 lessly weak as her most morbid detractor would de 
 scribe her ; the fact, in whatever case, is clear that 
 so long as the stronger race is powerless to control its 
 low or rebellious elements, the defences of its segrega 
 tion are no stronger than the barrier of this woman s 
 self-regard. The excluding partition between race 
 and race is just as weak as her will, just as stable as her 
 morality. The defences of her womanliness are the de 
 fences of our race integrity they are but two sides 
 of the same dividing wall. 
 
 The supreme question is not as to our aversions, but 
 as to our policy. Shall we however prodigious the 
 undertaking touch her situation with a constructive 
 purpose? Shall we add, through the influences of a 
 personal interest and the provisions of a sagacious 
 State, to the forces which would hold her within the 
 horizons of her weakness and her self-contempt, or to 
 the forces which would contribute to character and 
 to womanhood ? Needless to say, I do not altogether 
 share the cynical opinions expressed so frequently by 
 the man in the street, as to the absence of standards 
 among negro women. There is nothing more precari 
 ous, whether viewing the society about a throne or the 
 cattle upon a thousand hills, than the fate of sweeping 
 generalizations upon the subject of personal morals. 
 
60 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 The primary condition of immorality among women is, 
 apparently, not simply race or climate, but excessive idle 
 ness and whether we observe the negro of the tropics, 
 the Eskimo of the Arctic, 1 or the surfeited classes of 
 Paris, London, or New York, we find many of the same 
 defects of will, and, in greater or less degree, the same 
 self-destructive tendencies. Climate is, however, a 
 factor in imposing the redemptive necessities of labor; 
 and few human beings, in the latitudes with which 
 we are familiar, can long escape their discipline. Even 
 under the conditions of contemporary Africa and 
 nothing can be more superficial than to assume that 
 an incident of life there is the exact moral (or immoral) 
 equivalent of the same act under our own complex 
 conditions the fact of chief significance is not that 
 the standards of the negro woman are undeveloped, 
 but that they are varied, differing from locality to 
 locality and from group to group. 2 They represent, 
 therefore, no fixed depression of moral life, no crystalli 
 zation of abasement, no final arrestment of social or 
 personal development. They represent a basis of 
 differentiation. They exhibit those changes which, 
 responsive to the shifting factors of their environment, 
 are an earnest of further differences and of still more 
 wholesome developments. A morality that can grow 
 at all can go on growing. A life that can surpass the 
 
 1 "The Negro Races, A Sociological Study," by Jerome Dowd, 
 Vol. I, p. 135; The Macmillan Company, New York, 1908. 
 
 2 Interesting first-hand impressions of contemporary Africa are 
 to be found in the memorable narrative of the Alexander-Gosling Ex 
 pedition ("From the Niger to the Nile"), by St. Boyd Alexander, 
 Rifle Brigade; 1908, London, Edward Arnold; New York, Long 
 mans, Green, & Co. 
 
v OUR RACE SECURITY 61 
 
 level of its immemorial past can surpass the levels of 
 the present. 
 
 That the women of negro blood in the United States 
 have responded to the varied fortunes of their en 
 vironment in America, and that their general moral 
 gains, in spite of the larger number of the weak, are as 
 considerable as they are honorable, is the usual testi 
 mony of those who have had real opportunity for the 
 accurate observation of negro life upon its higher side. 
 The negro woman of the better class because thrown 
 less frequently into industrial relations with the stronger 
 race is less well known outside her own special envi 
 ronment. But the negro woman, whether of higher 
 or humbler station, is manifestly upon a moral level with 
 the general development of her people, and indeed as 
 with the women of other races she is usually above it. 
 However crude her standards, they are clearly in ad 
 vance of those of negro men ; and, upon the whole, they 
 have moved definitely forward rather than backward. 
 
 That the moral inadequacies of the race are still 
 so obvious, may, to a superficial view, obscure the 
 significance of what has been accomplished; but the 
 serious student of the development of the social ethics 
 of weaker peoples will test their relative advance not 
 solely by the standards of other and stronger groups 
 but rather by their own past and in the light of their 
 own historical and social situation. At the negro s 
 ultimate background is not Europe nor New England 
 nor Virginia, but Africa (if we must sometimes remem 
 ber it against him, let us also ungrudgingly remember 
 it in his behalf) ; and after Africa, came what ? 
 
62 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 The schooling of slavery in the United States repre 
 sented an industrial discipline conducted under the 
 most intelligent direction that has been brought to bear 
 upon a lower social group; but it was attended, as an 
 experiment, by tragic penalties upon both the more 
 efficient and the less efficient race. It seems increas 
 ingly evident, however, that the negro emerged from 
 that experience far stronger morally, intellectually, and 
 industrially than when he entered it; and the transi 
 tion to freedom meant a gain also. 
 
 But the gains of freedom will necessarily appear 
 slowly, unevenly, laboriously. For, morally and psy 
 chologically, they have involved a change in the funda 
 mental basis of control, a transference of the negro s 
 character from conditions within which the standards 
 of living were largely superimposed upon the will, to 
 conditions within which the standards of living must 
 be chiefly self-imposed. It is the inauguration of an 
 era of larger self-direction. The shock of such a 
 transition is profound. Its first effects within any given 
 mass of human beings of whatever race will naturally 
 be disastrous, disastrous not to all but to many. 
 
 The response upon the negro s part, his mental and 
 moral reaction under the new conditions, is naturally 
 all the more disappointing for the reason that the en 
 vironment which enfolds him, the laws and institutions 
 which lie, as a matrix of social character, about 
 his free and unfolding consciousness are those of an 
 alien and wholly different group. The free life into 
 which he awakes is not his freedom, but another s ; 
 freedom, as expressed and organized through the experi 
 ence and the institutions of another race. Liberty is forever 
 
v OUR RACE SECURITY 63 
 
 being talked about as though it were a pure abstraction. 
 As a matter of fact, it has no human meaning except 
 under its institutional expressions. Its symbol is not 
 that of a man in a vast waste of silence sitting naked 
 beneath a solitary tree. Its outer symbol is a per 
 fected society itself; it is a social achievement not 
 a bauble strung upon a string of beads, or a state of 
 individual isolation. Men create it together or not at 
 all. They cannot get it by going upon a journey; 
 nor can they give it away. They can bestow its in 
 stitutions; they can give to others the conditions in 
 which they, as free men, have expressed it; have ex 
 pressed, that is to say, their consciousness of what 
 a free society is to them; they can give to others those 
 forms of self-constraint and of self-development through 
 which their own genius has conceived its destiny 
 the terms of that ultimate Self which it has toiled to be. 
 But they can, in a fundamental sense, give freedom 
 to no other race. 
 
 They can, however, strike down the formal inhibi 
 tions which they themselves have imposed upon an 
 included group; they can erase the limitations or the 
 discriminations which they have sought to fix in the 
 terms of their institutions. They may do so in the 
 interest of the weaker race; they may do so as a 
 measure of rectification toward their own social or 
 ganization and as a freer and fuller expression of their 
 genius, an act of self-conquest and self-development. 
 That much the stronger race may do, and, in the 
 interest of the fulness and the significance of its own 
 horizons, must do, to the last and smallest letter 
 of its meaning. But the more intimate processes of 
 
64 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 emancipation we cannot bestow. These, under the 
 very necessities of the case and in the interest of the 
 negro s own security, must be self-chosen and self- 
 accomplished. 
 His failures will at first be manifest. 1 How soon or 
 
 1 Yet the familiar assumption that, in the relations of a weaker to 
 a stronger social group, the power of survival is necessarily dependent 
 upon the power to compete, must be seriously modified. The greater 
 the complexity and variety of a social or industrial situation, the larger 
 the opportunities for adaptation and readjustment. Certain members 
 of the weaker group may be displaced at some points, but they are 
 often found to reappear at others. To assume that every negro 
 barber who disappears from the industrial situation as a barber 
 becomes, necessarily, a criminal or a derelict, is to go beyond the 
 evidence. It is true that the competitive elimination of this or that 
 negro from a traditional calling may mean "failure"; but it may also 
 mean success; for the negro in question may have been driven, as 
 in instances which I have known, into other and better forms of work. 
 
 If the man who "disappears" as a barber reappears as a carpenter, 
 or as a small farmer on his own land, he may figure in the census 
 tables to prove all sorts of dismal theories; but, as a matter of fact, 
 he has been forced into a sounder and stronger economic position. 
 Many of the negroes are suffering displacement without gaining by 
 the process. But it is a mistake to assume that displacement, in 
 itself, is always an evidence of industrial defeat. 
 
 Nor is defeat necessarily an evidence of imminent destruction, 
 individual or social. Nature is always upbuilding its successes, but 
 it is also endlessly patient of its laggards. Society rewards its victors, 
 but the sagacity with which it does so does not surpass the sagacity 
 with which it is ever creating and re-creating the social wealth of the 
 world out of the toil of the multitudes of the unconquering. It is a 
 mistake to assume that society cannot and does not utilize its weaker 
 ndustrial factors. Within its complex and varied organization are 
 innumerable opportunites of adaptation and readjustment. 
 
 The individual in human society who cannot "compete" in one 
 situation, learns slowly and perhaps painfully to take up his position 
 at another. There are respects in which a grown man, through 
 physical disability, may not be able to compete with the child. If 
 so, he does not seek his economic foothold through his physical func- 
 
v OUR RACE SECURITY 65 
 
 how largely he can overcome them no man can say. 
 One who appeals for the wisdom and validity of funda 
 mental policies is not therefore bound to defend the 
 crude anticipations of an easy optimism. But it may 
 be well to remember, as to all our social policies, that 
 
 tions ; he chooses the basis of his competition in conformity with powers 
 which he has, rather than in conformity with powers he has not. This, 
 indeed, is but a further development of the principle of the division 
 of labor. It has never been so fully recognized or so profoundly 
 operative as under the ramifications and complexities of modern 
 society. The men who attempt to meet all other men on all grounds, 
 are fewer in number than ever; there were never very many ! And 
 while the untried and the uneducated are especially disadvantaged 
 as to the conscious control of their adaptations to the economic organi 
 zation (that is one of the disabilities which a true education should 
 partially correct), yet even where the factor of voluntary choice is at 
 its lowest, there is secured from the reaction of the industrial market 
 in relation to the laborer, a more or less automatic adjustment of 
 supply to demand, of specific work to the specific capacities of the 
 individual. This, within its lower stages, and in relation to untrained 
 masses, is relatively crude and ineffective; but in the mere fact that the 
 best dirt-digger is not put into competition with the best spike-driver, 
 but is put to digging dirt, we have at least a partial illustration of those 
 adaptations of capacity to labor that are found in increasing variety 
 and efficacy through all the higher ranges of industrial effort. 
 
 That the negro just now is finding many points in our industrial 
 organization at which he cannot "compete" with the white man, is 
 true. But individually and racially the power to survive depends less 
 upon the capacity for competition than upon the capacity for adapta 
 tion ; not so much on the power to meet competition as on the 
 power (in no dishonorable sense) to avoid it, to fit through new ways 
 into the new scene, to find a foothold upon the open land till more 
 varied industrial aptitudes may have time for more adequate develop 
 ment, or to find certain special functions in our organization which 
 the negro has the capacity and may win the opportunity to discharge. 
 
 Such adaptations are sought, necessarily, by every group entering 
 upon new industrial conditions. That there will be much loss and 
 failure, and some pain, in the working out of the whole process of the 
 negro s readaptation to American life is altogether probable. But 
 
66 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 a program is not necessarily sound in proportion to its 
 cynicism. I do not know how quickly or how generally 
 the negro race in the United States, responding to the 
 moral necessities of its position, will choose a life of 
 more deliberate self-control ; but no man can rise from 
 a careful study of social and economic conditions in 
 Africa to-day without perceiving that here in America 
 the leaven of a higher social consciousness has begun 
 to work, and that deep within the masses of this strangely 
 different race however unconsciously or imper 
 fectly the great decision has been made. The race 
 may at certain points fall back below the level which 
 it attained, artificially, in bondage. All that was 
 artificial will naturally fail and pass. But however 
 this may be, the distance between the average life of the 
 race in the United States and the average life of the 
 race in contemporary Africa is so overwhelmingly 
 
 that such contingencies and catastrophes indicate the early extinction 
 of the race, or need be taken as abnormally discouraging, I do not 
 believe. It is well to remind ourselves in this year of the Darwin 
 "centenary" that "the survival of the fittest" does not necessarily 
 involve the extinction of the relatively unfit. Otherwise, there would 
 be few species now in existence on any soil. Of the relatively 
 unfit, Nature is benignly indulgent, immeasurably prodigal. But 
 for that fact many of us, whether regarded as individuals or as groups, 
 would not be here to-day. Yet "there is room enough and to spare." 
 We are not shut up in a little walled prison with only one foot of 
 ground to till, and a single loaf to fight over and devour. It is a big 
 world. And the power of food production per each individual upon 
 our planet is yearly greater, and increases far faster than its population. 
 The racial or social group which will squarely put itself into relation 
 with realities, which will conserve and give its life and seek first its 
 own fitness of character and its own power to produce, will one day 
 discover that the world has more work than workers, and that the 
 competition between jobs to secure a man is to be much fiercer in it 
 henceforth than the competition between men to find a job. 
 
v OUR RACE SECURITY 67 
 
 evident that the progress of these people during their 
 three hundred years upon our soil becomes one of the 
 most astonishing achievements in the history of the 
 Republic. The standard of comparison for the Ameri 
 can negro should be the African negro, not the American 
 white man. There are many who read the current 
 records of the "dark continent" with no thought except 
 to trace the lines of weakness, in the terms of identity, 
 from that land to this; it is also open to us to trace 
 them in the terms of contrast. It is a contrast full of 
 vivid interest. Instead of depreciating its significance, 
 no Southern man remembering that the period of 
 greatest advance was within the period of slavery, and 
 that the South, within the period of emancipation, 
 has been the local environment of the race can well 
 fail to record it as among the occasions of his pride. 
 He will not forget it, though he still find upon every 
 hand many of the signs of moral catastrophe and social 
 helplessness. 
 
 A race which fails is not bankrupt if it be also a race 
 which succeeds. It is idle for us to speculate as to this 
 or that contingency which did not occur, or as to this 
 or that contingency which cannot arise: we are face 
 to face upon the same soil with eight millions of negroes. 
 
 All that can be done to decrease the margin of their 
 failures and to increase the margin of their successes 
 we will do in their interest and in our own if their 
 failures are indeed a menace to them, to us, and to our 
 institutions. We cannot choose for them, but we can 
 offer them something better than despair to choose; 
 we cannot build their righteousness, but we can do 
 
68 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 much to increase its inspirations; we cannot achieve 
 for them the self-restraints, the peace, the wholesome 
 securities of a racial or personal self-respect, but we 
 can refrain from making it impossible : indeed, we may 
 look abroad to find it, may watch with an affectionate 
 solicitude for its delayed appearing, may do all that 
 others can to give it solidity and truth, may rejoice 
 in the slow rise of its dim proportions above the ooze 
 and drift of long and unstable savagery, knowing that the 
 rough stone of this foundation waiting within the 
 shadow of our common humiliations is the other 
 half of the double basis of our own integrity of race, 
 the missing support of the uncompleted arch. 
 
 Let no one press the illustration or its phrases to 
 literal and strained conclusions. The support is not 
 wholly missing. 1 It in a measure now exists. Nor 
 will it ever be wholly found; for its existence will be 
 always incomplete, just as on the side of the stronger 
 race, also, there will be the story of recurrent failure. 
 But the great social differentiations of history, the cumu 
 lative divisions and demarcations of racial life, rise 
 
 1 One of the ablest and most representative of negro thinkers, 
 while protesting against such an interpretation of the denial of 
 " social equality " as would involve the surrender of civil and politi 
 cal rights, has said, "The charge that the educated negro is in 
 quest of social affiliation with the whites is absurdly untrue. House 
 hold intercourse and domestic familiarity are essentially questions of 
 personal privilege. The negro is building up his own society upon 
 character, culture, and the nice amenities of life, and can find ample 
 social satisfactions within the limits of his own race." "Race Ad 
 justment," by Kelly Miller, Professor of Mathematics in Howard 
 University, Washington, D.C., p. 116; The Neale Publishing Co., 
 New York, 1908. Booker T. Washington s essential sympathy with 
 this position is generally known. See also Professor Miller s article, 
 "The Ultimate Race Problem," the Atlantic Monthly, April, 1908. 
 
v OUR RACE SECURITY 69 
 
 as will rise the free integrities of these groups here 
 in spite of incidental pauses and occasional catastrophe. 
 Their tragic or ignoble fusions will slowly cease. The 
 individuality of each will come to clearer and larger 
 power. Such at least will be the tendency of every 
 guarantee accorded to the negro s elementary liberties, 
 of every protection thrown about his property, of every 
 legitimate satisfaction opened to his awakening man 
 hood, of every wholesome opportunity through which 
 he can found and equip and enrich the sufficiency of 
 his own life; of every security that can be accorded to 
 the character of the negro woman and the stability of 
 the negro home. This way lies the citadel of the 
 negro s personal and racial self-respect, of his generic 
 pride, of his social individuality. And this citadel 
 because the greater millions of a stronger group cannot 
 control their own rebellious elements is a forgotten 
 fortress of our own stability of race. 
 
NEGRO RACE INTEGRITY: THE 
 SCHOOL OF SELF-DISCOVERY 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 NEGRO RACE INTEGRITY: THE SCHOOL OF SELF- 
 DISCOVERY 
 
 "Bin:," it will be asked, "is not opportunity the gate 
 of culture? Will not security and culture increase the 
 powers and attractions of the negro race? Will not 
 these powers and attractions develop within that race a 
 greater longing for assimilation with the stronger; and 
 will not such advantages so operate, in their direct in 
 fluence upon the stronger race, as to reduce its dis 
 inclination for union with the weaker? Will not the 
 increasing development of the weaker race create the 
 social leverage of a powerful, cultivated class, and 
 invite the very argument for a defensible amalgamation 
 with the negro which we found to be possible in reference 
 to other national and racial groups?" 
 
 Such contentions have been too widely prevalent to 
 make it either possible or desirable to deny their ap 
 parent force. They have formed the essential ground, 
 consciously or unconsciously, of some of the coopera 
 tion accorded to the negro at the North, and of much of 
 the antagonism which has opposed the negro at the 
 South. Within the race itself such considerations have 
 had their advocates. Its familiar masses are as yet 
 unsettled as to any clear perception of their racial 
 destiny; the majority of their leaders as I shall 
 
 73 
 
74 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 indicate more fully in a later paragraph are turning, 
 rather, to a policy of self-respecting segregation ; but here 
 and there is to be found a negro writer (usually more 
 than four-fifths white) who distinctly proclaims a policy 
 of progress as the basis of a policy of ultimate amalga 
 mation. It is significant, however, that this conception 
 of the negro s future assumes a larger place in the fears 
 of certain elements of the white population at the South, 
 and in the hopes of a small white minority at the North, 
 than in the thought and aspiration of the dominant 
 majority of our intelligent negroes. They themselves, 
 as we shall see, are entertaining a somewhat different 
 theory. They are less and less inclined to sink their 
 destiny in that of another race. 
 
 For the broad outstanding fact is meeting us on every 
 hand the fact that the fusion of black with white is 
 occurring at the lower rather than at the higher levels. 
 No theoretic apprehension as to the tendencies of negro 
 progress should be permitted to obscure the significance 
 of this concrete situation, inasmuch as the chief factor in 
 every problem is the thing as it is. Nor is this a mere 
 temporary or incidental phase of our American situation. 
 Races, nationalities, social groups of practically every 
 description betray the tendencies of coalescence not 
 at the top but at the bottom. An "aristocracy" is al 
 ways an integrating force. The development of a higher 
 class creates a centre of social organization, a basis of 
 differentiation, a rallying point of common hopes. It 
 arrests disintegration and establishes a basis of racial 
 confidence and of enduring racial life. 
 
 It is altogether probable that as the years pass into 
 the decades, and the decades into generations, there will 
 
vi NEGRO RACE INTEGRITY 75 
 
 continue to be rare instances of intermarriage between 
 members of the white and the negro races. This does 
 not constitute "the intermarriage of the races" any more 
 than the occasional union of two individuals of different 
 nationalities would constitute "the intermarriage of the 
 nations." It is likely, also, that if viewed literally 
 rather than relatively there will be more intermarriage 
 than there is to-day. If viewed relatively, however, - 
 that is to say, in reference to the increasing numbers 
 of each racial mass, there will probably be less. 1 
 
 We should also bear in mind the fact that the inter 
 marriage of a small number of individuals, however 
 undesirable to the intelligent majority of both races, 
 would not constitute a process of "amalgamation" any 
 more than the occasional intermarriage of French and 
 German, or of the American and the Slav would con 
 stitute the amalgamation of their respective groups. 
 
 1 This is the present tendency even in such an environment as the 
 city of Boston. Such intermarriages as exist are largely cases of 
 intermarriage between those who are so low in the social scale as to 
 represent no characteristic attitude or tendency of either race, and even 
 these have steadily decreased in number. See "Following the Color 
 Line," by Ray Stannard Baker, p. 172, Doubleday, Page & Co., 
 1908. Mr. Baker gives the total of mixed marriages from the Registry 
 Department of the City of Boston, as 35 for 1900; 29 for 1903; 19 
 for 1905 ; this in a city of more than a half million inhabitants. 
 "Such couples " says another authority, "are usually absorbed by the 
 negro race, although if they belong to the more educated class, they 
 enter into natural relations with neither race." ... " Barred out 
 from the society he most admires, his mimicry only excites mirth, and 
 when he touches the white race on the grounds of social equality, 
 it is the meeting of outcast with outcast." See pp. 60 and 148, of 
 "Americans in Process," a settlement study of the North and West 
 Ends, Boston, by residents and associates of the South End Settle 
 ment House, edited by Robert A. Woods; Boston, Houghton, Mifflin 
 and Company, 1902. 
 
76 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 For intermarriage, upon a limited scale, is one thing, 
 and amalgamation the gradual absorption and ulti 
 mate disappearance of a weaker social group is 
 quite another. Indeed, in the larger history of societies 
 they have usually represented opposing and conflicting 
 tendencies. 
 
 While, moreover, it is true that certain instances of 
 intermarriage may occur in the history of our race 
 contact in America, it is equally obvious that in 
 any event, with or without a personal or social culture 
 on the negro s part such instances will at rare inter 
 vals arise. They are arising to-day. They can never be 
 wholly prevented; but the impression that the develop 
 ment of the negro race, its enlarging efficiency and 
 intelligence, will in itself add to the frequency of inter 
 marriage, or will itself increase the impulses of racial 
 fusion, is, so far as one can now determine, totally un 
 founded. 
 
 Indeed, the tendencies toward actual intermarriage 
 in any two racial groups are never strong, and they 
 usually decrease in proportion to the nature and the 
 degree of the differences to be "overcome." The de 
 gree of unlikeness marks the depth and persistency of 
 the division. While the American may occasionally 
 intermarry with human families such as the Russian or 
 the Pole, or even with the Turk, he usually does not; 
 for the normal disinclination upon each side has a 
 natural basis in their varying or divergent cultures. 
 The negro in America has, outwardly and consciously, 
 no conflicting culture. He has accepted, in one sense, 
 the peculiar culture of the land, and he has been in 
 cluded locally and politically within the same state. 
 
vi NEGRO RACE INTEGRITY 77 
 
 So, also, has the Jew. But the fundamental culture of 
 the Jew, that which draws him from the deeps of his 
 nature and from the associations of his past, is Hebraic 
 rather than English is an older and more intimate 
 possession than our own. Between himself and the 
 Gentile there is thus little intermixture or intermarriage, 
 the instinctive disinclination operating from his side 
 perhaps more powerfully than from ours. The negro, 
 too, though included locally and politically within 
 our life, has accepted our culture so far as he has 
 done so at all only in u~secondary~ sense. For it is 
 inevitable that fundamentally he should continue to be 
 more Ethiopian than Caucasian, more African than 
 English or Latin or Celt or Teuton. 1 
 
 1 It is sometimes assumed from quite different standpoints that the 
 full development of the negro race, its highest life, and its enjoyment 
 of the normal "rights" of a democracy, must involve the breaking up 
 of its racial distinctness and the abandonment of its social segregation. 
 That this is not the case is evident from the relations of the Gentile 
 and the Jew. The Jew does not "degrade" the Gentile or destroy 
 any "right" to which the Gentile is entitled when he carefully guards 
 the conditions of intermarriage and excludes the Gentile from his 
 table. Nor is the Jew conscious of political or social injury should 
 the Gentile accept from his own side, also, the canons of a voluntary 
 segregation. The parallel is not literal nor complete ; yet it is suffi 
 ciently suggestive to indicate that there is much difference between 
 the instinctive segregation of various groups and a barrier of political 
 and social degradation. The highest development of the black and 
 the white races on American soil need involve no necessary surrender 
 of any legitimate or social "right" of the weaker, nor any necessary in 
 vasion of any legitimate political or social " right " of the stronger. 
 For upon all questions touching the domestic and racial integrity of 
 social groups (as both races may well remember) the issues presented 
 by the injury of invasion are quite as serious as those which are 
 popularly associated with the injuries of exclusion. Indeed, in 
 America, we have been morbidly overconscious of the injuries of 
 exclusion, and have thought too little, of late, concerning the injuries 
 
78 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 In the cosmopolitan sense he has drawn much from 
 us and will draw still more as the years go by ; just 
 as he will also draw, through an enlarging mind, from 
 every rich or liberalizing force, whether English or 
 German or French or Japanese. It is altogether likely 
 that he will learn in every school, and in every school 
 gain something from and for humanity. But also in 
 the interest of humanity, as well as in his own interest, 
 the basis of his more fundamental culture will be natu 
 rally his own. It will take its more intimate force and 
 quality from the depths in him which are deeper than 
 the depths of his life here, which reach back to the store 
 of those fathomless years in comparison with which the 
 period of his existence on this soil is but a single hour. 
 It is a culture which may offer him as yet no established 
 heritage, no accomplished treasury of letters or art or 
 science or commerce, as these are known within the 
 Western World, but like the vast fecundities of the 
 mysterious Continent from which he comes, it holds 
 within itself strange, unmeasured possibilities of charac 
 ter and achievement. No one can believe, whether he 
 be Theist or Fatalist or Materialist, that a racial type 
 so old, so persistent, so numerous in its representation, 
 so fundamentally distinctive and yet with so varied a 
 territorial basis, is likely to pass out of human history 
 without a far larger contribution than it has thus far 
 made to the store of our common life and happiness. 
 
 of invasion as our weaker groups of every sort throng and press 
 upon the life and standards of the higher. The instinctive protection 
 of the higher, narrowly pursued, is but a false and futile impulse of 
 aristocracy; yet this protection of our higher groups, sanely and 
 broadly pursued, will prove a sound and indispensable service to our 
 democracy as a whole. 
 
vi NEGRO RACE INTEGRITY 
 
 The deepest thing about any man next to his 
 humanity itself is his race. The negro is no excep 
 tion. The force and distinctness of his racial heritage, 
 even where there is much admixture of alien blood, is 
 peculiarly, conspicuously strong. This persisting and 
 pervasive individuality of race is the ground and basis 
 of his essential culture by which I mean not the 
 formal product of a literature, a religion, or a science, but 
 that more intimate possession which a race draws into 
 its veins and blends within the very stuff and genius of 
 its being from the age-long school of its forests, its 
 rivers, its hungers, its battles with beast and fever 
 and storm and desert, that subconscious, ineradicable 
 life which stirs beneath its deliberate will and is articu 
 late through all the syllables of its every stated pur 
 pose. In the deeper sense, no negro can escape, or 
 ought to desire to escape, the Africa of his past. 
 
 This is the culture which no culture adopted here 
 from another race can quite transform : it is this which, 
 in every land where its individuality and significance 
 are given any collective representation, will divide the 
 peoples of the African and the Teutonic groups. Even 
 though the negro race in America acquire, as I trust it 
 may, the thus-far richer and lovelier possessions of our 
 heritage, our art, our knowledge, our wealth, our 
 industrial aptitudes; and even though its military and 
 political loyalty may be as it has always been 
 unquestioned, yet its deeper culture will not be ours, 
 nor will our deeper culture be fundamentally its own. 
 It will hardly be a possession which like the funda 
 mental affinity of certain other peoples has its roots 
 deep in a soil common to them and to us, a culture 
 
8o THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 which has revealed in terms of social efficiency or col 
 lective achievement a basis of racial reciprocity. 
 
 What other human families can do, what, in their 
 social ends, they will do, we largely know. What 
 the negro race, as a race, can do or will do, our own race 
 does not know. Viewing the social achievement of 
 human groups not as a commercial or mechanical con 
 dition of affinity, but as a symbol of social self-revelation, 
 our race does not and cannot know what that race is. 
 Its unforgetable mystery is itself. The white man fears 
 and shrinks and sometimes strikes not primarily 
 because he hates, but because he does not understand. 
 The thing in the ignorant negro from which he withdraws 
 is not the ignorance, but the negro. The sub tie tendencies 
 of social approximation, of amalgamation, of intermar 
 riage, overcome last of all the obstacles of mystery the 
 barriers of the unintelligible. If there be mere weakness, 
 it can be given strength ; if there be ignorance, it can be 
 informed; if there be poverty, it can be enriched; if 
 there be merely a strange tongue or a new wisdom, these 
 can be put to school or we can be put to school to them ; 
 but if the deeper genius of all relationship the self- 
 revealing self be absent, we have not the clues of 
 understanding: that which life seeks through all its 
 seeking is shrouded and hid away. We do not blame 
 Africa for not having created a common art, a collective 
 culture, an efficient state. We have instinctively de 
 manded them not because they are indispensable in 
 themselves, but because they are the media of self- 
 revelation. The ultimate basis of intimate social affili 
 ation is not individual (as is so frequently asserted) 
 but social. It is not the inadequacy of exploration 
 
vi NEGRO RACE INTEGRITY 81 
 
 which has left Africa in its isolation, so much as the 
 confusions, the ambiguity, the inadequacy of its self- 
 expression. Africa itself, in any of the intelligible terms 
 of social experience or institutional achievement, has 
 never spoken. The race is undiscovered, and its soul 
 unfound. 
 No language, therefore, of other races, no acceptance 
 
 however brilliant or faithful or effective of the 
 formulas and the institutions of other human groups, 
 will quite avail. For that which race would ask of race 
 
 as it contemplates the issues of racial and domestic 
 fusion is not the culture of another, even though that 
 other be itself ; but a culture of its own, its own as the 
 instrument of its self-revealing. Especially is this true 
 when the stronger race is one which, like our own, 
 conceives its very destiny in the terms of social and in 
 stitutional development. The being who, upon our 
 solicitation, sits opposite to us at the feast of life, may 
 be (not impossibly) a sinner whom we must redeem, a 
 weakling whom we must empower, an enemy whom 
 
 on the morrow we must fight or must forgive, 
 
 but hardly the Inscrutable. And that within the 
 Inscrutable from which we are here withdrawn, by 
 some far pre-natal force, is not simply its mystery 
 but Itself. 
 
 II 
 
 These are but additional reasons why the culture 
 of an educated class among the negroes of the United 
 States will hardly become an instrument of social lever 
 age through which the weaker race is likely to become 
 involved in any considerable fusion with the stronger. 
 
82 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 Its deeper force, its more intimate individuality, will 
 continue to be African. It is a truth which becomes 
 the more significant when taken in its relation to the 
 fact on which we have already dwelt the fact that 
 with this group (as with other social groups) the tend 
 encies toward amalgamation, toward the abandonment 
 of the race s individuality, are least evident within its 
 higher levels. The Africa which claims them is the 
 Africa which they have claimed. 
 
 And just as in the deeper sense the American negro 
 cannot escape the Africa of his past, so he cannot escape, 
 and will not desire to escape, the Africa of his future. 
 This consideration, viewed in its larger perspective, is 
 perhaps even more important than the other. The 
 negro, unlike the American Indian, is not included as 
 a social totality within our industrial and political or 
 ganization. Quantitatively, the negro does not begin 
 and end among us. The Indian is " all here." The ne 
 gro is not all here. He has, rather, the most profound 
 relations historically and racially with the nearly 
 one hundred and fifty millions of a vast and portentous 
 continent. Indeed, I am inclined to think that just now 
 the two most significant facts in connection with the 
 larger race-problems of the modern world are the edu 
 cated, efficient, creditable negro life so frequently repre 
 sented within the limits of the United States and the 
 reemergence of Africa. 
 
 If the negro were " all here," were included quantita 
 tively, as is the Indian, within our borders, there 
 might be some basis for the contention that the Africa 
 of his past will be forgotten, that, in the slow passing 
 of the generations, what is peculiar and estranging in 
 
vi NEGRO RACE INTEGRITY 83 
 
 his genius and what is divisive in his fundamental culture 
 will possibly be overlaid and overcome. But this is not 
 the case. The absorption of the American Indian 
 would close the existence of the Indian. The assimila 
 tion of the American negro would not absorb the negro. 
 Rather, it is probable that that absorption, and the 
 creation here of the vaster aggregate of a semi-negro 
 group, would be made the basis of a still greater African 
 infusion. For in that case the Africa of the Orient 
 would be found waiting at the heels of the Africa of the 
 Occident. 
 
 The old isolation of the negro s continent is gone for 
 ever. To the southward the problems arising from the 
 conflict of the Boer and the British; at the North the 
 problem of the English relations with Egypt and the 
 Soudan, and of the French relations with Morocco; 
 along the Congo and throughout equatorial Africa the 
 issues presented by the methods of the Belgian, are 
 drawing the threads of African development up into the 
 loom of our international interests and policies. What 
 ever may be settled or unsettled as to that continent, 
 whatever may be discovered or undiscovered, if any one 
 thing is more clearly evident than another it is this, 
 that with length of time its significance and importance 
 will not recede ; and that, however gradual the progress 
 of its larger inclusion within the vivid consciousness of 
 the modern world, this increasing inclusion is as in 
 evitable as any human event which we can now foresee. 
 
 Nor is this movement of closer inter-relation solely 
 from the side of ourselves. Lord Curzon has recently 
 stated, 1 in the debates upon the Eastern situation, that 
 
 1 Hansard s Parliamentary Reports (1908), IV, Vol. 191. 
 
84 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 all Asia from the obscurity of its central plateaus to 
 the extremities of India is stirring with a vague un 
 rest (due, in large measure, to the result of the Japanese- 
 Russian war), and that the lowest of its tribal groups 
 has somehow learned that somewhere far to the north 
 ward there has been a great conflict in which a dark 
 race has been victorious over a white race. In the 
 life of Africa s untutored masses some have found a 
 similar agitation ; and yet, if such restlessness exist, I 
 should be disposed to find for it a somewhat broader 
 basis. If the news of the victory of Japan has been a 
 factor in these situations, there have been other factors 
 also. Under the prodding of our divisions and redivi- 
 sions of the "spheres of influence," of punitive expedi 
 tions and monitory explorations, the self-consciousness 
 of a Continent even in its lower depths cannot 
 forever sleep. Nor can the relations of our international 
 life be external merely. We cannot be busied with 
 Africa as a geographical puzzle without desiring it as a 
 commercial asset; and from commercial to military 
 relations we advance even more directly, for the reason 
 that it is not easy to trade where it is not possible to live. 
 And inasmuch as others will enter or will wish to enter 
 the market we attend, they, too, will wish to protect 
 their agents and their barter. Thus a national interest 
 becomes a phase of international policy. A question 
 of international policy becomes, however, under any 
 representative government, a question of politics, - 
 for the party in power must seek popular support. Soon 
 the issues brought into the foreground by the Kaffir 
 serve to determine the alternations of party supremacy 
 among the English (just as the issues presented by the 
 
vi NEGRO RACE INTEGRITY 85 
 
 American negro have frequently put men into office 
 and parties into power in the United States), so that what 
 began as the intrusion of England into the affairs of 
 Africa ultimately emerges as the intrusion of Africa 
 into the affairs of England. Thus also is Morocco 
 denning the party history of France, and thus the 
 negro of the Congo is found to be alive and assertive 
 within the career of Brussels and her king. A move 
 ment which began, therefore, upon every hand as a 
 mere physical invasion has become and will become 
 increasingly a whole congeries of social and political 
 relations. 
 
 What the modern world itself has not escaped, and 
 cannot now escape, can be escaped least of all by that 
 social factor in this world which is so fundamentally 
 bound to the peoples of Africa by the ties of history and 
 of blood. I refer, of course, to the negro of the United 
 States. But the clearer revelation of that bond, the 
 pushing upward of the fact and significance of this 
 relationship into our national consciousness, can hardly 
 fail to be followed by two results. It would seem in 
 the first place to make still more improbable, as I have 
 already pointed out, the amalgamation, through inter 
 marriage, of the black and the white races upon our 
 soil. As the African race in its larger unity takes its 
 new form and outline within our popular consciousness, 
 as its larger magnitude and the vast weight of its un 
 developed elements are more fully understood, there 
 will be inevitable recoil within the masses of the stronger 
 race, a recoil, however, which because not im 
 mediately involved in any phase of our own sectional 
 conflict will not necessarily be accompanied by any 
 
86 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 access of racial bitterness. The reaction from even the 
 remoter possibilities of racial fusion will probably 
 prove, however, to be decisive. For the social an 
 nexation of Africa by the white peoples of Europe and 
 America would involve something less akin to fusion 
 than to inundation. 
 
 The reaction among the white peoples which is likely 
 to follow a popular appreciation of the new imminence 
 of Africa, the increase of race-consciousness within the 
 stronger group, is likely to induce an answering reaction 
 within the weaker race, a reaction even among its 
 representatives in the United States. Indeed, for the 
 very reason that their greater intelligence and their 
 greater efficiency as a social force make them more 
 sensitive to all impressions than the negro of Africa, 
 it is not improbable that they will become early and 
 effective interpreters of the continent and its races. 
 Not that the bodily transference of the negroes of 
 America to their older land will seem either profitable 
 or possible. I have dwelt elsewhere upon the weak 
 ness of such a policy. 1 But the continuing citizenship 
 of the masses of the race within the United States 
 need not shut out the negro from the helping of 
 Africa. It may prove, indeed, the basis of a sounder 
 and more interested cooperation. 
 
 Such an expectation may, to many, seem chimerical. 
 It may be that the conjecture is unfounded. And yet, 
 can we be mistaken in supposing that the dumb and 
 helpless peoples of that one vast negro land, goaded into 
 an awakened life and constrained, as a factor in policies 
 they cannot comprehend, to minister to visions which 
 1 See pp. 56, 57, of the author s "The Present South." 
 
vi NEGRO RACE INTEGRITY 87 
 
 they know not how to share, will hardly look in vain to 
 the one group within the inhabitants of modern states 
 which might give them a kinsman s voice ? 
 
 I well know that among some of the intelligent negroes 
 of America the very subject of Africa is like the skeleton 
 in the closet. They would keep well within the back 
 ground their affinity with an older and weaker world, 
 that their own origin may be forgotten in their progress. 
 However natural such an impulse may be, it is, I think, 
 doomed to rejection by the intelligent majority of the 
 race. 
 
 The large masses of the unintelligent in America 
 itself have made formidable indeed the burden of negro 
 leadership. The strain upon its resources has been 
 great. Here, moreover, the negro leader, of the better 
 type, has had to bear the weight of problems imposed 
 from above as well as those which have issued from be 
 low. The conditions of the development of the race 
 within a democratic society have forced into the fore 
 ground every conceivable type of political or social 
 issue; a group almost wholly undeveloped has been 
 forced by the exigencies of its situation into a conscious 
 ness of the issues, and into a participation in the con 
 troversies, of one of the most highly developed among 
 modern societies. It has not been allowed as would 
 have been the case under normal conditions to 
 develop its own issues in response to the development 
 of its own life ; but, upon its own peculiar issues 
 issues springing naturally and normally out of its own 
 needs have been superimposed the social and political 
 issues of the stronger group. If this has had its ad 
 vantages, it has involved certain disadvantages of the 
 
88 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 gravest sort. Not the least of these has been the com 
 plexity of the problem presented to the negro leader. 
 In addition to the sheer weight of the difficulties in 
 volved in the ignorance of the negro masses he has thus 
 had to face the questions presented by their abnormal 
 situation. The result has naturally been a preoccu 
 pation with American issues, an almost complete ab 
 sorption of interest and activity in the national rather 
 than the international fortunes of his people. 
 
 As the reemergence of Africa becomes, however, 
 increasingly evident, and as the varied questions pre 
 sented by its peoples appear and reappear within the 
 consciousness of the modern world, I have no manner 
 of doubt as to the response of the representatives of the 
 race in the United States. Here is grouped, in a peculiar 
 sense, the race s representative life. It will ring true. Its 
 failure to respond an attitude of deliberate indiffer 
 ence would be impossible. Such a course would 
 suggest that those finer motives under which the best 
 forces of American society have brought to the weak 
 the support of the strong, have failed of their essential 
 fruit ; for the true gift of every emancipating enthusiasm 
 is not solely the emancipation, but the enthusiasm; is 
 not liberty in its formal estate, to be selfishly enjoyed, 
 but that liberty of the spirit which sees its own issues 
 and leaps to espouse its own causes under all the forms, 
 wherever found, of negation and repression. By all 
 the psychology of its life it must so respond or must 
 decay. 
 
 If this be " a counsel of perfection " there is no such 
 counsel, but a suggestion of solid and immediate force, 
 in the consideration that when the negroes of privilege 
 
vi NEGRO RACE INTEGRITY 89 
 
 show a disposition to ignore the fate of the unprivileged 
 the moral sense of the world is shocked and the position 
 of the privileged is made measurably less secure. Many 
 generations of history must pass before even the more 
 progressive sections of the negro population will hold so 
 commanding a place in the western world as to be in 
 dependent of the moral solicitude of the stronger social 
 groups. They may not wisely offend against the partial 
 basis of their preservation. 
 
 Nor will they wish to do so. Partly through the op 
 eration of a community of interest, partly through a 
 community of suffering, partly through the presence of 
 prejudice from without, the sense of race identity has 
 gained a deeper sensitiveness as time has passed. Their 
 familiar readiness to respond to a "race-cause" or a 
 " race-policy " (a readiness at times too great) will 
 make them quick to claim their share in the fate of their 
 fellows across the sea. A theatre of international activity 
 will not be without its interest. But, above all, the 
 higher sagacity of the race will perceive an opportunity 
 of supreme magnitude and of historic dignity in the 
 interpretation of the mind and life of that waiting, 
 helpless, innumerable negro world. To assist it, 
 however humbly; to serve, somewhat, in the reorgan 
 ization and diversification of its trade activities ; to aid 
 a little in reversing the old and hideous policy of " profit 
 through devastation," and to substitute more generally 
 a policy based upon the fundamental and constructive 
 culture of its resources; to help the world to think a 
 little more of Africa and the Africans and to organize 
 its international relations within that continent, not 
 upon a basis of local ruin, but upon the more productive 
 
90 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 basis of local development; and, in the light of Amer 
 ica s own clear demonstration of negro capacity, to 
 give Africa its voice and its chance, such, to the in 
 telligent negroes of the United States, will seem the only 
 conceivable response to the challenge of the new African 
 situation. And in that response they will find, inevitably, 
 a new and higher sense of their relation to the world. 
 Through the grace of a broader service of the now 
 broader negro group, their own struggle will become less 
 a struggle for themselves alone, and still less a struggle 
 to lose themselves within the identity of another social 
 mass. The very stress and truth of their stewardship 
 will make forever impossible their self-obliteration or 
 their self-despair. However impalpable its formal or 
 political expression, they will have taken a continent for 
 their ward ; and those who while the world looks on 
 assume such a part upon such a stage, must attain new 
 dignities of conviction, and a new sense of usefulness, 
 and a stronger and clearer consciousness of race. 
 
 Let no one imagine that I here anticipate a career of 
 international meddling for the American negro. Formal 
 and collective protest in relation to political and social 
 evils will always have its place. But I have in mind a 
 more fundamental service: the service, first of all, of 
 men who are negroes and yet have learned how to ob 
 serve and to record the facts, the men of investigation; 
 secondly, men who are skilled in the methods of trade 
 and agriculture, who can find new resources and new 
 crops and can teach the better uses of the old ; thirdly, 
 men skilled in the problems of transport (the tragedy of 
 Africa is largely its problem of transportation), that 
 labor and foods may find their markets, and that the 
 
vi NEGRO RACE INTEGRITY 91 
 
 whole task of distribution for people and for products 
 may be reorganized upon those principles of efficiency 
 which American genius has been so successful in 
 applying : the conqueror of Africa will be neither the 
 explorer, nor the soldier, nor the diplomat, but the expert 
 in distribution though his work may perhaps involve 
 the activities of all. 
 
 Into the various phases, however, of the modern 
 service of the continent I may not enter here. Their 
 discussion would demand a monograph rather than a 
 suggestion. And yet the suggestion may serve as an 
 illustration. For the career of African cooperation will 
 possess its historic significance, its final dignity, and its 
 educative force (for those who attempt it) by reason of 
 its fundamental nature. It must begin at the bottom, 
 for that is where the task itself begins. Political 
 agitation will be of secondary significance. Yet those 
 who enter into this cooperation and who serve well its 
 far-reaching ends will not lack in any form of whole 
 some public influence ; they must be whatever their 
 outward rank the real counsellors of empire, for they 
 will hold the secrets of contented and productive labor, 
 of social stability and the general wealth. 
 
 It may be that this work must wait for white men. 
 It is possible that the young and far-sighted negroes 
 trained under secular and religious auspices who 
 have already entered the African service represent no 
 vital movement of racial interest; it may be that the 
 negro s continent must be reorganized without the 
 negro s help and must be rebuilded, by the masterful 
 spirit of another race, over its people s prostrate or 
 reluctant life, and yet I know that there are those 
 
9 2 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 among the younger negroes of America who will quietly 
 say : "It shall not be ! We may not for many years be 
 strong enough to do all that as men we would like to 
 do; great unsettled issues wait us here at home. We 
 know, however, that the world-problem is sometimes 
 the way to the heart of the home-problem; that we 
 may prove weak, but that there can be no such proof 
 of weakness as the spectacle of our inactivity; that the 
 task is great, but that if the intelligence now within the 
 race refuses the burdens of its stewardship, the task 
 will be greater still ; that in the varied depth and scope 
 of its appeal there is that which will give our powers 
 their work within a theatre of distinctive use, annexing 
 our fate in America by direct inevitable relationship 
 to one of the world-changes of human history. We 
 will begin in tutelage, but we will begin. Our science 
 we will put to work to regain our immunity from the 
 fevers of the tropics, and taking, by virtue of that im 
 munity, our best of wit and skill into the central furnace 
 of the task, and proving the mettle of the race within 
 the alembic of its forces, we will win, out of our power 
 to serve, a power to lead. We will make ourselves 
 necessary. Upon the basis of our necessity to Africa 
 we will achieve in still broader measure the sense of 
 our necessity to the world, knowing that all that shall 
 contribute to that sense will contribute to the integrity, 
 permanence, and happiness of our racial experience. 
 If the white man must redeem the black man s conti 
 nent, it will not be because of our failure to believe and 
 to attempt." 
 
vi NEGRO RACE INTEGRITY 93 
 
 III 
 
 How far or how generally such an avowal will find 
 response among the negroes of the United States no 
 man can say. Those within any social group who 
 rise to the higher policies of collective effort are not 
 conspicuous in number. And yet such a response 
 now represents one of the inevitable directions of negro 
 thought, and it will gain in its definiteness and its 
 momentum with every quickening and deepening in 
 fluence which through education or opportunity touches 
 the negro s life. The reemergence of Africa means 
 the broadening, here, of the base of negro solidarity, 
 the inclusion within the present consciousness of the 
 race, through old heredities, and through resistless 
 affinities of instinct, of a whole negro world, not as 
 a mere subordinate section of some proud and alien 
 stock, but a negro world, big with mystery, sentient 
 with an individuality which its obscurities have pre 
 served and strong with an authority which its formless 
 ness has defined. Here indeed is but one of the larger 
 forces in that school of his self-discovery by which the 
 negro through his Africa within as well as his Africa 
 without is finding the appeal and the power of his 
 race s life. 
 
 For the broadening of the basis of a race conscious 
 ness is among an educated group, a group educated 
 to the point of a self-conscious experience the process 
 of its intensification: Through that capacity for self- 
 projection which is the privilege (or the penalty) of the 
 educated mind, through the vicarious quality of the 
 social imagination, the liberated spirit sees within each 
 
94 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP, vr 
 
 of the masses of the social group with which it is identi 
 fied the replica of itself, its other soul, asking a like 
 deliverance. It is for this reason that the truest Chris 
 tian is inevitably a missionary and that the truest 
 culture finds the most inexorable bond with the fate 
 and longing of the ignorant. It is this truth as well 
 as that "consciousness of kind" which has been called 
 the fundamental sociological postulate, that so far as 
 the negro peoples are concerned, has made almost 
 every intelligent man or woman in some sense 
 " a worker for the race," a sharer in the race s suffering, 
 a serious but rejoicing captive of its identity, its hope, 
 its future. Those in whom the intensity of this racial 
 life has weakened are those who have shut out the vision 
 of its multitude, and have narrowed the numerical 
 basis of their racial contact. Those whose doors are 
 ajar, who walk, in fact or in imagination, in and out 
 among the throngs of its population, these behold 
 and remember, and by the music of that murmur 
 which sweeps through them from the fields of stirring 
 but yet unawakened life they build and rebuild 
 patiently and not unconfidently the structure of 
 their allegiance. Those who think that the educated 
 life will turn the negro from his race and will make 
 him seek the destiny of another group, know little of 
 the tendencies of the negro and still less of the ten 
 dencies of education. 
 X 
 
THE INTEGRATING FORCE OF OPPOR 
 TUNITY: DESPAIR AS A FORCE OF 
 DISINTEGRATION 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE INTEGRATING FORCE OF OPPORTUNITY: DESPAIR 
 AS A FORCE OF DISINTEGRATION 
 
 WE return again, therefore, to the fact itself. The 
 impulses of desertion from the life and destiny of the 
 negro race are moving within its lower rather than 
 within its higher levels. At its higher levels the race 
 betrays little tendency toward a weakening of the sense 
 of solidarity ; the tendency is rather in the direction of a 
 stronger and intenser racial life. The educated negroes 
 are keeping more closely than ever to themselves. Many 
 who are so largely white that the fact of " color" is 
 not observable, and who, by moving into other com 
 munities, might easily lose themselves within the 
 masses of the stronger race, take no such course. Here 
 and there one does so, but such instances are far less 
 common than they were some twenty years ago. The 
 power of the race to "hold its own" against all the 
 forces of disintegration has been marked. It is 
 a power which is increasing rather than decreasing, 
 and it is increasing in direct relation to the progress of 
 education. It is an issue of development. 
 
 The man who has dealt familiarly with the negro 
 field-hand, the man or woman who has known prac 
 tically no type of the race except the more ignorant 
 among the negroes in domestic service, is often con 
 fident that " the first effect of education will be to make 
 
 97 
 
9 8 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 the negro want to be a white man." But the chief 
 consideration is not as to "the first effect of education" 
 but as to its second effect: its result as a continuing 
 process and as a consistent policy of the state. 1 And 
 the field of observation in estimating the results 
 of education should hardly be limited to the un 
 educated. The uneducated negro has known, as 
 a rule, almost as little as the white employer, of the 
 educated of the negro race; his associations with an 
 educated world, having chiefly thrown him with an 
 educated world of white men, are likely therefore to 
 make him feel that the only access to it is through 
 the white man s life an impression strengthened by 
 every opponent of a policy of negro education. 
 
 1 1 have elsewhere so fully discussed the question of negro education 
 (see "The Present South," Chapters III and VIII) that I need not 
 here enter upon details. When confronted, however, by the contention 
 that education, as such, is injurious to the negro, one is reminded 
 somewhat of Sydney Smith s reply to those who made similar objection 
 to the education of women "Can anything," he inquired, " be more 
 absurd than to suppose that the care and solicitude which a mother 
 feels for her children depends upon her ignorance of Greek and mathe 
 matics? It would appear, from such objections, that ignorance is 
 the great civilizer of the world." So, in reference to-day to the vexed 
 question of the negro, there are those who seem to believe that in 
 view of the alleged relation between education and crime we have 
 only to abolish our schools in order to restore the black man to a state 
 of innocence and industry. It would be interesting to inquire just 
 what degree of ignorance and neglect, upon such a theory, may be 
 precisely calculated as a condition of perfectitude in the moral de 
 velopment of negro character. That the old-time darky was, in fact, 
 the educated negro of his period; that to-day the graduates of the 
 reputable negro schools are incomparably the least criminal element 
 of the race; and that it is only through systematic training that the 
 negro masses can be made, however slowly and painfully, efficient 
 producers as well as effective consumers and purchasers, such con 
 siderations are everywhere having a larger measure of recognition. 
 
vii THE INTEGRATING FORCE OF OPPORTUNITY 99 
 
 Nor does the uneducated mind of any race know 
 just what education will, for itself, involve. It can 
 not imagine. Just as few poor men who inherit a 
 fortune ever do, or ever want to do, with their money 
 what they once dreamed they would do with it, so 
 yet in a more inexorable sense no ignorant man is 
 likely to want to use an education just as he first im 
 agined he should use it. Its chief possessions are, in 
 the first place, not new possessions but new needs. 
 New aptitudes accompany them, but these aptitudes are 
 themselves the forces of needs still deeper and more 
 imperious. Among these is the hunger for association. 
 The profoundest need of every educated life is for an 
 other educated life. The deepened instinct, the edu 
 cated impulse, is assimilative, accumulative, social. 
 It demands and creates a community. Society itself 
 has been builded by education, by knowledge, which 
 deepens individual need the need of mind for mind - 
 and by the discipline which makes efficient that re 
 sponse to common needs which is represented in the 
 defensive and constructive functions of the state. 
 
 The ignorant negro may have all sorts of crude ideas 
 as to what he would do with himself if educated. But, 
 as education comes, it does with him quite as much 
 as he does with it. It takes him into the companion 
 ship of other educated negroes. It appropriates him 
 in behalf of a common standpoint. It introduces him 
 into the collective intelligence of his people. He comes 
 to share their racial interests. He is involved within 
 the formative tendencies of a class-consciousness and 
 enters into the heritage of race ideals, policies, antipa 
 thies. This is the broader education to which he is 
 
ioo THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 introduced by " education." With every new need he 
 turns inevitably to those who understand and share 
 that need. With every new power he turns to those 
 who, sharing a like power and moved by a like interest, 
 can through union with it increase its force and 
 its fruitfulness. Thus the whole drive and pressure 
 of his situation, from the side of its disadvantages as 
 well as by reason of its advantages, is in the direction 
 of his closer identification with the consciousness and 
 the fortunes of his race. Under the conditions which 
 surround him it is inevitable that as he becomes more 
 of a man he will become more of a negro. 
 
 And as in this higher sense he becomes more of a 
 negro, he will become more of a man, more re 
 sponsive to those collective responsibilities, to those 
 social interests and instincts, which deepen the qualities 
 of individual character. This does not involve his 
 forfeiture of the freer standpoint of humanity. The 
 citizen of the United States becomes more of an Ameri 
 can as he becomes more of a man, becomes more of a 
 man as he becomes more of an American. The ac 
 ceptance of one s standpoint within one s national or 
 racial group deepens, and does not destroy, one s share 
 in the universal fortune of the universal race. 
 
 Yet in every social and collective sense it is inevi 
 table that under all the influences which now engage 
 him the negro should assume increasingly the negro s 
 standpoint. The deeper impulses of his segregation 
 are but his response to the larger sway of that con 
 sciousness of kind to which all the stronger peoples of 
 history have answered. The growing clearness with 
 which the race perceives its destiny, and the fidelity 
 
vii THE INTEGRATING FORCE OF OPPORTUNITY 101 
 
 with which it follows, will mark, indeed, the measure 
 of its essential strength. With larger education and 
 a more accurate self-knowledge it will find the force 
 of its segregation less and less within the barriers of 
 antipathy imposed by other groups, and more and more 
 within the necessities and the satisfactions of its own 
 development. The barriers of the advanced groups will 
 play, and ought to play, their part. They present an 
 element in that pressure from the side of the stronger 
 race which sometimes extravagantly, but on the 
 whole wisely has directly operated to intensify the soli 
 darity of the weaker. But these barriers are external. 
 The explanations and policies which are based upon 
 them are partial rather than fundamental. That which 
 turns the educated life of the negro race into the course 
 and channel of its own development is the force of its 
 inward necessities and aspirations, is an instinct from 
 within rather than repression from without, is that call of 
 Itself of its own social individuality which is strength 
 ened by its expression and freed by its opportunities. 
 
 Nothing could be more misleading or more profitless 
 in the conduct of an inquiry as to the results of edu 
 cation than to confuse the educated with the literate. 
 The statistics of illiteracy encouraging as they are 
 in the study of negro progress * have little bearing 
 upon the general significance of education. The mere 
 ability to read or to write, or to do both, does not make 
 a white man " educated"; still less does it constitute 
 
 1 The number of illiterates in the negro population of the United 
 States 10 years of age and over was reduced from 70 per cent in 1880 
 to 44.5 per cent in 1900. See, for the statistics by States, the author s 
 "The Present South," p. 302. 
 
102 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 "education" within a social group almost wholly given 
 to agriculture, or to other rural or physical employ 
 ments which demand no necessary development of this 
 initial power. 
 
 It is, moreover, inaccurate to assume that the educa 
 tional process is a mere quantitative extension of ca 
 pacity in a fixed direction determined by a straight line. 
 Under this assumption a little "education" may be 
 indicated by registering a mark upon this line, and the 
 still greater degrees of education may be precisely in 
 dicated by further marks upon this line in the same 
 fixed direction. Thus it is assumed that the formal char 
 acter and the ultimate result of the whole educational 
 process can be predicted from the direction and the ten 
 dencies indicated by "education" in its earliest stage. 
 
 It would be difficult, however, to conceive of a more 
 questionable inference. The educational process is not 
 quantitative but stimulative. It is indeed formative, 
 but the formative response is organic rather than 
 mechanical. So far from maintaining a fixed direction, 
 its direction, especially in its earlier stages, is likely 
 to be changed at any point. The direction indicated 
 within the period at which the individual crosses the 
 simple boundary dividing the illiterate from the lit 
 erate as represented by individual aspirations or by 
 personal and social habit is often precisely contrary 
 to the direction taken at a later stage. There are few 
 of our boys who at the age of fifteen continue to retain 
 those ideas about being a policeman which possessed 
 them at the age of five; there are few adults passing 
 far into any educative experience, whether literary 
 or practical, who maintain the initial direction of 
 
vii THE INTEGRATING FORCE OF OPPORTUNITY 103 
 
 their earliest impulse; there are few social groups 
 which after even a partial education maintain the first 
 tendencies of a primitive industry without serious and 
 increasing diversification. The initial direction of 
 the educational process is not mechanically maintained 
 in conformity with a straight line (so many yards of 
 education indicating a like number of yards of the 
 same kind of man) ; it is a process of Jjberation ; and 
 its chief service in its later stages as it touches 
 a social group without a long- established racial ten 
 dency is to enable its members to change and to 
 correct the crude initial direction of their first educa 
 tional impulse. And this viewed in the larger per 
 spective is precisely what, in the case of the negro 
 race, has happened. 
 
 It may be objected that while the preceding sug 
 gestions may be true of the stronger race they are not 
 true of the weaker, inasmuch as the psychology of the 
 negro is not the psychology of the white man. That is 
 in some measure true. The psychology of the French 
 man is not quite the psychology of the American. Nor 
 is a negro merely a white man beneath a darker skin. 
 But a fact is none the less a fact, and it is to the fact 
 in the case, at this and at each other point, that our 
 theory of the negro s psychology must conform. We 
 must gain our notions of a particular "psychology" 
 from the facts; we must not assume our facts from the 
 basis of an assumed psychology. In reference, there 
 fore, to the immediate question with which we have 
 been dealing, the emerging result betrays no pro 
 foundly racial "color"; the negro as he becomes really 
 educated does, in fact, correct such aberrations as may 
 
104 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 have been manifested in the earliest period of his school 
 ing; he does respond, indisputably, to the instinct 
 of racial solidarity; he does claim, from within, his 
 affinity and identity with his race s life; he does with 
 his increasing manhood become increasingly and more 
 confidently a deliberate inheritor of its destiny, a negro. 
 In the popular discussion of the effect of education 
 upon our negroes we have sometimes given more at 
 tention to those in whom the educational process has 
 been imperfectly initiated than to those in whom it 
 has been partially completed. The immediate results 
 of the three months term of an elementary rural school 
 in a log cabin under an eighty-dollar-a-year teacher i 
 are assumed to be more significant than the data repre 
 sented in the hundreds of negro men and women who, 
 through long and intelligent sacrifices, have really won 
 a foothold within the precincts of the educated life. 
 The whole country, South and North, has given large 
 support to the schooling of the negro race, but the task 
 has been so prodigious in its proportions that it is 
 hardly within the masses of these people (by reason of 
 the limited application of the policy of public instruc 
 tion) that we can look for representative results. These 
 results are rather to be found in the ranks of the minor 
 ity, a minority as yet inconspicuous, and because of 
 the social separation which obtains and which, I believe, 
 
 1 The negro teacher, of course, is free, while not employed, to take 
 up other forms of work, so that his professional income is supple 
 mented from outside the school. The lot of the white teacher is often 
 almost as poor. The inadequacy of the local revenues to meet the 
 demands of proper professional remuneration for the teacher is one 
 of the gravest problems of rural life, particularly at the South, but also 
 at the North and West. 
 
vii THE INTEGRATING FORCE OF OPPORTUNITY 105 
 
 should continue to obtain between the stronger and the 
 weaker race a minority largely unknown by the casual 
 observer. Yet it does, in fact, find creditable represen 
 tation in almost every important American commu 
 nity. It is thus difficult to point out the results of 
 education among the minority; it is easy to point out 
 the crudities of education among the majority, for 
 the majority (in familiar personal service all about us) 
 are not negligible or forgetable. And yet as we pause, 
 and give ourselves to our thinking and our remember 
 ing, there are few of us who do not know of the well- 
 settled negro districts in our Southern and Northern 
 cities, or of small but well-conducted negro farms, in 
 which the quiet, decent, self-respecting men and women 
 of this race are creating the negro home and are slowly 
 but steadily advancing the level of negro life. Such 
 negroes are exceptional, of course. Who could reason 
 ably expect otherwise? Yet the point of chief signifi 
 cance is not that they are exceptional but, first, that 
 they exist; secondly, that they are increasing rather 
 than decreasing in number; and, thirdly, that by 
 reason of the admiration accorded them among their 
 fellows it is obvious that their leadership is accepted, 
 and that their own progress is indicative of the maturer 
 tendencies of their racial movement and an earnest of 
 its more positive and more general advance. 
 
 II 
 
 The fact, however, to which I would here again recur 
 is the nature of this racial movement in reference to 
 the question of racial disintegration. Its whole animus 
 
106 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 and direction are the other way. Here are those with 
 the least thought of fusion and amalgamation, with the 
 most thought of what the negro in America may be 
 come. And they are so because racially, intellectually, 
 socially, they are not bankrupt; they have begun to 
 create a racial wealth, however meagre, and to share 
 a racial consciousness, however troubled; a wealth 
 of memories for they have begun to have a history; 
 a wealth of present gain for they have attained a 
 competence, a home, and friends; a wealth of hope 
 for they have begun to share with one another those 
 common deprivations and affections, those mutual 
 responsibilities and interests which sober and clear the 
 vision of the future : and the consciousness into which 
 they come is that of men and women bound within a 
 bond which they may bear, and inheriting a destiny 
 they may attempt, because manhood and womanhood 
 are not impossible within it, but still attainable, - 
 the world offering them, at a cost however sharp, the 
 nobler sufficiencies of life, its freedom to grow and its 
 opportunity to serve. 
 
 Withdraw that education which has represented both 
 the opportunity and the process of acquisition, and 
 what becomes of this higher negro wealth and this 
 finer self -consciousness of a thus self-respecting race? 
 Let us admit its inadequacies, its imperfections, how 
 will you improve them? Will you improve them by 
 destroying them? Will you strengthen the appeal 
 of the negro s racial life by making that life synonymous 
 with destitution? Is there a remedy for a defective 
 racial pride in a denial of those things upon which an 
 
vii THE INTEGRATING FORCE OF OPPORTUNITY 107 
 
 honest pride is nurtured ? Can you expect to hold men 
 in patient allegiance to a race by withholding from the 
 race itself the opportunities of self-expression and self- 
 development? Will a man willingly remain a negro, 
 or will a negro long remain a man, if the capacities 
 of the one cannot be unfolded within the destiny of 
 the other? Is it not abundantly obvious that the man 
 cannot remain a negro unless the negro can become 
 at length a man? 
 
 "What then will he do?" I hear some one ask. 
 "Will he become other than a negro?" I answer yes, 
 and yet no. "But he shall not become a white man," 
 is the retort, "we will wall him in; we have already 
 done so ; we will strengthen the wall, we will sink its 
 foundations deeper, we will build it higher, and then 
 we will house it over. He shall remain as he is." 
 
 No, he will not remain as he is: that is one of the 
 few things in this strange and tragic case, of which we 
 may be sure. He will not remain as he is. A race s 
 life is an organic growth; it is not like a dead platform 
 that we can safely build our houses over or our walls 
 about; it is a living thing. You can force it back and 
 can lay it prostrate, but when you have driven it even 
 underground, it will reappear. Its living roots, its secret 
 and extending tentacles of growth, will search beneath 
 the familiar soil, will find their way below the founda 
 tions of your wall, will come up upon the outer side 
 intertwined with your own growth, blended with your 
 stock, and terrible in their confusions and their fruitage. 
 No; build your walls if you will, but give to this race 
 also a garden of noble spaces; build your walls high 
 in self-protection, but rear them as no dungeon above 
 
io8 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 another life. Let its growth have also its own sunshine, 
 light from the same sun, nurture from the same air and 
 the same rains; let all wise and pure conspiracies ad 
 vance it. Its liberation will mean not its encroach 
 ment, but its self-fulfilment. Force it downward into 
 degeneracy and abasement, and, having no garden and 
 no sunshine of its own, its pervasive and intruding 
 death will seek you out. Your sounder health depends 
 less upon its repression than upon its freedom. 
 
 And yet there are those who seriously contend that 
 negro education and negro self-development will prove 
 a peril to the white man s integrity of race ! little 
 realizing that in all racial groups the prime force of 
 disintegration is despair. 1 The negro s life cannot pass 
 into the life of another race by the open ways of so 
 cial acceptance and reciprocity, but "the underground 
 passage" - the passage through his complicity with the 
 white man s vice is always open to him. With 
 every weakening of his collective courage, with every 
 lowering of any reasonable hope, with every weight 
 added to the unequal burden of his labor, you relax 
 the pride of his conscience, the nerve of his racial self- 
 esteem, the vigor of the bond of those reservations and 
 
 1 It is sometimes assumed that the disintegration of a racial group 
 under the conditions of despair is equivalent to an easy process of 
 "quick evaporation," to be surveyed with equanimity by the 
 stronger group. But the soil of social catastrophe, whether individ 
 ual or collective, is not the wholesome earth but society itself. De 
 composition, with all its noisome horrors, must proceed within the 
 enfolding contact of the larger and stronger group. A defeated 
 race does not die instantly into oblivion; it dies first (through long and 
 tedious processes of self-perpetuation) into the life of the group pre 
 vailing; dies as its despair makes union with the sins of the strong, 
 into the lower life of the race above it. 
 
vii THE INTEGRATING FORCE OF OPPORTUNITY 109 
 
 fidelities which every man, however lowly, throws 
 or wants to throw about himself, his home, his 
 women, his children and you break up, bitterly 
 and desolately, the very foundations of his race alle 
 giance. The arch-enemies of race integrity are those 
 white men who have become the strident opponents of 
 negro development. The fomenters of the race s de 
 spair are among the factors of its disintegration. The 
 promoters of racial fusion, the real, though unwitting, 
 apostles of amalgamation, are no longer the Aboli 
 tionists of the East, but those anti-negro extremists of 
 every section who in their war upon the opportunities 
 of this weaker race would put the foundations of its 
 integrity upon the shifting and dissolving basis of its 
 self-contempt. You cannot in that way build up a 
 white race a race already full of initial confidence, 
 much less can you in that way build up a black race. 
 
 How, I again ask, can the negro be expected to cling 
 to his race-world with simplicity of feeling or tenacity 
 of purpose if that world be chiefly synonymous with 
 humiliation, and if the only creditable or honorable 
 world of which he knows is the world of another people ? 
 He who increases for the negro the legitimate com 
 pensations and satisfactions of his own world deepens 
 within him the formative attractions of his race, binds 
 him within its hopes, annexes him through ultimate 
 and self-evidencing forces to its interests and its future. 
 Those who are defeating the tendencies toward amalga 
 mation are the friends of his progress, the combatants 
 of his despair. 
 
 First of these, in point of honor, I will venture to put 
 the men and women of his own group, who, despite de- 
 
no THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 sertion from within and discouragement from without, 
 are making, with unpretentious fidelity, a clear and 
 consistent demonstration of negro life, clean, whole 
 some, self-contained. Second, I will put those of every 
 latitude indeed of every nation who, coming to 
 watch this modern birth of the negro consciousness into 
 a new and strange self-knowledge, have remained to pray 
 rather than to scoff, and to help rather than to accuse. 
 These influences outside the race, cooperating with its 
 truer representatives, are providing, through the se 
 curities and the opportunities accorded it, the real forces 
 of its integration, the powers of its self-possession and 
 its self-development. For the solidarity that is thus 
 achieved is from within. Its strength the only 
 ultimate strength of any social group is the strength 
 of a life self-chosen. Its integrity is not a reluctant 
 and artificial attainment from without, a result of 
 external pressures and prejudices, failing when they 
 relax and therefore as insecure as the alertness of other 
 groups; an integrity never really its own because 
 thus dependent upon the presence and activities of dis 
 positions outside itself, but a race integrity of its 
 own, because protected by the inclinations and dis 
 positions of its own spirit, responsive to its will and 
 growing with its growth. 
 
 A negro race integrity so founded is the only sort 
 that is really founded anywhere. You cannot found 
 the integrity of one race in the aversions of another race. 
 You cannot base the life of one people upon a foun 
 dation solely existent in another people. You cannot 
 force the negro to continue to be a negro merely by re 
 solving that the white man shall continue to be a white 
 
vii THE INTEGRATING FORCE OF OPPORTUNITY in 
 
 man. You must annex the negro to his own race 
 and his own future by the forces of his own choice and 
 the instinctive movement of his own growth, or you have 
 not annexed him to his race at all. It is for this reason 
 that the old philosophy of repression has utterly broken 
 down. Our millions of mulattoes, our deeper degrada 
 tions of infertile vice, are evidence of its futility. I 
 would not be misunderstood. I have already indicated 
 that certain phases of our self-protective discriminations 
 were necessary in their origin; some are necessary 
 still, especially where the black masses are formidable 
 in numbers and the lack of education has left them with 
 a real race standpoint and a racial self-respect wholly 
 undeveloped. But the remedy is, therefore, no per 
 petuation of repression, but opportunity. Deliverance 
 lies not solely in the white man s baldly assuming the 
 perpetual attitude of the policeman over his treasure, 
 but in giving the negro a treasure too; and, as he be 
 comes slowly conscious of his treasure, he himself be 
 comes also a policeman, on guard as a man and as a 
 race above his own. Keep him forever in his bank 
 ruptcy and his destitution, without a life to attract him 
 or a treasure to conserve, and these millions will be 
 come conscious of their race only to disown it and to 
 betray it, a despairing and devouring menace to the 
 wholesome stability of our own life, and a noisome 
 indictment of the perversity or the incapacity of our 
 statesmanship. 
 
 Ill 
 
 So far, therefore, am I from believing that the factor 
 of the negro in our population is a sound reason for 
 
ii2 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 postponing a policy of "compulsory education," that I 
 am persuaded that the negro is one of the stronger 
 arguments for such a program. Those who believe that 
 the separate integrity of our racial groups should be 
 protected and perpetuated should, indeed, be the last to 
 oppose any policy of Church or State which will con 
 tribute to the respective forces of their self -development. 
 To bring the masses of the weaker group into the circle 
 of opportunity is to bring them "within the range" of 
 their better leadership. Their ignorance involves their 
 isolation. Their isolation represents not their own 
 helplessness alone but the helplessness in reference to 
 themselves of those higher forces within their race 
 which are organizing the mental and spiritual condi 
 tions of its growth, fixing the direction of its aspirations, 
 and shaping the nobler policies of its segregation. To 
 give the masses of the ignorant into the shepherding of 
 their better leaders is, in itself, though the fuller 
 reaches of education may necessarily be long delayed, 
 so to broaden the basis and the constituency of the race s 
 higher life, that the growing passion of its selfhood, 
 the clearer vision of its identity and its peace, become 
 though afar off the possessions of the people. 
 
 The education of the multitude thus strengthens the 
 tendencies represented in the education of the few. 
 Education is the process by which the irresponsible are 
 bound into the life of the responsible. It is the means 
 by which a people, socially weak and organically un 
 conscious of a collective life, is changed from a mob into 
 a society, from an incoherent aggregation of petty 
 groups finding a bewildered and futile life under 
 ignorant leaders, to one inclusive, coherent group, re- 
 
vii THE INTEGRATING FORCE OF OPPORTUNITY 113 
 
 sponsive to the better leadership and the larger policies 
 of the race. If the curse of the blacks lies in the ig 
 norant power of their petty leaders, in church or lodge, 
 it is because their masses have never been brought 
 within the power of what is best in the race s life. 
 There can be no dethronement of bad leaders except 
 through the enthronement of good ones, and there can 
 be no enthronement of the good until a more generally 
 distributed elementary education has bestowed, among 
 the people, a capacity to understand and an opportunity 
 to follow. 
 
 It is true that popular education will sometimes 
 subject them to the advice of educated demagogues 
 (a peril not escaped by the people of stronger races), 
 but it will also introduce them to capacities which will 
 enable them to test that advice upon its merits, will 
 subject them to the counter-arguments of truer leaders, 
 will draw them up into those sobering processes of 
 feeling and reflection which always attend the enlarging 
 life and the growing responsibility of social groups. 
 A more efficient organization of negro life will bring its 
 risks, but the risks of intelligent organization, with the 
 natural divisions which intelligence will involve, are 
 as nothing in comparison with the morbid, brutal, un 
 reasoning solidarity that has so frequently prevailed. 
 After all, the only way to civilize men is to introduce 
 them into civilization. Those who think that the edu 
 cated negro leader is a more dangerous guide for his 
 people than the ignorant preacher of the cross-roads, 
 are probably comparing our present educated negro 
 leadership at its worst, with the old cross-roads preacher 
 at his best. The average educated leadership among the 
 
ii 4 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 negroes of to-day may be bitter, but it is not irrespon 
 sible. The irresponsible are few. But our uneducated 
 negro leadership having none of the old affectionate 
 relations with the educated opinion of the stronger race 
 is irresponsible as well as bitter. There can be no 
 breaking of its power except through that enlargement 
 of the scope and the efficiency of education which, 
 bringing the masses of the race within the contact 
 of its better minds, will break both the power of the 
 ignorant and the bitterness of the wise. The same fate 
 which has kept the many in darkness has kept the few 
 in bitterness; the giving of the sheep to the shepherd 
 is, in a sense poignant and evident and inexorable, the 
 saving of both. 
 
 For it is not merely true that there would be less bitter 
 ness among our educated negroes if there were less to 
 be bitter about, but it is well to remember that a large 
 factor in the distress and confusion of their experience 
 is that baffling ignorance in the masses of their race 
 which is largely the basis of its incapacity to follow 
 anybody anywhere. Education will not instantly avail. 
 The educated do not at once make more intelligent 
 followers (or leaders) than the ignorant. The first 
 effect of education in any social group, whether among 
 the poor of Russia or among the negroes of America, 
 will be distracting and divisive. There must be ex 
 perience also; and education is a necessity not as a 
 substitute for experience, but because as it touches the 
 capacities of apprehension, of memory, of comparison, 
 it is the one force which makes experience available. 
 
 But through a popular education that leads into a 
 freer experience and through an experience to which 
 
viz THE INTEGRATING FORCE OF OPPORTUNITY 115 
 
 education can contribute its standards and its discipline, 
 the vague, shifting, inchoate masses of an ignorant and 
 unresponsive negro life may be slowly drawn into the 
 sway and order of its better minds. There will be 
 factions and parties; they exist to-day. There will be 
 radicals, conservatives, opportunists; they are found in 
 every national or social group. But there will be one 
 race, conscious not only of its race but of its oneness, 
 able to judge and fitted to follow, as its leaders suffer 
 and endure and lead. The tug and strain of an answer 
 ing popular life, the tightening cords of an efficient 
 fellowship, will bring to their abler leaders that joy 
 which is the sovereign remedy for social madness 
 the sobering sense of definite responsibility, a sense of 
 responsibility deepening and broadening within them as 
 though responsive to the elective ordination of a vast 
 ecclesia, and imposing those common obligations which 
 give to every leadership its finer sanity and its ultimate 
 steadiness. 
 
 To give to the negro leader, even when " unsafe," 
 a larger and more intelligent constituency, will do more 
 than anything else to make a man of him. Nothing 
 educates a leader so thoroughly or so conservatively, 
 whether in the Church, the State, or "the labor union," 
 as to give him responsibility and to put a constitu 
 ency at his back. 1 It is an education not only in cau 
 tion, but in power. It saves one from that sense of 
 despair in which our futilities confuse us by their multi 
 tude and betray us by their irrelevancy. But when 
 
 1 See "The Social Unrest," by John Graham Brooks, Chaps. X 
 and XI, on the conservative results produced in the socialistic forces 
 of Germany by the gradual accession of responsibility; The Mac- 
 millan Company, New York, 1903. 
 
n6 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 we must act for others, when the fate of thousands is 
 dependent on us, their needs enter into us and add 
 through strange and subtle infiltrations their light and 
 reason to our own, giving to us their deeper insist 
 ence or their corrective truth, and enabling us by virtue 
 of their fuller experience to divide the irrelevant from 
 the immediate and the specious from the good. 
 
 Stronger even than that power which is the sense of 
 power, is the bond of that renewed acceptance which 
 is found in the sense of popular cooperation. It gives 
 to every leadership its highest satisfactions, for as 
 the leader chooses, in the interest of his multitudes, 
 the pathways of the common progress, he himself, 
 through their very progress in these pathways, is 
 chosen anew as the expressive instrument of their ad 
 vance. Their every step is a new acceptance of de 
 cisions which he has made, a new suffrage to powers 
 which he has gained. And their choosing of him means, 
 and will mean always, his choosing of them : they have 
 heard him and have answered; they have approved his 
 strength and have crowned his gifts. To his freedom 
 and his peace they are forever necessary, for their life 
 has been the form and the forum of his self-expression. 
 Though they may misunderstand him and betray him, 
 theirs are the crude endeavors and the hoarse voices 
 which have moved within him as the imperious sanc 
 tions of his combat, his combat for self-conquest and 
 self-development ; by those instincts of inarticulate need 
 through which they have been bound to him he has 
 been bound to them. They are his people. 
 
vii THE INTEGRATING FORCE OF OPPORTUNITY 117 
 
 IV 
 
 The deeper influences now at work, therefore, upon 
 the negro race both from without and from within 
 are operating as the forces of integration. From with 
 out, the reemergence of Africa is likely to be followed 
 by two results: in the stronger race by an impulse 
 of recoil from any possible tendencies toward negro 
 amalgamation; in the weaker race by the broader and 
 deeper self-consciousness of the negro group. 
 
 These external forces operating upon both races 
 toward the creation of a closer but higher segregation 
 of the negro group, are coincident with the inward 
 movement of its own experience as reflected in its 
 educational development. It has gained the school of 
 its self-discovery in that finding of itself which educa 
 tion inevitably imposes, as well as in the new-found 
 significance of the larger negro world. The education 
 of its leadership has involved an increasing rather than 
 a decreasing consciousness of race, due partly to the 
 force of pressure from without, but due also to the in 
 creasing sufficiency and the deepening responsibilities 
 of its heritage from within. As the race s identity has 
 become self-chosen, its integrity has been more deeply 
 and more securely founded. The gradual inclusion of 
 the negro masses within the scope and promise of the 
 educated world is slowly bringing them within the hori 
 zon of a common fellowship, is binding them into the 
 conscious destiny of a race choosing not a para 
 sitic but an individual career, and, by the very need 
 and progress of its multitudes, rewarding and annexing, 
 
n8 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP, vn 
 
 upbuilding, reenforcing and reabsorbing the higher and 
 freer capacities of its leadership. It is the old, old 
 story of the need of power upon the one side, and the 
 power of need upon the other. 
 
THE FATE OF THE STRONG 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE FATE OF THE STRONG 
 
 THE sympathy which our world has given, and has 
 rightly given, to the negro of these Southern States 
 should not be permitted to obscure the situation of the 
 stronger race. All may readily observe the suffering 
 of the poor man of the streets. The man who is not 
 upon the streets, whose lot is not familiarly associated 
 with any of the external conditions of misfortune, is 
 not observed so easily. Indeed, he is seldom observed 
 at all. Walled about by the privacies of his business 
 or of his household, he is shut within the precincts of 
 an instinctive or deliberate reserve. 
 
 The negro, associated through slavery with the out 
 ward conditions of misfortune, and still burdened with 
 the natural legacy of unequal powers, has stood clearly 
 within the view of a considerate public interest. Not 
 that that interest has ignored the stronger race, and yet 
 here, too, its response has been due to the external chal 
 lenge of obvious occasions to the tragedies of war, 
 to the poverty of the masses, to the humiliations of 
 reconstruction, to the burdens of political insecurity. 
 But the deeper aspects of our fate are little known; they 
 are not often pondered even by ourselves. Like the 
 shadowy backgrounds of social tradition or personal 
 assumption, they lie within us as the forces of our kinship 
 with one another rather than as our explicit challenge 
 
 121 
 
122 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 to the interest or sympathy of the world. Of these we 
 seldom speak. We sometimes half believe them to be 
 forgotten until, in the sharp shock of some definite 
 occasion, or on a journey into other scenes, or in 
 some silent moment of self-revelation, the fate of our 
 divided land flashes its significance upon us. Our 
 States, our communities, our neighborhoods, are the 
 abode of white and black : ours is a world of inexorable 
 divisions; divisions deeper than inclination, or will, 
 or habit can express; divisions not of race alone but of 
 race conjoined to strength upon the one hand, and to 
 weakness upon the other. Here the strength, with 
 whatever individual exceptions, lies upon one side; 
 the weakness with whatever exceptions lies, as a 
 whole, upon the other. The stronger race must live, 
 must find and equip and free itself, must rear its children, 
 thronged, environed, influenced, profoundly deter 
 mined by the weaker. 
 
 A weak group of a like race would present one prob 
 lem, a strong group of a different race would present 
 another; but here in one group are peculiarly repre 
 sented as within an enfolding world of unceasing 
 contact the weaknesses against which our climatic 
 tendencies have instinctively forewarned us and the 
 race from which our social heritage and our political 
 history have most sharply divided us. 
 
 The very fact that the one peril has been as inevitable 
 as the other, and that the division has proven at times 
 as ineffective as the forewarning, has but added to the 
 torture and the burden of our conditions. Those who live 
 within a different scene, who conduct the simple trans 
 actions of daily life as members of a homogeneous racial 
 
vni THE FATE OF THE STRONG 123 
 
 group, naturally enough do not immediately or easily 
 perceive the pressure and significance of our situation. 
 
 Industrially, it is imperative that the weaker group 
 should preserve itself from exploitation at the stronger s 
 hands, but it is quite as imperative that the stronger 
 group should preserve itself from those tendencies 
 toward exploitation which are constantly invited by the 
 very presence of the weaker. There is nothing more 
 perilous to the normal standards of social feeling than 
 the presence of a large and distinctive class of a closely 
 related population too ignorant and too weak to protect 
 itself. It is easy to say that the case of such a popula 
 tion should appeal to the chivalry of the strong. And 
 so it should. 
 
 And so it does. It is well known among us that the 
 chief burdens of the negro are economic rather than 
 political; and that he suffers more from discrimina 
 tion in trade than from discrimination against his suf 
 frage. The appeal to chivalry, to the protecting kind 
 liness of the stronger race, has found response. Its 
 story the daily, hourly offices of a disinterested 
 friendship, the strong leaving their own business 
 and giving of their own time in order to protect the 
 weak from the cupidity of the "loan-shark," from the 
 pitfalls of the " mule market," or from the legal conse 
 quences of their own frailty is, though so homely in 
 its occasions, a chapter of varied and recurrent interest. 
 I know of nothing simpler or happier in the history 
 of race relations. But the task, in its magnitude, is 
 overwhelming. Chivalry, like every other quality of 
 social life, has its quantitative limit. There is not 
 enough to go round. In no actual or conceivable human 
 
i2 4 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 society can one class in the population universally and 
 efficiently assume the task of protecting another class 
 against the consequences of its helplessness. I do not 
 know that it would altogether be best for the weaker if it 
 could. The stronger class is bound to do its utmost, 
 through every legitimate institutional provision, to aid 
 the weaker in ceasing to be helpless; but it must con 
 front the fact that institutional processes are slow, and 
 that in the long period of delayed development it will 
 find within its own life (no matter what the quarter of 
 the world in which the scene is laid) the tendencies that 
 would exploit as well as the tendencies which protect, 
 the men of self-interested trade as well as the men of 
 a disinterested chivalry. Education is long; its own 
 numbers are divided. 
 
 II 
 
 As the South becomes " modern, " industrial, cos 
 mopolitan, as the familiar affections of slavery-days 
 no longer preserve the personal touch between race and 
 race, the impulse of the old chivalry, even among the 
 few, is modified both by custom and by preoccupation. 
 But the weaknesses of the weak persist. Here are 
 constant invitations to fraud, to discriminations, lavish 
 opportunities for the cynical and the brutal. The chief 
 sufferer is not the weaker group, but the group thus 
 afforded a rich support for its coarser elements and its 
 lower tendencies elements and tendencies which a 
 normal and homogeneous life might more effectively 
 dislodge or modify. Low standards in the services 
 rendered by the negro to the community are not so 
 
vni THE FATE OF THE STRONG 125 
 
 serious as the low standard of the service he exacts: 
 low grades of goods, cheap, adulterated qualities of 
 food, poor houses at high rents, petty loans at extor 
 tionate interest, top-heavy mortgages that embitter the 
 victim and harden the heart of the lender; a con 
 stituency, which, however innocently, will float the less 
 efficient or less creditable element thrown off from the 
 commercial or professional life of the stronger group; 
 the declining merchant annexing a negro trade, the 
 discredited lawyer annexing "negro business." This is 
 not to say that negro business, professional or commer 
 cial, is necessarily discreditable; many of our honored 
 men in medicine, or at the bar, or in banking and mer 
 chandise, have always had a negro clientele, but they 
 have not selfishly specialized in that direction. They 
 have not served the negro because he lacked standards 
 of expectation or because they could cheat him with little 
 effort or rob him with little danger. Yet their old and 
 honorable service to him has found its competition, 
 its competition at the hands of those who promise more 
 and perform far less. 
 
 For how inevitable it is that the type and standard 
 of the demand should largely determine the type and 
 standard of the supply, and how inevitable that that de 
 mand and that supply should act and react upon each 
 other not in mechanical detachment from society as a 
 whole, but in subtle organic relation to the factors of all 
 demand and of all supply, in labor, in trade, in the 
 professions, in every department of our reciprocal in 
 dustrial relations. A low saloon instituted for the 
 "nigger trade" is entered also by the lower elements of 
 the white population, competes therefore with the white 
 
i 2 6 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 saloon, and pulls in the direction of its economic and 
 moral level every saloon within the city; street-car ac 
 commodations, public facilities of every type, even the 
 sanitary conditions of our public buildings, have a ten 
 dency to seek the average level of the community-demand, 
 a level affected automatically by ignorance in every 
 class, but especially affected by the serious proportions 
 of the weaker race. The penal system of the State, 
 morally indefensible as it is, punishes every white 
 prisoner, and every prisoner of every grade, with a 
 penalty more serious than the duration of his term (the 
 penalty of the very nature of the institution) by reason 
 of the fact that the whole system was naturally con 
 ceived in reference to the disproportionate criminality 
 of the population which would inevitably become the 
 chief subjects of its restraint. Those who imagine that 
 the only curse has fallen upon the negro know little of 
 the reactive power of institutional provisions. 
 
 It is to this point that I would again and again re 
 turn. That the negro is, as a class, ignorant and weak, 
 that he enters upon his relations with the stronger group 
 upon such terms as the stronger may impose, seems, upon 
 a superficial view, a situation of peril to the negro. But 
 the deeper peril is to the life of the strong low eco 
 nomic standards opening the way for our economic 
 vices, low intellectual standards yielding prizes to the 
 promptings of the charlatan, low moral standards 
 offering perpetually an occasion for pity but an occasion 
 also for lust in the young, the untried, the weak, as 
 well as in the brutally depraved ; an enfolding and 
 ever-waiting world of opportunity for darker tenden 
 cies, a world unlike that of any other weaker social 
 
vin THE FATE OF THE STRONG 127 
 
 group because the group itself is relatively so large and 
 because its weakness is, in its total mass, so abnormally 
 disproportionate to its strength. 
 
 For a stronger group to be involved in such conditions 
 is to be subjected to something more than the "pull" 
 of deteriorating forces. It is to be subjected to an 
 atmosphere. No man, except the peculiarly strong and 
 great, is at his best when habitually dealing with forms 
 of manhood lower than his own. The context draws 
 him into its phrases. He responds to the hourly press 
 ure of his social contact. The very vehemence of 
 his reaction from the negro, in manner and desire, 
 is the assertive instinct of his self-preservation, as it 
 struggles with the slow, remorseless logic of his situation. 
 He will not become the negro, but as little will he in 
 the freer and higher forms of his social heritage be 
 come adequately himself. And what is true of the 
 man, except under conditions which I shall attempt 
 later to define, is true also of his race. Every efficient 
 class in living and effectual contact with a class less 
 efficient than itself inevitably bestows upon the weaker 
 some measure of its efficiency as a gift, and receives 
 from the weaker some meagre of its inefficiency as a 
 burden. Thus do the strong bear the infirmities of the 
 weak. A class which is too ignorant and too weak to 
 protect itself has at least escaped the fate of that greater 
 peril in which, sometimes, the strong become themselves 
 defenceless against their own disintegrating forces. 
 
 Ill 
 
 But, it will be surely urged, the negro is really not 
 too weak to protect himself. His helplessness is arti- 
 
i 2 8 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 ficial rather than real. Give him politically the in 
 strument of his self-protection put the ballot in his 
 hands and you have preserved the weaker race from 
 despair and the stronger from itself. It should not be 
 necessary again to analyze the fallacy involved in the 
 assumption that there is any necessary protection to the 
 negro in a universal and unrestricted suffrage. 1 Nor 
 need I again dwell at length upon the truth that in a 
 restricted suffrage there should obtain as between 
 race and race a level and impartial equity both of 
 law and administration. 2 And yet were the laws as to 
 the suffrage always equal both in their letter and their 
 application, and were the suffrage universal as well 
 as wholly unrestricted, it would still be important to 
 remember that the ballot as a social power is ex 
 cept in organic relation to other forms and expressions 
 of service and efficiency no constructive social in 
 strument. With it or without it the political status 
 of any social group will tend to conform, substantially, 
 to its general economic and social position in the 
 life of the State. With the ballot as with the other 
 forms of social self-expression men do what they are; 
 you may rescue them from everything except them 
 selves. And human nature being everywhere sub 
 stantially the same, and our formal political procedure 
 being what it is, a stronger class, determined to pre 
 vail, has always at its command for effective use the 
 one element that remains constant amid all the vari 
 ous exigencies of the political struggle the element 
 represented by the weaker class itself. This class, 
 
 1 See p. 18, of this volume. 
 
 2 See pp. 194, 195, of the author s "The Present South." 
 
vin THE FATE OF THE STRONG 129 
 
 with its persisting limitations, is one of the fixed 
 factors of the situation: laws may change, State ad 
 ministrations may come and go, national parties rise 
 and fall, but within the local scene the weak 
 themselves remain, in the contact of group with group, 
 as the supreme instrument of the strong. 
 
 In a Southern State with which I am familiar, the 
 State Legislature had ordered a popular vote upon the 
 question "Shall a Constitutional Convention be called 
 together?" The declared purpose of the proposed 
 Convention, as announced by the dominant party, was 
 the disfranchisement of the negro voters. The negroes 
 of one of the more important counties of the State, 
 stirred by their popular leaders, took an unusual 
 course and decided to vote upon the issue. As the 
 blacks in this particular county outnumbered the 
 whites by more than two to one, there was a measure 
 of consternation among some of the members of the 
 stronger race. The local "boss" of the Convention- 
 forces showed, however, no perturbation of mind. The 
 sample ballots were printed and circulated in advance, 
 as custom ordered. They were in the familiar form. 
 Upon the unoffending slip there were but two lines, one 
 at the top reading "For the Constitutional Convention," 
 and the other at the bottom, reading "Against the Con 
 stitutional Convention." The negro leaders secured 
 the blank tickets as soon as distributed, and proceeded 
 from group to group, and from meeting to meeting, to 
 instruct the masses of their illiterate voters. The 
 directions were simple. They were rehearsed over and 
 over till copy-perfect: "Put the cross at the end of the 
 bottom line!" 
 
130 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 The election was held. The negroes in illiterate 
 hundreds marched solemnly into the booths and 
 marked their ballots. The ballots were freely voted 
 and fairly counted. There was no violence, no de 
 struction of ballot-boxes, no irregularity, no fraud. 
 And yet it was immediately obvious that a county with 
 a preponderant black majority had gone overwhelm 
 ingly for the Convention. How was it done ? The 
 local boss of the Convention-forces had merely advised, 
 in a quiet way, that the official ballots distributed at 
 the booths be passed out to the voters upside down. 
 
 The illiterate negro voters had put the cross, accord 
 ing to their instructions, at the end of the bottom line. 
 When upside down the top line as they surveyed it 
 was at the bottom, the bottom line at the top. In their 
 activity to record their disapproval they had recorded 
 their approval; and the negro masses, without coercion 
 and without the manipulation of the returns, had ex 
 plicitly voted in behalf of a movement for their own 
 disfranchisement ! 
 
 The incident is vividly suggestive rather than liter 
 ally typical ; and yet it is illustrative of a situation 
 which under one form or another is perpetually re 
 current. Ignorance cannot be protected against it 
 self. Under the forms of free democratic procedure, 
 the politically weak cannot be stayed from delivering 
 themselves, by one method or another, into the hands 
 of the politically strong. In the political relations of 
 two groups one representing approximately the 
 elements of actual power, the other the elements of 
 actual and obvious weakness the forms of a free 
 democracy are the very forms through which the will 
 
viii THE FATE OF THE STRONG 131 
 
 of the strong is the more likely to find its almost un 
 modified expression. 
 
 One might naturally assume that the weaker the group 
 the greater its opportunity in a democracy, for the gov 
 ernmental assumption of democracy is supposed to be 
 the value of the individual; but democracy, as we have 
 it, has political regard not to individuals, but to aggre 
 gates ; it yields nothing except as a second thought 
 even to minorities; its governmental policies, its ad 
 ministrative processes, are expressed through the domi 
 nant aggregate. The majority is usually the form not 
 through which the individual rules, but through which 
 he abdicates. It may be apotheosized as the collective 
 individual, but the individual is so lost in the mechanical 
 processes of associated action that when government 
 begins, the Collection becomes everything and the in 
 dividual becomes nothing ; the man is submerged in the 
 State. Under no form of political organization is a 
 minority so helpless or the individual so insignificant 
 as in that particular formulation of democracy, that 
 exaggerated enthronement of merely temporary majori 
 ties, with which we are familiar. Its evils are in 
 cident to the South only because they are common to 
 our country as a whole. 
 
 The weaker social group, not divided among 
 different parties, but ranged, through tragic historic 
 blunders, as a race-party against a race-party repre 
 sented by a stronger group, is necessarily condemned, 
 therefore, not simply to learn its lessons through defeat 
 alone, but to find itself almost without representation 
 in our local administrations. It should be remem 
 bered, moreover, that the weaker group under exter- 
 
i 3 2 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 nal leadership has represented the earlier organization 
 of a race into a race-party; the stronger race-party 
 was in its origin defensive. The white man s race- 
 party found its precedent and justification in the race- 
 party of the black man. Yet the weaker is now the 
 defensive and the defeated. Not only is it prevented 
 from sharing, alternately, in success and failure, but 
 it is found locally in the position of formal organiza 
 tion against that social and political aggregate which 
 represents the forces of ultimate social strength, and 
 which possesses in its hands and will necessarily 
 continue to possess the instruments and the ma 
 chinery for the attainment of our political decisions. 
 The invalidation by the Supreme Court of this or that 
 detail in any local constitution of this or that particular 
 State would be almost insignificant in its effect. The 
 arbitrary prevalence of race, the absolute political 
 control of the stronger group, is not solely dependent 
 for its expression upon any isolated technical device. 
 The fate of the strong is their strength. Were one 
 device invalidated, another, within a few weeks, could 
 be established. In control of every formal instrument 
 of social or governmental self-expression, the stronger 
 group, under that aspect of itself as a race-party which 
 its history has imposed, will continue to identify itself 
 with the very being of the State; and the cogency 
 of its contention in view of the fact that the local 
 basis of the opposing party continues to lie within the 
 masses of a weaker and politically unpractised race 
 will naturally mark the measure of its intolerance. 
 For the State, being temporarily but the administrative 
 form of the dominant aggregate, rejects the weaker 
 
vm THE FATE OF THE STRONG 133 
 
 group as a factor of its self-destruction. The one 
 group representing en bloc the efficiency of society, 
 and the other representing en bloc its inefficiency 
 (there being relatively no normal division of weakness 
 and power between them), the stronger becomes so 
 habituated to the conception of itself as identical with 
 the State that arbitrary processes instinctively tend 
 to dominate and to express the methods of our politi 
 cal procedure. 
 
 And it could hardly be otherwise. No weaker social 
 group exercising the ballot as a group and voting as 
 a group-party has ever been otherwise dealt with by any 
 stronger social aggregate. And yet the natural limi 
 tations of the weaker group, serious as they are in ref 
 erence to its own development, are more serious still 
 in their reaction upon society as a whole. 
 
 I have dwelt sufficiently upon the insidious effect of 
 arbitrary methods to indicate that the recognition of 
 their inevitable rise involves no approval of a per 
 manent policy based upon them. As the instances 
 of arbitrary method have arisen, it would, however, 
 require a wise judge infallibly to divide the indefensible 
 from the defensible. Many of the privileges destroyed 
 by them were less important to both races and to society 
 as a whole than the privileges which were preserved. 
 But the indefensible were abundant. And yet were 
 all such methods indefensible, we may well remember 
 that we have not yet interpreted with insight or with 
 justice the problems of any situation, whether per 
 sonal or social, when we have found a mistake or 
 accurately labelled an iniquity. The deeper questions 
 still remain. How, our average human nature being 
 
i 3 4 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 as it is and things being as they were, could our situa 
 tion have been otherwise ? If certain actions or policies 
 were not necessary, by what strange fate of nature, or 
 deception of circumstance, did men come to believe 
 them so? If men were deluded into a sense of peril, 
 by what national solicitude of their more favored 
 countrymen was their rescue from delusion so 
 important to themselves and to their whole society - 
 attempted and commended? If they were the victims 
 of obsession, how arose this obsession ? from no 
 fact in their situation, from no unfamiliar crisis, 
 from no industrial catastrophe, from no social or moral 
 shock, from no close or abnormal association with un 
 tried and ominous conditions ? If they were stark mad, 
 is madness a self-chosen state of intellectual or social 
 ease? Is not its suffering as real, the torture of its 
 delirium as pathetic and as poignant, as the alarm and 
 the pain of sanity? We have not explained a situation 
 or dismissed its difficulties when we have found some 
 one to blame. 
 
 IV 
 
 The fact was there before us, flashing as once flashed 
 the sword of the Archangel at the gateways of our 
 Peace, the fact that into the old estate of its security 
 and its pride the South could not return. It must 
 blaze its way, yoked unwillingly within a strange 
 fellowship, through untried directions into a new 
 world. That each yoke-fellow should sin against the 
 other was as inevitable as that each, at times, should 
 show a happier will, and help. That they have 
 arrived at all, has been chiefly due, just as inevitably, 
 to the stronger s power. 
 
viii THE FATE OF THE STRONG 135 
 
 Yet every necessary or unnecessary injustice of 
 either has reacted chiefly upon itself. Every ingrati 
 tude of the weaker has deepened that instinct for 
 grievances which has added a faculty for unhappiness 
 to unhappiness already great. Every brutality of the 
 strong has just so far embruted its spirit, has just so 
 far inclined its life to depend upon force rather than 
 upon reason : every political deception has decreased 
 our intolerance of indirection, has made more diffi 
 cult the methods of wholesome political procedure and 
 postponed still further that sound political rehabilita 
 tion which has been the deepest aspiration of our social 
 progress. And waiting within these delays, touched and 
 pressed upon by every spectacle of violence, by the 
 standards of familiar feeling, by the assumptions of our 
 public opinion, by the atmosphere of our factional dis 
 cussions and of our average journalism, lie as within 
 the educative forms of their culture and their happi 
 ness the children of the South. 
 
 Their fate is but the more serious form of ours. It 
 is a fate which no living man has sought, which no 
 living man, conscious of his obligation to his people 
 and to the future, would willingly desert. And yet 
 its remedies, largely lying in the creation of an intel 
 lectual and political freedom which shall become the 
 instrument of a constructive criticism, are naturally 
 delayed by the very conditions which demand redress. 
 Yet these, too, we have not chosen; they, rather, have 
 chosen us. 
 
 They are the conditions which naturally or un 
 naturally, rationally or irrationally, have arisen - 
 historically and actually from the very presence 
 
136 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 of the weaker group, a group weak enough for its 
 power to be despised, and yet strong enough for its 
 weaknesses to be feared; so unexacting in its demands 
 that its standards of consumption are more depressing 
 than its standards of production ; so much in need as to 
 be an occasion of compassion, yet so persistently con 
 joined with the great power of a political party thus far 
 locally inimical to reputable government as to be an 
 occasion of aggravation and suspicion ; so easy, however, 
 to cajole and to coerce that its presence has tempted 
 into prominence the lowest forces of our political capac 
 ity, and yet so effective through defeat, so impossible 
 by reason of its potential peril and its external alliances 
 - finally to compose, that the mere persistence of its 
 presence has driven many of the abler forces of our 
 political wisdom into an attitude of silence and inaction. 
 We now and again have imagined we were free, that the 
 negro-spectre was really laid. But in an instant some 
 fatuous threat of an arbitrary political intrusion from 
 without, or some revolting occasion of local crime, has 
 again given into the hands of the party demagogue (or 
 into the hearts of the sincerely timid) a new opportunity 
 for the "realism" of political obfuscation. 
 
 Men have called.it a "double" burden. Yet it is 
 more than one problem added to the weight and exi 
 gency of another. It is one plus another, and plus 
 all the complexities and anxieties created by their 
 mutual interaction. Are we concerned with questions 
 of legislation ? They must be conceived both as prob 
 lems of regulation and as problems of race; for, as 
 the forms of restriction which affect one class of the 
 population often bear but slightly on the experience 
 
viii THE FATE OF THE STRONG 137 
 
 of the other, the task of equalization involves the strong 
 in the temptations of injustice and the weak in the 
 temptations of retaliation and discontent. Are we 
 concerned as to the development of our labor? Our 
 division lies not only between the skilled and the un 
 skilled, but between race and race; the one with 
 instinctive solicitude too jealously guarding the 
 monopoly of its skill; the other with abnormal in 
 difference too patiently insensitive to the appeal of 
 industrial ambition. Do questions concern us as to 
 the distribution of our labor ? The great black masses 
 of the untrained are withheld, by racial and climatic 
 tendencies, from the normal movements of the general 
 labor market of the country; the rest of the country 
 does not want them and can hardly use them: we 
 ourselves want them, but the incursion of white laborers 
 which we also want is checked by the very conditions 
 which demand relief. Are we concerned with the tasks 
 of popular education? Long after we have decided 
 the question as to whose taxes support the negro school, 
 the instinctive popular reluctance to make public ex 
 penditures which must include the blacks (a reluctance 
 which, however unjust, any average white population, 
 North or South, has usually manifested in the presence 
 of negro masses) will long prevent the development of 
 such adequate facilities for general education as are 
 demanded by every interest of the stronger race. Our 
 white children must suffer, and do daily suffer, by 
 reason of the absence of such a system as could have 
 come far more readily into existence among a homo 
 geneous people. We have our public schools. Their 
 recent progress is among the happier evidences of our 
 
138 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 popular sanity and capacity. But their inadequacies 
 are part of the social cost of a situation which under 
 every aspect of our development has made of our eating 
 and drinking, our buying and selling, our labor and 
 housing, our rents, our railroads, our orphanages and 
 prisons, our recreations, our very institutions of religion, 
 a problem of race as well as a problem of maintenance. 
 Yet the price is one which, in so far as it has contributed, 
 not morbidly or speciously but really, to our protection, 
 to the conservation and integrity of the stronger race, 
 has been not a tithe too great. The very dignity and 
 necessity of the dogma of our protection has drawn, 
 inevitably, some of the basest of our factions and im 
 pulses to seek shelter and excuse beneath its aegis. 
 This has been the sorest burden of the cost. Yet, 
 whatever its weight or its distractions, rather than 
 endure the alternative, rather than the further race 
 deterioration which an absence of all divisions must 
 have invited, we would have met it a hundred fold. To 
 be blind, however, to its penalties is a price which we 
 cannot pay. The fate of it has visited us with a poverty 
 immeasurable in the terms of money. Its burden is 
 of the general mind. 
 
 An abnormal absorption in the issues of race has 
 tended to make real politics impossible to a people who, 
 historically, have always possessed peculiar political 
 efficiency; it has tended to denationalize the most 
 instinctively national of American localities and to 
 dehumanize (in the philosophical sense) a section 
 which has temperamentally represented an element 
 the most humanitarian and the most transcendental 
 in our American experience. The weaker group has 
 
vin THE FATE OF THE STRONG 139 
 
 suffered like the stronger. Because, however, the 
 stronger is the stronger, dominating and chiefly repre 
 senting the thought and being of society, its injury 
 is the more serious, its fate the more tragic in its con 
 sequences to itself, the negro, and the nation. In 
 the whelming and absorbing turmoil of the struggles 
 between race and race struggles which in our his 
 tory have represented the very issues of social order 
 what opportunity has existed within the popular con 
 sciousness for the larger (and enlarging) politics of 
 humanity for the issues of national taxation, of 
 public administration, of American trade and of our 
 international relations ? 
 
 The shadow and the burden of such a situation in 
 the education of our youth, in the development of sound 
 intellectual and social standards, are indescribable. 
 It has been a fate of tragic preoccupation. Not re- 
 belliously or bitterly, but wistfully, and with the real 
 sadness of the patriot, an older friend once said to me: 
 "I think I love my country; and yet its general 
 interests and its common life have been forced into 
 the background are far away. I sometimes feel 
 that I have ceased to be the citizen of my country, and 
 have become, instead, but the citizen of a race." 
 
THE EDUCATIVE POWER OF SOCIAL 
 REACTIONS 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE EDUCATIVE POWER OF SOCIAL REACTIONS 
 
 IN so far as so abnormal a situation is the result of 
 sectional or political antipathies from without, there 
 should be little question as to the nature of the na 
 tional response. Its spirit should touch with healing 
 discrimination the tense nerve of an exaggerated con 
 sciousness of race. To threaten anew or to seem to 
 threaten (subjectively they are equivalent) the security 
 of the stronger group, is but to intensify the reaction 
 of the stronger against the weaker, and to delay the 
 popular acceptance of national, unstrained assumptions 
 of feeling and opinion. 
 
 Upon the other hand, to touch this scene as though 
 the nation were indifferent, is as unfortunate as to 
 touch it as though the nation were intolerant. That 
 would be indeed to assume that the citizen of the South 
 has no country; would deny to him the tonic breath, 
 which, sweeping from regions less troubled by his pro 
 vincial fever, is quick with the vigor of varied aims, 
 free with the broad vitality of American emulation, 
 and wholesome with the power of our national horizons. 
 Such a relegation of the South to the fate of its peculiar 
 tasks would involve but the larger deliverance of its 
 life to the stifling preoccupations which have threatened 
 it, would call still further into exercise and influence 
 the leadership which defines its policies exclusively 
 
i 4 4 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 in the terms of racial conflict, and would intensify an 
 isolation in which we should be forced to bear alone the 
 burden of economic evils for which we were not alone 
 responsible. Either an intolerance toward the South 
 which would exaggerate its consciousness of the weaker 
 group within, or an indifference which would weaken 
 its consciousness of the larger group without, would be 
 no service to humanity. But that personal and fra 
 ternal touch which might slowly dissolve the sharper 
 accentuations of our sectional development, which 
 might prove the spirit of our greater country to be not 
 intolerant nor indifferent but aware, would like 
 some finer soul of policy within our politics relax 
 the taut, rigid faculties of negation and alarm, dis 
 perse the crude leadership which has expressed them, 
 and release as from the bondage of old nightmare 
 those capacities of varied opinion and of free achieve 
 ment which make the meaning and the distinction of 
 every true political society. 
 
 It is not sufficient to retort that the racial security 
 of the stronger group has been established. That, 
 at length, is true. But something waits now attain 
 able, and yet still to be attained. For that through 
 which men achieve the finer power of freedom is the 
 sense of security rather than security. Though not 
 possessing security, men through the sense of security 
 - have been known to rear their empires into security 
 and permanence; other men, though possessing secur 
 ity, have been known under some haunting sense 
 of insecurity, under some strange obsession of old 
 and habitual fear to wait, to doubt, to divide, to fail. 
 
ix THE POWER OF SOCIAL REACTIONS 145 
 
 To this sense of security the South would come. 
 The task, whatever the disposition of forces outside 
 the South, must at last be chiefly hers. No one can 
 conquer for her, or ultimately bestow upon her, that 
 estate of her own mind in which she may permanently 
 found the stability and the expression of her happier 
 life. She could not ask it if she would, she would not 
 if she could. Already in the zeal and fertility of her 
 new industrial development, in the vigor of her educa 
 tional renewal, in the social and political transforma 
 tions by which the masses of the stronger race are for the 
 first time sharing the perils and developing the capacities 
 of collective action, she is shaping the freer forms of 
 her self-possession. There is much of confusion : there 
 will be more ere there is less. There are conflicting 
 counsels as well as divided and dividing aims. There 
 will be delay, stupidity, reaction, wrong. But it is a 
 great fight; the greatest in its elemental significance 
 that our country has yet known, and all the greater 
 and all the more significant because its methods are 
 not military with their hardening reaction upon the 
 more varied dispositions and sensibilities of men but 
 the freer methods of our institutional and social self- 
 expression. Of the result, soon or late, no man can 
 doubt. But in order that it may come earlier rather 
 than later, and that it may assume stronger rather than 
 weak and ineffectual forms, the South with something 
 more of conscious direction will take her own part 
 against the weakening obsessions which have beset her. 
 
 In so far as an exaggerated consciousness of race is de 
 pendent as is largely the case upon the mere local 
 contiguity of two such racial masses, it is to the ad- 
 
i 4 6 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 vantage of our every interest that the relative numerical 
 proportions of the weaker group should be reduced. 
 The general effect of education will itself be distributive 
 in its tendencies, breaking up congestion at this point 
 or that, and putting a more varied labor in intelligent 
 relations with a more varied market. But it is to the 
 immigration of a larger white population that we must 
 look for still greater measures of relief, a relief de 
 manded, indirectly, by the situation of the negro as 
 well as by the situation of the white man. The pro 
 portionate reduction in the numerical mass of the negro 
 population will slowly tend to develop in the stronger 
 race both a larger sense of security and a larger sense 
 of discrimination. Not only will the white man in 
 becoming more sure of his own security become in 
 creasingly ready to promote a sense of security among 
 our negroes, but this increasing sense of security among 
 the negro population will sensibly deepen and broaden 
 the foundations of its thrift. 1 
 
 1 "Among the secondary causes which determine the productive 
 ness of productive agents, the most important is Security. By se 
 curity I mean the completeness of the protection which society affords 
 to its members. . . . The efficiency of industry may be expected 
 to be great, in proportion as the fruits of industry are insured to the 
 person exerting it; and all social arrangements are conducive to 
 useful exertion according as they provide that the reward of every 
 one for his labor shall be proportioned as much as possible to the 
 benefit which it produces. . . . All laws or usages which favor 
 one class or sort of persons to the disadvantage of others; which 
 chain up the efforts of any part of the community in pursuit of their 
 own good, or stand between those efforts and their natural fruits 
 are (independently of all other grounds of condemnation) violations 
 of the fundamental principles of economical policy ; tending to make 
 the aggregate productive powers of the community productive in a 
 less degree than they would otherwise be. . . ." John Stuart Mill, 
 
ix THE POWER OF SOCIAL REACTIONS 147 
 
 A larger knowledge of other classes of labor than 
 negro labor will develop in the white population a 
 clearer sense of discrimination. The employer will see 
 that many of the bad qualities of negro labor are not 
 due peculiarly to the fact that the laborer is a negro, 1 
 
 "Principles of Political Economy," Bk. I, Chap. VII, Sec. 6. 
 See also "The Principles of Economics," by A. Marshall, Professor 
 of Economics in Cambridge University, England, as quoted on p. xiv 
 of the preface to this volume. It has seemed appropriate to refer to 
 the monographs of Marshall and Mill, not because these authorities 
 had reference to the American negro, but because they had not; and 
 because it frequently happens that the deficiencies of the negro are 
 viewed out of all relation to the human, fundamental conditions 
 which so largely determine the development of the familiar economic 
 virtues. 
 
 1 "I think that no amount of immigration however large it may 
 be will make it wise for this section of the South to dispense with 
 much of the labor it now has. As our industrial development pro 
 ceeds, we shall, I think, find use for the old labor as well as the new. 
 In some fields of activity the negroes will be displaced. This dis 
 placement is now going on. But the negro who disappears at one 
 point in our industrial system often reappears at another. He adapts 
 himself to the changed conditions. 
 
 "While the South is thus likely to use all her labor, I am inclined to 
 think that a marked increase in immigration will be of decided ad 
 vantage to both races. Both races need a more varied labor situation. 
 It is always unfortunate for one whole class to have a monopoly as 
 employers, and for another totally distinct class to possess a monopoly 
 as employees. The negro laborer should have the bracing competition 
 of white labor. It will increase his moral steadiness and deepen his 
 sense of responsibility. 
 
 "While the prevalence of higher standards will help the white 
 employer, the new labor will also enable the employer to become 
 familiar with other workers besides the negro. He will find that 
 many of the negro s faults are not the faults of the negro as a negro, 
 but that they belong to other labor also. Some of the negro s failings 
 are peculiar to himself, but many of them belong to every race in the 
 same industrial position. The man on a dollar a day is not necessarily 
 
i 4 8 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 and yet that to the fact that he is a negro is due much 
 of the abundance and tranquillity of our agricultural pro 
 duction. Upon the other hand, the negroes themselves 
 will find that many of their grievances against the South 
 are grievances which have their basis in so far as they 
 are real in nothing peculiar to the South, nor in any 
 thing peculiar to the white man as a white man, but 
 in the temperamental and habitual tendencies of the 
 employer as an employer, particularly under simple 
 agricultural conditions. Few things illustrate this more 
 clearly than the fact that the negroes of the North show 
 no predisposition to seek employment at the hands of 
 the employers among their own race. The greater 
 diversification of our Southern industrial experience, 
 - the more national distribution of the negro popula 
 tion, and a more general white immigration will 
 show to each race some of the less obvious excellences 
 of the other, will illustrate to each the merely economic 
 basis of many of their respective misunderstandings, 
 and will confer upon both, through the social reactions 
 called into play, a freer opportunity and a larger ca 
 pacity for discrimination. 
 
 industrious, grateful, well-mannered, and faithful to his contracts just 
 because he happens to be white. Immigration will give us a more 
 varied industrial situation in which the negro will be subjected to a 
 more rigid economic test, but in which his qualities can be judged more 
 fairly in relation to other labor working under the same climatic con 
 ditions." From an interview by the author published in the Ad 
 vertiser, Montgomery, Ala., April 12, 1906. A fuller discussion of 
 immigration and the labor question at the South is to be included 
 in his later volume, " Issues, Southern and National." 
 
ix THE POWER OF SOCIAL REACTIONS 149 
 
 II 
 
 The diversification of our labor situation will be in 
 part the cause and in part the result of the diversifica 
 tion of our economic situation as a whole. The per 
 sistent monotony of our agricultural employments 
 with its inevitable consequences in the intellectual life 
 of our rural communities is partly due to the re 
 cently abnormal price of a single staple ; a price which, 
 through the unusual profits upon our cotton, has too 
 far absorbed our activity in the production of our one 
 easiest crop. The margin of our immediate returns 
 has been large ; the results, especially as contrasted with 
 the poverty of the preceding period, have been grate 
 ful. It seems fatuous, therefore, to question the evi 
 dent basis of monetary gains which have added so con 
 siderably not merely to the standards of comfort, but to 
 the wider distribution of education. And yet we can 
 hardly afford to forget that while education may follow 
 from the actual possession of cash and from the sheer 
 capacity to spend, yet the profounder education of men 
 springs even more directly from the educative force of 
 the processes of production. Production, rather than 
 consumption, is the school of capacity. Great peoples 
 are educated by what they are making and doing rather 
 than by what they are spending. Under the challenge 
 and variety of the creative forms of its self-expression, 
 every human society finds its great elemental univer 
 sity. Intellectual resourcefulness, intellectual freedom, 
 ease, efficiency, and force, are largely but the social re 
 action from the field of a varied, exacting, and therefore 
 interesting, labor. 
 
150 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 There was a former day when men said that "Cotton 
 is King ; " but the kingship of cotton involved the South 
 in a depressing economic system, an economic system 
 which could not have existed such are the ironies of 
 history but for that invention of the conscientious 
 New Englander which broadened, by a thousand fold, 
 the market both of the staple and of the slave. What 
 thus, at the initial point of cotton-manufacture, was ac 
 complished by the genius of Whitney, is now being ac 
 complished, upon its mechanical and commercial side, 
 by innumerable agencies of invention and distribution. 
 Whitney s contribution of the cotton-gin was but the 
 single precedent of a complex and bewildering process. 
 Since his day the fundamental problem of the utilization 
 of the cotton staple has engaged, with ever increasing 
 rewards, its thousands of experts in mechanics upon 
 the one hand, and its thousands of experts in distribu 
 tion upon the other. The responding and enlarging 
 market is so great, both intensively in the increasing 
 variety of its uses, and extensively in the range of the 
 territory of its purchase, that there is now no price which 
 the world will not pay to the South for keeping ever 
 lastingly at work upon its cotton. 
 
 The world may pay the price, but it is well to remem 
 ber that the South if it follow the temptations of 
 economic preoccupation will have to pay the cost. 
 Indeed, from a strictly material standpoint, the absorp 
 tion of the South in the mere growing of the one simple 
 staple will at length cut us off from the enjoyment of its 
 largest profits, the profits of its manufacture ; and our 
 excessive concentration of interest and land upon a 
 single raw material will so increase our dependence upon 
 
ix THE POWER OF SOCIAL REACTIONS 151 
 
 other sections for the more varied necessaries of life 
 and comfort, that the sectional independence which 
 we may have coveted as the reward of our larger income 
 will be lost in the economic tutelage which our " pros 
 perity" will create. So long, moreover, as one vast 
 interest is so dominant among us, we deliberately 
 narrow the basis of our economic safety. A calamity 
 to this one staple, to the product itself, or to the factor 
 of price, tends to involve our whole industrial estate 
 in a common peril. The strength of every sound 
 economic situation lies in that complexity and variety 
 of the common industrial and agricultural production 
 under which a surplus at one point may equalize a 
 deficit at another. 
 
 Thus our economic security as well as our economic 
 freedom are not less dependent than our intellectual 
 progress upon our relative emancipation from the an 
 cient "King." The tyranny of cotton in the older 
 period seemed to be a tyranny over the slave, but it was 
 really a tyranny over the South. It might to-day, but 
 for that modification of its dominion which I believe 
 to be in process, extend and fortify a tyranny over the 
 South, not less exacting, though perhaps less obvious, 
 than the old. Our remedy will lie not necessarily in 
 less cotton, but in more of other things; and if we can 
 not have more of other things without having less cotton 
 then, whatever the losses of apparent but superfi 
 cial income, less cotton ! It may be that less cotton 
 will mean more of cotton-money (the reduction of the 
 supply involving a still higher price) ; it may be that 
 this higher price will increase the economic temptation 
 to the breaking point, and will bring under cultivation 
 
152 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 a still larger acreage of now implanted lands, and so 
 still produce more cotton. Round and round, there 
 fore, may the vicious circle go. And from it there is 
 no escape, except for the personal South, individually 
 if not collectively, to cut straight through it, to re 
 solve that the supreme question shall be neither more 
 cotton nor more money, but more life; and that no 
 product, however great, which by the excessive absorp 
 tion of the human elements of power through the 
 over-occupation of the child in the factory or the pre 
 occupation of the farmer in his fields threatens our 
 essential intellectual and industrial wealth, can be left 
 wholly to the play of merely economic forces. Our 
 abandonment of our monopoly I do not advise; our 
 abandonment to our monopoly would be but the de 
 livery of our strength to selfishness without, and to 
 stupidity at home. 
 
 And yet such a declaration, though qualified with 
 exact and abundant caution, will seem to the average 
 "man on the street" and to the political economist of the 
 older school, like "talking back at" the law of gravita 
 tion. It will seem as profitless as reading a homily to 
 the Equator. There is, however, nothing more signifi 
 cant in the history of modern states than the increasing 
 economic appreciation of the factor of will. Modern 
 Germany is largely the result of the deliberate social 
 control of economic conditions ; peoples are everywhere 
 entering upon the courses of their progress through that 
 factor of selective choice by which they are consciously 
 substituting the higher for the lower forms of wealth. 
 Many a community will pay me more money, whether 
 as a day wage or as an annual salary, to dig in its streets 
 
ix THE POWER OF SOCIAL REACTIONS 153 
 
 than to teach in its schools, and the economic oppor 
 tunity presented in the streets may be more constant 
 than that offered in the schools; but my economic 
 response will be determined by forms of interest and by 
 a standard of values which money, in itself, cannot 
 express. If I enter a factory, there may be an economic 
 demand for me to work fourteen hours instead of ten, 
 and it may be that, in a lifetime, I can make more 
 money by working each day for the fourteen hours; 
 but, here again, the fundamental question is not the 
 money nor the time, but the life itself, the quality and 
 fulness of my human experience as an individual: 
 this, then, is the new "preferred wealth" of the world. 
 
 It is a force this factor of selective choice, of con 
 scious determination in the economic response of in 
 dividuals and peoples which economists have never 
 really ignored, but the meaning of which they are com 
 ing increasingly to appreciate. Its popular recognition 
 will come more slowly. The man, however, who now 
 chooses a ten-hour rather than a fourteen-hour day - 
 deliberately in the interest not of more money but of 
 more life would, fifty years ago, have seemed as 
 exceptional as the contemporary farmer who deliber 
 ately chooses an educative rather than an uneducative 
 crop. For the individual instances of so explicit and so 
 conscious a choice may be rare, but one can see over 
 the broad and general scene an increasing tendency 
 toward diversification, a tendency resting naturally 
 enough at first upon the more obvious practical ad 
 vantages of a more varied agriculture, but slowly sug 
 gesting a recognition of its larger economic and social 
 basis. The recognition of this basis need not obscure 
 
154 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 the immediate advantages of such a course indeed, a 
 policy of diversification is a policy not merely of social 
 satisfactions, but of material success; but the larger 
 popular appreciation of such a policy will increase the 
 volume and the quality of the conscious cooperation 
 which should be everywhere accorded it. Its value lies 
 not merely in its direct returns, whether intellectual or 
 financial, so much as in the educative and constructive 
 force of the social reactions which the South must 
 receive into her life from a freer, larger world of more 
 varied interests and occupations. While our activities 
 are quickened and multiplied by our schools, and while 
 it is thus true that to educate is to diversify, it is just 
 as profoundly true that to diversify is to educate. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Every population, however, finds the basis of its 
 reactions not merely in its industrial employments, but 
 in its human relations. The environment of every 
 conscious life is necessarily social as well as economic. 
 Under the activities and habits of personal or collective 
 contact men find those forms of their social and political 
 self-expression through which they not only create their 
 social wealth and their common institutions, but through 
 which they educate themselves and one another. Every 
 individual in conscious contact with things gets an 
 educative reaction from the work he does; every in 
 dividual in conscious contact with other individuals 
 gets an educative reaction from the souls he knows and 
 from the relations he establishes. It is in this sense that 
 every man is educated by every other man; for even 
 
ix THE POWER OF SOCIAL REACTIONS 155 
 
 when the one individual is wholly hidden from the other, 
 the inter-relations of men are so subtly but indissolubly 
 joined that the capacities or incapacities, the con 
 fidences or anxieties, the sympathies or hates of one 
 man will affect through vast distances or over the 
 more insuperable barriers of class the peace and the 
 fortunes of another ; may indeed help so to form some 
 outward factor of his environment or so to color some 
 inward state of feeling or opinion as to alter the choice 
 of policies or the fate of character. The ignorant fear 
 on the part of an Italian depositor in New York 
 through the social and financial interactions which it 
 may call into play may overthrow the bank in which 
 he has kept his savings ; the failure of that bank may 
 so affect the conditions of public confidence as to 
 disturb the exchanges of the country and involve the 
 institutions of Minneapolis or New Orleans, a ca 
 tastrophe which, in turn, may leave the cotton or the 
 wheat of thousands to rot within their fields. Upon 
 the other hand, a small deposit made in a single 
 city at one bank by the right man at a particular mo 
 ment may save the bread of millions. In each case the 
 factor of deeper significance is not the immediate ca 
 tastrophe or the external rescue, nor the instant emotional 
 effect of each, but the less obvious play of the educative 
 forces released and discharged into the social organism 
 by every factor within its limits. Long after the money, 
 whether lost or gained, has been forgotten, the social 
 " state-of-mind " induced by each of these men, in turn, 
 will be affecting and to that extent educating the 
 life of communities and of states. 
 
 Such incidents are but crude illustrations of the truth 
 
156 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 that the individual man, in this world, may escape almost 
 every calamity or deliverance except that which comes 
 in the form of other men. And this at last for the 
 strong upon the one hand, or the weak upon the other 
 is the unescapable education. The reactions of social 
 contact from individual to individual are so fre 
 quently neutralized by one another that the significance 
 of particular impressions or of single incidents is some 
 times inappreciable. But the more frequent these im 
 pressions, and the more these incidents are given the 
 power of mass and the authority of numbers, the more 
 profound and inevitable their consequences. It is 
 for this reason, as well as for the reason that each dis 
 tinctive group naturally possesses where the internal 
 demarcations of society are conspicuously drawn a 
 certain group-consciousness, or collective mind, that 
 the interactions of class upon class, and particularly 
 of race upon race, possess a significance so formidable 
 and so pervasive. 
 
 It may at first appear that an isolated member of a 
 stronger group, dealing with the isolated member of a 
 weaker, receives no direct return. From individual 
 to individual in this or that incident of contact 
 there may seem to be no commerce over the boundaries 
 of race. Such transference of influence as may be noted 
 is apparently from the strong to the weak. The white 
 man seems to be doing all the educating. He seems 
 to be giving, the negro to be receiving. It is easy to note, 
 even in a single incident of our race relations, how a 
 touch of manner, an impulse of feeling, or some fixed 
 assumption of thought may pass over into the negro s 
 receptive mind. For this is the basis of one of the most 
 
ix THE POWER OF SOCIAL REACTIONS 157 
 
 profoundly educative influences which operate upon 
 weaker social groups the influence which touched 
 the domestic slave in our older plantation life and which 
 so frequently touches, in other latitudes, those of other 
 races or nationalities who are admitted into the closer 
 relations of domestic service. But when the strong 
 man finds the trace of the servant s speech in the 
 speech of his child, he finds the sombre clue of a 
 returning influence. Here is the symbol of a process 
 of education which has been reciprocal, and which 
 stops not with the child alone. That little lisp, that 
 flavor of dialect, that syllable of a lower language, 
 is but sign and parable of a commerce of impressions, 
 sentiments, assumptions in which the weaker race is 
 creditor as well as debtor. 
 
 This is the beginning. It does not, as has been sug 
 gested, stop with youth; still less does it stop (if the 
 exchange ever really ends) with the cessation of direct 
 impressions. The direct action of one race upon 
 another is a great power, but the indirect reactions 
 inaugurated within the life of each through its habitual 
 contact with the other race are a power greater still. 
 
 The direct educative influence of the individual white 
 man on the individual negro is appreciable, but the 
 changes which are wrought upon this weaker or lower 
 life through the play of the faculties of the white man 
 upon the negro are slight in comparison with the 
 changes slowly wrought within the white man s nature 
 by the returning play of his faculties upon himself. 
 The fact of deeper significance is not the mere pressure 
 of a lower standard, but his cumulative modification 
 of his own standards of self-criticism and self-direction. 
 
158 THE BASIS OK ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 Through the conditions of his familiar contact with less 
 highly developed habits of efficiency, with forms of 
 will more immature than his, he is deprived of that 
 bracing and corrective force, resident in the standard 
 of his peers, which manifesting itself within every 
 personal world as one of the higher forms of social co 
 operation is, in fact, the moral equivalent of com 
 petition. He may sin and not die. His more exacting 
 expectations of himself are not echoed from without. 
 Of himself, as he would prefer to see himself, there is no 
 spiritual mirror. The occasional tendency to take him 
 self at his second-best is socially unchecked, and both 
 his powers and his inclinations tend to assume the forms 
 of approximation imposed by a life of habitual relation 
 ship with a mind lower than his own. To say that the 
 stronger tends to become brutal because the weaker is 
 brutal, or slovenly because the weaker is slovenly, is to 
 touch the process only on its surface. The deeper fact 
 is not that of imitation, nor yet that of contagion. It 
 is that tragedy of recurrent accommodations, of habitual 
 self-adjustment to lower conceptions of life and to 
 feebler notions of excellence, which is nothing less than 
 education in its descending and contractive forms. 
 
 The average man usually grows in the direction of his 
 habitual approximations. The employer wholly sur 
 rounded by ignorant labor becomes practised in dealing 
 with ignorance. The capacities in himself which 
 might otherwise find exercise and expression, the ca 
 pacities which intelligent labor might develop, are elimi 
 nated or weakened by disuse. Upon the other hand, the 
 capacities requisite for dealing with ignorance are 
 called constantly into play, gain strength from their 
 
ix THE POWER OF SOCIAL REACTIONS 159 
 
 exercise, and become increasingly the forms through 
 which his nature gains its self-expression and its self- 
 development. We tend to become the things we do. 
 The habitual handling of weak men forces into promi 
 nence in the individual the faculties by which mere 
 weakness is controlled, forces into prominence in the 
 community the types of mind in our representative 
 leadership which are practised in utilizing the weak 
 nesses of a lower group rather than in matching the 
 powers of a vigorous and resourceful opposition. 
 
 Indeed, it is in the inter-relations of our racial masses 
 even more than in the relations of individuals that the 
 retrogressive and contractive influences of the weaker 
 on the stronger have appeared. The saying that corpora 
 tions have no soul has been declared to be one form of 
 the confession that collective ethics are lower than the 
 ethical standards of individuals. But the quality of 
 the ethical standard is not the only element of difference. 
 Collective action is the less considerate and seems the 
 less sensitive because by its very nature it lacks the 
 flexibility of individual procedure. The weakness of 
 its formal processes is structural as well as ethical. 
 It is sometimes lacking in conscience, but it is always 
 lacking in adaptability. 
 
 When, therefore, group comes to deal with group, the 
 stronger determines its relations with the weaker under 
 the canons of a collective necessity which put all of the 
 white race upon one side and all of the negro race upon 
 the other. This is the situation within each group 
 which checks the appreciation and neutralizes the inter 
 racial influence of the exceptional individual within the 
 other, and which will show little change till the motive 
 
i6o THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 of cooperation enters more largely into our racial policy 
 as well as into our individual ethics. 
 
 And it is this situation which neutralizes the social 
 benefit as between the stronger and the weaker group 
 - of personal criticism and intelligent though isolated 
 opposition. The two groups are in direct juxtaposition; 
 their interests are constantly assumed to be in conflict, 
 but between these groups themselves there is about as 
 much of the educative action and interaction of op 
 posing forces as one might find in the carefully circum 
 scribed relations of a blooded terrier and a sawdust 
 doll. The terrier may lash himself at times into the 
 fury of inspiring combat; may through the intoxications 
 of imagined insult vindicate himself, in self-appeasing 
 rage, upon the unoffending partner of his confinement; 
 but the proceedings cease at last to be interesting even 
 to himself. If the confinement is prolonged into the 
 years (a fate too tragic even for the homely uses of 
 illustration), he will return in recurrent but ever 
 briefer moments of self-delusion to the fierce practice 
 of his better qualities; but the intervals will be longer 
 and the interest feebler, until, gone to waste in all the 
 higher virilities of his breed, he at length drifts drowsily 
 from meal to meal into the ignominy of a fat decrepitude. 
 
 The brute qualities of the dog are not the higher 
 qualities of men; and yet the illustration need not 
 obscure the normal dependence of our higher powers 
 upon the forces of legitimate opposition. There are 
 few things less wholesome, especially in the develop 
 ment of collective action, than the effect upon a strong 
 group of the divisive but ineffectual contact of another. 
 I do not assert that racial differentiations should always 
 
ix THE POWER OF SOCIAL REACTIONS 161 
 
 and necessarily present the basis of social or political 
 oppositions, but if they are in fact coincident if two 
 races do stand opposed in thought or interest then 
 the presence of practically unchecked power upon one 
 side and of a practically defenceless weakness upon the 
 other is more demoralizing to the strong than to the 
 weak. It is not a good thing for any race to be per 
 petually dealing with another race with which it does 
 not have to argue, which it may control without ex 
 planations, for whom it may think without an attempt 
 at persuasion, and for whom it may act without any real 
 partnership in responsibility. For the effort of a more 
 efficient group to share responsibility to include, by 
 free and voluntary processes, every common social 
 factor in every common social decision forces the 
 conscience of the strong up into finer forms of sensi 
 bility and discernment, impels a larger knowledge of 
 human interests, and evokes both a larger power of 
 intellectual comprehension and a higher and more com 
 plex political capacity. Anybody can rule by simple 
 force. When power is given, the dullest fool can govern, 
 if the whole of government is to impose conformity. 
 It requires no political capacity outwardly to order all 
 men by one man s will; but to rule through their wills 
 too, to create, however slowly and gradually, a gov 
 ernment through men rather than over them, is to re 
 ceive and acquire, in still larger measure, the capacities 
 we attempt to bestow, and is to win, in ever stronger 
 forms, the manhood for which we provide. 
 
 Indeed, the ethical suggestion, the principle of social 
 deliverance, which lies in every truth and aspect of our 
 situation, we cannot escape. It is the only protection 
 
i6a THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 of any strong man in habitual contact with a weaker; 
 it is the only protection of a strong race in habitual 
 contact with a weaker race. It lies enfolded within 
 every inadequacy as its contribution to social power. 
 It is the gift found in the hand of every individual 
 or collective want. It is the secret of social wealth. 
 In each weakness of every lower social group, there 
 lies an opportunity for exploitation; but in each weak 
 ness there lies also an opportunity to help. You may 
 use the weak man or the weaker group in the one way 
 or in the other, and by the nature of your use of this man 
 or this group your capacities and faculties (which take 
 their qualities from use) are yielded to an education 
 which assumes descending and contractive or as 
 cending and expanding forms. The injurious social 
 reactions caused in the stronger by its contact with the 
 weaker can thus be checked and in measure over 
 come only by the stronger modifying its revulsions 
 by its compassions, and by so admitting and utilizing 
 the educative power of its higher reactions as to deter 
 mine its relations with the weaker under the processes 
 of cooperation rather than repression. Its own gradual 
 deliverance springs from its resolution to deliver. Its 
 own dominant interests cease to be repressive, its larger 
 powers freed from their constraining preoccupation 
 in the constraint of a weaker group are released into 
 the varied forms of a larger activity and a happier self- 
 expression. And the weaker group itself, as it tends to 
 rise, tends also to yield to the stronger both the direct 
 cooperation of its growth, and the indirect cooperation 
 of its inclusion within the momentum of the general 
 progress. 
 
ix THE POWER OF SOCIAL REACTIONS 163 
 
 For, as the stronger race withdraws its life, in its 
 contact with the weaker, from the merely coercive 
 or regulative forms of its expression, and tends to yield 
 itself in larger measure to the forms of cooperative action, 
 it naturally finds the basis of its approximations in 
 sympathy rather than in compromise. Among the 
 social reactions excited by its contact with the weaker 
 race, the higher now tend to substitute themselves for 
 the lower, and the partial reversal of the tendencies of 
 the educative process gives to every element of power a 
 new quality of gentleness and a deeper touch of magna 
 nimity. This is the reason why, although the average 
 man deteriorates under habitual contact with weaker 
 groups, the exceptional man in whom the occasions 
 of weakness have developed the cooperative rather than 
 the coercive instinct is, whether alone, as was Liv 
 ingstone in Central Africa, or submerged in the slums of 
 our greater cities, the highest human type we know. 
 Nor is this the least of the reasons why the exceptional 
 citizen of the "Black Belt" of the South is so often 
 regarded as the most adequate representative of our 
 gentler and nobler life. 
 
 IV 
 
 But the exceptional man cannot be alone the theatre 
 or the agent of our social policies. These must include 
 the average man as well. The few may reign but the 
 many are the world; and it is with the world that we 
 must deal. The exceptional man, however, may give 
 us here as everywhere the clue to general policies, 
 not merely to their spirit, but to their principle. The 
 
i6 4 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 substitution of cooperative for repressive methods will 
 slowly reveal the fact that the basis of our ascendancy 
 as well as the basis of our security is a double basis. 
 The educative reactions induced within the stronger 
 group by the life of the weaker are given not merely a 
 higher principle, a new and constructive method, by 
 the cooperative instinct, but they are given a new and 
 cumulative power. As men help other men, as race 
 helps race, the slow rise of the weaker touches the level 
 of the stronger with an upward pressure. The weaker 
 group affects the stronger less and less as the dragging 
 pull of an insensate or declining life, and more and more 
 as the impulsion of a slowly rising and increasingly whole 
 some influence. The difference in the quality of its 
 contact, between a social group which is organically alive 
 and organically growing, and a social group, upon the 
 other hand, which is organically dying, cannot be meas 
 ured in the terms of cold and literal value. The level 
 of the latter may be actually higher than that of the 
 former, but the social contact of the one is disease, and 
 of the other however feeble is cooperative power. 
 This cooperation of the weaker with the stronger is, 
 moreover, largely independent of its desire to help, and 
 may not be necessarily sympathetic. Indeed, if this 
 lower group be really alive, if it be really a growing and 
 not a decadent social force, its oppositions will be, at 
 times, more helpful than its assistances. Its real co 
 operation is not dependent on its voluntary choice, but 
 upon the sheer vitality and the subtle momentum of its 
 progress. For there is something organic in the nature 
 of the larger unity of society itself. As within our physi 
 cal experience, one organ however unimportant- 
 
ix THE POWER OF SOCIAL REACTIONS 165 
 
 helps every other organ and helps the body as a whole, 
 primarily by being alive and by not being dead, and then 
 helps still further by the living processes of its own 
 life, just by its proper functioning, so within the 
 general order of society the active and growing group is 
 a contributary and cooperative force. The laborer 
 who begins really to think for himself helps the em 
 ployer just in proportion to the activity and soundness 
 of that thinking. He may not be especially interested 
 in helping the employer, indeed he may chiefly desire 
 to help himself, but his essential helpfulness whether 
 the employer perceives it or no is none the less 
 fundamental. That his thinking in one direction 
 makes his mind more active in all directions, and 
 makes him a more efficient laborer, is but the begin 
 ning of his contribution. His growing intelligence as 
 a laborer compels his employer to approach him and 
 to deal with him, more and more, through his higher 
 rather than through his lower faculties, and by his thus 
 unconsciously imposing upon his employer the necessity 
 for intelligent appeals and for an increasingly intelligent 
 adjustment of relations, his employer is himself forced 
 to become more intelligent, is involved in the educational 
 process of the workman. Education is thus both a 
 social act and, automatically, a compulsory movement 
 of society itself. 
 
 Few things in the general growth of intelligence 
 among our negroes at the South are, therefore, of more 
 far-reaching importance than the upward pressure of 
 that intelligence upon the levels of the race above them. 
 For the upward pressure of one group upon another 
 group is as obvious as the pressure from individual to 
 
166 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 individual. Not only does a race which is declining in 
 efficiency have a tendency to pull the stronger into the 
 descending processes of its ruin, but a race which is 
 relatively lower has a tendency, if it be growing in effi- 
 cency, to involve the stronger in the ascending processes 
 of its rise. As it thinks and knows, it compels every 
 group which deals with it to think more and to know 
 more. As it works better and wastes less, it impels 
 each other race which enters into relations with it to 
 take the better quality of its work, and the factors of 
 self-control represented by its economies, into its own 
 industrial or mercantile account. The laboring forces 
 of other groups must themselves labor better and save 
 more. 
 
 The employers of an improving and saving negro 
 labor are also helped by the treble form of that upward 
 pressure which an advancing lower group is uncon 
 sciously but unceasingly contributing to the higher. 
 First, there is the direct contribution of an advancing 
 efficiency not merely to the details of execution but to 
 the larger policy of production; the employer may 
 employ fewer hands, effect a more compact organization, 
 and, by reason of the decreasing factor of waste, may 
 estimate expenses and receipts with a nicety which in 
 creases both the stability and the profits of his under 
 taking. Secondly, there is also for the employer that 
 indirect contribution to his capacities and his business 
 which arises from his relations with a more effective 
 labor. He may never enter it in his ledger, but life will 
 enter it in the nature of the man. Though his "labor" 
 may be relatively much lower than himself, he will 
 have to deal with higher men in higher ways. Thirdly, 
 
ix THE POWER OF SOCIAL REACTIONS 167 
 
 he will have to deal with growing men in growing ways. 
 If they are growing, he must not only continue to be 
 relatively higher, he must not only continue to be 
 found at some old adopted level of advantage but 
 he, too, must grow. If a particular excellence of plan, 
 or method of oversight, or manner of persuasion, or 
 form of mutual commerce was adequate on yesterday, 
 and they move upward toward it, he must move also. 
 Their upward movement is one of those forms of social 
 reaction within the weaker race which, however inter 
 esting, is at this moment not within the scope of the 
 discussion. But as they move up, as they grow, their 
 movement touches and impels his own. He may grow 
 toward them in his sympathies, but their comprehension 
 within his sympathies, like their intellectual compre 
 hension within his policies, is in itself a process by which 
 he must transcend them. For they themselves how 
 ever unconsciously are ceaselessly at work within 
 him, his growth being a condition of theirs as theirs is 
 a condition of his own: and as they grow they con 
 tribute as we have seen, (i) the direct efficiency which 
 comes from growth ; (2) the indirect development of his 
 efficiency which comes from intelligent contact and more 
 effective oppositions; (3) that momentum of their 
 movement which makes their contribution not only 
 static but dynamic that gift which is no mere result 
 of growing, but the growing. This is the supreme ser 
 vice to every organism, to every faculty of every organ 
 ism, which comes from any part or faculty however 
 lowly or unhonored that is not dead, but living. 
 
i68 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 Such, indeed, are in some measure the processes of 
 that more general social movement which in its larger 
 aspect we call the progress of humanity. It is made of 
 innumerable divisions. It is divided into classes and 
 subdivided into races, or divided into races and sub 
 divided into classes. It is found in families and in 
 nations. Its unity is organized under governments 
 which deny it, and disorganized under revolutions 
 which affirm it. But it has survived the peril of its 
 negations and the darker peril of its affirmations, just 
 as it has survived and will continue to survive the pass 
 ing expressions of party and the indestructible forms of 
 racial and domestic segregation. Within the final order 
 of its life there is no test of survival or of ascendancy 
 except that condition of social health which has been 
 variously defined, but which I will venture to term the 
 capacity for the utilization of reactions. It might be 
 defined more simply as the social capacity for self-cor 
 rection, or as the power of fundamental appropria 
 tion. It is the power to transmute every possession of 
 society every relevant aid and every relevant antag 
 onism into the coin of social use, into larger and 
 freer forms of self-possession. It is more than the 
 survival of the fittest, it is the power which makes us 
 fit. It is more than the power of adaptation to en 
 vironment, it must adapt and readapt environment, 
 whether it be economic or racial or political, as the 
 social training-ground the educative home of men. 
 
 It perceives the nature of the reaction induced by 
 this or that economic situation. It declares that if the 
 
 
UNIVERSITY )] 
 
 OF 
 L I F 
 
 ix THE POWER OF SOCIAL REACTIONS 169 
 
 reaction be evil the situation must be changed, that it 
 must be changed not merely because it is damaging busi 
 ness, but because it is educating or miseducating men. 
 It declares that an economic force may be made a human 
 force, that it is just as much a human force if put 
 consciously to work in relation to human situations 
 as the electricity which through the telegraph we have 
 put into every intellectual or social activity of experience, 
 or the ether which through the skill of the surgeon we 
 have put into therapeutics. It would ask that we so 
 utilize the social reactions of an economic situation, and 
 the economic reaction of social forces, as not merely to 
 make our education of service in our industries, but to 
 make the whole industrial organization of society of 
 larger service to education. As men are educated more 
 largely by their occupations than by their schools, there 
 can be no ultimate education of society until the educa 
 tional significance of economic situations and of eco 
 nomic employments in their reactions upon individual 
 and social character are more consciously and more 
 directly included within the policies of the state. 
 
 Yet many a man has the power to utilize the reaction 
 which is induced in him by a field or an occupation, 
 who has not the wisdom or the self-control to utilize 
 the reaction induced in him by another man. So also 
 is it with social groups, and so is it with races. How 
 often have men been destroyed by situations through 
 which with whatever adversities they might have 
 reigned ! For the reaction induced in the man by 
 his habitual contact with a racial or social group is 
 just as educative, to his damage or his advancement, 
 as that from the occupation or the field. Each is a 
 
170 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 factor in the active or the responsive environment of his 
 nature. Each will contribute directly and indirectly 
 either to that education which through its narrowing, 
 contractive, descending forms will give to his manhood 
 an ever hardening and coarser quality, and to his life 
 horizons shrinking and overburdened ; or to that 
 education which in its expanding and emancipative 
 forms may so utilize the known reactions of his human 
 contact as to turn adversity into power. 
 
 If he is really strong, he will be also wise. He will 
 make no war upon the Universe. As he cooperates 
 with its forces it will stand at his back. He will know 
 that in so far as security and ascendancy are possible to 
 any racial group, their basis will be found not in his 
 preferences, but in Its realities. Yet, believing in him 
 self, and therefore taking its realities for his prefer 
 ences, he will create his institutions that he may 
 share them, his opportunities that he may divide them, 
 his integrity of race in forms so true that every race 
 will necessarily protect it, and his social ascendancy 
 in terms so efficient and so serviceable through the 
 qualities of its stewardship that every group will 
 instinctively bestow it. For such an integrity of race 
 is protected by every group which through the freer 
 processes of its self-development is led to deepen the 
 instinct of its self-protection; and such an ascendancy 
 is bestowed by every group which through its free 
 dom to think becomes a thought-compelling, rather 
 than a thought-repressing, force; which, through its 
 sounder health and its larger capacities, contributes 
 to the higher group, however slowly, not merely the 
 upward pressure of its gains, and the indirect profit 
 
ix THE POWER OF SOCIAL REACTIONS 171 
 
 of its resistances, but the dynamic impulsion of its 
 growth. 
 
 Just as within the related and impinging units of 
 every series the movement of the first transmits not 
 merely a contact which assists and an assistance which 
 impels, but motion itself, from unit to unit throughout 
 the whole, so the progress of our human life within its 
 lowest levels must involve as each level bears upward 
 upon higher levels not merely a change in the static 
 or relative position of units or classes, but the actuality 
 and quality of motion. It is this which transmutes 
 motion into momentum, and, in the organic world, 
 accretion into growth. This is the gift of one to all, 
 the unseen beneficence of every advancing level how 
 ever far submerged, of every group or race however 
 lowly. To be so advanced is to be advanced by the 
 valid suffrages of a far age contemporary with our toil, 
 and of strange peoples now alive within our history. 
 To profit by such progress if we have so used the 
 counsel of our affairs is to be advantaged by that 
 course of nature which is the will of Truth, the prof 
 fered friendship of Reality ; and to be so ascendant 
 is to serve, and to be served by, the order and momen 
 tum of the world. 
 
THE NEW COERCION 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE NEW COERCION 
 
 BEFORE leaving the subject of the educative effect 
 of the reactions inaugurated in one social group by the 
 capacities and activities of another, it would be inter 
 esting to dwell more fully upon some of its less obvious 
 phases. Yet these for the present must remain un 
 noted. 
 
 The consideration of the action of group upon group 
 within the South, must here yield place to a brief con 
 sideration of the effect upon the South as a whole, of 
 the forces of that greater world of Western ideas and 
 of modern institutions of which it forms a part. Under 
 this aspect of our subject the South and by "the 
 South" I mean the dominant and representative ele 
 ment in its life is viewed as itself a group placed 
 historically and socially within the context of a larger 
 fellowship. 
 
 Here again, however, the limitations of space permit 
 only a passing reference to but a few of the more sig 
 nificant phases of our subject. Yet it is obvious that 
 many of the issues of our American history which have 
 seemed to take their form under the constraint of mili 
 tary or political power have been so adjusted by armies 
 or by parties chiefly because they were of a piece with 
 the inevitable movement of society itself. Mr. Lincoln s 
 observation that the issue of the Civil War would be 
 
 75 
 
176 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 determined by "the preponderance of resources" was 
 true, but true only in the sense that the word "re 
 sources" must be given something more than its military 
 or its diplomatic usage. The time had in fact gone by 
 for the creation of a modern state involved in a system 
 of slave labor. The conception was an economic anach 
 ronism. In its conflict with the South, the "resources" 
 of the North were in fact the armies, the wealth, the 
 policies, the markets, the institutions, the literatures of 
 the world : for every selfish interest or social aspiration 
 of every class in every modern government was naturally 
 enlisted upon the side of an industrial system associated 
 with free labor, as against an industrial system repre 
 senting a system of slave labor. The temporary victory 
 of Lee, even the establishment of the Confederate States, 
 could have availed nothing. The war, under one form 
 or another, would have had to go on, and the victory, 
 under one form or another, must have brought at length 
 the same industrial transformation. The South, how 
 ever unwittingly, however heroically, had joined issue 
 with the world. The world, thoroughly committed to 
 a system of free labor as the industrial basis both of its 
 competitions and its reciprocities, could not pause 
 until the common standard of its adjustments and 
 exchanges was finally secure. This is not to ignore 
 the sentimental or humanitarian phases of the struggle ; 
 it is but to state them in another form. 
 
 Emerging in defeat from the issue of arms, it was 
 inevitable, however, that the South should have been 
 slow to appreciate both the moral and the economic 
 significance of its results. We do not readily learn the 
 advantages of freedom through the processes of con- 
 
x THE NEW COERCION 177 
 
 straint. We do not at once perceive the profits of 
 free labor through an industrial situation in which 
 - however inevitably freedom is largely extolled 
 and labor largely abandoned. We entered but pain 
 fully into the full philosophy of an enlargement of 
 popular rights "guaranteed" under forms which so 
 annulled the liberties of white men that the older deso 
 lation, wrought by intelligent armies, seemed prefer 
 able to the new exploitations wrought by the ignorant 
 civil successors of their authority and power. Yet, 
 in every deeper sense, it should have been understood 
 that there could be no ultimate winning of freedom for 
 the slave which did not involve the winning of the South 
 for freedom. A popular faith in liberty is insecurely 
 founded in policies of suspicion and repression. It is 
 hard for real men to find their generosities through 
 their humiliations. The school of our bitterness, of our 
 scepticism toward the future of the freedmen and tow 
 ard the larger democracy of the nation, lay not so 
 much in our defeat as in the policies which followed 
 it. Yet this Northern movement of retaliation and 
 repression, offending that spirit of freedom which it 
 had originally invoked, drew into the cause of the 
 South those deeper forces of moral cooperation and of 
 economic interest which slavery had estranged. 
 
 If the South had sinned against freedom in the name 
 of property, the North was now sinning against freedom 
 in the name of government. That common mind of 
 right feeling, of good sense, and of economic health 
 which had been arrayed against the South thus came, 
 in turn, to the South s support, expressed itself in oppo 
 sition to the policies of Reconstruction, in favor of a 
 
178 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 sounder confidence in the forces of local responsibility, 
 and compelled that ultimate readjustment of political 
 power which placed the government of each Southern 
 State within the control of Southern men. Against the 
 program of Reconstruction and in rejection of the policy 
 of repression, the soul and wisdom of the North at 
 length took part. Within the very party of Abolition 
 the program of coercion found its critics; for that 
 was by no means an isolated protest against the dis 
 abilities imposed upon the intelligence of the South, 
 which was voiced by the late Carl Schurz on January 
 30, 1872, in the Senate of the United States. His close 
 affiliations with the war party of the North, his intense 
 sympathy with the program of emancipation, and his 
 peculiar personal associations with the development of 
 the policy of Reconstruction make his words singu 
 larly significant. In his argument l for a policy of 
 " universal amnesty," Mr. Schurz said : 
 
 ". . . The end and aim of our endeavors can be no 
 other than to secure to all the States the blessings of 
 good and free government, and the highest degree of 
 prosperity and well-being they can obtain, and to re 
 vive in all citizens of this republic that love for the 
 Union and its institutions, and that inspiring conscious 
 ness of a common nationality, which after all must bind 
 all Americans together. . . . 
 
 1 See speech of the Hon. Carl Schurz, in the Senate of the United 
 States, January 30, 1872, in favor of a bill removing the political 
 disabilities imposed by the third section of the "Fourteenth Amend 
 ment to the Constitution"; reprinted from the Congressional Globe 
 with the permission of Mr. Schurz, in Ringwalt s "Modern American 
 Oratory," p. 93, and in Baker s "Forms of Public Address," p. 353; 
 Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1904. 
 
X THE NEW COERCION 179 
 
 4 Look at the Southern States as they stand before 
 us to-day [1872]. Some are in a condition bordering 
 upon anarchy, not only on account of the social dis 
 orders which are occurring there, or the inefficiency 
 of their local governments in securing the enforce 
 ment of the laws; but you will find in many of them 
 fearful corruption pervading the whole political or 
 ganization; a combination of rascality and ignorance 
 wielding official power; their finances deranged by 
 profligate practices; their credit ruined; bankruptcy 
 staring them in the face; their industries staggering 
 under a fearful load of taxation; their property holders 
 and capitalists paralyzed by a feeling of insecurity and 
 distrust almost amounting to despair. Sir, let us not 
 try to disguise these facts, for the world knows them to 
 be so, and knows it but too well. . . . 
 
 "Just at that period when they lay prostrated and 
 exhausted at our feet, when the destructive besom of 
 war had swept over them and left nothing but desolation 
 and ruin in its track, when their material interests 
 were to be built up again with care and foresight, - 
 just then the public business demanded, more than 
 ordinarily, the cooperation of all the intelligence and 
 all the political experience that could be mustered in 
 the Southern States. . . . When universal suffrage 
 was granted to secure the equal rights of all, universal 
 amnesty ought to have been granted to make all the 
 resources of political intelligence and experience 
 available for the promotion of the welfare of all. 
 
 "But what did we do? To the uneducated and 
 inexperienced classes uneducated and inexperi 
 enced, I repeat, entirely without their fault we 
 
i8o THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 opened the road to power; and at the same time we 
 condemned a large proportion of the intelligence of 
 those States, of the property-holding, the industrial, 
 the professional, the tax-paying interest to a worse 
 than passive attitude. We made it, as it were, easy 
 for rascals who had gone South in quest of profitable 
 adventure to gain the control of the masses so easily 
 misled, by permitting them to appear as the exponents 
 and representatives of the national power and of our 
 policy; and at the same time we branded a large num 
 ber of men of intelligence, and many of them of per 
 sonal integrity, whose material interests were so largely 
 involved in honest government, and many of whom 
 would have cooperated in managing the public busi 
 ness with care and foresight, we branded them, I say, 
 as outcasts. . . . 
 
 "When the Rebellion stood in arms against us, we 
 fought and overcame force by force. That was 
 right. ... But when the problem presented itself of se 
 curing the permanency, the peaceable development and 
 the successful working of the new institutions we had 
 introduced into our political organism, we had as wise 
 men to take into careful calculation the moral forces we 
 had to deal with ; for let us not indulge in any delusion 
 about this : what is to be permanent in a Republic like 
 this must be supported by public opinion; it must rest 
 at least upon the willing acquiescence of a large and firm 
 majority of the people. . . . We desired the Southern 
 whites to accept in good faith universal suffrage, to 
 recognize the political rights of the colored man and to 
 protect him in their exercise. . . . But what did we 
 do? . 
 
x THE NEW COERCION 181 
 
 ". . . If you desired the white man to accept and 
 recognize the political equality of the black, was it 
 wise to embitter and exasperate his spirit with the 
 stinging stigma of his own inferiority? Was it wise 
 to withhold from him privileges in the enjoyment of 
 which he was to protect the late slave? . . . To their 
 honor be it said that the colored people, following a 
 just instinct, were among the first not only in the 
 South but all over the country in entreating Con 
 gress to remove those odious discriminations [against 
 white men] which put in jeopardy their own rights 
 by making them greater than those of others. From 
 the colored people themselves, it seems, we have in this 
 respect received a lesson in statesmanship. . . . 
 
 "We are asked, shall the Rebellion go entirely un 
 punished ? No, sir ; it shall not. Neither do I think 
 that the Rebellion has gone entirely unpunished. . . . 
 There was a proud and arrogant aristocracy. . . . 
 They looked down not only upon their slaves, but also 
 upon the people of the North, with the haughty con 
 tempt of self -asserting superiority. When their pre 
 tensions to rule us all were first successfully disputed, 
 they resolved to destroy this Republic and to build up 
 on the corner-stone of slavery an empire of their own 
 in which they could hold absolute sway. They made 
 the attempt with the most overweeningly confident ex 
 pectation of certain victory. Then came the Civil 
 War, and after four years of struggle their whole power 
 and pride lay shivered to atoms at our feet, their sons 
 dead by tens of thousands on the battlefields of this 
 country, their fields and their homes devastated; their 
 fortunes destroyed; and more than that, the whole 
 
1 82 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 social system in which they had their being, with all 
 their hopes and pride, utterly wiped out ; slavery forever 
 abolished, and the slaves themselves created a political 
 power before which they had to bow their heads ; and 
 they themselves broken, helpless and hopeless, in the 
 dust before those upon whom they had so haughtily 
 looked down as their vassals and inferiors. Sir, can 
 it be said that the Rebellion has gone entirely un 
 punished? . . . 
 
 "Believe me, Senators, the statesmanship which 
 this period of our history demands is not exhausted by 
 high-sounding declamation about the greatness of the 
 crime of rebellion, and fearful predictions as to what is 
 going to happen unless the rebels are punished with 
 sufficient severity. We have heard so much of this 
 from some gentlemen, and so little else, that the inquiry 
 naturally suggests itself whether this is the whole com 
 pass, the be-all and the end-all of their political wisdom 
 and their political virtue; whether it is really their 
 opinion that the South may be plundered with im 
 punity by rascals in power, that the substance of those 
 States may be wasted, that their credit may be ruined, 
 that their prosperity may be blighted, that their future 
 may be blasted, that the poison of bad feeling may 
 still be kept working where we might do something to 
 assuage its effects; that the people may lose more and 
 more their faith in the efficiency of self-government and 
 of republican institutions; that all this may happen, 
 and we look on complacently, if we can only continue to 
 keep a thorn in the side of our late enemies, and to de 
 monstrate again and again, as the Senator from Indiana 
 has it, our disapprobation of the crime of rebellion? 
 
x THE NEW COERCION 183 
 
 "Sir, such appeals as these which we have heard 
 so frequently may well be apt to tickle the ear of an 
 unthinking multitude. But unless I am grievously in 
 error, the people of the United States are a multitude 
 not unthinking. The American people are fast be 
 coming aware that, great as the crime of rebellion is, 
 there are other villainies beside it; that much as it may 
 deserve punishment there are other evils flagrant 
 enough to demand energetic correction; that the 
 remedy for such evils does, after all, not consist in the 
 maintenance of political disabilities; and that it would 
 be well to look behind those vociferous demonstra 
 tions of exclusive and austere patriotism to see what 
 abuses and faults of policy they are [possibly intended] 
 to cover, and what rotten sores they are [meant] to 
 disguise. The American people are fast beginning 
 to perceive that good and honest government in the 
 South, as well as throughout the whole country, restor 
 ing a measurable degree of confidence and contentment, 
 will do infinitely more to revive true loyalty and a 
 healthy national spirit, than keeping alive the resent 
 ments of the past by a useless degradation of certain 
 classes of persons; and that we shall fail to do our 
 duty unless we use every means to contribute our share 
 to that end. . . . 
 
 "No, Sir, I would not have the past forgotten, but 
 I would have its history completed and crowned by 
 an act most worthy of a great, noble, and wise people. 
 By all the means which we have in our hands, I would 
 make even those who have sinned against this Republic 
 see in its flag not the symbol of their lasting degradation, 
 but of rights equal to all; I would make them feel in 
 
i*4 THK HAS IS OF ASCKNDANCY CHAP. 
 
 their hearts that in its good and evil fortunes their 
 rights and interests are bound up just as ours are, and 
 that therefore its peace, its welfare, its honor, and its 
 greatness may and ought to be as dear to them as they 
 are to us." 
 
 That such an appeal from such a man should have 
 failed of its immediate purpose is but an added illus 
 tration of the power and persistence of those coercive 
 forces within which the life of the South had been 
 involved. Only "by little and little" were these 
 disabilities swept away. 1 Not until 1877 were the 
 military forces of the North wholly withdrawn from 
 the Southern States, and they were then withdrawn, 
 as we now know, not in obedience to those impulses 
 of an uncalculating generosity for which Mr. Schur/, 
 had pleaded, 2 but in conformity with a compact in which 
 
 1 While the amnesty bill of 1872 removed the disabilities from all 
 but about 750 individuals (according to Mr. Hlaine) these were largely 
 those whose personalities were of special significance to the South and 
 whose cooperation was peculiarly indispensable to the nation; among 
 them were such natural leaders as Z. H. Vance of North Carolina, 
 L. Q. C. Lamar of Mississippi, J. L. M. Curry of Alabama, Judge 
 I II. Reagan of Texas, John A. Campbell, Joseph K. Johnston, 
 G. T. Beaureganl, W. J. Harden, and William A. (Iraham. A 
 number of these were soon relieved of their disabilities upon their 
 personal petition, but many regarded the conditions as unnecessarily 
 humiliating. The last personal act relieving disability was signed 
 February 24, 1897. Full amnesty was not granted till the passage of 
 the general act of June 6, 1898. (See James Ford Rhodes, "History 
 of the United States," Vol. VI, pp. 329, 330; New York, 1906: also, 
 "Reconstruction, Political and Economic," by W. A. Dunning, 
 Lieber Professor of History and Political Philosophy, Columbia 
 University, pp. 203, 204; Harper and Brothers, New York, 1907.) 
 
 "We mixed our generosity with just enough of bitterness to prevent 
 it from bearing its full fruit. I repeat, we can make the policy of 
 
x THE NEW COERCION 185 
 
 a Democratic House ultimately delivered the presi 
 dency to the North in return for liberty to the South. 1 
 And yet it is obvious that the possibility of such a 
 compact the popular vote for Mr. Tilden which so 
 directly challenged the supremacy of the Republican 
 party was an evidence of the truth that Mr. Schurz, 
 despite his immediate defeat, was but interpreting the 
 ultimate verdict of the country and of the world. The 
 long delay made more difficult the South s apprehension 
 of the significance of her industrial transformation, 
 darkened her appreciation of the better possibilities 
 of the negro, limited her knowledge of the broader 
 impulses of the North, chilled and shrivelled upon 
 every hand that sense of fraternity which is one of 
 the profounder springs of civic rejuvenation, and 
 yet this delay need not obscure for us the fact that the 
 power which spoke through Mr. Schurz was the resist 
 less force of that universal reason, that common and 
 self-executing energy of justice, which was now fighting 
 for the enfranchisement of the South precisely as it had 
 fought for the emancipation of the slave. Such forms 
 
 generosity most fruitful only by making it most complete. . . . You 
 must not do things by halves if you want whole results. You must 
 not expose yourself to the suspicion of a narrow-minded desire to 
 pinch off your gift wherever there is a chance for it, as if you were 
 afraid you could by any possibility give too much, when giving more 
 would benefit the country more, and when giving less would detract 
 from the beneficent effect of that which you do give." See Baker s 
 " Forms of Public Address," p. 376; already quoted on p. 178 of this 
 volume. 
 
 1 The suggestion that there was an actual "bargain" has been 
 questioned, but Professor Dunning s statement seems fully to justify 
 the wording of the text. See pp. 338, 339, 341, of "Reconstruction, 
 Political and Economic," by W. A. Dunning, already quoted. 
 
i86 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 of despotism as Reconstruction had attempted, such 
 abuses and exploitations, were against the common peace 
 and the general stability. They possessed no inward 
 coherence. They were based upon no foundations of 
 need. They were involved, externally and politically, in 
 no enduring or tolerable social situation to which they 
 were really contributary or by which they could be 
 permanently sustained. They were without an actual 
 being or potency, for they lacked the securities of order : 
 labor despised them because they promised everything, 
 and capital forsook them because they could really 
 promise nothing. That they had a name and a place 
 upon the earth was solely due to the external support 
 of a public state of mind, a state of mind which the 
 instinct for liberty had created and which the same 
 instinct for liberty would now as ruthlessly destroy. 
 
 II 
 
 The deliverance of the South from the disabilities 
 which had been imposed upon her, the restoration of 
 our local governments into the keeping of the local 
 conscience, was thus no mere achievement of an arti 
 ficial transaction between parties or sections: it was 
 an achievement of profounder forces. Such forces 
 may indeed have gained expression through the inci 
 dents of a local struggle or in the terms of a political 
 "adjustment"; yet these were at last but outward and 
 subordinate phases of one of the most characteristic 
 movements of the modern world, a movement 
 which, in conformity with the spirit of science and 
 in response to the spirit of democracy, is slowly sub- 
 
x THE NEW COERCION 187 
 
 jecting every policy of arbitrary repression or of 
 artificial constraint to the double test of reality upon 
 the one hand, and of freedom upon the other. Our 
 disabilities the older forms of our coercion were 
 overthrown by the very force and genius of our age. 
 
 Out of the conditions of that coercion the South 
 emerged with her right to re-create her fortunes univer 
 sally conceded. Her bonds were broken. Emancipation 
 was to be given its broader meaning. There might 
 be threats of "force bills," there might be incidental 
 political aggravations. Yet no one has since dreamed 
 that there could be again attempted the destruction 
 of the local basis of our local administrations. As the 
 South took up the task of rehabilitation, she began her 
 work in the light of the approving and rejoicing interest 
 of the well-meaning, the right-minded, of every latitude. 
 She issued from her period of humiliations bearing 
 in her hands as "a charter of consent" the to 
 kens of sympathetic and approving expectation from 
 those at home and abroad, from old enemies and older 
 friends. At the North there was still some suspicion, 
 and still a little hate, but these were the passions of 
 the few. The stronger forces both numerically 
 and intellectually were glad that our State govern 
 ments had been restored to the governed, and that 
 democratic institutions were to be put upon a demo 
 cratic basis. They were not oblivious of the evils 
 which still existed, many as in the case of Mr. 
 Schurz himself sometimes used language about the 
 South which contributed to give to generous policies 
 an ungenerous significance; and yet they clearly saw 
 that not until local control should be given its freer play 
 
1 88 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 could there come about that local correction of local 
 evils which is the only ultimate basis of social health. 
 Their exasperations were but the residual flash of old 
 and dying animosities. The new heart in them was 
 the heart of hope for the South and of confidence in 
 Southern men. Viewed thus in that larger and more 
 comprehensive sense in which any social attitude must 
 be interpreted, it is not inaccurate to declare that the 
 North, in abandoning the policies of Reconstruction, 
 abandoned them with an honest loathing for their 
 abuses and with an honest impulse to advance the 
 fuller autonomy of the Southern States. 
 
 The response of the South has been more spontaneous 
 and more general than the most sanguine could have 
 predicted. The personal and social fusion of the 
 forces of one section with the forces of the other, the 
 merging of their industrial fortunes, the tendency of 
 Southern manufacturing interests to find a common 
 ground with the dominant political party of the North, and 
 the tendency of Northern municipalities to find common 
 ground with the dominant political party of the South, 
 the settling of the West by the representatives of both, 
 the proving through the Spanish war of a com 
 mon loyalty, the recognition upon the assassina 
 tions of Garfield and McKinley of a common sorrow, 
 and the sharing through men like Waring and Gorgas, 
 and St. Gaudens and Lanier, of a common science 
 and a common art, have built up a nationality of spirit 
 which in its unity and efficiency is even stronger than 
 the old. The South is "at home" within the land. 
 The fact is so obvious that its very assertion carries 
 almost the note of affectation. It is true not merely 
 
x THE NEW COERCION 189 
 
 because of the reality of our kinship with the older 
 past the past in which our forefathers created the 
 unity our fathers could not destroy but because the 
 South is at home within the future, within the region 
 of our destiny and in the waiting province of the high 
 est things which this nation can conceive of personal 
 and social freedom. There too she dwells; she, in her 
 soul, has no dream nor notion nor imagination except 
 of a democratic state. Of all the sections of this 
 country the serious, responsible South is the least 
 likely, in the projection of its institutional future, to 
 plan a place for a slave ; for this is the only section which 
 has really tried both philosophies of labor. There are 
 some mistakes which peoples do not repeat. The 
 societies which are most securely free are those which 
 have found that a security attained through freedom 
 and therefore a security which every man is inter 
 ested to protect is not merely the better way but the 
 only way. 
 
 And yet freedom has its inconveniences. It has 
 especially as a social condition its testing points, its 
 anti-climaxes, its weird confusions, its strange self- 
 stultifications. You feel them in New York City when 
 the vote of an Assembly- District of educated men, 
 with large property-holdings, of long residence and 
 tried experience, is offset by the vote of another in 
 which the interests of the state are represented by 
 an extemporized constituency of twenty languages, 
 little property, and less intelligence. Yet the North s 
 increasing consciousness of the ignorant in its own 
 electorate has but added to the general appreciation 
 of our Southern difficulties, and has to that extent 
 
igo THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 contributed to the unification of the national temper. 
 While the presence at the South of a disproportion 
 ate fraction of weakness and ignorance in our body 
 social has had a tendency to contribute to our iso 
 lation, the very problem of its mass the sheer 
 weight of the social burden has deepened and 
 broadened the interest and comprehension of the 
 country as a whole, and has involved a franker and 
 freer acceptance of our initiative. Despite the mut- 
 terings and threatenings of the few, despite a few cap 
 tious but really unimportant intrusions of the federal 
 authority, the South since 1876 has been given a "free 
 hand." 
 
 Ill 
 
 Yet not for an hour has the South been conscious of 
 peace. The sense of uneasiness has been perennial. 
 We know that the old coercion is ended; yet the con 
 sciousness of pressure is almost all-pervasive. There 
 is a mind of uneasiness within our general life. The 
 scent for aggression is acute, and the defensive habit 
 is persistent. 
 
 Such a feeling of social strain is due partly to the 
 vivid memory of old abuses, partly to the skill with 
 which these abuses have been recalled, for partisan pur 
 poses, by the cheap threatenings of an occasional 
 spokesman of the North and by the answering tumult 
 of some protagonist of the South. Our uneasiness is 
 also the result of a sense of social responsibility wrought 
 upon by the presence of abnormal difficulties at home, 
 and by the occasional sting of sincere but undiscriminat- 
 ing censure from without. Nor is this all. It is the 
 
x THE NEW COERCION igt 
 
 result of other and less conspicuous aspects of our fate 
 as "a section" and as a people. Yet the deeper 
 source of our disquietude lies, I think, in none of these. 
 They are not as disturbing influences sufficiently 
 general or sufficiently powerful to explain a social state 
 of mind so inclusive and so persistent. The absence of 
 any general public interest at the North in the moral 
 petulance with which its narrower journalism has 
 sometimes assailed the South, has long been evident. 
 The political attacks of partisanship at the North and the 
 recurrent "defences" of partisanship at the South have 
 had little direct significance. While indirectly their 
 effect has been serious as an irritant, providing a re 
 peated "suggestion" for the states of social self- hypnosis 
 in which at times our population has become involved, 
 yet unrelated to other forces their continued 
 influence would have been impossible. Their sources 
 of power lie, as we shall see, rather in the moral psy 
 chology of our situation than in any serious fear of one 
 political party or in any serious delusions as to the 
 other. Nor does the source of our sense of disturbance 
 lie in the mere magnitude of our task. In one sense, 
 its quantitative proportions, the very weight and nature 
 of its burden, have really proven as we have already 
 noted one of the strongest factors of our security ; 
 they have drawn into the enlarging autonomy of the 
 South the sympathetic cooperation and the broader 
 self-interest both of the North and of the world. 
 
 What, then, is the force of our disquietude ? For the 
 instinct of uneasiness has its basis. The popular con 
 sciousness of pressure from without, the sense of a 
 
192 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 new coercion, is not unfounded. Our popular leaders 
 are prone to find it in some external enactment like the 
 Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, or in some 
 Northern expression of feverish solicitude for the in 
 tegrity of the Eighth Commandment, or in some poig 
 nant outcry or sickening crime of the weaker race: 
 and these leaders strike back; we are all tempted to 
 strike back. And yet, whether or not we do so, the 
 old disquietude returns; the old sense of pressure, 
 the grip and force of the new coercion, close us in; 
 and we remain apart, apart from the comparative as 
 surance, the common peace of our national household. 
 We know it. Despite the emancipating approval of 
 the world, ours is still a heritage of constraint ; and 
 we are not untroubled or unmoved. 
 
 Yet is not this very community of freedom into which 
 the world invites us the source of our new coercion? 
 Is not its hospitality the intimate and universal 
 invitation of its ideals, its democratic tendencies, its 
 industrial and political assumptions the real chal 
 lenge to every provincial aspect of our development? 
 
 The external conditions of that development have 
 been unusual. No population of a modern state could 
 well have been involved in processes of adjustment and 
 of readjustment more directly calculated to detach 
 them from the general movement of democracy. In 
 volved in an economic situation which naturally 
 brought their social temper as well as their intellectual 
 activity to the defence of slavery, forced to abandon 
 the institution not by processes of persuasion but by 
 a physical constraint which found its natural reaction 
 in sympathetic interpretations of the departing order, 
 
x THE NEW COERCION 193 
 
 surrounded by emancipated multitudes whose weak 
 nesses obscured the benefits of freedom, and over 
 whelmed by victors whose exploitations obscured the 
 motives of emancipation, the people of the South have 
 been permitted no untrammelled course into the prov 
 inces of democratic feeling. In the very presence of 
 the undeveloped masses of another race so different 
 in type and circumstance we have had at each 
 moment of our social development and at each point 
 in our institutional history a powerful challenge to 
 every democratic instinct, and an insidious invitation 
 to modify through artificial provisions that com 
 mon democratic basis to which the North itself is by 
 no means perfectly adjusted. Thus in her forces of 
 population as well as in the influences of her history, 
 the South finds herself confronted by formidable, 
 I had almost said irreducible, factors of social differ 
 entiation. The things that make a people "different" 
 abound within her. Her whole environment is, in a 
 sense, a school of eccentricity, of detachment, of isola 
 tion. 
 
 The contact and challenge of our modern age to 
 a society involved in such conditions will set up within 
 its dominant population two distinct sets or tendencies 
 of reaction. It is inevitable that one of these reactions 
 should be resistive. A challenge from without will 
 be answered by a responsive challenge from within. 
 Opposition will develop opposition the return and 
 recoil of our life upon itself. It will be general and 
 instinctive. The forces of rejection, of antagonism, 
 of passionate segregation, will possess a profound and 
 general power. An acute and exaggerated conscious- 
 
i 94 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 ness of section and of race will be inevitable. Instead 
 of passing away with the increasing sweep of the 
 challenge from without, it will become the more intense. 
 Its standpoint will be popular, will appeal therefore 
 to the self-interest of a local political leadership, which, 
 in turn, will commend its necessity, exalt its dignity, 
 and attempt its institutional expression. 
 
 IV 
 
 Responding to these impulses of popular reaction, 
 each merely sectional agency in our politics, our jour 
 nalism, or our education becomes, in turn, such an 
 energy of reenforcement to all the processes thus inaugu 
 rated that the force of detachment would become su 
 preme but for the corrective power of another tendency. 
 The force of attachment and inclusion is also operative. 
 It may not always lie upon the surface. Those who 
 at the shore-line watch the drive and direction of an 
 ocean s storm may forget (to use a familiar illustration) 
 that there are deeper, stronger powers than wind and 
 wave; that beneath the tumult and fury of the storm 
 the pull of the tide, unnoted but resistless, is moving 
 the vaster volume of the sea. Within the South the 
 force and sweep of our turmoil are realities; no wise 
 observer will jauntily predict their termination or build 
 upon the assumption of their inconsequence. But 
 deep as the force of gravity and resistless as the equi 
 librium of our stellar magnitudes, the responsive reac 
 tion of our nationality, the moral and economic forces 
 of association and fraternity, are drawing the South 
 into the context and community of the world. 
 
x THE NEW COERCION 195 
 
 Just because this movement which enfolds us is free, 
 is itself a horizon rather than a dynamic, its cogency is 
 the more pervasive and irresistible. It is not a propa 
 ganda, but an invitation : it is an opportunity ; a vast 
 and befriending hospitality. Many forces will react 
 against it, but the deeper forces will react toward it. 
 For the very reason that it offers no acute aggressions, 
 the sway of its attraction is supreme. Because this new 
 coercion does not in the usual sense coerce, its 
 power is the more persistent, and the ultimate and 
 liberal scope of its persuasion is the more decisive. It 
 is not a mere abstraction; it descends not to one 
 particular but to all. It touches not only every isolated 
 locality, but every temper of isolation with an im 
 palpable but dissolving power; for this movement of 
 unification and inclusion, this force of national incor 
 poration drawing into itself the detached interests 
 and the self-separating provinces of our American 
 life is in fact the real education borne upon every 
 page of every newspaper, the final influence of every 
 schoolhouse, the gain acquired in every transaction 
 of our broadening commerce, the ultimate harvest of 
 every farmer who sows for a national market and of 
 every laborer matched and disciplined in the school 
 of an international competition. We live, moreover, 
 by the exchanges of thought as well as by the ex 
 changes of trade. To stand outside the world is in 
 tolerable and impossible. Yet to be admitted is to 
 admit; for the commerce of ideas, of intellectual and 
 social influence, is impossible through erected barriers 
 and unopening doors. 
 
 Our new coercion is indeed but the myriad force of 
 
196 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 every agency and instrument of our modern world, 
 a world everywhere drawing peoples from their de 
 tachment, races from their isolation, governments 
 from their provincialism, societies from peculiar tra 
 ditions and estranging faiths. We may draw about 
 ourselves the tense protections of our "peculiarity," the 
 boundaries of our intellectual or political segregation. 
 In so far as that which we would preserve is the subtle 
 quality of our individuality of spirit, the movement 
 which enfolds us will give it depth, richness, poise. 
 But in so far as we attempt to seek the basis of our 
 detachment within the institutions, the laws, the litera 
 ture which must always form the common terms of our 
 relationship with other sections and peoples (through 
 which they must deal with us and through which we 
 must deal with them), the deeper movement of our 
 own genius will correct us, and will become in re 
 sponse to the expectation of the world a movement 
 of catholicity and accord. For the agencies of its ex 
 pectation, as the world draws us within itself, the 
 instruments of its appeal, lie not in particulars alone, 
 but in those ceaseless assumptions under which it 
 claims our kinship with itself. We cannot escape 
 them. They deal with us as with the people not of the 
 eighteenth century, but of the twentieth; as with men 
 speaking the same language, responsive to the same 
 ideals, answerable to the same laws, moved by like 
 motives, destroyed by the evils and quickened and 
 enriched by the blessings that are visitant wherever the 
 thought of God has a practical reality and conscience 
 a social significance. To reorganize our life outside of 
 the whole congeries of institutions and assumptions 
 
x THE NEW COERCION 197 
 
 in which our age has involved us is as unthinkable 
 as to reorganize ourselves outside of the laws which 
 express the conservation of energy or the force of 
 gravity. Even to violate them is to call them into 
 play; to oppose them is but to affirm them. 
 
 We will therefore deal with our problems tragic 
 and excessive as they are not merely as a modern 
 people, but in conformity with the modern spirit, - 
 a somewhat different thing. To talk, in an age like 
 ours, of not educating any particular class of human 
 beings or of deliberately holding any fraction or race 
 of men at a permanently lower level of industrial or 
 political opportunity is to talk a language as stale 
 and as pathetic as that of the complacent memorial 
 upon the coffin of an Egyptian mummy. We are not 
 bound to assume equalities which do not exist, but we 
 cannot arbitrarily fix the status of inequality from 
 without. The thing cannot be done. It cannot be 
 done except in the terms of general law and in the 
 forms of our common institutions. So to adjust and 
 revamp our general laws as to make them the ex 
 pression and instrument of arbitrary classifications 
 is to habituate them to artificial discriminations and to 
 re-create them upon an undemocratic basis. A dis 
 crimination put into the law is a discriminatory law; 
 a discriminating law, in a democratic society, is not 
 a law, but a revision of the law at the command of the 
 minority. That which may have been so rewritten and 
 reaffirmed is not the limitation of a particular class, 
 but the limitation of the universal basis upon which, 
 and within which, the inter-relations of all men have 
 been established and expressed. 
 
198 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 The essential issue is not the negro at all. He is 
 comparatively of little significance except as the humble 
 occasion and instrument of the processes through 
 which the South is defining and establishing her con 
 ceptions of society and is determining her relations to 
 the country at large, to the world, and to democracy. 
 The fundamental issue is not what we will do with the 
 negro, but what we with the negro as the incident 
 or provocation of our readjustments will do with 
 our institutions. With the negro and with the 
 historic, political, and industrial associations which he 
 involves as its basis, the resistive reaction to which 
 I have referred may draw the South, in its recoil from 
 the pressure of a democratic age, more and more within 
 itself, may intensify its separateness and its isolation, 
 may provincialize its mind, may harden and con 
 firm its life within the closer and more persistent 
 forms of a merely sectional development. Or the life 
 of the South, responding as I believe to be inevitable 
 to the inward forces of a reaction which shall be 
 not negative but affirmative, will enter into ever larger 
 and closer relations with the strong and advancing 
 spirit of our country and our generation. 
 
 The recognition of the rights civil, political, indus 
 trial of the negro race, need involve no invasion of 
 our social autonomy or our race integrity; our "social " 
 segregation need involve no invasion of the negro s 
 political or civil rights. The South will realize that, as 
 it seeks to move forward through the forms of its own 
 free self-determination, its rejection of the principle of 
 free self-determination in the development of any sub 
 ordinate group may establish those legal precedents of 
 
x THE NEW COERCION 199 
 
 discrimination and may set to work within the world those 
 broader popular revulsions under which its own liberties 
 may be redefined. That such contingencies are improb 
 able does not destroy the subtle pressure of the social 
 situation they suggest. Some of the profoundest forces 
 of social life reside within things which do not happen 
 and within circumstances which cannot arise. In the 
 sensitive psychology of human aggregates there is a 
 conscience toward the impossible which is perhaps 
 unneeded as a constraint, but which, like the shadowy 
 intimations of a religion beyond duty, keeps the path 
 way clearer. For, turning to the positive aspect of 
 the contention, it is at least obvious obvious as a cir 
 cumstance which is ever arising and as a force which 
 is ever operating that in so far as we shall choose 
 as the forms of our own free self-determination those 
 and only those which involve the free self-determination 
 of our included groups, the free activity of each must 
 advance and fulfil our own. Within the very life of 
 each, the choosing and fulfilling of its liberty instinc 
 tively becomes the choosing and affirming of our de 
 velopment as the security and theatre of its growth. 
 No true freedom can retard our freedom. Every lib 
 erated capacity must contribute both its capacity and 
 its liberty to ours. 
 
 Such a policy, moreover, will draw into the pro 
 cesses of our self-development the forces that are with 
 out as well as the forces that are within. It will rep 
 resent the answer of hospitality to hospitality. The 
 humanizing and democratizing forces of our age may 
 
200 
 
 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 through such a policy find within us the forms of their 
 proper movement, the unobstructed channels of their 
 accomplishment. Their streams, as we thus direct 
 them, will flow naturally within our own, turning 
 the mill-wheels of our social commerce. This is the 
 lesson of all science. Out of adaptation comes our 
 conquest. Why be thwarted and divided by the 
 waters, when they may be made to unite us, or 
 delayed by currents which may advance us? Why 
 oppose ourselves to tendencies and forces of our 
 time which, admitted within the processes of our 
 development, will serve our well-being and advance 
 our happiness? The powers of that new coercion 
 which some would persuade us to distrust, may be 
 accepted and transmitted within our progress as 
 new and kindly energies of welfare. The influences 
 from without may give us service. Our life, put into 
 full accord with the moving and determining princi 
 ples of our age, will find in their contact not a force of 
 upheaval a damaging contagion of alarm but a 
 source of control and steadiness. A new sense of 
 security, a new consciousness of truth and peace, 
 comes to those who stand against the background of 
 the actual world and the immediate hour, within the 
 flow and context of universal forces, asking no benefits 
 of artifice, but rightful claimants upon the cooperation 
 of the common stars and the universal will. Every 
 man who asks an arbitrary or unnatural favor sur 
 renders something of his birthright; for the birthright 
 of every genuine social factor is not "immunity," but 
 the tonic power of the fair chance, is not "privilege," 
 but democracy. 
 
x THE NEW COERCION 201 
 
 In our departure from our detachment and our 
 isolation we but withdraw ourselves from a false centre 
 and occupy within a full horizon the real centre 
 at which the powers of our age converge. All that 
 men are doing becomes now of advantage to us. We 
 not only can "get the news" more perfectly, but we 
 are at the operative, effective point of distribution for 
 ideas, for labor, for wealth, for culture, yes, for 
 righteousness; for the discipline of life as well as its 
 quality is deepened by its more varied contacts. All 
 that is of service anywhere serves us. All that is truly 
 believed anywhere, delivers us, whether that faith 
 be economic, or political, or religious. Ours is a great 
 task, but within the harness of this task we thus put 
 the very world to work. 
 
 The distinctive genius of any age, its spirit, its as 
 cendant impulse, is perhaps the mightiest social asset 
 available in the development of classes and peoples. 
 In a period, like our own, of general and efficient 
 communications, its power is the more significant. 
 It is the waiting reservoir, the dynamic heritage of 
 every political or social group. Its operation is so 
 bewildering in its energy and complexity that its 
 very existence is at times forgotten; but the peoples 
 who use it, who are wise enough to put it to work for 
 them and within them, must prevail. To accept its 
 service is not necessarily to accept its evils. To admit 
 its cooperations is not blindly to surrender to its per 
 versities. In some respects its teaching is not admirable, 
 and in certain other respects its practice is less admi 
 rable than its teaching. And yet the power with which 
 to fight the evil of this age does not lie in some virtue 
 
202 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 of an age departed, but in some higher power of this, 
 - in some relevant and effectual truth of our own abun 
 dant moment. The armory is full. The weapons are 
 given into our hands. To take the part of our age 
 against its evils is to serve our age as well as to serve 
 our country; but to reject the gift of the finer uses of 
 our generation, to shut out those deeper forces which 
 give to our time its distinctive character, is to serve 
 neither our country nor our age, is to deprive the 
 South of that accumulated and collective energy of 
 accomplishment which is the heritage of every modern 
 state. To throw such power away is to be immeasur 
 ably poorer, wisely to accept it is to be measurably 
 stronger. 
 
 Nor need we fear that when fully accepted within our 
 life and directly at work within our growth it will destroy 
 the strong in the interest of the weak, that it will 
 fulfil every prophecy made by every Abolitionist in its 
 name, or make valid every deduction from its postulates 
 that the morbid have suggested. For its canons are 
 those both of democracy and of science, of reality as 
 well as freedom. That instinct for liberty which is 
 working within the social energy of our period is tense 
 as answering to the nerve of its self-control with 
 the sense of truth. Of the far future we cannot predict. 
 We do not and cannot see. We can only observe, 
 and think, and take counsel one of another as to a way 
 strangely difficult and dark. But it would seem as 
 safe to trust the power of truth, of the sheer actuality 
 of the forces that lie within our scene, as to trust the 
 policies of freedom. A civilization which in this age 
 cannot commit itself into the hands of the truth and into 
 
x THE NEW COERCION 203 
 
 the keeping of liberty, without attempting "private 
 arrangements" in behalf of its institutions, contains 
 no peril so great as its own self-doubting heart. 
 "Things are what they are and the consequences of 
 them will be what they will be; why then should we 
 desire to be deceived?" l 
 
 That the deeper spirit of the South, responding to 
 the forces that encompass us, will accept the processes 
 of reality and liberty as processes of its own develop 
 ment, I do not doubt. Consciously and in large 
 part unconsciously it has done so. Its instinctive 
 nationality is sound. Its loyalty to the country and 
 to our time is genuine. The vitality and scope of its af 
 firmative reaction, under the touch of the new coercion 
 which enfolds it, must be measured not by the stand 
 ard of a conceivable abstract attainment, but in 
 the light of its history and its conditions. For its 
 difficulties are real and the internal grounds of its 
 negative reaction will long persist. To recognize them 
 is not to despair. To underestimate them will con 
 tribute neither to their reduction nor to their postpone 
 ment. To attempt to see them clearly, to measure 
 adequately the principles which move within them, 
 and the ends to which they minister, may itself con 
 tribute to the correction of the detachment and isola 
 tion they invite. 
 
 Conscious of the contact of its age, the popular mind 
 of the South seeking relief from its unquiet will 
 strike again and again, and sometimes with success, 
 at this or that fancied occasion of disturbance. It 
 
 1 Quoted from Bishop Butler, by Matthew Arnold, in "Last Essays 
 on Church and Religion," p. 304. 
 
204 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 will give much sympathy to this or that attack upon some 
 justly offending conception of the negro or upon some 
 phrase or section of the national Constitution. Such 
 impulses, however mistaken, cannot be answered by 
 a misconception of their earnestness or by a misstate- 
 ment of their motive. They are sometimes used, 
 indeed, as are all popular impulses, by unworthy 
 men for selfish ends. But the forces which they rep 
 resent are part of the legitimate psychology of our 
 situation as inevitable and as intelligible as any 
 of the social reactions of our period. Their corrective 
 will be chiefly found not in any explicit criticism or 
 direct attack so much as in that other reaction, that 
 affirmative response to the larger horizon of our affairs, 
 upon which I have dwelt so fully. It is under the 
 instruction of its tendencies that the popular mind 
 will at length perceive the full significance of the forces 
 in which we are involved. It is this positive and 
 affirmative reaction which will at length draw our 
 public opinion within the sway of the conviction that 
 to end the instrument of our unrest the South must 
 needs repeal (if she would dwell apart) not this or that 
 clause of a formal Constitution, but the very genius 
 and quality of her time; that such clauses are but 
 symbols of a deeper agency; that this agency is the 
 age itself with its imperious conceptions and its 
 exhaustless capacity for their distribution; that these 
 powers are effective not because their only sources are 
 without, but because their seat is also here within, - 
 the South herself in her deeper nature and her more 
 intimate desire being quick with the sense of nationality 
 and humanity. 
 
x THE NEW COERCION 205 
 
 The old coercion which was ended by the instinct of 
 liberty in the world has been succeeded by the new, 
 the new, which, as the scene changes, is now that 
 same liberty s coercive form. Every moment is its 
 instrument. Every phase of progress is its minister. 
 Every invention of mechanics or discovery of science 
 is an article of its irresistible conspiracy. Through 
 every fugitive journal or published book, every rail 
 road or telegraph, every exchange of commerce or ideas, 
 every national or international debate, it is ending the 
 isolation and the detachment of social groups and is 
 impelling their reorganization within its larger and 
 freer unity. The forces of this coercion have, as they 
 touch the South, no partial or discriminating interest 
 in any weaker or included group, save as we ourselves 
 may make such a group (or our adjustment to such 
 a group) the point at which the free and normal move 
 ments of democracy and equity are confounded or 
 arrested. They can challenge us through any weaker 
 race only in the event that we, through it, array our 
 selves against the order of the world. They are not 
 peculiarly concerned with such a race (nor, let us re 
 member, in any partial or arbitrary sense with us), 
 but with the free coursing through free channels of the 
 total beneficence of their currents to the fertilization 
 and enrichment of mankind. 
 
 Because they are impartial, because they ask not and 
 give not by private contract, but upon the common 
 terms (terms which therefore every force of nature and 
 of society will instinctively protect) they are imperious. 
 To oppose ourselves to them is to receive them into our 
 selves not as powers of our normal development, but 
 
206 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP, x 
 
 as powers of limitation, maladjustment, and distortion. 
 But to receive them with an answering hospitality, 
 to accept them within our life as proper forces of our 
 development and our happiness, is to unite them to 
 our tasks and to bind them within our progress as the 
 forces of a resistless cooperation; the things that we 
 do will be done well as by the labor of the common 
 will; and the hopes we hold will bear and upbear 
 the seal of the world the community of its patience 
 and the authority of its mood. 
 
ASCENDANCY 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 ASCENDANCY 
 
 I 
 
 THE true ascendancy of any social group, at this or 
 that period of its history, is primarily determined 
 in the more vital sense with reference to the former 
 states or levels of its own life, rather than with refer 
 ence to groups outside itself. One star may be actually 
 lower than another, yet if its progress (as compared 
 with each of its preceding moments) be upward rather 
 than downward, it may be regarded as ascendant ; 
 ascendant not in relation to other stars, but in relation 
 to the former levels of its own advance. 
 
 A star in the western sky may, moreover, be actually 
 higher than a star in the eastern, and may therefore 
 be said to possess a relative ascendancy as compared 
 with its eastern comrade. But this actual relative as 
 cendancy may (from the immediate standpoint of the 
 observer) be unconvincing, for the western star, 
 though at the higher altitude, may be declining, and 
 the eastern star, though at the lower altitude, may be 
 slowly rising passing its former levels and ascendant 
 over its older limits. 
 
 The illustration is but partially applicable to the 
 phenomena of collective growth, and yet it may serve 
 to suggest a vital though a somewhat neglected sense 
 in which the ascendancy of social groups may be con 
 sidered. For the fact of deepest significance in refer- 
 
 209 
 
2io THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 ence to every human aggregate is the relative status 
 of its development as compared with the former states 
 or stages of its own advance; it is this test which 
 indicates its growth or its decline. Here necessarily 
 is the real basis of the distinction between an advancing 
 and a decaying group, between decadent and ascendant 
 peoples. The national or social aggregate which is 
 slowly slipping below the levels of its former life, which 
 is so using the capital of its moral and economic forces 
 as to be consuming more than it is producing, is not 
 in the organic sense entitled to the deeper distinctions 
 of ascendancy. While its relative position as con 
 trasted with other aggregates may be incidentally 
 superior, it is in fact a declining power representative 
 of excellences which possess only a residual dominion, 
 and carrying within its own life the now prevailing 
 forces of debility and decay. 
 
 This does not suggest that a great but decadent 
 people may not be for generations even for centuries 
 relatively nobler and stronger than a people weaker 
 but progressive. Yet it does, I think, suggest that 
 with every national or social group, however great, 
 the question of supreme concern as it considers its 
 own fertility, efficiency, and happiness is not the 
 much mooted question as to whether or not it is superior 
 to some other nation or group, but the question as to 
 whether its own experience as contrasted with the 
 levels of its former progress is fairly representative 
 of an -ascendant life. With every organic structure, 
 personal or social, the health and soundness of the life 
 itself is thus the primary basis of its ascendancy. It is 
 doubtless interesting and profitable to compare our 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 211 
 
 civilization with the civilization of Japan; it is, how 
 ever, equally interesting and even more profitable that 
 we should compare our own present civilization with 
 its past, that we should measure by this test its vital 
 soundness as well as its versatility and wealth, and 
 that, thereupon, we should contribute what we may 
 to those popular capacities for clear thinking and right 
 feeling which must largely constitute the forces of our 
 self-correction. This is not to admit the thought of 
 failure or decay. It is but to emphasize the thought 
 that so long as our positive ascendancy is secure, our 
 relative ascendancy as contrasted with other peoples 
 need not primarily concern us, and that when our 
 positive ascendancy is gone, and our star declines 
 upon its descending pathway, no concern, however 
 serious, can give to our relative ascendancy the signifi 
 cance and the distinction we would crave. To pre 
 vail will have little meaning when we have ceased to 
 prevail against ourselves. 
 
 II 
 
 (And yet, inasmuch as the precise parity of social 
 groups is practically unthinkable, some groups being 
 actually stronger or weaker than other groups, it is 
 / inevitable that the question of the relative ascendancy 
 S of one nation or section or race, as contrasted with other 
 ^nations or sections or races, should persistently recur. 
 Not that the issue in its totality can in every case 
 be finally determined. For a particular group which 
 may, in some respects, be stronger than all the groups 
 with which it is contrasted, may, in other respects, 
 
212 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 be relatively weaker. One nation may be ascendant 
 in reference to one range of qualities or one species of 
 wealth, yet in reference to other standards of production 
 or other phases of efficiency it may be immeasurably 
 inferior. The question must be answered, moreover, 
 in relation to the varied forms of social strain to which 
 peoples are subjected, and in relation to the conditions 
 and the environment of the specific age in which the 
 contrasted groups must play their part. Certain 
 forms of social attainment may indeed be extremely 
 difficult, may illustrate fine and rare powers of artistic 
 enthusiasm or collective industry, yet they may be- 
 in the actual context of our present struggle so 
 irrelevant as to represent no important capacity for 
 success. Other qualities of other groups may be so 
 aptly and definitely "timed for the race," so over 
 whelmingly and directly "practical," so strung and 
 tuned with the sense of the immediate industrial or 
 physical encounter, as to promise much for the earlier 
 periods of the struggle, but to promise little for those 
 longer and severer stages which test the factor of re 
 serve, the resources of their self-control, the slow wisdom 
 of their moral steadiness and their spiritual patience. 
 Ascendancy at one point may not involve ascendancy 
 at others. The problem as with almost all social 
 problems possesses its complexities and confusions. 
 And yet to be ascendant in relation to other groups 
 ascendant not over them but among them is, to 
 some appreciable degree, one of the most elementary 
 and persistent of our social passions. 
 
 Not infrequently, however, the pursuit of ascendancy, 
 because conceived in false and destructive terms, 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 213 
 
 has itself involved the embarrassment if not the de 
 cadence of the aspiring group. It would be interesting 
 to inquire to what extent the policies upon which modern 
 Spain depended for her relative advantage, resulted 
 in her poverty, how far the cultural isolation of ancient 
 Greece contributed to her decay, and to what extent 
 the military preoccupations of the Empire resulted in 
 the decline of Roman life and the ultimate deterioration 
 of the Roman state. And yet we may not forget that, 
 in some of its forms, the struggle for ascendancy has 
 often seemed to be but a phase of the struggle for exist 
 ence, peoples like individuals being sometimes so sharply 
 confronted with the challenge of opposition that they 
 have been forced to answer to the alternative " prevail 
 or die." Rightly, therefore, to divide the issues of 
 ascendancy, to claim without encroachment and to 
 prevail without oppression, to choose and to pursue 
 only those courses which are the pathways of a right 
 eous self-expression, to reject the constricting and 
 narrowing forms of false advantage, and to attain to 
 true power and to the horizons of a real and service 
 able eminence this is the problem again and again 
 presented to national and social groups. 
 
 Within the life of our Southern States the problem 
 has assumed at least two forms. The representative 
 people of the South have been conscious of a double 
 task, the task of maintaining their general ascendancy 
 in relation to the included group comprising the negro 
 population, and the task of maintaining their political 
 ascendancy as a section and as a people in relation to the 
 other sections of the United States. The latter aspect 
 of our aspiration now seems so sadly and impossibly 
 
214 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 remote that we are sometimes tempted to forget those 
 deeper ambitions for a national leadership which 
 swayed the generations immediately preceding our 
 Civil War. The leadership and the prestige of Wash 
 ington, Jefferson, Monroe, James Madison, Patrick 
 Henry, Chief Justice Marshall, established a general 
 and effectual body of political influence, a cumulative 
 political tradition, which made the South preeminent 
 if not paramount in the earlier institutional development 
 of our country. That glory has departed, and the 
 South now sits in our national councils clothed in but 
 the sorriest measure of her old and honored state. 1 
 
 1 "I speak to you in the intimate intonations of our unfulfilled 
 ambition. For we have an unfulfilled ambition that has given a deep 
 seriousness to our lives. Of course, I do not speak of personal dis 
 appointments. . . . We claim a larger ambition and a higher 
 patriotism than this. What I speak of is an unfulfilled ambition for 
 our country an ambition for these States and these people as a part 
 of the Union. The ambition that men felt in the time of Washington, 
 of Jefferson, of Marshall this is what I mean. They and their 
 fellows wrought out their high wish. Our wish, equally high, we have 
 not wrought out ; and that is our sorrow. How has the South 
 fallen in the life, in the thought, in the conduct of the Republic, since 
 their time ! If we have not been disinherited, we are yet almost 
 strangers in the house of our fathers. Why are we not, why may we 
 not become, leaders in our country s progress? " From an address 
 by Walter H. Page, of North Carolina, at the Conference for Educa 
 tion in the South, Birmingham, Ala., April 27, 1904; Report of the 
 Proceedings, p. 99. 
 
 Yet in the view, sometimes suggested, that the South will find this 
 serious accession of political influence in the merely external division 
 of her party support, I cannot concur. I see no large or wholesome 
 political liberation or political development in the States like Ken 
 tucky, Maryland, and Missouri, where close party divisions have 
 been effected. Serious political influence will be dependent upon 
 deeper forces and on more far-reaching conditions than the mere fact 
 of "voting for the other party," especially among those who have 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 215 
 
 There are many explanations of her decline; there 
 are many theories as to the essential secret of her 
 restoration; and yet the present facts touch us with a 
 melancholy not wholly lost in the stirring sense of our new 
 achievements and our brighter future. A crude numer 
 ical supremacy would do no one any good. A hard and 
 coercive ascendancy, based upon a mere count of 
 heads, on the clever perpetuation of some mechanical 
 or tactical advantage, or on some shrewd association of 
 selfish interests, would involve no true renewal of our 
 political or social power. But a free ascendancy, based 
 upon capacities for leadership which the nation might 
 accept as indispensable to her welfare, an ascendancy 
 of service rather than an ascendancy of force, would 
 involve both the return of our prestige and the renewal 
 of all the deeper and happier springs of our confidence 
 and pride. 
 
 Such, after all, is the only form or phase of ascend 
 ancy which really matters, or which in a democracy 
 
 can have any true security or ultimate significance. 
 The only way in which we can become strong within 
 the nation is to become really necessary to its life. 
 When in the soundness and health of our industrial 
 
 been inclined to the opinion that (at the South) the Democratic party 
 
 as contrasted with the local Republican organization has not 
 been right because it has been numerous, but has been numerous be 
 cause, in spite of its many blunders, it has upon the whole been right. 
 That this party precedence is now to be subjected to the tests of a 
 wiser Republican appeal and a higher party competition must have 
 its wholesome influence. With the party questions involved I am to 
 deal more fully, however, in the volume, "Issues, Southern and Na 
 tional." In the present chapter I am concerned with conditions that 
 seem to me to be more fundamental than those of our immediate 
 party politics. 
 
2i6 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 development, in the fertility and efficacy of our ideas, 
 in the higher sagacity and the personal devotion of our 
 political leadership we have that to contribute which 
 our country can find with us but which it cannot or does 
 not so fully find elsewhere, its powers will once more 
 quicken our hands and our hands will again execute 
 its larger tasks. The agricultural ascendancy of the 
 middle West is free, is not artificially wrested from any 
 body, but actually bestowed by the suffrages of those 
 who buy its grain, who buy it because they have 
 learned that the consummate capacities which have 
 given themselves to the problems of its growth and its 
 transportation have proven their indispensable and 
 peculiar fitness for the feeding of the world. The merr 
 cantile and banking ascendancy of New York is not 
 secured by trick or artifice or negotiation ; it is bestowed 
 and conferred by those who trade. Tricks have been 
 used in its behalf (and always to its eventual injury), 
 but the only real basis of its ascendancy lies in its essen 
 tial service its proved and indispensable utility to the 
 commercial and industrial interests of the United States. 
 The recent political ascendancy of the North (I make 
 no exclusive reference to any particular political party) 
 has been largely due to the fact that the North, not being 
 overburdened by the preoccupations of such a local issue 
 as the negro has presented, has been freer to deal with 
 national issues, freer to develop capacities for national 
 and international administration, and has therefore 
 ruled not only through the larger masses of her popula 
 tion, but through the larger range of her experience. 
 Our common necessities have yielded the suffrages of 
 her support. 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 217 
 
 The ascendancy as a whole of any particular 
 section in relation to other sections may not recur. It 
 is perhaps better that it should not. For each section, 
 however, through the training of its special capacities 
 in the field of its special experience, to represent some 
 particular phase of ascendancy within the common 
 councils of the country, would contribute to a sectional 
 "balance of power" and to a broader sense of participa 
 tion which would deepen and enrich the consciousness 
 of our unity as a people. As each section or quarter of 
 our country finds an ascendancy of service based upon 
 its peculiar capacities and opportunities, and expressed 
 through its indisputable relation to the national welfare, 
 its position of eminence and honor need not be self- 
 proclaimed, it will be bestowed; and its federate and 
 authoritative relation to the common life will be instinc 
 tively acknowledged. Has the South a field of experi 
 ence peculiarly her own? Has the South, therefore, a 
 peculiar opportunity for the development of distinctive 
 capacities and for the contribution of an indispensable 
 service ? Has she a training ground for forms of states 
 manship of which this country in its national progress 
 and in its international relations has especial need? 
 Has she a chance to do things which no other section 
 has quite the chance to do so well? And is there for 
 her in the special capacities and the eminent suc 
 cess through which she may perform her immediate 
 task a possible opportunity to regain her place of 
 influence in relation to other and more varied issues of 
 our national development? 
 
2i8 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 Ill 
 
 As one looks broadly to-day over the scene of national 
 enterprises and of international policy, one can hardly 
 fail to note two general and conspicuous movements 
 in the development of contemporary peoples. The first 
 is a movement of comprehension and inclusion. The 
 large political aggregates are growing larger. The 
 small are disappearing or growing smaller. The phase 
 of this tendency which, for the South, has an especial 
 interest, is that the isolation of weaker groups is being 
 broken up, and the "inferior" peoples are being every 
 where included and reorganized within the life of 
 stronger aggregates. The weaker lands are not being 
 let alone ; they are not being separated unto their own 
 boundaries and delivered to their own people. 
 
 Into the ultimate causes of such a movement I do not 
 here inquire; I now enter into no discussion of its 
 policy or its ethics. It is with the fact that I would 
 deal, the broad outstanding fact that (for example) 
 almost every man has a government in Africa except 
 the African, and that all round the world the weaker 
 groups and the backward peoples are being included 
 within the limits and policies of the stronger. The 
 one rejected policy is the policy of political segregation; 
 the one prevalent policy is the policy of inclusion. 
 Where political segregation persists and the movement 
 for inclusion has been halted, the result is due not to 
 political disinclination, but to strategic defeat. Di 
 plomacy has not yet solved the problem of "ways and 
 means." Its plans may have been thwarted, yet 
 not by popular rejection at home nor by the effectual 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 219 
 
 protest of the weaker group, but rather by another 
 nation and a competitive diplomacy. Its policy of 
 encroachment has been checked only by another of the 
 "leading nations," representing the same policy, 
 eager for the same "burden," ready for the same ad 
 ministrative "inclusion." 
 
 In addition, however, to this movement toward the 
 inclusion and comprehension of populations, there is 
 also proceeding strangely enough a movement 
 toward the broader distribution of power. The move 
 ment of empire is coincident with a movement toward 
 democracy. The two movements are not always found 
 within the same territory, but they overlap at many 
 points and each is as characteristic of our period as the 
 other. Just how far the one is related to the other it 
 would be difficult to say. Perhaps (aside from any 
 question of individual or local rights) the very size of the 
 huge political aggregates which the movement of in 
 clusion is creating, has impelled the extension and 
 development of the local basis of control. Perhaps, 
 after all, in the interest of the efficiency of federal ten 
 dencies it has become advisable to rescue the adminis 
 trative organization from unwieldiness and inflexibility 
 by an ever broadening distribution of the centres of in 
 terest and power. At any rate the fact is clear. The 
 tendency of all self-conscious political groups is essentially 
 in the direction of a larger popular control. Great 
 Britain, Germany, France are emphasizing the impor 
 tance of their colonial units; in Germany the social 
 ist organization now represents a vote of more than 
 3,000,000 and is numerically the first political party of 
 the Empire; the struggle for imperial representation 
 
220 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 in the Russias is not more significant than the previous 
 possession of numberless local rights which have not 
 been so generally reported; to India and South Africa 
 are yielded each year a more varied representative 
 authority; Bulgaria is free; concessions to the demo 
 cratic movement are made even by the Sultan at 
 Constantinople ; and, beyond the Caucasus and the Eu 
 phrates, Persia itself is upon the eve of a Constitution. 
 I would exaggerate the scope of none of these develop 
 ments. That they have always meant what, to the 
 average American mind, they naturally suggest, I 
 would be the last to declare. Yet they represent a 
 tendency, and a tendency in one direction. In the other 
 direction, be it noted, in the direction of the fundamental 
 reversal of the democratic movement, there is no con 
 scious tendency anywhere. 
 
 We are confronted therefore by two significant devel 
 opments in our immediate history. First, there is the 
 tendency toward inclusion, the movement of empire, the 
 gradual incorporation of the weaker races and groups 
 within the administrative federation of the stronger. 
 Secondly, there is the movement of democracy, the ten 
 dency toward the broader distribution of the units of 
 control. The stronger peoples are drawing into closer 
 and closer relations with the weaker, and yet the terms 
 under which these relations are established and expressed 
 are inevitably tinged and colored by the democratic 
 assumptions to which modern society is increasingly 
 committed. The movement of empire is indeed modi 
 fying certain of our older notions of democracy, correct 
 ing some of our doctrinaire conceptions as to the natural 
 equality of men; but the movement of democracy is 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 221 
 
 modifying even more deeply some of our older notions of 
 empire, is correcting the legal presumptions of inequal 
 ity, is enforcing the conception of the equality of rights 
 before the law, is impressing the fact of the social re 
 sponsibility of the strong, is discouraging and slowly 
 arresting the destructive policies of exploitation, and 
 everywhere commending the redemptive and construc 
 tive policies of equity, order, and education. It is no 
 easy problem, this problem of the strong living with 
 the weak (as the strong have resolved to do) and yet so 
 living with them as to keep faith with those profounder 
 interests of the weak which are also the interests of the 
 strong, so living as to assure peace without inflicting 
 desolation, as to preserve order without defeating jus 
 tice, as to upbuild a state which will express the life of 
 its higher groups without enfeebling or destroying that 
 waiting manhood of weaker peoples which itself craves 
 and deserves expression. 
 
 We ourselves are finding this problem in Cuba, in 
 Porto Rico, in Hawaii, in Panama, in the Philippines, 
 just as England is finding it in the West Indies, in India, 
 Africa, Australasia. In some respects, it presents just 
 now for every modern government the supreme question 
 of its national policy and its international relations. 
 That England and Germany that other nationalities 
 as well do not have to face it in its cold and literal 
 forms, that they can govern without a written con 
 stitution, may seem to obscure or to postpone the 
 sharper phases of the "contradiction," but it does not 
 terminate the problem in its essence, nor change the 
 essential elements of the administrative task. Tem 
 porarily, indeed, the task is immeasurably simpler: 
 
222 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 through this or that period of wise and kindly tutelage 
 the problem may appear to sleep; but this sleep is 
 never that of oblivion or death. As between the ten 
 dencies of governmental absolutism and the tendencies 
 of popular participation the latter are not the tendencies 
 which are vanishing, or being outgrown, or being super 
 seded by "more modern methods." There may be no 
 written constitution, but the forces which antedate our 
 constitutions, which they express and will outlive, 
 are operative within the scenes and factors of every 
 administrative situation. They are presented not 
 merely by the instincts and interests of the included 
 groups, but even more persistently by the instincts, 
 interests, and preferences of the groups including them. 
 The issue is always there. For the stronger race so to 
 dwell with the weaker as to upbuild a common state 
 upon the basis of the common welfare and expressive 
 of the common happiness, may be called the distinctive 
 task of a democratic imperialism or of an imperial 
 democracy ; yet it is in either case the supreme 
 problem just now challenging the political capacity of 
 modern peoples. 
 
 IV 
 
 Where, peculiarly, is the training ground so far as 
 our country is concerned of such capacities ? The 
 task which day by day engages us in our Southern States 
 is but the characteristic problem of the modern world. 
 It confronts us in phases of peculiar difficulty, for each 
 element of the problem is presented in clear and insist 
 ent forms. There is upon one hand the uncompromis 
 ing reality of the negro, in his inexperience, his weakness, 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 223 
 
 his racial contrasts; there is, upon the other hand, the 
 uncompromising reality of the Constitution, both in the 
 force of its written obligations and in that deeper force 
 which our own instincts, interests, and preferences have 
 accorded it. We may quarrel with its details, but even 
 after we had repealed them (should we do so) the opera 
 tive force of its elementary assumptions of our own 
 social convictions and dispositions would create the 
 same problem and reimpose the same difficulties. All 
 the essential issues presented by a stronger and a weaker 
 race within the administrative household of a demo 
 cratic state would still confront us. To repeal an ir 
 ritation or an annoyance is not to abolish a situation or 
 to remove an issue of life. We have to do with a situa 
 tion and with an issue of life. 
 
 To face this problem as it engages us or as we are en 
 gaged by it, and to deal with it successfully, is to meet 
 not only a necessity of our welfare but that special task 
 through which we may best serve our country and our 
 age. Not that these may rightly demand of us a neat 
 and mechanical "solution," wrapped within the easy 
 formulas of a political panacea. "The great problems 
 of experience are never solved in any mathematical or 
 final sense. They are solved only in the sense that life 
 becomes adjusted to them, or in the sense that their 
 conflicting or complementary elements find a working 
 adjustment to one another, an adjustment consistent in 
 larger and larger measure with wisdom, right, happiness ; 
 but always coincident with the possibility of misconcep 
 tion and with recurrent periods of acute antagonism. 
 The issues of racial cleavage, like the issues of labor 
 and capital, or of science and religion, yield to no pre- 
 
224 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 cise formulas; they are issues of life, persistent and 
 irreducible. And yet they are subject to approximate 
 adjustments, increasingly righteous, intelligent, and 
 effective, and yielding an increasing measure of social 
 peace, of industrial cooperation, of individual freedom 
 and happiness. It is only in this sense that the word 
 solution is employed. Toward the establishment of 
 such a working adjustment of the factors of any national 
 problem, it is well to labor in order that the tasks of 
 American life may become the occasions of a keener 
 and more widely distributed sense of social obligation, 
 a larger and saner political temper, a purer civic devo 
 tion, rather than the occasions of national demoraliza 
 tion." l 
 
 Such a progressive and approximate solution we may 
 advance to further and larger stages of success. To do 
 so will be to advance our institutions in their efficiency 
 and our country in its promise. So to further these, 
 so to play our part in reference to what is perhaps the 
 supreme difficulty in our national experience, will 
 advance the vitality of our own relation to its common 
 welfare and the indispensable significance of our service 
 to the world itself. This need not involve our exclusive 
 absorption in a local issue. To accept it in its larger 
 meaning, in the spirit of our fundamental institutions, 
 is to transform it from a local issue into a national 
 opportunity. To deal with it in a temper un-American 
 and in terms repressive and provincial is to localize it 
 and to be localized by it ; but to accept it and to deal 
 with it as the men of a practical and yet a democratic 
 
 1 From the preface to the author s volume, "The Present South," 
 p. ix. 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 225 
 
 age is to be employed, through it, at the very testing 
 point of our modern spirit and of our national institu 
 tions. There is no strong political party which it does 
 not embarrass and involve. There is therefore no na 
 tional issue and no area within our national boundaries 
 which it does not affect. We may dislike the task and 
 may shrink from it, may much prefer to deal with the 
 issues peculiar to other localities and peoples, but we 
 cannot escape it ; it is the problem which, in the phrase 
 of the period, is " up to us." 
 
 What is the alternative? If we may make no dem 
 onstration of capacity by dealing with this question, 
 may we do so by ignoring it ? If we are to find for the 
 South no distinction of leadership or eminence of service 
 in the handling of our own task, are other and more 
 general tasks likely to be committed to our keeping? 
 If we fail, by bungling or preoccupation or neglect, 
 in doing the thing that is at hand, if we sulk at our 
 own work, or weaken idly or petulantly beneath its 
 strain, are our shoulders the more likely to feel the 
 weight and honor of the general burden ? 
 
 V 
 
 Much has been accomplished. And yet the period of 
 time is so brief within which the South has been able 
 to deal unobstructedly with the conditions, that it is 
 inevitable that only the beginnings of an adjustment 
 should appear. Nothing so tempts one to despair 
 as to hear some distinguished publicist dwelling plain 
 tively upon "the now extended trial" which has been 
 accorded to this or that factor in the situation. So 
 
226 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 short a perspective, a pessimism so premature, is an 
 injustice both to the South and to the negro. It is 
 superficial and unhistorical. Our whole case has 
 suffered from few things so seriously as from that utter 
 lack of social imagination (upon the part of many of 
 the well meaning of both sections) which supposes that 
 the vast and involved confusions, the different histories, 
 the conflicting interests, the inevitable suspicions, the 
 diverging social tendencies and political affiliations 
 of two wholly contrasted races thrown together within 
 a fate which has seemed to make the rights of each 
 a menace to the security of the other could be com 
 posed within a couple of generations, and finally and 
 complacently catalogued in some cheerful list of " Pop 
 ular Misunderstandings Rectified." No; these issues 
 run deep through all the more recent soil of our ad 
 ventures and our institutions back into the very roots 
 of nature. Their processes of adjustment must be those 
 of growth, of slow approximation, of gradual but firm 
 advance into a clearer appreciation of motives, a 
 broader knowledge of life, and a more accurate under 
 standing of both the persistent factors in the problem 
 given us. There would be no problem if the negro were 
 not a negro ; there would be no problem if this age, and 
 this country which is its characteristic institutional 
 expression were not distinctively democratic. 
 
 It may be said that the South is not likely to forget 
 the first, that we, at least, are always likely to know 
 that the negro is a negro. It is true : and yet it is also 
 true that the South has sometimes forgotten (perhaps 
 not unnaturally) that the rest of the country also knows 
 it. The fact may be ignored or obscured by a few, 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 227 
 
 but the average multitudes of the North and of the 
 modern world are as far from the notion that the negro 
 is but a white man in a darker skin, as are the multi 
 tudes of the South from the notion that the negro is not 
 a man at all. It is the privilege of each section, if it 
 will have the magnanimity to do so, to judge the other 
 not by the small eccentric remnant of its sentimentalists, 
 but by the sober aggregate of its collective common 
 sense. The world knows that the negro is a negro; 
 the negro knows it, and rightly declines to deny it or 
 abjure it. Any "solution" which ignores it would 
 wrong the weak as well as the strong, for it would yield 
 its inevitable fruit of disappointment and reaction. It 
 is an element of the problem which no tendency or 
 inclination of our age would have us to forget, but which 
 its passion for reality (the age being, as we have seen, 
 an age of science as well as an age of democracy) 
 would command us to regard. To call the weak strong, 
 to call the ignorant wise, to press the refinements of 
 Horatian prosody upon those whose problem is bread, 
 to repose government in the hands of those who can 
 naturally have no instincts concerning it except to 
 welcome it as a Santa Claus or to sell it as a bauble; 
 ruthlessly to anticipate capacities in the untried at the 
 expense of the experience, the interests, and the capaci 
 ties of the tried is to touch all the solid integrities of 
 society, the assumptions and supports of its elementary 
 transactions, with a vague and tottering madness. It 
 is what the South will not do. And, what is just now of 
 almost equal importance, it is what no one expects the 
 South to do. 
 
228 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 For the spirit of democracy is not essentially at war 
 with the spirit of reality. If it be in conflict with the 
 force of reality to call the weak strong and the ignorant 
 wise, it is equally at variance with reality to call the 
 strong weak and the wise ignorant, to classify a weaker 
 group wholly under the assumption of weakness, and 
 after asking it to grow to deal to the individuals 
 through which its growth appears, the same ruthless 
 repression imposed upon the most irresponsible of their 
 race. This the South has not wholly done. The rec 
 ognition politically as well as industrially of the 
 exceptional negro has in a number of our States and in 
 many of our communities been explicit. The familiar 
 assumption of the older controversialist of the North 
 that all negroes have been disfranchised is conspicu 
 ously unfounded. And yet that there is among us such 
 a tendency is evident enough. It is not the prevailing 
 tendency; it is checked and corrected by other forces; 
 but it is sufficiently powerful and representative to arouse 
 the concern and to challenge the opposition of those 
 within the South who desire that the forces of reality 
 shall have their genuine rather than their spurious ex 
 pression. 
 
 For to deal alike with the capable and the incapable, 
 to make no appreciable distinction between the un 
 worthy and the worthy, is not merely to deliver the better 
 life of the negro to a sense of injury and humiliation, 
 but to take from a whole race one of the deeper incen 
 tives of advance. More serious still, it is to involve all 
 our political formulas in the twist and tradition of un 
 reality, is to weaken the simplicity and directness of 
 their meaning in the average mind and the adminis- 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 229 
 
 trative habit of the stronger race, and by the social 
 reactions attending such a process is to involve the 
 whole body of our popular political instincts in per 
 versity and confusion. I have so frequently indicated, 
 in this volume and elsewhere, the reactive injury of 
 arbitrary methods in their relation to the stronger group 
 that I do not here dwell upon them further. To declare 
 that the political capacity of the worthy negro is not 
 equal to that of the illiterate white man is wholly to 
 confuse the issue. The statement is in many cases 
 true, though I have never been able to understand how 
 it could injure the political capacity of the illiterate white 
 man for us to demand that he shall " qualify. " * And 
 
 1 " Illiteracy is not a crime, but literacy is a duty. It is a duty of the 
 individual to himself, and not only to himself but to the State. It is 
 for the welfare of all that every man should be able to read the legal 
 papers which he signs and the laws which he is expected to obey. 
 No man should vote who cannot read the ballot which he casts. The 
 man who himself has fought in the armies of the State should be 
 exempt (as having already served his apprenticeship of responsibility). 
 He should be excepted either by specific declaration or by a general 
 provision postponing the period at which the new Constitution 
 shall become effective. ... I am not in favor, even though the 
 individual be not entitled to exemption on the ground of military ser 
 vice I am not in favor of surprising any man into the forfeiture of 
 his ballot. The State should be reasonable ... but she should also 
 be wise in relation to her own good. Alabama s percentage of illiteracy 
 puts her, in that category, almost at the foot of the list of States. Shall 
 she remain so ? I am not now impugning the voting capacity of the 
 illiterate white man; he is usually a better voter than the illiterate 
 negro; and he is sometimes a better voter than some of the white men 
 who can read and write. But I am arguing for the welfare of the 
 white man and I am speaking in his interest. . . . Does he not need 
 the incentive of a slight educational test ? Will he value the ballot as 
 he should if we continue to make it as cheap in his hands as ignorance 
 itself ? Is it statesmanlike to declare, as the State platform has de 
 clared, that the Constitutional Convention chosen by the people 
 of Alabama for the consideration of this whole question shall be 
 
230 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 yet the essential issue is not at all an issue as between the 
 relative political capacity of the illiterate white man 
 and the literate negro, or between this class and that of 
 these contrasted races. The ballot has never been any 
 where withheld or bestowed upon the subtle grounds of 
 comparative political capacity. We do not withhold 
 it from a Russian who has never known it, to bestow it on 
 a Frenchman who has exercised it for a decade. We do 
 not decide, before awarding it, whether it is safer in the 
 hands of a cultivated Austrian socialist who does under 
 stand it or in those of a conservative Austrian peasant 
 who does not. Allegations against the political capacity 
 of excluded classes have insistently opposed (with more 
 or less truth) every extension of the suffrage under 
 every modern government; and yet it has been usually 
 found except in cases in which the admission of the 
 ignorant and inexperienced was so precipitate and so 
 overwhelming as to submerge the state itself (as in the 
 regime of our "Reconstruction") that the classes re 
 cently admitted have exercised the suffrage with as 
 much intelligence and responsibility as the classes which 
 have grown old in privilege and stale with custom. 
 Such is the experience of England, of France, of our 
 own communities at the North. Many a negro with 
 his hard-won training, or with his little farm, is a 
 wiser and safer custodian of the ballot than the white 
 loafers about our bar-rooms or the transient element in 
 the foreign population of our industrial and mining 
 centres. 
 
 denied the right even to consider so elementary and so conservative a 
 proposal ? " From "An Open Letter Against the Proposed Constitu 
 tional Convention," by Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy, of Mont 
 gomery, Ala., April 12, 1901. 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 231 
 
 And yet, as I have already ventured to suggest, this 
 is not at all the essential issue. The real question is not 
 as to whether the worthy negro has, as yet, any very 
 marked political capacity, but as to whether the attitude 
 of the State toward such capacity as he has, is to be 
 that of development or repression ? That, in a sentence, 
 is our question. Is it to the interest of the State that 
 there should be perpetuated within its limits a vast * 
 politically excluded population, a population of per 
 manent non-participants in the interests, inspirations, 
 and responsibilities of suffrage? There is no question 
 here as to the unrestricted admission of the great masses 
 of our ignorant and semi-ignorant blacks. I know no 
 advocate of such admission. But the question is as to 
 whether the individuals of the race, upon conditions of 
 restriction legally imposed and fairly administered, shall 
 be admitted to adequate and increasing representation 
 in the electorate. And as that question is more seriously 
 and more generally considered, many of the leading 
 publicists of the South, I am glad to say, are quietly re 
 solved that the answer to it shall be affirmative. 
 
 They realize that because of historic traditions it is 
 inevitable that the admitted negroes should at first 
 vote against "the party of the soil"; that theoretically 
 if not actually the negro group may sometimes hold 
 
 1 Mr. Walter F. Willcox, expert statistician of the Census Bureau, 
 one of the least hopeful of the critics of negro growth and progress, 
 estimates that at the close of the present century there are not unlikely 
 to be from 23,000,000 to 24,000,000 negroes in this country, most 
 of whom will be presumably within the Southern States. See Mr. 
 Willcox s paper in "Studies of the American Race Problem," by Alfred 
 H. Stone; Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, 1908, p. 503. Of 
 course the white increase will be much greater, so that the proportionate 
 number of negroes will probably be smaller than to-day. 
 
232 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 "the balance of power," but that the negro vote is more 
 likely to divide and that the menace of its partisan 
 solidity will more certainly disappear under a policy of 
 fairness than under a policy of discrimination. They 
 have observed, also, that the third party or the reck 
 less faction which has made a discreditable alliance 
 with the negro vote has usually met the inexorable 
 penalty of the politically insincere the penalty of 
 popular rebuke and of temporary, or permanent, an 
 nihilation; that the possible peril of a smaller group 
 to the efficiency of the State is not a ground for de 
 stroying the democratic basis of the State itself (for upon 
 that pretext the Conservatives of the East might strike 
 the ballot from the hands of every Socialist, or a decided 
 majority might anywhere subvert the power of the 
 minority) ; and that the only real remedy for the abuse of 
 suffrage lies in the normal and automatic reactions of 
 public opinion. Nor have they forgotten that if the 
 fact that a newly admitted class may theoretically hold 
 "the balance of power" is a valid argument against 
 the admission of worthy negroes to the ballot, it is an 
 argument which would have excluded every new class 
 which has been advanced to the suffrage since the intro 
 duction of the franchise; and that none of the possible 
 or occasional evils of a carefully qualified negro electo 
 rate are likely to be so insidious or so damaging as the 
 deliberate perpetuation of a fixed discrimination against 
 a particular class a class permitted in war to bear the 
 responsibilities of the national defence, forced in peace to 
 bear the responsibilities of the law-observing, of the tax 
 payer, of the free worker on the common soil, and yet 
 inexorably condemned to a permanent status of political 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 233 
 
 humiliation. No population under such conditions - 
 as even the counsels of self-interest might suggest will 
 ever reach the normal measure of its industrial produc 
 tivity. Such a policy is powerless to touch the deeper 
 springs of initiative and ambition; and the lower the 
 original endowment of initiative the greater the necessity 
 for every legitimate political reenforcement of the incen 
 tives to alert and sustained production. 
 
 A policy of fixed political humiliation toward any 
 class of our population comports even less with our in 
 stincts than with our interests and our laws. There is 
 no place in our American system for a helot class. 1 
 Our country is a democracy; and, whether we will or 
 no, we are the inheritors of a Constitution. This is the 
 second irreducible factor of our problem. Not only is 
 the negro a negro, and not only is that fact among the 
 realities, but it is also among the realities that the re 
 creation of our institutions and the transformation of the 
 political and social assumptions of our age are not among 
 our privileges. Nor are such enterprises among our 
 conjectures or desires. We want no fixed and perma 
 nent populations of "the inferior." We may in every 
 personal or social sense desire separation, that is an 
 issue of personal reserve. It trenches upon no legal or 
 social right. It inflicts no degradation of personal, in 
 dustrial, or political status. It is a dogma not of 
 repression, but of self-protection and self-develop 
 ment. But to legislate the permanent and indis 
 criminate political proscription of a whole population 
 
 1 See also the Memorial Address on J. L. M. Curry, by Edwin 
 Anderson Alderman, now President of the University of Virginia; 
 Proceedings of the Sixth Conference for Education in the South, p. 266. 
 
234 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 is to attempt the refounding of a country which is not 
 exclusively our own, and the revival and reconstitution 
 of an epoch of class autocracy which Jefferson, Washing 
 ton, and Marshall had themselves surpassed. Indeed, 
 our own greater preference is our greater country. 
 The men of the South whatever may be their political 
 expedients of the moment have seriously no more 
 interest in the reactionary philosophies of caste than 
 in the political conceptions of Nicholas II. If the con 
 scious and deliberate acceptance of such a status by the 
 weaker group be the only condition of "peace," then 
 we had better have something less than peace; for it 
 would indicate an absence of manhood in the weaker 
 population far more serious than an inadequate or 
 belated political capacity, and an absence of moral 
 sagacity in the stronger far more costly than any of the 
 conceivable consequences of racial or political disturb 
 ance. To rear the population of a stronger race sur 
 rounded by an environment of the lowly and the menial 
 is difficult enough, but to rear such a population virile 
 in spirit and sensitive to the finer instincts of self-depend 
 ence thronged by the deliberately menial, by those who 
 are not only inferior but who have made a compact to be 
 so, by those whose lot is an accepted subordination and 
 a consenting subserviency, would be more difficult by 
 far. The stronger group within the South, as I have 
 already tried to illustrate, has suffered indescribably 
 from being pressed upon, from every side, by a weaker 
 racial life; yet this "fate of the strong" has been light 
 compared to the fate involving that higher racial group 
 which through long periods of time should be subjected 
 to the personal, domestic, and industrial contact of a race 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 235 
 
 of men and women wearing the self-accepted and self- 
 approving status of perpetual proscription. It would 
 involve a peril to everything in our life that is self-resource 
 ful, wholesomely self-respecting, and soundly strong. For 
 the member of a weaker race to accept the plain personal 
 fact, in this instance or that, that his race is inferior, that 
 it has incapacities or weaknesses, is one thing; for a 
 whole race deliberately to accept a fixed legal and collec 
 tive inequality of status in a democracy is quite another 
 thing ; a thing as injurious to the stronger group as to 
 the weaker ; a thing, moreover, which there is a Constitu 
 tion to prevent, 1 and (should the Constitution sleep) the 
 quick instinct of the South itself to weigh and to reject. 
 Not that the spirit of democracy (as we may again 
 remind ourselves) is at war with reality. Democracy, 
 as our institutions have interpreted it, does not mean 
 that all men are physically or naturally equal, nor that 
 all men, necessarily, shall be entitled to the ballot. It 
 is wholly consistent with the restriction of suffrage. It 
 declares, however, that such restrictions shall bear no 
 stigma of class and that any fraction of our citizenship, 
 under the provisions of the local State, shall be excluded 
 - if excluded at all only on the common terms. 
 
 Thus, to the inequalities of capacity democracy may 
 not be wholly blind. General groups of men if not 
 arbitrarily chosen may be excluded in the common 
 interest. Democracy is not bound in its distribution 
 of political responsibilities to accept the incapable for 
 
 1 The reference here is not to the punitive clauses of the "War 
 Amendments," which in the writer s judgment will never in the 
 deeper sense be very influential, but to the spirit and force of the 
 Constitution as a whole. 
 
236 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 the capable, to enthrone the weak above the strong, or to 
 overburden the intelligent with the multitudes of the 
 ignorant and untrained. But there is, at length, a 
 point at which the ultimate test of democracy appears. 
 It is the point at which it reveals, or fails to reveal, 
 what in a broad and human sense I may call its 
 educational attitude toward the factors which it ex 
 cludes. Does it exclude from suffrage in order finally 
 to proscribe or in order finally to include? Does it 
 rear its restrictions loaded with such negations of 
 industrial and educational opportunity as to be dis 
 couragements, or conjoined with opportunities which 
 apply them and commend them as incentives? Is 
 its administration thus so ordered as ultimately to 
 broaden and strengthen (rather than to narrow) the 
 basis of representation ? And as to the relative political 
 capacities of its included groups, capacities which will 
 naturally differ from individual to individual as well 
 as from class to class, are these dealt with in such man 
 ner as to develop rather than to repress, as gradually 
 to incorporate them, train them, and utilize them as 
 assets in the political contentment and security of the 
 State or, by taking " snap- judgment" on their inade 
 quacies, are our dogmas of proscription so timed and 
 fortified as to condemn them to inaction, to discourage 
 their true and eventual growth, and to transform them 
 into embittered and permanent forces of weakness, 
 suspicion, and decay? The fundamental issue is, I 
 repeat, not as to the present relative political capacity 
 of the negro, but as to whether the attitude of the State 
 toward such capacity as he has shall be that of de 
 velopment or of repression. 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 237 
 
 VI 
 
 Such a question will largely find its answer in the 
 scope and efficiency of our policy of fundamental public 
 education. In the imposition of its educational " tests," 
 is the State also providing such efficient institutions of 
 elementary instruction as may enable every factor in its 
 population to meet, and to find wholesome advantage 
 in, the test imposed? Upon no presumption of expe-^ 
 diency or right can we first disfranchise the masses of a 
 population on the ground of their ignorance or on the 
 ground of their incapacity, and then deny to them 
 schools in which ignorance may be modified and ca 
 pacity partially developed. 
 
 In the imposition of its property tests (however 
 elementary these may be) is the State through the 
 equities of its legislation, the justice of its courts, the 
 stability and efficiency of its protections to property and 
 life inspiring all the individuals of its population, 
 however lowly, to have confidence in a policy of accu 
 mulation and to commit themselves to the practices of 
 a patient and hopeful industry ? 
 
 These are but two phases of what I may call the 
 constructive policy of society, upon its educative side. 
 I have dwelt elsewhere so fully upon the various phases 
 of negro education, and the sacrifices which the South 
 has made toward negro education are now so generally 
 understood, that I touch the subject here only in relation 
 to some of its more general phases. The distinctive 
 work of the schools is of significant value, of value 
 not only for the elementary knowledge and the mental 
 quickening which they initiate, but as an influence in 
 
238 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 the discipline of character. But their work is as yet so 
 poor in quality, so intermittent and ineffectual, and 
 must inevitably so remain for so long a period, that 
 the general formative and educative force of our com 
 mon contact and of our familiar transactions with the 
 race must remain peculiarly important. This, after all, 
 is the most significant aspect of the actual education 
 which a stronger group gives to a weaker. It may not 
 be amiss if, in a single sentence, the case be overstated 
 in order to give it clearness: to teach any group of 
 human beings to read, and then in the daily press 
 which encompasses it to give it little to read concern 
 ing itself except the flaring records of its crimes or 
 monotonous comment upon its faults; to awaken a 
 mind (and the very contact of our time is awakening 
 the negro mind whether we give it a school or not), 
 and then to touch it only with contempt; sharply to 
 demand the development of high character, and then to 
 class it in with the lowest ; to insist upon thrift, and then 
 to tolerate such conditions of disadvantage or insecurity 
 to the life and property of the weak as to take from 
 thrift its deepest economic basis, all this constitutes 
 an "education" which cannot be expected to train any 
 race, much less a weaker one, into the life of a highly 
 useful or happy population. This, after all, is our 
 question. It is not a mere question as to the "rights" 
 of the negro, as to academic and outworn contentions 
 of "the North," or as to the controversial justification of 
 this or that political party. It is a question of practical 
 and fundamental policy. Is the negro race at the South, 
 a large and persistent factor in our economic and 
 political organization, to be, in every fundamental sense, 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 239 
 
 a retrogressive or a cooperative population ? The negro 
 masses need the schools, but they need even more pro 
 foundly that sort of education, that form of unconscious 
 training, which is found in the quickening of the fun 
 damental economic motives in the renewal of hope, 
 the arousal of elementary ambitions, the stimulation 
 of those industrial tendencies (such as economy, te 
 nacity, frugality) which spring from a larger sense of 
 security, from a more general confidence in the average 
 rewards of industry, and from the simpler satisfactions 
 of educational and civic opportunity. So to touch 
 them and so to use them in the larger policy of our 
 affairs is to increase both their power to produce and 
 their power to purchase, and is to add increasingly to 
 the forces which must contribute to the common devel 
 opment of the South. It is true that the acquisition 
 of these qualities is not easy to any negro population. 
 Their weaknesses are notorious. Shall we, therefore, 
 make the acquisition of such qualities more difficult? 
 Shall we best advance the health and strength of the 
 State by further contributing to the race s demoraliza 
 tion, or by fostering so far as we may the slow but 
 cumulative growth of those popular capacities and 
 habits within which every government must find the 
 ultimate sources of the public wealth ? 
 
 Deliberately to hold them within the fixed stages of 
 crude servility and undeveloped capacity is, moreover, 
 but to mould the iron forms of our own repression. 
 From motives both humanitarian and economic (but 
 more conspicuously economic) the training of the com 
 mon man, the development of every human industrial 
 unit of society, has become the most characteristic policy 
 
2 4 o THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 of modern states. The returns of such a policy in 
 higher skill, in productive energy, in larger wealth, in 
 the freer and happier experience of whole populations, 
 have promoted it from the position of an elective experi 
 ment to the status of a now established assumption of 
 economic health and power. The real training of the 
 masses of the people has sometimes seemed the despair 
 of statecraft. And yet no responsible modern govern 
 ment thinks, or will ever think again, of doing anything 
 else. The advantage to the individual both from his 
 own training and from his incorporation in a progressive 
 industrial organization has been so great that the re 
 sulting gain to humanity has advanced us from what 
 has been called a deficit, to a surplus, civilization, 1 a 
 civilization in which the cumulative processes of society 
 have apparently overtaken the absolute necessities of 
 consumption. Within the exchanges and transactions 
 of such a fellowship of sections and nations so amaz 
 ing in their popular efficiency the South must play 
 her part. Upon what industrial basis shall she conduct 
 her competitions? How can she hold her own, or be 
 anything but a halting participant within the general 
 body of the national supremacy, if her fundamental 
 policy in reference to a vast fraction of her labor (a frac 
 tion which will be great no matter how large our acces 
 sions from without) be not a policy of deliberate and 
 sustained development? 
 
 Our progress in the face of our difficulties has 
 been inspiring. Our gains will gather volume as we 
 
 1 See the opening chapter of "The New Basis of Civilization," by 
 Simon N. Patten, Professor of Sociology in the University of Penn 
 sylvania, New York, 1907 ; The Macmillan Company. 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 241 
 
 proceed. The time, however, will be soon upon us 
 when we shall not be able fairly to compute our relative 
 advance in startling percentages which have reference 
 merely to our own past, or merely to isolated phases of 
 activity, but when we must ourselves see and measure 
 with clear eyes the total present scene with us, as con 
 trasted with the scene elsewhere; and when our actual 
 economic organization, as expressed in the average sat 
 isfactions and comforts of the people, must be viewed in 
 direct comparison with like conditions in other sections 
 of our country. That the general wealth of the South 
 will ever equal the wealth of any section possessing a 
 homogeneous white population we cannot expect. The 
 average negro is not, and apparently will never be, 
 individually as productive as the average white man ; 
 though we should bear in mind the fact that no policy of 
 deliberate development, such as has been applied to other 
 groups, has been applied as yet to any negro population. 
 But the test of the mettle of our statesmanship will 
 not lie in any challenge of the impossible, in any demand 
 that the South be relatively as rich as other sections 
 (that we should be so is not necessary either to our 
 character or our happiness), but rather in the challenge 
 of the reasonable, the wise, the forever possible: 
 the doing of the right thing with a difficult case, the 
 making of the most out of the human and economic 
 possibilities of our situation, the development and the 
 utilization rather than the repression and rejection 
 of such stores of industrial capacity as our populations 
 may possess. To assume that in this day of the train 
 ing of peoples, of the development and equipment, not 
 merely of a selected leadership, but of human aggre- 
 
242 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 gates, we can even measurably succeed upon a labor 
 basis of crude " untrained muscle," of mere stolid, stupid 
 animal power, is to forget that elementary truth which 
 throughout our discussion has seemed to appear and 
 reappear in many forms, the truth that whenever 
 a social group persistently maintains, in relation to an 
 included group, a policy of constriction and repression, 
 there follows the constriction and repression of its own 
 life. Not only is it embarrassed and constrained by 
 the actual loss of the energies and capacities which it 
 restricts, but the reactive force of its restrictive policies 
 
 absorbing its mind in the preoccupations of constraint 
 
 confines and hardens the largeness of its own temper, 
 the varied fertility of its thinking, the scope and free 
 dom of its development. To be long busied with the 
 task of holding a laborer by the throat is an engrossing, 
 confining, oppressive occupation not to the laborer 
 alone. That the illustration, if literally applied, 
 would be unjust does not alter its relevancy as a sug 
 gestion. 
 
 VII 
 
 It may seem, in one sense, that I have dwelt but little 
 upon the wisdom and necessity for every policy which 
 might promote the development of the unprivileged 
 masses of our white population ; yet in another 
 sense it may be said that I have written of but little 
 else. I have given the subject little direct discussion, 
 partly because I have dwelt upon it so explicitly else 
 where, partly because its significance commands an 
 assent so cogent and so universal that its importance 
 could happily be assumed. 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 243 
 
 There can be no general basis for any policy of 
 progress, no ground for any larger program in reference 
 to the weaker group, except in so far as the masses of 
 the stronger race are themselves more adequately in 
 cluded in our whole philosophy of development. It is 
 only through their larger fitness to comprehend and 
 to believe, that any wholesome conception of a free 
 and legitimate ascendancy can have consistent popular 
 support. 
 
 And yet there is also an indirect consideration of 
 the backward elements of our white population in 
 every policy which in its homelier applications may 
 give them better neighbors, may quicken the dull negro 
 life about them from its apathy into something more of 
 hope and vigor, which may turn the common mind 
 and the general face of their localities and communities 
 outward toward constructive interests, which may set 
 every man to work even the blackest and lowest 
 in the knowledge that he has his chance. The musty 
 allegation of "the man on the street corner 7 that the 
 success of the negro will mean "war," and will make the 
 poor white man "fight," is like so many of the dogmas 
 of cheap gossip that have befogged our situation. It 
 is anything but true. The ferocity of the irresponsible 
 is found at the South, just as it is found everywhere, 
 but it expresses no representative attitude toward the 
 successful or unsuccessful negro. The occasions of 
 racial conflict, as with all the occasions of their mutual 
 demoralization, are found at the lower rather than at 
 the higher levels. The negro man or woman who can 
 really do something, the negro farmer who shows the 
 qualities of industry and stability, is not an occasion 
 
244 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 of fisticuffs. Here and there the lawless may show 
 envy and irritation; but the worthy negro is protected 
 not merely by the common habits of social order and 
 of neighborly good sense, but by those forces of public 
 and economic self-interest which in every community 
 come to the support of the life which is an asset, and 
 which protect everywhere the citizen with something to 
 sell and with money to buy. Where our negroes are 
 failing, are hopeless and sullen and self-abandoned, we 
 know that all things are insecure and that every man 
 is relatively poorer. Where our negroes are succeeding, 
 we know that each life is safer, that the general wealth 
 in circulation is greater, that every man is a little 
 stronger, freer, and richer. 
 
 Just why we should distrust as a policy for the State a 
 policy which we thus know to be sound for the neigh 
 borhood, it would be difficult to explain. Yet it is in the 
 clear light of our homely, daily, immediate experience 
 as well as in the light of the ethical and economic sug 
 gestions upon which I have so long dwelt, that we shall 
 find the principles of that constructive policy through 
 which we may advance the national position and the 
 new ascendancy of the South. As already suggested, 
 this new ascendancy may seem to involve a double task 
 - a task in relation to the included group and a task 
 in relation to that larger national group within which 
 the South is itself included. But we have found that 
 these tasks are, in a measure, one; that it is largely in 
 relation to the included group that the South, through 
 all the forms of her public policy, is defining the 
 nature of her relation both to the forces of her own 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 245 
 
 economic power and to the contingencies of national 
 and international need. In her wise handling of the 
 one problem lies her escape from local failure and her 
 opportunity for general service. We shall win the 
 distinctions of such a destiny if we are permitted to 
 win them at all not, as we have seen, upon the basis 
 of our conquest of the impossible, not by the hot-house 
 advancement of a different social group into the posses 
 sion of characteristics to which it may never have been 
 destined and into a range of efficiency precisely parallel 
 with that of stronger peoples, but just by dealing greatly 
 with a great difficulty, by the sobriety and flexibility 
 of mind, the genius of resource, the sanity of temper, 
 the moral tenacity and the intellectual courage with 
 which we may contribute from the ground of our special 
 experience to what, just now, is the imminent special 
 problem of the world. Its solution will be long 
 delayed. Its difficulties will yield to no immediate 
 formula. But to us as we are busied with the creation 
 of adequate institutions, and of a society rich in its 
 satisfactions and generous in the freedom, solidity, and 
 happiness of its culture, the supreme question (to adopt 
 one of the commonplaces of illustration) is not the date 
 of our arrival but the right direction of our progress, 
 is not the precise hour of the harvest but the soundness 
 of our tillage and the wisdom of our sowing. Few of 
 the great problems of human development, as we have 
 before observed, have ever been finally " solved." 
 That our own problem should be thus " solved " is per 
 haps unnecessary. Yet to us it is supremely necessary 
 that this problem should become in us no occasion of 
 our industrial and political undoing. If it be not thus 
 
246 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP. 
 
 an occasion of our failure, if it yield us, as we proceed, 
 less and less of political cynicism and of spiritual 
 despair, and something more of social confidence and 
 intellectual power, then in the larger view of things our 
 problem is solved already, for we shall have found 
 in such health that sense of health which is the joy of 
 living : no unfinished civilization has anything better to 
 desire, no " finished " civilization has anything better to 
 remember. 
 
 And what is this sense of health, this consciousness 
 of adequate and normal growth, but the responsive 
 answer of every fraction and factor within a free and 
 responsive commonwealth ? A democratic state which 
 while protecting its higher groups protects them not in 
 order to destroy the weaker but in the interest of its 
 total life, which imposes its reservations and restrictions 
 not as denials of opportunity but as educative forces of 
 its development, will have attained, at least in principle, 
 the ultimate method of political and social progress. 
 For as it pursues this principle in the varied forms and 
 phases of its public policy it will discover within even 
 the highest levels of its life the educative reaction of all 
 its institutional provisions, that justice in its courts 
 will educate both the powerful and the lowly the 
 lowly in the sense of security and peace, the powerful in 
 the sense of honor and the temper of equity; that a 
 popular faith in the schools will advance the compre 
 hension and sagacity of the strong as well as the training 
 of the weak ; that an efficient police, impartially enforc 
 ing an impartial law, will sensibly contribute to that 
 established and instinctive prevalence of public order 
 which is the best protection of the life and property of 
 
xi ASCENDANCY 247 
 
 every class; and that the fairness of our reward to 
 labor is in large degree the measure of the cogency of 
 our invitation to the productive capital of the world. 
 As every informing custom or creative institution thus 
 touches our lower or weaker groups, it reacts upon the 
 strong as but another of the determining forces within 
 the life and growth of a modern state, a state embar 
 rassed though not defeated by the abnormal perplexities 
 presented through its divergent and contrasted popula 
 tions, and rinding in the educative equity of its adjust 
 ments and in the social discipline of its political situation 
 no occasion of self-satisfaction or self-pity, but oppor 
 tunities of peculiar achievement, of national and inter 
 national service. 
 
 It may seem strange that our own distinctive task 
 should be one of such peculiar difficulty. And yet, 
 as one observes at Westminster that grateful legend 
 upon the memorial of the elder Pitt, he is reminded 
 that not infrequently the supreme difficulty in the life 
 of peoples, as in the experience of individuals, is the 
 occasion of the supreme distinction. Out of England s 
 isolation set as a little island in unfriendly seas 
 came that policy of naval strength which became the 
 opportunity and the fact of empire. So, the Kingdom 
 of the Netherlands rose out of its supreme difficulty, - 
 its people finding, in their struggle against their floods, 
 not merely a larger land beneath their feet, but new 
 fidelities of patience, stronger powers of resolution, a 
 deeper unity of mind, a larger country within the 
 heavens. 
 
248 THE BASIS OF ASCENDANCY CHAP, xi 
 
 Those lands which are conscious of a great difficulty 
 are not poor. The poor land is that which, having no 
 great difficulty, busies itself with the fictions of its im 
 portance ; or the land having a great difficulty, but 
 finding no way out of its imperturbable complacency. 
 It was through the negro in our experience that the South 
 once lost her mastery, her mastery not over him alone, 
 but over those opportunities for a national leadership 
 and for an uninterrupted eminence of service to which 
 her capacities entitled her. It may be that through this 
 same strange, waiting, baffling factor in her life, her 
 ascendancy, in higher forms, may again return, in 
 forms not threatening the estate and dignity of labor, 
 the sway of freedom, the instinct and custom of our 
 age, but bestowed by a labor which she has freed, and 
 by an age and a democracy which, in her service to 
 their profoundest task, she has supremely justified. 
 
INDEX 
 
 ACTON, Lord, 42. 
 
 AFRICA, absence of collective 
 achievement, 42, 79; its in 
 ternational "intrusion," 85; 
 reemergence of, 82; race 
 influence of reemergence, 85, 
 86. 
 
 AGRICULTURALDlVERSIFICATION, 
 149. 
 
 ALDERMAN, Edwin Anderson, 
 
 233- 
 AMERICAN INDIAN, no parallel 
 
 in, 82. 
 ASCENDANCY, varied forms of, 
 
 209. 
 
 BAKER, Ray Stannard, 75. 
 BOYD-ALEXANDER, 60. 
 BROOKS, John Graham, 115. 
 BRYCE, James, 44. 
 BUTLER, Bishop, 203. 
 
 COERCION, the new, 175. 
 COMPETITION, and survival, 64, 
 
 65- 
 CONSCIOUSNESS, of Kind, xviii, 
 
 xix. 
 CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, 
 
 letter on, 229. 
 COTTON MONOPOLY, dangers of, 
 
 149. 
 CURZON, Lord, 83. 
 
 DEMOCRACY, as a world move 
 ment, 196, 219. 
 
 DESPAIR, as a force of dis 
 integration, 97, 108. 
 
 DISINTEGRATION, its social peril, 
 107, in. 
 
 DIVERSIFICATION, agricultural, 
 
 149. 
 
 DOWD, Jerome, 60. 
 DUNNING, W. A., 184, 185. 
 
 ECONOMIC FORCES, social sig 
 nificance of, xiv, 239. 
 
 EDUCATION, a conservative in 
 fluence, 99, 100 ; and race 
 solidarity, 106; its power 
 against negro demagoguery, 
 113; its aid to negro leader 
 ship, 115; of white population 
 imperative and fundamental, 
 242, 243. 
 
 EMPIRE, movement of, 218. 
 
 GIDDINGS, Franklin Henry, xix, 
 
 94. 
 GREEK, patriotism of race, xx. 
 
 HARRISON, Frederick, xiv. 
 
 IMMIGRATION, 145. 
 INDIAN, American, 82. 
 INHERITANCE, the Indivisible, 3. 
 INVASION, injuries of social, 77. 
 
 JEW AND GENTILE, 77. 
 
 LABOR, diversification of, 147; 
 
 importance of its general 
 
 position, xv, 239. 
 LECKY, W. E. H., 28. 
 
 MARSHALL, Alfred, xv, 147. 
 MILL, John Stuart, xv, 146. 
 MILLER, Kelly, 43, 68. 
 MINORITY, Negro, significance 
 
 of, 104, 109, 114. 
 MULATTO, the, 43. 
 
 249 
 
250 
 
 INDEX 
 
 NEGRO, peril of his bankruptcy, 
 107, in; his education a 
 conserving force, 99; its ser 
 vice to negro leadership, 115; 
 the negro woman, 58; her 
 importance and progress, 60; 
 negro limitations universally 
 admitted, 226; restrictions 
 should be not repressive but 
 educative, 236 fol. 
 
 OPPORTUNITY, integrating force 
 of, 97. 
 
 PAGE, Walter H., 214. 
 
 PATTEN, Simon N., 240. 
 
 PENAL SYSTEM, its deeper 
 
 penalty, 126. 
 PRESENT SOUTH, The, quoted, 
 
 xi, 54, 128, 224. 
 
 RACE AGGRESSION, impulse of, 
 
 25- 
 RACE SECURITY, double basis 
 
 of, 51. 
 RACIAL COSMOPOLITANISM, its 
 
 possible evil, xvii. 
 REACTIONS, Social, capacity 
 
 for utilization of, 168. 
 REN AN, Ernest, 19. 
 RHODES, James Ford, 6, 184. 
 ROYCE, Josiah, xiii, xvi. 
 
 SCHURZ, Carl, 178, 184. 
 
 SECURITY, Economic, as a 
 condition of thrift, xiv, 239. 
 
 SELF-PROTECTION, protest of 
 our, 15. 
 
 SETTEMBRINI, iii. 
 
 SEWANEE REVIEW, 29. 
 
 SLAVERY, Negro s transition from, 
 62. 
 
 SMITH, Sydney, 98. 
 
 SOCIAL REACTIONS, educative 
 power of, 143. 
 
 STEVENS, Thaddeus, 6. 
 
 STONE, A. H., xiii, 231. 
 
 STRONG, the fate of the, 121. 
 
 SUFFRAGE, restrictions neces 
 sary, 1 6, 18; their adminis 
 tration, 231, 233, 236; their 
 spirit should be educative 
 rather than repressive, 235. 
 
 VILLARI, Pasquale, iii. 
 
 WASHINGTON, Booker T., 68. 
 
 WHITE POPULATION, as a race 
 party, 132; frequent kind 
 liness to negro, 123; educa 
 tion of its masses imperative 
 and fundamental, 242, 243. 
 
 WILLCOX, Walter F., xiii, 231. 
 
 WOODS, Robert A., 75. 
 
FOURTH PRINTING 
 
 THE PRESENT SOUTH 
 
 A DISCUSSION OF CERTAIN OF 
 THE EDUCATIONAL, INDUSTRIAL 
 AND POLITICAL ISSUES IN THE 
 SOUTHERN STATES; BY : : : : 
 
 EDGAR GARDNER MURPHY 
 
 (Cloth, I2mo, 335 pages, $l-5O net; by mail, $1.66) 
 
 Chapters: I. The Old in the New. II. The Schools of the People. 
 III. A Constructive Statesmanship. IV. The Industrial Revival 
 and Child Labor. V. Child Labor and the Industrial South. VI. 
 The South and the Negro. VII. A Narrative of Cooperation. VIII. 
 Culture and Democracy. Appendices, Statistical Tables, Etc. 
 
 "An extraordinary sociologic and political study." 
 
 New York Times Saturday Review {Editorial}. 
 
 " A volume of noble spirit, full of fact and wisdom." 
 
 The Independent, New York. 
 
 " The truest interpretation the South has ever had to the world at large." 
 
 The Advertiser, Montgomery, Ala. 
 
 " The sociological importance of this book . . . cannot be overesti 
 mated." 
 
 The Press, Philadelphia, Penn. 
 
 " I can hardly thank you enough. I have read it not only with the 
 intensest interest, but with the greatest delight." 
 
 The late CARL SCHURZ, New York City. 
 
 " The most important single book for one who would understand what 
 
 its subject propounds." 
 
 The Berea Quarterly, Berea, Ky. 
 
 " His writings put before us the attitude of the finest intelligence and 
 conscience of the South on the great national problems which are 
 
 there acute." 
 
 The New York Tribune. 
 
 " A book of national importance. Not since the close of the Civil War, 
 and therefore not since the South began to deal with its present 
 problems, has there been a contribution of such importance to a clear 
 understanding of those problems as that which Mr. MURPHY has made." 
 
 The Outlook, New York. 
 
" Mr. MURPHY S splendid book." 
 
 The Richmond Dispatch, Richmond, Va. 
 
 " Trenchant, informing, fair." 
 
 The Watchman, Boston, Mass. 
 
 " A welcome and grateful addition to the discussion." 
 
 The Post, Washington, D.C. 
 
 "A most valuable work. Mr. MURPHY is a recognized authority on 
 the subject." 
 
 The State, Columbia, S.C. 
 
 " The author is thoroughly informed and probably the most reliable 
 authority on the matters which he discusses." 
 
 The Congregationalist, Boston, Mass. 
 
 "An interpretation, in noble and vigorous English, of the hopeful and 
 progressive tendencies in the present South." 
 
 Leslie s Weekly, New York. 
 
 " Striking and illuminating essays. It is to be hoped that the book 
 will attain both at the North and at the South the wide circulation to 
 which its merits so amply entitle it." 
 
 The News and Courier, Charleston, S. C. 
 
 " It is the most important document yet issued and will do more to 
 bring about true union of all the States than anything that has 
 appeared since Lincoln s Gettysburg address." 
 
 EDWARD ATKINSON, Boston, Mass. 
 
 "We have had many books written upon this subject; we are likely to 
 have many more; we have not had, so far, one more important; we 
 are not likely to have one that is so hereafter, all things considered." 
 JOHN WHITE CHADWICK, in Unity, Chicago, III. 
 
 " Wide as is the scope of these topics there is nothing of the superficial 
 or the half-baked to be found on a single page. . . . Mr. MURPHY S 
 broad interests and rarely excellent equipment fit him peculiarly to 
 represent the progressive and thoughtful South on every issue vital to 
 this section." 
 
 The News, Nashville, Tenn. 
 
"Viewing the whole matter with unusual impartiality and fairness." 
 
 The Record-Herald, Chicago, III. 
 
 " A book so distinguished by its grasp, its breadth, its extreme wisdom, 
 sanity, and deep moral sense that I venture to predict it will prove 
 epoch-making in the discussion of the subject with which it deals." 
 Dr. FELIX ABLER, Professor of Political and Social Ethics in 
 Columbia University, New York. 
 
 " Avoids no issue, shirks no fact, and brings to the various problems of 
 the South a clear vision, a sound logic, a temperance, and a devotion 
 that are full of the very essence of patriotism. It is impossible to over 
 praise such a book to overestimate the effect of its poise, its sanity, 
 its wisdom." 
 
 The Post, Louisville, Ky. 
 
 " So far from going North for his ideas, he is conveying to the North 
 the very best thought of the South. . . . We will say for the book 
 that it has given us a better, a clearer, a more optimistic view of the 
 South that was, the South that is, and the South that is to be, than all 
 the other books that we know anything about." 
 
 The Biblical Recorder, Raleigh, N. C. 
 
 " The volume sheds a clear light on conditions of which those outside 
 of the limits covered have no clear conception, and has therefore a dis 
 tinct educational mission. Of the innumerable books which have been 
 written during the last twenty years on the unsettled questions of the 
 South it is the sanest, fairest, most practical, and most suggestive that 
 we have read." 
 
 The Evening Transcript, Boston, Mass. 
 
 " Written with an unusually intimate knowledge of Southern sentiment 
 and with a rare breadth of vision. We have long regarded Mr. 
 MURPHY S The Task of the South [in substance included in this 
 volume] as the very ablest deliverance in behalf of universal education 
 that has yet been made by a Southern man, and The Present South 
 is marked by the same statesmanlike qualities." CLARENCE H. POE : 
 Editorial in The Progressive Farmer, Raleigh, N. C. 
 
 " It marks an epoch in the statesmanlike treatment of Southern issues. 
 In this volume is found the best thought of our people stated so clearly, 
 so cogently, so calmly, that he who runs may read and he who reads 
 must agree. Mr. MURPHY is true to the past. The thoughtful Southern 
 man finds his convictions formulated and reinforced by a sinewy style, 
 wealth of facts, and masterful reasoning." Dr. S. C. MITCHELL, 
 President of the University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C. 
 
" The substance and spirit of this volume might easily have been 
 produced by any one of a dozen men of the new South . . . though it 
 is doubtful if many of these Southern celebrities could have equalled, 
 or any of them surpassed, Mr. MURPHY in power and charm of literary 
 
 style." 
 
 KELLY MILLER, in the Dial, Chicago, III. 
 
 " Words of truth and soberness. With a full knowledge of the facts, 
 and in an admirable spirit, the author examines certain of the educa 
 tional, industrial, and political issues in the Southern States. These 
 papers should be read carefully and sympathetically by all Northerners 
 who comprehend that the day has gone by when the North could be 
 alleged to constitute the Nation." 
 
 The New York Sun [Editorial). 
 
 "We can hardly speak too highly of the breadth, the sanity, the 
 humanness, and the wise self-restraint which mark the utterances of 
 this volume. He faces the actual situation in every direction in which 
 he explores, and by his answers to objections, by his exposure of 
 fallacies, by his strenuous arguments, he makes an exhibit in behalf of 
 the cause he represents which should command admiration and awaken 
 cooperation in all sections of the land." 
 
 The Christian Advocate, Cincinnati, Ohio. 
 
 " It is rare that any writer or speaker when discussing any phase of the 
 Southern question does so with entire absence of prejudice and passion 
 and applies a strictly judicial temperament in the stating of his views. 
 ... It is refreshing as well as encouraging to find a writer who 
 discusses the South and the race question with the temper of a judge, 
 and in the manner of a scholar. . . . Nothing in the way of a review 
 can do the book justice; it should be read if one would be informed 
 and helped by it." BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, in an article on "The 
 Present South " / contributed to the Atlantic Monthly, October, 1904. 
 
 " In spite of constant interruptions I have stuck to your book until I 
 have read it over twice, and I feel that I must in common honesty send 
 you a word to let you know how deeply I am indebted to you for the 
 pleasure and profit I have found in it. I have read nothing referring 
 to the vital questions it discusses, at all comparable with your book in 
 vigor, fairness, and lucidity." The late JOHN HAY, Secretary of State ; 
 sometime Ambassador from the United States to Great Britain. 
 
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