UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES
 
 THE NEGRO QUESTION 
 
 BY GEORGE W. -CABLE. 
 
 THE QUESTION. 
 I. 
 
 The matter that is made the subject of this paper is not to day 
 the most prominent, but it is the gravest, in American affairs. 
 It is one upon w_hich, of late years, as we might say, much inat- 
 tention has been carefully bestowed. It has become a dreaded 
 question. . We are not politically indolent. We are dealing 
 courageously with many serious problems. We admit that no 
 nation has yet so shaken wrong and oppression from its skirts 
 that it may safely or honorably sit down in a state of mercantile 
 and aesthetical pre- occupation, , And yet the matter that gives us 
 daily the profoundest unrest goes daily by default. The Nation's 
 bitter experiences with it in years past, the baffling complications 
 that men more cunning than wise have woven around it, its 
 proneness to swallow up all other questions and the eruptions of 
 rancor and strife that attend every least sign of its spontaneous 
 re-opening, have made it such a weariness and offence to the 
 great majority, and especially to our commercial impatience, that 
 the public mind in large part eagerly accepts the dangerous com- 
 fort of postponement. 
 
 What is this question ? Superficially it is whether a certain 
 seven millions of the people, one-ninth of the whole, dwelling in 
 and natives to the Southern States of the Union, and by law an 
 nndifferentiated part of the Nation, have or have not the same 
 full measure of the American citizen's rights that they would 
 have were they entirely of European instead of wholly or partly 
 African descent. The seven millions concerning whom the ques- 
 tion is asked, answer as with one voice, that they have not. 
 Millions in the Northern States, and thousands in the Southern, 
 of whites, make the same reply. While other millions of whites,
 
 in North and South, respond not so often with a flat contradic- 
 tion as with a declaration far more disconcerting. For the 
 " Southerner" speaks truly when he retorts that nowhere in the 
 entire Union, either North or South, are the disadvantages of 
 being a black, or partly black, man confined entirely to the rela- 
 tions of domestic life and private society; but that in every part 
 there is a portion, at least, of the community that does not claim 
 for, or even willingly yield to, the negro, the whole calendar of 
 American rights in the same far-reaching amplitude and sacred- 
 ness that they do for, or to, the white man. The Southern white 
 man points to thousands of Northern and Western factories, 
 counting-rooms, schools, hotels, churches and guilds, and these 
 attest the truth of his countercharge. 1 * Nowhere in the United 
 States is there a whole community from which the black man, 
 after his physical, mental and moral character have been duly 
 weighed, if they be weighed at all, is not liable to suffer an unex- 
 plained discount for mere color and race, which he would have 
 to suffer publicly in no other country of the enlightened world. 
 This being the fact, then, in varying degrees according to locality, 
 what does it prove ? Only that this cannot be the real point of 
 issue between North and South, and that this superficial defini- 
 tion is not the true one. 
 
 Putting aside mere differences of degree, the question is not, 
 Are these things so? but, Ought they so to be? To this a large 
 majority in the Northern States from all classes, with a small 
 minority of the Southern whites, also from all ranks of life, and the 
 whole seven million blacks, irrespective of party leanings, answer 
 No. On the other hand, a large majority of the whites in the' 
 Southern States large as to the white population of those States, 
 but a very small minority in the Nation at large answer a vehe- 
 ment "Yes; these things should and shall be so." 
 
 But how does this small minority maintain itself? It does 
 so owing to the familiar fact that, although by our scheme of 
 government there is a constant appeal to the majority of the 
 whole people, the same scheme provides, also, for the defence of 
 local interests against rash actions of national majorities by a 
 parallel counter- appeal (constantly through its Senate and at 
 times in other ways) to the majority, not of the people en masse
 
 I 35- ( 
 
 C\\ YV 
 
 but of the States in their corporate capacity. Now a very large 
 minority in the Northern States, whose own private declaration 
 would be against a difference between white men's rights and 
 other men's rights, nevertheless refuse now, as they refused before 
 the Civil War, to answer with a plain yes or no, but maintain, 
 with the Southern white-rule party, that whether these things 
 ought so to be or not is a question that every State must be 
 allowed to answer for, and to, itself alone ; thus so altering the 
 voice of the Nation, when it speaks by States, as virtually to 
 nullify that negative answer which would be given by a majority 
 of the whole people. In the Civil Rights bill the verdict of the 
 States was once given against all race discrimination in all mat- 
 ters of public rights whatsoever, and for confining it within that 
 true domain of private choice to which the judgment of other 
 Christian nations consigns it. But the Civil Rights bill, never 
 practically effective in the communities whose upper ranks were 
 hostile to it, has lately perished in the National Supreme Court, 
 and the Senate majority that passed it was long ago lost by revo- 
 lutions in the Southern States. Thus, by a fundamental pro- 
 vision in the National Government, intended for the very purpose 
 of protecting the weak from the strong, a small national minority 
 is enabled to withstand the pressure of an immense majority. 
 Whether this is by a right or wrong use of the provision is 
 an inseparable part of the open question. The weak are pro- 
 tected from the strong, but the still weaker are delivered into the 
 -hands of the strong. Seven millions of the Nation, mostly poor, 
 ignorant and degraded, are left for the definition and enjoyment 
 of rights, worth more than safety or property, to the judgment 
 of some ten other millions of unquestioned intelligence and virtue, 
 but whose intelligence and virtue were not materially less when, 
 with a courage and prowess never surpassed, they drenched their 
 own land with their own blood to keep these darker millions in 
 slavery. However, be it a use or an abuse of the Nation's scheme 
 of order ; be it right or wrong ; this is politically the stronghold 
 of the conservative party in the Southern States ; and it is made 
 stronger still, steel-clad and turreted, as it were, with the tre- 
 mendous advantage of the status quo that established order of 
 things which, good or bad, until it becomes intolerable to them- 
 
 350430
 
 selves, men will never attack with an energy equal to that with 
 which it is defended. 
 
 But political strength is little by itself. The military maxim, 
 that no defences are strong without force enough in them to 
 occupy their line, is true of civil affairs. Entrenchment in the 
 letter of a constitution avails little with the people at large on 
 either side of a question, unless the line of that entrenchment is 
 occupied by a living conviction of being in the right. The most 
 ultra-Southern position on the negro question has an element of 
 strength close akin to this. To be right is the only real neces- 
 sity; but where is the community that will not make and defend 
 with treasure and blood the assumption that what is necessary is 
 right? "Southerners," in the political sense of the term, may 
 sometimes lack a clear, firm-founded belief that they are right ; 
 they may have no more than a restless confidence that others are 
 as wrong as they ; but they have at least a profound conviction 
 that they are moved by an imminent, unremitting, imperative 
 necessity. Not that this is all ; hundreds of thousands of them, 
 incapacitated by this very conviction from falling into sympathy 
 with the best modern thought, have been taught, and are learn- 
 ing and teaching, not only on the hustings, but in school, in col- 
 lege, at the fireside, through the daily press, in the social circle 
 and in church, that in their attitude on the negro question they 
 are legally, morally and entirely right. 
 
 / n. 
 
 Now, specifically, what are these things that the majority of 
 a free nation says ought not to be, while a sectional majority tri- 
 umphantly maintains they must, will, ought to and shall be? 
 Give an example of an actual grievance. One commonly 
 esteemed the very least on the list is this : Suppose a man, his 
 wife and their child, decent in person, dress and deportment, but 
 visibly of African or mixed blood, to take passage on a railway 
 train from some city of the Eastern States, as Boston, or of the 
 Western, as Chicago. They will be thrown publicly into com- 
 pany with many others, for an ordinary American railway pas- 
 senger coach seats fifty persons, and a sleeping-car accommo - 
 dates twenty-five ; and they will receive the same treatment from 
 railway employes and passengers as if, being otherwise just what
 
 5 
 
 they are, they were of pure European descent. Only they will 
 be much less likely than white persons to seek, or be offered, new 
 acquaintanceships. Arriving in New York, Philadelphia, or any 
 other Northern city, they will easily find accommodations in 
 some hotel of such grade as they would be likely to choose if, 
 exactly as they are, they were white. They may chance upon 
 a house that will refuse, on account of their color, to receive 
 them ; but such action, if made known, will be likely to receive 
 a wide public reprobation, and scant applause even from the 
 press of the Southern States. If the travelers choose to continue 
 their journey through the night, they will be free to hire and 
 occupy berths in a sleeping-car and to use all its accessories 
 basins, towels, pillows, etc. without the least chance of moles- 
 tation in act or speech from any one of the passengers or em- 
 ployes, let such passengers or employes be from any State of 
 the Union, Northern or Southern. 
 
 But, on reaching the Southern States, the three travelers will 
 find themselves at every turn under special and offensive restric- 
 tions, laid upon them not for any demerit of person, dress or 
 manners, but solely and avowedly on account of the African tinc- 
 ture in their blood, however slight that may be. They may still 
 be enjoying the comforts of the sleeping-car, by virtue of the 
 ticket bought in a Northern State and not yet fully redeemed. 
 But they will find that while in one Southern State they may 
 still ride in an ordinary first-class railway coach without hin- 
 drance, in another they will find themselves turned away from the 
 door of one coach and required to limit themselves to another, 
 equal, it may be, to the first in appointments, and inferior only 
 in the social rank of its occupants. They may protest that in 
 America there are no public distinctions of social rank ; but this 
 will avail them nothing. They may object that the passengers 
 in the car from which they are excluded are not of one, but 
 palpably of many and widely different social ranks, and that in 
 the car to which they are assigned are people not of their grade 
 only but of all sorts ; they will be told with great plainness that 
 there is but one kind of negro. They will be told that they are 
 assigned equal but separate accommodation because the presence 
 of a person of wholly, or partly, African blood in the same railway
 
 car on terms of social equality with the white passengers is to 
 those white passengers an intolerable offence ; and if the husband 
 and father replies that it is itself the height of vulgarity to raise 
 the question of private social rank among strangers in railway 
 cars, he will be fortunate if he is only thrust without more ado 
 into the " colored car," and not kicked and beaten by two or 
 three white men whose superior gentility has been insulted, and 
 he and his wife and child put off at the next station to appeal 
 in vain to the courts. For in court he will find that railway 
 companies are even required by the laws of the State to main- 
 tain this ignominious separation of all who betray an African tinc- 
 ture, refined or unrefined, clean or unclean, from the presence of 
 the white passengers in the first-class cars, be those passengers 
 ever so promiscuous a throng. 
 
 Such is an example of one of the least grievances of the col- 
 ored man under the present regime in the Southern States ; and 
 so dull is the common perception of wrongs committed at a dis- 
 tance, that hundreds of thousands of intelligent, generous, sensi- 
 tive people in the Northern States are daily confessing their ina- 
 bility to see any serious hardship in such a case, if only the 
 "colored car" be really equal in its appointments to the one in 
 which only white people of every sort are admitted ; as if a per- 
 manent ignominious distinction on account of ancestry, made in 
 public, by strangers and in the enjoyment of common public 
 rights were not an insult or an injury unless joined to some bodily 
 discomfort. Let it be plainly understood that though at least 
 scores of thousands are intelligent and genteel, yet the vast 
 majority of colored people in the United States are neither 
 refined in mind nor very decent in person. Their race has never 
 had " a white man's chance." In America it has been under 
 the iron yoke of a slavery that allowed no distinction of worth to 
 cross race lines; and in Africa it has had to contend for the mas- 
 tery of wild nature on a continent so unconquerable that for thou- 
 sands of years the white race has striven in vain to subdue it, 
 and is only now at last strong enough to pierce it, enriched, 
 enlightened and equipped by the long conquest of two others 
 less impregnable. For all that is known the black is " an inferior 
 race," though how, or how permanently inferior, remains un-
 
 proved. But the core of the colored man's grievance is that the 
 individual, in matters of right that do not justly go by race, is 
 treated, whether man or child, without regard to person, dress, 
 behavior, character or aspirations, in public and by law, as though 
 the African tincture, much or little, were itself stupidity, squalor 
 and vice. But let us see whether the grievance grows. 
 
 On passing into a third Southern State, the three travelers, 
 though still holders of first-class tickets, will be required to con- 
 fine themselves to the so-called second-class car, a place never 
 much better than a dram shop. When the train stops for meals, 
 and the passengers, men, women and children, the rough, the 
 polished, all throng into one common eating-room to receive a 
 common fare and attention, those three must eat in the kitchen or 
 go hungry. Nor ca.fi they even await the coming of a train, in 
 some railway stations, except in a separate " colored waiting- 
 room." If they tarry in some Southern city they will encounter 
 the most harassing and whimsical treatment of their most ordinary 
 public rights as American citizens. They may ride in any street 
 car, however crowded, seated beside, or even crammed in among, 
 white men or women of any, or every, station of life ; but at the 
 platform of the railway train, or at the threshold of any theatre, 
 or concert, or lecture hall, they will be directed to the most 
 undesirable part of the house and compelled to take that or 
 nothing. They will find that the word " public " rarely means 
 public to them ; that they may not even draw books from the 
 public libraries or use their reading rooms. 
 
 Should the harried and exasperated man be so fierce or indis- 
 creet as to quarrel with, and strike, some white man, he wilt stand 
 several chances to a white man's one of being killed on the spot. 
 If neither killed nor half-killed, but brought into court, he will 
 have ninety-nine chances in a hundred of confronting a jury 
 from which, either by, or else in spite of, legal provision, men of 
 African tincture have been wholly or almost wholly excluded. 
 If sent to prison he must come under a penal system which the 
 report of the National Commissioner of Prisons officially pro- 
 nounces "a blot upon civilization." He will find the population 
 of the State prisons often nine-tenths colored, divided into chain- 
 gangs, farmed out to private hands, even subleased, and worked
 
 8 
 
 in the mines, quarries, in railway construction and on turnpikes, 
 under cordons of Winchester rifles ; veritable quarry slaves. He 
 will find most of the few white convicts under this system suffer- 
 ing the same outrages ; but he will also find that the system 
 itself disappears wherever this general attitude toward the black 
 race disappears, and that where it and its outrages continue, the 
 race line in prison is obliterated only when the criminal becomes 
 a negotiable commodity and it costs the lessee money to main- 
 tain the absurd distinction. He would find the number of col- 
 ored men within those deadly cordons out of all proportion to 
 the colored population outside, as compared with the percentages 
 of blacks in and out of prison in States not under this regime. 
 There are State prisons in which he would find the colored con- 
 victs serving sentences whose average is nearly twice that of the 
 white convicts in the same places for the same crimes.* In the 
 same or other prisons he would find colored youths and boys 
 by scores, almost by hundreds, consorting with older criminals, 
 and under sentences of seven, ten, twenty years, while the State 
 Legislatures vote down year after year the efforts of a few cour- 
 ageous and humane men either to establish reformatories for col-, 
 ored youth, or to introduce the element of reform into their so- 
 called penitentiaries. Should he some day escape alive across 
 the dead-line of Winchesters, he will be hunted with bloodhounds. 
 But suppose he commits no offence against person or prop- 
 erty ; he will make another list of discoveries. He will find that 
 no select school, under " Southern " auspices, will receive his 
 child. That if he sends the child to a public school it must be, 
 as required by law, to a school exclusively for colored children, 
 even if his child is seven times more white than colored. Though 
 his child be gentle, well-behaved, cleanly and decorously dressed, 
 and the colored school so situated as to be naturally and properly 
 the choice of the veriest riff-raff of the school population, he will 
 have no more liberty than before ; he will be told again, " We 
 know but one kind of negro." The child's father and mother 
 may themselves be professional instructors ; but however highly 
 trained ; of whatever reputation for moral and religious charac- 
 ter ; however talented as teachers or disciplinarians ; holding the 
 
 *See "The Silent South," Century Magazine, September, 1885.
 
 diploma of whatever, college or university, Wellesley, Vassar, 
 Yale, Cornell ; and of whatever age or experience, they will find 
 themselves shut out by law from becoming teachers in any pub- 
 lic school for white children, whether belonging to, and filled from, 
 the " best neighborhood," or in, and for, the lowest quarters of 
 alleys and shanties. They will presently learn that in many hun- 
 dreds of Southern school-districts where the populations are too 
 sparse and poor to admit of separate schools for the two races, 
 the children of both are being brought up in ignorance of the 
 very alphabet rather than let them enjoy a common public right 
 under a common roof. They will find that this separation is not 
 really based on any incapacity of children to distinguish between 
 public and private social relations ; but that the same separation 
 is enforced among adults ; and that while every Southern State 
 is lamenting its inability to make anything like an adequate out- 
 lay for public education, and hundreds of thousands of colored 
 children are growing up in absolute illiteracy largely for lack of 
 teachers and school-houses, an expensive isolation of race from 
 .race is kept up even in the normal schools and teachers' insti- 
 tutes. Even in the house of worship and the divinity school 
 they would find themselves pursued by the same invidious dis- 
 tinctions and separations that had followed them at every step, 
 and would follow and attend them still to, and in, the very alms- 
 house and insane asylum. 
 
 III. 
 
 And then they would make one more discovery. They 
 would find that not only were they victims of bolder infractions 
 of the most obvious common rights of humanity than are offered 
 to any people elsewhere in Christendom, save only -f he Chinaman 
 in the far West, but that to make the oppression more exasper- 
 ating still, there is not a single feature of it in any one State, 
 though justifiable on the plea of stern necessity, that does not 
 stand condemned by its absence, under the same or yet more 
 pronounced conditions, in some other State. Sometimes even 
 one part of a State will utterly stultify the attitude held in 
 another part. In Virginia or South Carolina a colored person 
 of decent appearance or behavior may sit in any first-class rail- 
 way car, but in Georgia the law forbids it, and in Kentucky the
 
 10 
 
 law leaves him to the caprice of railway managements, some of 
 which accord and others withhold the right. In some States he 
 is allowed in the jury box, in some he is kept out by the' letters 
 of statutes, and in some by evasions of them ; while in Tennessee 
 some counties admit him to jury duty and others exclude him 
 from it. In one or two Southern cities, the teachers in colored 
 public schools must be white. In certain others they must be 
 colored ; and in still others they may be either. In Louisiana 
 certain railway trains and steamboats run side by side, within a 
 mile of one another, where in the trains a negro or mulatto may 
 sit where he will, and on the boats he must confine himself to a 
 separate quarter called the "freedman's bureau." 
 
 The Civil Rights bill was fought for years and finally de- 
 stroyed, with the plea that it infringed the right of common car- 
 riers and entertainers to use their own best judgment in distrib- 
 uting their passengers and guests with an equitable consideration 
 for the comfort of all. In fact, it only forbade distributions that, 
 so far from consulting the common comfort, humor the demand 
 of one crudely self-assorted private social class for an invariable, 
 ignominious isolation or exclusion of another. Yet the same 
 States and persons who so effectually made this plea, either allow 
 and encourage its use as a cover for this tyrannous inequity, or 
 else themselves ignore their own plea, usurp the judgment of 
 common carriers and entertainers, and force them by law to 
 make this race distribution, whether they 'deem it best or not. 
 
 And yet again, all over the South there are scattered colleges, 
 academies and tributary grammar schools, established and main- 
 tained at the expense of individuals and societies in the Northern 
 States, for the education, at low rates of tuition and living, of the 
 aspiring poor, without hindrance as to race or sex. For more 
 than twenty years these establishments have flourished and been 
 a boon to the African- American, as well as to the almost equally 
 noted " poor whites " of the Southern mountain regions, sand- 
 hills and "pauper counties," and through both these classes to 
 the ultra-Southern white man of the towns and plantations a 
 boon the national value of which neither he nor one in a thou- 
 sand of its hundreds of thousands of Northern supporters has an 
 adequate conception, else these establishments would receive
 
 1 1 
 
 seven times their present pecuniary support. These institutions 
 have graduated some hundreds of colored students as physicians 
 and lawyers. At one time lately they had more than eight hun- 
 dred divinity students, nearly all of them colored. Their pupils 
 of all grades aggregate over seventeen thousand, and the sixteen 
 thousand colored teachers in the public schools of the South have 
 come almost entirely from them. But now in these institutions 
 there is a complete ignoring of those race distinctions in the 
 enjoyment of common public rights so religiously enforced on 
 every side beyond their borders; and yet none of those unnam- 
 able disasters have come to or from them which the advocates 
 of these onerous public distinctions and separations predict and 
 dread. On scores of Southern hilltops these schools stand out 
 almost totally without companions or competitors in their pecu- 
 liar field, so many refutations, visible and complete, of the idea 
 that any interest requires the colored American citizen to be 
 limited in any of the civil rights that would be his without ques- 
 tion if the same man were white. Virtually, the whole guild of 
 educators in the Southern States, from once regarding these 
 institutions with unqualified condemnation and enmity, are now 
 becoming their friends and, in some notable cases, their converts. 
 So widely have the larger colleges demonstrated their unique 
 beneficence that in some cases Southern State Governments, 
 actively hostile to the privileges of civil liberty they teach and 
 apply, are making small annual appropriations in contribution 
 toward their support. So bristling with inconsistencies, good 
 and bad, would our three travelers find this tyrannous and 
 utterly unrepublican regime. Nowhere else in enlightened lands 
 and in this day do so many millions see their own fellow-citizens 
 so play football with their simplest public rights ; for the larger 
 part of the Southern white people do with these laws of their 
 own making what they please, keeping or breaking them as con- 
 venient. 
 
 But their discoveries would still go on. They would hear 
 these oppressions justified by Southern white people of the high- 
 est standing, and more's the shame by Northern tourists in the 
 South, on the ground that the people upon whom they are laid 
 are a dull, vicious, unclean race, contact with which would be
 
 12 
 
 physically, intellectually and morally offensive and mischievous 
 to a higher race. And when they might ask why the lines of 
 limited rights are not drawn around the conspicuously dull, vic- 
 ious and unclean of both races for the protection of the opposite 
 sort in both, they would come face to face upon the amazing as- 
 sumption that the lowest white man is somehow a little too good 
 for even so much contact with the highest black as may be neces- 
 sary for a common enjoyment of public rights ; and, therefore, 
 that no excellence, moral, mental or physical, inborn or attained, 
 can buy for a "man of color" from these separationists any distinc- 
 tion between the restrictions of his civil liberty and those of the stu- 
 pidest and squalidest of his race, or bring him one step nearer to the 
 enjoyment of the rights of a white man ; or, if at all, then only as a 
 matter of the white man's voluntary condescension and with the 
 right disguised as a personal privilege. They would find that the 
 race line is not a line of physical, moral or intellectual excellence 
 at all. Stranger yet, they would learn that no proportion of 
 white men's blood in their own veins, unless it washes out the 
 very memory of their African tincture, can get them abatement 
 of those deprivations decreed for a dull, vicious and unclean race, 
 but that men, women and children alike hundreds and thou- 
 sands of mixed race are thus daily and publicly punished by their 
 brothers for the sins of their fathers. They would find the race 
 line not a race line at all. 
 
 They would find that the mere contact of race with race is 
 not the matter objected to, but only any and every sort of con- 
 tact on an equal footing. They would find that what no money, 
 no fame, no personal excellence and no fractional preponderance 
 of European blood can buy, can nevertheless be bought instantly 
 and without one of these things by the simple surrender of the 
 attitude of public equality. They would find that the entire es- 
 sense of the offense, any and every where where the race line is 
 insisted on, is the apparition of the colored man or woman as his 
 or her own master ; that masterhood is all that all this tyranny is 
 intended to preserve, and that the moment the relation of master 
 and servant is visibly established between race and race there is 
 the hush of peace. 
 
 "What is that negro what is that mulattress doing in here ? "
 
 13 
 
 asks one private individual of another in some public place, and 
 the other replies : 
 
 " That's nothing ; he is the servant of that white man just be- 
 hind him; she is the nurse of those children in front of her." 
 
 "Oh, all right." And the "cordial relation" is restored. 
 Such conversation, or equivalent soliloquy, occurs in the South a 
 hundred times a day. 
 
 The surrender of this one point by the colored man or woman 
 buys more than peace it buys amity ; an amity clouded only by 
 a slight but distinct and constant air and tone of command on the 
 one part, a very gross and imperfect attitude of deference on the 
 other, and the perpetual unrest that always accompanies forcible 
 possession of anything. But since no people ever compelled 
 another to pay too much for peace without somehow paying too 
 much for it themselves, the master-caste tolerates, with unsurpassed 
 supineness and unconsciousness, a more indolent, inefficient, slov- 
 enly, unclean, untrustworthy, ill-mannered, noisy, disrespectful, 
 disputatious, and yet servile domestic and public menial service 
 than is tolerated by any other enlightened people. Such is but 
 one of the smallest of many payments which an intelligent and 
 refined community has to make for maintaining the lines of mas- 
 ter and servant-hood on caste instead of on individual ambition 
 and capacity, and for the forcible equalization of millions of un- 
 equal individuals under one common public disdain. Other and 
 greater payments and losses there are, moral, political, industrial, 
 commercial, as we shall see when we turn, as now we must, to 
 the other half of this task, and answer the two impatient questions 
 that jostle each other for precedence as they spring from this still 
 incomplete statement of the condition of affairs. 
 
 TWO FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES AT WAR. 
 
 The two questions are these : If the case is so plain, then, in 
 the first place, how can the millions of intelligent and virtuous 
 white people of the South make such a political, not to say such 
 a moral, mistake ? And, in the second place, how can the over- 
 whelming millions of the North, after spending the frightful costs 
 they spent in the war of '6i-'65, tolerate this emasculation of the 
 American freedom which that war is supposed to have secured to 
 all alike ?
 
 THE ANSWER. 
 I. 
 
 As to the Southern people the answer is that, although the 
 Southern master-class now cordially and unanimously admit the 
 folly of slave-holding, yet the fundamental article of political faith 
 on which slavery rested has not been displaced. As to the peo- 
 ple of the North the answer is simpler still : the Union is saved. 
 
 The Northern cause in our civil war was not primarily the 
 abolition of slavery, although many a Northern soldier and cap- 
 tain fought mainly for this and cared for no other issue while this 
 remained. The Southern cause was not merely for disunion, 
 though many a Southern soldier and captain would never have 
 taken up the sword to defend slave-holding stripped of the dis- 
 guise of State sovereignty. The Northern cause was pre-emin- 
 ently the National unity. Emancipation the emancipation of 
 the negroes was not what the North fought for, but only what 
 it fought with. The right to secede was not what the South 
 fought for, but only what it fought with. The great majority of 
 the Southern white people loved the Union and consented to its 
 destruction only when there seemed to be no other way to save 
 slavery ; the great bulk of the North consented to destroy slavery 
 only when there seemed no other way to save the Union. To put 
 in peril the Union on one side and slavery on the other was 
 ( enongh, when nothing else was enough, to drench one of the 
 greatest and happiest lands on earth with the blood of hundreds 
 of thousands of her own children. Now, what thing of supreme 
 value rested on this Union, and what on this slavery, that they 
 should have been defended at such cost ? There rested on, or 
 more truly there underlay, each a fundamental principle, conceived 
 to be absolutely essential to the safety, order, peace, fortune and 
 honor of society ; and these two principles were antagonistic. 
 
 They were more than antagonistic ; they were antipodal and 
 irreconcilable. No people that hold either of these ideas as car- 
 dinal in their political creed will ever allow the other to be forced 
 upon them from without so long as blood and lives will buy de- 
 liverance. Both were brought from the mother country when 
 America was originally colonized, and both have their advocates
 
 is 
 
 in greater or less number in the Northern States, in the Southern, 
 and wherever there is any freedom of thought and speech. 
 
 The common subject of the two is the great lower mass of so- 
 ciety. The leading thought of the one is that mass's elevation, of 
 the other its subjugation. The one declares the only permanent 
 safety of public society, and its highest development, to require 
 the constant elevation of the lower, and thus of the whole mass, 
 by the free self-government of all under one common code of 
 equal civil rights. It came from England, but it was practically, 
 successfully, beneficently applied on a national scale first in the 
 United States, and Americans claim the right to call it, and it pre- 
 eminently, the American idea, promulgated and established, not 
 by Northerners or Southerners, one greatly more than another, 
 but by the unsectional majority of a whole new Nation born of 
 the idea. The other principle declares public safety and highest 
 development to require the subjugation of the lower mass under 
 the arbitrary protective supremacy of an untitled but hereditary 
 privileged class, a civil caste. Not, as it is commonly miscalled, 
 an aristocracy, for within one race it takes in all ranks of society, 
 not an aristocracy, for an aristocracy exists, presumably, at least, 
 with the wide consent of all classes, and men in any rank of life 
 may have some hope to attain to it by extraordinary merit and 
 service ; but a caste, not the embodiment of a modern European 
 idea, but the resuscitation of an ancient Asiatic one. 
 
 That one of these irreconcilable ideas should by-and-by be- 
 come all-dominant in the formation of public society in one region, 
 and its opposite in the other region, is due to original differences 
 in the conditions under which the colonies were settled. In the 
 South, the corner-stone of the social structure was made the plan- 
 tation idea wide lands, an accomplished few, and their rapid 
 aggrandizement by the fostering oversight and employment of an 
 unskilled many. In the North, it was the village and town idea 
 the notion of farm and factory, skilled labor, an intelligent many, 
 and ultimate wealth through an assured public tranquillity. Noth- 
 ing could be more natural than for African slavery, once intro- 
 duced, to flourish and spread under the one idea, and languish 
 and die under the other. It is high time to be done saying that 
 the South retained slavery and the North renounced it merely be-
 
 i6 
 
 cause to the one it was, and to the other it was not, lucrative. It 
 was inevitable that the most conspicuous feature of one civiliza- 
 tion should become the public schoolhouse, and of the other the 
 slave yard. Who could wish to raise the equally idle and offen- 
 sive question of praise and blame ? When Northerners came 
 South by thousands and made their dwelling there, ninety-nine 
 hundredths of them fell into our Southern error up to the eyes, 
 and there is nothing to prove that had the plantation idea, to the 
 exclusion of the village idea, been planted in all the colonies, we 
 should not by this time have had a West Indian civilization from 
 Florida to Oregon. But it was not to be so. Wherever the farm 
 village became the germinal unit of social organization, there 
 was developed in its most comprehensive integrity, that American 
 idea of our Northern and Southern fathers, the representative 
 self-government of the whole people by the constant free consent 
 of all to the frequently reconsidered choice of the majority. 
 
 Such a scheme can be safe only when it includes inherently the 
 continual and diligent elevation of that lower mass which human 
 society everywhere is constantly precipitating. But slave-holding 
 on any large scale could not make even a show of public safety with- 
 out the continual and diligent debasement of its enslaved lower mil- 
 lions. Wherever it prevailed it was bound by the natural neces- 
 sities of its own existence to undermine and corrode the National 
 scheme. It mistaught the new generations of the white South 
 that the slave-holding fathers of the Republic were approvers and 
 advocates of that sad practice, which by their true histories we 
 know they would gladly have destroyed. It mistaught us to con- 
 strue the right of a uniform government of all by all, not as a 
 common and inalienable right of man, but as a privilege that be- 
 came a right only by a people's merit, and which our forefathers 
 bought with the blood of the Revolution in 1776- '83, and which 
 our slaves did not and should not be allowed to acquire. It mis- 
 taught us to seek prosperity in the concentration instead of the 
 diffusion of wealth, to seek public safety in a state of siege rather 
 than in a state of peace ; it gave us subjects instead of fellow-cit- 
 i/.ens, and falsely threatened us with the utter shipwreck of pub- 
 lic and private society if we dared accord civil power to the de- 
 graded millions to whom we had forbidden patriotism. Thus, it
 
 17 
 
 could not help but misteach us also to subordinate to its preser- 
 vation the maintenance of a National union with those Northern 
 communities to whose whole scheme of order slave-holding was 
 intolerable, and to rise at length against the will of the majority 
 and dissolve the Union when that majority refused to give slave- 
 holding the National sanction. 
 
 The other system taught the inherent right of all human soci- 
 ety to self-government. It taught the impersonal civil equality 
 of all. It admitted that the private, personal inequality of indi- 
 viduals is inevitable, necessary, right and good ; but condemned 
 its misuse to set up arbitrary public inequalities. It declared 
 public equality to be, on the one hand, the only true and adequate 
 counterpoise against private inequalities, and, on the other, the 
 best protector and promotor of just private inequalities against 
 unjust. It held that virtue, intelligence and wealth are their own 
 sufficient advantage, and need for self-protection no arbitrary 
 civil preponderance ; that their powers of self-protection are nev- 
 er inadequate save when by forgetting equity they mass and ex- 
 asperate ignorance, vice and poverty against them. It insisted 
 that there is no safe protection but self-protection ; that poverty 
 needs at least as much civil equipment for self- protection as prop- 
 erty needs ; that the right and liberty to acquire intelligence, vir- 
 tue and wealth are just as precious as the right and liberty to 
 maintain them, and need quite as much self-protection ; that the 
 secret of public order and highest prosperity is the common and 
 equal right of all lawfully to acquire as well as retain every equi- 
 table means of self-aggrandizement, and that this right is assured 
 to all only through the consent of all to the choice of the majority 
 frequently appealed to without respect of persons. And last, it 
 truly taught that a government founded on these principles and 
 holding them essential to public peace and safety might comfort- 
 ably bear the proximity of alien neighbors, whose ideas of right 
 and order were not implacably hostile ; but that it had no power 
 to abide unless it could put down any internal mutiny against 
 that choice of the majority which was, as it were, the Nation's 
 first commandment. 
 
 The war was fought and the Union save"d. Fought as it was, 
 on the issue of the consent of all to the choice of the majority,
 
 i8 
 
 the conviction forced its way that the strife would never end in 
 peace until the liberty of self-government was guaranteed to the 
 entire people, and slavery, as standing for the doctrine of public 
 safety by subjugation, destroyed. Hence, first, emancipation, and 
 then, enfranchisement. And now even the Union saved is not 
 the full measure of the Nation's triumphs ; but, saved once by 
 arms, it seems at length to have achieved a better and fuller 
 salvation still ; for the people of the once seceded States, with 
 a sincerity that no generous mind can question, have returned to 
 their old love of this saved Union, and the great North, from East 
 to utmost West, full of elation, and feeling what one may call the 
 onus of the winning side, cries " Enough ! " and asks no more. 
 
 II. 
 
 Thus stands the matter to-day. Old foes are clasping hands 
 on fields where once they met in battle, and touching glasses 
 across the banqueting board, pledging long life to the Union and 
 prosperity to the new South, but at every feast there is one empty 
 seat. 
 
 Why should one seat be ever empty, and every guest afraid 
 to look that way ? Because the Southern white man swears upon 
 his father's sword that none but a ghost shall ever sit there. And 
 a ghost is there ; the ghost of that old heresy of public safety by 
 the mass's subjugation. This is what the Northern people can- 
 not understand. This is what makes the Southern white man an 
 enigma to all the world beside, if not also to himself. To-day 
 the pride with which he boasts himself a citizen of the United 
 States and the sincerity with which he declares for free gov- 
 ernment as the only safe government cannot be doubted ; to- 
 morrow comes an explosion, followed by such a misinterpretation 
 of what free government requires and forbids that it is hard to 
 identify him with the nineteenth century. Emancipation de- 
 stroyed domestic bondage ; enfranchisement, as nearly as its mere 
 decree can, has abolished public servitude ; how, then, does this 
 old un-American, undemocratic idea of subjugation, which our 
 British mother country and Europe as well, are so fast repudi- 
 ating how does it remain ? Was it not founded in these two- 
 forms of slavery ? The mistake lies just there : They were 
 founded in it, and removing them has not removed it.
 
 19 
 
 It has always been hard for the North to understand the alac- 
 rity with which the ex- slaveholder learned to condemn as a mor- 
 al and economic error that slavery in defense of which he en- 
 dured four years of desolating war. But it was genuine, and here 
 is the explanation : He believed personal enslavement essential to 
 subjugation. Emancipation at one stroke proved it was not. 
 But it proved no more. Unfortunately for the whole Nation 
 there was already before emancipation came, a defined status, a 
 peculiar niche, waiting for freed negroes. They were nothing 
 new. Nor was it new to lose personal ownership in one's slave. 
 When, under emancipation, no one else could own him, we quickly 
 saw he was not lost at all. There he stood, beggar to us for 
 room for the sole of his foot, the land and all its appliances ours, 
 and he, by the stress of his daily needs, captive to the land. The 
 moment he fell to work of his own free will, we saw that emanci- 
 pation was even more ours than his ; public order stood fast, our 
 homes were safe, our firesides uninvaded ; he still served, we still 
 ruled ; all need of holding him in private bondage was disproved, 
 and when the notion of necessity vanished the notion of right 
 vanished with it. Emancipation had destroyed private, but it 
 had hardly disturbed public subjugation. The ex-slave was not 
 a free man ; he was only a free negro. 
 
 Then the winners of the war saw that the great issue which 
 had jeopardized the Union was not settled. The Government's 
 foundation principle was not re-established, and could not be 
 while millions of the country's population were without a voice 
 as to who should rule, who should judge and what should be law. 
 But, as we have seen, the absolute civil equality of privately and 
 socially unequal men was not the whole American idea. It was 
 counterbalanced by an enlarged application of the same principle 
 in the absolute equality of unequal States in the Federal Union, 
 one of the greatest willing concessions ever made by stronger 
 political bodies to weaker ones in the history of government. 
 Now manifestly this great concession of equality among the un- 
 equal States becomes inordinate, unjust and dangerous when mil- 
 lions of the people in one geographical section, native to the soil, 
 of native parentage, having ties of interest and sympathy with no 
 other land, are arbitrarily denied that political equality within the
 
 20 
 
 States which obtains elsewhere throughout the Union. This 
 would make us two countries. But we cannot be two merely 
 federated countries without changing our whole plan of govern- 
 ment ; and we cannot be one without a common foundation. 
 Hence the freedman's enfranchisement. It was given him not 
 only because enfranchisement was his only true emancipation, but 
 also because it was, and is, impossible to withhold it and carry on 
 American government on American ground principles. Neither 
 the Nation's honor nor its safety could allow the restoration of 
 revolted States to their autonomy with their populations divided 
 by lines of status abhorrent to the whole National structure. 
 
 Northern men often ask perplexedly if the freedman's enfran- 
 chisement was not, as to the South, premature and inexpedient ; 
 while Southern men as often call it the one vindictive act of the 
 conqueror, as foolish as it was cruel. It was cruel. Not by in- 
 tention, and, it may be, unavoidably, but certainly it was not 
 cruel for its haste, but for its tardiness. Had enfranchisement 
 come into effect, as emancipation did, while the smoke of 
 the war's last shot was still in the air, when force still ruled 
 unquestioned and civil order and system had not yet super- 
 seded martial law, the agonies, the shame and the incalculable 
 losses of the Reconstruction period that followed might have 
 been spared the South and the Nation. Instead there came two 
 unlucky postponements, the slow doling out of re-enfranchisement 
 to the best intelligence of Southern white society and the delay of 
 the freedman's enfranchisement his civil emancipation until 
 the "Old South," instead of reorganizing public society in har- 
 mony with the National idea, largely returned to its entrenchments 
 in the notion of exclusive white rule. Then, too late to avert a 
 new strike, and as little more than a defensive offset, the freedman 
 was invested with citizenship and the experiment begun of try- 
 ing to establish a form of public order, wherein, under a political 
 equality accorded by all citizens, to all citizens, new and 
 old, intelligence and virtue would be so free to combine, 
 and ignorance and vice feel so free to divide, as to insure the 
 majority's free choice of rulers of at least enough intelligence 
 and virtue to secure safety, order and progress. This experi- 
 ment, the North believed, would succeed, and since this was
 
 21 
 
 the organic embodiment of the American idea for which it had 
 just shed seas of blood, it stands to reason the North would not 
 have allowed it to fail. But the Old South, still bleeding from 
 her thousand wounds, but as brave as when she fired her first gun, 
 believed not only that the experiment would fail, but also that 
 it was dangerous and dishonorable. And to-day, both in North 
 and South, a widespread impression prevails that this is the experi- 
 ment which was tried and did in fact fail. Whereas it is just 
 what the Old South never allowed to be tried. 
 
 This is the whole secret of the Negro Question's vital force to- 
 day. And yet the struggle in the Southern States has never been 
 by the blacks for and by the whites against a black supremacy, 
 but only for and against an arbitrary pure white supremacy. 
 From the very first until this day, in all the freedman's intellect- 
 ual crudity, he has held fast to the one true, National doctrine of 
 the absence of privilege and the rule of all by all, through the 
 common and steadfast consent of all to the free and frequent 
 choice of the majority. He has never rejected white men's polit- 
 ical fellowship or leadership because it was white, but only and 
 always when it was unsound in this doctrine. His party has 
 never been a purely black party in fact or principle. The " solid 
 black vote " is only by outside pressure solidified about a prin- 
 ciple of American liberty, which is itself against solidity and de- 
 stroys the political solidity of classes wherever it has free play. 
 But the " solid white vote " which is not solid by including all 
 whites, but because no colored man can truly enter its ranks, 
 much less its councils, without accepting an emasculated eman- 
 cipation the solid white vote is solid, not by outside pressure 
 but by inherent principle. Solid twice over; first, in each State, 
 from sincere motives of self-preservation, solid in keeping the old 
 servile class, by arbitrary classification, servile ; and then solid 
 again by a tacit league of Southern States around the assumed 
 right of each State separately to postpone a true and complete 
 emancipation as long as the fear remains that, with full American 
 liberty this and no more to all alike, the freedman would him- 
 self usurp the arbitrary domination now held over him and plun- 
 der and destroy society. 
 
 So, then, the Southern question at its root is simply whether
 
 22 
 
 there is any real ground sufficient to justify this fear and the atti- 
 tude taken against it. Only remove this fear, which rests on a 
 majority of the whole white South despite all its splendid, well- 
 proved courage, and the question of right, in law and in morals, 
 will vanish along with the notion of necessity. 
 
 Whoever attempts to remove this apprehension must meet it 
 in two forms: First, fear of a hopeless wreck of public govern- 
 ment by a complete supremacy of the lower mass; and second, 
 fear of a yet more dreadful wreck of private society in a deluge of 
 social equality. 
 
 III. 
 
 Now, as to public government, the freedman, whatever may 
 be said of his mistakes, Mas never shown an intentional prefer- 
 ence for anarchy. Had he such a bent he would have betrayed 
 something of it when our civil war offered as wide an opportunity 
 for its indulgence as any millions in bondage ever had. He has 
 shown at least as prompt a choice for peace and order as any 
 "lower million" ever showed. The vices said to be his in inordi- 
 nate degree are only such as always go with degradation, and 
 especially with a degraded status; and when, in Reconstruction 
 years, he held power to make and unmake laws, amid all his deg- 
 radation, all the efforts to confine him still to an arbitrary servile 
 status, and all his vicious special legislation, he never removed 
 the penalties from anything that the world at large calls a crime. 
 Neither did he ever show any serious disposition to establish race 
 rule. The whole spirit of his emancipation and enfranchisement, 
 and his whole struggle, was, and is, to put race rule of all sorts 
 under foot, and set up the common rule of all. The fear of anar- 
 chy in the Southern States, then, is only that perfectly natural 
 and largely excusable fear that besets the upper ranks of society 
 everywhere, and often successfully tempts them to commit in- 
 equitable usurpations; and yet a fear of which no amount of power 
 or privilege ever relieves them the fear that the stupid, the des- 
 titute, and the vicious will combine against them and rule by sheer 
 weight of numbers. 
 
 Majority rule is an unfortunate term, in that it falsely implies 
 this very thing; whereas its mission in human affairs is to remove 
 precisely this danger. J[n fact a minority always rules. At least
 
 23 
 
 it always can. All the great majority ever strives for is the power 
 to choose by what, and what kind of, a minority it shall be ruled. 
 What that choosing majority shall consist of, and hence the wis- 
 dom and public safety of its choice, will depend mainly upon the 
 attitude of those who hold, against the power of mere numbers, 
 the far greater powers of intelligence, of virtue and of wealth. If 
 these claim, by virtue of their own self-estimate, an arbitrary right 
 to rule and say who shall rule, the lower elements of society will 
 be bound together by a just sense of grievance, and a well-ground- 
 ed reciprocation of distrust, the forced rule will continue only till 
 it can be overturned, and while it lasts will be attended by largely 
 uncounted but enormous losses, moral and material, to all ranks 
 of society. But if the wise, the upright, the wealthy, command 
 the courage of our American fathers to claim for all men a com- 
 mon political equality, without rank, station or privilege, and give 
 their full and free adherence to government by the consent of all 
 to the rule of a minority, the choice of the majority frequently 
 appealed to without respect of persons, then ignorance, destitution, 
 and vice will not combine to make the choosing majority. They 
 cannot. They carry in themselves the very principle of disinteg- 
 ration. Without the outside pressure of common and sore griev- 
 ance, they have no lasting powers of cohesion. The minority 
 always may rule. It need never rule by force, if it will rule by 
 equity. This is the faith of our fathers of the Revolution, and no 
 community in America that has built squarely and only upon it 
 has found it unwise or unsafe. 
 
 This is asserted with all the terrible misrule of Reconstruction 
 days in full remembrance. For, first be it said again, that sad 
 history came not by a reign of equal rights and majority rule, but 
 through an attempt to establish them while the greater part of 
 the wealth and intelligence of the region involved held out sin- 
 cerely, steadfastly, and desperately against them, and for the 
 preservation of unequal privileges and class domination. The 
 Reconstruction party, even with all its taxing, stealing and de- 
 frauding, and with the upper ranks of society at war as fiercely 
 against its best principles as against its bad practices, planted the 
 whole South with public schools for the poor and illiterate of both 
 races, welcomed and cherished the missionaries of higher educa-
 
 2 4 
 
 tion, and, when it fell, left them still both systems, with the master- 
 class converted to a belief in their use and necessity. The history 
 of Reconstruction dispassionately viewed, is a final, triumphant 
 proof that all our American scheme needs to make it safe and 
 good, in the South as elsewhere, is consent to it and participation 
 in it by the law-abiding, intelligent portions of the people, with 
 one common freedom, in and between high life and low, to com- 
 bine, in civil matters, against ignorance and vice, in high life and 
 low, across, yet without disturbing, the lines of race or any other 
 private rank or predilection. 
 
 There are hundreds of thousands in the Southern States who 
 would promptly concede all this in theory and in practice, but for 
 the second form of their fear : the belief that there would result a 
 confusion of the races in private society, followed by intellectual 
 and moral debasement and by a mongrel posterity. Unless this 
 can be shown to be an empty fear, our Southern problem cannot 
 be solved. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The mere ambiguity of a term here has cost much loss. The 
 double meaning of the words "social" and "society" seems to 
 have been a real drawback on the progress of political ideas a- 
 mong the white people of the South. The clear and definite term, 
 civil equality, they have made synonymous with the very vague 
 and indefinite term, social equality, and then turned and totally 
 misapplied it to the sacred domains of private society. If the idea 
 of civil equality had rightly any such application, their horror 
 would certainly be just. To a forced private social equality the 
 rest of the world has the same aversion; but it knows and feels that 
 such a thing is as impossible in fact as it is monstrous in thought. 
 Americans, in general, know by a century's experience, that civil 
 equality makes no such proposal, bears no such results. They 
 know that public society civil society comprises one distinct 
 group of mutual relations, and private society entirely another, 
 and that it is simply and only evil to confuse the two. They see 
 that public society comprises all those relations that are imperson- 
 al, unselective, and in which all men, of whatever personal inequal- 
 ity, should stand equal. They recognize that private society is 
 its opposite hemisphere; that it is personal, selective, assertive, ig-
 
 25 
 
 nores civil equality without violating it, and forms itself entirely 
 upon mutual private preferences and affinities. They agree that 
 civil status has of right no special value in private society, and 
 that their private social status has rightly no special value in their 
 public social i.e., their merely civil relations. Even the South- 
 ern freedman is perfectly clear on these points ; and Northern minds 
 are often puzzled to know why the whites of our Southern States, 
 almost alone, should be beset by a confusion of ideas that costs 
 them all the tremendous differences, spiritual and material, be- 
 tween a state of truce and a state of peace. 
 
 But the matter has a very natural explanation. Slavery was 
 both public and private, domestic as well as civil. By the plan- 
 tation system the members of the master-class were almost con- 
 stantly brought into closer contact with slaves than with their 
 social equals. The defensive line of private society in its upper 
 ranks was an attenuated one; hence there was a constant, well- 
 grounded fear that social confusion for we may cast aside the 
 term "social equality" as preposterous that social confusion 
 would be wrought by the powerful temptation of close and con- 
 tinual contact between two classes the upper powerful and bold, 
 the under helpless and sensual, and neither one socially respon- 
 sible to the other either publicly or privately. It had already 
 brought about the utter confusion of race and corruption of society 
 in the West Indies and in Mexico, and the only escape from a 
 similar fate seemed to our Southern master-class to be to annihi- 
 late and forget the boundaries between public right and private 
 choice, and treat the appearance anywhere of any one visibly of 
 African tincture and not visibly a servant, as an assault upon the 
 purity of private society, to be repelled on the instant without 
 question of law or authority, as one would fight fire. Now, under 
 slavery, though confessedly inadequate, this was after all the only 
 way ; and all that the whites in the Southern States have over- 
 looked is that the conditions are changed, and that this pol- 
 icy has become unspeakably worse than useless. Dissimilar 
 races are not inclined to mix spontaneously. The common en- 
 joyment of equal civil rights never mixed two such races ; it has 
 always been some oppressive distinction between them that, by 
 holding out temptations to vice instead of rewards to virtue, has
 
 26 
 
 done it; and because slavery is the foulest of oppressions it makes 
 the mixture of races in morally foulest form. Race fusion is not 
 essential to National unity ; such unity requires only civil and po- 
 litical, not private social, homogeneity. The contact of superior 
 and inferior- is not of necessity degrading; it is the kind of contact 
 that degrades or elevates; and public equality equal public rights,, 
 common public liberty, equal mutual responsibility this is the 
 great essential to beneficent contact across the lines of physical, 
 intellectual and moral difference, and the greatest safeguard of 
 private society that human law or custom can provide. 
 
 V. 
 
 Thus we see that, so far from a complete emancipation of the 
 freedman bringing those results in the Southern States which the 
 white people there so justly abhor, but so needlessly fear, it is the 
 only safe and effectual preventive of those results, ^and final cure 
 of a state of inflammation which nothing but the remaining ves- 
 tiges of an incompletely abolished slavery perpetuate. (I The abo- 
 lition of the present state of siege rests with the Southern white 
 man. He can abolish it if he will with safety and at once../ The 
 results will not be the return of Reconstruction days, nor the in- 
 coming of any sort of black rule, nor the supremacy of the lower 
 mass either white, black or mixed ; nor the confusion of ranks and 
 races in private society; nor the thronging of black children into- 
 white public schools, which never happened even in the worst 
 Reconstruction days; nor any attendance at all of colored chil- 
 dren in white schools or of white in colored, save where exclusion 
 would work needless hardship; nor any new necessity to teach 
 children what they already know so well that the public school 
 relation is not a private social relation ; nor any greater or less 
 necessity for parents to oversee their children's choice of compan- 
 ions in school or out; nor a tenth as much or as mischievous 
 play-mating of white and colored children as there was in the 
 days of slavery; nor any new obstruction of civil or criminal jus- 
 tice; nor any need of submitting to any sort of offensive contact 
 from a colored person, that it would be right to resent if he were 
 white. But seven dark American-born millions would find them- 
 selves freed from their present constant liability to public legalized 
 indignity. They would find themselves, for the first time in their
 
 27 
 
 history, holding a patent, with the seal of public approval, for all 
 the aspirations of citizenship and all the public rewards of virtue 
 and intelligence. Not merely would their million voters find 
 themselves admitted to, and faithfully counted at, the pollswheth- 
 er they are already or not is not here discussed but they would 
 find themselves, as never before, at liberty to choose between 
 political parties. These are some of the good and there need 
 be no ill changes that will come whenever a majority of the 
 Southern whites are willing to vote for them. 
 
 There is a vague hope, much commoner in the North than in 
 the South, that somehow, if everybody will sit still, " time" will 
 bring these changes. A large mercantile element, especially, 
 would have the South " let politics alone." It is too tjusy to un- 
 derstand that whatever people lets politics alone is doomed. There 
 are things that mere time can do, but only vigorous agitation can 
 be trusted to change the fundamental convictions on which a peo- 
 ple has built society. ^Time may do it at last, but it is likely to 
 make bloody work of it. For either foundation idea on which 
 society may build must, if let alone, multiply upon itself. The 
 elevation idea brings safety, and safety constantly commends and 
 intensifies itself and the elevation idea. The subjugation idea 
 brings danger, and the sense of danger constantly intensifies the 
 subjugation idea. It may be counted on for such lighter things 
 as the removal of animosities and suspicions, and this in our Na- 
 tion's case it has done. Neither North nor South now holds, or 
 suspects the other of holding, any grudge for the late war. But 
 trusting time to do more than this is but trusting to luck, and 
 trusting to luck is a crime. 
 
 What is luck doing ? Here is the exclusive white party in the 
 Southern States calling itself, and itself only, "The South," pray- 
 ing the Nation to hold off, not merely its interference, but its 
 counsel even its notice while it, not removes, but refines, pol- 
 ishes, decorates, and disguises to its own and the Nation's eyes, 
 this corner-stone of all its own and the true South's, the whole 
 South's woes ; pleading the inability of any but itself to " under- 
 stand the negro," when in fact itself has had to correct more, and 
 more radical mistakes about the negro since the war than all the 
 Nation beside ; failing still, more than twenty years since Recon-
 
 28 
 
 struction began and more than ten since its era closed, to offer 
 any definition of the freedman's needs and desires which he can 
 accept; making daily statements of his preferences which the one 
 hundred newspapers published for his patronage, and by himself, 
 daily and unanimously repudiate ; trying to settle affairs on the 
 one only false principle of public social order that keeps them un- 
 settled ; proposing to settle upon a sine qtta non that shuts out of 
 its councils the whole opposite side of the only matter in question; 
 and holding out for a settlement which, whether effected or not, 
 can but perpetuate a disturbance of inter-state equality fatal to 
 the Nation's peace a settlement which is no more than a refusal 
 to settle at all. 
 
 Meanwhile, over a million American citizens, with their wives 
 and children, suffer a suspension of their full citizenship, and are 
 virtually subjects and not citizens, peasants instead of freemen. 
 They cannot seize their rights by force, and the Nation would 
 never allow it if they could. But they are learning one of the 
 worst lessons class rule can teach them exclusive, even morbid, 
 pre-occupation in their rights as a class, and inattention to the gen- 
 eral affairs of their communities, their States and the Nation. 
 Meanwhile, too, the present one-sided effort at settlement by 
 subjugation is not only debasing to the under mass, but corrupt- 
 ing to the upper. For it teaches these to set aside questions of 
 right and wrong for questions of expediency ; to wink at and at 
 times to defend and turn to account evasions, even bold infrac- 
 tions, of their own laws, when done to preserve arbitrary class 
 domination ; to vote confessedly for bad men and measures as 
 against better, rather than jeopardize the white man's solid party, 
 and exclusive power ; to regard virtue and intelligence, vice and 
 ignorance, as going by race, and to extenuate and let go unpros- 
 ecuted the most frightful crimes against the under class, lest that 
 class, being avenged, should gather a boldness inconsistent with 
 its arbitrarily fixed status ; and these results are contrary to our 
 own and to all good government. 
 
 VI. 
 
 There is now going on in several parts of the South a re- 
 markable development of material wealth. Mills, mines, fur- 
 naces, quarries, railways are multiplying rapidly. The eye that
 
 29 
 
 cannot see the value of this aggrandizement must be dull indeed. 
 But many an eye, in North and South, and to the South's loss, 
 is crediting it with values that it has not. To many the " New 
 South " we long for means only this industrial and commercial 
 expansion, and our eager mercantile spirit forgets that even for 
 making a people rich in goods a civil order on sound foundations 
 is of greater value than coal or metals, or spindles and looms. 
 May the South grow rich ! But every wise friend of the South 
 will wish besides to see wealth built upon public provisions for 
 securing through it that general beneficence without which it is 
 not really wealth. He would not wish those American States a 
 wealth like that which once was Spain's. He would not wish to 
 see their society more diligent for those conditions that concen- 
 trate wealth than for those that disseminate it. Yet he must see 
 it. That is the situation, despite the assurances of a host of well- 
 meaning flatterers that a New South is laying the foundations of 
 a permanent prosperity. They cannot be laid on the old planta- 
 tion idea, and much of that which is loosely called the New 
 South to-day is farthest from it it is only the Old South re- 
 adapting the old plantation idea to a peasant labor and mineral 
 products. Said a mine owner of the far North lately ; " We 
 shall never fear their competition till they get rid of that idea." 
 A lasting prosperity cannot be hoped for without a disseminated 
 wealth, and public social conditions to keep it from congestion. 
 But this dissemination cannot be got save by a disseminated in- 
 telligence, nor intelligence be disseminated without a disseminated 
 education, nor this be brought to any high value, without liberty, 
 responsibility, private inequality, public equality, self-regard, vir- 
 tue, aspirations and their rewards. 
 
 Many ask if this new material development at the South will 
 not naturally be followed by adequate public provisions for this 
 dissemination by-and-by. There is but one safe answer: That 
 it has never so happened in America. From our furthest East 
 to our furthest West, whenever a community has established 
 social order in the idea of the elevation of the masses, it has 
 planned, not for education and liberty to follow from wealth and 
 intelligence, but for wealth and intelligence to follow from educa- 
 tion and liberty ; and the community whose intelligent few do
 
 30 
 
 not make the mass's elevation by public education and equal 
 public liberty the corner-stone of a projected wealth, is not more 
 likely to provide it after wealth is achieved and mostly in their 
 own hands. 
 
 Our American public school idea American at least in con- 
 trast with any dissimilar notion is that a provision for public 
 education adequate for the whole people, is not a benevolent 
 concession but a paying investment, constantly and absolutely 
 essential to confirm the safety of a safe scheme of government. 
 The maintenance and growth of public education in the Southern 
 States, as first established principally under reconstruction rule, 
 sadly insufficient as it still is, is mainly due to the partial triumph 
 of this idea in the minds of the Southern whites, and its eager 
 acceptance, with or without discordant conditions, by the intelli- 
 gent blacks, and in no region is rightly attributable to an excep- 
 tionable increase of wealth. Much less is it attributable, as is 
 often conjectured, to the influx of Northern capital and capitalists, 
 bringing Northern ideas with them. It ought to go without say- 
 ing, that immigration, with or without capital, will always try to 
 assimilate itself to the state of society into which it comes. 
 Every impulse of commerce is not to disturb any vexed issue 
 until such issue throws itself immediately across the path. It 
 never purposely molests a question of social order. So it is in 
 the South. 
 
 Certain public men in both North and South have of late 
 years made, with the kindest intentions, an unfortunate misuse 
 of statistical facts to make it appear that public society in the 
 South is doing, not all that should be done, but all it can do, for 
 the establishment of permanent safety and harmony, through the 
 elevation of the lower masses especially, in the matter of public 
 education. In truth, these facts do not prove the statement they 
 are called upon to prove, and do the Southern States no kindness 
 in lulling them to a belief in it. It is said, for instance, that cer- 
 tain Southern States are now spending more annually for public 
 education, in proportion to their taxable wealth, than certain 
 Northern States noted for the completeness of their public school 
 systems. Mississippi may thus be compared with Massachusetts. 
 But really the comparison is a sad injustice to the Southern
 
 State, for a century of public education has helped to make Mas- 
 sachusetts so rich that she is able to spend annually twenty dol- 
 lars per head upon the children in her public schools, while Mis- 
 sissippi, laying a heavier tax, spends upon hers but two dollars 
 per head. Manifestly it is unfair to compare a State whose pub- 
 lic school system is new with any whose system is old. The 
 public school property of Ohio, whose population is one million, is 
 over twice as great as that of ten States of the new South, whose 
 population is three and a half times as large.* And yet one 
 does not need to go as far as the " new West " to find States 
 whose tax-payers spend far more for public education than 
 Southern communities thus far see the wisdom or need of invest- 
 ing. With one-third more wealth than Virginia, and but one- 
 tenth the percentage of illiteracy, Iowa spends over four times as 
 much per year for public instruction. With one-fourth less 
 wealth than Alabama, and but one-fourteenth the percentage of 
 illiteracy, Nebraska spends three and a half times as much per 
 year for public instruction. With about the same wealth as North 
 Carolina and less than one-eighth the percentage of illiteracy, 
 Kansas spends over five times as much per year for public educa- 
 tion. If the comparison be moved westward again into new 
 regions, the Territory of Dakota is seen making an " expendi- 
 ture in the year per capita on average attendance in the public 
 schools" of $25. 77, being more than the sum of the like per 
 capita expenditures by Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, 
 North Carolina, Alabama and Georgia combined. In Colorado 
 it is about the same as in Dakota, while in Nevada it is much 
 greater and in Arizona twice as large. As to comparative 
 wealth, the taxable wealth of Dakota in 1880, at least, was but 
 one two-thousandth part of that of the six States with which it 
 is compared. 
 
 Xow what is the real truth in these facts ? That the full 
 establishment of this American public school idea and of that 
 elevation idea of which it is an exponent, and which has had so 
 much to do toward making the people of the Northern States the 
 wealthiest people in the world, waits in the South not mainly an 
 
 * See Report of United States Commissioner of Education, i883-'84, page 21, 
 last column of table. 
 
 350430 
 
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 32 
 
 increase of wealth but rather the simple consent of the Southern 
 white man to see society's best and earliest safety, the quickest, 
 greatest and most lasting aggrandizement in that public equality 
 of all men, that national citizenship, wider than race and far 
 wider than the lines of private society, which makes the eleva- 
 tion of the masses, by everything that tends to moral, aesthetical 
 and intellectual education, in school and out of school, the most 
 urgent and fruitful investment of public wealth and trust. Just 
 this sincere confession. All the rest will follow. The black man 
 will not merely be tolerated in 'his civil and political rights as 
 now sometimes he is and sometimes he is not ; but he will be 
 welcomed into, and encouraged and urged to a true understand- 
 ing, valuation and acceptance of every public duty and respon- 
 sibility of citizenship, according to his actual personal ability to 
 respond. 
 
 To effect this is not-the herculean and dangerous task it is 
 sometimes said to be. (The North has 20,000,000 foreign immi- 
 grants to Americanize, and only this way to do it. The South, 
 for all her drawbacks, has this comparative advantage ; that her 
 lower mass, however ignorant and debased, is as yet wholly 
 American in its notions of order and government. All that is 
 wanting is to more completely Americanize her upper class, a 
 class that is already ruling and will still rule when the change is 
 made ; that wants to rule wisely and prosperously, and that has 
 no conscious intention of being un-American. Only this: To 
 bring the men of best blood and best brain in the South to-day, 
 not to a new and strange docrine, but back to the faith of their 
 fathers. Let but this be done, and there may be far less cry of 
 Peace, Peace, than now, but there will be a peace and a union 
 between the Nation's two great historic sections such as they 
 have not seen since Virginia's Washington laid down his sword, 
 and her Jefferson his pen. ) 
 
 We are indebted to the courtesy of the AVc. 1 York Tribune for this thoughtful presenta- 
 tion of the Negro question. 
 
 67
 
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