i ?".&; ., : ~ r To all good men and women of every race throughout the world, in the past, the present, and in the future, this effort is DEDICATED AND SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF MY WIFE, CHARLOTTE JOSEPHINE BROADHART POWHATAN TAYLOR, and my boy, GESAR ANDREW AUGUSTUS POWHATAN TAYLOR, JR. G O THOU Annihilate wrong Wherever found Blaze a path ; illumine The way to freedom, And crown at last The Brotherhood of Man With the Fatherhood of God. Ceesar Andrew Augustus P. Taylor. 4.2O487 NOT HEATHENS? WHAT SHOULD You EXPECT OF THEM? NOT HEATHENS! They say they are not. Observe them as I shall throw the light upon them. NOT HEATHENS! What should you expect of them ? See them in this, and my larger book to follow this. AUTHOR'S FOREWORD. The manuscript comprising this book was written and intended to be published in 1910, since which time many things political have happened; notably: the complete rout and disintegration of the "Gang" Republican ( ?) machine in Philadelphia, Pa, through the triumphant election of Rudolph Blanken- burg as Mayor, along with practically every candi- date slated by the Keystone or Reform Party. Second. The disruption of the Republican party throughout the nation, culminating in the birth of a new National Political organization; the Washing- ton or Progressive Party at Chicago, 111., during the week of August 5th, 1912. Third. A political revolution throughout the na- tion which in a day changed completely the political complexion of the National Government through the election of Woodrow Wilson, a Democratic candi- date to the Presidency, along with a Democratic ma- jority in both the United States Senate and House of Representatives. Throughout all this political up- heaval the Negro has been a tremendous factor, play- ing a conspicuous part. In this connection I as an individual played my part. I have just been amused by looking over the daily and weekly papers, religious and secular, as pub- lished in Philadelphia by the white and colored race during the last Mayoralty campaign, and then as now, they, one and all, predicted in glowing head- lines accompanied with photo cuts and column write- ups, the sweeping victories of every candidate but the one who actually won, and that was Rudolph 11 Blankenburg, who upset all calculations and sur- prised them all by making a "Clean Sweep" in his election to the mayorality which was foreseen, and predicted in the April, 1910, issue of Taylor's Maga- zine. Why was I able to do this? Because I wear no man's collar, politically, and am not subsidized with a dollar itching palm. I saw what was best for the people's interest, and though but a poor man I spent my own money in pushing Taylor's Magazine through every news-stand in the populous part of the city, and by sandwich sign advertisement employing twelve men at one dollar ($1.00) and board per day. Through this medium I created the Anti-Contrac- tor Boss Mayoralty issue, culminating in the fulfill- ment of my prediction against the combined subsi- dized white and Negro secular and so-called relig- ious press of the city. I have played the game of politics for more than twenty-five years; associated with many of the ablest white and Negro politicians of this country, and in that municipal contest I felt to know that I was "in right" for what was all the people's best interest. Opposing "Gang" Republican ( ?) political corruption in Philadelphia, I in co- operation with other men, issued a call which on Au- gust the 2ist, 1912, resulted in the formation of the Union Protective Association, with branch organi- zations throughout the forty-seven wards in the city, and a Central Representative Committee. I was made chairman of the Keystone Party or- ganization in the Fifteenth Division of the 7th Ward, and later chairman of the Washington or Progressive Party organization in the same division : Entering the fight for Roosevelt and Johnson and the Progressive platform, as against corrupt Republi- can ( ?) machine politics, in the last presidential cam- paign, I was elected chairman of the Resolutions Committee for the Citizen's Mass Meeting and Rally Foreword iii held at Musical Fund Hall, Wednesday evening, Sep- tember 4th, 1912. As chairman of that committee, I framed a set of resolutions intended to be read at the mass meet- ing, but by others on the committee who were more politic than patriotic I was compelled to compromise by having incorporated only a part of my just and truthful arraignment of the impotent "Gang" Repub- lican party. Hence, I give here in full the resolutions as drawn by me: Resolutions Whereas, The Negroes in the United States of America are native citizens who have never as a race, by word or act, proved other than the Nation's and the general government's most patriotic and loyal defenders ; in spite of the sad fact that foreign aliens and others who resort to dynamite, the torch, the dagger, to anarchistic speech and in other ways disturb and threaten the peace and quietness of the state and nation and the stability of the government, are preferred always before them, and Whereas, We view with just alarm increasing race prejudice in the Northern states; through the preach- ments of Tillman, Vardaman, Tom Dixon, Hoke Smith of Georgia, Blease of South Carolina, and others like them, influencing Northern public opinion through the press, from Chautauqua lecture plat- forms, and even by demagogic harangues in the United States Senate and House of Representatives against the race; unchallenged by the Republican party which the Negroes have loyally and unflinch- ingly supported with their ballot at every election, local and national for near half a century, this, in spite of the fact that the Republican party in control of both the legislative and executive branches of the iv Foreword general government during all these years, with but a single intermittence, have been apathetic and indif- ferent while southern Democratic legislatures have steadily, through the enactment of "grandfather" clauses, and other legislative jugglery, disfranchised and segregated the Negro citizenry until their position in the Southern states is a political nonentity and a farce in a boasted free Republic. Despite the fur- ther fact that the United States Constitution with its several amendments afford means for redress and make it mandatory upon the United States Congress that redress should be had and relief afforded the Negroes from legislative, political oppression in the southern half of the States, and Whereas, It is plainly evident to all fair minded and impartial men and women of whatever race or party that the Negro vote has been jockeyed with and used by the Republican party of the nation in a way to conserve the political interest of white men, most invariably to the Negro's detriment, and without a care as to the moral, industrial and political effect upon the Negro's status as an American citizen, and Whereas, This apathy on the part of the Republi- can party (the Negro's mentor and looked-to Moses) and its utter indifference as to the ungraciously flag- rant injustice meted out to them by the nation consti- tutes a grievance painful in the extreme to contem- plate, and Whereas, The once great Republican party of the nation has now become so commercialized and dollar itching in its palm (so to speak) that it has coquetted and flirted with Bourbon democrats in legislative financial deals, exploiting the municipalities, the states and the nation, that honor, principle and general humane interest is lost sight of where personal and corporate interest intervenes until it is difficult to distinguish a member of the Republican party from Foreword v one of the Democratic party, excepting by name, and Whereas, In the great state of Pennsylvania under dominant control of the Republican party, with its boasted high ideals and morals, the mob spirit resul- tant from influence of Southern teachings, "Judge Lynch," with all its defiance of law and judicial pro- cedure dares to lift its head; while at Harrisburg sits a supposed Republican Governor, who in news- paper mouthings makes a fuss like a "tempest in a teapot," and yet, he and his "Gang" sponsors do not exert their prerogative to compel a change of venue in order to secure the conviction by an impar- tial court in another county of the state of the self- confessed murderers of Jack Walker at Coatesville, Pa., and yet, all the "Gang" Republican political ma- chinery is industriously at work finding one "Gang" made judge after another in different parts of the state to delay the serving prison sentences of election crooks as fast as an honest jury convicts and an hon- est Judge is found to sentence them. We deplore crime, whether the criminal be Jack Walker, the ne- gro, or the white election crooks, but law to be re- spected should be administered without favor or par- tiality ; and Whereas, In the legislative district embracing the 7th Ward in the First Congressional District, and in the First Senatorial District in the City of Phila- delphia, the Negro vote numerically is such that no candidate can be elected from either without receiv- ing that vote, and Whereas, There has been recently erected in South Philadelphia (the Vare "bossed" section of the city) a public place of amusement known as Point Breeze Park or The Areodome, the management of which amusement draws the "color line," and in every way endeavors to impress upon Negro visitors to said park that their presence is undesirable. This we view vi Foreword as prejudicial and stultifying to the Negro's man- hood and good citizenship; as tending to impress upon him as a race and upon others that he is infe- rior to all other races; even to aliens, to cats and dogs, to which no objection is made ; and Whereas, In this, the Washington party movement opportunity is afforded to cast our lot with citizens of other races in rebuking with our ballots the mani- fest injustice and flagrant abuses of which we justly complain, and to do this without registering a vote for either the corrupt Republican or Democratic parties ; though we recognize and appreciate the fact that there are many good and noble white men and women who are friends to the Negro race, and who yet feel that good will result from the ascendancy to power of one or the other of the two old parties - according to which one they may be adherents. Not- withstanding this, we feel to see not alone ours, but the interest of all the people best conserved by fol- lowing the matchless leadership of the scholar, dip- lomat, soldier-patriot and statesman, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Washington party as pre-empted in this state and elsewhere as the Progressive or Bull Moose Party: Therefore Resolved, That as citizens and voters here assembled, we endorse and ratify the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt, and Hiram W. Johnson, as nominated by the Progressive National Convention as held at Chicago, 111., during the week of August 5th, this 1912. Resolved, Further, that we pledge our influence and votes to no candidate for office from either the Legislative District embracing the 7th Ward, the First Congressional District and the First Senatorial District without a pledge from said candidates that it will be their aim among other things to strive hon- estly to secure and demand for the Negro as a part Foreword vii of the great American citizenry just and equitable treatment in the full enjoyment of their civil, politi- cal and industrial rights even as accorded all other American citizens. Resolved, Further, that a committee of five be ap- pointed by the Chairman to wait upon the candidate or candidates appealing for votes from either the First Senatorial District, the First Congressional Dis- trict and the Legislative District, embracing the 7th Ward, and acquaint them with this our determina- tion: That the Negro in this country is a factor po- litically and otherwise cannot be denied. In the last Gubernatorial campaign in Pennsylvania, Harry W. Bass, a Negro (the first in the history of the state) was nominated on the Republican ticket, and elected from the Sixth Legislative District. This was done to save the Gubernatorial ticket from opposition threatened by the large Negro vote of the state on account of the attitude of Tener, the Gubernatorial candidate, toward a large and influential Negro ben- evolent and fraternal organization. And again, in the late state and national contest the Republican ma- chine intending to nominate a white man to succeed Bass, they hesitated in face of the rapidly growing sentiment for the Progressive Party and renominated Harry W. Bass ; hoping thereby to aid in saving the electoral vote of the state for Taft and Sherman, the Presidential candidates. Bass was re-elected, but the state's electoral vote was lost to Taft and Sher- man, being polled for Roosevelt and Johnson. This was one time that the "Gang" Republicans jockeying with the Negro vote failed to "pan out." Thomas J. Ryan, the man who set up Point Breeze Park, and permitted the management to foster a damnable race prejudice, was slain by his own soul's viii Foreword conflict. He committed suicide, thus emphasizing the existence of a retributive nemesis even as seen in the case of the late Jeff Davis of Arkansas whose brain exploded within, he dying of apoplexy ; and of Henry W. Grady, who died suddenly in midst of his efforts to win the North to the adoption of a commer- cial and industrial policy where greed subordinated the nation's attitude of justice and fair play toward the Negro. Gorman, of Maryland, halted by death as he strove to re-enslave the Negro by efforts of dis- franchisement. Rutherford B. Hayes, cut off from earth as he betrayed the Constitutional guarantees of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to America's 15,000,000 black souls. James A. Garfield, providentially stricken by an inspired mad man as he began to square the policies of the government along lines where human interest is lost sight of as corpo- rate interest intervenes and so they go. Four years ago, with a united Republican party, the Taft administration went into office weak, vaccil- ating and blundering on the Negro, i.e., national prob- lem. Its last fatal blunder and crowning act of racial injustice was allowing itself to be made the tool of a gang of scoundrels not to prosecute, but persecute, Jack Johnson, the world's fistic champion, charging him with crimes of which there is not a white man who ever made money out of the prize fighter's ring, but what they did not engage in the same ; they have all finally opened up a saloon and engaged in the so- called "White Slave" traffic, and no one has ever raised a howl until it was found impossible to bring forward a "White Hope" to beat the "nigger." The poor old Republican party it is dead. Even as the Panama Canal will prove the nation's undoing. As for myself, I set at defiance any law of man which intervenes between me and the enjoyment of any Foreword ix right not denied to other men. I teach my boy the same. The States of Pennsylvania and New Jersey have, through their legislatures made appropriations in aid of the Semi-Centennial Emancipation Proclamation Celebration in September, 1913. This, and all simi- lar celebrations for the years yet to come, should appeal not alone to the Negroes, but to all the world, and especially to all Americans. Emancipation not only freed the Negro from physical bondage, but it in great measure freed the white race from industrial slavery and conditions worse; an intellectual, moral and social thraldom, which at once prevented a full development of all the white race along lines of in- tellectual, moral and social progress. The after effects of black slavery was emphasized by John Temple Graves nineteen years ago thus: "Let me assume without argument, that no thinking man of to-day questions the existence of a race problem a vital and present and pressing problem, which challenges at once the humanity, the pride, the integrity and safety of the Republic. It is the bar to fraternity and to the unity of national sentiment. It is the ob- struction in the way of foreign immigration and capi- tal. It throttles liberty of sentiment and suffrage in the South. It poisons the Southern ballot. It de- moralizes justice in the Southern courts. It steadily threatens the peace and safety of society. It impedes the progress and full development of a race." On the first Sunday in this January, 1913, Dr. Stephen S. Wise, Rabbi of the Free Synagogue, New York City, speaking from his pulpit on "Abolition and Fifty Years After," said: "Emancipation came as a war measure, and rightly so a measure of war upon slavery. Pity did not free the Negro, but war did. Pity and charity will not solve the Negro problem of to-day. It is upon x Foreword the higher grounds of justice and democracy that the question must be met. We face to-day, as a na- tion, not a negro question, but the American ques- tion. It is and always has been the test touchstone of American life, testing the very foundations of the Republic. If we fail here we fail everywhere. The question is not one of racial equality, but of social justice, of true democracy, of genuine Americanism." For these reasons and they are vital, I look for- ward to the future, when the celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation will not be considered wholly a Negro affair, but an affair of the nation and of the world. Twenty years ago Frederick Douglass, taking for his subject "Lessons of the Hour" among other things, said: "There is one thing, however, in which I think we must all agree at the start. It is that this so-called, but miscalled, Negro problem is one of the most important and urgent subjects that can now engage public attention. Its solution is, and ought to be, the serious business of the best American wisdom and statesmanship. For it involves the honor or dis- honor, the glory or shame, the happiness or misery, of the whole American people. It not only touches the good name and fame of the Republic, but its highest moral welfare and its per- manent safety. The evil with which it confronts us is coupled with a peril at once great and increasing, and one which should be removed, if it can be, with- out delay." "But even the Southern whites have an interest in this question. Woe to the South when it no longer has the strong arm of the Negro to till its soil," and "woe to the nation when it shall employ the sword to drive the Negro from his native land." Such a crime against justice, such a crime against grati- tude, should it ever be attempted, would certainly bring a national punishment which would cause the Foreword xi earth to shudder. It would bring a stain upon the nation's honor like the blood on Lady Macbeth's hand. The waters of all the oceans would not suffice to wash out the infamy. But the nation will commit no such crime. But in regard to this point of our future, my mind is easy. We are here and here to stay. It is well for us and well for the American people to rest upon this as final." "Could I be heard by this great nation, I would call to mind the sublime and glorious truths with which at its birth, it saluted and startled a listening world. Its voice, then, was as the trump of an archangel, summoning hoary forms of oppression and time-honored tyranny, to judgment. Crowned heads heard it and shrieked. Toiling millions heard it and clapped their hands for joy. It announced the advent of a nation, based upon human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality. Its mission was the redemption of the world from the bondage of ages. Apply these sub- lime and glorious truths to the situation now be- fore you. Put away your race prejudice. Banish the idea that one class must rule over another. Rec- ognize the fact that the rights of the humblest citi- zens are as worthy of protection as those of the high- est, and your problem will be solved; and whatever may be in store for you in the future, whether prosperity or adversity ; whether you have foes with- out or foes within, whether there shall be peace or war, based upon the eternal principles of truth, jus- tice and humanity, with no class having cause for complaint or grievance, your Republic will stand and flourish forever." I look forward to the day when men in the positions of Samuel Gompers, John Mitchell, Wm. Morrison, Eugene V. Debbs, John Burns of England, and others who lead the host of labor will join with their millions of followers in xii Foreword celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation in em- phasis that America is in truth and not in theory the "'Land of the free and the home of the brave," for well has Terrance V. Powderly said: "Labor cannot solve its problems without considering the black man a brother and a factor. Their interest indus- trially are the same." The celebration at Philadelphia, the home of "Liberty Bell" and the house of Betsey Ross) this coming September should not be the Ne- groes' affair only, but it is the white man's affair equally, if not more so, and should be an occasion and an opportunity for American patriotism and sublime oratory by white and black champions of human liberty. INTRODUCTION. In this, my crowning effort, my mission is one of peace ; yet I shall wield a sword with edge so keen as to cut clean between the marrow and the bone. In this effort effect shall follow cause pain may be inflicted, but ease will come to an aching world. Yea, joy shall supplant sorrow, and the bowed head shall be lifted in praise to the Geni of Good to all the World. The hydra-head of hate, malice, envy, jealousy, prejudice and proscription, shall be exposed and crushed, and all mankind made to feel and proclaim that: "Children are we all of one Great Father; in whatever clime his providence hath cast the seed of life, He, the all-seeing Father, regards nations, hues, and dialects alike/' that "Laws of changeless justice binds oppressor with oppressed, and close as sin and suffering joined we march to fate abreast," That "Fleecy locks and black complexions cannot forfeit nature's claims, that skins may differ but affection dwells in white and black the same." Irrefutably I affirm that this work shall be done. Where I leave off another will begin. What I have begun another will finish." "So BE IT." The principles actuating this book are preor- dained and inspired, hence like the rubber ball, their elastic properties are such that the harder you throw them down the higher will they bound. Attempt to combat them, and you and your issue will be buried in anathmatic oblivion. Espouse the cause of right and justice, and through ignominy and xiv Introduction seeming defeat your name will shine on through the darkness of conflict. Yea, your personality will stride down the ages, on up throughout eternity, shedding a glorious effulgence; illumining the path of your posterity even as the Christ, as John Brown, the mar- tyr; as Wm. Wilberforce, Robert Emmet, Daniel O'Connel; as the immortal Lincoln, Grant Lovejoy, Stephens, Jas. B. Julian, Lucretia Mott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Ward Beecher, Wendell Phil- lips, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Tousant LeOverture, Grover Cleveland, Antonia Maseo, Andrew Carnegie, Miss Anna P. Jeanes, Gen- erals O. O. Howard, Clinton B. Fisk and Benj. F. Butler, Sarah Mapps Douglass, Carolina Phelps Stokes, Hannah Pierce Cox, John Cox, Mrs. Thomas Garrett, Thomas Garrett, Elijah Pennypacker, Dr. Fussell, Wm. Still, Chas. Sumner, Carl Schurz, Jus- tice Harlan, Mother; Cathern Drexal, George Pea- body, John Fox Slater, Daniel Hand, Dr. Booker T. Washington, Thomas B. Reed, James G. Blaine, ; Senators Joseph Benson, Foraker and Henry W. Blair, Mr. Shaw, George L. Stearns, Thaddeus Stev- ens, Capt. John Edwin Cook, W. F. S. Cook, and the militant host of other patriots, philanthropists and statesmen, the long roll of whom I am pained be- cause space will not permit to enroll them here il- lustrious men and women distinguished from the demagogue, the public sycophant and blatant mounte- bank. In the preparation of this book a work is fore- shadowed, the stupendousness of which I fully real- ize, but am equally conscious that one with Right- GODusness is a power irresistible, while many with- out righteousness is as nothing. In this my fight is Universal hence, questions International, Industrial, Sociological, Political and Economical I intend to discuss with all the force p| Introduction XV5 unrestrained logic and humane reasoning in meta- phor inspired and emphasized by centuries of prepar- edness. In this and its continuance to follow the voice from the Tomb shall speak. The world shall hear the spoken defiance of a soul to the oppressor. All demagogic scoundrels shall be made to tremble at the awakening of long shackled millions. The elements, both animate and inanimate, shall stand aghast at the new conflict waged, and all celes- tial and terrestrial beings shall sound the vault of creation with praise for the victory of righteousness against injustice throughout the Universe. CAESAR ANDREW AUGUSTUS P. TAYLOR. December, 1909, THE CONFLICT AND COMMINGLING OF THE RACES NOT HEATHENS, WHAT SHOULD YOU EXPECT OF THEM? Sunday, February 23rd, 1902, there appeared in the "New York American and Journal" a full page write-up captioned, "What Happened to Pretty Miss Jewell Who Married King Lobengula the Savage." Said "write-up" was profusely illustrated, showing purported incidents in the married life of this couple after the nuptials at the altar. The various illustra- tions were underprinted : First, "The Wedding;" second, "Lobengula Feasts on the Floor;" third, "Throws Assegais at His Wife;" fourth, "At Last Beats Her with a Huge Knobkerry ;" fifth, the cen- tral illustration shows what pretends to be King Lobengula the savage in raiment with assegais in hand emerging from a tangled jungle with vision bent upon Miss Jewell, who is pictured full length as a modern English beauty, looking the perfection of modesty, innocence and virtue, with back turned, seemingly unaware of her approaching captor. Com- pleting the illustrations, there is in the lower left hand corner of the page a group of five photos of half nude, thick lipped, kerchief head covered black savage looking persons with huge rings hanging in I Cije Conflict their ears. This photo group is underprinted, "A Few of King Lobengula's Hundred Wives in Africa." The writer of this so much per line paid for malignant travesty on a race of people, prefaces or introduces his story thus: "No occurrence excited more curiosity in England or more disgust among right minded people than the marriage of Miss Jewell, a pretty English girl, with the savage King Lobengula, the dethroned monarch of Matabeleland, in South Africa. This marriage has ended in misery, as might have been expected. The young wife has brought suit for divorce in London against her royal savage. She makes as- tonishing allegations of cruelty and misconduct. Al- though Lobengula was married in a frock coat and silk hat, he relapsed immediately afterwards into utter savagery. Dressed only in a few feathers, he feasted on raw meat on the floor. He bit his wife, threw assegais at her and beat her with a knob- kerry." Lobengula was driven in 1893 from his king- dom after getting into a war with the English settlers in Rhodesia. Miss Jewell, whose father was a mining magnate, first met him at Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State. In 1899 ne came to London as part of a show called "Savage South Africa." They were then married. In the body of the story the writer goes on to say: "This is the climax to one of the most astonishing and painful stories of modern life. Miss Jewell was the daughter of an English mine owner, who had large interests in Mexico and South Africa. She was not only handsome, but cultivated and seemingly refined. In spite of all protest she mar- ried him. His face is quite good looking for a Negro, and one would hardly think it concealed so 2 CJje Conflict much savagery. The present divorce case reveals that Lobengula behaved in the worst possible way that could be expected of a savage king. Immedi- ately after their marriage, King Lobengula began to show his true colors. Grown tired of biting and beating his wife, he used to amuse himself by throw- ing assegais at her. When he was in bad temper he would run a spear through her shoulder or some other place." Thus with Billingsgate vituperation and high col- ored misrepresentation the writer with his poison brewing imagination goes on caricaturing and hold- ing up to ridicule King Lobengula, and ascribing to him and his South African subjects all manner of barbaric atrocities. He tells of some peculiar insti- tution of Matabeleland known as the Milmo, a high priest believed by the natives to be immortal and who could not possibly be killed, and that finally one, Major F. R. Burnham, an American who afterwards served with Lord Roberts in the Boer War, crawled on his hands and knees into the cave of the Milmo and shot him as if he were a trapped animal, thus ending his influence over the Matabeles, and, inci- dentally paving the way for the successful over- throw of Lobengula's power and his capture by the English. He states when Miss Jewell brought her suit for divorce in London from Lobengula, that Sir Fran- cis Jeune, the Divorce Court Judge, on hearing her story, asked Queen Lobengula, "Isn't this rather what you might have expected?" "I don't know what you mean," replied the Queen, indignantly. "You knew he was a savage, didn't you?" asked the Judge. "I loved him," said the petitioner, pa- thetically. For the purpose of this book it is not necessary 3 C6e Conflict that I shall further dignify the writer of this by quoting his scurrilous attack upon African nobility (for Lobengula is a king of royal line with all kingly prerogatives, despite certain white persons imbued with American race prejudice who try to influence the world against everything pertaining to Negro blood, brain and character) . My purpose is to show the bias of the average newspapers and other publications conducted by white men in the United States of America when purveying news or treating upon any subject where the Negro race is concerned. Certain white publishers make a bid for any write-up which caricatures the Negro race, or distorts, twists, misrepresents, misquotes or mag- nifies into grotesqueness the least happening or inci- dent concerning this people and at times it appears that there is a concerted movement among a scoun- drelly pessimistic class of news writers to purvey through public print an avalanche of imaginary filth and mud about Negroes and other peoples of color. Hence, many lies have been written as to Chinese rat eating, the Yellow peril, the cocky Jap and rice eat- ers of Nippon, the deceptive and begging Hindoo, the big burly black brutes yea, about the unwashed, uncivilized, bloodthirsty heathens in all the world, and, lately, in a current magazine, an American white writer has an article in which she awakes from a new nightmare and conjures up another ghost, "The Mulatto Negro, the Yellow Peril of the North." Referring to the so-called "Yellow Peril" and the "Negro Peril" of the South, she writes: "Few have seemed to realize that to the Caucasian dwellers in the Northern half of this country there is a deeper and graver racial menace than either of these two, 4 Cfce conflict in that it involves the most horrible possibilities of both." The writer then quotes President Elliot of Har- vard University in a speech before the Lincoln Din- ner Club delivered some months before her writing: "Northern opinion and Southern opinion are identi- cal with regard to shielding the two races from ad- mixture one with the other. We frankly recognize that the feeling of Northern whites against personal contact with the Negro is even stronger than that of Southern whites." Then she proceeds forthwith to take issue with his declaration, and seeking to sus- tain her contention, cites Maine and Delaware, Ore- gon, Idaho, Nebraska, and Indiana as the only Northeastern and Northwestern States in which marriage between whites and blacks is prohibited by statutory law. Then she refers to statistical tables on page 16 of Census Bulletin No. 8, as giv- ing the percentage of mulattoes in total Negro popu- lation for the various States and groups of States in 1890, 1870, 1860 and 1850, and asserts that: "The figures warrant the belief that between one- ninth and one-sixth of the negro population of con- tinental United States have been regarded by four groups of enumerators as bearing evidences of an admixture of white blood. The figures also indicate that this admixture was found by the enumerators to be most prevalent in sections where the population cf negroes to whites is smallest, and least prevalent where the proportion is largest." She finds that Maine, whose Negro population in 1890 was one-fifth of one per cent, of the total, shows 59.4 of the Negroes to be mulattoes. Right here let me remark for obvious reasons that Maine is one of the States she has already cited where mar- 5 Cjje Conflict riage between races is by law prohibited by all means let us not lose sight of Maine. She continues: "Allowing for all possible errors and inaccuracies in this mongrel enumeration, we cannot escape the plain statistical fact, that as one passes from the great cotton growing States between South Carolina and Texas toward the North there is a marked increase of racial fusion. The pre- sumption that this is due solely or chiefly to immi- gration from the South is precluded by noting the same ratio between the figures for the two sections in 1850-60, when the only immigrants of this color from the South were the runaway slaves. A com- parison of Northern and Southern cities for the earlier periods tells the same story." Thus far with all her array of figures she proves nothing as refers to the States and cities North compared with the same South as to the percentage of mulattoes to the whole Negro population in any city or State North or South excepting it be in Maine, and, remember, that Maine is one of the Northern States in which, like at the South, mar- riage between the races is prohibited, and yet there in 1890 the Negro population was one-fifth of one per cent, of the total, and yet 57.4 of these Negroes were mulattoes. Again, I say, note this. But, she continues: "If we hold that the only sin in the com- mingling of these is the sin of illegality, perhaps the chief onus of miscegenation still rests upon the South; but if it be conceded that any such amalga- mation is in itself a crime, the South stands ap- proved as the champion of Anglo-Saxon purity, not only for exhibiting the smallest percentage of ad- mixture in the midst of the greatest opportunity for it, but also for entering her protest uniformly against it on her statute books. In this view of it 6 Cfje Conflict also it seems a poor defence to say that the strong Caucasian instinct of the North is sufficient protec- tion against miscegenation, and that it is useless to legislate against an evil which does not exist. Un- less the census statistics lie, the evil does exist, and in much greater proportion than in the South." Thus, of the nine sections into which her labored article is divided she concludes the first, and proves nothing, for she does not prove that these growing additions to her "Mulatto Peril" ( ?) were not begot- ten at the South, though the census enumerators may have found their ratio to the whole Negro population greatest in the states and cities North as compared with the states and cities South, and to her asser- tion that "the greatest opportunity for miscegenation exists at the South," all must agree with her that it does for the white libertine and despoiler of Negro female virtue, but it does not exist for a Negro man, because that very "protest uniformly against it on the South's statute books is vengefully exerted against the Negro man where a white woman is con- cerned excepting when the mob gets on the job in ad- vance. Then there is nothing for this aforesaid pro- testing uniform statute to do but contemplate the fin- ished work of the South's "best citizens." Even as Southern writers and preachers in the past sought to twist the Bible into indorsing their despicable traffic in human flesh and blood, this writer now as- serts the census statistics lie "if they do not prove that miscegenation is greater at the North than at the South, while it is a truth that there is not now and never was as many white fathers of illegitimate children by Negro women at the North as there has been and is now at the South. In the attitude of that class of white men who despoil the Indian and the 7 f) e Conflict Negro is seen the truth that they hate with fear most those whom they have wronged most. An incident I know of in a southern city was a Negro girl in the employment of a white family to whom her parents had belonged in slavery. The girl's name was Maggie. She one day brought to her work with her an infant very light of complexion. The white mistress and daughters of the family gath- ered around and made much over the cooing babe, and asked Maggie who was its father. Maggie, thinking no harm, not realizing what would be the final consequence, replied: "Mr. Wilbur is its father." Now, Wilbur was the son of that mistress and the brother of those fair Anglo-Saxon, blue-blooded, rosy cheeked, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired daughters of Southern aristocracy. They all stood aghast and in chorus exclaimed: "Oh, Maggie!", and yet they smiled sweetly upon the innocent babe in its black mother's arms. The subject was dismissed; poor Maggie thought no more about it. But one dark, stormy, muddy night, when lightning was flashing and thunder roaring aloud, a knock came upon the little cabin door down the lane where Maggie lived with her poor decrepit old mother and father. Hear- ing the knock the old mother hobbled to the door, lifted the bolt and poked her head out of the door ajar. With a sickening thud and crashing bones the old lady fell to the floor a brick bat intended for Maggie thrown from the darkness had mashed in the old woman's face. Thus Wilbur, after seducing the girl, attempted to murder her for admitting that he was the father of her child. There is not alone this particular Wilbur; there are many others south of Mason and Dixon's line. Hence : 8 Cfte Conflict THE NEGRO WOMAN IN THE NATION'S PROBLEM. Much has been written, much has been spoken, and much has been resolved for the solution of the prob- lems which perplexes the Negro race, but the one thing needful is yet to be done by the women of the race ; then will speedily come the solution. This must be admitted on every hand when you consider first, that the strength of a race consists in the virtue and integrity of its women; second, the entire Negro race is compromised and weakened by and through the attitude of certain white men toward Negro wom- en; hence the question? Why do white men as legislators at the South enact Jim Crow laws, inflict- ing discriminating outrages upon the Negro race ; de- grading both their men and women, and ever intent upon seeking clandestine alliances under cover of night with the women? These same white men in- troduce and enact Jim Crow laws in the legislatures by day, and at night they are out in the byways and lanes inquiring and looking for a "pretty yaller girl". Oh, Heaven! witness the unholy alliances of concu- binage by white men with Negro mistresses. It is these men that say there are no Negro ladies. They say it when they cause to be written over the doors of southern railroad depot waiting rooms signs reading thus : "Ladies' Waiting Room" and "Colored Waiting Room." Now, be it known that the "col- ored waiting room" indicates the waiting room set apart for all Negroes, where cats, dogs, white men drunken, cigar smoking, tobacco using white men and every other vile abomination is privileged to en- ter and tarry. This, "The Colored Waiting Room," while the "Ladies' Waiting Room" is sacred to white men and white women only be the white women 9 Cbe Conflict ever so vile in character and person, the "Ladies' Waiting Room" is free to them, while the colored woman, no matter how refined and virtuous, is not allowed to enter it. Thus, it is not the white woman, but the white men who declare that there are no Negro ladies. Oh ! monstrosity of wickedness done by the son of a gun who is eternally and forever looking for "a pretty yaller gal." How long, oh, how long, will colored women quietly tolerate these beastly proceedings, which pins upon them the scarlet letter; and weak- ening the men of their race? How, oh, how long, will noble white women allow these proceedings to continue, which deprive their marriagable daughters of honorable husbands in that certain white men prefer Negro mistresses? Negro women have for many years worn the scarlet letter, and by their silence, yea angel-like silence he who should have stood in the criminal dock has posed in society as a paragon of virtue, but now, even as Hester Prynne and little Pearl dramatically set forth in Nathaniel Hawthorn's "Scarlet Letter," the other and more guilty culprit must come up on the scaffold. White men, if you have any sense of honor, if you respect the wives, daughters and mothers of your own race, be just, be charitable toward the offspring of your unholy lust and clandestine alliances. If you will not be just and consistent, then "shinny on your own side." It is intended to inaugurate a new cru- sade; yea, though the Heavens fall, I mean it, and call upon Negro woman everywhere to assist, for in this I see the solution of the problem : Who else will assist men or women? Let me hear from you through some concerted action. Again, I quote the article "The Mulatto Negro a Yellow Peril." Be- ginning the second section, she says : 10 C ft e conU iet "The question naturally arises, 'If such large per- centage of admixture stands against the North with few Negroes, what might it be with more? And more Negroes is the proposition which confronts the North to-day; as an eminent and radical change in the South's industrial system may ultimately deliver into Northern hands both the Negro and his problem. Every breeze from the South blows tidings of this change. Mr. William Garrett Brown of Harvard University observed it going forward through two movements of population exodus and immigration: 'There is/ he wrote, 'a steady and widespread move- ment of Negroes from the countrysides into the towns, and out of the state into the North; and there is a moderate but fairly steady, and apparently, increasing inflow of whites. All over the South com- plaint is heard that the Negro as a laborer, particu- larly as a farm hand, is deteriorating. It becomes harder and harder to bind him to the soil or to long terms of service in any line, and he is likely to leave when the" farmer needs him most.' " All over the South, too, as it happens coincident with this, there is a great industrial renaissance; a full awakening, for the first time in her history, to the complete realization of the hidden potentialities in her vast and comparatively untouched resources. This industrial giant has risen from the lethargy which two centuries of slavery imposed, and shaking off the transient effects of defeat and misrule, he will brook no obstacle and no delay in his high re- solve to cause the South to blossom with new wealth and power. There is work to be done in this vast undertaking; the Negro refuses to do it. Very well. Then he must make room for someone who will. At the convention of the "Southern Industrial Par- liament" held in Washington last May, the chief sub- II C i) e Conflict ject for discussion was the immigration of farm la- bor. The burden of their cry was "the harvest is plenteous, the laborers are few. The Negro as an in- dustrial factor is a failure ; he is not dependable ; we must have something else." "The vital point in all this for the North is that the South is getting something else. Italian labor is no longer an experiment in the South. Since the first colony at "Sunny side Plantation" in Arkansas twelve years ago at first a failure, afterward a signal suc- cess these people have proven more industrious and more thrifty than the Negroes. This is illustrated by the saying "If an Italian earn a dollar and a quarter a day he will live on the twenty-five cents and save the dollar ; but if a Negro earn a dollar and a quarter, he will spend a dollar and a half." At least one great railroad system of the South has begun to use Italians instead of Negroes for track work; but the most deeply significant fact is their appearance in the sugar, rice and cotton fields. Better still, the Negro's industrial short-comings are bringing to the front the native white rural and mountain population "the South's great unutilized industrial reserves." The whites are gaining in the shops and mills; they are to be found working side by side with the Negroes in the tobacco factories, and they have a monopoly in the cotton mills, where the Negroes are not found at all. The silk mills near Norfolk, Va., employ girls exclusively. "In parts of Virginia and the Carolinas whence the Negroes are migrating northward so steadily," says an eye- witness, "white men are doing more and more of the work that was formerly left to Negroes. Large planters and landowners in those quarters now make it a rule to have neither Negro tenants nor Ne- gro laborers, aiming specially against sudden depar- 12 Cibe Conflict tures. Once free of their long dependence on the African, these people will hardly go back to it of their own accord." Aiming at greater efficiency for this white labor is the movement recently inaugurated in Washing- ton entitled, "The Southern Industrial Education League" for the establishment of more and better training schools in the South for the poor white children. Mr. Brown deposes in this connection: "The white man whom the Negro has to fear is no longer the man who would force him to work, it is the white man who would take his work away from him. The immediate danger to the Negro is from rivalry rather than oppression." Thus far the writer argues entertainingly, but she does not wipe out the fact that for two hundred and forty-seven years the Negroes poured out their toil, their sweat and their blood, as a foundation upon which the greatness of not alone the South but the Union is erected. For two hundred and forty-seven years they toiled as instruments of utilization in the hands of Anglo-Saxons developing this country and producing its ponderous wealth, and after a fearful conflict of blood and carnage and a stupendous price in lives and material wealth, the Negro's freedom re- sulted. From the surrender at Appomattox down to now, the white men of the South have striven by every device to defeat the benefits of emancipation. Yea, within the breast of many a one who cannot bear to see the hated nigger prospering, this form of prayer may be: "Oh, Lord! do keep the nigger back, Let darkness be his shroud. He is tripping close upon our track, He is ranting long and loud. 13 Cfce Conflict We have sent some educated farmers to legis- lative halls To make some laws that when enforced would make the nigger fall. We have stolen his vote, we have clipped his rights, But he rises over all." Of all the causes which conspire to blind the judg- ment and mislead the mind it is selfishness and pre- judice, the never failing vice of fools. Surely self- interest attained cannot comprehend the magnitude of the wrongs inflicted upon the many. Zealous in endeavor to deal injustice dwarfs one's conception of what constitutes justice. Hence, the prejudiced nigger-hating whites cannot be fair judges or sound thinkers to be trusted. Whatever they write, say or do is to be viewed, and rightly so, with suspicion and caution. The world and the ages will so rate them throughout all time. Here I shall let the tomb speak in the person of Frederick Douglass, who in an able contribution en- titled "Lessons of the Hour," appearing in July, 1894, in the "A. M. E. Review," he spoke thus : "The righteous judgment of mankind will say, if the American people could endure the Negro's pres- ence while a slave they certainly can and ought to endure his presence as a free man. If they could tolerate him when he was a heathen, they might bear with him now that he is a Christian. If they could bear with him when ignorant and degraded, they should bear with him now that he is a gentleman and a scholar. But even the Southern whites have an interest in the question. Woe to the South when it no longer has the strong arm of the Negro to till its soil, and woe to the nation when it shall employ 14 C i) e Conflict the sword to drive the Negro from his native land. "Such a crime against justice, such a crime against gratitude, should it ever be attempted, would cer- tainly bring a national punishment which would cause the earth to shudder. It would bring a stain upon the nation's honor like the blood on Lady Macbeth's hand. The waters of all the oceans would not suf- fice to wash out the infamy. But the nation will com- mit no such crime. But in regard to this point of our future, my mind is easy. We are here and here to stay. It is well for us, and well for American people, to rest upon this as final. Another mode of impeaching the wisdom of emancipation, and the one which seems to give special pleasure to our enemies, is, as they say, that the condition of the colored peo- ple of the South has been made worse by emancipa- tion. The champions of this idea are the men who glory in the good old times, when the slaves were under the lash and were bought and sold in the mar- ket with horses, sheep and swine. It is another way of saying that slavery is better than freedom ; that darkness is better than light, and that wrong is better than right; that hell is better than heaven. It is the American method of reasoning in all mat- ters concerning the Negro. It inverts everything, turns truth upside down and puts the case of the unfortunate Negro inside out and wrong end fore- most every time. There is, however, nearly always some truth on their side of error, and it is so in this case. When these false reasoners assert that the con- dition of the emancipated slave is wretched and de- plorable, they partly tell the truth, and I agree with them. I even concur with them in the statement that the Negro is physically, in certain localities, in a worse condition to-day than in the time of slavery, IS Cfje Conflict but I part with these gentlemen when they ascribe this condition to emancipation. To my mind, the blame does not rest upon emancipation, but the de- feat of emancipation. It is not the work of the spirit of liberty, but the work of the spirit of bond- age. It comes of the determination of slavery to perpetuate itself, if not under one form, then under another. It is due to the folly of endeavoring to put the new wine of liberty in the old bottles ol slavery. I co cede the evil, but deny the alleged cause. The landowners of the South want the labor of the Negro on the hardest terms possible. They once had it for nothing. They now want it for next to nothing. To accomplish this, they have contrived three ways The first is, to rent their land to the Negro at an exorbitant price per annum and com- pel him to mortgage his crop in advance to pay the rent. The laws under which this is done are en- tirely to the interest of the landlord. He has a first claim upon everything produced on the land. The Negro can have nothing, can keep nothing, can sell nothing, without the consent of the landlord. As the Negro is at the start poor and empty-handed, he has to draw on the landlord for meat and bread to feed himself and family while his crop is growing. The landlord keeps books, the Negro does not, hence, no matter how hard he may work or how saving he may be, he is, in most cases, brought in debt at the end of the year, and once in debt he is fastened to the land as by hooks of steel. If he attempts to leave he may be arrested under the order of the law. Another way which is still more effective, is the practice of paying the laborer with orders on the store instead of lawful money. By this means, money is kept out of the hands of the Negro and the Negro is kept entirely in the hands of the landlord. 16 C&e Conflict He cannot save money because he gets no money to save. He cannot seek a better market for his labor because he has no money with which to pay his fare and because he is by that vicious order system al- ready in debt, and therefore already in bondage. Thus he is riveted to one place, and is, in some sense, a slave ; for a man to whom it can be said, "You shall work for me for what I choose to pay you, and how I shall choose to pay you," is in fact a slave, though he may be called a free man. We denounce the land- lord and tenant system of England, but it can be said of England as cannot be said of our free country, that by law no laborer can be paid for labor in any other than lawful money. England holds any other payment to be a penal offence and punishable by fine and imprisonment. The same should be the case in every state in the American Union. Under the mortgage system no matter how indus- trious or economical the Negro may be, he finds him- self at the end of the year in debt to the landlord, and from year to year he toils on and is tempted to try again and again, but seldom with any better re- sult. With this power over the Negro, this possession of his labor, you may easily see why the South some- times makes a display of its liberality and brags that it does not want slavery back. It had the Negro's labor heretofore for nothing, and now it has it for next to nothing, and at the same time is freed from the obligation to take care of the young and the aged, the sick and the decrepit. There is not much virtue in all this, yet it is the ground of loud boasting. I now come to the so-called, but miscalled, "Negro Problem," as a characterization of the relations ex- isting in the Southern States. I say at once, I do not admit the justice or propriety of this formula, as applied to the question before us. Words are 17 C ft e Conflict things. They are certainly such in this case, hence they give us a misnomer that is misleading and hence mischievous. It is a formula of Southern origin and has a strong bias against the Negro. It handicaps his cause with all the prejudices known to exist, and any- thing to which he is a party. It has been accepted by the good people of the North, as, I think, without proper thought and investigation. It is a crafty in- vention and is in every way worthy of its inventors. It springs out of a desire to throw off just respon- sibility and to evade the performance of disagreeable but manifest duty. Its natural effect and purpose is to divert attention from the true issue now before the American people. It does this by holding up and pre- occupying the public mind with an issue entirely dif- ferent from the real one in question. That which is really a great national problem and which ought to be so considered by the whole Ameri- can people, dwarfs into a "Negro Problem." The de- vice is not new. It is an old trick. It has been oft repeated and with a similar purpose and effect. For truth, it gives us falsehood. For innocence, it gives us guilt. It removes the burden of proof from the old master class and imposes it upon the Negro. It puts upon the race a work which belongs to the nation. It belongs to that craftiness often displayed by dispu- tants, who aim to make the worse appear the better reason. It gives bad names to good things and good names to bad things. The Negro has often been the victim to this kind of low cunning. You may remember that during the late war, when the South fought for the perpetuity of slavery, it usually called the slaves "domestic ser- vants," and slavery "a domestic institution." Harm- less names, indeed, but the things they stood for were far from harmless. The South has always 18 Cfte Conflict known how to have a dog hanged by giving him a bad name. When it prefixed "Negro" to the nation- al problem it knew that the device would awaken and increase a deep-seated prejudice at once and that it would repel fair and candid investigation. As it stands, it implies that the Negro is the cause of whatever trouble there is in the South. In old slave times, when a little white child lost his temper he was given a little whip and told to go and whip "Jim" or "Sal," and thus he regained his temper. The same is true to-day on a large scale. I repeat, and my contention is, that this Negro problem formula lays the fault at the door of the Negro and removes it from the door of the white man, shields the guilty and blames the innocent, makes the Negro responsi- ble when it should so make the nation. Now, what the real problem is, we all ought to know. It is not a Negro problem, but in every sense a great national problem. It involves the question, whether after all our boasted civilization, our Declaration of Indepen- dence, our matchless Constitution, our sublime Chris- tianity, our wise statesmanship, we, as a people, pos- sess virtue enough to solve this problem in accor- dance with wisdom and justice, and to the advantage of both races. The marvel is that this old trick of misnaming things, so often displayed by Southern politicians, should have worked so well for the bad cause in which it is now employed, for the American people have fallen in with the bad idea that this is a Negro problem, a question of the character of the Negro and not a question of the nation. It is still more sur- prising that the colored press of the country and some of our colored orators have made the same mis- take and still insist upon calling it a "Negro problem," or a race problem, for by race, they mean the Negro 19 Cfce Conflict race. Now, there is nothing the matter with the Ne- gro whatever ; he is all right. Learned or ignorant, he is all right. He is neither a lyncher, a mobocrat or an anarchist. He is now what he has ever been, a loyal, law-abiding, hard- working and peaceable man; so much so that men have thought him cowardly and spiritless. Had he been a turbulent anarchist he might indeed have been a troublesome problem, but he is not. To his reproach, it is sometimes said that any other people in the world would have invented some violent way in which to resent their wrongs. If this problem depended upon the character and conduct of the Negro there would be no problem to solve; there would be no menace to the peace and good or- der of Southern society. " He makes no unlawful fight between labor and capital. That problem, which often makes the American people thoughtful is not of his bringing, though he may some day be com- pelled to talk of this tremendous problem in common with other laborers. He has as little to do with the cause of Southern trouble as he has with its cure. There is no reason, therefore, in the world why his name should be given to this problem. It is false, misleading and prejudicial, and like all other falsehoods must eventually come to naught. I well remember, as others may remember, that this same old falsehood was employed and used against the Negro during the late war. He was then charged and stigmatized with being the cause of the war, on the principle that there would be no high- way robbers if there were nobody on the road to be robbed. But as absurd as this pretense was, the color prejudice of the country was stimulated by it 20 and joined in the accusation and the Negro had to bear the brunt of it. Even in the North he was hated and hunted on account of it. In the great city of New York his houses were burned, his children were hunted down like wild beasts and his people were murdered in the streets, all because "they were the cause of the war." Even the good and noble Mr. Lincoln, one of the best and most clear-sighted men that ever lived, once told a committee of Negroes who waited upon him at Washington, that "they were the cause of the war." Many were the men who in their wrath and hate accepted this theory and wished the Negro in Africa, or in a hotter climate, as some do now. There is nothing to which prejudice is not equal in the way of perverting the truth and inflaming the passions of men. But call this problem what you will or may, the all important question is: How can it be solved? How can the peace and tranquility of the South and of the country be secured and established? There is nothing occult or mysterious about the answer to this question. Some things are to be kept in mind when dealing with this subject, and should never be forgotten. It should be remembered that in the order of Di- vine Providence the "man who puts one end of a chain around the ankle of his fellowman will find the other end around his own neck." And it is the same with a nation. Confirmation of this truth is as strong as proofs of holy writ. As we sow we shall reap, is a lesson that will be learned here as elsewhere. We tolerated slavery and it has cost us a million graves and it may be that lawless murder now rag- ing, if permitted to go on, may yet bring the red hand 21 Clbe Conflict of vengeance, not only on the reverend head of age, and upon the heads of helpless women, but upon even the innocent babes in the cradle. But how can this problem be solved? I will tell you how it can be solved. It cannot be solved by keeping the Negro poor, degraded, ignorant and half starved, as I have shown is now being done in South- ern States. It cannot be solved by keeping back the wages of the laborer by fraud, as is now being done by the landlords of the South. It cannot be done by ballot-box stuffing, by falsifying election returns or confusing the Negro voter by cunning devices. It cannot be done by repealing all federal laws enacted to secure honest elections. It can, however, be done, and very easily done, for where there is a will there is a way. Let the white people of the North and South con- quer their prejudices. Let the Northern press and pulpit proclaim the gospel of truth and justice against the war now be- ing made upon the Negro. Let the American people cultivate kindness and humanity. Let the South abandon the system of mortgage labor and cease to make the Negro a pauper by paying him dishon- est scrip for his honest labor. Let them give up the idea that they can be free while making the Negro a slave. Let them give up the idea that to degrade the colored man is to elevate the white man. Let them cease putting new wine into old bottles and mending old garments with new cloth. They are not required to do much. They are only required to undo the evil they have done in order to solve this problem. In old times when it was asked, "How can we abol- ish slavery?" the answer was "quit stealing." 22 C6e Conflict The same is the solution of the race problem to- day. The whole thing can be done simply by no longer violating the amendments of the Constitution of the United States, and no longer evading the claims of justice. If this were done, there would be no Negro prob- lem or national problem to vex the South or to vex the nation. Let the organic law of the land be honestly sus- tained and obeyed. Let the political parties cease to palter in a double sense and live up to the noble declarations we find in their platforms. Let the statesmen of our country live up to their convictions. In the language of ex-Senator John J. Ingalls: "Let the nation try justice and the problem will be solved." "Two hundred and twenty years ago the Negro was made a religious problem, one which gave our white forefathers about as much perplexity and annoyance as we now profess. At that time the problem was in respect of what relation a Negro should sustain to the Christian Church, whether he was in fact a fit sub- ject for baptism, and Dr. Godwin, a celebrated di- vine of his time, and one far in advance of his breth- ren, was at the pains of writing a book of two hun- dred pages or more, containing an elaborate argu- ment to prove that it was not a sin in the sight of God to baptize a Negro. His argument was very able, very learned, very long. Plain as the truth may seem, there were at that time very strong arguments against the position of the learned divine. As usual, it was not merely the baptism of the Negro that gave trouble, but it was as to what might follow such bap- tism. The sprinkling him with water was a very simple 23 C6e Conflict thing and easily gotten along with, but the slave- holders of that day saw in the innovation something more dangerous than cold water. They said that to baptize the Negro and make him a member of the Church of Christ was to make him an important person in fact, to make him an heir of Jesus Christ. It was to give him a place at the Lord's supper. It was to take him out of the category of heathen- ism and make it inconsistent to hold him as a slave, for the Bible made only the heathen a proper sub- ject for slavery. These were formidable consequences, certainly, and it is not strange that the Christian slave holders of that day viewed these consequences with immea- surable horror. It was something more terrible and dangerous than the Civil Rights Bill and the Four- teenth and Fifteenth Amendments to our Constitu- tion. It was a difficult thing, therefore, at that day to get the Negro into water. Nevertheless, our learned doctor of divinity, like many of the same class in our day, was equal to the emergency. He was able to satisfy all important parties to the problem, ex- cept the Negro, and him it did not seem necessary to satisfy. The doctor was a skilled dialectician. He could not only divide the word with skill, but he could di- vide the Negro into two parts. He argued that the Negro had a soul as well as a body, and insisted that while his body rightfully belonged to his master on earth, his soul belonged to his master in heaven. By this convenient arrangement, somewhat metaphysical, to be sure, but entirely evangelical and logical, the problem of Negro baptism was solved. But with the Negro in the case, as I have said, the 24 Conflict argument was not entirely satisfactory. The opera- tion was much like that by which the white man got the turkey and the Indian got the crow. When the Negro looked for his body, that belonged to his earthly master; when he looked around for his soul, that had been appropriated by his heavenly master. And when he looked around for something that really belonged to himself, he found nothing but his shadow, and that vanished into the air, when he might most want it. One thing, however, is to be noticed with satisfac- tion ; it is this : something was gained to the cause of righteousness by this argument. It was a contribu- tion to the cause of liberty. It was largely in favor of the Negro. It was a plain recognition of his manhood, and was calculated to set men to thinking that the Negro might have some other important rights, no less than the religious right to baptism. Thus, with all its faults, we are compelled to give the pulpit the credit of furnishing the first impor- tant argument in favor of the religious character and manhood rights of the Negro. Dr. Godwin was undoubteldy a good man. He wrote at a time of much moral darkness and when property in man was nearly everywhere recognized as a rightful institution. He saw only a part of the truth. He saw that the Negro had a right to be baptized but he could not all at once see that he had a primary and paramount right to himself. But this was not the only problem slavery had in store for the Negro. Time and events brought an- other, and it was this very important one: Can the Negro sustain the legal relation of a husband to a wife? Can he make a valid marriage contract in 25 6e Conflict this Christian country ? This problem was solved by the same slaveholding authority, entirely against the Negro. Such a contract, it was argued, could only be bind- ing upon men providentially enjoying the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and since the Negro is a slave and slavery a divine institution, legal marriage was wholly inconsistent with the in- stitution of slavery. When some of us at the North questioned the ethics of this conclusion, we were told to mind our business, and our Southern brethren asserted, as they assert now, that they alone are competent to manage this and all other questions relating to the Negro. In fact, there has been no end to the prob- lems of some sort or other involving the Negro in difficulty. Can the Negro be a citizen ? was the question of the Dred Scott decision. Can the Negro be educated? Can the Negro be induced to work for himself with- out a. master? Can the Negro be a soldier? Time and events have answered these and all other like questions. We have among us Negroes who have taken first prizes as scholars; those who have won distinction for courage and skill on the battlefield ; those who have taken rank as lawyers, doctors and ministers of the Gospel ; those who shine among men in every useful calling, and yet we are called a prob- lem a tremendous problem ; a mountain of diffi- culty; a constant source of apprehension; a disturb- ing social force, threatening destruction to the holi- est and best interest of society. I declare this statement concerning the Negro, whether by good Miss Willard, Bishop Haygood, Bishop Fitzgerald, ex-Governor Chamberlain, or by 26 C & e Conflict any and all others, as false and deeply injurious to the colored citizens of the United States. But, my friends, I must stop. Time and strength are not equal to the task before me. But could I be heard by this great nation, I would call to mind the sublime and glorious truths with which, at its birth, it saluted and startled a listening world. Its voice then was the trump of an archangel sum- moning hoary forms of oppression and time-honored tyranny to judgment. Crowned heads heard it and shrieked. Toiling millions heard it and clapped their hands for joy. It announced the advent of a nation, based upon hitman brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality. Its mission was the redemption of the world from the bondage of ages. . . . Apply these sublime and glorious truths to the situation now before you. Put away your race prejudice. Bannish the idea that one class must rule over another. Recognize the fact that the rights of the humblest citizens are as worthy of protection, as those of the highest and your problem will be solved ; and whatever may be in store for you in the future, whether prosperity or adversity, whether you have foes within, whether there shall be peace or war, based upon the eternal principles of truth, jus- tice and humanity, with no class having cause for complaint or grievance, your Republic will stand and flourish forever." FREDERICK DOUGLASS. Were I to conclude this effort at this point, enough would be said in refutation of anything which has been spoken or written, or that may ever be spoken or written derogatory to the Negro race. But I shall not stop. A soul shall speak its defiance to the op- 27 C&e Conflict pressor until oppression shall cease. Truth shall op- pose falsehood, right against wrong, light against darkness. Truth, justice and right must prevail. It is an invincible trinity anchored in the consciences of just men and women everywhere who shall over- throw oppression by opposing moral purity to moral corruption. The potency of truth to error. Hence, I take up the third section of "The Mulatto Negro The Yellow Peril of the North." The writer says: "With the industrial failure of his race in the low- er grades of service, the educated and professional Negroes of the South will be forced into new fields ; for it is true of Negroes as of whites, that those who do the head work must be supported by those who work with the hands. What field so alluring to the educated and ambitious Negro as the region whence the propaganda is so often heard that only ignorance and poverty separate him from the white man? That once he has educated and enriched himself the Negro should be admitted to full partnership with the An- glo-Saxon. It is not the purpose of this article to quarrel with this propaganda. Let those hold it who will, only from henceforth let those who preach it, practice it. We have reached the point where the ex- ponents of this idea should either back it with their example, or back down from it altogether. The edu- cated Negro of the North ivill be satisfied with noth- ing short of full recognition, and those who are not yet ready to accede to all his demands would do well to draw the line while there is time." Right here, permit me to plead the readers' thoughtful consideration of this third section of the article now under review; especially the paragraph just quoted, as I shall oppose to it a logic the force of which is demonstrated in a law which cannot be infracted, but that 28 C6e Conflict in the persistent attempt to do so a national calamity must result. In this, the writer and all others who think as she does or follow her teachings, are as Satan : rebelling in heaven fighting against an invis- ible, invincible, all-powerful host. The issue is in- evitable, and her ridiculousness is only equalled by the enraged bull who would attempt to butt a locomo- tive off the track. But back to her argument "We plead only for honest declaration and purpose." The writer above quoted concludes his remarks with: "The misery of all our debating about the Negro is that we cannot honestly pretend to be glad that he is here or to desire that his seed shall increase. Yet surely we can afford the honesty of telling him the truth." This is the only plea that can fairly be made for the Negro now. This he has a right to demand, and this is finally the only kindness we can show him at present. Yet it is precisely this which very few people seem disposed to do. The political complica- tions which envelop him at the North and his en- tanglements with the industrial system of the South have hitherto prevented a free expression of opinion in regard to him. He has been deceived and misled by specious theories and glittering generalities until he might well be pardoned for praying: "Lord, save us from our friends ; we may be able to take care of our enemies !" "In the autobiography of a Northern Negress, pub- lished in the Independent some months ago, occurs this sentence: 'I can but believe that the prejudice that blights and hinders is quite as decided in the North as in the South, but does not manifest itself so openly and brutally.' Probably her Southern readers thought the Northern colored sister's adverb "brutally" might be more justly rendered "frankly," but that is immaterial. The important thing is her 29 Cjje Conflict testimony to the existence of the "blighting preju- dice" in the section where she was born and reared, and where she claims her father was an officer in a white church for years, and her mother was per- mitted to teach in a white Sunday school and young white girls officiated at her own wedding. And still she was not satisfied ! The Negro is what the French term "a difficult subject." He is so humble in his lowliness and so perked-up in his arrogance that one fluctuates be- tween indulgent commiseration and an indignant de- sire to punch his head in a hopeless effort to adjust one's mental plane to his attitude." In this para- graph, in fact, in this entire section of her article, she shows her animus and unreasonable bias her brain seemingly colorpho-biased ; reminding me of DR. GEORGE MORTON and MISS BERTHA GILMAN. the aristocratic and wealthy young woman living in the country village not far out from Philadelphia, and of whom it was reported in big headlines in all the Philadelphia papers a few years ago, that one night she awoke and seeing a "big, broad-shoul- dered mulatto Negro, with a slouch hat on, climbing in her bed-room window she did not frighten and scream as characteristic of her sex, but quietly got out of bed, cocked her little revolver, aimed and fired at the "big, burly brute." Her aim was good; as she had learned to shoot while visiting on a ranch somewhere out West. She heard her victim drop from the window to the ground below. She hastened to the window and looking down by the bright moon- light, she saw him on the ground below and pumped two more bullets into him and "heard him groan." Yes, I have all the newspapers with the full account and the young woman's photo as published. And a 30 C&e Conflict learned physician examined the blood as left in the trail by the "big mulatto Negro" as he dragged himself away into the bushes where, inside of a week afterward an honest white constable, seeking the wounded prowler, followed the trail of blood which the physician had declared to be human blood and found what was in reality a "big torn cat" with three bullet holes in its carcass. Thus exploding an- other bad case of Negro on the brain. Back to "the mulatto Negro" "His presence in any considerable numbers at the North will force public sentiment there to line up on the issue. Un- like the South, the North does not present a united front on this question, and this will increase her diffi- culties when her time comes to wrestle with the 'problem.' " As promised, I will oppose to this argument a logic irrefutable. In "McGirt's Quarterly Maga- zine," July, August, September, 1909, a series of six articles on "The Future of the American Negro" is just concluded. From it I quote: "This is an economic age; men are studying the workings of economic law more now than ever be- fore. They are beginning to find that as no law of man's making can annul or divert the effect of the physical laws of nature, so no human legislation can withstand the workings of economic laws. They are both immutable. For example, we have already found out that legislation cannot fix prices nor wages. And though a few centuries ago we tried to fix these things, yet the man who would introduce a bill in Congress to fix the price of lard or sugar or bread or the wages of all carpenters or day la- borers would be laughed to scorn. We have learned that these things are fixed by the economic law of 31 C6e Conflict supply and demand; that to legislate supply and de- mand out of existence is impossible." "Dr. Seligman, of Columbia University, to whom we have previously referred, says that economic free- dom is absolutely necessary for the highest develop- ment of any people, and that a nation which does not give the highest economic freedom, or tries to inter- fere with this freedom by legislation, may succeed for a while, but in the long run must fail of its high- est development. He says there are seven various kinds of economic freedom. These he enumerates as follows: On pages 165 to 168 (i) The first and most obvi- ous form is "freedom of marriage and divorce." This involves the right of any man of good, sound mind to marry any woman of the same character, if they both be willing, without any outside pressure on the part of the State. (2) "Freedom of movement," which permits the man to take his labor wherever he chooses without governmental interference. If he thinks it will net him more to work in California than in Maine, he is at liberty to go. (3) "Freedom of occupation." No laws should prohibit one man from going into any occupation which he desires, provid- ed he is competent. All men should have a chance, so that the best may come to the top and the worst go to the bottom; drop out or change to some other occupation, all willingly. (4) "Freedom of associa- tion." Every man can associate with every other man who desires to associate with him. No law should prohibit two persons who want to associate from doing so. (5) "Freedom of consumption." If a man works he ought to be free to spend his money as any other man. It is against all economic law, and therefore against the best interest of a people for any law to exist which permits one person or 32 C 6e Conflict group of people to buy sugar or salt and forbids an- other from doing this, or lets one have automobiles and prohibits another from doing so ; to let one have sleeping cars or rooms in hotels and prohibits an- other. All men ought to be permitted to consume according to their ability to pay, and no human law ought to interfere. (6) "Freedom of production," including freedom of contract and enterprise. All sane men ought to be allowed to make contracts, and both parties ought to have the same protection. The law should not know the employer from the employe, or the black from the white; all that it should do should be to protect the rights of each. (7) "Free- dom of trade." The State can require uniform li- cense, but should put no burdens on one tradesman that it does not put on another. These are some of the forms of economic freedom so necessary to national development. It took the civilized world centuries to learn them, and all of them are now accepted by most civilized nations for internal purposes. All except the 7th are accepted in the United States of America, both internally and ex- ternally, and from the calls for revision of the tariff it appears that the time is not far distant when we may have free trade, as England has to-day. But while these are accepted in the United States, the Negro is excluded from the first, fourth and fifth kind of freedom, namely, marriage and divorce, of association and of consumption. The ground of his exclusion from this freedom is "social equality," which will lead to the amalgamation of the races. Let us approach the subject fairly and squarely, without expressing our opinion or caring for the ra- cial prejudices of black or white men; let us ap- proach it from the viewpoint of the student of society. From this viewpoint it is not hazarding toe 33 i)e Conflict much to say that economic progress demands that these three limitations be done away with. The country cannot get the best out of itself or out of the Negro so long as these three limitations are per- mitted. They are uneconomic, therefore unnatural and, despite laws and prejudices must go. To show how impotent the law is, let us illustrate: There should be freedom of marriage, says the economist. Negroes and whites shall not marry, says the law. Now, marriage, economically speaking, is a mating of males and females, and its chief aim is to pre- serve and increase the population. To have children is the chief aim of marriage from the point of view of the economist. But the law steps in and says that there shall be no marriage between them. But what does it accomplish? Nothing, only to retard the working of economic law. For it, indeed, prohibits marriage but does not prevent children. The fact that the race of mulattoes is constantly increas- ing, and increasing more to-day than ever before, is ample evidence of the impotency of legislative statute to prohibit the mating of men and women of different classes, and the birth of children from their intercourse. That is why we do not advocate social equality or amalgamation or miscegenation or any other such unnecessary thing, for it does no good to advocate or oppose these than it does to oppose or ad- vocate gravitation or evolution, or the course of the stars. They are fixed by higher laws than those made by human legislatures. Of course the Negroes shall continue to grow in wealth and intelligence ; in power to organize, and in their influence in politics. This being true, they shall become more and more differentiated into social groups and classes, and though they remain for gen- 34 Cbe conflict erations to a degree separate, yet it can be depended upon that in a few decades they will become more and more diffused among the nation as a whole. They cannot always maintain their position of iso- lation. As soon as the Anglo-Saxon finds it to his advantage to attempt to break up the Negro's isola- tion, the Negro's future in this country will depend upon the Negro's economic development. They are now in a strategic position. And if they use the opportunities they now have even halfway well they cannot be kept down. It is said that when James K. Vardaman was inaugurated Governor of Mississippi, that some of his partisans predicted that the Negroes would "be put in their place." The fact was, more Negroes rose in business and otherwise in Mississippi during- Vardaman's adminis- tration than in all the forty years preceding. They established more banks and more schools, more soci- eties and more businesses than ever before. Some ignorant whites said. "Vardaman would stop Negro women from wearing silk dresses," but the women wore many more than before, and as one man re- marked, underdresses too. Some women in Jackson went to Vardaman to get him to force Negro women to work for them at a low price. But, despite the fact that he was gover- nor, and had a willing Legislature, he found it impos- sible to be of help to these would-be house-mis- tresses ; for economic laws are stronger than human laws. And thus I claim that there is no power under heaven to keep the Negroes down, they have begun to rise and they must rise if America is to be the great nation she hopes to be; for as no nation can survive half slave and half free, so none can make permanent progress where there is a double standard 35 Conflict of morals, in politics, in business or in law; one for whites and the other for blacks. They all must go." Thus it is evident that the harder the Negro is thrown down the higher he bounces. Like the fabled dragon if its head is cut off a thousand other heads spring from the bleeding neck, and from every drop of blood shed springs a young dragon. Oppression is the womb from whence springs civilization. Through it and in the multiplicity of po- litical parties among the whites I see the salvation finally of the Negro race. Professor Kelly Miller, in his book "Race Adjust- ment," says: "Genius knows no age, no country, no race. It belongs to mankind. The Negro enters in- to the inheritance of all the ages on equal terms with the rest, and who can say that he will not contribute his quota of genius to enrich the blood of the world ?" Yes, the future yet remains that the Negro race will by the exercise of thought draw out evidences, and produce facts yet unknown to the annals of history. As declared in my introduction, that they who es- pouse the cause of righteousness will shed a radiancy, illumining a path for their posterity, and that their personality would stride down the ages in splendor as evidence a great man and a statesman who has just died, in the person of Grover Cleveland. He speaks from the tomb on this great national question in and through his deeds which lives and works. Good men and women everywhere honor his memory, Philadelphia having just erected and dedicated to his memory a public school building at a cost of $2,500,000, accommodating 1,200 pupils. In the "A. M. E. Review," July, 1894, appeared by me an article entitled "Cleveland's Administration Influencing Public Opinion." Pertinent to this part of my argument, I quote from that article, "I regard 36 C & e Conflict Grover Cleveland in many ways one of the most re- markable men that ever attracted public notice. It must be admitted that his selections for cabinet portfolios and other high appointments have contrib- uted more than anything in recent years toward the solution of vexed national problems, and especially toward the easy and certain solution of a problem the positive existence of which is cause for the na- tion's greatest anxiety; and that problem exists in the denial of civil and political rights to more than 16,000,000 people, who by Congressional enactments, amendatory to the national Constitution is made first, by Article XIII, Freedmen; and second, by Ar- ticle XIV, is given the right of franchise ; and third, by Article XV, is guaranteed protection in the exer- cise of that right. Here allow me to remark that the act making one a citizen according to the Constitu- tional meaning of the term citizen, clothes that one with all the privileges and immunities peculiar to the protectional guarantees declared by the fathers of this American Republic in the basic principles of the Con- stitution, namely : "Life, liberty and the peaceful pur- suit of happiness." Hence, when the Negroes were by Article XIII made citizens there was no need for fur- ther legislation enacting the Fourteenth and Fif- teenth Amendment to the Constitution. The recent decision of the Supreme Court sustain- ing the contention of Fortune V. S. Trainor evi- dences the fact that the Negro citizen has every im- munity and privilege embraced in and recognized by the Constitution, even as that of any other citizen, notwithstanding the nullity of the Fifteenth Article, the inanity of the Fourteenth Article, and the repeal of the Federal election laws. Nevertheless, public opinion appears indifferent to the disposition of some people to disregard the Negro 37 C&e Conflict citizen's constitutional, civil and political rights, and herein is the Negro problem. In emphasis of our claim to the existence of a grave national problem, Mr. John Temple Graves, the brilliant ex-editor of "Dixie," says : "Let me as- sume, without argument, that no thinking man of to- day questions the existence of a race problem a vital and present and pressing problem, which chal- lenges at once the humanity, the pride, the integrity and the safety of the Republic. It is the bar to fra- ternity and to the unity of national sentiment. It is the obstruction in the way of foreign immigration and capital. It throttles liberty of sentiment and suffrage in the South. It poisons the Southern bal- lot. It demoralises justice in the Southern courts. It steadily threatens the peace and safety of society. It impedes the progress and full development of a race." Yes, it stains the Judicial ermine with foul murder and more in the South. The condition could not be more truthfully or beautifully stated, but Mr. Graves, in prescribing a panacea falls into the same error as others who have come like him, and gone before him, while the problem remains a fact not to be solved by African deportation, neither by separate statehood for the Negroes as suggested by Mr. Graves, Bishop H. M. Turner, Dr. Edward W. Blyden and Mr. McKinney, of Virginia. No! Mr. Graves must face the situation, and though grave it be, he and others must first recognize and admit that whatever in this problem is cause for local, national or universal alarm, the white people in the South particularly, and the white peo- ple throughout the country generally, are respon- sible, for in that the Negro's condition in this country is what -the white people have made it, and now to 38 change this condition the panacea demanded is sim- ple justice. Nothing short of that will do it. ... Hence, long magazine and newspaper articles and flowery speeches are but a waste of time and breath. Justice must finally come through the deeper thought, greater honor and higher intelligence of the nation, and the nation, as a whole, is taking on these qualities through cosmopolitan intermingling and na- tional contact of the West and South with the East and North. This cosmopolitan intermingling and national con- tact of thought and energy seems to be what Mr. Graves and all others of his way of thinking dread, especially if the Negro is to be considered fairly and as a man therein. But despite all objections, thought is being revolutionized and prejudices overcome through the opinions expressed in print by men and women, and by party leaders who are uncompromis- ingly wedded to the cause of right and justice rather than party success. The noiseless conscience of a divine and irresisti- ble providence in nature is like a great maelstrom at work purifying public opinion even as the wreckage and refuse of ocean is swallowed up ; and thus Mr. Graves and all others of his way of thinking are be- ing drawn by the whirlpool and carried down the vortex to trouble earth no more. In this relation Mr. Cleveland has done and is doing great good. Through his administrations Car- lisle, Watterson, Bayard, Pugh, Morgan, Mills, La- mar, Gorman, Garland and other strong leaders in the South, not incapable of broader thought, were brought into relations and in touch with the nation's higher and better thought as they had not before conceived of. Hence these men are to-day ashamed of their for- 39 C & e Conflict mer selves, since they now see how narrow were their views, how contracted their thoughts on public ques- tions. Their higher opportunities and broader asso- ciations now enable them to see how little and un- worthy of themselves were their former opinions. It certainly is a mutual help by way of mental improve- ment and manhood development to associate with great minds and lofty spirits at Delmonico's in New- York, and as the guest of the Home Market and other clubs in Boston, at the nation's capitol and among the royalties abroad. One cannot enjoy such opportunities and then be narrow unless he be both hide and brain bound. Therefore, if for nothing more than these appoint- ments to the democratic party, Cleveland and his ad- ministration are deserving of praise, for aid to this extent has been given toward the solution of the nation's problems. Again, the appointment by Mr. Cleveland of Ne- groes to high positions of trust and emolument has added wonderfully toward the easy and certain solu- tion of the Negro problem, in that by such appoint- ments, first, personal ambitions, self-interest and an almost general disposition among white democrats, and especially at the South, to discredit the Negro's ability is in great measure overcome by their animus being aroused to study more observantly the Negro as he really is, and being finally convinced of his sterling qualities and susceptibility and ability along with that of others. Second, the appointment of Negroes to high office lays white men along with others under tribute to them, especially when Negro diplomats and heads of departments have patronage to dispense and influ- ence to help office-seekers. Thus, in all, it is plainly evident that Cleveland's 40 C&e Conflict administrations have wonderfully influenced public opinion toward an easy and certain solution of the Negro problem. Then what has the Negro citizen to dread from the ascendency of a Democrat to the Presidency, gauged by Cleveland's administrations? Some of the important appointments by President Cleveland during his first administration were C. C. Astwood, Consul to Santo-Domingo ; Moses Aaron Hopkins and Charles H. J. Taylor, Minister Pleni- potentiary to Liberia, and Mr. Thompson, Minister to Hayti; Wm. H. Matthews and James Monroe Trotter, Recorder of Deeds of District of Colum- bia. During this, his second administration, he ap- pointed Mr. Astwood Minister to Calais, France, and Mr. Taylor, Minister to Bolivia, S. A. The Senate failing to confirm Mr. Taylor, Mr. Cleveland re- cently appointed him Recorder of Deeds. He also sent Mr. Smith Minister to Hayti. These are but a few of his strong appointments, not to mention the great number of Negro Republi- cans retained in office and held over throughout his first administration. In spite of my friend, Senator John J. Ingalls' philosophy, the Negroes are factors not only in the politics of this country, but otherwise, and it is un- reasonable to expect them to advance more rapidly, while only twenty-eight and a half years out of bon- dage." CESAR A. A. TAYLOR. At the time my article just quoted was written it is seen that I had a better opinion of some of Cleve- land's Cabinet selections and other appointees than they were worthy of. But it is not always easy to 41 C i) e Conflict distinguish the false prophet from the real, or the despicable demagogue from the statesman. But anathematic oblivion will shroud in eclipse all demagogic scoundrels whose hides and brains are im- pervious to reason, ungracious, and invulnerable to the higher sense of justice to mankind. Such some of these men have proven to be. The world will rate them, execrate them and then forget them. Their offspring in seeking entrance into the world's forum of assembling character, intellect and general worth will be shamed by the memory of their upas- like turpitude; as some of these murderous, power- hunger scamps died endeavoring to again rivet the shackles upon millions of their fellowmen. Yes, some of these howling mountebanks are dead, and others are dying, but the soul of justice is alive in the land. ' In two recent elections in Maryland, an intensely Southern state, the principles of hell was defeated at the polls ; the last time on the 2nd of jNovember, this 1909. "BLOOD WILL TELL." "Blood will tell" is an expression often quoted, and nothing demonstrates it stronger than the achievements of one individual or race as compared with the achievements of another individual or race. Hence, tell me of the hero's fight. In horrors' blackest night; For they alone are great Who great deeds have done ; Who triumph against fate; Who from depths to heights have come. Yes, blood will tell. The question raised by this expression is answered in the honest, humane judg- 42 C&e Conflict ment of every impartial, unbiased mind in the affir- mative. Of the North American Indian and the Negro, which of them as individuals or as a race have con- tributed most, if anything, to the cause of civiliza- tion, discovery, art, science or invention? Has an Indian ever written and published a book of interest? No. Has any Indian ever invented and had patented any article of utility ? No. Has any Indian ever given to the world any valu- able discovery in any of the arts or sciences? No. Have the Indians ever evolved or perfected any organization economical, religious, political, or otherwise of a civilized nature? No. Have the Indians ever demonstrated ability to con- duct a newspaper or magazine, monthly, daily or weekly ? No. Have the Indians ever demonstrated ability in com- merce or the trades and professions, in law, in medi- cine, in journalism, in art, in science, in literature, in politics or otherwise? No. In the history of the American Republic has an Indian ever sat as a member in either branch of the United States Congress? No. Has an Indian ever in the history of the American government held a position of national significance? No. Then what have the Indians ever done as a race to class them among the benefactors of mankind? Noth- ing. Absolutely nothing. From the "Okamulga Indian Territory Democrat" the following: "A few hundred dispirited, ragged, impoverished and ignorant people, the remnant of one of the most powerful tribes of North America is all that is left 43 Cije Conflict of a once happy and contented race, dwelling in Ar- cadian peace and primitive simplicity. These full- blood Cherokee Indians are starving to death. They have no food in their cabins, nor sufficient clothing on their backs. While half-breeds and whites and the Dawes Commission are quarrelling and contend- ing over rolls, the treaties and land tenures, the real Indian the people the country justly belongs to are actually dying in the hills for lack of food and clothing." This story is not overdrawn. It is not tinged with "yellow journalism." Three hours' drive into the hills east of Grand River will prove every assertion, and the half has not been told and never will be. Eternity alone will reveal the depths of poverty of these people, the owners, but not the users, of a princely estate. Will nothing be done to relieve these exceeding poor peo- ple? Will their own people, their kinsmen, many of them rolling in wealth gained through the use of more than their part of the common estate, will they permit these poor Indians to continue to perish for lack of bread? This is the present dreadful, actual picture of a people who inhabited and owned the whole American continent when the white man first set foot upon it more than four hundred years ago. A people who have been exploited and despoiled by the paleface from that time on down to the present. Hence the half-breeds, the amalgamated offsprings of the paleface, are now the despotic and tyrannical, tricky masters of the poor, incompetent remnant of full-blooded Indians. Has any other race ever, will any other race ever, demonstrate to all the world its utter incapacity to overcome its environment, or even to rise and assert 44 Cbe Conflict an individuality when aided by others? Echo an- swers No. I cannot more appropriately ring down the curtain on this sickening tragedy than by quoting from a Western magazine, published by two Indian half- breed sisters, the following: "Now that so much is being written about Anglo-Saxon dominion, and Cubans and Filipinos are to be either annexed or absorbed, perhaps it is not beside the question to look back to another inauguration of Anglo-Saxon do- minion a century or two ago, with the landing of the Mayflower and the settlement at Jamestown. Doubt- less, a consciousness of strength and power induces contempt for the conquered, an underrating of his good qualities, an exaggeration of his faults; at any rate, whatever the fate of the Cuban or Filipino, it is possible that the thinking world has never done the Indian justice. We see him to-day, the remnant of a once great and powerful nation, struggling against the inexorable laws of the survival of the fit- test, and unmindful of the heroism of that struggle, the world regards him with idle curiosity, as a sort of anachronism, or quotes that flippant bit of epi- gram, "no good Indians but dead ones." With characteristic selfishness, the great mass of humanity has passed on unheeding, and the tragedy is nearly played out now ; the curtain rose on the last act with the signing of the allotment of lands and the opening up of the territory. A hundred years or more will mark the passing of the Indian. Though there will be those who proudly trace their descent from Indian ancestry, the full-blood will have had his day. His has been a losing cause, though led heroically, 45 CDe conflict meeting the issue with stoic courage, giving no sign, he has fulfilled his destiny. When the white man first set foot on the North American Continent he found it inhabited by the most unique type of savage known to history. Of commanding physique, brave, courageous, of noble dignity, faithful to a fault, neither "forgetting a kind- ness nor forgiving an injury/' worshipping his Great Spirit with simple faith, hoping, as his reward, to live forever in the happy hunting grounds such was the Indian before the wise men came out of the East. The blight of civilization fell upon him, driv- ing him backward, ever backward, breaking his spirit, usurping his domain, sapping his strength. Yet a certain quixotism has always characterized the Indian. He has a keen sense of justice, and though suffer- ing from the grossest injustice himself, he cannot consent to inflict it. When fugitives from justice, social outcast, ad- venturers, all the flotsam and jetsam of civilization sought refuge in Indian Territory, they were unmo- lested, while their misdeeds and crimes were laid at the Indian's door. Though the vices of civilization have left their mark upon him, though the unequal struggle has taxed him sorely, he remains the most picturesque, the most heroic figure on the pages of American history. He goes down to succeeding generations without a literature and with no history save that recorded by a race inimical to the Indian in every instinct of his being. Until some Cooper shall arise, some Longfellow with a "higher, bolder note," the richest heritage of 46 Conflict American literature must remain unchronicled, un- sung blood will tell. The Indian is passing. Yea, merit is the source of life, Through the fiercest earthly strife, Sterling merit brings him safe, WJjgjjj the gods such a boon vouchsafes. Since first Africa was known, Many a nation's overthrown; In oblivion's sea has died, All unfit to stem the tide. But since Africa arose, Her success confounds her foes. Watchful, faithful, true and pure, She must evermore endure. A few years ago at the United States Indian In- dustrial School, at Carlisle, Pa., Prof. W. H. Coun- cill, of Normal, Ala., speaking on the "Negro and the South: His Work and Progress," in part said: "Some years ago, in the city of Montgomery, Ala., an old aunty was walking down the street from the capitol. A gust of wind swept her bandanna from her head out into the sands of the avenue. A manly Anglo- Saxon gentleman recovered the handkerchief and presented it in a most courtly manner to that old Negro woman. That gallant man was Thomas G. Jones, then Governor of Alabama. I am not afraid of a people who can produce men like that. This is only reciprocal kindness, for every great white man and white woman of the South, was taught patience, love and politeness by the thousands of black mam- mies and uncles scattered throughout the South for two hundred years, which peculiar conditions pro- 47 Cfte Conflict duced a manhood and womanhood, both black and white, unlike any other manhood and womanhood in the world. AN UNCROWNED QUEEN. "The Negro woman is, indeed, an uncrowned queen in adversity, and lifts her head far above abuse, slander and insult as the lofty mountain peaks kissed by the pure airs of heaven tower above the swamps and marshes which lie at their base. "Our female element, under mother influence, at- tends school and church, eschews the brothels, stays at home and works, and, to our shame, is the back- bone of the Negro race to-day. Were it not for the Negro women the outlook would be dark. I ani aware of the breadth of my speech when I say that the world has never furnished a higher womanhood under like conditions than the Negro women of the South. With strong appetites and passions, penni- less, often houseless, practically left to shift alone, amid debasing influences in the race and out, exposed everywhere, stumbling, falling, rising, fleeing she goes on washing, cooking, plowing, sowing, reaping educating her children, building the cottage, erect- ing churches and schools often supporting husband and son this black woman deserves the admiration of the world. THE NEGRO TRUE TO HIS COUNTRY. But has the Negro no claim upon the American government? Is there a section which has not felt the warm breath of his loyalty? Is there a section which has not been bathed in the sweat of his brow ? Is there a section that has not felt the lifting up in- fluence of his toils? Is there a decade in history, or a spot on its surface which has not been hallowed 48 C6e Conflict by his blood ? Has the East ever called when he did not answer? It was Crispus Attucks, a Negro, who was the first to lay down his life in the Revolution- ary War. Has the South ever called when he did not answer? Was he not with Jackson at New Or- leans? Did he not there pile up the cotton bales which protected the Americans from British lead? Has the North called when he did not answer? Al- though he would not follow Nat Turner, although he spurned the entreaties of John Brown to rise and slay innocent women and children, still, when he had a legal opportunity, he marched two hundred thou- sand strong, beneath the Stars and Stripes for his own freedom and the perpetuation of the Union. Has the whole nation ever called when he did not answer? It was the Tenth Cavalry under gallant Wheeler which planted the American standard on the heights at San Juan, crushed out the Spanish Empire, changed the map of the world, and made the crowned heads of all nations seek our government. True, through it all, as was great Toussaint L'Ou- verture who provided for the safety of his master's family, then whipped the best drilled soldiers of the world, gained the freedom of his people and the in- dependence of his beloved isle. What else is needed to establish the Negro's title to participate in the enjoyment of the rights and lib- erties of this great country? Permit this interjection to say: That despite the long, honorable record of faith- ful service to the nation, the patriotism and hero- ism of these Negro troopers whose valor made lus- trous more than a quarter of a century's page, in the nation's history I say despite this, southern preju- dice and Negro hate at Brownsville, Texas, gigan- tically conspired to blot them out, but through an 49 C&e Conflict overuling Providence, Theodore Roosevelt, as the nation's Chief Executive, whether unwittingly or in- tentionally, did by a stroke of his pen in executive order rescue the Negro troops from a bad predica- ment i.e., saved them from courtmartial, where enemies among white men in and out of the Army would have had wide scope to have done them incal- culable harm. If lies would in this case have accom- plished anything there would have been no lack of liars volunteering to testify before a courtmartial. Hence is explained the attitude of some publications and public persons who apparently were anxious that the Negroes be court-martialed rather than that they received Roosevelt's drastic dismissal. The position of this class of solicitous false friends was a reversal of the Irishman who was on trial for stealing a watch. He said to his lawyer : "Faith, see that ye get me out o' this." The attorney replied: "I'll see you get justice, Pat." AVhereupon Pat hurriedly said: "No, faith, it is not justice I want, but freedom." He knew that justice meant conviction, as he had actually stolen the watch, By this act of Roosevelt's the negro soldiers were saved from their false friends. Notwithstanding there may have been, and doubtless were, many hon- est lovers of fair play who believed that Roosevelt did wrong. But I see "standing in the shadow the Great Unknown, keeping watch over his own" yea, may- be in Roosevelt, another Daniel come to judgment. At any rate, Roosevelt had reason to remember the valor of the Negro troopers at San Juan Hill, making possible his continued and brilliant career. Quoting Prof. Councill's address, "Every Man's Friend" I know of no good element in human char- So Conflict acter which is not found in the Negro race. Indeed, the Negro has been placed under great strains of conscience, and taxed more severely in honor and integrity than any other race known to history. The South is wild in its praises of Negro fidelity in the days when it was prostrate in civil strife and its de- fenceless women and children committed to the care of the Negro. Is there a single case of treachery or infidelity recorded against us? The Northern sol- dier could always trust his life in the hands of a Negro wherever found. Is there a single case of treachery or infidelity recorded against us by the North? The faithful Negro would defend and feed "old mistress," hide the cattle, food and valuables in the hollows and in the thickets, and then pilot the Northern army by these hidden goods safely through the mountain out of danger. There was a struggle between his sense of honor and his desire for free- dom. He would rather have remained in bondage to this very hour than to have violated his sacred honor. Was ever human nature so taxed before? Do the pages of history record greater fidelity and heroism? Those same noble traits of character are in the Negro to-day. But some men will not see them. LESSON OF THE MONUMENTS. The world's monuments tell the story of human struggle. Where man has shed the most tears and moistened the earth with his blood, there the monu- ments have their foundation deepest. Where man has toiled and struggled for man, there the foundations of the monuments are broadest. Where man has fought fiercest in the realm of mind, there he has conquered most and there the monuments rear their heads highest My race has 5' Cfte Conflict built a monument in America which Time cannot efface. As long as man loves true liberty, as long as the spirit of justice finds lodgment in the human breast, as long as the virtues of fidelity and patience live among men, so long will the memory of the Ne- gro race in America live. All efforts to discount or wipe out our glorious record will only brighten it and cause it to reflect its refulgent glories far away across the ages to come. LESSON FROM THE JEWS. Nothing is immortal but mind. Nothing survives but spirit. Nothing triumphs but soul. The Jewish people are the fittest people in the annals of man. They alone live. All others die. All nations, whether an- cient or modern, have been broken and shattered in proportion to the intensity with which they have thrown themselves against this spiritual people. Oppress them, they increase. Persecute them, they flourish. Discriminate against them, they grow rich. They go right on growing stronger by the cruelty of their enemies. Babylon carried them into captivity. The Jew is here. Where is Babylon? Egypt beat them with many stripes, while they built her gigantic pyramids, and her enigmatical sphinx. The Jews are here, the pyramids and sphinx which they built are here. Where is Egypt? Rome whipped the Coloseum out of their muscles. The Coloseum is here. The Jews are here. Where is bloody Rome? Such will be the history of spiritual races unto the end the Negro is a spiritual race. WHAT SOLUTION MEANS. The solution of the race problem does not de- pend upon votes. Houses and lands cannot solve it. 52 C&e Con f Met Wealth and all the power, ease and comfort which it brings may aggravate it. The race question can be settled only by each race understanding its relation to the other. The solution of the race question does not mean social equality between the races, but it does mean fair treatment of races in inferior condition by races in superior condition. The solution of the race problem does not mean the triumph of one race over another. It does not mean the measuring of industrial and literary capaci- ties. It does not mean comparison of racial possi- bilities, but it does mean peace and mutual helpful- ness among the races. If this is not to be the result of discussion and present educational effort our civilization is a fail- ure, and our Christianity a farce. NO HISTORY. It is said we have no history. Take Egypt from us, if you please. We give up Hannibal. We will not remember noble Attucks. Wipe from history's page great Toussaint L'Overture and grand old Douglass, and still the Negro has done enough in the last forty years to give him creditable standing in the society of races, and to place his name in letters of gold across the azure blue above. Although we may be considered the baby-race in civilization we have answered every test which your highest civilization has applied. In science, in art, in literature your best critics give us good standing. In invention your own records give us credit. In music and song- you say we lead the world. In ora- tory you place us with your best. In industrial walks we have piled up a billion dollars for our- 53 Cfte Conflict selves and a billion for you in thirty-nine years. In the military your government records place us first. In Christian fervor and generosity we have taught the world lessons of self-denial, patience and love, transcendentally beautiful and glorious. And it doth not yet appear what we shall be. We will light up our wonderful imagination and emotion by the lamp of culture, turn our imagination into mechanical and philosophical invention, turn our deep emotion into music and poetry, turn our con- stant stream of feeling into painting and sculptury. We will send wonder and amazement through the scientific and literary world. There are more inventions to be thought out, higher classes of forces yet undiscovered to be har- nessed to appliances, more worlds to be discovered, more of God to be brought down to man. If the Negro is true to himself he may be God's instrument to bring it all about. God does not pay large prices for small things. Two millions of men did not meet forty years ago upon the battlefield, bankrupt the nation and redden the earth with their blood for nothing. God is helping the Negro to rise in the world." BLOOD WILL TELL. Dissatisfaction with one's condition is a virtue to be commended, dissatisfaction with one's self is a vice to be deplored. He who is dissatisfied with his condition will strive to better that condition, but he who is dissatisfied with himself is lacking in courage to face the demands of existence. As we emphasize one or the other of these views we go up or down; we either make or mar ourselves. The failures, the wrecks, the dispirited, the disheartened in life, the 54 C6e Conflict suicides, are all people who hate and despise them- selves, while, on the other hand, those who succeed, who triumph over opposing environment, who rise to place and power, who achieve greatness, who shape and mould the thought of others, who compel the world's support and applause, are those who are not dissatisfied with, but love themselves, and are dis- satisfied with, and hate and despise their condition or opposing environment. Be a man black, red or white, whatever is in him he will be. Yes, "blood will tell." If we want to we can, and we can if we will. We may want to, but cannot if we will not. I know not my mother, and never knew a father. Some think me a Negro, some think me a Mexican greaser, some think me a Cuban, some think me a Filipino, some designate me an Australian, etc. But, notwithstanding I do know that Indian blood courses largely through my veins, whatever be the other blood, and yet I cannot but deplore the Indians' sad plight and give credit to, and admire, the surviving qualities of worth as demonstrated in the Negro race. Yes, "blood will tell," so be it whatever blood pre- dominating in me, I do know that there is some kind of blood (if it be but one-sixteenth) in me which causes me to be satisfied with myself. It makes me love myself. I am proud that I am what I am, but I hate and despise my opposing environment the conditions which hamper and hem me in. So, by the eternals, I have sworn, I have determined to break through! I will be a man among men, either living or dead. I will not be satisfied with any condition less than that which is the right and due to a man and a gen- tleman. Thus my soul, heart and brain yea, all my com- 55 Conflict bined powers even as a giant hand, I lay it hard upon the world around me, compelling where coaxing does not avail the consideration accorded any other man. BLOOD WILL TELL. It is in me; I have done, am doing, and will do until I die. The world will know that in me a man lived. I will. Even of there is one-sixteenth of Ne- gro blood in me, I will be a man, for blood will tell, and heroic passions, great men and an illustrious an- cestry are requisite to the making of a nation. Thus I see in the Negro a worthy example to emulate. Being of an adventurous nature, with a love for travel and romance, and being a free man born, it was and is my prerogative to exercise the rights of a freeman in gratifying my desire for travel; yet when I essayed a tour of the Southern United States my color made me subject to Southern caste pro- scriptions ; forcing and compelling me into social re- lations where, despite the fact that I had sworn never to be other than a bachelor, rather than the benedict to any woman of a race the virtue of which the white man had either compromised or clouded with suspicion. I say, despite my determination, somehow or other, I contracted marriage with a young woman of mixed Indian and African blood. Her father, a mixed blood Negro of prominence who had served as a Senator in his state, as Post- master of his town and as Chairman of the Republi- can Committee of his county. Notwithstanding this Negro's high prominence, a low, degraded white man had despoiled his fair daughter. She was a mother before she was fifteen. I married her, and put her child by the white father into a boarding college. I preached ambition, the hope of opportunity and 56 Ij e Conflict a better life and future to both the mother and the growing- daughter, but I was not to be allowed to make the best I could in getting enjoyment out of the sacrifice which I had made. The white villain who had seduced my wife before I knew her fol- lowed her, sought her out, and in my absence again caused her to pawn her soul; to be faithless to her marriage vows. I refused to believe it until the truth was so plain I was compelled to admit it. And still I clung to her whom I had married. I tried to forget her guilt her unchastity. I travelled her around the world. I lavished wealth ; the fruits of my toil of brain and hand upon her. I introduced her among persons of honor and high distinction in America, and nobility abroad. I caused many distinguished attentions to her by press and public, but the effect of her first fall was upon her we grew further and further apart, until finally divorced by legal decree. This is what the white man did for me changed the whole course of my life. Blighted my most honorable aims and highest hopes. It is not in me to be a libertine, and again I de- termined to never marry any woman unless she either be virtuous or have not less than $10,000 whatever her race. I am now married again. My wife is a white woman, a woman who won me because of her vir- tue and her love. Yes, she loved me. I loved her. I did not seek to despoil and seduce her as white men do the women of other races. No, I married her honorably. And because I did this honorable act a white mob of hoodlums assailed my residence and place of business, threatened my peace and life and made me an exile among strangers. The white man in the United States of America 57 l)e Conflict has so robbed, plundered and otherwise exploited the Negro they have so lived upon them in print, on platform, and in church pulpit before all the world. They have caricatured, misrepresented and distorted the truth about these people till now that the Negroes by their endeavor and achievement are proving them as the greatest historical liars they as a last desper- ate resort turn to lynching, burning, open murder, incitement to riot, and all manner of barbarities, hop- ing thus to prevent the human part of the world from being undeceived. They charge the Negro with inferiority, while their own criminal brutality proves their inferiority, while the Negroes' superior virtue is seen in his magnani- mous patience and irresistible progress against every despicable hindrance the whites can impose. A VAMPIRE UPON THE NATION'S OTHER HALF. or the South's only, and a deadly enemy, and the nation's worst foe. In any community those who industriously labor as wealth-producers are certainly not a hindrance, but a help to the support of that community, while those who "neither toil nor spin," but with lusty throat and blatant mouth stir up racial strife by appeals to brute passions, fomenting pre- judice, and inciting mobs, threatening life and dis- turbing the peace and quiet of others, that through it they may obtain office to thereby enrich them- selves, are as certainly pariatic vampires upon that community; sucking its life blood, throttling pro- gress, and sowing a withering desolation more dis- mal than Sodom. Such men at the South are vampires upon the na- tion's other half. They are the South's only, and a deadly enemy, and the nation's worst foe. The 58 6 e Conflict Southern people are generally a noble people, goo- at heart, but the curse to them and their gloriously beautiful Eden-like land is the unrestrained yelping, and howlings of their Tilmans, Dixons, Vardamans, Hefflins, Germans, Smiths, Davis's, Slaydens and the wholesale tribe of other revenue-seeking dema- gogues who, to boost themselves into power, raise a hue and cry. Others hearing it, and wishing to ap- pear as not approving the inhuman instinctive make- up of the Negro as they believe it to be as pictured by the unprincipled politicians, so they join in the yelling without taking the trouble to inform them- selves. Then there are a considerable number of low, vic- ious, worthless, "ne'er-do-well" class of poor, white trash, typical of a class to be found in every com- munity and of every race. Such persons naturally envy those whose enterprise and endeavor place them in fortunate circumstances, and welcome the op- portunity to add emphasis to the firebrand utter- ances of the demagogue, and in these outbreaks of turbulence the thief, thug and corner loafer come to the front and loot right and left ; sparing none where opportunity favors them to plunder, and at times to even burn and murder thus to augment a reign of terror, the better enabling them to ply their nefarious thievery undetected. And since, in the nature of things, there are a large number, the great majority who do not feel to jeopardize their interest or hazard themselves amid the howlings and yelpings of the demagogue, the thug, the thief, the hoodlum and such like in a bloody crusade for spoil, so, since the voice of these is heard the loudest, it seems all is going their way. Hence, the cause of right and justice suffers; not 59 Cfje Conflict because there is not a majority of good men and women in our land, only that these good men and women have not as they ought to interest themselves as their "brother's keeper" to call a halt to iniquity in the land. But praises be given that there is now beginning an awakening yea, righteousness must and will prevail God is not dead. Here again I quote "The Mulatto Negro a Yellow Peril": "Largely speaking, there are three classes of Northerners in their attitude toward the Negro. There is a small, select cult, who preach the doctrine of full political and social equality and boldly advo- cate miscegenation as the only Christian and ra- tional solution There is, of course, no 'Negro peril' for this class anywhere. There is another class, the antipodes of this one, in whom Caucasian exclusive- ness is as strongly developed as in the proudest South- erner, and who answers to President Eliot's descrip- tion of being even more averse to personal contact with the Negro. This class of Northerners are not appeased by the colored man's educational veneer- ing, nor by his acquisition of wealth and official honors, nor yet by his light complexion. They are less impressed by the meretricious show of Negro progress than many Southerners, because with more discernment they have thought the thing out for themselves independently of their environment. They hold that the qualities of the blood go deeper than any mere surface-show of book learning or pious phraseology; that 'reversion to type' is a scientific principle." I here recommend the writer and all so- called and self-constituted historians and scientists who have delighted to juggle the facts of history that they read with honest eyes the brilliant history of Carthage for more than 700 years, of Hasdrubal, of Hamilcar and of Hannibal. Remember that the 60 Cfje Conflict Roman Senate conferred not the title of Cartha- genus, but Africanus upon Scipio thus attesting the fact that the Carthagenians were Africans. Read of Egypt, in the northern part of Africa, founded by the great Miseraim, the descendant of Ham, Kam or Chem, the root of chemistry Egypt, the cradle of learning, of science and art, from whence light emanated and as a torch in the hands of men and women it was borne around the world, banishing ignorance from darkened minds at a time when the descendants of Shem and Japhet were dwelling in caves, covering themselves with the skins of wild animals and subsisting upon roots and herbs. Memnon in Egypt invented letters. Thales traveled in Egypt, returned to Greece, the place of his nativity, and calculated eclipses and made other astronomical reckonings more than 600 B.C. It cannot be wisely contended that a civilization the like of that in Egypt did not affect the entire African continent. As a fact, travel in Africa to- day is bringing to light the truth of the ancient greatness of the African continent by and through its people centuries ago. The African, the Negro parent root, lives to-day. Where are the Huns, the Celts, the Gauls and other races who live only in history ? A certain class of white writers and speak- ers would if they could blot all this out if they could not twist and distort it to suit their own prejudiced, biased brains. The writer further says : "They stand by the bio- logical axiom that "the man history is the race his- tory." Yes, and I say: and vice versa. Continuing she writes: "and they know the proper place to study the latter is where the racial tendencies have free play, unrestrained by the presence of the domi- nant race. Therefore for the real Negro character- 61 Cbe Conflict istics these turn not to the cities of Europe and con- tinental United States, where he is constantly copy- ing and leaning upon the white man, but to the jun- gles of Africa and to the black republics which he has established for himself, where he may work his own sweet will without let or hindrance from others." Nowhere is he permitted to do this. Whites en- deavor to exploit him, and to this end diplomatically intermeddle with him and endeavor to discredit him everywhere even as you are doing. But what of ancient Egypt as compared with the world both an- cient and in modern times? What of Liberia and of Abyssinia despite their environment? What of Hayti as compared with other, and white governments in South and Central America? There was a time when the great government of these United States of America wanted a coaling station as a naval base at Mole St. Nicholas in Hayti, but being unable to secure such a foothold on Hay- tian territory under the then Haytian administration ; somehow or other a revolution ensued down there, and some ambitious Negroes, even as like white peo- ples, came to the front, through a revolution, to the overthrow of the Negro Haytian patriot who could not be used to foster the designs against his govern- ment by those who to serve their own ends would bathe the weaker nations in blood. Why did Frederick Douglass resign as Minister to Hayti ? Who knows ? What of Capriano Castro, Venezuela and the United States of America ? What of Panama, Colombia and the United States of America when this good and righteous government wanted a right of way for a link of the Atlantic with the Pacific Ocean, and more recently the complica- tions between Nicaragua, the United States and the 62 C6e Conflict ever ready tool the ambitious, aspirant hungry for place and power in close juxtaposition? Oh, you Monroe Doctrine, you are great, and no doubt about it, but the world is watching you. What would your Uncle Sammy do if some foreign "galoot" should have the "gall" to come here and even attempt to start a filibuster movement against his government at Washington? She writes: "And these Northern students of the race problem along purely scientific lines find the racial traits therein revealed so little to their liking that they have no mind to take chances on them in their own families not even for the "eighth move." These will fight most strenuously the new Negro peril at the north, and in so doing they will merit the sym- pathy of the civilized world, for they are fighting foes within and without and, as usual, the worst are those of their own household. Between the two extremes of Northern opinion on this question there is another and by far the most numerous class at the north, who wish well to the Negro in a vague and general sort of way, who would like to "help" him at long range, who are full of beneficent platitudes anent the "man and brother," but whose regard for him rests partly on a miscon- ception of his real nature and partly on a sense of security from him in any event. With the "coming of more Negroes" this class will have an opportunity of applying to themselves the theories they have so long believed applicable at the South, with the pos- sible result of a better understanding of their South- ern neighbors. It is a favorite argument with this class that the South's policy of making the Negro subordinate, of drawing the color line as rigidly against the educated and virtuous as against the illit- 63 Cfu Con f iict erate and depraved, is not calculated to foster the Negro's self respect nor conducive to a very high racial development allowing that he is capable of such development and this is indisputably correct. There is absolutely no flaw in our Northern friends' reasoning on this point, and if the Negro's advancement were the sole thing to be considered, the South's "color line" policy should receive unmiti- gated condemnation. But there is another aspect of the question on which the Northern mind does not appear to reason quite so clearly. It fails to see the logical connection between political equality and social equality in a free republic, and particularly the advocates of social equality, for the most deserving Negroes deny that this is the natural precursor of miscegenation. They take sharp issue with the statement of Professor Smith of Tulane University (New Orleans) in his recent book, "The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn" "If we sit with the Negroes at our tables, if we entertain them as our guest and social equals, if we disregard the color line in all other relations, is it possible to maintain it fixedly in the social relation, in the marriage of our sons and daughters, in the propagation of our species ? Unquestionably, No ! It is as certain as the rising of to-morrow's sun that once the middle wall of partition is broken down, the mingling of the tides of life would begin instant- ly and proceed steadily. If the race barrier be re- moved and their individual standard of personal ex- cellence be established, the twilight of this century will gather upon a nation hopelessly sinking in the mire of mongrelism." As every one knows, "The mid- dle wall of social partition" has never been so solidly maintained in the North as in the South, and the 64 C6e Conflict greater mongrelism as set forth in the census records cited in this article seems to uphold Professor Smith's position rather than that of the Negrophiles However, the final vindication of the one or the other will come with the increase of the Negro popu- lation at the North, and the opportunity to witness the effect of the different Negro policies when some- thing like an equality of numbers obtain between the sections. If it should happen, for instance, that cer- tain counties of Massachusetts instead of Mississippi should register eight Negroes to one white citizen it will be interesting to watch the working of the "free ballot and fair count" system in the home of its chief apostles." My strictures on this section are the same as upon that preceding this, as well as all I say in this book, and the Negro himself, when viewed by humane eyes, unprejudiced, everywhere answers this, "Blood Will Tell." Yea, to quote that true and beautiful poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox : "However the battle is ended, Though proudly the victor comes With fluttering flags and prancing nags And echoing roll of drums, Still truth proclaims this motto In letters of living light No question is ever settled Until it is settled right. "Though the heel of the strong oppressor May grind the weak in the dust, And the voice of fame with one acclaim May call him great and just, 65 Cfte Conflict Let those who applaud take warning And keep this motto in sight No question is ever settled Until it is settled right." "I know as my life grows older And mine eyes have clearer light, That under each rank wrong somewhere There lies the root of right." Here I take up the sixth section : "One fact which is usually ignored by the Negro-rights' agitators, and clamorers tor "equality of opportunity," must com- mend itself to every thoughtful intelligence: wher- ever the Negro exists in sufficient numbers to make his presence felt in any community, in direct pro- portion as his privileges increase is the racial feel- ing against him intensified." Sure, competition be- gets rivalry anywhere among all peoples, but rash indeed are those, and insanely so, who do not realize that the Negroes in this country are industrial fac- tors and have got to be so considered in any eco- nomic scheme embracing capital and labor if this nation is to continue a free and prosperous Republic. The truth is, that "they whom the gods would de- istroy they first make mad," was never more mani- fest than is seen in the attempt being made in the United States of America to inaugurate an indus- trial policy eliminating the Negro. Facing the fact that there are hundreds of thou- sands of Negroes in this country who are not only willing and capable, but anxious to do the labor of the land in any line of industry if only given a chance, paid fair wages and treated humanely, it is with commiseration and pity that I contemplate the future of this country when I see the inhumanity of 66 C&e Conflict a class of white men in the United States of America giving cause for the following editorial as appeared September I9th, 1907, in the Philadelphia, Pa., Press; "Attorney General Bonapart's opinion on state as- sisted immigration as affected by the immigration act passed by the Congress just adjourned will be a very serious disappointment to Senator Tillman and other Southern Senators. Led by the Senator from South Carolina, they objected to the prohibition of assisted immigration. The new legislation vitally changed the law. Before assisted immigration was prohibited if the assistance was based on a contract for future labor at an agreed wage. The new legislation cuts off all assisted immigration whatever. "Senator Tillman anxiously asked if this cut off aid from the State Bureaus of Immigration. Htf was assured it did not. The law, however, was clear. Congress has the explicit power to cut off any assisted immigration. In the new immigration act it has exercised it. "The Southern States are desirous of white immi- gration. South Carolina, Louisiana and Texas have active commissioners ready to pay the passage of immigrants. Charleston, New Orleans and Galve- ston were by special acts in the Congress just ad- journed made immigration stations. All assisted immigration, however, has its perils normal immi- gration takes the adventurous, efficient and enter- prising. Assisted immigration attracts the reverse. "Steamship companies are already doing enough to bring in assisted immigration under one disguise and another. One investigation and some scandal have grown out of one state assisted colony of im- migrants. Others may follow. States which permit peonage, the chain gang and the use of various means 67 Cfje Conflict to keep men at work, including in some counties the shotgun and the lash, are liable to have employers ready to apply these means to foreign immigrants, brought over under contract and set to work in isolated regions. Immigration needs to be sifted, and there is no better test than the stringent requirements that an immigrant shall have the thrift and initiative to bring himself here, without any aid whatever, State or individual." This editorial rings clear and right, but there is absolutely no earthly reason at all for this maD doG backwards business. But read this: "Washington, D. C, Sept. i8th, 1907. More than a quarter of a million places of employment are open for the thousands of aliens who are pouring into the United States, according to a report to-day by Terence V. Powderly, chief of the division of information of the Bureau of Immigration, to Sec- retary Straus, of the Department of Commerce and Labor. Although the bureau has been in existence only two months, it already has on file information showing that places can be provided for 256,400 men, women and children at wages ranging from $3.00 a week to $3.50 a day. "Individual employers will place immediately 1,395 at wages ranging from $1.25 to $3.00 a day. "Commissioners of Labor and State Boards of Agriculture report that 84,100 aliens can be given employment at wages ranging from $18.00 per month to $3.00 per day. "The Commissioners of Agriculture of three States say that 1,020,000 settlers are needed in their States. "It is proposed to distribute this information in circulars and pamphlets printed in several languages through steamship agencies abroad, on vessels com- 68 Cbe Conflict ing into this country carrying aliens, through foreign missions and societies at various European ports and at the steamship docks and immigration stations at Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore and through the public press. "It is proposed also to have well qualified men and women to travel on steamships to inform incoming aliens of what they may expect on arrival in the United States. Through these agents, it is expected to check any attempted violations of the alien con- tract labor law." Now, wouldn't the mummies save this nation? Why all this commotion why this fustin and feathers ? Could not the government be in better business if it were to busy the Department of Commerce and Labor in trying to equalize the distribution of the American citizen laborers right here at home, both whites and Negroes, instead of being so solicitous about the foreigner and the alien? Here and now I speak a prophecy, that in this policy the nation is "sowing to the winds to reap the whirlwind." In my book to follow this I shall have more to say upon this particular subject. Again I quote the "Mulatto Negro, the Yellow Peril" : "This is strikingly illustrated in the District of Columbia, where there are more Negroes (ninety thousand) than in any single community North or South, and where thev are at the same time under fewer restrictions. Barring the self-assertiveness which this policy naturally engenders in them, the Washington Negroes are as well-behaved as the most, and yet nowhere in the country is racial antagonism so acute, and this without respect to the sectional leanings of the whites. Nothing is more common 69 Clje Conflict than to hear citizens from the Northeast or North- west, where Negroes are scarce, depose : "We thought we had a good deal of sympathy for Negroes before we came to Washington ;" or to hear them informing newcomers from those regions: "You have only to come to Washington to find out your real sentiments about the Negroes." And racial antagonism is a factor to be reckoned with. Right or wrong, it in- sists on space to exist as much as the roots of a tree. You cannot reason it away, nor preach it out of countenance, nor annul it by legislative enactment, and any scheme for the amelioration or uplifting of the Negro which ignores this as a complication must surely fall to the ground. Few people have the honesty and the fearlessness to tell the Negro that only by his consenting to remain the "under dog in this government can he hope to continue a peaceful residence under it; and yet this is precisely what every honest thinker, white or black, knows to be the case. The colored teachers who have the courage to proclaim this truth have usually paid the penalty of their rashness in the mob vengeance of their irate followers." Concluding this section the writer reasons like a baby, ignoring the fact that a race of people that could furnish more than two hundred thousand he- roes to offer up their lives for the Stars and Stripes that this nation might live will surely not be lacking in courage if the time should ever come to fight to retain the liberty they have once breathed even such as it is. She either ignores or forgets the Negro's career as a soldier and a fighter campaigning in the West, at San Juan Hill, at El Caney and in the Philippines, not to mention the thousands of courageous hearts 70 Cfje Conflict and cultured minds to inspire, lead and direct, these in the ranks of the Negro and among his friends amid every race throughout the world. The Negro fully realizes that "To wealth there is no royal route: 'Tis written with a sigh, The universal rule must be, "Root, hog or die." And he's er-rootin' live or die; His children will profit by and by. This Negro question is the nation's problem, and it must be solved two of four ways, either social and religious, or political and industrial; and if to serf- dom the Negro is reduced, then will the wage stand- ard of the white man go down. Then our Republic is gone. In the language of the immortal Lincoln, "This nation cannot exist half slave and half free." Again I say: "Laws of changeless justice binds Oppresser with oppressed, And close as sin and suffering joined We march to fate abreast." Will this nation commit the great crime of aban- doning the Negro to the opulent, rapacious greed and the unequal struggle to pursue peace, life and liberty against the combined wealth, intelligence and crafty, conscienceless statecraft of the Southern white man ? No, I cannot believe it. Writing in the January, 1907, "American Maga- zine," Dr. Washington Gladden chose for his sub- ject "The Negro Crisis." Quoting from that article, he says : "Governor Hoke Smith of Georgia declares 71 C&e Conflict that the proper position of the Negro in the nation is not that of a citizen, but that of a ward, a dependent the same position as that of the Indian. He for- gets or ignores the fact that the attempt to keep the Indian in this relation has brought blight to the In- dian and a perennial curse to every agency of the government that has tried to deal with him. But, of course, Governor Hoke Smith agrees with Governor Vardaman in advocating the repeal of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, for they precisely define the position of the Negro in the nation, and declare that he is not a ward nor a subject, but a citizen. These recent utterances of representative men show that the movement described by Mr. Schurz to re- duce the Negroes to a permanent condition of serf- dom is well under way. MAKING SLAVES OF MEN. Will this movement be successful ? I do not think so. The Negroes have submitted, without much re- sistance, to practical political disfranchisement, but when it becomes evident that their intellectual and economic opportunity is limited or threatened, there is likely to be serious trouble. Mr. Schurz has a few sober words on this subject which ought to be pondered: "To keep a race in slavery that had been in that condition for many generations, as was done before the Civil War, is one thing, comparatively easy ; but to reduce that race to slavery or something like it, after it has been free for half a century (and after, we might add, it has increased from four to nine millions), is quite another thing nobody knows, how difficult and dangerous." This campaign of subjugation into which the gov- ernors of Mississippi and Georgia propose to lea(| 72 the Southern whites will be found to be an ardu- ous one. The white population of the Southern tier of States from Texas to North Carolina number 6,622,281 ; the Negro population of those States num- bers 5,483,460. The whites, of course, are far stronger, and could easily overpower the Negroes in a race war; but the Negroes are numerous enough to cause them a great deal of trouble. It is not likely that any general conflict would be precipitated; but Senator Tillman's prediction that race struggles of a very bitter nature are likely to be frequent and continuous in the South is not without probability. If any such policy as that which the two governors are advocating should be generally adopted through the South, that result may be confidently predicted. Allow me to interject here to remark that the South has already seen the hand-writing on the wall, and is thus busy through her emissaries (Tillman, Varda- man, Dixon, Graves, Smith, Swanson, Hefflin and the author of "The Mulatto Negro: A Yellow Peril"), turning earth and hell upside down in an endeavor to corrupt the North and the world to ac- quiesce, if not be a partner, to the iniquitous piece of infamy which it hopes to finally consummate; but, hear Dr. Gladden further: "In their, the Negroes', resistance to this policy, which undertakes to shut them out from the opportunities of manhood, the Ne- groes would have the sympathy of the whole civil- ized world. That they would have the sympathy of the vast majority of the white people of the United States can hardly admit of a doubt." In my use of the word South in a general sense, I wish not to be understood as referring to the many good and noble people in that section. I mean the 73 Cfje Conflict reactionaries, those loud mouthed demagogues who assume to speak for the people of that section. Quot- ing Dr. Gladden again, he says: "I have spoken of this policy of subjugation and repression as the pol- icy of the reactionaries of the South. But I wish now to make it very plain that the people of the South are not all reactionaries. I have admitted that a good many people at the North sympathize with this policy, and I rejoice in believing that a good many people at the South utterly abhor it." That other movement which Mr. Schurz predicts is also in motion to-day, "the movement in the direc- tion of recognizing the Negro as a citizen in the full sense of the word." That is not distinctly a Northern movement. It is a Southern movement as well. There are many Southern men who are determined that the Negro shall not be reduced to serfdom; who mean that he shall have a chance to be a man to make of himself what God meant him to be. Listen to the words of the Southern man who now presides over the university founded by Thomas Jefferson: "The best Southern people are too wise not to know that posterity will judge them according to the wisdom they use in this great concern. They are too just not to know that there is but one thing to do with a human being, and that is to give him a chance." What is to be done with the Negro race? It "must somehow be built into this national fabric, and or- ganically incorporated with the national life and character." That is the word of Professor Wood- ward of Trinity College, South Carolina. "For a superior race to hold down an inferior one simply that the superior race may have the services of the inferior was the social doctrine of mediaeval- 74 c Conflict ism. To deny the Negro the highest and strongest influences is to enslave him to a life of moral weak- ness and moral degradation ; and the God who made him, in the final settlement of human history, will not likely overlook such unrighteous conduct." That is the word of President Kilgo of the same college. While the development of the higher life (of the Negro) may come slowly, even blunderingly, it is dis- tinctly to be welcomed." That is the word of the Rev. Edgar Gardner Murphy of Alabama. We must not belittle the work that has been done for the Negro in the South, since it has been a great and beneficent work, and the men who have taken part in it deserve the honor of the nation and of human-kind. If at this moment the movement which they repre- sent seems to be losing ground, and "the movement in the direction of reducing the Negroes to a perma- ment condition of serfdom" seems to be advancing, we may hope that this reverse is temporary, and the forces of Christian civilization are sure to prevail. "The forces of Christian civilization," I have said. I have not spoken of the Christian Church, but it would seem that it ought not to be, in this computa- tion, a negligible quantity. Does the Christian Church believe that the Negro is a man? Does it believe that Christ died for him? Does it believe that the word of Jesus is addressed to him, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect"? Does the obligation rest on him of mak- ing the most of himself, of cultivating to the full the powers with which his Creator has endowed him? We know what some Christians of the South think about these things, for the above words that I have quoted just now are the words of Christian men, and they were inspired by love and loyalty to Jesus 75 Cfte Conflict Christ ; the mind of Christ is in them. And it would seem that the great truth of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, which is shining forth in these days with such compelling clearness, which is forcing men in all the lands to consider the cause of the poor, and to do justly and love mercy, must become the controlling influence in the church of Jesus Christ everywhere. If that central truth of Christianity is accepted by the churches of the country, North and South, there can be no question about the solution of this problem. CONFLICT OF OPPOSING TENDENCIES. In the meantime the issue is clear between the ideas and interests represented by the two Governors and Senator Tillman on the one hand, and those rep- resented by these college presidents and professors on the other, and the question is, which of these movements is destined to prevail? What will happen if the first of these movements becomes prevalent I have tried to indicate. If the other, which is in harmony with the Constitution of the United States, and with the instincts of human- ity and with the principles of the Christian religion, should prove the stronger, the two races would continue to dwell together peacefully; the laws would be rigidly and steadily enforced equally against Negro brutality and white savagery; each race would learn to respect the other and to respect itself; the specter of miscegenation would vanish and the two races would co-operate produc- tively for the common good. Each needs the other; the highest prosperity and welfare of each depends 76 C6e Conflict on the friendship of the other. Not only on its friendship, on its well-being also. Those reactionaries at the South who imagine that they can build economic prosperity on a pros- trate laboring class are simply ignorant of the com- monest truths of human experience. It is a momen- tous conflict between these opposing tendencies. The chief theatre of it is at the South, but the North is involved in it. We have had our own outbreaks of savagery, in which race-hatred made wild beasts of men; and so long as our industries shut the Negro out of all the best opportunities, we have few stones to throw at our Southern brethren. Our trades unions are less frank in their treatment of the Negro than Governor Vardaman or Senator Tillman, but they are not much less inhuman. We must clear our skirts of these stains before the North can hope to speak to the South as per- suasively as it ought to speak respecting the rights of the Negro. Nevertheless, the problem at the South, as we have already seen, is a national problem, and we must not withhold our hands from doing what we can to help in its right solution there. With those true and brave witnesses whose voices we have heard, and with all who stand with them for the opportun- ity of the Negro to be a man, we join ourselves in an earnest endeavor to open to him the gates of op- portunity and to lift up before him the ideals of Christian civilization." "With redoubled emphasis I ask, can it be possible that any race of people would be so rash as to invoke their own annihilation by open and brutal defiance of God through persistently trying to prevent the 77 Cbe Conflict Negro from developing to the limit whatever good- ness God has implanted in him? If the white race can succeed in this dastardly at- tempt then infidelity and atheism is enthroned and the world goes back to beastly anarchism, and says with me : damn the white man of America's religion, damn his church, damn his preaching, and damn his false interpretation of God's Book of Holy Writ, and the compassionate Christ. Coming now to the Seventh Section of "The Mu- latto Negro, etc.," the writer says: "The advocates of the elevating process, to be consistent, should also advocate giving the Negro a country and a govern- ment of his own; but, strange to say, those who are most insistent upon the high qualities and great pos- sibilities of the Negro race oppose any colonization scheme upon the ground that the Negro cannot be trusted to work out his own salvation. People are continually talking about educating and elevating the Negro as the final and amicable solution of the race problem, when they must know, in the light of all past history, that whenever the Negro rises to the dignity of rivalry with the Anglo-Saxon his doom is sealed." It may be the doom of his rival. The world and Russia thought likewise about the "little brown men of Nippon." Remember, the Negroes make no boast by way of inviting such an issue, but, by the Eternal it is sealed as writ that he will be whatever it is in him to be, and all the combined powers of darkness are impotent to prevent it. You and those of your thought had better be satisfied that there is room for fair play for all. In such a rash declaration your race has much to lose and nothing to gain ; while the Negro has much the hope of being a man, or dying in the struggle yea. in the cataclysm or the 78 C6e Conflict holocaust, whatever you might choose to forecall it. When a patience like that of the Negro's ceases to be a virtue animate and inanimate creation will stand aghast at a conflict the like of which the world has never seen. Continuing this section: "The measure of con- sideration which he receives at present is due to the fact that we feel ourselves so immeasurably above him. It is a case of "noblesse oblige." Well, why in all creation do you oppose him so hard? "To unset- tle a weak mind, were an easy, inglorious triumph. And a strong cause taketh little count of the worth- less suffrage of a fool." "Thrice, not twice, but three times, is he armed who hath his quarrel just, and he but naked though locked up in steel whose conscience with injustice is corrupted." Again, I say: "Within the breast of many a one who cannot bear to see, The hated negro prospering, This form of prayer may be: 'O, Lord, do keep the nigger back. Let darkness be his shroud. He's tripping close upon our track, He's ranting long and loud. We've sent some educated farmers to the legis- lative halls To make some laws, that when enforced should make the nigger fall. We've clipped his rights, we've stole his vote, but he rises over all. O, Lord, do keep the nigger back." 79 C&e Conflict Still gnashing her teeth over the "Mulatto Peril" she writes : "Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, in the summary of his conclusions on this subject says: 'There are but two solutions of the Negro problem: we must re- move him, or we must elevate him.' " Mr. Page would have put the case more accurately in saying: "If we elevate him we must remove him." In himself are the elements of elevation, hence, the question arises: can you remove him? You are certainly trying hard. Beginning April, 1907, Mr. Ray Stannard Baker had a series of articles appearing in the American Magazine, "Following the Color Line." From the July number, I quote, "Continued aggression," John Hay once said, "is the necessity of a false position." The ante-bellum Southern leaders saw that they must either extend their institution or else face its ulti- mate extinction. At the present time we have a repetition of the ante-bellum aggression. As it happened then, we have speakers like Tillman and others coming North urging the validity of the Southern treatment of the Negro. Writers like Thomas Dixon rekindle old fires of hatred. At the same moment that Tillman is abusing the North for its interest in Southern education, he himself is speaking from Northern platforms to make sentiment for the Southern position. So we have the extension of disfranchisement and "Jim Crow" laws to the new Western State of Oklahoma and the agitation for disfranchisement in Mary- land. So we. have the advancing demand by South- erners in Congress for the repeal, of the Fifteenth Amendment, and just recently Congressman Heflin So Cfje Conflict of Alabama has introduced a bill seeking to provide for "Jim Crow" distinctions upon the street cars of Washington. How all this recalls efforts of the ante-bellum Southern congressmen to force the United States government to take the Southern po- sition on the slavery question. FIGHTING TO KEEP THE NEGRO DOWN. I have recently read some of the voluminous dis- cussions upon the subject of slavery which took place before the Civil War, and I have been astonished to find the arguments of the Southern political leaders of to-day almost identical in substance (though changed somewhat in form) with the reasoning of the old slave-owning class. One hears the same arguments regarding the physiological and ethnological inferiority of all col- ored men to all white men; the argument that "one drop of Negro blood makes a Negro," and even that the Negro is not a human being at all, but is a beast. I have before me a book recently published by a Bible house (of all places!) in St. Louis and widely circulated in the South. It is entitled, "Is the Negro a Beast?" and it goes on to prove by Biblical quota- tion that he has no soul! Being a beast, it becomes a small matter to kill him. One also hears the argument now, as in slavery times, of the divine right of the white man to rule the Negro. "God intended the white man to rule," says Vardaman, "and the Negro to be a humble ser- vant." And, finally, there is the frank argument of physical force : that the white man, being strong, will and must rule the Negro. Hoke Smith to-day is supporting the idea of a 81 Cfje Conflict white aristocracy exactly as Robert Toombs did be- fore the war. Of course, Hoke Smith has receded from the be- lief in the chattel slavery of the Negro for which Toombs contended, but in many other respects he evidently believes that the Negro should be reduced (as ex-Congressman Fleming of Georgia says in the quotation given above) "to slavery in many of its substantial forms." In order to validate its position and keep its place (and make the Negro keep his)., the white aristoc- racy has been formed to defend the doctrine of all monarchies and aristrocracies the inequality of men in all respects. Hoke Smith states the fundamental assumption thus plainly in his address (June Qth, 1906) : "I be- lieve the wise course is to plant ourselves squarely upon the proposition in Georgia that the Negro is in no respect the equal of the white man, and that he cannot in the future in this State occupy a position of equality." Out of this position has flowed naturally and in- evitably the long- list of discriminatory laws, limita- tion of the franchise, hostility to education, "Jim Crow" legislation, and the like, all of which tend, of course, to force the Negro back to a position of eco- nomic servitude. And Vardaman, honestly pursuing his position to the logical end (for Vardaman, when all is said, has the frank courage of his convictions) has asserted that there must be two sorts of justice in the South a justice for white men and a justice for Negroes, He says: "Men talk of justice and the enforcement of the laws upon the white man and the Negro alike, as though such a thing were possible. Justice must be the end and aim of all, but justice to the Negro 82 C&e Conflict does not mean that you must treat the Negro in all matters, even in the enforcement of the law, as you would the white man. ... In spite of the pro- visions of the Federal Constitution, the men who are called upon to deal with this great problem must do that which is necessary to be done, even though it may have the appearance at times of going some- what outside the law." Thus it is sacriligiously, painfully evident that these nation corruptors and world polluters are frantically endeavoring to induce this nation and the world to become candidates for Hell red hot and unadulterated. In such infernally inspired fiends I see the white multi-crime-soaked imps of the horned-head, claw- fingered, fire-eyed, forked-tailed, misshapened-bod- ied, web-footed personality as pictured incarnate by Dante. O, ye Gods, and Angelic Hosts (if such there be), defend this nation and the world, and insure to us that paradise which we are preached the Christ died and arose to make sure. "BOTH THE SOUTH AND THE NORTH UNDEMOCRATIC. Thus I have attempted to present the political situation in the South and the reasoning which under- lies it. It possesses a large significance for the en- tire country. Here is the fact: the war and the emancipation proclamation did not make the South completely democratic; it merely cut away one bul- wark of aristocracy slavery. The South is still dominated by the aristocratic idea, and more or less frankly so. The South has admitted only grudgingly, and not yet fully, the 83 Cbe Conflict "poor white" man to democratic political fellow- ship. There are, as I have shown, hundreds of thou- sands of disfranchised white Americans in the South. Moreover, many white leaders look askance on the new Italian immigrants, though they, too, are white men. The extreme point of view in regard to the foreigner was expressed in a speech by the Hon. Jeff Truly, candidate for Governor of Missis- sippi, at Magnolia in that State, on March i8th, 1907: "I am opposed to any inferior race. The Italian immigration scheme does not settle the labor ques- tion; Italians are a threat and a danger to our racial, industrial and commercial supremacy. Mis- sissippi needs no such immigration. Leave your lands to your own children. As Governor of the State, I promise that not one dollar of the State shail be spent for the immigration of any such." As for the Negro, of course, the South has never, and does not now, believe in a democracy which really includes him. But neither does the North. When we get right down to it, the controlling white men in the North do not believe in an inclus- ive democracy much more than the South. I have talked with many Northerners who go South, and it is astonishing to see how quickly most of them adopt the Southern point of view. For it is the doctrine which many of them, down in their hearts, really believe. Of course, the North preserves a fiction of complete democracy, but in reality the North also has an aristocratic government, an oligarchy based upon wealth and property, which dominates politics and governs the country more or less completely. Roosevelt has been fighting some of the more 84 CM Conflict boisterous aspects of the rule of this oligarchy, and has shown the country how powerful it is ! THE UNDER MAN FIGHTING ALL OVER THE WORLD. It is curious, indeed, when one's attention is awak- ened to the facts, how strong the parallel is between the South and the North. I mean here a parallel not in laws or even in customs, but in spirit, in the living reality which lies down deep under institu- tions, which is, after all, the only thing that really counts. The cause of all the trouble in the North is ex- actly what it is in the South the under man will not keep his place. He is restless, ambitious ; he wants civil, political and industrial equality. Thus we see the growth of labor organizations, and the spread of populist and socialist, who de- mand new rights and a greater share in the products of labor. They will not, as Hoke Smith says of the Negroes, "content themselves with the place of inferiority." The essential feature of the history of the last five years in this country, and it will go down in history as the beginning of great things, has been the vague, crudely powerful effort of the under man (half his strength wasted because he is blind) to limit in some degree the power of this moneyed aristocracy. Such is the meaning of the demand for trust and railroad legislation, such the significance of the in- surance investigation, such the effort to curb the power of men like Rockefeller, Harriman and Mor- gan. Societies as well as men have different methods of 85 Cfce Conflict expression : One man reveals his strength by the blow of his clenched fist, another with the rapier of his mind. The coin of expression of the South is talk and legislation; that of the North is cash, property. When the South becomes as rich and prosperous as the North, it will not concern itself with the "su- periority" and "inferiority" problem to the extent that it does now. A man who is rich can set him- self apart without recourse to law-making; he can buy his exclusiveness and convince himself of his superiority with material possessions. So the North, in spirit, disfranchises its lower class exactly after the manner of the South. It does it by the purchase of elections in one form or another of its "poor whites" and its Negroes. What else is the meaning of Tammany Hall and the boss and machine system in other cities? Tam- many Hall is our method of disfranchisement : it is our cunning machine for nullifying the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. While the South is dis- franchising (with frankness) by legislation, the North is doing it by cash. THE QUESTION WE ARE COMING TO. I have spoken of the lack of free speech in the South; but that is not peculiar to the South, though there is, undoubtedly, a far greater intellectual free- dom to-day in the North than in the South, yet for every professor disciplined in the South for his utterances on the Negro problem, the North can match a professor disciplined for his utterances on the trust or railroad questions. South or North, it is dangerous to attack the entrenched privileges of those in control. 86 Cfte Conflict And the North also has its "Jim Crow" regula- tions not by that name, but none the less real. The under man in the North is set apart, unescapably, in hotels, restaurants, railroad trains and everywhere else. Imagine a carpenter, iron worker, street cleaner, trying to live at the Astor Hotel or the St. Regis or a Russian Jewish tailor eating at Delmonico's, and on the railroads the aristocrats travel in private cars or Pullmans; for all essential purposes the line is drawn between upper man and under man as ef- fectively as though by statutes. We are horrified in the North by the frankness of Vardaman in advocating different standards of justice for white men and Negroes, but we do not have the same custom in the North ? How extreme- ly difficult it is sometimes to get a rich criminal into jail in the North! The North also believes thoroughly in the divine right theory the divine right of the man who owns property and the more property he owns the di- viner his right. The South has this single great advantage over the North its under men are all colored and can be readily distinguished. So the North preserves its "color line," not by ob- trusively frank legislation, but by purchase, by prop- erty. The spirit, North and South, is the same. In short, we are coming again face to face in this country with the same tremendous (even revolution- ary) question which presents itself in every crisis of the world's history a sign in itself of the greatness and virility of the age in which we live : "What does democracy include? Does democracy really include Negroes as well as white men? Does it include Rus- 87 &e Conflict sian Jews, Italians, Japanese? Does it include Rockefeller and the Slavonian street-sweeper, and Tillman and the Negro farmhand?" The white man's "industrial emancipation will never come until he recognized the Negro as a man and brother in the industrial world. In my larger book to follow this I shall more exhaustively discuss the industrial relation of the \vmtj in:-n to the Negro in which I shall reproduce an article by me, and which appeared in the "Commoner and Glasswork- er," Pittsburgh, Pa., September I4th, 1889, in a spe- cially illustrated series along with the Rev. Dr. Ed- ward McGlynn, the great single-tax priest; August Donath, the then president of the International Typographical Union and editor of the "Craftsman," the official organ of the Union, and others equally prominent as writers and thinkers in interest of the laborer. I shall also in that book republish a bill drawn by me and intended to be introduced in the national Legislature. Said bill intended to compel an equit- able distribution of the wealth which labor in con- junction with capital creates. Said bill was drawn by me twenty years ago, was read to an audience in Mercer Hall at Princeton, N. J., was read by me before bodies of organized labor at Trenton, N. J., at Philadelphia, Pa., and elsewhere and published in several daily and weekly papers, but laughed at as visionary. I state all this because the same principles as set up in that bill are just now beginning to be applied through legislation and by executive order notably under the Roosevelt administrations. In discussing the question of superiority or inferi- ority of the Negro as against the white, as relates to the justice accorded the classed inferior of the one 88 Conflict race or the other, the white fares the better, because of opportunity afforded, both North and South, to prove their worth by the exercise of developed abil- ity, and the reward as finally given in recognition. Thus the white individual is everywhere amenable to the highest recognition by reward for display of ability which is often inferior to that of many Ne- groes of extraordinary superior ability. Hence, the Negro, despite ingenious and multi- combined obstacles, often compels by sterling merit his elevation to high positions of reward and honor, though there are many who have never yet received approximately the full reward of their hon- orable merit. If I were born a and not as it is, not knowing who I am, though under opposing circum- stances denied every opportunity afforded others. Though a self-made individual, I have proven executive and versatile ability, which, if not for a foolish sentimentality, practically cruel caste preju- dice, I would long since have been at the head of some great corporate enterprise or otherwise high in the world of honors and emoluments. How strangely is it evident that there are numer- ous fools, in that they recognize, yea, worship, idol- ize ability where it is veiled under a seeming na- tionality acceptable to their fancy ; whereas repudia- tion would quickly follow if they but knew it was an ability, but not possessed by the nationality they be- lieve it to be. Such is the hollow, empty fickleness of life. Damn such an age which fosters such hypoc- risy. Damn the religion of a people who evidence themselves to be such unmitigated damn fools. Universally, I see this damn unholy, un-Christly, un-Godly sentiment so powerfully, malignantly exert- ed no power seeming able to counteract it that I 89 Cfte Conflict despair of being honest and getting a man's chance to exist and advance. Hence, I am forced to live a lie however much my soul hates it. / must. I will. Blood will tell. And right here, I am reminded of Auguste Rodin's statue, "Le Penseur," which personates in the nude a giant Negro with rope-like muscles, sitting on a huge rock, back bowed, left arm resting on knee, right elbow resting on thigh with closed right fist jammed to his mouth as if to suppress some terrible pent-up emotion. The pic- ture of this statue recently appeared in a current magazine with a poem beneath it by Julia Magruder, entitled : "THE THOUGHT. "Thinker thou art not, however called, What room for thought in that poor, narrow head? Only brute instincts' cry for daily bread Has reached thy consciousness, securely walled Behind the structure of coarse bone and brawn, By dreary time and grievous toil induced. Patient thou'st lived and worked the thing of scorn To which, by those who think, thou art reduced. "Yet once, indeed, there came to thee a thought, Gripping thee, as thy feet this clay. Within, A spark thrilled through thy mighty frame and wrought A consciousness of outrage, shame, and sin. Thy great hand stops thy mouth, to hush its cry A piteous, bitter, and unanswered: Why?" And then in "Everybody's Magazine," Dec., 1904, appeared a poem by Emery Pottle, entitled: "MUTE." from which I quote : 90 Cfte Conflict "Here on his Western plains, so far, so still Where dawn and twilight fill my eyes With wondering tears, and earth seems as the sill Of Paradise, Mute I must live, and one day die Go as I came, the silent guest And none shall ever hear the pent-up cry Within my breast." Me. I feel it. Shut up from all the world, or who am I, and why is it thus? That suppressed figure is not I. For they shall hear it. Yes, the world the ages shall hear my cry. My soul shall speak its defiance. Democracy in its technical and broadest sense ought to include the rich and poor, the Negro and the white alike, but it does not, and never will any- where, but there will come a day when universally will be recognized the eternal and divine right of all men to develop and demonstrate the best that there is in them, and reward proportionately will not as it cannot be withheld because of creed or na- tionality. This, then, will be as it should the recognition and reward of merit this the living standard of true democracy. Socialistic teachings does not embrace this view in its tenets the "Golden Rule" does : "Do unto others as you would that they do unto you." Any one taking a correct and unbiased view of my definition here given of the standard of true democracy will unhesitatingly admit that my stric- tures on page 105 on the democratic party in the United States of America, and such of its leaders as 91 Ci)e Conflict Tillman, Vardaman, Dixon and others is altogether inadequate no, to exhaust adjectives would not do their "ilk" that due them as obstructors in the path of real democracy. The writings and preachments of such creatures affect and corrupt the minds of ignorant and weak mortals who have generally grown up undisciplined, or are false cultured, and such mortals in turn trans- mit by heredity and teaching the poison of their own poisoned minds to the minds of their children. Thus, the pernicious seed for a hell-crop is sown to the winds of the world only to be finally reaped in a whirlwind by way of strife and wars among communities, peoples, and nations. Sad to see it, yet I am often chagrined to see some inconsequential, hair-brained, worthless white per- son, or some poorly-bred, incapacitated, raggedy, semi-starved, despair-eyed, overworked white youth assume an air of superiority over a Negro of indu- bitable superiority, or hatefully and revengefully sneer at the mention of some act or work of merit by a Negro in whose little finger is more intelligence than in the combined bodies of five or more such green-eyed sneerers. It is reported that the late Frederick Douglass on one occasion was, by his matchless oratory, elec- trifying an audience of several thousand when in the crowd a newly-landed Irishman yelled out: "Faith, ain't he a foin speaker !" Whereupon an American born, prejudice-blinded Irishman accompanying him retorted: "O, sha, he's only a half Nigger." The first Irishman exclaimed: "Gee, if only a half a Nigger can do that good what wouldn't a whole Nigger do!" And so I say. It has been my pleasurable delight to squelch not 92 C&c Conflict a few of such up-start sneerers at Negro worth and manhood. On one occasion, while sitting- in front of my place of business in the leading city in a Southern State, when a twisted speech, lean looking, ignorant white country youth came up asking me some in- formation regarding the city. A friendly answer, one word brought on another. He finally started to discussing the Negro, saying : "The colored folks here seem to put on a lot of airs, living in fine houses, and wearing fine clothes." I replied: "That if they did it by honest effort I could not understand that it should worry anyone." He retorted that : "A Nigger was no good anyway." I replied: "There are some industrious, scholarly Negroes of excellent charac- ter." He whined back that "no matter what they were, he never seed a Nigger the equal of a white man." Then I opened up my batteries (so to speak) on him, telling him: "He had not seen everything, that, in fact, he had seen very little ; that there were Negroes in that city the superiors in wealth and in- telligence to any white man back in the woods from where he came, "that I was his superior in ability, in character, in ideal, and in means, though I was not white." I began to recount to him briefly the dis- tinctions of Bruce, of Douglass, Langston, Price, Revels, Elliott, Smalls, Walls, Dunbarr, Dumas, Derrick, Banneker, Lyons, Hannibal, Generals Doods and L'Overture, Arnett, Allen, Vernon, Washington, Blyden, Scarborough, Du'boise, Tan- ner, Aldridge, Maceo, Peter Jackson, Dixon, God- frey, Cans, Wolcott, Veezy, Cuffie, and a long line of others illustrious in oratory, letters, science, state- craft, music, art, etc. I recounted Negro industries, organizations and in- stitutions. I called his atention to Negroes of dis- 93 C6 e Conflict tinction and Negro enterprises right there in his home state and in the city where he then was. I directed him to streets in that city where he would see what Negroes were doing of merit, as he had never in all his life seen in the backwoods and swamps where he had come from. As I throwed it into his "crop" and jammed it down his throat (so to speak) he became violent, and rushed from me, as if to remain he would burst wide open from the effects. I shot it into him and at him as he ambled away like a cur hound-dog, with flopping ears and hanging jaw. God pity such miserable, cowardly curs ! Taking up the Eighth Section of "The Mulatto Negro," the writer says: "There is yet another phase of this question which holds a darker meaning for the whites than race war or 'black supremacy.' Every onlooker in Northern cities is struck with the number of mulattoes who might easily pass for dark skinned members of the white race. Again the Negro - 1 particularly the mulatto despises himself. He is ashamed of being a Negro, and bends all his energies toward wiping out that fact. No epithet of abuse is quite so offensive to him as his own appropriate racial name. Even the euphemistic appellations 'colored gentleman,' 'Afro-American citizen/ etc., have become distasteful to him. He grows more and more resentful of any kind of differentiation. An important witness to this fact is the statement of the chief statistician of the Census Bureau, that no attempt had been made to obtain the percentage of mulattoes in the total Negro population for 1900 because of the growing reluctance of quadroons and octoroons to admit their real identity. Said he: "Those who are very light won't admit it at all, and those who find it impossible to deny it altogether confess to it in a less degree than the fact." 94 Conflict Instances are on record of this mongrel class per- juring themselves rather than confess to their Afri- can inheritance. Now, what is the significance in all this? It must be apparent to every thoughtful observer that the Negroes' contempt for himself and his kind which prompts him by every possible means to elude identi- fication with his kind will also lead him to seek ad- mission into white families under an Anglo-Saxon guise, if need be." This is the bone which chokes you Ah ! See ? "The successful pose of Hannah Elias in the cele- brated Platt case of New York ; the well nigh suc- cessful role of B. Sheppard White in Washington a few years ago ; the more recent case of a Minister from one of the Central American states, whose en- gagement to a proud society belle was brought to a sudden termination by the discovery of his African descent, all point very ominously to the possibility and feasibility of unwitting and unwilling amalga- mation of races in this country. Granting that this wish of the hybrid Negro to lose his identity in the Caucasian stream has its pathetic side; granting also the retributive justice in it for the proud Anglo-Saxon who of his bestial appetites has made whips to scourge not only himself but his race ; this article aims only at pointing out the most salient traits of the mulatto and their significance for the white people of the North particularly." As a truth the Negro has every reason to be proud of his record as already made, and is endeavoring to so live as to make the word Negro his name signify for all time a proud, a progressive, and a happy race of people; but at this point the writer in her argu- ment seems to forget, or wantonly ignores, the fact that while the Ncrth and the world in the past were 95 Cfje Conflict condemning the mongrelistic concubine practices which Southern brutality delighted its libidinous, memphomaniacally lustful passions in, the loud- mouthed votaries brayed out long and loud, "Mind your own business," "This is our own domestic in- stitution." Yea, they continued the propagation of mongrelistic hybrids, converting the product into cash in the slave markets on the auction block, and now that the slave pen has been torn down and the auction block rooted up, they still continue to propa- gate the mongrel species, which, like the plagues out of Pandora's box, begin to scourge them in discom- fiting their villiany. they now send some educated petticoats throughout the land to cry alarm. Where is the cause for alarm? "They alone are great who great deeds have done" ? and the Negro is great, measured by "the depths from which he has come." Individual character, brains and wealth take prece- dence over empty family titles, pride, etc., as made so much ado about in the continuance of this section thus : "In the nature of the case the danger must be greater in those states where miscegenation re- ceives the sanction of the law, the conscientious ap- proval of a portion of the whites, and where the freer association and commingling of the two races, coupled with the presence of a large foreign popula- tion of varying complexion, enables the masquerad- ing octoroon to pursue his course with more or less impunity. For the select few who guard with jealous care their own little Anglo-Saxon plot, the peril is not imminent, perhaps. But a great many quite worthy and well-meaning Americans, either from indiffer- ence or from a democratic scorn of aristocratic pre- tensions, do not enquire very closely into the antece- 96 C & e Conflict dents of persons claiming to be "white and respect- able." This applies especially to the North, where the "for a' that" man has always had more show than at the South, where the idea of caste and of family pride has ever been dominant. It is worthy of note that exposure, in two of the instances cited above, followed upon the gentlemen's proposing mar- riage to Southern women, whose families instituted the customary probing into genealogical backgrounds. It is worthy of note, also, that they met these Southern ladies in Northern society, for the South- ern Negro, be he black, brown or lightest tan, is care- fully fenced off "in his own back yard." Which fact, joined with the knowledge of swift and certain pun- ishment for any Negro masquerading as a Caucassian lessens the probability of mesalliances of this char- acter occurring at the South." At the South, white men should have thought of all this wonderful philosophy about Anglo-Saxon purity before they started in to propagate a crop of mulattoes, as a theme to lecture the North about. "Deep is the sea, and deep is hell, but pride mineth deeper." Beneath the poverty, rags, and turpitude of an obvious class, "It is coiled as a poisonous worm about the foundations of their soul." Yes, "Pride is a double traitor, and betrayeth itself to entrap thee. Rather look away from innate evil, and gaze upon extraneous good, for in viewing the heights above thee thou shalt be taught thy littleness. Could an emmet pry into itself it might marvel at its own anatomy; but let it look on eagles to discern how mean a thing it is. 97 Conflict Beware that the standard of thy soul wave from the loftiest battlement: For pride is a pestilent meteor, flitting on the marshes of corruption, That will lure thee forward to thy death, if thou seek to track it to its source. It is a gloomy bow, arching the infernal firmament, That will lead thee on, if thou wilt hunt it, even to the dwelling of despair." As an illumining close to this section, I here re- produce the report of SOME TRAGEDIES OF COLOR. In the news despatches through the daily papers November 29th, 1909, appeared the following: WIFE AN OCTOROON, HE IS DRIVEN TO SUICIDE Secret of Ex-Chancellor Von Buelow's Cousin Revealed in New Orleans Humiliated by Foes Arrested for Mixed Marriage. Husband Becomes Desperate, Dis- appears New Orleans Nov. 28th. There no longer seems to be any doubt that Edward von Buelow, a cousin of the former German Chancellor, has killed him- self. The act, following upon his financial ruin and the breaking of a happy home which he maintained 98 i)e Conflict for fourteen years, has brought to light a pathetic and romantic story. His fortune was deliberately wrecked, it appears, and his most sacred secret that his wife was an octoroon was deliberately revealed to the public by enemies he made in cotton speculations. "More than that, he was arrested under the law prohibiting the marriage of white with persons hav- ing a slight trace of Negro blood. And so, penniless, heart-broken and facing a trial, he vanished, and it is generally believed, killed himself. "No one will ever see my husband again. He is dead," said Mrs. Von Buelow, a beautiful woman, as light of complexion as most women of the South, and she says, the daughter of a judge who bore an honored name in Louisiana. Her two children are flaxen-haired and blue-eyed, little German-Ameri- cans." Another : "JILTED GIRL ENDS LIFE. "Sandusky, Ohio, Nov. 29th, 1909. Hannah Stanley, nineteen, daughter of a colored couple, but frequently taken for a white girl, committed sui- cide here this morning by drinking carbolic acid. "Acquaintances say that a young man from a neighboring city who had been courting Miss Stan- ley found out Sunday night that she was not of his race and told her that their engagement was ter- minated. Hannah Stanley was one of the prettiest young women in the city. She dressed in the height of fashion and had many admirers." These are an item of the millions of crimes worse than murder resulting from the conduct of the Southern Wilburs as referred to on page 8. I now proceed to the Ninth and last section of 99 C ft e Conflict that infernally inspired article "The Mulatto Negro" as appeared in the National Magazine, January, 1906, by one Annie Riley Hale. She says: "This then appears to be the situation in brief: the North is the natural and preferred home of the mu- latto, by common consent, who is to 'make the trou- ble' for the white man. It goes without saying, also, that every untoward aspect of this question for the North will be aggravated by the increase of her Ne- gro population. "The past five years have witnessed a rapid in- flux of Southern Negroes to Northern cities, and the next decade will probably augment this beyond all previous records. Any attempt at drastic legisla- tion aimed at the Southern States by Congress would surely facilitate and precipitate a Negro exodus from those States into the North. For the South will wage no more devastating wars over the Negro. She has had enough of that, nor is it necessary. There is an easier way out of the difficulty. The South is working out her Negro problem along industrial lines, and the Negro, all unconsciously to himself, is her most active assistant in it. In the slow work- ing out of racial destinies it becomes practicable to shift the burden she has born so long onto the shoul- ders of her quondam critics, and in doing so her temper is neither pugnacious nor controversial. She has put forth her best writers and orators in the past to tell the North and the world tvhat they know about this unfortunate race, and their report has been credited in the main. One of these writers, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, says apropos of this; 'We have the singular example in this country of opin- ions on this subject being weighed and estimated, not according to the character, intelligence and oppor- tunity to know the facts, but altogether upon the geo- 100 Cfte Conflict graphical habitat of the person delivering them. As a rule, it is enough to know that a writer or speaker comes from the South to rob his testimony of half its value.' " So that in handing over to the North the Negro and his concomitant perplexities, the South's only mes- sage is, in parliamentary phrase: "Are you ready for the question? . . . It is yours." Thus ending this remarkable tirade the writer says she's quitting. I cannot conceive it. Nevertheless, this book and more to follow is to meet the damna- ble arguments of the "South's best writers and ora- tors," as she says. She admits two truths in closing: That the South is by every hook and crook through "its best writers and orators," is moving earth and hell to pollute and corrupt the North and the world. Second, That "the testimony of a writer or speaker from the South is discredited or accepted with suspicion." This is precisely as it should be . . . "Behold the sorrowful change wrought upon a fallen nature : He hath lost his own esteem, and other men's re- spect ; For plain truth, where none could err, he hath chosen tortuous paths. Verily, infirm thyself, be slow to chide a brother's imperfections, For many times the decent veil must hang on faults of nature. Often will the meanness of life hidden away in cor- ners Prove wisdom; and the generous is glad to leave them unregarded in the shade." 10 r Clje Conflict A LECTURE TO THE DEMAGOGUE. To the Vampire of the Nation's Other Half. To the Souths Only and Worst Enemy, The Nation's Deadly Foe. "Let honesty be 'companied by charity of heart, lest it walk unwelcome; Or the mouthing censor of others and himself soon shall sink to scorn. Let honesty be added unto innocence of life : then a man may only be a martyr; But if openness of speech be found with secrecy of guilt, the martyr will be seen a malefactor. There is a cunning scheme to put on surface blunt- ness, And cover still water with the clamorous ripples of a shallow. For a man to gain his selfish ends will make a stalk- ing horse of honesty; And hide his poaching limbs behind, that he may cheat the quicker. Such an one is loud and ostentatious, full of oaths for argument Boastful of honor and sincerity, and not to be put down by facts : He is obstinate, and showeth it for firmness : He is rude, displaying it for truth; And glorieth in doggedness of temper, as if it were uncompromising justice." The North and the world hath seen such scoundrels. "Beware of such a man; his brawling covereth de- signs ; This specious show of honesty cometh as the herald of a thief: 102 C&e Conflict His feint is made with awkward clashing on the buckler's boss, But meanwhile doth his secret skill insure its fatal aim. This the hypocrite of honesty; ye may know him by an overacted part; Taking pains to turn and twist where other men walk straight; Or walking straight, he will not step aside to let another pass, But roughly pusheth on, provoking opposition on the way; He is full of disquietude for calmness, full of in- triguing for simplicity, Valorous with those who cannot fight, but humble with the brave. .Where brotherly advice were good, this man rudely blameth, And on some small occasion flattereth with coarse praise. The craven in a lion's skin hath conquered by his character of courage; Sheep's clothing helped the wolf, till he slew by his character for kindness." Such unmitigated scoundrels have no place in a Re- public . . No, not in our glorious country . . No. The good and righteous, like the Virgin Queen, Victoria of England, like Grover Cleveland and Judge Thomas G. Jones of our land, like Sumner, Garrison, Phillips, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Robert Emmet, Benjamin Disraeli, Daniel O'Connell and the list too long to here enroll are the personalities that will live amid the annihilation of time. 103 Cfje Conflict "For honesty hath many gains, and well the wise have known This will prosper to the end, and fill their house with gold. The phosphorus of cheatery will fade, and all its profits perish, While honesty with growing light endureth as the moon." If these United States of America were a land of thieves, it might be wise to dare the virtue of honesty, "if any would be rich." "For that which by the laws of God is heightened into duty, Ever in the practice of a man, will be seen both policy and privilege. Thank God, ye toilers for your bread, in that daily laboring. He hath suffered the bubbles of self-interest to float upon the stream of duty: For honesty of every kind, approved by God and man, Of wealth and better weal is found the richest cornu- copia. Tempered by humbleness and charity, honesty of speech hath honor ; And mingled well with prudence, honesty of pur- pose hath its praise: Trust payeth homage unto truth, rewarding honesty of action: And all men love to lean on him who never failed nor fainted. Freedom gloweth in his eyes and nobleness of nature at his heart, And independence took a crown and fixed it on his head: 104 Cfce Conflict So, he stood in his integrity, just and firm of pur- pose, Aiding many, fearing none, a spectacle to angels, and to men: Yea, when the shattered globe shall rock in the throes of dissolution, Still will he stand in his integrity, sublime an honest man." Where demagogues dominate is not the place for honest men. It is certainly not the place for men who would be freemen. THE MILITANT PARTY IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. No political party is qualified to be intrusted with the destinies of the great American people until it has proven itself qualified to deal with equality and justice among all the people in the States in which it is in the ascendency. In a republic "of, for, and by the people," no man or group of men can honestly and consistently aspire to political distinction or official position with the in- tention of carrying into execution ideas and views favoring the interest of a part of the people, a class of the people, or a section of the country to the ex- clusion of another part of the people, class of the people, or section of the country, whether that man or group of men be called Democrat, Republican, Socialist, Prohibitionist, Independent, Woman's Right or otherwise. Such a man or group of men so aspiring are inimi- cal to the constitution and to the republic and should be shunned. 105 Cfje Conflict By this standard I gauge parties, and thus find that the democratic party as existing in the United States of America is not deserving of the confidence of either men or women who claim for themselves freedom of thought and action along lines of right and justice. It is a fact of history that the democratic party in the United States of America has either originated or championed every issue that threatens the peace and progress of the nation and the perpetuity of our republican constitution. It was that party which prolonged the traffic in human souls in America, devised methods for its con- tinuance, and to perpetuate it sought to destroy the Union of States. It is that party in the States in which it controls to-day through a rape of the ballot legislates against freedom of speech and action, and by legislation imposes a tax upon those who fought to defend the Union of States; said tax to pension those who fought to dissolve the Union and to perpetuate slav- ery, and thus array in competition the millions of poor white men, women, boys and girls north and south against slave labor. This pensioning of ex-Confederate soldiers is not the only evidence that at heart and in practice the democratic party, solidified at the South, is still the nation's greatest foe. If not, why hug the memory of a despicable past and a lost cause? If not, why pedestalize in the archives of the capi- tols of the Southern States and look with idolatrous eyes upon the tattered returned battle flags, the in- signia of a traitorous cause? These flags rightly belong at the nation's capitol, and no man who has the courage of his convictions 106 C6e Conflict will acquiesce in the false cry "Peace" while the enemy that was, yet evidences by its every act that what it could not accomplish by force of arms it hopes to finally accomplish by the hypnotic influence of diplomacy and legislation. By appeals to base passions, to race prejudice and sectional hate the leaders of the Democratic party at the South secure a following which by the stuffing of ballot boxes and the intimidation of voters elect themselves to the Governorship, to the Legislature and to the National House of Representatives. It is a fact undenied that there is not a Democratic member of Congress from a Southern State but who is there by virtue of suppressed speech and stolen votes. The same being true of the Southern democratic legislatures which elects the United States Senators from the South, it is plainly evident that our republi- can form of government is dangerously menaced. Will this republic stand while this condition en- dures ? Gauging the democratic party by the men who lead it, what do men and women who demand for themselves right and justice and fair play think of the industrious preachments and writings of Ben. Tillman, Jeff. Davis, Hoke Smith, Tom Dixon, Claud Swanson, Williams, Vardaman, Slayden, Hefflin Stone, English, Haskell Graves, Grady, Handy and the host of other rabid Southern lead- ers? What, O, what do you think of them? The Democratic Party through its leaders is not only the corruptors of the nation, but of the world. They allow no opportunity to pass that they do not try to convince the world to their way of thinking, and no man of thought and observation can say that they are not making converts. 107 Cfte Conflict The Democratic Party as far as it has been able has nullified every act of right and justice which has been sealed by Union soldiers' sacrifice of blood and treasure on gory fields of war and carnage, and in the nation's congress. Trust them further, and it is only a question of time when the nation by legislation at its seat of gov- ernment will be taxed to pension those who sought its destruction. Not only this: damages for every chicken, goat, or hog lost, or every blade of grass trampled in the South during the war of the rebellion will be exact- ed by ex-rebels or their representatives in Congress. I have in my possession a bill I came by traveling through the South some years ago. Said bill de- manding damages for a donkey killed, and other in- consequentials lost during the war. This bill was in- tended to have been introduced in Congress during the late Democratic administrations. By every standard of justice; even at a sacrifice of principle, the North has tried to placate and con- ciliate the South. I, myself, as a former newspaper editor, advocated a division of the Negro vote, pub- lishing a symposium of views from leading Negroes throughout the country to that end. Dr. Booker T. Washington and others have ad- vocated abandonment of politics for industrial pur- suits to the Negro, adinfinitum. WHAT HAS IT ALL AMOUNTED TO? The history of the Democratic Party in all its long years' production of leaders with but rare ex- ceptions is one of unparalleled retrogression, pessi- mism, demagogy, obstruction, destruction and all- 108 Conflict hell shaming, harranguing conglomerates, as evi- dent to all the universe in Jim Tillman, Vardaman, Hoke Smith, Tom Dixon and the other great crop of blatant, braying, yelping, howling and altogether despicable demagogues of equal or lesser degree in their hell-inspired and upas-like influence. If the Democratic party was what we are asked to believe it is its leaders would not be what they are. No, no, no ; men like Tillman and Vardaman could never be elected as the mouthpieces of the Demo- cratic party. The Democratic party is a party of misrule. It thrives by suppressed speech, stolen votes, appeals to brute instincts, by demagogy and anarchy. It is a party which believes in feudalism and a landed aristocracy, with serfs to till its lands and support its barons in profligate idleness. Hence it demands free-trade to secure pauper made products of Europe to the disestablishment of Northern fac- tories. It is a party which, given the power, it would lower our money standard and substitute a depreci- ated currency. It is a party as visionary and impracticable as it is seen to be brutal in the States over which it presides. It is a party not to be trusted. That is the Democratic party, and just in propor- tion as it is allowed to come into control of the nation we may finally witness the disgraceful and humiliat- ing spectacle of mobs formed, riots incited, and lynching bees promoted in the North, even at the nation's capital by Southern Congressmen, judges, colonels, etc., like Congressmen Hefflin of Alabama and Sullivan of Mississippi, and other intolerant hot- heads who constitute themselves prosecutor, judge and jury perforce. But Wilson, I think, will prove a. Statesman. 109 Cle Conflict Just now, the Progressive party is the party not alone for the Negro, but for all men who aspire for a "land of the free and a home for the brave," but when need there be the opportune time and the men, yea, strong hearts will not be lacking to save the republic. In the Negro will be found the "lump to leaven the whole." Consider these figures: THE NEGRO A BALANCE OF POWER. The United States census for 1900 gives a total Negro voting population of 2,065,989. To-day it is greater. In 1902 the excess of Negro votes over the Republican majorities in the states here given was as follows: Negroes of Republican voting ag. majority. New York 29,649 8,803 New Jersey 21,240 6,634 Delaware . . 8,354 3,249 Maryland .... 60,208 2,940 West Virginia ' 14,774 1^873 Indiana 18,149 7,282 California 3,413 2 >549 Total Negro vote 155^87 43>33O Republican majority .. 43,330 Hence there were 112,457 Negro votes in excess of the Republican majority over all votes counted in these seven states in the state elections for 1902, and the Negro voters are all Republicans, with exceptions too rare to be worth mentioning. The Negro vote in these states, nearly four times more than the Republican majority, was a formidable no C6e Conflict factor in the 1904 presidential election. And remem- ber that in this computation is not included the States of Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania, with their big electoral count and large Negro vote. "The question is an interesting and pertinent one, because there is no doubt about the weight of the Negro vote in the aggregate in any election. If the Negro vote had gone over to Cleveland from Harri- son in 1886, Cleveland would have been elected. Un- der normal conditions New York, Connecticut and Indiana would hardly be classed as rock-bound Re- publican States. These States alternate about. The New York Negro voting population in 1900 was 31,000. The McKinley and Roosevelt, and the Bryan and Parker contest showed an anomaly as to vote casting in the history of the country, but the Negro vote of Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware was required by McKinley in 1895 m order to carry those States. Hence, it is evident that the Negro vote is a balance of power in close States and communities, and in the aggregate also in any national election. Following this line to its logical analysis : it was I who swung the States of Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and other States to the election of Grover Cleveland. It was I who defeated Frederick C. Gibbs, in the Eighth Senatorial District in New York in 1885. Ask Stephen Merritt, Charles N. Taintor and others in New York. See my article in "Howard's Negro- American Magazine," as published about that time. See also my book copyrighted: "The Negro Race, Retrospective and Prospective," about that time. It was I who took Chicago and Cook County, Illinois, from Carter Harrison and the Democratic in C& e Conflict Party. Ask Mr. Baddenoch, the then Chairman of the Republican Committee. It was I who took Jacksonville, Fla., Duval Coun- ty, and the State of Florida from Bourbon Democ- racy, and gave it to the Corporation or Liberal Democrats an element which invited capital, and the development of the State. Ask Messrs. Luken- bill, J. E. T. Bowden, Jules Solomon, and the then Democratic State Chairman, Hon. E. J. Treighi. See also my paper in the "Forum," published in Florida and Texas, issue Nov. 26th, 1898, before and after. See its rating in Rowell's and other newspa* per directories. In some movements which I have been identified with in the past there no doubt were some who may have thought they were "using" me, but that is another question. It was I who first ennunciated the policies actuat- ing Roosevelt in his fight against the rapaciousness of corporate greed, but the hollow mockery in our governmental genius, based on color, denied me that hearing essential to attaining to that point where I could execute my idea. It was I who aided strongly in the instantaneous launching of the New York Press, which was the main medium electing to the presidency Wm. Mc- Kinley, the champion of the economic protection principle. Messrs. Bridgeman, Porter and Hatton ought to remember me. I have said "the hollow mockery in our govern- mental genius, based on color. Instance: December 4th, 1906, a bill was introduced in Congress by Rep- resentative Slayden, of Texas, "providing that all enlisted men of the army who are colored or of colored descent shall be discharged from the service of the United States and thereafter no colored per- 112 Cfte Conflict son or person of colored descent shall be enlisted or appointed in the service of the United States." This certainly was an effort far reaching in its de- signs, and worthy of the Democratic Party. It was the effort of a swelled head gone mad, as every hon- est and intelligent person the least informed as to the history of this country knows that of all its citizens, native or adopted, none has ever surpassed the Ne- gro race in loyalty and patriotism, and I speak a truthful prophecy that "when the American nation follows the lead of this wild Texan, of Ben. Tillman, Vardaman and others of their like, forgetting the debt of gratitude due this government to the Negro, that day will the government perish as a blot upon civilization, a farce a travesty upon justice, and unworthy to exist. Yea, I already see the decline of the American na- tion in the multiplication of such men as Ben Till- man, the extension of "Jim Crowism," Negro dis- franchisement, caste prejudice, race discriminations, international meddling, of "yellow journalism," demagogic appeals to passion and prejudice; inten- sifying bitterness and strife between capital and la- bor, the visionary theories, intemperate utterances, overzealous and unsupportable charges against pub- lic persons and corporations by irrational, impetuous and often unscrupulous persons, who through some adventitious, circumlocutions manner have forced themselves into a position of prominence and author- ity among the people. Through the greed and rapa- cious avarice of certain American white men, who in plundering the Indian and despoiling the Negro has been whetted an appetite blinding such white men to every principle of justice and honor, hurry- ing the nation on to a fearful cataclysm. Clje Conflict As in the past the Negro as the nation's loyal de- fender will be needed in the not distant future. The people of enlightened Japan are not so blind as not to see that it the humblest of their race is discriminated against on account of his race it will only be a question of time when all their race alike will be discriminated against. Personal interest, where loss of liberty is threat- ened, compels men sometimes to form strange alli- ances, thus history records intrigues between indi- viduals of one nation with the government of another where it is made possible for a weak and despised government by outside financial aid and information to humble, if not overthrow, a stronger and more self-confident government. To-day there are numerous persons whose indi- vidual millions alone could finance a war of greater magnitude than the modern filibustering expeditions promoted for commercial supremacy and the ex- ploitation of peoples in the islands south and west of the United States and in Africa and China. Blood may be "thicker than water," and interna- tional marriages may multiply, but the honest pat- riotic American statesman will still have reason to anticipate a clash of interest as long as John Bull at Fort Sarna and Uncle Sam at Fort Huron and else- where along the great lakes and Canadian border glare at each other through cannon's mouth, with Mexico and Brazil to the south of us. Are we as a nation not a little too selfish in our consciousness ? Would-be American statesmen may bluff and blow, we may write as we will, but a "jingo" diplomacy cannot forever stave off the ultimate issue. "As we sow, so shall we reap," "Laws of changeless justice binds," etc. Remember. . . 114 e Conflict Like a Colossus we have spradded out over Ha- waii, Porto Rico, the Philippines, Santo Domingo and Cuba, and yet we have troubles of our own. To the real thoughtful our position is as the dog with the bone, and there is such a thing as raising the devil and not being able to put him down. The real Cuban the numerical people in that isl- and are not uninformed of the crafty manner with which the white race of America has dealt with the Indian and Negro of America and the dark people of Hawaii and the Philippines, and yet it is known that the ostrich sticks its head in the ground imagin- ing its entire body to be hidden. The American government in its "world power" policy has planted its foot and flag in parts remote, yet not adequately defended, while our domestic re- lations are not of the most assuring, with a vanishing hope for a betterment while Tillman, Vardaman, Smith, Davis, Dixon, Graves, the wild Texan Slay- den and other blatant demagogues continue their preachments among us. Yes, "We are marching to fate abreast." The contest between right and wrong is eternal. Let the American white race deal justly with all men, the Indian and Negro races included, and there is no problem on this continent. Then shall we be strong to face the world, otherwise we shall fall when we think we are strong. We all know the Southerner like a spoiled pam- pered child has been made intolerant through his long sway of undisputed power over the former slave, and now that the Negro is free to dispose of his labor as best conserves his own interest is free to change in the exercise of his choice for an employer who exhibits the most humane consideration for his ser- vices. Thus the Southerner considers the new or C!) e Conflict young generation of Negroes impertinent when they dare to exhibit a will of their own, be it ever so much in the right. The white Southerner has said it, and believes that a "Negro has no rights that a white man is bound to respect. But ah, Mr. Southerner, the day of "Marse John" and "Miss Sue" is gone forever. It was written at Appomattox when Lee humiliatingly laid off his sword, and as a bird of plumage strutted no longer. This may stick in your "crop," but you can't get over it, so you had as well run along, and be a good little baby. Your naughty intolerance, bigotry and narrov/ prejudice has long held back the full development of the beautiful southland, and now it cannot be that the North, the East and the West will recede to the barbaric civilization of the South, and thus America become a corrupting menace to all the na- tions of the earth? If so, then the world goes back to beastly anar- chism, though rich in material wealth. When the South has substituted the Negro laborers for alien laborers, or black for white labor, will Southern white men be more just and tolerant to their imported laborers? From all accounts it does not appear so; as for instance, white peonage in Georgia, in Florida and elsewhere in the South, and bloodshed in Louisiana some years ago when Italian laborers resisted being reduced to the Southern ideas concerning laborers. Again, I ask, is the world through the unbrotherly greed of mankind by legislative and treaty enact- ments to be made a prison restricting people in their desire to travel from one place to another, from one country to another; excepting persons of leisure or 116 Cfce Conflict such as can afiord to loaf because of their wealth ? I see developing a false and dangerous Politico- Industrial Economy. May it not be possible that other governments are as astute in diplomacy as our great government? In our "World Power" tour it would appear the part of wisdom to make home secure before ventur- ing into new fields, weakening by spreading ; leaving weak places undefended as an opening for the enemy when we have become too deeply enmeshed to retrace our steps then, all is lost. Yea, "pride goeth before a fall." CONCLUSION. After being forcibly and by stealth brought from his native land by the white man two hundred and forty-seven years ago, the Negro was in America subjected to a degradation the like of which never before distressed any human soul, and yet, though saturated with his heart's blood, the hounds of Hell in human guise pursue him with malignant hate, though he never did them wrong or harm. Then is there not a cause that he should be defended? Let Christ, let the human heart, yea, let all the angelic host that mortal mind has capacity to conceive of, answer. The timid may falter, and demons may howl, but while more than ten millions of God-created souls are hounded, caricatured, misrepresented, and savagely slaughtered, and no power seeming able to call a halt, can it be conceived that any righteous man or woman would cry halt when, as in this book, I attempt to throw my hand into the throat of the assassins of a race of unoffending, patriotic, magnanimous people. "Woe to him by whom the offence cometh" is God's edict. 117 CHe Conflict Forty-eight years* ago, when the shackles were struck from the Negro, he stood without a knowledge of letters, without money a poor, trembling, quak- ing, human outcast, clothed with more than twenty- four hundred years of ignorance, vice, superstition, fanaticism and other attendant evils ; confronted by a gigantic combination of wealth, intelligence and statesmanship of a mighty confederacy, combined to hold him down and if possible crush him out, but by Northern philanthropy, supplemented by his own endeavor, the seed of liberty and intelligence has been deeply sown and is now bearing fruit, and no power in the universe can check the swelling tide. He is waxing into a mighty race beneath the giant upas-like tree of oppression. The world hears afar off the muffled, thunderous, reverberation of the on- ward march of a mighty rival in good and righteous endeavor. Yea, he is coming over the hills of ignorance and oppression, and demonstrating to the ill-informed world that: "Merit is the source of life, Through the fiercest earthly strife. That sterling merit brings him safe, Whom the gods such a boon vouchsafes. That first since Africa was known Many a nation 's overthrown, In oblivion's sea has died, All unfit to stem the tide. Thus, since Africa arose, Her success confounds her foes. Watchful, faithful, true and pure, She must evermore endure." 118 Cfje Conflict "What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted? Thrice is he armed who hath his quarrel just, And he but naked, though locked up in steel, Whose conscience is with injustice corrupted." Oh, will not the white man of America deal justly ! [The End] 119 Vl V UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 4WKJUN.231994 4 A^, 315 I I ^ , X.QF-CAU inn UN i L 006 211 952 4 > \t I ffi If^-lA.