By W. CABELL BRUCE.

BALTIMORE;

JOHN MURPHY & CO,
1891.Copyright, 1891, by W. Cabell Bruce.THE NEGRO PROBLEM.

From first to last it should be borne in mind that the
Negro Problem is a race problem. It is true that the great
mass of the Southern negroes vote republican ballots. This,
however, is not because they have any definite convictions
upon questions of public policy, nor yet, except to a limited
extent, because it was the Republican party that conferred
upon them freedom and the franchise, and that to-day affects
to be their one champion and guardian. Their intellectual
condition renders the first idea ludicrous. The second is
largely shorn of its claims to consideration by the fact that
enough negroes have resided at the North to fully enlighten
their race at the South as to how far white Republicans in
the former section are disposed to fraternize with the African
in all the personal and business relations of life. When to
correct information in this respect is added the begrudging
spirit in which a few petty offices are awarded to the Southern
negro as his part of the spoil of a presidential election, it is
hard to see how the emotions excited in him by the Emancipa-
tion Proclamation, the post-bellum Amendments to the Fed-
eral Constitution and the present professions of the Republican
party could be otherwise than considerably cooled.

The Southern negro votes a republican ballot because
it is the race prejudices of the Southern whites, which he
heartily reciprocates, and not the race prejudices of the
Northern whites, that bear directly upon his daily life,

3

p85614

The Negro Problem.

and because he knows that the Republican party is still
numerously composed of partisans whose feelings towards the
Southern whites are such that they would not hesitate to use
even him as an agency for their degradation. If by some
process of transposition all the Southern whites could be
removed to the North, and all the Northern whites to the
South, only a few years of race friction would suffice to foster
a political antagonism between the latter and the negro, as
marked as that which now exists between the former and him.

The problem then is a race problem. Whatever gratitude
the negro might feel for the political privileges, conferred
^ upon him by the Republican party, he would be an even
more highly organized individual than the white man, if he
were capable of soothing the smart of the social and political
proscription at the North, which excludes him from schools,
hotels, places of amusement, positions of public .trust and
private employments other than menial, with memories of
historical favors, of which he is as a rule so ignorant that,
when the test was made at a recent banquet in a Northern
city, it is said that not one of the negro waiters present was
found to know who William Lloyd Garrison was.

Side by side, or rather face to face at the South, there are
two races, of all the members of the human family the most
' widely separated by salient and ineffaceable physical distinc-
tions, and to all appearances by moral and intellectual dis-
tinctions equally as salient and ineffaceable.

Let us contrast these races.

And first as to the physical distinctions between them.
Surely, never were such distinctions more acutely accentuated.
It is hard to see how a person can remember the inveterate
aversion, which has sprung from race peculiarities not so
pronounced, such for instance as those that keep the English-
man and the East Indian or the American and the Mongolian
sullenly apart, even when brought into the closest contiguity
in point of space, and yet fail to recognize in the wooly hair,The Negro Problem.

5

the receding forehead, the flat nose, the thick lips and the |
protruding jaw of the negro, not to speak of the paramount ^ *
incompatibility of color, personal attributes exquisitely calcu-
lated to disgust prepossessions based upon their exact opposites.

To this statement it will, of course, be replied that, if the only
lines of separation between the negro and the white man are
physical, such prepossessions are capricious merely and should
not be countenanced by the enlightened spirit of to-day. And
ten to one the reply will emanate from some Republican editor
or politician who would have heaped the bitterest reproaches
upon the South, if her representatives had not helped to arrest
the tide of Mongolian emigration, that was creeping over the
face of the Pacific coast, and was stayed only when the stern
common sense of self preservation indignantly trampled
under foot every appeal of false sentiment and false philoso-
phy. But the argument begs the question. Man is a creature
of prejudice as well as of reason, and no government is
conducted in the spirit of true statesmanship that does not
take deeply ingrained prejudice into account. Omission in
this regard is chargeable with one half of the irritation that
always follows when one community undertakes to do the
thinking or the want of thinking of another. More and
more the tendency in modern times, especially since the reign
of the abstractions, that conspire to swell the warnings of the
French Revolution, has been to regard Government as a prac-
tical science that should seek to accommodate itself not only
to the virtues but the weaknesses of the human beings upon
which it operates. As well might a tailor attempt to frame a
coat without reference to the defects of the structure, for which
it is intended, as a Legislature to frame laws without reference
to the social predilections and antipathies of its constituents,
however unjust or even whimsical some of these predilections
or antipathies might appear to an outsider to be.

But the lines of separation between the negro and the
white man are far from being purely physical. Even if the
personal characteristics, to which we have alluded, were want-6

The Negro Problem.

ing, his origin, his history, his present condition and moral
and intellectual idiosyncrasies of his would still impart to his
individuality an invidious relief.

From the dawn of recorded time, from the period, when
his captive form was delineated upon the commemorative
walls of ancient Egypt, until the present day, he has been
the slave of a will other than his own, or, when not the
slave of a will other than his own, the slave of what is even
worse—of his own unillumined and misguided will. Of all
the teeming millions, that people the Dark Continent, not one
of its innumerable tribes has ever succeeded in elevating itself
to a level that even the more advanced of the Asiatic nations
would call civilization. Indeed, so sunk in savagery and
superstition is this vast continent that, without a perceptible
shock to the conscience of the world, six or seven of the Great
Powers of Europe have partitioned its entire surface between
them with as little regard to the inclinations of the natives
themselves as if the latter were so many rabbits in a warren.
So too, when any portion of the African race has been enslaved
by the Caucasian, and, through the harsh discipline of slavery,
has been lifted to a higher than its aboriginal estate, itjhas
never been endowedjvvith self-control except Jo its discredit.
These are hard words. They are written entirely without an
intention to claim that the conclusions of the future can always
be safely deduced from the premises of the past. Nevertheless,
it cannot be denied that they are justified by the facts and
should therefore be allowed their full force in shaping the
spirit, in which the Negro Problem should be approached.
Froude, certainly an intelligent observer, has just warned
Great Britain, after a tour of her possessions in the West
Indies, that a more liberal extension of political power to the
blacks in those islands would probably terminate in as many
fac-similes of Hayti. What this means we are at no loss
to determine. Another highly intelligent Englishman, Sir
Spenser St. John, who resided for years as British MinisterThe Negro Problem.

7

at Port-au-Prince, had, a short while before, expressed in a
singularly interesting book, Hayti, or the Black Republic,
which should be in the hands of every public man in the
United States, his conviction that, in spite of her unsurpassed
natural resources, in spite of the ready-made industrial, politi-
cal and ecclesiastical organizations, to which she fell heir,
when the French were expelled from the island, in spite of
her long term of self-rule, Hayti, already the seat of chronic
peculation and carnage, was steadily returning to serpent
worship and cannibalism. The same view of Hayti was pre-
sented by the various correspondents of our great American
dailies,1 who wrote from the island during the periodic revo-
lution of last year. It is also sustained by the testimony of
an official successor of Sir Spenser St. John.2

Other examples can be readily adduced. A negro, Charles
H. I. Taylor, appointed Minister to Liberia by President
Cleveland, threw up his mission in disgust, and came home
to declare in a paper, which appeared in the Kansas City
Times on April 22, 1888, that the Republic, founded and j
upheld by the generous patronage of our country, had arrived I
at the lowest point of disorganization and decay. It is well \ 1
known that Congress was compelled to withdraw the privi- I
lege of self-government from the District of Columbia, as |
England had been compelled to withdraw it from Jamaica, |
because of the degree to which its value was impaired by the/
associated evils of negro suffrage. Contrasted, however, with"
the fate, that befell the Southern States, after the close of the
Civil War, these illustrations assume but a secondary signifi-
cance. As long as they retain the recollection of anything,
the people of those States will not forget the odious and mad-
dening crisis in their affairs when the liberated slave, the
scalawag and the cast-off vagabond of other communities
joined hands for the purpose of insulting and despoiling

1

JSee for instance the Baltimore Sun, January 8, 1889 and April 5, 1890.

2 Richmond Times, March 13, 1890.8

The Negro Problem.

them, and their offices became instruments of plunder far
more efficacious than the sword itself had been, and unblush-
ing knavery and corruption culminated in tax rates high
enough to be little less than the equivalents of confiscation
and yet not high enough to save the public credit from utter
shame, and the high places of justice were befouled, and par-
liaments, once the seats of eloquence and deliberative wisdom,
resounded with the rude gibberish of a council fire in the
bush, and ancient and illustrious commonwealths trod the
lowest abysses of humiliation and disgrace.

With the exception of the negro, all the elements that enter
into the population of the United States came here. The
negro was brought here. Captured by his own kith and kin
in Africa, sold by his captors to the slave dealers, sold by the
slave dealers to the slaveship, transported by the slaveship to
our shores, he was, from the colonial period until the moment-
ous day, that struck off his fetters, as much a chattel as the
plough or the hoe that he handled. Never did any race in the
annals of human existence bow its neck so tamely to the yoke
or show such little tenacity of fibre in resisting the influences
of new surroundings. He not only learnt to wear his chains
with docility but with light-hearted carelessness. He not only
ceased to cherish every usage and institution of his mother
country, but surpassed all other races, of which there is any
record, in the ready imitativeness with which he adopted the
usages and institutions of his masters. More than a century
passed away, and yet scarcely in a solitary instance did the
noble instinct of self-assertion, that has at times spurred the
heart of every other slave into desperation, move his. A direful
war supervened between his owners and their foes, of which
he himself was at least indirectly the occasion, and yet, though
it afforded him every opportunity to strike a successful blow
for his liberty, he, as a general thing, pursued the ordinary
routine of his servile tasks, as if he had no stake in the contest.
Many and most touching proofs of fidelity and devotion to
master and family did he exhibit during this time, as hasThe Negro Problem.

9

i

s

\

again and again been gratefully acknowledged in word and
deed by those who received them, but these credits belong to
his account as a bondsman and not as a citizen.

Such a slave as this was doubly a slave. Hurried from J
chattelism into citizenship, utterly without any sort of proba- \
tionary training for its duties, he, of course, still bore in \
the latter state all the badges of the moral and intellectual !
debasement that had characterized him in the former. Here ; \
and there in the larger cities of the country, where he is '1
brought into immediate contact with the civilization of the
white race, he has made some advance towards the acquisition
of education and property, but in the rural communities at
the South, through which the great mass of his race is diffused,
he is, in point of moral and mental enlightenment, substantially
what he was before emancipation. A widespread belief in
conjury, common even to domestic servants, who have spent
the greater part of their lives under the roofs of white persons,
morbid superstitions fermenting beneath a thin film of religious
forms, an almost unbridled licentiousness in the intercourse of
the sexes, a venality at the polls absolutely unqualified by any
principle short of hostility to the whites, an improvidence that
wastes in a day on luxuries the earnings of a week or a month, |
a childish elevation of spirits that assumes a more sober cast \
only when some chord of sensual desire, or furtive hatred or !
indefinable fear is touched; all testify “to an observer in the |
, heart of a country neighborhood in the Southern States how /

| slightly in every fundamental respect the nature of the negro >
has been altered since he went to bed a slave and awoke with
\ja, ballot in his hand.

I / Persistently it is always assumed by honest and dishonest f
/partisans at the North that the negro is simply a white man /
\jvith a black skin. The assumption is in no instance founded S
upon anything better than a total want of practical familiarity j
with his temperament and character. It is impossible to say
in what ratio his present deficiencies are to be apportioned
between the circumstances of his past and innate shortcomings.10

The Negro Problem.

But this we can say. Though he has now been a freeman for
a quarter of a century/though the South in that time has
applied a most generous share of her state revenues towards
his education/and Northern philanthrophy has accepted him
as a standing charge upon its liberality, his position in the
scale of human progress has not materially changed. His
faculties betray the same immaturity and incapacity to antici-
pate the future. / His moral and religious perceptions still
grope in the twilight. Brought from sunrise to sunset into
companionship with the sublime phenomena of nature, where,
in his case, are to be found the rude but stirring strains of
poetry and eloquence that this companionship has evoked from
every gifted race in its infancy. Vested with citizenship,
stamped with indelible tokens as a distinct individual, who
should be impelled by the strongest motives of self-interest
and race emulation to improve the condition of his people,
when has he ever evinced an aptitude for public affairs?
Living in vicinities, where land can be purchased for a few
dollars an acre, what proportion of the Southern soil has he
acquired? Laboring as a farm hand in thousands of open
fields and as an operative in hundreds of tobacco and cotton
factories, how many patents for improvements in agricultural
or manufacturing machinery has his inventive genius ever
secured ? It is in no intemperate spirit that these questions
are asked. A more distasteful duty cannot be devolved upon
a man and a gentleman than that of laying bare the infirmities
of a race, which was not brought into contact with him of its
own free will, and that, whatever may be its inherent imper-
fections, has never enjoyed, and, in association with the white
race, will never enjoy, that full equality of opportunity which
is granted to every white man. Indeed, if the entente cor diale
between the Southern whites and the Southern blacks, that
is absolutely necessary to the progress of the latter, has been
rendered impossible, the blame must largely rest upon the
selfish third parties to the relation, who are tireless in condemn-
ing foreign intrusion into the domestic affairs of the Irish, butThe Negro Problem.

11

are equally tireless in their insidious efforts to adjust the
domestic affairs of the South without reference to the views of
the dominant race there, as to the appalling issues that turn
upon the manner in which the adjustment is effected. Towards
the negro, individually, the Southern whites often entertain
the kindest feelings. He has his good qualities. Under the
oversight of the people, who know all the limitations on his
character, he is in many respects a highly efficient laborer, and ^
personally he is far from being destitute of amiable character-
istics. That the Southern whites are not wholly lacking in
the disposition to pave his path to a higher position than he
now occupies, when he is fitted for it, is demonstrated in the
enormous sacrifices in the way of taxation for educational
purposes that they have made and are still making to fit him
for it. But towards the negro, collectively, their attitude
under existing conditions could not fail to be indicative of the
profoundest apprehension. No matter what the negro is capable
of becoming, or may become, not wilder or guiltier was the phan-
tasy that man can hold property in man than the phantasy that v
the nggro, as he is to-day, is the equal of the white man and >
has as much right to political supremacy as he. A Northern
emigrant never comes South, and buys a plantation, and acts
upon that idea that he does not introduce hopeless demorali-
zation into his operations. The long experience, which is the
parent of all wise conduct, has taught the Southern whites better.
Not only does their superior knowledge of negro nature lead
them in some of their relations with him to tighten their grasp,
but in as many more to relax it. They know that a negro
man may not hesitate to rob a cornhouse or a smokehouse and
yet be a diligent and, in other respects, a faithful hand. They
know that a negro woman may be devoid of the rudimentary
instincts of chastity and yet be a valuable domestic. The
consequence is that there never was a more unjust charge than
the one, so confidently pressed by writers like Cable, that the
penalties of the criminal law are inflicted by them in a harsher
spirit upon the negro than upon themselves. The very reverse12

The Negro Problem.

is true. Except in the case of one heinous offence, in its
administration, they make the most indulgent allowances for
the weaknesses of the negro, and too often decline to put it into
motion at all in cases in which it would be sternly applied to
a white criminal, and this upon the tacitly conceded ground
that the negro, like the Utopia of Cuckoldom, of which Charles
Lamb speaks in his comments upon the comic dramatists of
the Restoration, is not justly amenable to ordinary moral laws.
Only a short time since, a negro in Virginia, known to the
writer, was detected in the theft of several hogs. The next
day, after a reprimand, he was at work as usual in the enclo-
sure about the house of his employer. Many other instances
of the same sort might readily be cited from the personal
observation of the writer alone.

f In bringing our remarks in this connection to a close, it
/ may be added that not only have the great majority of the
/ Southern negroes failed to make any notable headway since
the Civil War, but in some important particulars have dis-
% tinctly retrograded. ! This much at least may be said for
slavery. By subjecting the will of the negro to the will of a
master, who was constrained by a sense of pecuniary interest
and, on the whole, by a sense of moral accountability too, to
consult the best welfare of his slave, it disciplined him into
habits of moderation and self-restraint. The salutary effects
i of this discipline are apparent in the fact that such property,

\ as has been acquired by the negro in recent years, has been
i acquired almost exclusively by former slaves. When slavery
j ceased, it ceased and nothing so far has arisen to take its place.
It is the “new issue,” that has never known its influence, which
is recognized by the older generation of negroes themselves as
most notoriously wanting in all the characteristics that con-
stitute thrifty or useful citizens. Unaccustomed to personal
responsibility for a violation of duty, and too benighted to
grasp such a refinement as the moral obligation of a contract,
they are faithless in their engagements to a degree that often
seriously embarrasses their employers. Not being obliged as13



? '•



, ^ t \ ,> (

V. theix*. fliers' were to surround cohabitation with the sanctions
ofthey are progressively dispensing with the latter
^ «, "V-^^h^^ding an outlet for their sensual impulses in casual lib-

if

The Negro Problem*

at best in temporary arrangements that rarely
7e the first strong temptation to escape from their trarn-
/	\ mels. Saucy, vagrant, improvident, without self-restraint,

and subject to no external discipline, that could supply its

* ^lace, if they were the only types of their race, it would have
Been difficult indeed for the genius of Thomas Nelson Page
or Irwin Russell to have discovered a single tint of romance
in the composition of the negro.

And how could it be otherwise? So long as slavery lasted,
the master was free to tolerate a considerable latitude of per-
sonal intercourse between himself and his slaves; for no indi-
vidual familiarity or indulgence could possibly efface the line
of deep demarcation that the law had prescribed. With the
termination of slavery, however, and the mad legislative
attempt to shuffle up the blacks and the whites together, it
became impossible for the whites to allow themselves the same
liberty without running the risk of having their race suscepti-
bilities irritated in many different modes. On the other hand,
the blacks, endowed with full political equality, have naturally
become less and less disposed to accept personal intercourse
with the whites on any terms that do not recognize their full
social equality also. The first result is that the two races
have steadily drifted further and further from each other,
and the second that the one, already lamentably ill supplied
with capacity for self-improvement, has been left more unre-
servedly than ever to the free play of its own untutored and
degrading tendencies.

This growing separation is manifesting itself in the very
physical aspect of the negro. It is impossible to defend the
illicit commerce between white men and negro women, that
has so palpably qualified the strict African type, but it is
undeniable that one of the effects of this commerce was to
enhance the intellectual capabilities of the lower race by pro-The Negro Problem.

%



BISig

ducing cross products superior to the unqualified African.
However delusive race theories may be, it is certain lyaJhost
suggestive fact that the majority of the few negroes, who hpwe
attained prominence, have belonged to the shades intermediate
between the white race and the pure blooded black. Every
remove from the latter involves a distinct gain in intelligence
and vivacity. One of the most cogent causes of the rapid
pace, at which Hayti is reverting to barbarism, is the jealousy
with which the lighter section of its population is regarded by
the darker. The negro leaders of the Reconstruction Period
were principally men of color. It is a matter of every day
occurrence that, in all the employments, open to the negro, that
call for the exercise of something more than mere muscular
vigor, the preference is given to the mulatto. Indeed, the
negro himself recognizes that the various gradations of
his color carry along with them corresponding gradations of
intellect. Put, says a curious saying of the Haytians, a white
man, a mulatto and a black man in prison, and the first
demands paper and ink to draw up a protest, the second casts
about for means to escape, and the third falls asleep, and, after
sleeping twenty-four hours, awakes, grumbles a little, and then
turns over on his other side and sleeps another twenty-four*

Increased mental stamina undoubtedly accrued to the South-
ern negro from race intermixture, in spite of the sinister
circumstances under which race intermixture went on. Owing
however, to the mutual reserve, to which we have just alluded,
this benefit is fast disappearing. Everywhere at the South,
except in cities where, for obvious reasons, sexual commerce
between whites and blacks is not followed by the same social
penalties, the negro is unmistakably breeding back to the
original African physiognomy, and, unless this process of
retroversion is checked, the event must be most disastrous to
the average intelligence of the black race.

Worse still. Not only has the new regime unsettled the
negro in all his economic relations by withdrawing him from
the dominion of the authority that in some form or other is15

The Negro Problem.

indispensable to his economic value, not only has it imparted j
superadded energy to his reactionary tendencies by isolating
him from every kind of refining contact with the white race
and throwing him back upon his primordial type, but as a
further effect of his emancipation from authority and the
habits of subjection that authority created, it has stimulated his
grosser nature into full activity. Without the exaggeration of
local pride, it may be said that the simile of Lucas in the
verses so dear to every Southern heart, “as violets our virgins
pure and tender/’ simply expresses in a poetic form the deep-
seated deference for womanhood, that only less than the virtue
of its objects, renders crimes against female chastity exception-
ally rare at the South among the whites. Yet, surely, of all
contradictions, it is one of the most ghastly, that in this very
community a white woman does not dare to leave unattended
the curtilage of her house for fear that the libidinous hand
of a bestial savage may be laid upon her. . If a negro is
killed in a brawl, there are always Jacobins, like Senator
Chandler, drunk with the wild riot of their own evil passions,
to stigmatise the entire Southern people as murderers. Yet
there is not one of these men who does not know, silent as
they are on the subject, that scarcely is a morning newspaper
laid upon a breakfast table in the Union that does not narrate
a nameless outrage, all but peculiar to the negro, followed, it is
true, invariably, by the keen and swift vengeance that, under
the sense of a stringent necessity, however mistaken, has
almost supplanted legal procedure in such cases but too often
perpetrated under circumstances of sickening atrocity. This
subject is one from which even the cold eye of philosophical
disquisition shrinks, but nothing better illustrates than offences
of this sort, sternly redressed as they are, not only what a
thoughtless thrall to his momentary appetites the negro is,
but how much the difficulty of dealing with him is likely to
increase as years go on.

So much for one of the two antagonistic races. Should sec-
tional passion and party lust succeed in placing the destinies16

The Negro Problem.

of the South under the control of this race, while it remains
what it is at this hour, then well might the Southern people
exclaim, with a profounder significance than the poet ever
dreamed:

u Black is the badge of hell,

The hue of dungeons, and the scowl of night! ”

And what of the other race ? There is no need of a detailed
.comparison. It is enough to say that it is in substance the
Anglo-Saxon race, the race that has asserted its inborn dignity
and power under every constellation of the heavens, and, in
the sublime language of Edmund Waller, has trod with a
steady foot even upon the billows of the sea; the race of
reformed religion and its purified altars ; the race of home and
its sweet, tranquil joys ; the race of representative institutions
and constitutional restraints; the race of colonization and
battle; the race of letters, invention, industry and commerce;
the one race that has proved itself capable of reducing human
infirmity to the wedded sway of liberty and law.

In England, it has produced Shakespeare and Milton, Marl-
borough and Wellington, Pitt and Gladstone, Arkwright and
Stevenson. In the Northern States of the Union, it has pro-
duced Emerson and Hawthorne, Grant and McClellan,
Franklin and Webster, Morse and Edison. And it is no idle
vaunt to say that Washington, Lee, Stonewall Jackson,
Henry, Jefferson, Madison, Marshall, Calhoun, Davis and the
people and the civilization, of which they were the flower, will
for all time attest that the blood of this race has lost none of its
energy, when, mixed with a smaller infusion of foreign elements
than anywhere else in the United States, it starts out on its
circuit from the Southern heart.

These are the two races that constitute the population of
the South. It is important to bear in mind that they are not
simply distinguished from each other by vivid contrasts, phys-
ical, moral and intellectual, but are jealously divided from
each other in all the personal relations of life by a relentlessThe Negro Problem.	17

caste, founded upon the contrasts. This is true even of the
North, although nowhere in that section is the negro sufficient
in numbers to be a source of immediate political danger, or to
make the friction of his presence generally felt in the ordinary
round of daily existence. If it were not so, why is it that
the negro manifests such a strange reluctance about crossing
Mason and Dixon’s line—only a few hours away—and taking
up his residence in communities where the old barriers of dis-
like and disqualification have long ago been torn down ? No
one needs an answer to this question who subscribes to a
Northern newspaper, let alone all other sources of popular
knowledge. It is because the negro has learnt for himself
what prominent representatives of his race have publicly
declared again and again, that he does not escape race bias by
going Northwards, and that, if the instinctive disfavor of the
whites there is not displayed towards him in all the various
phases that it is at the South, or so quickly under provocation
as it is at the South, it is because the spaces between his elbows
and theirs are wider, and he is too weak, numerically, to be a
menace to order and property. All the same the disfavor
exists, deep seated, intuitive, ready at any moment to break
out into angry inflammation. Northern legislatures do not
pass laws requiring separate coaches for white and black
passengers on railroad trains. What Southern State would
do it, if a white man could board a train within its borders
and find a negro face here and there only to invite his
listless curiosity? Northern legislatures do not pass laws
against miscegenation. What Southern State would do it,
if it knew that, even though race repellency were to cease
and the two races were to attract each other, it could swallow
down its black infusion like a dose of nauseous medicine at
a single gulp and with a single wry face ? It is not until
diseases of the body politic are felt or apprehended through-
out its entire sensitive area that the vis medieatrix legum
is invoked. So long as fond theories of human relationship,
potently seductive in all their Utopian forms to human opti-
218

The Negro Problem.

mism, can be preserved with impunity in any event, however
remote, there is not likely to be a call for the political physi-
cian. But it is unquestionably true that the negro at the
North is exposed to a race proscription differing only in kind
and degree from that to which he is exposed at the South. As
long ago as 1880 there were nearly a half million of negroes
residing in the Northern States. In some of these States they
and their increase now hold the balance of political power.
How comes it, then, we may ask the sublime moralists of the
Senate chamber, who so generously maintain that God made
of one blood all nations of men except the Mongolian, that no
one of these negroes is ever sent to Congress by a Northern
constituency? How many negro governors, members of State
legislatures, mayors, aldermen, judges, prosecuting attorneys,
sheriffs, court clerks, bank presidents, railroad presidents, book-
keepers, or railroad conductors are there in the Northern
States? When the Postmaster General concludes that the
race is entitled to a few scattered post-offices, is it from the
eager North that the post-offices are selected, or is it from the
reluctant South? Why is it that when even so talented a
negro as Frederick Douglass who, curiously enough, in the
estimation of Senator Ingalls, is “greater by his Caucasian
reenforcement than by his African blood/'? is to be provided
for, he is given either an office in a disfranchised community
in the United States or a mission to a black Republic? How
much are negro lawyers and doctors at the North patronized by
white clients or patients? Are blacks freely admitted there
to the various social and religious organizations that effect so
much for this world and the next ? Do they not sometimes
complain that, cosmopolitan as is the city of New York, it is
almost impossible for them to rent houses in that city outside
of a cul de sac or some forbidding thoroughfare. Indeed,
have not even colored clergymen been heard to allege that
New Jersey hotels, usually so covetous of guests, become as
secluded as nunneries when they present themselves at the
door, gripsack in hand. Black policemen and firemen are notThe Negro Problem.

19

unknown in Southern cities. How many are there in Northern ?

It is a common thing for Southern whites to work side by
side with the negro in the cotton and tobacco fields. How is (
this companionship relished when a Pittsburgh manufacturer
undertakes to introduce blacks into his rolling mill ? These
and a thousand other questions of like character might be put,
and there is not one of them that can be honestly answered
without sustaining the truth of what we have said with refer-
ence to the existence of race prejudice at the North.

What is true, however, of the North is, of course, still more
strikingly true of the South, for all the conditions favorable
to race prejudice are in the South actively, incessantly and
ubiquitously at work. There the line of the division runs
with terrible distinctness through the entire organization of
society. Intermarriage is universally or all but universally
inhibited by constitutional or statutory provisions, and, if it
were under no legal ban, would be as effectively inhibited by
custom. Sexual intercourse between a negro man and a white
woman, against the will of the latter, is avenged by the surest,
the fleetest and the most absolutely pitiless nemesis that ever
silently and irresistibly sped to its mark. Sexual intercourse
between a negro man and a white woman, with the consent
of the latter, is as rare as buggery and when it does occur
awakens very much the same sensations in the superior race
as that unnatural crime. A negro never enters the house of
a white person except as a menial. A white person never
enters the house of a negro except on an errand of business,
mercy or charity. Errands of the latter two descriptions were
common enough while slavery lasted, and are still occasionally,
prompted by ties then formed, but they are becoming fewer and |
fewer as death severs the ligaments of the past and the chasm 1
between the rising generations of the two races steadily j
widens. Justly or unjustly too, as at the North, the white *
race has settled down to the conviction that the negro is
unfitted for any but the ruder vocations, and, if he transcends
the limits of these vocations, he must expect to secure his20

The Negro Problem.

patronage solely from his own people. Go into a public
schoolhouse where white children or white youths are taught,
and' there is not a black face there. Go a few blocks or a
few miles further into a public schoolhouse where black chil-
dren or black youths are taught, and there is not a white face
there, unless it be that of the teacher, and the black race is
not more anxious than the white to everywhere displace him
with a black substitute. Enter a church of the one or the
other race and the same phenomenon greets the gaze. The
galleries in the churches of the whites, which were once set
aside for the blacks, have long ago been abandoned by them
to cobwebs and dirt daubers. If a white person enters a
church of the blacks, when the strident voice of the preacher
is floating out over the fields, and the old men are groaning
and rocking their bodies to relieve their repressed emotions,
and the women are shrieking and swooning like pythonesses,
and all the other concomitants of the nervous disorder, that
passes on such occasions for religion, are fully developed, the
sudden lull in the excitement and sidelong glances will easily
enable him to judge how far he is wanted. At the country
store, the railroad station, and the voting precinct, the blacks
gather in one group and the whites in another, set over against
each other like two warring chemical elements that may at
any moment unite in an explosion. At the voting precinct,
of course, the antithesis is most glaring. To one side of the
ballot box stands the mass of black voters, sullen or light-
hearted, accordingly as the last flaw of their mercurial tempera-
ment blows them about, demanding in silence more expressive
than any words that the human lips ever syllabled the money
or the civil institutions of the rival race. To the other stands
the mass of white voters, firm, self-centred, tense as the single
cool man that walks with a cocked pistol in one hand and his
life in the other. And so with every other point of proximity
between the two races, for there is no contact but collision.
In some of the Southern States, if a negro purchases a rail-
road ticket, he must find a seat in the cars or compartmentsThe Negro Problem.

21

reserved for him. In others, where, for reasons, in nowise
suggested by relaxing prejudice, he is not under this necessity,
unless he desires to gratify race enmity, he instinctively seeks
the side of another negro. Theatres and hotels are practically
closed to him. Let him enter a circus, the one place of amuse-
ment, to which he is addicted in common with the whites, and
the tier after tier of unrelieved black countenances, ascending
to the roof of the tent, opposite to the tier after tier of unre-
lieved white, tells him that an unrelenting law of the human
heart has fixed his place. Occupying the same soil, sustaining
to each other usually the relation of employer and employee,
or of landlord and tenant, nearly equal in numbers, dreadfully
unequal in intelligence and morale, the two races are as far
removed from each other in sympathy and mutual interest
as if they were inhabitants of different countries. And mark
how radical and invincible the antagonism is. That the race
line should be thus drawn, it is not necessary that the negro
should be a full-blooded black, or even closely approximate
that character. Partus sequitur ventrem alike applies to him
whether he is an unmitigated African or has just enough Afri-
can blood in his veins to crisp his hair or to lend a faint saf-
fron tint to his cheek. In either event there is between him
and the white race a great gulf cast. The mulatto may formu-
late, and does formulate his distinctions too, but they receive
no recognition on his paternal side.

And it is but sober truth to assert that the caste under-
lying this state of things has simply been confirmed by the
abrupt elevation of the negro to citizenship. If the negro
had merely been manumitted, and had then been exclusively
turned over to the wisdom and justice of the Southern whites,
he would most assuredly have been the victim of temporary
oppression. The transmitted ideas of the slave era, the bit-
terness of the recent struggle, the character of the negro him-
self, would have rendered any other result impossible. But if
the Southern whites had come to the conclusion that the negro
was destined to be a permanent element in their corporate life,22

The Negro Problem.

they would as the reconciliation of the sections advanced, and
the appeal to their generosity and fairness became stronger
and stronger, have devised a modus vivendi between the races
that would have been the offspring of their own free will and
experience, and would therefore have afforded a solid and
stable earnest of liberal modifications as the negro indicated
his title to them. Forever barred from a return to slavery
by a change in the organic law of the land, convinced from
their own observation that it was better even for themselves
that the negro should be a freeman than a slave, compelled
by the ^necessities of their position, maugrt every backward
leaning, to deal wisely and justly with him, their own enlight-
ened self-interest, animated by the clear-sighted and conserva-
tive spirit of local self-government would have slowly accorded
to the negro every privilege that he deserved. In this way
the excesses of the Reconstruction period, and its frightful
admonitions, so destructive of all confidence in the negro as a
citizen and a voter, might have been avoided. Fate, however,
decreed otherwise. By three or four tremendous strokes of the
pen, partly directed by genuine humanitarianism and honest
zeal for abstract rights, and partly by a disinterested purpose
to harmonize the new conditions at the South with what was
thoughtfully believed at the time to be for the best interests
of the whole Republic, but far more by the passionate sugges-
tions of the late conflict, the slave was, through the entirely
external instrumentality of a conqueror, made in every out-
ward respect the political co-equal of his recent master; an
act so utterly inconsistent with every principle of practical
statesmanship and so obviously but the refinement of a con-
stitutional age upon the old sequels of subjugation, that the
Southern people had little resentment to expend upon the
subsequent attempts of the National Legislature to make the
same slave their social co-equal as well.

Thus conferred, the political equality of the negro has served
|f only to intensify his social inequality. Pinned upon the white
11 race by an extraneous power, utterly without regard to theirThe Negro Problem.

23

wishes, they could not but feel that it was little else than
another badge of conquest, all the more hateful because not
affixed by the mailed hand of the warrior but by the sleek
f attorney hand of legislative oppression, guided by the cool,
calculating machinations of the committee room. The conse-
quence is that finding themselves debarred from denying one
form of equality beyond their control, they have all the more
jealously denied others within their control. What the negro
has gained in political privileges, he has lost twice over in social.
The freer his access to the polls, the more difficult has become
his access to all the human relations that law cannot reach.
In the normal progress of a despised race, the political standing
always precedes the social, but whatever hopes of social advance-
ment the negro might have justly based upon a citizenship, con-
ceded by the people with whom his lot was cast, after he had
demonstrated his right to it, he cannot well base such hopes
upon a citizenship granted him by the arbitrary fiat of a third
party at a time when he could not, as he did not, fail to exhibit
as slight credentials to political as to social preferment.

■^'Nor should the reader forget here that the race prejudices
of the whites are heartily returned by the blacks. The white
man does not more cordially despise the black man than the
black man hates the white man. In Hayti, no white person
can own an inch of soil or indeed obtain any footing but that
of bare toleration. In the same island, Sir Spenser St. John
once heard a negro advocate pleading before a black jury
defend a member of his race, who had murdered a white, on the
ground that it was only one white the less. So at the South
there are abundant evidences that if the negro but had the
power he would not lack the proscriptive spirit. Every year
of the Reconstruction Era saw him more impatient of white
leadership and more disposed to take the reins into his own
hands. On the eve of an important election, it is a common
habit in parts of the South for negroes to assemble in the
recesses of the forest at night for the purpose of giving expres-
sion to sentiments and aims, so congenial with the hour and24

The Negro Problem.

place that they are still. reflected in the morose faces and
averted eyes that are noted by the planter or overseer the next
day. An ordinary arrest in a negro quarter in a Southern
City, even for a crime committed within the view of the officers, *
often brings the whole vicinage about his ears. Asa rule, of
course, the animus is revealed only in the covert and indirect
forms, characteristic of acknowledged inferiority, for the
negro knows that the blood runs near the skin of the white
race, and as yet he cannot altogether shake off the spell of the
conscious mastery that is familiar with every weak spot in his
moral and mental constitution, and that responds with a ready
rebuke to every encroachment upon its reservations. Still, as
he recedes further and further from under the direct influence
of the whites, his port becomes more and more aggressive.
Now he will content himself with visiting social ostracism or
even corporeal injury upon the black, who has had the courage,
when race feeling was running high, to vote the Democratic
ticket. But then again, on another occasion, when separate
tables of the same quality have been provided for the two
races by a Steamboat Company, some “ Afro-American ” will
clamorously insist upon eating with the white passengers.
Again the same heady presumption will induce a negress to
throw herself down with a defiant gesture into a vacant place
in a railroad car beside an unprotected white female. Again,
on still another occasion, when a considerable party of negroes
are in possession of a street car, and one or more ladies are
standing, the men will effect a careless ease in retaining their
seats, and the women will indulge in ostentatious chatter, that
leaves little doubt as to the person for whom it is intended.
The same uneasy sense of inferiority leads the negro to signifi-
cantly abjure Christian names and to interlard his conversation
with the prefixes of the post-office and the visiting card.

Pretensions like these the white race might well dismiss
with a shrug or a laugh. Unfortunately, however, race
tantagonism assumes far more threatening aspects. An exam-
ination of the back files of any daily newspaper for the lastThe Negro Problem.

25

year will corroborate the statement that there is scarcely a*
Southern State which has not, during that time, been the scene
of a race conflict, involving more or less bloodshed. It is
impossible to read the history of any of these conflicts, which
usually originate in trivial causes, without forming the most
painful impressions as to the inflammability of the moral
atmosphere that kindles them. The service of a writ, some
real or fancied act of individual injustice, some casual broil
between two members of the opposing races, is at any moment
sufficient to start a blaze that does not expire until the stronger
race has inflicted the exemplary measure of retaliation that
is essential to the continuance of its prestige and dominion.
Already collisions like these are constantly occurring, and it
is a melancholy reflection that the immediate future is far
more likely to augment than to diminish them. The aston-
ishing fecundity of the negro which is fast giving him, if the
census of 1880 may be believed, a numerical , preponderance
over the whites in many of the Southern States, and other
causes, upon which we have already touched, make this only
too probable.

In the meantime, there is not a nerve in the happiness or
prosperity of the South that does not feel the festering touch
of the conditions upon which we have been dwelling. As a
slave, the negro exercised a very pernicious effect on her mate-
rial welfare by confining within the narrowest limits feverish
energies, that might under different auspices have been directed
into various channels of peaceful activity. The centre of
gravity to which all her interests had to be adjusted, the
shuttlecock of sectional rivalries, the vortex of every storm,
lowly and ignoble as he was, he unwittingly had his revenge
in the morbid extent to which he monopolized her attention.
One consequence of this concentration of public attention upon
the negro was, of course, to impart an extraordinary unity and
intensity of purpose to the Southern people, that disseminated
political information far and wide, bred a remarkable aptitude for
public affairs, and, through its unnatural momentum, prolonged26

The Negro Problem.

the political ascendency of the South beyond the normal term
prescribed by the expanding population and wealth of the
North. But these advantages were dearly purchased at the
price that the South was all the time paying for them in the
corresponding neglect of her material resources and the sec-
tional animosities that contentions over the negro implanted.

Though the negro is no longer a passive but an active factor
in political movements at the South, he is still the creaking
and heated pivot upon which all such movements turn. No
one who has not lived in what is known there as a black belt
can realize how far the thoughts and conversation of the people
are colored by the suggestions of his presence. His ominous
shadow falls athwart every lintel and lends a sombre tint to
every ray of reviving prosperity. How is this alien, unassim-
ilable, ignorant, immoral, thriftless, corrupt mass of voters,
darkening the face of the South like the overhanging skirts
of a nimbus cloud, to be illuminated or dispelled? These
questions address themselves every day and hour to every
reflective man and woman at the South. And they are ques-
tions to which the efforts that she has made on behalf of the
negro since the war return no answer. Out of her impover-
ished resources, she has heroically supplied the negro as freely
as she could with educational and benevolent aid, and yet what
compensation has there been for her generosity and self-denying
sense of duty? Not only have they produced no sensible
improvement in the moral and intellectual condition of the
negro, but apparently they have not awakened in him a solitary
sensation of gratitude. As ready as before to lift his hand
against the only hand that can extend him assistance, which
will prove a blessing instead of a curse to him, as prompt as
ever to league himself with every desperate crusade against
the banded intelligence and property of the community with
which his fortunes are bound up, and to submit his feet to the
lead of every drunken Trinculo or Stephano that comes along
with cozening dreams of wild license, it is not strange that the
white race is growing sick and tired of him and is resolved27

The Negro Problem.

that, if there is to be a straggle for race supremacy, it will
prosecute that struggle with its usual degree of unfaltering
firmness and spirit. From the cruelest experience it has
learnt to know that whatever assails the honor or the safety
of the South, whether it be an attempt to stain the financial
credit of Virginia, or to impose a debauching lottery upon
Louisiana, or some other nefarious scheme, concocted by the
most depraved whites, is simply regarded by him as affording
him another opportunity to divide the white race and to feed
his resentments upon their weakness and abasement.

In spite of the results, precipitated by the Constitutional
Amendments, if the negro were not constantly the victim of
outside interference, the process of segregation, that is now
completely separating him from the white race, might yet be
arrested, and reversed tendencies produce more harmonious rela-
tions between him and the latter. Thrown entirely upon his own
expedients, he might be intelligent enough to see that the only
wise and certain way of dissolving the solid opposition of the
whites was by according to them the full portion of deference,
that is due to their better opportunities in the past, if nothing
else, recognizing the mutual dependence of the two races
under existing circumstances, and exercising the franchise upon
some other principle than mere race rancor. Such a policy as
this perhaps presupposes a far greater amount of sagacious
patience and foresight than belongs to the negro. If this be
so, at any rate, however, in the event suggested, he would soon
reconcile himself to the conviction that there resided in the
will and directing intellect of the white race an indomitable
power of self-assertion that, no matter what might be his
numbers or paper rights, he could never hope to break down
by blind impact merely. With the formation of this convic-
tion, the mass of the race would sink into a political apathy
even deeper than that which has already been occasioned in
many parts of the South by his observation that, whether the
President of the United States be a Republican or a Democrat,
his personal liberty is secure, the wearing off of the first28

The Negro Problem.

novelty of the ballot, and his repeated political reverses. How
probable this is the increased lethargy, that followed the recent
success of the great national party, that is identified in the mind
of the negro with white rule at the South, clearly discloses.
In either case, the negro would gain, for in either case the
prejudices and apprehensions of the whites would abate.
Party dissensions would spring up among them. The interests
and ambitions, engendered by these dissensions, would hatch
competition for the negro vote, and enable the negro to play off
one party against the other by holding out his support to the one
that promised him the most liberal treatment. In this way^
personal and political ties would be created between him and
the white race that would tend to stay their present estrange-
ment, promote mutual friendliness and confidence between
them, and clear his pathway of every artificial obstruction that
blocks his progress towards the acquisition of the external
advantages that secure consideration and respect. Relieved
from the fear of negro domination, the whites would be more
generous, more just, more forbearing. Taught to look entirely
to himself and to the whites at his own doors for the ameliora-
tion of his condition, the negro would be less presumptuous,
less hostile to the other race, and more disposed to substitute
the claims of solid attainment for the claims of empty mimicry.
Concession would follow concession, each one leading naturally
to the next because the preceding one was a normal stage in
an orderly and logical progression. Admitting that the negro
is capable of substantial and lasting improvement, and that the
white man and he could occupy in amity the same territory
under circumstances that did not absolutely guarantee the
political ascendency and the race integrity of the former, it is
certain that only under the circumstances just described could
the negro ever insert the entering wedge of social and real
political equality.

But it is just outside interference that the negro always has
invited, and to all appearances always will invite, so long
as the population of the South continues to be dual as it isThe Negro Problem.

29

to-day. He has not been the active and efficient auxiliary in
curtailing the political strength of his former masters that he
was expected by the Republican party to be when it made him
a citizen. On the contrary, all history does not furnish a more
signal example of the utter fatuity of expectations, based
upon a priori inferences, than is to be found in the manner in
which his former masters have vindicated in his person the
claims of violated nature over the subtlest and most complex
contrivances of law. Constitutional amendments, elaborate
systems of statutory equality, the military force of the nation
have all at one time or another been called in for the purpose
of standing the cone upon its apex and making the law of
gravitation operate upwards instead of downwards. But not
more impotent to restrain the waves of the Hellespont were the
chains of Xerxes than were these agencies to produce a real
equality between the former master and the former slave, and
to transfer to ignorance and barbarism and landlessness the
same share of influence that naturally and rightfully attaches
to intelligence and civilization, and property. Though every
governmental function was in the hands of the blacks, though
the ballot box was beset with serried masses of federal
bayonets, though the dejection of defeat and disfranchisement
and of humiliations worse than either was still strong, the
white people of the South reclaimed the supremacy that
belonged to them with a facility that can only be compared
to the facility with which, the rising tide reclaims the deserted
margin of the sea. Restored to the full control of their State
governments, represented in Congress almost exclusively by
persons of their own choice, they might not unnaturally bestow
a bitter laugh upon the miscarriage of the policy that was
intended to exact an opprobrious and perpetual security for
their bondage, if they did not feel that, whether negro suffrage
abridges or doubles their political power, it is in either event
an affliction and a mockery.

It might have been supposed that the inability of the Repub-
lican party, demonstrated over and over again, to prop up the30

The Negro Problem.

negro in such a way as to qualify him to cope on equal terms
with the white man would have induced it to let race relations
at the South alone. It is needless, however, to say that this is
not so. It is true that a marked change has taken place in
the attitude of Northern sentiment towards the negro, due
to the subsidence of sectional passions, the futility of past
efforts to compound the white and black races at the South into
one homogeneous whole by forced processes, the sense of common
danger, inspired by the insoluble communities of Chinese and
other undesirable immigrants in the heart of the West and
North, the growing conviction,/based upon forfeited oppor-
tunities, that the negro is a mauvais sujet’ who claims a larger
share of the national attention and patience than he deserves,
and the closer personal and commercial ties between the two
sections that are being woven by the mighty industrial move-
ment that has arisen at the South and is absorbing so much
Northern capital and energy. Nothing can be more certain
than that, in the ratio, in which the negro gained by the
estrangement of the North and the South, he will lose by their
reconciliation. It is also true that the change mentioned has
already been so decided that the day has passed when the
South could be singled out as a distinct target for oppressive
legislation, designed to promote the interests of the Republican
party, and that such legislation must now, ostensibly at least,
apply to the other sections of the Union. We want no better
proof of this than the insidious force bill, pending in Congress,
which proposes to transfer the control of national elections
from the hands, which have held it since the adoption of the
Federal Constitution, into hands, that are expected to make
one more effort to put the heel of the black race on the neck
of the white. And this fact is one of incalculable value to the
South. It converts every undue stretch of federal authority
into a common bond of sympathy between her and the rest of
the Union. It hastens the end of the political isolation that is
alike distasteful to her cordial instincts and inimical to her
selfish interests.The Negro Problem,

31

Nevertheless, the disposition of the Republican party to
intermeddle with the domestic affairs of the South is still so
alert that its success invariably fills the minds of her people
with the gloomiest forebodings of political persecution and
social discord. Whatever it may hereafter become, with the
decadence of sectional jealousies and the adoption of more con-
servative counsels, it is at present hopelessly sectional in its
organization and purposes. Forever cheated by the tempting
solicitations of an immense vote, captivatingly available in
point of theory and cruelly illusory in point of fact, saturated
with traditional prejudices, that are untiring in devising new
means for harrowing the tranquillity of the South, the Southern
people would be more than human if they did not set their
faces like flint against its invasions.

Most lamentable for every reason are the consequences of
this intermeddling. Lamentable to the negro, because, when
the Republican party is in power, he not only remains a negro
but becomes the supple instrument of centralizing encroach-
ments upon local autonomy, and, therefore, proportionably the
more obnoxious to the white race; lamentable to the white race,
because Republican rule plants a Dublin Castle in the South,
elevates to the local federal offices the most ignorant and irre-
sponsible members of her population, damps hope, disorders
industry, involves every Southern State in anxiety and turmoil,
and distils blistering dews upon every olive branch that the
one section holds out to the other. No better evidence of these
facts can be found than in the improved race relations, sectional
good feeling, and marvelous quickening of every industrial
impulse that ensued at the South upon the election of Presi-
dent Cleveland.

Hence, the solid South, the conspicuous phenomenon that
has so unjustly, and yet so artfully, been used to convince the
honest and unprejudiced masses of the North that the Southern
people are unreconciled to the results of the war and full of
smouldering hostility to the general government. Analyzed,
it is found to be merely the mode in which the fear of negro32

The Negro Problem.

domination, established by external intervention, has organized
itself. If there were no negroes at the South, and the Repub-
lican party were to adjust its necessities to that fact, as it would
then, despite every lingering incentive of the past, unques-
tionably soon do, the white race would, in the briefest period,
split up into party divisions along the same general lines as
the North. The clashing of individual ambitions, and the
natural diversity of human antipathies and convictions would,
in any event, guarantee that. But an additional guarantee for
it would be found in the infant industries, that are leading
thousands of Southern Democrats to look with favor upon the
tenet of protection, that is so pertinaciously cherished by the
Republican party. As it is, however, protection to factory
chimneys is but a small matter compared with protection to
domestic hearthsides. How deeply the Southern people appre-
ciate this is exhibited in the solidity just mentioned that resists
with the tensile strength of steel every centrifugal influence,
however urgent. It is a most painful fact that the South is
compelled by her negro problem to sternly deny herself all the
great benefits that flow from party strife and the agitation of
party issues. No matter how variant are the views of her
people upon the questions of public policy that keep the rest
of the Union in a state of healthful dissension, she must, at any
cost, dress every break in her alignment in the face of the over-
shadowing issue that is with her the very issue of life and
death. There are no parties at the South but the white man’s
party and the black man’s party. There is no issue but the
race issue. Even the electoral and administrative reforms, that
sweep from time to time over the rest of the country, must be
carefully weighed by her with reference to their probable effect
in affording a freer scope to the dangers that lurk in the igno-
rance and race temper of her black population. Often, from
considerations of this sort, she is constrained to reject such
reforms because they do not comport with the exigencies of
her peculiar situation, when, if she were unhampered, she
would be one of the first sections of the Union to adopt them.The JS^gro Problem.

33

Such in faint outline are the conditions that surround the
Negro Problem. It seems to us that to barely state them
ought to be sufficient to expose the fatuous impolicy, not
to say wickedness, of any further attempt upon .he part of the
federal government to modify them by coercive legislation.
Upon some other occasion, we propose to consider the remedies
that they call for.

W. Cabell Bruce.

3