Several causes contributed to the growth and permanence of slavery, the most notable being the invention of the cotton-gin by Whitney,—an event which gave a tremendous impetus to the culture of the cotton plant, necessitated a vast increase in the productive forces of agriculture, and led to increased activity in the importation of African negroes. For, in consequence of this invention, it is estimated that no less than a half-million of them were imported into the United States between the years of 1793 and 1808, the latter being the date at which the foreign slave traffic became illegal. But neither of these causes would have greatly affected the perpetuity of slavery, had not other controlling factors been enlisted in its behalf. The erection of mills in the New England states, for the manufacture of raw cotton into cotton cloth enlisted a powerful interest on the side of slavery, which, together with its commercial alliances, religious support, and legal protection, intrenched it in what appeared to be an impregnable fortress. The Southern slaveholders strenuously objected to the presence of manufacturing industries, on the ground that they would destroy slavery, and that already slave mechanics were half free. They also prevented the education of the poor whites, who outnumbered the slave autocrats ten to one. They were also stubbornly opposed to elevating negro labor above the crudest performance, notwithstanding the fact that ignorant and superficial cultivation speedily exhausted the soil. With chattelism finally established, there of necessity arose class distinctions, with the inevitable result that the government passed into the hands of its landed aristocrats.

The security of slavery rested on two fundamental conditions, viz. that there should be no instruction of the slave, and no discussion of the evils of slavery by white men. Slaves had no legal personality. The law of Louisiana said they should be considered as real estate, and that they could possess nothing, and acquire nothing but what belonged to their masters. On the other hand, the law of South Carolina declared that slaves should be decreed and adjudged in law to be chattels personal. The legislation in the other slave states was similar, though the greater number regarded slaves as chattel property. The slave code of the South was based on the Institutes of Justinian; but, while ancient slaveholding nations subjugated their slaves by fetters and death, the slaveholders of America kept their slaves in submission by debasing their minds and morals, and dominating their persons with execrable legal atrocities.

The following extracts are taken from the slave legislation of the South: “Any person who shall attempt to teach any free person of color or slave to spell, read, or write, shall, upon conviction thereof, be imprisoned not less than one or more than twelve months;” a statute of Louisiana. “Teaching slaves to read and write tends to excite dissatisfaction in their minds and to produce insurrection and rebellion; therefore, if any person shall give or sell to any slave a Bible, tract, or book of any kind, such person, if white, shall be punished with a fine of two hundred dollars, and if a free negro, with thirty-nine lashes on the bare back;” the law of North Carolina. The law of South Carolina punished any slave found receiving mental instruction with severe castigation and his instructor with a fine of five hundred dollars. These excerpts are not exceptions; every slave commonwealth made the mental instruction of the slave a crime and his teacher a criminal. Not only was the mental enlightenment of the slave inhibited, but all morality set at naught by the mandate of the law. The code of Louisiana declared that “slaves could not contract matrimony,” that their sexual association was “a relation without sanctity, and to which no civil rights adhere.” The law of slavery was that slaves were not amenable to church or state for incontinence or adultery, since they were not bound by marital ties nor subjected to their obligations.

The legal iniquities of slavery reached the climax of audacity in its criminal code. The universal law of negro slavery declared that “If any slave shall presume to strike any white person, such slave may be lawfully killed.” Slaves were mutilated and killed at the pleasure of their owners whenever, in their judgment, their safety required it, and no punishment, even in the most aggravated cases was inflicted other than the imposition of a trifling fine. When a non-slaveholding white killed a negro, payment of the price of the bondman was his acquittance; in no case was imprisonment or the death penalty inflicted. Slavery per se, upheld and fostered as it was in this country by an ostensibly free government, and justified and participated in by its free subjects, could not do otherwise than produce a monstrous aberration of the sense of human right.

The contact of whites and blacks in the relation of master and servant corrupted both races. The physical depravity of the enslaved negro exerted a pernicious influence on the white masters; it corrupted their language, warped their moral vision, and swept away the decent and orderly restraints which civilized society imposes on its members. Moral integrity was set aside, the caprice of the individual substituted. Slave-owners became self-indulgent, brutal and lustful, masterful in speech, audacious in action; and throughout the whole saturnalia of chattelism the whites sunk as the blacks rose in moral stamina, for the latter acquired, through the church and social regulations of the plantation, some knowledge of the duties and obligations of moral living.

The condition of the negro during slavery is thus graphically described by De Tocqueville: “The negro of the United States has lost all remembrance of his country; the language which his forefathers spoke is never heard around him; he abjured their religion and forgot their customs when he ceased to belong to Africa, without acquiring any claim to European privileges. He was sold by the one, repulsed by the other; violence made him a slave, and the habits of servitude gave him the thoughts and desires of a slave; he admires his tyrants more than he hates them, and finds his joy and his pride in the servile imitation of those who oppress him; his understanding is degraded to the level of his soul, and he quietly enjoys the privilege of his debasement.” This luminous portrayal of negro nature is as true today, after thirty years of freedom, as when it was written by this keen-witted Frenchman.

It may be said that human bondage was not instituted to develop and cultivate the mental and moral qualities of those who were imported to toil and propagate their kind, especially where mercenary greed deliberately set aflame negro sensuality. Slavery, we know, caressed productive wantonness, and flogged barren prudery in its mad strife to increase human herds for traffic and use. We also know that moral integrity was impossible while the slaves lived in an atmosphere tainted with sensuous corruption. Furthermore, we know that just in proportion as the restraints of racial contact were removed, the corruption of white society increased, a fact conclusively established by millions of negroes whose blood is mixed with that of their masters. But whether in slavery or out of it, moral, deterioration is sure to follow in any race or individual gifted with high social development, when contact with another lower in the scale of civilization is unrestrained and of indefinite duration.

But while slavery wrought immeasurable evil in the white slaveholding class of the South, its positive iniquities bred a moral debasement in negro women, without parallel in modern annals, and whose consummate degradation was reached during our Civil War. It may have been the outcroppings of gratitude to Federal victors, or reckless abandon to lust, but the inciting cause is immaterial, so long as the shameful fact is true, that, wherever our armies were quartered in the South, the negro women flocked to their camps for infamous riot with the white soldiery. All occupied cities, suburban rendezvous, and rural bivouacs, bore witness to the mad havoc daily wrought in black womanhood by our citizen soldiery. We have personal knowledge of many Federal officers of high station, and some of strong prejudices against the race, who openly kept negro mistresses in their army quarters; nor do we doubt that the present lax morality everywhere observable among negro womenkind is largely due to the licentious freedom which the war engendered among them. Slavery had its blighting evils, but also its wholesome restraints.

Negro slavery was a many-sided affair, for at one and the same time it constituted a political force, an industrial factor, an ethical agency, a social institution, and a domestic feature. The character of the slaves themselves was largely affected by these several phases of enthralment. For example, the negroes coarse in speech and crude in action were assigned to labor in the field and forest; they were under the control of a white overseer who was assisted in his duties by negro drivers; men and women were herded together in work each with a definite assigned task. They were bound to a limited sphere of activities, which the least intelligence sufficed to execute, and where neither experience nor knowledge gave them a choice of methods. In the plantation social system field labor was its penal colony, and to be transported thither from other vocations was, in the eyes of the slaves, the most degrading punishment to which they could be subjected.

A favored class was the domestic servants employed in various capacities in the homes of the planters. These were usually bright and intelligent negroes, who, through contact and sympathetic supervision acquired in many instances a training in manners and methods of incomparable grace and efficiency. Another equally intelligent, but more self-reliant class, was the slaves employed in porterage in commercial centres, together with many others engaged in occupations which required little supervision, but a fair degree of personal intelligence and practical judgment to perform rightly. But the superior slave class, and the one which represented all that was best in negro development, was the mechanics who were in most cases conspicuous for their ability and achievements, for slavery included among its mechanical industries every form of handicraft, and as the ability to acquire a mechanical art carries with it a fair degree of intelligence, it is not surprising that negro artisans, who were carefully selected for their special lines of work, should have developed characters superior to their less fortunate fellows.

From the formation of the Union slavery was, in authority and influence, an aggressive force and dominating factor in the national government. The evidence in support of this is found in the Ordinance of 1787, providing for the return of fugitive slaves; in the compromises of the Federal Constitution with slavery, viz.: the organic recognition of a class of bondmen; the provision for the rendition of fugitives of that class to their masters; the concession that three-fourths of them should be counted in the apportionment for Congressional representation, a concession which gave the South representation for property, and by which the vote of the owner of five hundred slaves equalled that of three hundred non-slaveholding white citizens; finally, by the extension of the slave trade for twenty years from the formation of the Federal government.

The direct legal responsibility of the nation for slavery is established by the treaty made with the Creek Indians, in 1790, in which they agreed to return the runaway slaves among them. By the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which permitted the owner of a runaway to recover his slave in any state to which he had fled. By the act governing the District of Columbia, which affirmed that the laws of Virginia and Maryland should respectively remain in force. By the direct affirmation of Congress, that “The legal presumption is, that persons of color going at large without evidence of their freedom are absconding slaves, and prima facie liable to arrest as such; “that if a free man of color should be apprehended as a runaway, “he is subject to the payment of all fees and rewards, given by law, for the apprehending of runaways, and upon failure to make such payment, is liable to be sold as a slave.” By permitting slavery, in 1798, to be extended in the territory ceded by Georgia and North Carolina. By the Treaty of Ghent, whereby the English were required to pay to the United States $1,200,000 for the benefit of Southern slaveholders, whose negroes had escaped to the English army. By the invasion of Spanish Florida, for the express purpose of recovering Georgia fugitive negroes. By the Missouri Compromise, which was a clear and unequivocal Federal recognition of slavery. By the acquisition of Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, and the legal authorization of slavery therein, as well as in the states of Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi. By judicial defence of slavery by the United States Supreme Court, as shown in the celebrated Dred Scott decision, wherein it was affirmed that the Missouri Compromise was not warranted by the Constitution, and was therefore null and void, that negroes were not included in the word “citizen” employed in the Constitution, and that they were regarded as an inferior order of beings, altogether unfit for association with white men, in social or political relations, and therefore might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for the benefit of white men.

That slavery was a national institution, recognized and protected by the Constitution, by foreign treaties, by Federal legislation, and by judicial decisions is a fundamental fact. It is equally true that from the foundation of the government up to 1860 no act inimical to slavery was ever enacted into law by the Congress of the United States. The Missouri Compromise may be cited as an instance to the contrary, but all the facts connected therewith show that, while the bill was introduced by a Northern Senator, it was admittedly a Southern measure, and enacted by Southern voters in the belief that it would efficiently check the spread of free institutions southward.

During the decade between 1850 and 1860 slavery was more popular in the South than at any previous period. The foreign slave trade was openly pursued. It is officially stated that at least forty slavers, whose net annual profits exceeded $15,000,000, were annually fitted out in the United States, chiefly from the port of New York. Moreover, near the close of this decade, the whole South was engaged in efforts to secure through national legislation a reopening of the African slave trade. In fact, never in the history of the nation had slavery been so aggressive in demands, so unyielding in purpose, as in 1861, when, for the first time, it had absolute right and security in all the states and territories by national legislation. But perhaps no single legislative act so significantly exemplified the paramount influence of the slave barons in national affairs, as the fact that, notwithstanding the open rebellion of several of the slave states, an amendment to the constitution was adopted by both Houses of Congress in January, 1861, and its submission for ratification to the several states ordered, which provided for the perpetual observance of the Fugitive Slave Act, the protection of slavery in all states and territories, and further provided that no subsequent amendment to the Constitution should ever be made that would impair these obligations or permit Congress to legislate adversely to slavery. This crowning injury and wanton surrender of freedom to slavery was heartily supported by many Republican members who have since become conspicuous in the councils of the nation, and, strange to say, two states, Ohio and Maryland, gave their assent to it.

In its later moods, slavery stood on the ground that negro chattelism was an essential element of a high civilization, and, in support of its pretensions, enlisted the activities of the ostensible Christian teachers of the South, most of whom owned slaves, and who deliberately taught from the pulpit and through the religious press that slavery was not only right in itself, but that it was a God-ordained institution. Nor was this the only class who supported this monstrous iniquity. The American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, and The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, together with all other distinctly religious organizations North and South, with the exception of the Society of Friends, the Methodist Protestant, and the United Brethren churches, were at one period distinctly committed to the support of negro slavery.

The religious sentiment of the country therefore constituted one of the chief bulwarks of the slave system, a statement amply justified by even the most. cursory examination of American sectarian history. For instance, the Episcopal Church, at that time representing the wealth and culture of the country, was proslavery to the core. The Presbyterian Church, after much internal dissension over the question of its communicants and ministers holding slaves, separated into a Northern and a Southern wing in 1837. And the church of John Wesley, whose founder had proclaimed slavery to be the “sum of all villanies,” was, a few years later, rent in twain by a slaveholding faction led by a slaveholding bishop. Nor was the Baptist Church one whit behind its sectarian brethren in defending the enthralment of the blacks. Moreover, while, in all denominations negro slaves were included among their communicants, none of them permitted their black brethren to testify in church tribunals against white members, it mattered not how heinous were the crimes they had committed against the person of the negro.

But while the American slave system had not the slightest shred of moral justification, yet, if we would be just in our conclusions respecting it, we must needs distinguish between slavery and slaveholding. Slavery, in itself, had no moral status, but slaveholding had in many instances commendable and extenuating features. Every master, the good and the bad, had at his disposal the services and life of his slave. In the long run absolute power will corrupt the best human beings. But candor compels us to say that there were many examples of Southern slaveholders who in their treatment of their black bondmen were actuated by a lofty sense of duty and principles of Christian benevolence. To be sure, they were part and parcel of an odious system, and to that extent their beneficent activities were checked; still, for all that, their wholesome examples and generous deeds left all indelible impress upon many negro men and women, who were ennobled thereby.

Nor has the universal kinship of humanity ever been more fitly realized than in the results achieved in negro bondage. Despite its barbarities, slavery wrought a salutary transformation in the negro race. It made rational men out of savage animals, and industrious serfs out of wanton idlers. It found the negro rioting in benighted ignorance, and led him to the threshold of light and knowledge. It clothed nakedness in civilized habiliments, and taught a jungle idolater of Christ and immortality. Moreover, paradoxical as it may appear, many a negro slave man was girt with a freedom of mind and nobility of soul far beyond anything his master comprehended; for, just as the maimed Phrygian slave, Epictetus, embalmed his name in immortality, while that of his master lies buried in oblivion save for that one brutal act, so some American negro slaves have carved out for themselves fame, while their white owners are numbered among the unknown.

But, in order to form a direct estimate of the Southern slave-owner, it is necessary to take into account the hereditary traits and religious beliefs of the original settlers, which, as a matter of course had a profound bearing on their future domestic economy. Virginia was settled by English adherents of the Episcopal Church, and later was noted for its aristocratic landed gentry. North Carolina, settled by the Scotch-Irish and Quakers, was not only democratic in sentiment, but was the first of the thirteen colonies to declare for independence and strike a blow in defence of civic freedom. South Carolina, peopled by Cavaliers and Huguenots, developed an imperious aristocracy, whose social organism rested on negro slavery and white domination. Florida and Louisiana had each a social condition peculiar to itself. All of the Southern commonwealths, therefore, developed certain characters, which during centuries underwent but slight change. Practically, each of them grew, separated by broad distinctions and pronounced traits from its neighbors, with the characteristics of ancestors faithfully transmitted to descendants, which characteristics, through the isolation of plantation life and the intermarriage of a segregated people, gave tone and color to its sectional impulse. It is not surprising that unique traits were developed in a people free from restraints and yet possessed of strong notions of despotic power, which the early introduction of negro slavery gave them an opportunity to exercise, and the continuance of which undoubtedly exerted a tremendous influence upon the individual character of the slaveholding class.

This discussion would be lacking in completeness were not attention directed to the influence which negro bondage exerted on the white women of the South, who in many respects are unlike their Northern sisters. Between the two no fair comparison could be instituted. This much, however, may be said, without involving the least implication of sinister motive. The Southern white women are essentially indolent; their environment invites repose, and under the influence of the slave régime many of them sank into effeminate sensuousness or became vindictive and cruel. And yet we have evidence of numberless instances of moral heroism exhibited by Southern women under conditions that would have reflected credit on the rarest Spartan courage. What is immediately relevant to the matter in hand, however, is the effect which the obvious immoralities of negro enthralment produced upon the women of the master class. Human nature is essentially the same the world over, and the presumption is inconceivable that Southern white women were not susceptible to the licentious carnival which rioted about them, for before their eyes fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons revelled with slave concubines. That it dulled their moral sensibilities cannot be denied; that it aroused resentment is to be inferred, though we have seen the wives of white planters tenderly caring for the negro illegitimates of their husbands, and showering a wealth of affection upon them—altogether unlike the inconsistency of Sarah, which made Hagar an outcast and her child a desert marauder. If nothing else may be said, this is self-evident, the licentiousness of slavery made these women tolerant of social lapses and conjugal unfaithfulness, wherever indulged in with what they conceived to be an inferior race. In so doing they have dishonored all womankind. Nor does it extenuate their guilt to say of them that they have maintained for themselves an unsullied standard of social purity. In any attestation of their own chastity their selfish indifference to the social impurity about them is made apparent. Nor does their culpability end here, inasmuch as their neglect to inculcate and enforce their own conception of moral living on their women dependants has wrought untold social mischief among the black women of the South, and contributed in no slight degree toward unsettling the foundations of Southern society. When all the facts incident thereto are weighed and adjusted, we must conclude, if we would be candid, that slavery has wrought as great evil to the whites as to the blacks.

While the suppression of the African slave trade was largely brought about by an enlightened public, indignant at its remorseless barbarities, whose interest in the subject extended no farther than its cessation, there were not wanting those far-sighted enough to realize that a suppression of the African slave trade rendered the ultimate extinction of slavery inevitable. The suppression of the foreign traffic, therefore, was followed by vigorous efforts for the emancipation of the domestic enslaved. In the American slaveholding countries negro emancipation took place in Mexico in 1829, in the English West Indian possessions in 1834, and in the French colonies in 1848. Portugal issued a decree, in 1858, which provided that after a lapse of twenty years her slaves should be free. The Dutch freed their slaves in 1863. The Spanish Cortes passed an act for the gradual emancipation of the negro slaves in Cuba in 1870, and the Brazilian government approved of a similar measure in 1871.

From the advent of the first cargo of negro slaves in America, down to the day of the eradication of human chattelism, there were those who doubted the expediency of slave labor and were opposed to its existence. The question of negro emancipation ante-dated the formation of the Federal Union, and in its earlier stages found many strong supporters both in the North and South. Among the latter were many large slave-owners. The decisive objection raised to negro emancipation, at least the one that appears to have had the most weight in deciding the matter adversely, was the alleged fear of revolt and retaliation on the part of the freed negroes for real or fancied wrongs committed against them during, their enslavement. Another objection, which was also strongly urged against such a movement, was that negro emancipation would produce immediate and widespread amalgamation of the races. That either objection could have been sincerely entertained by a sober-minded generation appears, in the light of subsequent events, to border on the absurd. The matter of retaliation has always been out of the question; and as for race amalgamation, slavery is the responsible factor in negro race admixture.

That a strong antislavery sentiment obtained in all the colonies during the progress of the Revolutionary War is attested by their legislative acts. Delaware, in 1776, adopted a new constitution prohibiting any further importation of negro slaves, and removing all restraints upon emancipation. Maryland did the same in 1783. So likewise New Jersey, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Pennsylvania declared that no slaves should be brought into that state after 1780; that all negro citizens born after that date should be free. Massachusetts abolished slavery, not by direct enactment, but under a Supreme Court decision in 1780. New York, in 1785, enacted that all children of slaves thereafter born should be free, and have the same rights as other freemen. Both Georgia and South Carolina united in prohibiting traffic in the African slave trade, and in the latter state that prohibition was not repealed until 1803.

The ablest statesmen of the revolutionary and constitutional period of United States history, advocated the emancipation of slaves. Washington said, “The abolition of slavery must take place, and that, too, at a period not remote,” and showed the courage of his convictions by emancipating his own slaves. Jefferson uttered these words in reference to negro slavery, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Madison declared that it was “wrong to admit into the Constitution even the idea that there could be property in man.” Patrick Henry affirmed, “That we owe it to the purity of our religion to show that it is at variance with the law which warrants slavery, and it would rejoice my very soul to know that every one of my fellow-beings was emancipated.” Robert Morris, in the Constitutional Convention, declared slavery to be “a nefarious institution.” The celebrated Dr. Rush declared slavery to be “repugnant to the principles of Christianity, and rebellion against the authority of a common Father”; and William Pinckney, in 1789, boldly affirmed in the Maryland House of Delegates, that, “By the eternal principles of natural justice, no master in this state has a right to hold his slave for a single hour.” Luther Martin, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention from Maryland, opposed the adoption of the Constitution on the ground that it contained no express provision against slavery; and General Lee of Virginia lamented that no provision was made in the document for the gradual abolition of slavery; while Judge Tucker of the same state, in a letter to its General Assembly, recommending the abolition of their slaves, said, “It is our first duty to effectuate so desirable an object, and to remove from us a stigma, with which our enemies will never fail to upbraid us, nor our consciences to reproach us.” In the Virginia convention, called together for the ratification of the Federal Constitution, Mr. Johnson said, “The principle of emancipation has begun since the Revolution, let us do what we will, it will come around”; and in a similar convention in North Carolina, Mr. Iredell, who was afterward a justice of the United States Supreme Court, remarked, “When the entire abolition of slavery takes place, it will be an event which must be pleasing to every generous mind and every friend of human nature.” Colonel Laurens, a noble patriot, and large slave-owner of South Carolina, informed his son that he was devising means to manumit his slaves, and requested his aid in the matter. Mr. Leigh of Virginia affirmed that, “During the Revolution, and for many years after, the abolition of slavery was a favorite topic with many of our ablest statesmen, who entertained with respect all the schemes which wisdom or ingenuity could suggest for accomplishing the object.” These citations, which need not be further indulged in, undoubtedly show the existence of a widespread antislavery sentiment among the American people at an early date in our national history.

But a more significant confirmation of the prevalence of early antislavery sentiment is shown by the action of the Constitutional Convention in the promulgation of its ordinance for the government of the Northwest Territory, which contained these significant words, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, shall exist”; nor has slavery ever had the least foothold in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, or Michigan, the five states which were afterward carved out of this magnificent territory, whose free character was made possible by the unanimous vote of slaveholding states.

With this array of credible evidence before us, the conclusion is irresistible that the representative public sentiment of the country was largely antislavery in character. That a powerful reaction subsequently took place is no less obvious. It is, therefore, worth while inquiring into the causes which wrought so great a change in the popular mind. We have already referred to the invention of the cotton-gin, which, perhaps more than any one event, was responsible for the extension and continuance of slavery, when viewed from an industrial standpoint. But it must also be borne in mind that the irreconcilable strife between freedom and slavery, though lulled by the Revolution, was renewed in the Constitutional Convention, and fanned into flame as the South, step by step, wrested from its adversary ignoble concessions, and that these conflicts strengthened and crystallized the convictions and purposes of each side. The proslavery sentiment was also abetted by the lack of education among the masses of the Southern whites, a large proportion of whom could neither read nor write. It was further fostered by the geographical isolation of the states, the lack of means for rapid transit, the rarity of personal and postal intercourse, the commercial greed of the North, the dearth of civil knowledge, the conflict in the public mind regarding the nature and functions of the Federal government, which grew out of a concurrent belief in the sovereign capacity of each state. The supreme agency, however, which assured permanence to slavery, was the overthrow of the Federal party in 1800, an event that gave the South for sixty years practical control of the national government.

The first measurement of strength between slavery and freedom took place in 1819, and grew out of the application of the citizens of the territory of Missouri for admission to statehood. A bitter and hostile feeling was at once developed, which ended in a drawn battle with the odds in favor of the South. Missouri came into the Union as a slave state, though slavery, by the terms of the famous Compromise Act of the following year, was forever prohibited north of 36° 30', in all territory acquired from France by the Louisiana Purchase. The second attempt to check and curb the expansion of slavery was embodied in the Wilmot Proviso of 1846, and though it failed to become incorporated into law, it was, nevertheless, a courageous endeavor to consecrate American soil to freedom. Moreover, the fact that its author, David Wilmot, was a Democrat from Pennsylvania invests the measure with historic interest. That Texas and slavery were interchangeable terms was a foregone conclusion, when the matter of its admission was made the issue in 1845; but, notwithstanding the most strenuous opposition, slavery was again the victor. In 1850 a prolonged and bitter contest ensued over the petition of California for admission to the Union as a free state. A second compromise was effected, California was admitted; the slave trade was prohibited in the District of Columbia, but a Fugitive Slave Law of the most atrocious character was enacted to appease the South. In 1854 the Missouri Compromise Act was repealed, in order to introduce slavery into Kansas and Nebraska; and though the South scored a legislative triumph, both of these territories were subsequently admitted as free states.

The exclusion of slavery from Kansas became the turning-point in the contest between slavery and freedom, and assured the free element in our population a future ascendency in national affairs. Previously the South had maintained its power in the general government with unscrupulous persistence, for it permitted the admission of no free state that was not offset by the admission of a slave state, so that, up to 1850, when we had fifteen free and fifteen slave states, the numerical parity of the two sections was kept intact. But, after the admission of California, Oregon, and Minnesota as states of the Union, the South foresaw the eradication of slavery decreed. The illimitable Northwest, with its millions of acres of inviting soil, awaiting the advent of free labor, was undergoing rapid settlement with persons opposed to servile toil, hence with the circumscription of slave territory the freedom of the negroes became merely a question of time and methods.

The course of the South on the slave question vividly illustrates the power of coherence in conviction and purpose, when exerted by a determined minority. In 1860 that section had twelve million of inhabitants, of which one-third were, slaves, owned by less than four hundred thousand persons; and we are treated to the unique spectacle of seeing less than half a million persons, in absolute control of eight million of free persons in their own section, arrogantly dominating twenty millions of white freemen in another part of a country whose laws declare all its members equal. Truly the world furnishes no parallel to it, and it appears impossible that, in this age, rational men should so long have submitted to such a subversion of their liberties and denial of rights. And, inasmuch as the autonomy which the slave advocates had in mind, and which they sought to engraft on the noblest and truest conception of the rights of man that the blurred vision of humanity had hitherto realized, was a republican oligarchy based on class supremacy, there necessarily arose a conflict. The Southern slaveholding class had no adequate conception of the nature and functions of republican institutions. How could they, representing as they did a self-constituted oligarchy, with their notions of government drawn from Greek and Roman sources, and every local condition constantly suggesting analogous states between themselves and their classical slaveholding predecessors in these ancient republics?

The nomination of Abraham Lincoln by the Republican party for President of the United States created a direct issue between slavery and freedom, and on that issue the South, for the first time in the history of the government, was defeated. Secession had been the threat which, like the sword of Damocles, the South had long held over the North. In 1787 Georgia and South Carolina had refused to come into the Union unless slavery was recognized and the slave trade permitted. In 1820 the South as a unit threatened to dissolve the Union unless Missouri was admitted as a slave state. It took the same position, though with greater vehemence, when California came up for admission as a free state, and, in the judgment of many sane men, the dissolution of the republic was only averted by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Southern arrogance rose to the height of frenzy in the Kansas matter, and the manifest determination of the slave party to dominate the nation or destroy it awakened the free spirit of the North, as nothing else had done before; still there was a general feeling that it would never proceed to the extreme length of actual separation. But, notwithstanding the incredulity of the North and the impassioned protests of the conservative South, one after another of the slave states seceded, to inaugurate a war that aimed at nothing less than the destruction of the Federal government. In the sober perspective of to-day it will hardly be questioned that slavery was the immediate incitement, as well as the underlying motive, which led to the Civil War. Nor is this conclusion unwarranted, for Alexander Stephens said at the organization of the Secession government, “Slavery is the cornerstone of the new Confederacy.”

President Lincoln had a preëminent endowment of moral qualities. He was a leader of consummate parts, a statesman of prophetic wisdom, a magistrate of unwavering fidelity, a citizen of transcendant loyalty to the highest ideals of the nation. He was unalterably opposed to slavery, which he fitly characterized as having its origin and continuance in the selfishness of man. “My paramount object,” said he, “is to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery; if I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.” Yet he was mindful to say, “If God wills that the war continue until all the wealth of the bondman's toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether.’ ”

President Lincoln was the chosen head and front of the military and civil power of the nation. That he had authority in either capacity to issue a proclamation freeing the slaves of the Southern insurgents is beyond question, nor does the fact that negro emancipation was not the purpose, but a strategic incident, of the war detract from the value of the act to the enslaved race. The primary purpose of the United States, in employing all available means for the suppression of the Rebellion, was to maintain national integrity. But future union without universal freedom was impossible, for servile bondage in a free government bad been made impossible. The executive act, then, which conferred physical freedom on the negro was not due in any measure to fanaticism, but to a sense of duty and exalted conceptions of national patriotism.

In the historical evolution of negro freedom five great epoch-making events precede its final consummation. These were the prohibition of the slave trade in 1774 by the Continental Congress; the Declaration of Independence, in 1776; the Free State Ordinance of 1787; the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854; and the invasion of Virginia by John Brown in 1859. Each of these events had a marked influence on the institution of slavery. The earlier ones circumscribed its bounds, and fostered an antislavery spirit among the non-slaveholding classes. The latter thoroughly awakened the country to the dangers of a servile insurrection. The John Brown invasion, in its ultimate reaches, possessed tremendous significance. The weakness of the South was laid bare; all saw that its social fabric rested on a slumbering volcano; the nation was alarmed and gave voice to its fears by its votes.

The years between 1860 and 1865 marked the inception and culmination of the most practical and effectual antislavery agitation and legislation the country had witnessed. Beginning in July, 1861, the first act of a series of similar measures directed against slavery was passed by the Congress of the United States, freeing all slaves employed by the Confederate authorities in rebellious acts against the government and authority of the United States. The second, prohibiting officers of the Federal army from returning slaves to their masters, was enacted early in 1862. The third was the adoption by Congress of the joint resolution recommended by President Lincoln, tendering national pecuniary aid in furtherance of state emancipation. Mr. Lincoln constantly urged upon the Union-adhering states gradual emancipation, and pleaded for national compensation; but his wise and disinterested efforts were not destined to bear fruit. The fourth act was the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, April 16, 1862. This was a national act, pure and simple, and vindicated the antislavery contention of over half a century; namely, that Congress had exclusive jurisdiction over slavery within the District. About three thousand slaves were included in and benefited by this act of emancipation. The average pay of the government to their owners was about $300. To one of the payments a singular incident was attached. It appears that a free negro, who had some years before bought and paid for his slave wife, demanded payment for his wife and children. The claim was allowed on legal grounds, it being held that, as purchaser, he was the actual owner of his wife, and, as a slave woman, the children followed the condition of the mother. The fifth measure, passed in June, 1862, forever prohibited slavery in all the territories of the United States then held, or that might thereafter be acquired. The sixth made free all slaves of disloyal owners who found refuge within Union lines, and forbade their return to masters by army officers on pain of dismissal from the Federal service.

The seventh act was a law to prohibit the African slave trade. The eighth was the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law, in June, 1864. The ninth was the prohibition of the interstate slave trade, which Randolph of Virginia, in the early part of the century, characterized as “worse and more odious than the foreign slave trade itself.” The tenth and crowning antislavery act was the Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment, which forever prohibits slavery in the United States and territories. This consummate measure was suggested and its adoption urged by Mr. Lincoln himself, after he had failed to secure the coöperation of the border states in the matter of gradual emancipation. When, therefore, universal freedom was decreed by the Thirteenth Amendment, the obstinate Union slaveholders found themselves entirely shut out from receiving any compensation for their negro property. One notable exception, however, to the mandatory operations of this amendment should be mentioned. Maryland, by a popular vote, in October, 1864, freed her slaves.

In reviewing the causes which brought about the abolishment of slavery, we are painfully impressed with the indifferent attitude of negroes toward the agencies which consummated their freedom, an indifference which leads us to conclude that they have neither intelligent knowledge of the magnitude of the boon conferred on the race, nor sensible gratitude for one who performed the most heroic act for them. This apathy and ingratitude becomes all the more inexplicable when we recall that negroes of the United States continue to commemorate English slave emancipation, while the anniversary of our own great epoch-making event, the liberation of four million chattel slaves, with its attendant strife, carnage, disrupted homes, and disabled survivors, is passed over in silence and forgetfulness by a people who ought to be the first and foremost in perpetuating its memories. Not only is there no racial recognition of the 22d of September, the date of the issuance of the emancipation proclamation, nor of the 1st of January, the time when it went into effect, but negroes neither celebrate within their own ranks, nor unite with their fellow-citizens, in commemorating the anniversary of the great emancipator's birthday.

Before the war the South had a free negro population in excess of a quarter of a million souls, most of whom were engaged in some form of industry; many of them had wealth. They occupied, however, an anomalous social and political relation to the white race, which cannot be more concisely depicted than by taking this lucid description from the pages of an eminent writer: “The free negro can neither share the rights, nor the pleasures, nor the labors, nor the afflictions of him whose equal he has been declared to be, and he cannot meet him upon fair terms of life, or in death; and these obvious inequalities established by laws are perpetuated by manners.” But, notwithstanding their admitted oppression and servile state, the official records show that thousands of free negroes tendered their services as soldiers, and were duly enrolled and equipped by the Confederate authorities. Moreover, not a few of them owned slaves, and gave both sympathy and money in support of the Southern cause. But free negro soldiers were no strangers to the South. General Jackson had employed them at New Orleans; they were also regularly enrolled as soldiers in the Revolutionary War, and, in the main, all of the colonies favored their employment, in one form or another, in military service. Virginia, it may be recalled, led off in offering freedom to all negro slaves who should enlist for colonial defence, though there is no proof that any considerable number availed themselves of the privilege. On the contrary, more than thirty thousand slaves fled to the English army, and a later generation repeated the experience during the Civil War, when vast multitudes deserted their homes to cast in their lot with the Union forces.

So far as the slaves themselves were concerned there was a belief, both here and abroad, that when a favorable opportunity came they would rise in rebellion against their masters, But, contrary to a century of prophecy, as well as current expectation, neither a general insurrection nor local outbreak of any kind occurred. The negroes, largely left to their own devices, quietly tilled the soil, raising cotton for exportation and food for their own and army uses. They built fortifications for Southern defence, and spun and wove the cloth for its soldiers' garments, and, in the most praiseworthy manner, took care of the wives and children of their absent enslavers. The slaves therefore were important and powerful auxiliaries of the Southern Confederacy, and, in the light of later developments, we are led to believe that, had they been enrolled in the Confederate army early in the Rebellion, recognition of the Confederacy would have come from both England and France, in which event the final issue would have been problematical.

That the negroes did not revolt is one of the incomprehensible features of our Civil War. Every chance for success was theirs, nor were they ignorant of their opportunity for striking an effectual and crushing blow against their oppressors. Why was it not done? Several potent causes combined to render any widespread insurrection at that time impossible. There was, in the first place, a genuine affection for the white race, implanted in hundreds of thousands of negroes by amalgamation; there was, in no less degree, a race love created by the foster parental relations which negro women sustained toward white children; there was also a genuine desire on the part of the negro men to discharge worthily the duties with which they were intrusted by their absent masters. But the supreme and all-pervading influence which restrained them was rooted in their religious convictions; for the slave negro, unlike the modern freedman, was a being in whom religious fervor was intensely and overwhelmingly manifest.

In the last analysis, then, the key to negro passiveness is found in his religious notions, and the fact that he had unquestioning faith in his eventual liberation through some extraordinary but always supernatural method of interference, explains many otherwise inexplicable phases of his character and attitude during slavery. Faith in negro freedom was the dying prophecy of white-haired patriarchs, the parting legacy of fathers and mothers to weeping children of whom they were bereft by a dehumanizing chattelism. At moments it awakened in the most abject of bondmen a dim sense of manhood, while the far-seeing were lifted toward the summits of the Mount of Transfiguration, and beheld themselves clothed in God-ordained rights and divinely imposed duties. Convictions of eventual manumission were so thoroughly inwrought into every fibre of the negro's being that triumphant freedom became the refrain of every aspiration and the burden of all invocation.

These sentiments were kept at white heat through plaintive songs and the impassioned speech of their own religious teachers, who, likening their thraldom to that of the Hebrews of old in bondage to the Egyptians, were wont to attribute their ultimate deliverance to a mandate recorded on high in response to tears and groans and midnight wrestlings in prayer, and which was to be executed on earth with fiery vengeance. Hence, when freedom came, the credulous mind of the negro saw the likeness between the Hebrews and himself verified. Were not Pharaoh and his army drowned in the Red Sea in a mad pursuit of the escaping Israelites? Did not every battle-field of whitened bones and unmarked graves bear witness to the stubborn determination of the white masters not to let God's black children be free? Nor did the analog cease here, for, as the dead first-born in every Egyptian household testified to the ampleness of God's anger toward the merciless oppressors of his people, so every Southern household was wrapped in sadness, and every hearthstone shadowed by grief, because some loved one was stricken down by a soldier of freedom.

To the religious slave negro, scriptural statements were literal facts, and with his mind filled with its memorized texts he believed himself to walk and talk with God. When, therefore, Lincoln's proclamation of liberty was first read in the slave cabins of the South, their inmates were filled with inexpressible rapture. An unutterable joy swept into the hearts of every decrepit father, aged mother, toilworn brother, and burden-ladened sister, who had watched and waited through long weary years for the fruitage of a faith which had sent heavenward unnumbered prayers to Him who watches even the sparrow's fall. But when the last word of Liberty's message was read, and they realized that its tremendous mandate made them free, and ushered in the dawn of a new era, it could not be expected that they would be fully conscious of its vital significance. Before them, spread out in freshness and beauty, lay the Promised Land of Liberty, with its illimitable possibilities of manly growth and womanly development, with its unexplored opportunities for mind-training and soul-culture,—for fraternal consort with American ideas, for investiture with American citizenship, for industrial achievement at the forge and factory, for racial reciprocity and friendly strivings for national unity,—with only the Jordan of preparation, sobriety, steadiness, and purpose lying between. But no Joshua was with them to part the waters, and so, turning back from visions of grandeur and high-wrought hopes, they were speedily enwrapped in the darkness of industrial servitude.

The emancipation of the negroes brought about a social and economic revolution in the methods and habits of Southern life, and introduced grave and disturbing issues that have not yet ceased to exist. The truth is that neither the white nor black people were prepared for the abolition of slavery. The former, humiliated by their defeats in war and exasperated by the loss of property at home, were in no mood to submit to an arbitrary deprivation of that industrial force on which they had depended for centuries; nor were the latter, in any essential respect, qualified to pass from a state of bondage to one of freedom. Such a transition, fraught with untried responsibilities and unknown duties, carried them beyond their depth. To be sure, the negroes had a dim consciousness that they were free,—but free to do what? To eat, to drink, to sleep, and roam at will, so much was conceivable and eagerly sought to be realized; but that as free men and women they owed duties to each other and society in general, they had no clear conception.

Set adrift as the freedmen were, without capable self-direction, among a superior governing class embittered by a conscious impotence to arrest the movement of an aimless people standing out in the broad sunlight of physical liberty, they were aware only of an escape from a hitherto interminable system of unpaid toil. It was obviously impossible that an event so abrupt should not produce serious disarrangement of the previous social order. To their credit be it said, however, that but few of the negro men and women who were living together as husband and wife, under the régime of slavery, abandoned each other when emancipation gave them the opportunity to sever such relations. On the contrary, intoxicating as the joys of freedom may have been to them, its new birth of feeling and experience gave them not only a sense of personal ownership of body and limb, of muscle and movement, but reasonable notions as well of conjugal duty, parental rights, filial obligations, and fraternal relations which acquired greater coherency as the stability and endurance of these relations became more clearly manifest. The negro, however, in his early emergence into domestic freedom, was not without the helpful counsels of the better men and women of the slaveholding class, which did much to hold in check the turbulence of his unstable nature.

The negroes entered on their career of freedom barren of all material possessions other than the tattered garments with which their bodies were partially covered, to begin under untried conditions a grim conflict with industrial servitude. Responsible ownership, with its provident oversight, had cared for them in the matter of clothing, food, shelter, and general supervision of labor and conduct. This now gave way to a whimsical and irresponsible method of living. It has always been to us a source of ceaseless regret that the liberated slaves were not committed to some method of probationary oversight, which would have provided for their industrial and mental training. Examples were not wanting; for that which European serfdom did for the slaves of Europe, and industrial apprenticeship for the emancipated negroes of the British West Indies, might have been successfully invoked in behalf of our own released bondmen with infinite profit to themselves and the nation. Negro labor under slavery was bred to subjection and dependent control. When directive oversight was withdrawn, and the negro left to his own volition, his productiveness and reliability as a worker, for obvious causes, deteriorated. He had no aspiration to create, no ambition to excel; to him labor was bondage; idleness, freedom.

The negro is legally free, but out of the changed relation between the two races a problem of perilous reality has grown, one which even at this late day is but little understood by the great body of the American people. We are satisfied that the groundwork of this problem in not race aversion. The negro cherishes no resentment toward the whites, notwithstanding that race appears to be imbued with a deliberate and set purpose to forego none of its ancient customs; nor have the white people any inherent or ineradicable aversion to the negro. But, nevertheless, there are wrongs to be effaced and rights to be enthroned before enduring harmony can be established between them.

We believe this problem to be solvable despite the irrational attitude of each race toward existing misunderstandings, though until each side is ready to make substantial concessions an ever widening breach must continue to exist between two interdependent classes. We find, to put the facts in a sentence, that transmitted influences have implanted in the white race a masterful spirit, which imperiously disregards the rights of the freedmen to such an extent as to exclude from the start every consideration of their equal participation in the common benefits of life. On the other hand, we discover that the negro has no true sense of his relation to the other race, or of those obligations which such relations impose; nor does he appear to realize that neither race appreciation nor self-respect can be secured—except by acquiring ability for capable doing. Each side, therefore, contributes to the general issue its selfish and crude notions of social justice, and, because of it, social injustice dominates their lives and living.

AT the end of the Civil War no steps had been taken by the Federal government to define what relation the states lately in rebellion should thenceforth sustain to the national Union. Not only had no permanent civic status of the states been arranged, but the future condition and relation of the negro to his environment was wholly undecided. Local government in the South remained under the control of those who had waged stubborn warfare in support of slavery. It was under these circumstances a natural outcome of events that those who were in actual control of affairs, and who had previously sought by every available means to perpetuate negro enthralment, should strive in other respects to keep the freedmen in as rigorous subjection as possible to their established customs. The consequence was that, for three years after the war, the negro occupied a nondescript relation to Southern society. He was neither slave nor freeman, though he partook of the nature of both. It was during this period that the most odious class legislation was enacted which has ever disgraced the pages of American jurisprudence, nor is it too much to say that the industrial bondage to which the freed people were subjected embraced all of the abominations of chattelism, without possessing, in the least degree, any of its humane features.

It is not necessary, to the end we have in view, to reproduce in full the “Black Code” of the period, which was essentially the same in text and character in all of the Southern states. A brief reference to its salient features will give sufficient insight into the nature and purpose of the many measures which hedged about the person of the disenthralled bondman. Under the established laws negroes were compelled, under heavy penalties, to hire themselves within a specified time to the white planters, at such wages as the latter had determined. They were forbidden to leave their place of employment without written permission from their employer; nor could they be absent after nightfall without liability to arrest and severe punishment. Moreover, should they quit their places of service, they could be arrested by any white man, and lodged in the nearest jail, to await identification and recovery. The cost of such proceedings was fixed upon the absconding negroes. Among other restrictions the freedmen were forbidden for any cause or provocation to offer resistance to their employers, either by word or act. It was made a felony for them to have a gun, pistol, or knife in their possession, nor were they permitted to keep any livestock, or to raise domestic produce for individual use, or to barter in such things, or to have them in their possession. Corn, cotton, and flesh foods were especially named in the statutes, and when found in the hands of a freedman were deemed prima facie evidence of theft.

The law further decreed that all plantation negroes not in the employ of a white person were to be treated as vagrants, and, as such, were liable to arrest and sale to the highest bidder, for a term of service not exceeding six months. It was also directed that the unemployed negroes in cities should be put to work, without pay, by the city in which they were found, and kept in confinement at night, during a period of six months. Every male negro was required to pay a heavy poll tax, which constituted a lien on his wages; but when not paid by his employer, the delinquent negro debtor was compelled to work out the tax, with added cost, for the benefit of the state. Negroes were also prohibited from assembling or, holding meetings for any purpose, without first having obtained municipal license. These legal enactments fitly portray the temper and attitude of the South toward the freedmen in the years immediately after the war. That such legislation had not a shred of justification is obvious. Southern civilization was rightly discredited when it transformed its freed people into social outcasts, and stripped them of all ability to exert either physical or legal resistance to the most heinous injuries against their person or rights. Theoretically, the negro was liberated by law from physical slavery; but, as a matter of fact, he was simply transferred from responsible ownership and provident care to the negligent oversight of an irresponsible industrial servitude, and consigned to a condition from which there was neither appeal nor revolt.

The correctness of this conclusion is established by a brief recital of existing labor methods. The Southern economic unit, from the colonial period to the present, has been the plantation, which during slavery was also a social and civic centre. Labor on a plantation is divided into three classes. The first is the wage system, in which the planter stipulates to pay a certain sum to the laborer for a year's work. The second is payment in kind,—that is, the laborer agrees to accept a certain portion of the projected crop for services rendered. Crop sharing is the compensation of the third class: under this system the tiller undertakes to return a certain share of the crop grown for the use of the land in cultivation; and it is only under this latter method that thrifty and industrious negroes of the tenant class find opportunity for material progress. All of these several classes of labor are usually provided with subsistence by the planter. The adult negro, when employed, is allowed a monthly ration of one bushel of corn meal, fifteen pounds of pork, and two quarts of molasses; flour, sugar, and tea are extras, for which, if used, the employee is charged, and payment is taken out of his wages. Contracts for plantation labor are usually made for a year; wages are due at the end of the season. Accrued earnings are forfeited to the employer, through any voluntary quittance by the laborer. In the civil courts, the planter is the recognized accountant of both parties. His books of record are unimpeachable evidence, though abounding with fraudulent entries, and by his exhibit the negro is usually a debtor, and rarely a creditor, of the planter. We have knowledge of numerous instances where the written agreements drawn by the white planter's hand were the reverse of verbal contracts between himself and workmen; but what of that, so long as the negro's sign manual is appended to the acknowledged instrument—an admission that stops controversy or litigation.

In Southern crop-raising cotton leads as a staple production. The cereals are incidents of plantation growth, hence needful domestic subsistence is neglected, notwithstanding idle and fertile fields lie ready to yield abundant support. This obvious food improvidence compels planters to have recourse to merchants for annual supplies. Subsistence for plantation use includes everything in the nature of domestic wants,—for example, food and clothing for the planter's family; grain and hay for animals; pork, meal, molasses, and tobacco for negroes; with implements, seeds, and fertilizer for land. Payment for supplies is secured to merchants by mortgage of the ungrown crop and real estate of planter, and credited supplies command a monthly interest of two or more per cent on indebtedness, with the result that the planter is always in bondage to the shopkeeper, and the negro laborer to the planter. At maturity the cotton is picked, baled, and consigned in liquidation to the commission merchant who advanced the planter supplies. Should it prove insufficient to discharge the claims of both merchant and laborer, the latter goes unpaid, no matter to what depth of poverty or length of suffering he, who has borne the heat and burden of the day, in the care and cultivation of the crop, is by that act reduced. Nor is there any remedy for the negro, since the commission merchant has priority of claims over all other creditors; besides, the new year opens with contracts that create fresh obligations and beget new securities.

This summary of current plantation methods shows that such a life is not one round of balmy sunshine and careless indifference for the industrial serf, who, born in penury and reared in ignorance, ceaselessly begins a year of toil in want, and ends it in debt. His shelter is never more than a barren hovel; his luxuries, coarse food and scanty clothing; his recreations, the weird music and emotional religion of the unlettered; his realities, ploddings of unvarying sameness under the sweltering sun of a Southern sky. He is paraded as a well-paid wage-earner; but one fails to understand how, by any known method of economy, eight dollars a month will support a family and make men well-to-do. This sombre picture of the freedmen, alternating between hope and despair, awaiting the dawn of a better day, is not the fairest painting one might desire. But there is no other. The negro, so born and bred, toils and dies in helpless bondage to an environment as unyielding as the mountains of his own Southland. Moreover, under the present economic system of the South, there is no way out of this condition of affairs; for negro destitution gluts the labor market and dominates the manual activities of the freedmen as resistlessly as similar conditions overstock and control the pauperized centres of Europe. On the other hand, the employers of the negro say that he is an improvident spendthrift, and that all of his earnings go to the shopkeepers. Such statements are not without an amount of truth, but it should be understood that the credit system is the basis of Southern business economy, and the negro wage-earner is paid not always in cash, but largely by planters' orders on stores in which they may have a direct or indirect interest. There the sight of gaudy attire and flashy trinkets flame the desire and bedazzle the vision of the average freedman, who rarely exercises sound judgment in expenditure. At any rate, cajolery and chicanery, with remorseless insistence, wrest from the pockets of a weak and credulous people every dollar of their hard-won earnings, and leave them stripped of all means,—to enter anew on a round of interminable endeavor.

We have not unfairly depicted the condition of the wage-working plantation negroes; but when all is said that can be said in behalf of a downtrodden class, it must be admitted that they have but dim notions of the value of time, of personal obligations and the sacredness of contracts. They are willing mendicants, where they ought to be manly producers, and, even when at work and receiving wages in cash, they are not thrifty and provident. Strongly averse to self-denial, they habitually indulge in extravagances in food, dress, and pleasures, from which other races who have abundant means to waste in folly refrain. But as thrifty industry was never a heritage of the Southern slave, the actual industrial power of the negro is more the promise of possibilities than substance of achievement. The negro, then, has yet to find his place and vocation in our social structure; and that will not be done until he has attained, through self-comprehension, an adequate knowledge of his powers and limitations; nor will the acquirement of mere dexterous activity avail him, for nothing less than first-hand knowledge gives men actual capacity, and the ability for well-doing.

From a purely economic standpoint no people understands the benefits and possibilities of free labor more clearly than do the former slaveholding class, and from no quarter would come stronger opposition to any proposal to reëstablish negro bondage on its former basis. The advantage to the slaveholding class accruing from free labor may be readily seen by observing that the interest on capital formerly invested in slave property, now pays the wages of an equal number of freedmen. Nevertheless, the free industrial serf, who does more work than a slave, and whose labor nets a larger value to his employer, receives barely enough in wages to clothe himself and family in the vilest shoddy or coarsest of homespun, to say nothing of other needful domestic expenses, or those demands which sickness and death everywhere entail.

The obvious superiority of free hired labor over chattel bondage is very clearly demonstrated by a simple illustration. We will take, for example, the planter who undertakes to raise fifteen hundred bales of cotton by the labor of one hundred negro hands, and who has had an intelligent experience with both slave and free labor, and contrast the difference in outlay between the two systems. Now observe, in the first instance, that the planter is required to expend at least $80,000 for the purchase of slaves before beginning his crop-raising; note further, that their clothing, food, and incidental expenses for a year, will add, say $20,000 more, or, in all, $100,000 for the first year's cost of slave labor; then compare these expenditures with the present cost of free labor. The annual wage hire of one hundred hands for a plantation will be about $6000; less than $4000 will provide for their food and other expenses connected therewith, so that, taken altogether, the total cost of hired labor for a year will not exceed $10,000. The profits derived from the products of the two systems of labor will still more clearly show the disparity between free and slave service. Supposing that, in each instance, cotton sells for ten cents a pound; fifteen hundred bales will bring $60,000,—an annual net gain to the employer of free labor of $50,000. But in using all slave labor, two years would be required to realize a sum equal to the initial purchase outlay; while the third year, though showing a profit of $30,000, would be $120,000 less than the net gains of free labor. But not only did the freeing of the slave liberate imprisoned capital, but that event now compels its toiling millions to reimburse the South every decade for its pecuniary losses in chattel property; and it has so transformed that section that wealth revels where poverty once reigned.

The industrial bondage of the freedman, is, however, the logical sequence of negro chattelism. It has no justification in law or reason, though it strongly reminds us of the several phases of servitude which ancient bondmen underwent before individual liberty was attained. For example, in ancient industrial slavery, serfdom constituted the first step toward the personal freedom of the laboring class; the serf, unlike a slave, being an inalienable adjunct of the soil, could only be parted from along with the land to which he and his family were attached. Feudalism marks the second great stride in industrial emancipation; while the third and fundamental step in industrial progress was the legal emancipation of the individual worker from personal ownership, and the substitution of the wage system for unpaid toil. A comparison of the freedman's condition with that of historical industrial servitude suggests, in many respects, his relations to the Southern plantation. He is a wage-working serf when bound by debt to a particular planter; and a mortgaged crop makes him a feudal tenant. But, though the freedman is an industrial serf, the groundwork of his bondage is not racial prejudice, but mental and manual inefficiency; on the other hand, we are aware that, while his nominal drift is toward extravagance, follies, and aversion to substantial acquisition, his earning capacity is greater than the compensation received. Industrial oppression, however, draws no color line, for both white and black breadwinners are under its sway. In all ages, and under every form of civilization, it has existed, and will continue to exist so long as idleness and industry, poverty and affluence, ignorance and knowledge, dwell side by side, and mankind divides into a served and a serving class.

Many of the complex forces which environ modern society are of our own creating, and irremediable so long as the capable and incapable jostle each other, and receive indiscriminate recognition in the industrial world. That men who have the right to live have a right to equal opportunity for acquiring the means of living, is a sane conclusion. But as all men are not equally endowed with capacity for labor, and have not the ability to render service equal in quality and productiveness, justice to both requires that laborers should be compensated for specific results—that is, for the quality and character of the work they perform—rather than for the time consumed in a given operation. Our convictions are that the God-ordained function of every human being is self-support; that people who can work and ought to work by reason of having health, strength, and unprovided physical needs, but who will not work, ought never to be made objects of charity, but should be subjected to such disciplinary processes as would compel their self-support. The only classes of unemployed deserving the slightest sympathy or assistance are the physically disabled and that truly unfortunate group of humanity, able and willing to work but unable to secure employment. For the physically helpless the state should furnish shelter and subsistence. To the other sort preference should be given, when opportunity offers, by all who employ manual labor; and that done, deserving physical want would be reduced to a minimum.

We now take up those questions which bear directly on negro industrial development. It is conservatively computed that there are eight million freedmen in the United States; of that number nearly seven million reside in sixteen states of the Union. They constitute one-fourth of the manual labor class of the nation; in station and capacity they represent the crude, raw material of industrial muscular force. That negroes are not capable workers, and fail to acquire a high degree of proficiency and efficiency in their undertakings, is due to many explicable and correctible causes. The chief and foremost of these is their profound ignorance of industrial possibilities and abhorrence of disciplinary methods, They chafe under the restraints imposed by the requirement of capable performance, and crave to exchange for its exactions what they are pleased to term liberty—but which in reality is license—to do as they please. Nor can they be made to comprehend that the workingman is the uncrowned king of the industrial realm, and educated labor enthroned vitality; or that only freemen—free to do or forbear—work with genuine fidelity, and give to toil their highest endeavor. Inasmuch, then, as they have no true sense of work or abiding inclination for intelligent production, they have naturally sunk into industrial bondage. Not only has social inefficiency imperilled and thwarted race uplifting, but false and pernicious notions regarding the nature and functions of industrial endeavor have been sown broadcast in the minds of the negro people. The specious teachings of pulpits and schoolrooms have wrought havoc, in creating a well-defined aversion to manual industry among the negro young men and women,—to such an extent that the evils of idleness are ripening into bitter fruit, and are fast unsettling the foundations of orderly living.

It is notably true that the Southern educated negro shuns all work involving manual effort, and, in imitation of a superior environment, calls in to his aid, for domestic, garden, and field service, the sinewy arms of unskilled muscular force. It is this belittling of the dignity of labor on the part of the more enlightened negroes that creates an aversion among the illiterate for honest toil, and a desire to escape physical exertion. It finds its highest exemplification in the studied avoidance of mechanical industries, involving intelligent physical endurance. For instance, we have knowledge of many negro mothers, themselves inured to toil and of honest intent, though of obvious weakness in judgment, who undertake at great self-denial to procure for their daughters a semblance of knowledge acquired from books, but who studiously exempt them from domestic labor. The consequence is that, being untrained to work, such girls grow up in idleness, and readily drift into dissolute company, to their own shame and their parents' humiliation.

It is obvious that individuals reared under such conditions are foredoomed to social destruction; for what capital in the way of acquirements have these young people, when called to enter upon a career of responsible living? To begin with, their mental training is rudimentary and defective, and, therefore, inadequate for professional requirements; while their hands, the only absolutely available raw material of real value they possess, have been wholly neglected. They are, therefore, neither qualified to enter the domestic service of others nor fitted to make a home for themselves. Inasmuch, then, as these conditions largely obtain among the freedmen, we insist that a knowledge of domestic industries should be imparted to the youth of both sexes, who, when capably trained, should be required to perform a responsible daily task, not so much with a primary purpose of future wages, as to discipline them for usefulness in adult living. A forecast of sound wisdom indicates that the future is full of peril to the rising generation of negroes. That being the case, it becomes our duty to devise such ways and means as will not only avert impending disasters, but so mould and fashion our young people as to fit them for an honorable and successful discharge of the active duties of life.

That the negro has an aversion to manual labor and strives to evade it, is shown by the vast numbers of freedmen who throng to the cities and towns to avoid field work, although in cities only idleness and poverty await the great majority of them. For a similar reason multitudes of the freed people congregate in the villages, where the struggle for existence is a death-grapple. In both cases the actual drift of these movements is toward idle and dissolute living. Actuated by a like spirit of unrest, no inconsiderable proportion of negro men and women migrate North and West annually, and in increasing numbers each succeeding year. These people frequently come in the capacity of servants to families who had been sojourning in the South for the winter; others are assisted North by relatives and friends already residing there, either for the purpose of attending school or of engaging in domestic service. This latter class of persons, which consists mostly of young women, is notably improved in manners and morals whenever they are fortunate enough to secure good homes and responsible supervision in cultured white families. But it is to be regretted that such freedwomen in large percentage soon evince a disposition to resist wholesome restraints, and through gregarious relations with a resident negro class, which imitates in a vainglorious way the dress and customs of fashionable white society, they imbibe a spirit of dissatisfaction with their station and means. The inevitable outcome is that such persons, having already an aversion to domestic labor, and finding their wages insufficient to satisfy their craving for personal adornment, readily succumb to the allurements of vicious living; consequently our Northern cities contain many negro women who lead impure lives, often under the garb of pretentious respectability.

Another class of freedmen who come North in all capacities and for all purposes are young men, a majority of whom are no doubt allured here by fairy tales of high wages and ready employment. Many of them do succeed in finding what, in comparison with their former earnings, would be fairly lucrative positions, and where, so long as discreet deportment and reasonable fidelity to the interests of their employers are observed, they are treated with considerate regard. It must not be forgotten that there exists in the minds of many Northern white men and women what may be termed a sentimental sympathy for the freedmen. These sympathizers extend every aid toward the advancement of such members of the race as are brought into contact with them. It is to be regretted, however, that in many instances such favors are unworthily bestowed. Nevertheless there are other instances where the recipients have developed strong manly and womanly qualities, and become honored members of the community where they reside. This would be more often true of the negroes who live in the North, were they content to live in the country and suburban districts; but who appear to be never so happy as when huddled together in crowded tenements in the slum quarters of our large cities.

A significant thing to be observed in connection with the migrations of the freedmen is that, when once they leave the South, they rarely return thither, it matters not what may have been the main incitement of their leaving. All types and grades appear to be under the same spell, the learned and unlearned, the student class as well as domestic servants. None of them appear to be bound in any serious sense to the land of their birth. A desire to aid their less fortunate brethren rarely recalls them. On the contrary, after a brief stay in the North, negroes of every sort seem to acquire an aversion for their Southern connection, and whenever possible seek to hide the fact of their actual origin by conveying the impression that they were born elsewhere.

There was a time when it was the pride and boast of black men that they occupied responsible and confidential positions in the homes of the best Northern families, the doors of which to-day are closed to all negro applicants. Not only are they often excluded from the more exacting phases of domestic service, but they are largely shut out from kindred offices, such as those of steward, coachman, and private waiter,—lines of service that a generation ago were filled entirely by them. Nor has the negro fared better in other industries; for even as a barber, the Frenchman, Italian, Portuguese, and German have effectually supplanted him, and, through the evolutions of social change, have lifted what was in his hands menial work to an almost artistic perfection. We have referred to the increasing exclusion of negroes from private service. Perhaps the greatest drawback in the way of their procuring domestic employment is the innate fondness of negro men for white women. Coming from a section where social delinquencies are winked at, the less restrictive intercourse of the races in the North raises the presumption in their minds that all social barriers are eliminated. Therefore, while the negro women are amenable to impure proposals from their social superiors, the negro, men, crazed by their social freedom, become so emboldened by vicious contact as frequently to make improper advances toward the white female domestics of the houses where they are employed. The possibility of such occurrences furnishes the ground, it is fair to presume, for the exclusion of negroes from vocations where they once enjoyed a monopoly, and which, in many respects, they are better fitted to fill than are the members of any other race.

But while it is impossible for the negro to escape the consequences of his foolhardy pretensions, yet much of the social and industrial disaster which has overtaken him since emancipation has not been altogether of his own creating, but rather the direct outcome of the sophistical exhortations of his early accredited teachers. Their insistence was that he should abandon the fields of industry, of which he had some knowledge, and betake himself to others of unknown and untried endeavor, and for which he had neither preparatory training nor visible aptitude. Hence, jeered at as scullions and derided as menials, the modern negroes have quit the callings in which their fathers had right worthily wrought, to become declaiming pettifoggers, pulpit ranters, quack doctors, and sham teachers. It is the nondescript representatives of these vocations who evince a proneness to speak in terms of depreciation, if not of positive contempt, of their ancestors and negroes of the present time employed in domestic capacities. But it is no undeserved tribute to say in this connection, that some of the best examples of good conduct and high character the race has ever known belonged to the class of humble domestic workers. Moreover, many of the former head waiters and stewards employed in hotel and steamboat service, in the selection of subordinates and by the example they set in speech and demeanor, did more to create and maintain high ideals of negro manhood than the blatant pretensions of our modern negro ministry are ever likely to accomplish.

Universal experience has demonstrated that ignorant masses of mankind are not aroused or elevated by mere contact with intelligent forces; and that fact brings into prominence a racial characteristic which, in view of its industrial bearing, ought to be considered. For two centuries and a half the negro has dwelt in the presence of a superior and vigorous civilization, and one that at times has sought to inculcate in him lofty notions of duty, industry, and power, with the result that he has acquired a fair degree of diligence, and is reasonably industrious when under capable supervision. But what he has not yet acquired is that self-propelling force inherent in the white race; nor has he fairly utilized in freedom what he gained in compulsory bondage. For, notwithstanding its wanton abuse of power, slavery taught negroes trades, and made many of them skilled workmen in every department of mechanical handicraft. To these freedom gave an unlimited field for the exercise of their trained faculties. It was this class of artisans who became men of affairs, took contracts, made money, acquired credit, bought property, and became substantial citizens in our Southern commonwealths,—a fact which furnishes conclusive evidence that a knowledge of tools lifts a man immeasurably above his fellows and crowns him with the emblems of industrial kingship.

But the slave-disciplined mechanic has no successor in the ranks of the freedmen, for the simple reason that they are lacking in mental energy and that subtle intelligence required of efficient artisans. The exclusion of the negro from the higher mechanical industries is due largely to his incapacity for acquiring a thorough painstaking knowledge of details. His sloven and slipshod methods are justly chargeable with his inability to achieve place and distinction in the mechanical field. Nor are we far amiss in saying that to these causes is due the fact that the race is not employed to any considerable extent in those large corporations managing the cotton and wool industries, the shoe factories, the iron mills, and machine shops of the country, North and South, though isolated examples of capable and trustworthy freedmen may be found in every department of skilled industry. There is a phase of this question, however, which has an important bearing on the future industrial development of the negro, and even now affects a saving remnant of the race; it is therefore entitled to candid treatment. We refer to the fact that there are black mechanics of known capacity and tried integrity who are not infrequently shut out from plying their vocation solely on account of racial prejudice, and in consequence thereof are compelled to resort to crude employments or starve.

Now it is evident that exclusion from opportunity to earn a living, based on color or other physical incident equally irrelevant, is an invasion of the rights of labor, and one which contravenes the spirit and teachings of American institutions. A thorough preparation and competent performance should be insisted upon, but no less strenuously opportunity for achievement. When skilled negro labor is excluded from opportunities for work and material gain open to white men of no greater mechanical endowment, a grave wrong has been perpetrated, and one that merits universal condemnation at the hands of all right-thinking men. But the crux of the whole matter lies in the fact that the competent and incompetent, the trustworthy and untrustworthy negroes, are set apart from their white fellow-men by a distinctive color badge common to all. The caste disabilities, therefore, with which the deserving members of the race are burdened, become really formidable when we consider what color means to the educated, industrious, competent negro.

Black is deemed a symbol of ignorance and inefficiency. The unknown negro of capacity and integrity, essaying to enter competitive avenues of industry, encounters at the very threshold of his career an intense and deep-seated distrust of his ability, which, if it does not summarily thrust him aside without opportunity of vindication, subjects him to suspicious surveillance and unjust exactions, until incontestible demonstration of personal ability compels recognition and subsequent respect. This is the gantlet which all skilled negro laborers have to run in seeking employment. It is, however, the wholesome examples of such workmen as gain a foothold in the industrial world, through sheer pluck and endurance, that are slowly eliminating race prejudice, and inclining the employers of labor more and more to take men for what they can do in the way of productive results. We note also a growing tendency on the part of the trade unions, which have always been formidable barriers to the employment of freedmen in competitive vocations, to take broader views of the industrial problem. This is evinced by their permitting negroes in many instances to become members of trade associations. We may therefore cherish the hope that at no distant day the capable representatives of labor of every type will fraternize in competitive rivalry, and that when the industrial worker seeks for opportunities to render service, there will be no lack of steady work and a due appreciation of both white and black laboring men.

The general unfitness of negro labor for other than the crudest endeavor has been thoroughly demonstrated in the United States and other parts of America where the negro dwells. But to substantiate our contention that he is industrially inefficient by inheritance, we quote a single well-attested example, furnished by South African experience. In 1898 there were employed in one industry, in that section, 73,000 laborers, of whom 9000 were white men and the remainder negroes. All were engaged in the same kind of labor, yet, owing to their superior fitness, the white men earned, during the year, $15,000,000 in wages, a sum as great as that which the 64,000 negroes received during the same period. That is to say, the white men earned per capita an average of $1784, while their negro fellow-laborers received but $230 per capita, thus showing a difference in the individual earning capacity of the two races of over $1500. What are the conclusions to be drawn from this statement and comparison, other than that the best educated and disciplined men always have a tremendous advantage over the inferiorly equipped; and further, that those who have acquired only a common rudimentary training are not only distanced at the start by better-trained competitors, but are forever doomed to constitute the rear-guard of our great industrial army. What is true of all conditions of life is not to be waived aside by flippant speech or craven plaints. Moreover, so long as all human growth is due solely to individual energy and intelligent foresight, the negro ought fully to realize that untiring industry and self-denying thrift are potential forces in any struggle for material acquisition, and that, when these factors are associated with intelligent prudence, they inevitably become, in all competitive industrial activities, the foreordained winners.

No impartial observer of current phases of industrial economics fails to see that moral inadequacy is a characteristic defect of the unskilled class, or to realize that there is no place in the modern world for the sloven, the indifferent, or the unskilled industrial toiler. The untrained man is always at the mercy of conditions, and in every undertaking invites defeat from the start. Nor can one who works fitfully compete with a steady plodder. Such being the case, the question of discipline and training becomes a paramount issue in dealing with manual inefficiency. But, while there ought to be uniformity in industrial educational methods, and equality in opportunity for employment as well as for learning, yet it is the greatest folly to assume that one industrial worker is as good as another, though both may have had the same advantages. Industrial success is dependent upon the perceptive power and sense of moral responsibility inherent in the individual worker. Furthermore, as skill is the sole key to success, it becomes more and more evident that the future belongs to the most strongly qualified and equipped races, and, within races themselves, to the best-trained men. Moreover all that is implied in industrial education is that the individual should make the wisest use of accessible means, and that a trained industrial worker is one who has the requisite ability to do a specific thing as it ought to be done.

But, notwithstanding the manual inefficiency of the freedmen appears to be clearly demonstrated, we have profound belief in eventual negro regeneration through forceful methods of discipline; nor ought there to exist any serious doubt that adequate training in constructive industries under capable instruction will bring to the race self-mastery and efficient development. The freedmen should be subjected therefore to thorough industrial drill in every department of manual activity. It will raise their efficiency and increase their compensation, but above all it is desirable because well-doing in itself brings out all of the highest and best qualities in man. Work in itself is the highest opportunity and greatest instrument of negro development. But the supreme need of the hour is a racial baptism in truth, integrity, frugality, continuity of purpose, intelligent action. Endowed with these qualities, negroes cease to be the inferiors of others, but are the equals of all, and capable of reasonable achievements.

We are ourselves of the conviction that any true uplifting of the negro in this country is to be found in a return to country life and in working the soil; nor will he, in our judgment, ever be rid of the shams and delusions that now environ him until he is back in simple touch with God and nature. If he desires to acquire steadiness, sobriety, intelligence, morality, physical harmony, and a clearer insight into duties and responsibilities than the submerged living and incessant strife of his present condition can possibly afford, he will find that rural work constitutes a basis for character-building incomparably beyond that of any other agency within his reach.

CONTRARY to a general impression, property owners were not rare among the free negro residents of the United States, prior to the Civil War. We have no trustworthy data by which to measure the wealth of those residing in the North, though it is known to have been considerable; but in the South, where separate racial statistics were kept, the value of property owned by free negroes was between $35,000,000 and $40,000,000. In the early history of the country free negroes had equal chance with the whites to acquire an interest in the soil, for the public domain was open to them for settlement on the same terms as to others. That in many instances they availed themselves of such opportunities is established by the fact that in Virginia and the other colonies they were taxed as landowners. But while the South formerly had and still contains the largest number of negro property owners, the mass of the freedmen have not made the advance in material prosperity which we of right had expected of them. To be sure, there is no authorized statistical exhibit which sets forth the aggregate material accumulations of the negro people; but, from the most trustworthy sources accessible, it may be inferred that at least fifteen per cent of them own property, and a conservative estimate puts the value of all real and personal property now held by that class throughout the United States at about $700,000,000, on which it is said they pay state and municipal taxes in excess of $3,000,000.

We shall get a more accurate view of the freedman's opportunity for material gain by an inspection of his annual wage-earnings, which may be fairly put at $450,000,000, or about $56 per capita. The range of his expenditures is said to be: for food, $180,000,000; for clothes, $90,000,000; for rum and vices, $65,000,000 ; for rent, $40,000,000; for housefurnishings, $25,000,000; for fuel, $21,000,000; for landed property, $8,000,000; and deposits in banks, $5,000,000. Should these sums approximate the actual facts, the obvious conclusion is that the negro is not only deficient in industrial perseverance, but in provident forethought. For example, were negroes creative producers of wealth to the extent of one dollar per month, their yearly savings would foot up $100,000,000; or if from their earnings a saving per capita of twenty-five cents a month were made, the total annual cash deposits would reach $25,000,000. That this is not done is evidence that the freedmen do not represent a saving people, though there are to be found among them many striking examples of self-denying thrift. We grant that adverse causes have operated against the race in the past, but, nevertheless, we are moved to point out these serious existing conditions in the belief that substantial benefit may accrue to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

This exhibit is valuable to us chiefly for the sidelight which it throws on the financial status of the freedmen. For, granting they have accumulated property to the amount of $700,000,000, a division of that sum among 8,000,000 people will give to each individual less than $90 worth of property, or, in other words, it represents a saving of about $2.60 a year since emancipation. Such facts are significant, and effectually dispose of that bubble which asserts that “The freedmen have made unparalleled material progress since the war.” Another unwarranted assertion, frequently indulged in by overzealous friends of the blacks, is that they are the wealth-producers of the South. It may be that they are mechanical factors in the primary forces of wealth-production. But who does not realize that back of any kind of mechanism stands the guiding force of mind, and as negroes are obviously deficient in administrative qualities, we deny that they are now, or ever have been, directing forces in any department of industrial activity. In fact, as matters stand, any cessation of their crude labors for others renders their starvation imminent.

Broadly speaking, the three primary sources of material gain are agriculture, manufacture, and trade. But as neither manufacturing nor commerce were distinctive features of Southern economy before the war, the people of that section were agriculturists, whose chief employment was raising cotton, the whitened fields of which were tilled by slave labor. In the other departments of industry the machinery, which exacted only the crudest knowledge of mechanics, was also in the hands of the bondmen, or the more shiftless poor whites. Dormant energies and inventive faculties were never stimulated into intelligent activity. Neither natural resources nor local incentive were wanting, for mineral wealth of fabulous value cropped out of every hillside and lay at its feet untouched, and from every mountain spur went forth a magnificent waterpower rivalling those of many Northern mill-sites Nevertheless, manufacturing languished, The swift-flowing stream was a stranger to the hum of the spindle or the vibration of the loom. The silence of the pine-covered hillside was undisturbed by the delving shovel, or plodding pick. Cotton was king, and negro slave labor its abject subject. Moreover, despite its pretensions to wealth, the South, as we now see, was in reality poor.

The advent of freedom wrought in the South changes so great that within a single score of year it has built more railroads, constructed more cotton mills, erected more iron furnaces, located more factories, opened more coal mines, discovered a large mineral area, raises annually more cotton, and is in possession of more available wealth than during the whole period of negro chattelism. Through these mighty forces of a silent and irresistible revolution every dashing river is alive with throbbing machinery and thriving activity; and mountains and hills are dotted with excavations for carboniferous deposits, and covered with tramways for transporting metallic ore. But what is of greater significance is that there may sometimes be seen in the wake of such transformative progress those who were the slave autocrats of yesterday and their former chattels, each busily engaged in acquiring the means for subsistence and wealth, and not infrequently rivals in competitive strife. Current statistics show that in the matter of cotton manufacture alone the South possesses over 500,000 spindles, and that its more than 500 mills represent one-fourth of the textile industry of the country, and have an aggregate value exceeding $100,000,000. Fifty millions are invested in the cotton-seed oil industry, whose annual output exceeds $100,000,000. The value of the cotton crop in a raw state will not fall far short of $300,000,000.

So varied and complex are the economic conditions which surround the growth and manufacture of cotton, that it is not improbable that the entire cotton textile industry of the United States will at no distant day be transferred to the South, where the climate, water power, and other local advantages are strong competitive features of Northern mills. We need not be surprised, therefore, to see rivals of Lowell, Lawrence, and Fall River planted in North Georgia, East Tennessee, and western North Carolina by Northern capital, and manned by American labor. Such a consummation does not imply the destruction of the textile mills of the North, for no doubt in that event they would be remodelled and devoted to the woollen manufacture, and so find profitable employment in a growing industry. The Merrimac may yet become the American Tweed, and surpass its transatlantic competitor in the quality and finish of its woollen goods. Meanwhile this is assured: the South in process of construction is a substantial gain to humanity over the one it has displaced, and it gives abundant promise of a prosperous and enduring future. All that is wanting to make the transformation complete is that the whole section forego idleness, take on thrift, open its green forests and barren fields to small husbandmen, and substitute, in law and politics, fraternal liberty and universal equality for class legislation and race domination. When that is done it may be safely predicted that no part of the Union will grow richer in honest wealth or stronger in intelligent development.

Though the South is primarily an agricultural section, its economic methods are neither conducive to material thrift nor industrial elevation. Its dependent classes, white and black, are landless serfs, and feel bitterly the full force and effect of that significant aphorism which affirms that an ownership of land carries with it an ownership of men who live on it. The result is that a condition of hopeless poverty, unknown elsewhere outside portions of continental Europe, exists in the Southern rural settlements. Thomas Jefferson uttered a profound economic truth when he said that the earth belonged in usufruct to the living, and to them only to derive subsistence and maintenance therefrom. With that sentiment all shades of leading economists agree; but back of all human selfishness and greed is recorded the original and universal title-deed to mankind, which commands men to “multiply and subdue the earth.” Its fields forests, ocean, and air are the ordained storehouses of subsistence for industrious humanity, whose “right to live carried with it the right to earn the necessaries for living.” Humanity has everywhere the right to demand, not only the opportunity to labor, but to receive a just share of the fruits of its industry, and in no more equitable way can this be done than by giving every human toiler an interest in the soil.

The primary and essential factors in any successful movement undertaken for the uplifting of illiterate and indigent classes are land and education. This involves two elements: the establishment of sound economic conditions, and the creation of a class of intelligent and efficient producers. It is an incontrovertible fact that great wealth and great poverty always exist where wages are low. It is equally apparent that a poverty-ridden class engaged in great industrial activities is an economic fallacy, because good wages enhance local values, and add to already acquired wealth. Now, the working force of plantation life is the freedman; obviously, then, to broaden his knowledge and increase his pay adds to the general prosperity. This is notably exemplified in that hunger for home-ownership, which is so characteristic of the negro of brain and brawn, and who has somehow by dint of skill and rare frugality, become a small landowner and prosperous proprietor. We also see evidence of a similar spirit in a class of thrifty negro mechanics and plodding all-sorts, who, on the outskirts of some sleepy village or drowsing town or piney cross-roads, own a few acres of land and live contentedly in humble cottages. The man who owns the soil he tills, and is conscious that he alone is the rightful and exclusive possessor thereof, has a sense of manly independence which landless classes lack; and these sentiments are not only the life-springs that build up fresh, healthy, noble characters in individuals, but constitute, as well, the bulwarks of solid national development.

Landownership is unquestionably a substantial factor in race improvement. We maintain that it ought to take precedence over all other agencies for negro uplifting, for the reason that a landowner, great or small, is a fixture in the community, and thereby acquires a vested right in its welfare and development. Nor is it the nominal ownership of an extensive area of land, but a small homestead, with the inclination and ability to cultivate it, that the poor man needs. But as the Southern plantation usually represents an extensive area of land, with rarely a disposition on the part of the owner to sell a small parcel, and as but few of the freedmen have either the means or the credit to purchase a large plantation outright, the result is that the great majority of them are landless dependants. Confronted, therefore, by inexorable economic conditions, it would be well could the negro race, as well as other landless inhabitants of the South, be stimulated into an effort of relentless activity against land monopoly and labor bondage through some feasible method of coöperative land purchase. But evidently, where there is a desire on the part of such persons to acquire a landed interest, the first step toward that end necessarily lies in intelligent association, and a combination of the means of the laboring classes within either race. To aid such movements, we present the following practical suggestion.

We have made a computation based on 100 families, organized as a land purchasing association. Let it be supposed that an organization is effected in September, with the fee for membership fixed at $10, and with stated assessments at $4 a month. In the month of February following its organization the association will have, in cash, $3000. With this sum thirty mules are bought, and 1000 acres of land rented, for the use of which one-third of the cotton raised is to be given in payment of rent. Thirty families of the society are designated to till the soil. An average crop will yield 300 bales of cotton; besides, considerable food subsistence should be produced on spare ground. At the close of the season, a division of the crop is made on this basis: 100 bales of cotton go for rent; 100 bales to the thirty families, for the labor of production; and 100 bales to the association, which if sold at six cents a pound will net $2400. The financial exhibit at the beginning of the second year, in February, should show cash, per assessments, $4800; from sale of cotton, $2400; making in all, $7200; which should be invested in mules and farming implements, in order that the whole association may engage in cotton-growing the second year. Hence, for that end, 4000 acres are leased; the assessments are reduced to $2 a month as a guarantee fund for incidental expenses. We will suppose, as the result of the second year's experience, that the total production of cotton is 1500 bales, which are distributed as follows: 500 bales go to the landowner for rent; 500 for service of production, and 500 bales to the association fund. The latter, if sold at six cents a pound, will net a return of $12,000; the assessments will aggregate $2400; and both combined will give the association at the beginning of the third year a cash fund of $14,400.

We will now assume that 4000 acres of land are bought, let us say at a cost of $40,000, with one-third of the purchase money paid in hand. The remaining indebtedness is secured by a mortgage on the land, which should be discharged by annual payments extending over one, two, and three years. The monthly assessments should then be reduced to one dollar a month, though each family continues its annual contribution of five bales of cotton to the common treasury, besides being required to raise a sufficient food supply for its own consumption during the following year. Granting that a coöperative movement for land purchase such as we have described has been fairly inaugurated, we pass over the intervening period, and note the results of three years' experience. Fifteen hundred bales of cotton, the property of the association, should return in clear profit, $36,000, a sum that will lift the land encumbrance, pay the interest on deferred payments, and meet current taxes, besides providing a substantial sum for distribution among the coöperating families for the improvement of their local homes. It is, of course, understood that the final liquidation of land indebtedness would be followed by a partition of the property, and the issuance of a deed in fee simple for forty acres of land to each participating head of family.

This brief survey of Southern material possibilities shows that within five years the indigent laborer may through intelligent coöperation acquire a proprietary right to the soil, and become a substantial citizen. Nor do we speak unadvisedly in saying that opportunity for substantial race improvement lies in the adoption of a proposition entirely practicable under honest and intelligent leadership. Every intelligent person who is in any degree familiar with the facts of Southern life and resources can testify that extraordinary returns for comparatively small investments are not only possible, but substantially assured by this simple coöperation method. Moreover, the experience of building associations and coöperative banks furnishes conspicuous examples of what mutual self-help may accomplish, and the successful material amelioration of the laboring classes in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts through such agencies sufficiently attests the remunerative merits of such coworking.

To be sure, the negro is not an adept in aggressive, worldly shrewdness, nor the representative of a great money-making race. Perhaps his ethical conceptions prompt him to forego much that is immediate and practical in human affairs. Be that as it may, he ought, nevertheless, to be true to his best instincts, and faithful to those known duties which relate to himself and family. Whatever lifts him above his present dependent level should be eagerly embraced and judiciously undertaken, and as landownership will do for him what no other agency can accomplish, every true man in the race should bestir himself, and set on foot at once some method of land purchase that will provide homes for himself and his people. Nor can the colored preachers of the South render more efficient service to their race than by actively and honestly leading them in this matter of material progress, for in no other way can they so wisely contribute to the development and maintenance of a high standard of Christianity among the freed people.

While we insist that negroes, in common with other indigent classes, shall use all legitimate means to improve their physical condition, we are not unmindful of what many well-informed persons hold to be true, that the general government is under moral obligations to devise such measures of relief for the freed people as will ameliorate their condition. Specious pleading and sophistical ingenuity may interpose objections, but this statement of facts remains unanswered. The negroes were held as slaves under national and constitutional law, they were emancipated by the same authority, and in each instance national jurisprudence was held to be supreme. If slavery was right, emancipation was wrong, while if the reverse is true, negroes were illegally and arbitrarily held to a service for which they received neither adequate recompense nor reward. There is no denial here that individuals were the nominal owners of negro slaves, but it is indisputable that the general government was a prime factor in maintaining them in bondage. But, waiving aside all questions of government liability, prior to national emancipation, we may reasonably conclude that some compensation is due to the negroes for services rendered after January 1, 1863, to the close of the war, and the adjustment of those changed relations imposed by freedom.

There is scarcely need to cite precedents and quote authorities in support of this conclusion, since numerous well-authenticated decisions under the common law fully cover the ground here taken. A reference in point is that of indentured minors, who, on attaining their majority, have been unlawfully restrained of their liberty and continued in compulsory service. In such cases adequate compensation and, not infrequently, exemplary damages have been awarded by the courts. Assuming our statement of facts to be correct, and construction of law judicially sound, we discover, in estimating the number of working slaves at 1,200,000 persons, that, by allowing them pay for labor performed from January 1, 1863, to July 1, 1865, at the rate of $60 per year, there would be due them, for the thirty months' service, $180,000,000. Granting, therefore, that recompense ought to be made to the freedmen, there is no measure of compensation that could be devised which would secure such beneficent results to them as the ownership of land; and a legislative enactment which provided for its acquisition by these people would be truly of the dignity of statesmanship.

We now advance the suggestion that the general government set apart a quantity of land in each Southern state for the exclusive benefit of the freed people, on the same principle that it has heretofore granted land subsidies to railroads and corporations, to promote the public welfare. That open to homestead entry should be used for this purpose. According to the report of the Land Commissioner, there are in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, more than 100,000,000 acres of public land. In each of the other South Atlantic and Gulf states, the Federal government should acquire by purchase 2000 square miles of territory, an area, that represents 1,280,000 acres of land, and by subdivision and allotment of forty acres to a homestead, give to each Southern state 30,000 small landed proprietors. The purchase cost of the land and the erection of necessary dwelling-houses should not exceed $10,000,000. The buying of mules, farm implements, seeds, fertilizers, and the first year's subsistence would require an additional six millions of money, making the government outlay, for 30,000 well-equipped farms, $16,000,000, or requiring a grand total expenditure of $128,000,000 in the designated states for the acquirement of homesteads for a negro population of 1,200,000 persons.

It will be observed that this estimate excludes possible entries of the public domain. Should such be available, it will reduce, this sum by at least thirty millions, otherwise the foregoing estimates, based on a maximum local valuation, will cover all necessary expenses for the first cost. The proposed appropriation for mules, farm implements, and subsistence will show a decided falling off in any practical application of this suggestion, since it will be found that many of the negro planters are already supplied. The savings made therefore, in this and other directions, from the total appropriation should be expended in the erection of schoolhouses for normal and industrial education, which should be put on a basis of self-support by utilizing the remaining 80,000 acres of land in each state, in the manner now indicated. This land should be disposed of in forty-acre lots, under lease, contingent on the probity and industry of the tenant, and annual rental of three bales of cotton, and should yield a yearly school fund of 6000 bales, and have, in all probability, an average market value of $150,000.

Our conviction is that the acquirement of land and education, under competent supervision, will work a transformation in the negro race. Hence, at the inception of a movement of this sort, suitable school buildings, not exceeding in cost $1500 each, should be erected, say one for each 100 families. This would give 300 schoolhouses to each state, and the total expenditure in this direction ought not to exceed $4,000,000. These schools, under the management of competent instructors, should be kept open eight months in the year; and just here it may be remarked that, in the event of such a movement as this land scheme contemplates being undertaken, it would be for the best interest of all concerned that distributed settlements of negro tenants, in communities of 100 families each, should be made. It would be unwise, and would defeat the end in view, to segregate the race in one locality. Moreover, distribution of these settlements would not only healthfully stimulate their own industrial forces, but would exert a powerful influence of the most salutary nature on outside industrial agencies, and in the end bring the whole South into harmonious accord with the idea here broached.

But to continue the discussion of the main proposition. Each of these 30,000 farms should be leased for a period of three years, to thrifty and well-approved tenants, for an annual rental of three bales of cotton, with the privilege of purchase at the expiration of lease. A probation of three years will significantly test the fitness and integrity of the tenants, and assure deserving purchasers of land. Other safeguards that will readily suggest themselves should be thrown around both the government and tenant interest, not to hamper either, but to insure on the part of each an exact fulfilment of all the conditions stipulated in the contract. The total rent for three years will reach the sum of 2,160,000 bales of cotton, which, at a reasonable estimate, will have a cash value of at least $60,000,000,—a sum of money that represents nearly one-half of the original investment. But with the termination of the tenant period these farms should be sold on a credit of five years, and paid for in five deferred annual payments, to be made in cotton, at the rate of three bales each year, the government to retain an equitable title until all liabilities are discharged by the purchaser, when its patent should issue to him. In this matter of land purchase we contemplate that its entire supervision should be under the direction and control of the national Interior Department.

A conservative estimate of the monetary return that will accrue to the government by carrying out this proposition, shows that 240,000 farms with an annual rent roll of three bales of cotton from each farm will aggregate 720,000 bales a year, or a total of 3,600,000 bales for five years, which, if sold at $25 per bale, will yield in cash $90,000,000. When, therefore, we add to this sum the $60,000,000 previously received as rent, it will be seen that the government has in eight years had returned to it $150,000,000 on its original investment, or an excess over all expenditure of more than $20,000,000, to say nothing of the hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth which it has been the means of creating for a previously indigent class. The expense attending these transactions would be nominal, for no doubt the large class of school-teachers, which we shall presume to be in the employ of the government, would be retained as subordinate agents, while the present corps of special agents of the Treasury would likely have general supervision of all financial matters. In any event, we are confident that the necessary annual expenditure would not exceed a quarter of a million dollars,—a sum which the rents from the school lands, to which reference has already been made, would amply provide. All payments to the government, whether as rent or purchase money, should either be covered into the national Treasury, or else employed in the purchase of additional land for distribution and occupation, on terms similar to those we have described. In the latter case, the revenues accruing from such landed indebtedness could very properly constitute a sinking fund, for the payment of such portion of the national debt as may have matured during that period.

This discussion of government duty in the matter of affording material relief to the freedmen, while by no means exhaustive, as indeed it was not meant to be, is, nevertheless, pertinently suggestive of latent resources, of infinite possibilities, and of immeasurable gains in morals, intelligence, wealth, and homogenous civilization, to both of our Southern classes, and consequently to the nation at large. No gratuities in land, food, shelter, or clothing are sought for the freedmen; all we ask is that full opportunity be given them to become useful, law-abiding citizens of the community in which they live; and in no better way can that result be reached than by aiding them to become self-respecting and self-sustaining custodians of rural homes. Nor is apology deemed necessary for a proposition whose utility is so obvious, and whose humanitarian qualities are so conspicuous, nor ought pleadings to be invoked for a measure that seeks to award a degree of reparation for past and present wrongs, committed by a powerful nation against a helpless people. This possible achievement for the freedmen of this country has its practical prototype among the serfs of Russia, whose freedom came only two years earlier than that of our slaves. In emancipating her serfs Russia advanced loans to them upon their standing crops, and up to date has invested nearly $500,000,000 in land purchase for their settlement which they are to repay in stated instalments. The consequences is that freedmen are noted for industry and frugality in the management of their homes, and have strikingly distinguished themselves for good government and the advancement of popular education.

Previous to the Civil War the United States Treasury had a surplus of funds which was distributed among the several states. The wisdom of that measure has always been in doubt, but our national legislature is never lacking in distinguished members who are ready to advocate a lavish expenditure of public money for schemes of doubtful value. Let us, therefore, indulge the hope that at no distant day our Congress may rise to the dignity of sound political wisdom, and, through a judicious use of means already at command, solve a problem of almost inextricable comprehension. We have already called the attention of the country to this subject in numerous publications; and during the sessions of the Fifty-first Congress the late General Cogswell of Massachusetts had the kindness to introduce a bill for us whose main features, provided for ten normal and industrial schools for the freedmen, and, similar to lines laid down here, for the purchase of 6400 acres of land in each of the ten states designated, and the erection of an industrial institute, and settlement of 100 selected negro families on each of these tracts of land. It is needless to say the bill never became a law. And yet, if such an enterprise were created by the government, or through private means, its influence and effect on Southern economics would be incalculable, both as a practical object-lesson in thrift to the white planters and as a source of inspiration to our benighted freedmen.

The chief aim of our preceding observations has been to exhibit the wide difference, as modes of land culture, which exists between the present labor methods of plantation service and those of an intelligently managed lease system, though in so doing we have not sought to introduce new and untried innovations, but rather to readjust existing agricultural methods. A better comprehension of this subject may, however, be gained by stating that the cultivated cotton area of the United States exceeds 20,000,000 acres, and has an average production of about 175 pounds to the acre; that fully 3,000,000 persons are engaged in its production, with an output per capita of less than three bales; and that the planter's net profit, under the present system of cotton-growing, will not, under the most favorable circumstances, exceed five per cent of his gross production.

We now deal with the question of material thrift in a way that is believed to cover the whole problem of negro industrial elevation; and the two propositions which are presented below, while involving a radical change in Southern industrial methods, are obviously fraught with advantages to both the white and black people of the South. Our first proposition, which deals with land cultivation by tenants under lease, aims to effect a division of large tracts of tillage land into small allotments, with each tract cultivated by a responsible laborer under specified conditions. For illustration, we will take a planter engaged in cotton culture, owning 1200 acres of land, worth, we will say, $10 an acre, or $12,000 for the whole tract. We will assume that 300 acres are devoted to that staple, with an annual crop of 100 bales, and calculating the cost of production by ordinary methods, we shall get the following result: The wages of twenty negroes at $8 a month for eight months' labor in ploughing and cultivation will be $1280. The cost of their food, estimated at $3.50 a month each, will require an outlay of $560 more, and the feed of mules and incidental expenses will add $200. To pick the cotton will cost about $300, hence the aggregate of these sums will bring up the total expense of the year to $2300 as the amount required to produce 100 bales of cotton, which, if sold at $30 a bale, will bring $3000. After deducting the expenses of production, the planter will have a credit balance of about $700, though such a fair margin is not always realized in ordinary experience.

On the other hand, suppose this planter subdivides his plantation into thirty farms of forty acres each, and secures thirty capable and trustworthy tenants. To each of them he leases a farm for an annual rental of four bales of cotton, the agreement binding the lessee to plant and cultivate each year during occupancy fifteen acres in cotton, ten acres in corn, and ten acres in pease, potatoes, and other food products. Such a distribution of farm produce should always be insisted upon, not only to guarantee the rent, but to secure the diversity in crop-raising meant to provide the tenant with food supplies for the coming year. At present, one of the most serious drawbacks to Southern industrial prosperity lies in pledging the ungrown crop for current food supplies. This method is not likely to be set aside without the exercise of wise forethought and intelligent self-denial. For some reason the people of that section, white and black, have never acquired the habit which is the key of all agricultural success, of raising and laying by a surplus of breadstuff for future use. In any practical test an industrial movement of this kind will give these results. The rent of thirty farms, at four bales of cotton each, will aggregate 120 bales, which at $25 a bale will net $3000,—a sum that represents clear gain to the planter without the least outlay of money or labor on his part, and returning a profit of over twenty per cent on capital invested in land. Should the same conditions obtain for five years, the landowner will then have received in rents $15,000, or more than one hundred per cent on the original investment.

What are the gains under this system to the tenant, would be a pertinent query. After deducting cost of production, and excluding reserved foods, a fair estimate will give at least $100 in cash to the lessee,—a sum that puts him on the road to prospective wealth, and away beyond any comparison with previous earnings. But aside from any gain in material growth, this process of labor distribution and supervision teaches the most important lesson of plantation life,—that is, the faculty of raising and storing subsistence for future use. Observe, moreover, that when a laborer leases land and pays a fixed rental for its use, he is in every respect lifted above the level of a wage-worker, and by that act alone has taken a long stride toward industrial independence. Productive capacity and personal compensation is measured by what individual effort decrees or health permits. A negro tenant, therefore, with ordinary thrift and foresight, should, at the end of five years, have a comfortable house, good farming implements, mules and horses, cows and hogs, and at least $500 in cash. He should also have acquired habits of industry and prudence, and be fitted by experience and practical knowledge to become a capable, self-directing owner of the soil; for to that end all such industrial movements should be directed.

Before passing to the next phase of this industrial question, we desire to call attention to certain salutary advantages involved in these suggested changes in plantation methods. It will be seen that this plan contemplates the assignment of a single family to a specified parcel of land for residence and cultivation. A judicious isolation of negro families is a necessary step in the social elevation of the race. Such separation, moreover, will promote industry by developing commendable rivalry among tenants in land production. It will also create individual responsibility in oversight and execution, and is admirably adapted to serve every phase of plantation service. Nor is there the slightest doubt that by abandoning existing industrial methods the quality and character of negro labor will in a short time be perceptibly elevated, which would result in substantial increase in agricultural products at a lower cost to the planter and higher remuneration to the laborer. Finally, an arrangement of this sort opens the way to the core of our proposition, which seeks to enable thrifty negroes to become lessees of land.

We now take up the second proposition, and carry the illustration to its conclusion, by supposing that at the close of a five years' satisfactory experience in renting land to tenants, this thrifty owner, for a consideration of twenty-five bales of cotton, or its equivalent, to be paid in annual instalments of five bales each, sells to his negro tenants a farm of forty acres, giving a deed, and taking a mortgage on the land as security for deferred payments. We will further presume that the conditions of sale are carried out in good faith, with every obligation promptly met, and, in that case, it requires no seer to foretell the result. On the one hand, there is a negro farmer with debt paid and mortgage cancelled, the owner of a free home. On the other there is a white owner, who has, on an investment of $12,000, received in ten years over three hundred per cent gain, and possibly a larger sum, besides having developed in his community a thrifty settlement of negroes.

We have purposely elaborated this proposition, in order conclusively to show that these suggested improvements in plantation methods afford genuine self-help to any dependent, struggling class. By such means the thrifty wage-taker may not only become a lessee of the land, but pass from that condition to a proprietor of the soil; and, when once absolute owner of his person and surroundings, he is bound to take on a new and conscious manhood. With his best energies directed toward developing his possessions, his log hut gives place to a cottage, the pine bushes make way for fruit trees, the broom sage for flowers; the unstabled mule is snugly sheltered in a comfortable barn, while the lowing of cattle, the bleating of sheep, the grunting of swine, and the cackling of fowls bear witness to thrift and prosperity. Nor is this all. Newspapers and books will be regular and welcome visitors to these rural homes, and the church, schoolhouse, and society will be neither forgotten nor neglected. Such, we predict, are some of the changes that will be wrought and results achieved during the years of material growth, in which the previous pauper freedman grows into true manhood and worthy citizenship.

THE pure negro type, whether in India, Europe, Africa, or America, always displays those identical external characteristics which so markedly differentiate it from the rest of mankind. But while prognathous features and black hues are inseparable characteristics of negro people, it is well to keep in mind that color of any shade is erasable by admixture with contrary colors, just as a specific physical contour is readily changed by amalgamation with unlike physical forms. Both of these results have been, in many instances, effected among these people. Still, as neither of these processes has eradicated other racial traits, which are always exhibited where a preponderance of negro blood exists, we are forced to conclude that, apart from and independent of color and feature, there must be certain qualities inherent in the nature of the negro which differentiate him from other humankind as distinctly as either color or feature. Believing these surmises to be correct, it remains for us to show that this savage inheritance, modified but uneradicated, has been perpetuated in the American offspring of an African ancestry. Such a task would be simple had the imported negro type maintained its characteristics free from any infusion of alien blood; in that event there is little reason for doubt that the freedman of our day would be hardly one remove from his African ancestors. The slave offspring, however, underwent a physical transformation, and foreign miscegenation changed a sensuous savage animal into a rational human creature, with a possible attainment to manhood and spiritual consciousness.

The negro undoubtedly constitutes the most unique feature in universal anthropology, and as such furnishes a subject for profound psychological investigation and social study. There is, of course, broadly speaking, a common agreement in the public mind that the negro represents an accentuated type of human degradation. Beyond this there is a wide divergence of opinion as to whether he is a normally constituted but unawakened member of the human family, a survival of an earlier type of man, or a specific type of indurated degeneracy. Much may be said both for and against each of these views, but the one pregnant fact of which intelligent mankind is conscious is, that the negro is in every essential respect wholly unlike other races of men. It is estimated that the pure and mixed negro types of the world number about 160,000,000 of people, though the mixed types, native and foreign, are largely in excess of the pure negro stock. It is also important to know that, while certain well-defined changes may be wrought in negro physical character by amalgamation, yet, despite the degree and duration of such admixture, an aberrant preference for intensified negro characteristics is not infrequently exhibited. We assume that the negro is still burdened with the mental and physical weakness of his heritage; and we realize the sum of ancestral characteristics transmitted to a people of stationary habits is immense, and usually so great as to preclude racial variation. This knowledge will shed light on many perplexing features of race conduct which appear inexplicable.

All human life expresses through physical, mental, and moral qualities the three fundamental endowments of its nature. We shall now deal with such characteristic traits as the mental, moral, and social nature of the freedman appears to disclose. True intelligence is, to speak from a scientific standpoint, “the exact conformity of the inner, to the outer order of cognizable phenomena.” That is, the law of intelligent growth demonstrates all capable advance in knowledge to proceed from simple to complex states of consciousness, each step of which is attended by accuracy of conception and adjustment of action to all preceding phenomena.

In applying these mental laws to the freed people the fair inference is that the supreme difficulty of the negro mind is its inability to parallel internal with external environing phenomena, because there is no apparent intelligent apprehension and adjustment of its internal mental states to external facts. The negro has all the physical endowments of intellect, but he has a mind that never thinks in complex terms, and, as it is wholly engrossed with units of phenomena, the states of consciousness aroused by visual or textual impressions rarely suggest sequences. The consequence is that the freedman exhibits great mental density, and gives conclusive evidence that he has neither clear nor distinct perceptions of specific facts, inasmuch as in every attempt at primary reasoning he falls into confusion and error. There is also reason to believe that the negro neither associates correlated facts, nor deduces logical sequences from obvious causes. He is largely devoid of imagination in all that relates to purely intellectual exercises, though he has fairly vivid conceptions of such physical objects as appeal to the passions or appetite.

There is then no intelligent comprehension and adjustment of the freedman's internal mental states to external facts, because the former is only engrossed with units of phenomena. That many negro people are incapable of associating numbers, beyond a few elementary numerals, verifies this conclusion. We have an example of this kind in the Australian negro, the zero, so to speak, of all anthropological analysis, who is of such low development as to be incapable of dealing with other than units of ideas as well as of numbers. Of course, such mental conditions forbid any apprehension of simultaneous or successive events being acquired; and we shall infer that, so long as the negro is devoid of the power of introspection, he will neither have the ability to analyze his own defects nor determine his relation to external phenomena.

The accuracy of human knowledge, as is well known, depends on the number and quality of stored-up concepts,—that is, on the clearness and vividness of the images impressed on the brain; and for this purpose attention is the fundamental factor. Hence, it is not what our visual organs behold, but what, as a result thereof, is imprinted on the brain, which determines man's intelligence. It is just at this point that negroes fail. They see as much with their eyes as others do, but for lack of attention to details the mental images formed by external impressions become vague and indistinct. Having no clear notion of that which passes before them, nor of that with which they are in daily contact, neither the observed experience of others, nor their own under like circumstances, ever appears to teach them as similar conditions teach others. The negro, then, with a visual consciousness perplexed and a subjective consciousness bewildered, always betrays in his normal states a lack of creative and constructive aptitude. Nor is such defect made good by any faculty of intuitive perception. What he undertakes is neither systematic in thought nor logical in statement, because his mind,—always dull and dense in repose,—when confronted by strange conditions, is not only slow to act, but exhibits an obvious want of cohesive strength. Nor is that all, for, like all people who are neither serious nor earnest, the freedman's mental attitude ceaselessly oscillates between depression and exaltation.

The negro not only lacks a fair degree of intuitive knowledge, but so dense is his understanding that he blindly follows weird fantasies and hideous phantoms. So great is his predilection in this direction, that he appears incapable of understanding the difference between evidence and assertion, proof and surmise. These facts warrant the conclusion that negro intelligence is both superficial and delusive, because, though such people excel in recollections of a concrete object, their retentive memories do not enable them to make any valuable deductions, either from the object itself, or from their familiar experience with it. The explication of such intellectual states is to be found in the fact that the chief mental anxiety of the freedman is for the immediate gratification of his physical senses. He lives wholly in his passions, and is never so happy as when enveloped in the glitter and gloss of shams. But while the frankness of these reflections is only equalled by their veracity, we must remember that the negro represents an illiterate race, in which ignorance, cowardice, folly, and idleness are rife, and one whose existence is dominated by emotional sensations. It is only from this standpoint, and with this knowledge of his being, that his characteristic qualities can be fairly ascertained.

To those who know the freedman the fact is obvious that the highest aspiration of negro ambition is, not to acquire the essential spirit of knowledge, but to imitate mechanically what he only succeeds in caricaturing. He certainly is not an intelligent observer of facts, for he can seldom accurately describe objects of daily contact, and one may easily discover that there is no such thing in his mind as capacity for original definition and analysis. We are also thoroughly convinced that the negro mind is rarely awakened to responsive intelligence by meditative reasoning. Nor has it shown, generally speaking, such accurate understanding, sound judgment, and correct comparisons as would assure a comprehensive and discriminating grasp of a given subject. The freedman certainly does not realize that the aim and consummation of mental development is to know, to do, and to be; that real knowledge is a matter of reflection; and that such knowledge comprehends, not only a particular thing itself in contradistinction to all other things, but also its relation to all else. Nor is the fact that the freedman readily acquires superficial familiarity with theoretical forms and symbols of learning any proof that he comprehends their significance. He may even excel in textual work along elementary lines indicated by defined rules, yet he is always entangled in abstract studies, for the reason that he accepts all postulated statements as complete fundamental truths. What he acquires is memorized statements, and not real knowledge, because the most clearly expressed principles rarely suggest to him concurrent ideas or develop new points of view.

To make our meaning clear we need only to state that when the negro acquires the terminology of things he vainly imagines himself endowed with a knowledge of the subject-matter represented thereby, and so gets credit from the unthinking class for a knowledge he does not possess. And his mental environment is not only complicated by the fact that in his quest for knowledge he never gets beyond unverified theoretical assertion and memorized verbal learning, but also because the opinions he asserts are echoings of second-hand utterances. He does not realize the absurd contradictions involved in such a course, especially in his many-sided attitude toward American ethical culture and social living. For while in each of these particulars the negro may appropriate to himself whatever feature in them serves his fancy, he does so with reference to its external effect, and not for any purpose of internal personal change. Knowledge, refinement, truth, and honor are to the negro mind acquirable vestments that may be put on or off as occasion requires, but which in no sense work a reconstruction in the nature of man. These conclusions are easily verified. Any one fairly conversant with the negro people will readily recognize that intellectual veneer, which makes up so large a portion of its assumed culture, and which is invariably rubbed off and supplanted by an insufferable pomposity whenever it is forced into illiterate association. That what there is of racial scholarship has never passed beyond the mediocre and commonplace in mental character is due to the fact that the negro is always an imitator and never a creator.

As American philanthropy has never instituted searching inquiry respecting the fundamental characteristics of negro nature, it is pertinent to say that, if the foregoing deductions are correct, it follows that our negro educational methods are both wrong and profitless. There is an enormous waste in time, money, and results mainly because we have deliberately blinded the natural capacity and natural aptitude of the freedman by hedging him about with useless studies. It would have been far better for all concerned had he been taught a few essential things, and required to learn them intelligently and thoroughly. Two things, especially he needs to do,—one is to cultivate a habit of self-reliance, and the other, to use his rational faculty in a common-sense way. He can do neither now, nor has he any idea that enlightenment comes from within or that a man may be learned without being enlightened. Have we not said that mental growth is dependent upon the right adjustment of the mental organism to physical environment? That thoroughness in knowledge is the power to think conscientiously and accurately to correlate cause and effect? Sound educational training is a rational appeal to individual alertness, intelligence, and energy; it constantly sets knowledge against ignorance, and skill against incompetence. Culture and mind are not synonymous terms. It is well to know that a stalwart mental power, uncultivated, is of infinitely more value than the most thoroughly cultured feeble intellect could possibly be. But, inasmuch as the vacuous-minded negro possesses neither strong mental powers nor intelligent culture, he is never more than mechanical in mental assimilation. He has acquired a nomenclature of abstractions in the belief that symbols signify knowledge, but he does not know that no man understands a thing who does not perceive its relation to all other things.

We do not decry negro training—on the contrary, our insistence is that he shall be trained adequately and wisely, but always with reference to the essential requirements of race life. It is useful knowledge, not useless smattering, which ignorance needs. We therefore believe that the end and aim of the race's education should be to inculcate self-respect, self-restraint, prudent forethought, careful industry, honest courage, the grace of patience, the purity of maidenhood, the continence of youth, the nobility of manhood, the chastity of womanhood. But has this been achieved in a system of education which merely permits the negro to riot in a saturnalia of intelligent animalism? To be sure, he has pondered over mathematics and scanned the humanities, though neither he nor his teachers realize what insensate madness lies in such course. The educated class of the race—the result of such teachings—rarely seeks for truth in statement, but rather for rhetorical flourish, skill in contradiction, and word juggling, in order to confuse, bewilder, and impose upon their hearers, and to make those among the less informed believe them to be wise and all-knowing. So long as this shameless mendacity or pretence of learning continues, it will prove a fundamental hindrance to race awakening.

We all know that there is a tremendous difference between theory and fact in mental culture. Real education is acquired by training the individual mind, by the individual himself, to such a degree that it becomes an instrument of capable use in daily living. But as the negro scorns details, his intellect, we take it, is so constituted as to be incapable of indefatigable research or luminous penetration, and, so far as we can see, his chief mental outfit is nothing more than a facile memory for unconnected subjects. He always sees things in mass, with neither faculty for close observation nor aptitude for analytical detail. He is an idle mental-incapable, with a self-satisfied knowledge that substitutes shadows for substance, darkness for light, sound for sense, chattering for wisdom. Small wonder, then, that our freed people are slow to comprehend their impotence and folly, but swift to display their ignorance. And as they are largely wanting in clearly defined ideas and executive ability, they are forced to copy the form and bearing of others, without knowing the reasons for their actions, a thing they will continue to do so long as their overshadowing curse is mental imbecility, moral induration, and spiritual stupor. Confronted by such conditions, it is obvious that the most transcendent gift to the negro people would be an endowment of universal intelligence. But for any such consummation in racial life current methods of enlightenment are useless as corrective forces. The negro is immoral; he must be endowed with morality. He is lazy, and therefore needs to be made industrious. He is a coward; he must acquire courage. His conscience is dead, his intellect dense; one must be resurrected, and the other set aflame by the light of heaven.

Not only do negroes lack the ability to acquire clear and concise knowledge of ideas and things, but in that which they appear to understand there is forever wanting judgment in its use. For example, words are, as we know, the vehicles of thought: thought, the vesture of ideas. Vague speech, therefore, indicates misty, incoherent conception, just as clean-cut expressions show that the speaker has in his mind clearly defined mental images. Negroes have very meagre conception of the import of words, and are influenced more by sound than sense in their use. For illustration, we may take the word virtue, whose exact and complete significance no negro comprehends—who fails therefore to engraft its import into the fibre of his being. With him it is a vocal sound, and not a significant symbol representing actual, visible, living qualities. The same is true of words like truth, honor, and integrity. These are meaningless expressions; and because the negro cannot connect words with ideas, and ideas with realities, he lies with avidious readiness, and in all moods and degrees of enormity, without undergoing the slightest remorse, and often without any apparent sense of prevarication, He lies to please, to evade, to conceal, to excuse, to assert, to command. He lies to be heard, and will not be silent, though he has no truth to utter. He lies not to be outdone in speech and glibness,—to gratify his vanity, to satisfy his ambition, and win applause from credulous and illiterate hearers. But the main cause of negro lying is his eager, voluble, incessant chatter. He talks too fast and too recklessly to afford time for pause or opportunity to think; hence his indiscriminate use of words, and the frequently disagreeable, and sometimes disastrous, consequences that ensue from his ill-timed sentences and falsely gauged phrases.

It will readily be surmised that the negro idea of conversation is a fluent use of words, uttered without any regard to truth or facts. That conclusion is correct. He will spend hours in talking about the most trivial things concerning himself and others. This disposition to chatter consumes an amount of time of the value of which he has not the slightest idea. Prattle is a source of infinite mischief to the freedman, for it leads him to be very inquisitive about persons; though it may be said, that, were he to expend half as much energy seeking to know the why and wherefore of things, as he employs in prying into the personal affairs of others, he would speedily become an intelligent and self-reliant being. As it is, though golden opportunities for acquiring knowledge and material gain lie all about him, such is his characteristic shiftlessness and so intrenched is he in mental stubbornness and foolish egotism, that he is never other than a sensuous dawdler, glorying in self-laudation. Negroes are always creatures of impulse; consequently they laugh and cry, not that the ridiculous excites them to merriment or pity to tenderness, but simply and solely because the vacuity of their minds is such that every passing sensation is likely to move them to hilarity or tears. It has been said by some one that to talk understandingly one must learn to listen well. The negro does neither; he talks to be noticed, not to entertain, reason, convince, acquire or convey information, but simply and solely to put himself in evidence for egotistical display and the gratification of personal vanity. When silent he is not engaged in any endeavor to comprehend what is being said, unless he is the subject of criticism or his vanity is wounded. He is simply waiting, with bated breath and restless impatience, like a fresh charger on the turf, for the vocal exhaustion of his speech competitor, and on whose slightest pause he will, without regard to relevance or sense, instantly plunge in for the sole object of outdistancing others in chattering clamor.

It is no doubt difficult for any people, among whom a tendency toward exaggeration exists, to indulge in a discriminate use of language, and obviously well-nigh impossible to a race bred in an atmosphere of mendacity. These conditions actually obtain among the freedmen. The educated as well as the illiterate are under the same spell, and, though all are ever ready for disputatious speech, they are obstinately impervious to the voice of reason, inasmuch as they never heed the wisest advice nor hearken to the soundest experience, should either conflict with their physical desires. Really, the inferiority of the negro in mind, morals, judgment, and character is such that there is no doubt that some very plausible confirmatory evidence of the justness of the simian theory of human origin might be derived from a close inspection of his demeanor. For example, the animated negro is a frisky, frothy creature of overflowing frivolity in speech and action, though one who instantly collapses into a glum, sullen, spiteful reticence at the slightest rebuke. He is, when awake, a person of ever varying moods, but one whom, when the curtain of unconsciousness is drawn over him in sleep, we fully realize to be scarcely more than a sensuous animal. These reflections apply to all phases of negro development, for all chafe under criticism and rebel against wise guidance, though at the same time all are vainglorious and credulous, craving flattery, and burdened with self-conceit. The freedman is not only grotesque in his buffoonery, but at times a consummate humbug, who is forever floundering between the summit of hope and the depth of despair, not only because he substitutes servility for humility, and insolent brag for modest courage, but rather on account of his insufferable pretensions. He assumes knowledge when densely ignorant, and to have wealth when sunk in deepest poverty. Assuredly, such self-sufficiency would be amazingly inexplicable, did we not know that he has an inordinate craving for all spectacular display which makes him the central figure.

There is a cunning astuteness about the nature of the negro which renders him an adept in deception and consequently enables him to hide many of the shams of his life. So dominated by insincerity and false-heartedness is he that he is compelled to be a pretender whether he will or not. He has, therefore, neither manly courage nor veracity, and his life and living, founded on fallacious settings, is as artificial and stilted as one's knowledge of social functions would be if derived from a book of etiquette. Moreover, so great is his vanity, obstinacy, and self-complacency, that he never realizes the depth of his own stupidity nor its identity with that of others whom he upbraids, and whose follies he is ever ready to decry. Upon the average he is either a beggar or upstart, but in either case is incapable of self-repression in intercourse with his fellow-men. Moreover, in all his methods he is a petty schemer, and one result thereof is that many a white church has enrolled among its members mendicant freedmen who are there solely as gleaners of charity, and who exist in content on the crumbs that drop from the hands of sentimental philanthropy.

Again, negroes are wanting in the elements of solid affection and genuine sympathy for one another; for, though their speech is brimful of tender sentiment and vocal rectitude, yet so enveloped are they in a nimbus of charlatanism that the one is evanescent, and the other without guiding force. It would therefore appear that the freed people have no conception of the requirements of life or the amenities of society,—at least they always cast aside the substantial for that which is showy and flimsy. In speech they are silly and vaunting; in their homes, untidy and negligent; in their associations, coarse and vulgar. Their demeanor toward inferiors is pompous and arrogant, while their conduct toward superiors is always servile and craven. Moreover, as they are improvident and idle, their undertakings often begin in folly and shame, and end in sin and crime.

THE freedmen who are identified with sectarian religious societies will aggregate three millions. They are chiefly adherents of the Methodist and Baptist denominations, and have membership in eight distinct branches of the former and six of the latter. Of the Methodist freedmen, four-fifths are in affiliation with the five organizations under their own control, all of which, in doctrine and polity, are moulded after the Methodist Episcopal Church, as well as being, in character and management, identical with each other. The negro Baptist churches are conducted after the plan of the white churches of the same faith and order, but are otherwise largely under race management. They are inferior to those of the Methodist freedmen in many respects, especially in organized coöperation. Moreover, though their peculiar church polity has given their members unusual opportunity for sensible training in self-government, they have, we regret to say, evinced but little capacity in that direction. Notwithstanding the negroes are allied with different religious organizations, the sectarian freedman has no well-defined ethical convictions, neither does he have positive and steadfast notions regarding denominational distinctions, and will unite with one or the other as caprice may incline. Social instincts have much to do in promoting religious association among negroes, but, in the last analysis, church membership is to them what a paid-up life insurance policy would be to a prudent investor; it gives moral immunity on earth, and guarantees eternal bliss in heaven.

The prodigious multitudes which throng under the banners of negro religion are to it a source of weakness rather than strength, mainly for the reason that its adherents have no sense of accountability to authority, for in neither the homes nor churches of the race is personal discipline inculcated or enforced. The disorganization manifest in negro religion arises from the fact that its institutions are crude copies of misapprehended originals, the disowned offspring of an estranged paternity, the indifferent products and full-grown illiterates of our composite civilization. It is a religion glib of speech, but poor in ideas. By reason of its anomalous character it has never originated within its own environment a feasible movement for promoting the welfare of humanity, nor has it, at any time, made an important or valuable contribution to American life or morals. On the contrary, stubbornly refusing to consort and coöperate with other religious forces, it has been unable to impress contemporaneous Christian society with a considerate regard for its leadership or admiration for its achievements. To be candid in statement, negro religion shuns the light of intelligent contrasts, and avoids searching inspection, preferring racial segregation and sectarian isolation, where, amidst inexplicable contentment, it can ladle out to credulous benightedness defunct ideas, decayed sophistries, galvanized superstitions, and all the frayed and discarded emblems of physical inspiration. In doing this, it has wrought irreparable mischief in quarters where mental and spiritual mendicancy reign supreme.

The current trend of negro religious belief is chiefly responsible for the capricious and hampering conditions which hedge about and permeate negro life. For instance, it enthralls illiterate souls and blindfolds consciences by its methods of false scriptural exegesis. It accentuates individual helplessness and emphasizes dependence on unknown forces by a prominence which it gives through songs, texts, sermons, and prayers to a weird psychic guidance. Nothing is risked in saying that such ethical beliefs will not, indeed in the nature of things can not, rid the negro race of its characteristic defects, which are bound to resist any attempt at overthrow and displacement by substantial virtues, especially those appalling weaknesses attaching to them through inherited ignorance, inherited laziness, inherited unbridled desires, inherited apathy and cowardice. But it may fairly be said that negroes, in or out of church relations, do not understand the force and bent of their inherent characteristics. Lacking a trained and comprehending intelligence, they are blind to every weakness, and of necessity ignorant of their incapableness, and are therefore unfit to exercise self-discretion and self-government. Furthermore, so long as human greatness is not a pronounced feature in their religious beliefs, one may rightfully conclude that their crude religious agencies, rioting in impiousness and revelling in infamy, can never function that moral and spiritual potency required to regenerate the negro race.

Modern religion is represented by several ethical systems of more or less clearness of spiritual perception and purity of ideal. The Saxon standard of spiritual belief is the Christian, and among us the term “Christian” carries with it a sharply defined meaning; it embodies profound convictions and personal obligations to a distinct ethical ideal. That ideal is Christ, who not only enunciated principles, but wove them into life and living. He made character the goal to which all human endeavor should be directed, and exemplified a consummate manifestation of ethical truth in being and doing. Now the divine function and prerogative of every human soul is to possess discriminate knowledge,—that is, the ability to discern with unerring instinct the real from the unreal. Max Müller says, “Religion consists in a perception of the Infinite under such manifestations as are able to influence the moral character of man.” The highest appreciable manifestation of the Infinite is the life and teaching of Christ, by which we are made to understand that true religion is a spiritual growth having inception and perpetuity in sincere convictions of truth and duty. True regeneration is the life of God in the life of man, which in its outward manifestation exhibits two fundamental aspects,—a recognition of a supreme power to whose laws man yields due reverence and obedience; a recognition of a divine life within the souls of fellow-men, and therefore a recognition of the brotherhood of man.

Admitting these statements to be sound expressions of Christian truth, the question arises, To what extent does negro religion apprehend their significance and conform to their precepts? The answer is that the mass of negro religionists significantly fail to comprehend, both in their mental processes and actual living, the vital and fundamental principles of divine truth, and to that extent have no right to claim spiritual regeneration. This candid impeachment may provoke controversy, but only with those who wilfully shut their eyes to obvious facts or are blind to the logic of the situation. No intelligent observer can fail to note that the religious methods and ethical notions characteristic of a large body of our fellow-citizens are an irrational type of Christianity. For example, by the negro's code, it is impossible to predicate a divine power of absolute supremacy, who, as the embodiment of law, is bereft of passion and divested of personality. To postulate such a being would be to the negro mind an anomaly, an incomprehensible and impossible phenomenon. The God of negro Christianity is a fetich of personal characteristics and human idiosyncrasies, instinct with passion, cherishing hate, harboring revenge, swayed by importunity, relenting to entreaty, gloating over suffering, and appeased by sacrifice.

The basis of all sound religious belief has three essential elements, viz.: a belief in deity, belief in future human existence, belief in the relation of the present life to the future. Now the negro is, preeminently, a religious being, and a devout believer in all things which lie beyond the scope of his vision or reason. To him, hell and heaven are literal abodes, one of endless pain, the other of eternal repose. The mansions of bliss are celestial homes; the garniture of glory, tangible realities; the apparel of the saints, actual garments of white, golden slippers, and dazzling crowns; the food of the redeemed, milk and honey; their recreations, songs of praise on golden harps. Hence, the negro has a vivid conception of a future life of compensation and fruition; of an actual deity he has more or less beclouded notions; but of the relations of the present life to the future he has but an inadequate conception. We must, therefore, for any intelligent understanding of the subject, interpret negro ethnic belief in the light of these facts, and in so doing we shall observe that, in its every phase of manifestation, negro religion represents a conglomerate survival of ancient savage faith.

In his native home, the negro was a fetich worshipper, devoid of reverence, but possessed of superabundant awe of unseen gods. He was brought here with a savage religion ingrained in every fibre of his being. Once on these shores, he was inducted into a form of Christian belief, by force rather than by faith, which, superimposed on his uneradicated ancestral religion, has wrought a blindness of prodigious import. But the negro neither in slavery had, nor has he now, intelligent convictions regarding sectarian preference. As a slave, he was compelled to follow the religious attachment of his master; as a freeman he followed the whim and impulse of religious association. In his transition from slavery to freedom he underwent a religious change which may best be described by saying that while the freedman has a larger mental apprehension of Christianity, the religious slave had a deeper spiritual insight, and a more familiar acquaintance with Old and New Testament events.

The pastoral life of the slave gave him opportunity for meditation; he dwelt on prophetic visions, and the wonders of the Apocalypse enraptured his overwrought imagination. His religious instinct was quickened by the rapt songs of his race, whose music, so weird and plaintive in expression, often disclosed the sorrows and aspirations of its composers. Surprise has often been expressed that the negro should have maintained such stolid passiveness in servitude. Such an attitude was in strict keeping with a faith that, in its higher reaches, unconsciously exemplified the martyrdom of patience, the heroism of despair. To the slave physical emancipation was a hope deferred, but endless freedom lay just beyond; while there was toil here, there was rest hereafter; of what avail, then, were bondage and stripes on earth, when death opened the gateway to a sensuous paradise?

What we have striven to make clear up to this point is, that negro religion is primarily a sensuous faith built of incongruous matter. But in comparing the religion of the slave with that of the free negro, we are bound to admit that, while that of the former was crude in conception and illiterate in expression, it was loyal to the ideal which it sought to realize. In the case of the latter, with his larger opportunities and greater knowledge, there is a visible degeneration in spiritual appreciation, moral consciousness, candor of belief, and personal integrity. It is well to bear this distinction in mind, since what follows deals with the current phases of negro character and belief.

Turning to negro religion in its present form, the question is rightly asked, What is its comprehension of the functions of nature, human society, and Christianity; and to what degree has it contributed to the solution of the problems of the present day? Still further, To what extent does it conform in precept and practice to the enunciated principles of sound Christian polity? For answer, neither evasive shibboleths nor subterfuges will suffice, in the presence of that infallible test, “By their fruits ye shall know them,”—the one inexorable criterion for determining all shams and realities. Millions of nominal citizens are in our midst, who by their every instinct and act are aliens to the Christian culture of this hemisphere. In consequence of their adherence to an ethnic religion which is functioned by a priesthood as illiterate as themselves, and whose scandalous follies set at defiance every canon of the decalogue, we have in them a significant menace to the civilization of this age.

Under existing conditions the negro priesthood is largely recruited from a pretentious class who enter the ministry for social recognition, for official preferment, for idle maintenance and unearned support, and who, by deliberately shunning contact with intelligence, rarely become conscious of their own shortcomings. They are filled with conceits, and prate with glib assurance and authority about the most abstruse subjects, under the vain impression that they possess an amazing fecundity of learning,—although the paucity of their knowledge is transparent to others. As passed masters in the art of dissimulation, they evince wonderful skill, and in the acquisition of scriptural phraseology they can reel off Biblical texts with such deftness as to deceive even the “elect” with their show of sanctity, which only proves that speech and action are distinct things. No people can speak more knowingly of Christian obligation, and none are less observant of its duties. And their manifest disregard of the ordinary morality of daily life leads to the conclusion that “though ever learning, they are never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.”

It is an open secret that many negro preachers who have attained great notoriety within their race by solemnly masquerading in garments of seeming righteousness, find intense satisfaction in praise evoked by pulpit effusions, the original material of which was got together through indiscriminate pilferings. In fact, the freedmen have but few preachers among them who do not purloin their discourses from the printed sermons of white ministers, but whose illiterate mannerisms so distort the original as to render it of little value. Plagiarism is not the sole crime of our current negro ministry. It is well known that desecraters of human welfare boldly stalk into negro sanctuaries, overshadow the pews, dominate the altars, invade the precincts of domestic life, despoil the family fireside, and through bewildering sophistries yoke virgin innocence and brazen guilt. It must be confessed that ungodliness is triumphant when negro temples of worship are turned into debauching rendezvous, with prayer-meetings transformed into séances of sensuous contortions and physical frenzies. Human regeneration is out of the question where material greed riots, and eternal conflict is waged between a dollar and a human soul, with the inevitable sequence that the dollar wins, and that too in the face of the divine mandate that they who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.

These are serious charges, but so capable of substantiation that outraged humanity has a right to rebuke the audacities of selfishness. Tricks and tricksters are forever out of place in a Christian church. Vulgar pomposities and brazen mendacities in leadership and power should not be tolerated nor endured. Leadership ought to mean men of clear discernment, of robust insight, of direct determination, and forceful energy; men of thrift, of indefatigable industry, and eternal alertness; men of moral affluence, the wealth of frugality, veracity, punctuality, and diligence, qualities of mind and heart that are the woof and web of all values. In brief, the need of the hour in negro life is inexorable realities; that imperative need should cause all shams, pretensions, subterfuges, evasions, insincerities, and exaggerations to flee from honest daylight and hide themselves in everlasting darkness.

That negro religion is worthless as a factor in race regeneration is a justified conclusion in face of the fact that the most heinous crimes are committed by those who read and write and are members of negro churches. It may be said that these negro culprits are “sinners fallen from grace.” But may it not be fairly inferred that the “saints” of the race are wanting as examples of wholesome living? Can it be truthfully denied that the great majority of the professedly religious negroes are visibly seamed and seared with carnal vices, or that falsehood, hypocrisy, pilfering and drunkenness are but minor vibrations in an ascending gamut of “saintly” turpitude? But while it is a foregone conclusion that the social and religious demoralization of the negro is great, there ought to be virility enough in American negro manhood to face the truth regardless of whither it may lead. In fact, no person of intelligent discernment can be found who will admit that he is contented with the present attitude of current negro religion, or affirm that it is either a vital factor or regenerative force in racial life. For charity's sake, good intentions will be conceded, even where ignorance riots and idleness revels in turbulent luxury,—but always with the reservation that where the “spirit was willing, the flesh was weak.” Negro religion is unconscious of the tremendous upheavals going on around it, either in ethical thought or practical Christian living, and is impervious to the impressions which these processes have wrought elsewhere. Hence, the issue here raised, in truth the sole problem, is, Will the existing negro religion bestir itself?—can its lethargy be shaken, its excrescences shorn?—has it the ability to appropriate new ideas, evolve lofty aims, and, animated by the freshness and vigor of a new truth, take a place among the forces of modern Christianity?

One insuperable difficulty confronts any undertaking aimed at race redemption, if directed by purely negroid agencies, and that is, the moral instability of negro character. One might as well attempt to weave a rope of sand as to direct a people swayed by impulse, torn asunder by petty jealousies, and dominated by selfishness, people whose abnormal egotism is overlaid with dense ignorance of eternal verities, an ignorance, too, that, barren of satisfying resources within itself, is dependent upon external excitants for gratification, and in consequence is driven by restless and unappeasable desire to gross physical excesses. No people are to be regarded as morally sound who are willingly ignorant and vicious, and just so long as the greater number of them is averse to acquiring sound judgment and lofty ideals of truth and duty, their redemption will prove a chimerical conjecture. Another thing is certain: any religion is a sham which does not make of its disciples better men and women. And for the vitalizing forces that would accomplish this the present religion of the negro cannot stand the ordeal of searching inspection. Such inspection would expose the demoralization of its adherents and the hollowness of grotesque forms, which are ridiculous and even pathetic by reason of their abnormal decrepitude. The perpetuity of these conditions accentuates the ethical depravity of the negro. We believe racial regeneration to be possible, but at the same time absolutely contingent upon a radical change in the religious ideas and actual living of the freedmen. The ability to know God is the highest aspiration of the finite mind. But as negro religion, by statement and method, strives to stifle in the minds of its followers every intelligent reaching after divine truth, we are constrained to believe that it lacks the power of self-redemption, and will never, unaided, rid itself of gross deceptions.

Vinet, with sententious brevity, has aptly said that Christianity is conscience raised to the highest exercise. Man's supremest need is the courage to be right and to do right. A coward is a moral monstrosity and cravenness the source of iniquity, because fear, leading either to ferocity or falsehood, blocks the way to moral betterment. Now, in the light of these statements, what is the opportunity and duty of self-respecting negro Christianity for religious awakening, for loyal agreement, for nobility of purpose, for life now and hereafter? Its chief and foremost duty is to make character the sole test and criterion of a Christian life, and to see to it that a life devoid of courage, veracity, sincerity, and honest piety is not rated as a Christian character. Already in this matter a negro manhood and womanhood is astir, whose efforts to free the freedman's mind and morals from sensuous chattelism neither bigotry with audacity nor ignorance with numbers can defeat; for, having themselves become disentangled from ethical depravity, they are implacably arrayed against it, with neither belief nor confidence in the methods of negro religious teachers. There is growing up within the race a new school of religious believers, and the cleavage between them and the old is impossible to close. The old represents dreams, shadows, misdirected energy, impeached veracity, ephemeral fidelity, deficient judgment, and thorough satisfaction with specious achievement. The new exacts character, consistency, integrity, industry, common sense, simplicity, clearness, beneficent service, and, above all, fervent piety in word and deed. But unfortunately the awakened are a very few, with whom the sleeping masses have no fellowship; however, God is patient, and waits long for men to learn his lessons of truth and justice.

It is a grave misfortune to negro humanity that its sectarian religious organizations are wanting in an intelligent and educated priesthood; a ministry of clean-handed and clean-hearted men; teachers of righteousness consecrated to human service, and loyal to the truth; a ministry of men, endowed with common sense, that finite quality of infinite origin, which invests its possessors with wisdom and understanding, and teaches them to shun folly, to do right and be right, and to know the highest needs and wants of their fellow-men. To be sure, a group of nondescript negro schools exists, which are assumed to supply every conceivable need, but their educational methods and means are of a poverty-stricken sort, and wholly inadequate to meet existing wants. Besides wasting a wealth of energy on ostentatious vanities, these bawbles of pedantry never undertake to develop in their pupils integrity and veracity. They utterly fail to instil into the negro mind any comprehension of the higher functions of life, or to originate any influence that sorts the true from the false, or the wise from the simple of the race. No doubt, defective ethical thought is responsible for much that is amiss in negro life. The divine dictum, “As a man thinks, so he is,” finds but slight credence among the illiterate who have never learned, and openly deny, that true spiritual vitality depends upon right conceptions. We have, therefore, no clear evidence to show that the freedman believes the beginning and continuance of human regeneration is in sound convictions of truth and duty, and that growth in Christian grace and knowledge is attained only by following the line of conduct set forth in the teachings and life of Christ.

Again, what negro religion needs is a leadership endowed with divine instincts. Its present leadership has never learned the lesson of self-abnegation, nor the law that “he who would save his life, must lose it” in self-forgetfulness. For a pertinent object-lesson in this direction our negro priesthood of all degrees might turn with profit to the inspiring example of personal effacement furnished by the Roman Catholic Church, within whose folds the petty ambitions of its priests commonly count for little. The supreme good of the church, they are drilled, is the first and foremost consideration. Pontiffs, cardinals, bishops, and priests come, go, and are forgotten, while the fixed aims and definite purposes of the church move on with measured pace their destined way. The lack of competent leadership, of adequate endowment, or rather, we ought to say, the presence of negro leadership with extinct ideas and of impious hypocrisies, has driven the race into dangerous, and forsooth almost inextricable, passes. Among them there has been a shifting of burdens, a shirking of duty, with sloth set over against industry, cowardice against courage, and notorious mendacities and impious wantonness have revelled without shame and without remorse on the reckless shearings plucked from deluded flocks by the hand of rapacity and greed.

In extenuation and excuse it is sometimes said— although the French have it, that he who excuses himself, accuses himself—that the negro, has had no opportunity for acquiring practical experience in large public affairs; and what he evidently lacks in clear insight and capable efficiency is to be attributed to race exclusion from power and place rather than to any inherent deficiency in actual capacity. Such claims are the sheerest folly. With social conditions awaiting a guide, the requisite qualities for capable leadership are in individual life; and the logical inference is that where such qualities are not in evidence, they do not exist. What more magnificent field for exploiting capable faculties or deploying trained forces exists, than that afforded in the domain of negro religion. Do not its surging millions offer opportunity and inspiration alike to souls aflame with genuine ability to mould and direct? Within its folds multitudes of earnest men and women, with millions of consecrated dollars, await the call of wise activity for beneficent service; still no hand is raised to blaze the way.

Race guidance such as we have displays marvellous shrewdness and consummate craft in pandering to vicious followers for place and power; but beyond the meretricious notoriety it acquires, it cannot be credited with praiseworthy motives or noble acts. Unexampled opportunities for beneficent service to humanity are constantly thrust in its pathway, but they, in every instance, are flung aside either through wanton recklessness or ignorance of means to utilize them. With such conclusive facts before us, we cannot afford to extenuate racial shortcomings or condone its misdeeds. The American negro, in and out of church relations, is passing through a crisis, and, with the odds everywhere against him, is being tried and tested as never before. Incompetent leaders and their despicable methods must go; greed and selfishness have no right to beguile negro credulity. The necessities of the race, the good of humanity, require that men of human insight and business sagacity, having the capacity to conduct themselves and affairs intrusted to them along sensible and helpful lines, should be set in places of leadership and race guidance.

The obvious inefficiency and weakness of negro leadership is further emphasized by the fact that race churches have not escaped the evils of sectionalism. A senseless degree of hostility exists between the sectarian organizations of the North and South, and bitter animosities have usurped the sway of peace and good will. The freedmen do not seem to realize that strife is a formidable impediment to their advancement, and that no servile and oppressed people can afford to quarrel among themselves. There is, among negroes, not only a strong undertow of prejudice, but, within their local religious organizations, mismanagement, discord, and disintegration are characteristic features; and we have yet to discover a single sectarian society under negro control that has evinced a capacity for wise self-government. Meanwhile, the gravity of such defects become more pronounced when the fact is recalled that negro sectarianism is not original in its polity, but is a more or less imperfect transcript of already established white organizations.

Into every movement for reform two elements must enter. The first requirement is an adequate knowledge of existing evils; the second requirement, a willing capacity to correct them. We have shown that the negro is not endowed with an inherent sense of law and order. Neither protest, entreaty, nor example has ever effected a transformation to this end in his character. The first step toward the sound regeneration of his nature is to eradicate, root and branch, his lawless impulses. We are of the opinion that no effective means can be devised for that end which does not have as its chief factor efficient coercive force. But when the negro has been brought to a condition of willing obedience to law, the second stop in his awakening is to create within him such a conscious self-respect as will develop manhood and instil integrity into every fibre of his being, so that, by giving practical evidence of ability and capacity to appreciate sensibly and discharge properly the duties and responsibilities of life, he may deserve and win the confidence of religious contemporaries.

The necessity of negro regeneration having been established, the initial instrument for racial awakening is in our judgment sectarian disintegration. And we further believe that the most consummate agent for the redemption of the race will be found in its subjection to a superior white Christian supervision. We discriminate advisedly in using the expression, superior white Christian supervision, for nothing less than the best ethical thought and example would be of the slightest value in such an undertaking. We are well aware that intolerance, bigotry, selfishness, and fanaticism are directive in many phases of white Christianity. Of that sort of tutelage the freedmen have had a surfeit. What they now need is the guidance of men conscious of God, and free of soul, conscience, and intellect, who fully recognize their moral needs and are adequately qualified to administer to their wants. The chief function of Christianity, as we understand it, is to deal intelligently with every issue affecting human welfare, and unquestionably the best interests of society are involved in raising this submerged class. In fact, American Christianity can render to God or man no greater service than that which would come through its fraternal union for negro redemption. Nor are conclusive examples wanting to prove that, when negroes are placed under capable white leadership, they become more intelligent in method and more faithful in performance than when left to their own guidance, where many of them now chafe under restraints imposed by a leadership that does not command their obedience and respect.

The negro ministry will no doubt raise vigorous objection to the suggestion that their religious organizations ought to be placed under the supervision of competent white oversight; for, though gulping with avidity every form of specious praise, they revolt at wholesome correction and repel with sensitive resentment adverse criticism. Still, substantial reasons exist why this should be done, and, among others, the following are noted as foremost. Negro religionists are always wanting in either clear or abiding conceptions of Christian principles; they are not endowed with a steadfast devotion to truth and duty, nor have they achieved, through their current religious methods, any visible uplifting of the negro race. Furthermore, their ethical platitudes are in deserved disrepute, especially that preposterous contention for the rightful existence of heinous vice and godly grace in the same person. That is to say, this specious postulate affirms that bodily sin and spiritual regeneration are compatible, coexistent facts, on the ground that physical and spiritual natures, being separate and distinct entities, physical acts do not involve or contaminate the spiritual essence of man. Now the inevitable sequence of such duplicity is that these negro religionists with great assertiveness arrogate to themselves exalted virtues, but at the same time, deliberately and of set purpose, follow their own vicious inclinations. Infamous vices, therefore, fail to awaken in the religious freedmen repugnance, but rather induce a condition of moral obliquity, which condones crimes and approves, or is indifferent to, venality, They seem to have neither the ability nor desire for self-purgation from evil. It is not unfair to say, that self-extrication is impossible to a people wanting in strong mental qualities, and who evince little capacity for moral progress. The negro, then, has a choice of two courses: either to drift soul and body into eternal perdition, or else, with an awakened sense of imminent peril, to commit his mental and moral guidance to the trained forces of an advanced Christian civilization.

We have endeavored up to this point to indicate the leading characteristics of negro religion in order that enlightened evangelical sentiment might fairly judge to what extent it deals with eternal verities and chases shadowy phantoms. We shall now undertake to show how these traits and impulses may be directed into channels of usefulness and godly living. But here, as in other phases of this question, the subject must be dealt with from a standpoint of ethnic psychology, and with reference to all its related facts. As we see it, the fundamental defect in negro religion is not a want of mental cognition, but a spiritual inability to realize the essential import of Christian truth. There is no assimilation of ethical principles, nor application of them to everyday living. To the negro, religion is a transient impulse, a kind of hypnotic sensation, a thing entirely apart from and outside of ordinary life and duty. What we should seek to do, then, is to awaken in him a sense of spiritual realities, to restrain and direct the exuberance of his emotions. In his nature intelligent guidance and moral stamina, combined, ought to develop some of the finest qualities of perfect manhood and ideal Christianity. Nor does such a consummation appear difficult of achievement, when it is fully realized that, in dealing with the negro, we are dealing with a primitive people, of crude ethnic beliefs, but of warm generous impulses and misdirected energies. We need also to keep to the fore faith in the belief that human regeneration and personal redemption are realities, and that divine truth has the power to evolve, even in a people now sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, a life consecrated to love and duty.

We believe American Christianity has, in the person of the negro, an unmeasured wealth of latent spiritual energy, which will be aroused and consecrated when the notion of sacerdotalism is scattered from before his clouded vision, when transmitted ethnic fetichism is eradicated from his religion, and the virility of his nature, bared of empty forms of righteousness, is breathed upon by the spirit of God himself. With all the better instincts of their being stimulated by the white heat of endeavor, under a conscious knowledge that transmitted crimes do not shut men out of the kingdom, nor paternal faults and maternal follies close the door of divine kinship against them, what shall hinder even sensuous and illiterate negro humanity from becoming regenerated by the ideals of truth and righteousness? There is a well-founded conviction that in all men there is a spiritual force which yearns for divine realities, for love, sympathy, justice, and mercy, and that it is of such vitality and potency as to fill wasted lives and blasted hopes with divine immanence, and re-create manhood and womanhood in battered and shattered human forms. Such moral cravings of souls a-hunger for truth and godliness are more than psychological hallucinations. There is “a power not in ourselves, that makes for righteousness.” With a spiritual insight ennobled to luminous penetration, those Christian forces will become sublimely great that have the prescience to see the glory of humiliation, the riches of poverty, the exaltation of abasement, the radiance of self-sacrifice, in disinterested service to hungry, starving souls, crying daily for the bread of eternal life.

MAN is not a law to himself; on the contrary, he is both the product and subject of law. He is a rational being, and as such is cognizant of the existence of moral and physical laws. He further understands that conformity to these laws constitutes a sane attitude of mind, that non-conformity is followed by pains and penalties above and beyond human infliction. From these fundamental principles of life, which apply to all men and are equally obligatory upon all, man has derived a feasible and comprehensive standard of right and wrong conduct,—one by which the civilization and morality of men is measured. When men have agreed upon a normal standard of living, and fixed the boundaries of right and wrong, it is obvious that henceforth the social status of a race is to be determined by the degree of conformity or resistance which a majority of its people evince toward such established rules of conduct. The sum of racial greatness is never more than the whole product of individual power minus the sum of individual weakness.

A man, we say, is good or bad, according as he conforms to or departs from the spirit of sound ethical deportment. But it cannot be assumed that he is good or bad in an absolute sense. In like manner a person is said to be ignorant or learned, notwithstanding the fact that no human being is so untaught as to be entirely devoid of some degree of intelligence, and that the greatest human erudition is limited by insurmountable mystery. What these relative terms are meant to indicate is that a manifest excess of immoral inclinations in a given individual is evidence of vicious intent, just as a preponderance of rectitude is indicative of ethical obedience. There is no other criterion, and by such discriminations the dividing line between the vicious and virtuous of mankind is ascertained. Such endeavors are not only landmarks of growth or monuments of folly in any people, but it is absolutely true that the actual condition of any given portion of mankind is nowhere more clearly exemplified than in their moral conceptions, their ideals of truth and duty in everyday living, and the character and aim of their social and civic institutions.

But no intelligent comprehension of social subjects will be reached, unless it is fully realized that the home life of a people is the most vital of all civic or social institutions. We need, therefore, in order to secure trustworthy results when dealing with inferior types of people, to ascertain correctly the drift of the moral impulse of that people, and what social order they sanction in their family life. In any examination into the moral condition of the freedmen, these observations are to be kept in mind. To know the negro people in any comprehensive and inclusive way, one must dwell with them and be one of them in outward sentiment and sympathy. There is no other way by which a clear insight into their domestic living can be acquired. The freedmen, like all submerged classes, have an exterior and an interior code of conduct, and the superficial knowledge of their social life acquired through public contact is altogether misleading and worse than useless as an agency for bettering them. We are therefore led to believe, by reason of the current misapprehension concerning the freed people, that every essential fact of negro life and living should without evasion or concealment be brought to light. We also trust that this brief recital of racial shortcomings may not only induce an awakening, but will enable those charged with the education of the black people to devise adequate measures for their enlightenment.

Now, to persons reared in an atmosphere of domestic privacy and chaste living, the well-attested facts connected with the actual conditions of negro life may appear incredible statements; but, if so, it will be largely for the reason that the cultured among us have but slight knowledge of the habits, disposition, and social conduct of those inferior to them in point of development. Nor is it possible for our higher classes, with their formal methods and masterful ways, to acquire an accurate insight into the actual life and living of those beneath them, since visible contempt on the one side and resentful distrust on the other effectually block the way to any mutual understanding. In this explanation lies the key to the usual inconclusive results achieved by reformatory agencies. In what is attempted there is rarely any honest effort to get at the core of the matter by ascertaining, with precision, the instincts, impulses, and aspirations of the people whom we undertake to serve. Humanitarian efforts for the amelioration of mankind are, therefore, often futile. Nor does the matter end there, for philanthropy becomes discouraged and ceases to interest itself in human betterment while those of inferior social attainments cling with greater obstinacy to environing conditions. In most cases such results might be averted if a clearer understanding of actual conditions were acquired before attempts at social uplifting were begun.

No one will deny that our freed people occupy an anomalous and unique relation to American society; consequently, in any serious study of this subject, the question which naturally arises is, What are the chief besetments which hinder negro recognition, as an equal member of our social fraternity? There are four characteristic phases which we shall note, as having a pronounced bearing on his exclusion from well-ordered social intercourse. He is regarded as a creature of lascivious habits, personal vanity, mental density, and physical laziness. All who know the negro recognize, however, that the chief and overpowering element in his make-up is an imperious sexual impulse, which, aroused at the slightest incentive, sweeps aside all restraints in the pursuit of physical gratification. We may say now that this element of negro character constitutes the main incitement to the degeneracy of the race, and is the chief hindrance to its social uplifting.

We have elsewhere referred to the cleavage between high and low degrees of social development. In well-ordered homes, the conduct of the members, male and female, is environed with certain reservations, and their personal intercourse is governed by a self-respecting courtesy that neither invades individual privacy nor invites wanton liberties. In negro homes, on the contrary, their inmates, devoid of either modesty or discretion, indulge in the utmost freedom of speech and action, and the female members, regardless of the presence of their male relatives and friends, go about in scanty clothing which invites a familiar caress that is rarely forbidden or resented as an insult. Not only does the semi-nude attire of the adult negresses invite lascivious carousal at home, but their young daughters are permitted to parade the streets and visit their associates clad in a scantiness of attire that ought never to be seen outside a bedroom. With a knowledge of these facts, it will not require a very keen discernment to discover that negroes have not learned the elementary principles of moral conduct, nor acquired sobriety of speech, nor delicacy of manner in daily intercourse, and domestic seclusion.

EVERY social organism is founded on laws defining right and wrong. But, apart from any legal definition, a sense of right and wrong is grounded in the human understanding. Crimes are offences prohibited by municipal law. Crime is a menace to social order, an infringement upon individual rights, an assault on private property. Criminals are the open and avowed enemies of mankind, against whom society has a right to protect itself in every possible way. The crime instinct has its source in moral obtuseness and physical desire, and the criminal class may be divided into the congenital, the habitual, and the spasmodic, according to the proclivities evinced in each particular person.

The extent of the crime instinct in the negro is indeterminate for the reason that accurate data are unattainable. In so far as he has been held to an outward observance of moral restraints, it is obvious that fear of bodily harm has been the chief influence which has kept him in check. That his nature is surcharged with latent ferocity is shown by abundant evidence of atrociousness, committed on weak and defenceless objects. Indeed, there is good ground for believing that, were the negro once convincingly assured of personal security, all the malignity of his slumbering savagery would immediately find expression in the most revolting acts of physical lawlessness. His passions are easily excited, and his feelings readily inflamed to the point of reckless vindictiveness, though a natural unsteadiness of character renders him fickle and unstable in purpose.

For the commission of crime requiring forethought, coolness, sagacity, and persistency, the negro would be entirely wanting in the requisite courage. He can and does commit offences of horrible atrociousness, but rather as the sequence of impulse than as the outcome of deliberate preparation. At every step in his criminal career he is timid and cowardly, and, whether his victims be human or animal, he is never generous in treatment nor magnanimous in forbearance so long as he occupies the vantage ground. When detected and apprehended, he exhibits all the cravenness of a servile nature by confessing with verbose volubility every harrowing detail of his revolting misdeeds, and the more heinous the crime committed the greater appears his self-heroism. Should he be adjudged guilty and sentenced to undergo capital punishment, he awaits the end with a seeming impatience and a serenity that betokens resignation and submission to a just award, though as a matter of fact his attitude is merely the result of moral obtuseness and apathetic indifference to an impending fate.

THE American system of free public instruction, to which we owe that general diffusion of knowledge so characteristic of Northern people, had its origin in New England. The Puritans bequeathed an inestimable legacy when they instituted free schools in the struggling colonies, and gave to an embryo nation institutions of higher education. We are also indebted to that fearless people of rugged virtues and stern morals for many of the best phases of our social development, and Puritan influence is conspicuously visible in those lofty national impulses which regard knowledge and wealth as instruments of beneficent service to humanity.

The present school system of the South may be fairly designated as a visible landmark of post bellum reconstruction and legacy of Republican administrative control. Previous to that period, the public school, though a recognized institution in most of the Southern states, had but a fitful existence and meagre support,—chiefly because the children of the wealthy class attended private schools. The poor whites were indifferent to learning, and to teach the blacks, free or slave, was a crime. As it now exists, the Southern school system is inferior in achievement to the Northern. The cost of public instruction is increased by the requirement of separate teachers and buildings for the white and negro children. Moreover, as the cities alone have really efficient schools, dense ignorance abounds among both classes of children in the rural districts. The Southern negro children of school age aggregate 2,800,000, yet only about half of that number are enrolled in the public schools, and of those registered less than three-fifths are in constant attendance. That there are gross defects in the current school system is evidenced by the fact that, since 1868, the Southern states have raised by taxation, and expended for negro education, nearly $100,000,000 without making any visible inroad on negro illiteracy,—or rather, we should say, on negro obtuseness; for many of the freedmen who read and write are incomprehensibly lacking in intelligence.

The gravity of the Southern illiterate situation has attracted wide attention, and many plans have been suggested for bettering it; among others, national aid for the education of the negro and other illiterate citizens has been from time to time suggested. Of course, we are familiar with the constitutional objections which have been raised to Federal interference in matters of this sort, notwithstanding it is admitted on all sides that illiteracy is a menace to republican institutions. We, however, believe it to be the imperative duty of a free government to provide ways and means for an intelligent instruction of its citizens; and that this essential and true function of government cannot be evaded without imperilling the foundations on which our institutions rest, viz. an intelligent consent of the governed.

Two distinct and antagonistic forces are engaged in attempts to enlighten the freedmen; one is civic, the other sectarian, in management and influence. The one under municipal supervision imparts instruction in studies ranging from the lowest primary to the highest academic, and in time service ranges from two to nine months a year. The state institutions devoted to advanced negro learning, and classified as high schools, normal institutes, and colleges, are, so far as we have been able to ascertain, 68 in number. The students in annual attendance upon them will not fall far short of 18,000, four-fifths of whom must be reckoned as pupils of the city high schools.

The Southern negro schools under sectarian control comprise 22 universities, 31 colleges, 26 normal schools, 23 institutes, 15 academies, and 12 seminaries. They have an estimated value of eight millions, and a reported annual income of $850,000. The latest statistics, which are here given in round numbers, show the student attendance to be in collegiate, professional, and normal courses, 8000; in intermediate grades, 16,000; in elementary grades, 28,000; those engaged in industrial studies are put at 17,000. These statistics, we caution, are not to be implicitly trusted, for, although furnished by those in control, they are nevertheless inaccurate in details, and altogether misleading in many other very important respects. One significant feature not likely to escape notice is that, notwithstanding their high-sounding titles, all of these institutions are chiefly engaged in primary work, and appear to be attempting to do what the public schools are doing.

The instruction of the freedmen was first undertaken in the fall of 1861, under the guidance of many noble, self-sacrificing white men and women from the North, who unfortunately began their labors under the false notion that their negro pupils, with centuries of mental density behind them, should be taught by the same methods and along the same lines as Northern white children of intelligent ancestry environed with more or less cultured homes. The result has been that a series of misfortunes have ensued, all too apparent to intelligent and impartial observers. The chief blunder, however, and the one which has inflicted lasting harm upon the freedmen, was committed when religious bigotry and sectarian rivalry, casting aside all notions of the negro's welfare, decreed his ethical and mental spoliation. This conclusion is obviously just; for when the war ended and reconstruction began, there sprang up all over the South sectarian universities, colleges, academies, institutes, and seminaries, in name, but not in efficiency, and which have since proved a delusion and snare to the cause of enlightenment.

ABSOLUTE human rights are those of personal liberty, of personal security, and the unquestionable right to think, speak, and act according to the dictates of an enlightened conscience. Growing out of these fundamentals are numerous subdivisions of rights, such as legal, civil, and social rights, the latter of which we shall now consider. Social rights cover a wide field, and include both absolute and conferred rights. Even in the restricted sense in which we shall deal with this subject, it takes in such common law rights as that of contract, compensation for labor, the purchase and sale of real and personal property, transit by public conveyance, admission to public places of amusement or instruction, together with all expressed or implied social rights inherent in public franchises, created under authority from the states, and carried on by individuals or corporations for public service. In setting forth these well-established principles as correct definitions of social rights, we do not mean to imply that public carriers and other servants of the people have not the inherent right to make such regulations regarding the manner and method of rendering such service— so long as its quality is unimpaired and free from individual discrimination—as will best subserve their corporate or individual welfare.

Social rights and personal association are sometimes inextricably confounded in the popular mind. The two, however, are wholly distinct from each other. Social rights are universal franchises, and relate entirely to public privileges. Social intercourse, on the other hand, is an inherent and personal prerogative, in no wise amenable to municipal regulation; it may, therefore, be indulged in or not, just as individual tastes determine. Municipal law, then, has no right to say who shall or shall not consort together; first, because it would be of no avail where individuals were strongly attracted toward, or repelled from, each other; and secondly, because any law permitting, or restricting, social intercourse, is an obvious invasion of primary individual rights, inasmuch as choice of association, as well as option of religious belief, are, for adult people, God-ordained functions. Hence, any infringement of privilege inherent in either social rights or personal association by municipal law or social custom becomes an inexcusable act of tyranny. Any and all races have the right of unrestricted social intercourse, either as individuals or communities, whenever and wherever reciprocal sentiments prompt such intercourse. Social freedom always carries with it the right of social union. Hence, where persons of opposite sexes or races, of their own free will and choice, seek to enter into conjugal relations, municipal restrictions have no right to interfere, either by forbidding such marriages or by annulling them after consummation.

We have already remarked that men will select their associates despite civic regulations, and that municipal functions are supereminent whenever any attempt is made to separate races or create class distinctions by organic authority. In thus enunciating these principles of social intercourse, we are not contending for such an abrogation of all municipal oversight as would supplant liberty with license. Such conclusions would be far astray from our meaning. Social affiliations are, as we have said, the outcome of personal desire for congenial association, and in so far as individual commingling does not endanger the welfare of the state, as where the vicious undertake to seduce the virtuous members of society, the right of private judgment in accepting or declining overtures for social intercourse, and in contracting or severing individual friendship, is supreme. What, we may ask, are the functions of the municipality in dealing with its members, if not to protect and conserve their public and private rights? Among the latter, is not the inviolability of private life to be placed first and foremost? Do not the peace, security, preservation, and integrity of the social organism rest on the great magna charta of personal liberty, which declares “A man's house is his castle,” and which, so long as the occupant is not answerable to processes of law, he may defend against all comers? At its threshold all public surveillance ends, and its master alone has the right to say who shall enter and who shall remain on the outside.

We have been at some pains to state these well-known elementary principles of social intercourse, in order to show how ineffectual would any municipal mandate prove which undertook to compel social intercourse among races or classes fundamentally antagonistic, or to forbid the association of a people affinitively related. Under normal conditions of social development these abstract principles apply to both white and black social intercourse. Negroes have no just ground of complaint against the white race for refusing to associate with them, nor have the whites any right to force their society on the blacks. In all cases social intercourse should be free and untrammelled. These statements will also assist in preserving accurate distinctions between public and private intercourse, for the bugbear of negro social equality has stood in the way of many just and equitable measures affecting the freedmen.

We shall add a word to what has already been said regarding co-race intercourse. It is evident to any observant person, that in any Southern community of blacks and whites there is more of absolute social equality and personal freedom, in the intermingling of the races, than has ever obtained in the North, where, in the main, the public social rights of the negro are respected, but against whom pronounced caste distinctions are applied in private intercourse. We are, therefore, of the belief, that, should wealth, culture, and character come to the great body of the negroes, all traces of race prejudice would disappear from our Southern section as effectually as it has been obliterated in Portugal and the Latin-American countries. In that event, the members of each race would be attracted toward the other by a parity of social development, and their difference in color would be merely an accident of contact, without becoming a factor of separation.

We have indicated what social rights and social intercourse are, and in what respect they differ from each other. We shall now attempt to show how social rights may be nullified and abrogated altogether through social prejudices. Personal likes and dislikes are amenable to no authority save that of individual judgment and conscience, and may be well founded or superficial in their conclusion. The most pronounced prejudices of mankind grow out of their social, legal, political, and religious distinctions. Social prejudices may be racial and national, though there will always be found individual members of a proscribed people who are exempt from its operations. Municipal law is powerless to eliminate personal prejudices, nor is any attempt made in that direction, though the principles of our civic institutions are arrayed against racial distinctions and class legislation. Neither this, nor any other, government is founded on principles embodying purely abstract human rights. Governments are not sentimental affairs, but practical organizations, created for specific purposes, in the interest and for the welfare of the whole body of those who constitute their inhabitants.

So far as the social rights of the freedmen are concerned, the following is our position regarding co-race intercourse under normal conditions. Negroes are citizens of the United States, and as such they have, in common with all other citizens, a right to the enjoyment of all public privileges created and maintained by the state. We are aware that a widely different view was taken of this subject in the earlier stages of American development, and that legislative attempts were made to control the social rights of this people,—in much the same way that some of the early colonies undertook to supervise the religious beliefs of their citizens. At that time laws were in force which forbade public social interminglings of the blacks and whites, and prohibited with severe penalties their intercourse in public conveyances, schools, churches, hotels, and theatres. There was a time when not one of the older states was free from legislation imposing barbarous and execrable distinctions on its black citizens. Happily, the force of enlightened public sentiment has swept away most of these odious restrictions, with the result that where public rights are accorded to our several classes of citizens, such commingling does not excite the slightest friction, nor provoke the least invasion of private rights.

THE status of citizenship is vested in all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction. The first authoritative definition of American citizenship was contained in the Fourteenth Constitutional Amendment, which made all individuals, in any state or territory of the Union, who came within its prescribed definitions, American citizens owing direct allegiance to Federal authority. Before that amendment was adopted, there was no common standard; citizenship was a local institution, and determined by the laws of the several states, hence a person who was a citizen in one state might be an alien in another. But by virtue of that amendment, every inhabitant born or naturalized in the United States, in becoming Federal citizens, acquired citizenship in any particular state in which residence was made. This amendment wrought a sweeping revolution in the status of citizenship, which was not fully grasped at the time, and whose significance is by no means generally apprehended now. It was this amendment which conferred citizenship on the American negro, North and South. By one of its sections provision was made for restricting the representation of a state when persons were denied suffrage. The obvious intent of this section was to limit congressional representation to the actually qualified voters of the several states. Negroes were not then entitled to vote. They had, as slaves, added three-fifths to the Southern representative apportionment, and would, as citizens, increase the congressional representation of that section two score.

To understand the effect of the acts which grew out of our war legislation, it is necessary to advert briefly to some of the causes which led up to them. The possible dissolution of the Union had been upper most in men's minds from the adoption of the Constitution. The possible severance of allegiance was the attitude of Virginia in 1799; also later of Kentucky, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. It was preëminently evidenced in the far-reaching plot of Burr to form an empire in the Mississippi Valley. Even New England, with Massachusetts in the lead, showed an inclination in this direction, in the Hartford Convention of 1814. We may say that the conception of a single supreme sovereignty which should be a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” had no existence in the mind of any one in the early days of the nation. Popular sovereignty was, therefore, an inconceivable possibility. The nearest approach to it was the town meetings of New England, and these institutions of local self-government were ill-equipped to grasp the profound significance wrapped up in the idea of a supreme authority, created by individual assent, and exacting loyalty to the exclusion of local interests and sectional prejudices. Sound notions respecting the nature and functions of a federal government were impossible to incongruous, isolated colonists, deeply rooted in local prejudices. The fact is that, from its creation to the close of our civil strife, the Federal government was viewed by all classes with all the suspicion that attaches to foreign control. Fraternity of states and national loyalty were unbudded plants, that had no flower and fruitage until strife and bloodshed brought men to see that friendship and unity were better than hate and separation.

Before their rebellion the seceding states were civic organizations, owing official allegiance to the Union, and amenable to Federal control. The citizens of the several states held, in a primary sense, allegiance to their several states, and only through their civic relation to the state were they bound in allegiance to the Federal government. Consequently the rebellion of the state not only destroyed its organic relations to the Federal government, but carried its individual citizens, except such as gave their allegiance directly to the Federal government, outside of all national civic rights. Logically speaking, then, though the secessionist was an inhabitant of Federal territory when the Rebellion ceased, he was not a citizen, but in every sense an alien subject. The severity of these conclusions, while not stated in express terms, was fully borne out by the attitude of Congress in dealing with Southern reconstruction. The official declarations of our Federal legislature and judiciary were that their rebellion had destroyed the former organic and legal status of the states in regard to the Federal government. To be sure, no physical territory was alienated or destroyed,—that was still within, and the property of, the nation; but the former municipal organism to which the inhabitants of such territory were in subjection was obliterated. Therefore, in the absence of any recognized legal government, and in pursuance of the mandate of the Constitution to provide a republican form of government for each state, it was held that Congress had the undoubted right to prescribe the form and method by which new municipalities should be organized.

It is not our purpose to present a history of the steps which led to the conferring of suffrage on the freedmen and the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment. For a proper understanding of certain parts, however, a brief statement is necessary. Eleven states had been in armed rebellion against the national government. When hostilities ceased, no provision had been made for the restoration of these states to the Union. Congress was not in session, President Lincoln had been assassinated, and the man who had succeeded him to the presidency, though at first disposed to resort to rigorous measures in dealing with the Confederates, was speedily led, under the persuasive influence of Mr. Seward, then Secretary of State, to issue pardons to many of the leading Southern conspirators. Guided by the same influence, he appointed provisional governors for the several Southern states, and directed that in each a convention should be held for the purpose of resuming administrative functions; the only conditions imposed were the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment and the repudiation of the Confederate debt. The consequence was that, when Congress met in December, 1865, each of the eleven rebellious states had, under such terms, effected a complete restoration of their state administrative functions, and had sent their senators and representatives for admission to the Federal Congress.

Congressional inquiry into the means and methods by which these events had been accomplished disclosed the fact that these state governments were organized, not in accordance with, but in defiance of, the expressed sentiment and policy of the nation; and especially was this observable in the attitude of these states toward the Thirteenth Amendment. It is true they had perfunctorily given their assent to that amendment, though, as was claimed by them, under duress; but they nullified both spirit and letter of the Amendment by such odious and inhuman laws against the freedmen as practically to reënslave the whole negro race. In fact, the laws for the control of the freedmen, enacted by the Southern states immediately after the close of the war, effectually reduced that people to a condition of helpless servility such as had had no parallel on this continent. It was this attitude of the South toward the freedmen, and the manifest purpose of its leaders to evade and ignore every requirement which the logic of events and national legislation had imposed, that finally awakened the North to the true intent and purpose of the South, and created a demand for the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment. The ratification of this by the seceding states was made a prerequisite condition of their admission to the Union.

Previously, the political leaders of the South had defiantly rejected every congressional measure for reconstruction. They stubbornly contended that Congress had nothing to do with presenting terms to the late Confederate states for their reëntrance into the Union; and, fixed in this illogical attitude, they steadily held aloof from countenance or support of every step in Federal readjustment, from the inception to the consummation of the act. The rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment was the cause of the establishment of provisional military government in the South; through which government, according to the testimony of leading Southerners, law and order was brought to a turbulent people. Public opinion was divided as to the wisdom of enfranchising the negro, but out of the chaotic mass of reconstructive endeavors it was finally arranged that each Southern state should hold a constitutional convention, for whose members all loyal citizens, regardless of color, should be permitted to vote. These events transpired in 1868. It was not until 1870 that the Fifteenth Constitutional Amendment was enacted. It will thence be seen that the freedmen were permitted to vote two years in advance of the time when most Northern negroes were granted suffrage, and only three years from the date of their actual emancipation.

The three years immediately following our Civil War was the golden period of white Southern opportunity. Had there been loyal acquiescence in the Thirteenth Amendment, the Fourteenth would have been long delayed. Had the Fourteenth Amendment been promptly ratified, the Fifteenth would never have been promulgated; consequently, negro suffrage would have been altogether eliminated from Southern reconstruction. Even as matters were finally arranged, with the negro a factor in the premises, the actual determination of the political situation remained in the hands of the white South. For the freedmen, dazed with their sudden transition to giddy heights and overawed by unknown responsibilities, turned to their former masters, and, with a spirit of self-abnegation from which they are wholly divorced in these latter days, implored the white leaders of the South to accept place and preferment at their hands. But they were spurned with contempt. There was no other resource but to confide in strangers whose pretensions of disinterested service had won their confidence. Under such conditions state control and national representation passed into the hands of an alien white class,—an event for which there will always rest upon the white South the greater blame. There were some persons of conviction and patriotic purpose, to whom political activity was a fulfilment of duty, regardless of partisan results or personal gains. Such were those who put country before party. If political passion and personal selfishness had been eliminated in their endeavor, with a broadminded statesmanship ruling the nation, the latent union sentiment existing in all the states would have been brought to the fore, and the governments established would have been universally superior and of more lasting benefit to all concerned than those which were erected.

When the civil governments of the South were finally reconstructed, the white people of that section and their political sympathizers of the North sought to discredit them with the cry of negro domination. It was a baseless charge, but it served to arouse the worst passions of a masterful class. Its sole plausibility lay in the fact that negroes were voters, and held various subordinate offices under the new order of things. Southern reconstruction marks the blackest page in American history. It is well that its infamies and crimes are fast sinking into oblivion. These facts, however, are to be noted for the purpose of showing the important part the negro bore in public affairs. The constitutions of the reconstructed states were framed by white men, under the direction and with the approval of the best legal intelligence of America. The majority of state executive offices and the most important were always filled by white men. The congressional delegations were composed of the same class of individuals. The leading men in both branches of every state legislature were representatives of the dominant race, as were the chief county officials. These white men planned and directed the financial and civic policy of their several states. It was they who created a bonded indebtedness, negotiated loans, levied and collected taxes, disbursed revenues, and therefore they, and they alone, were responsible for the good or evil wrought by a government of unique exigencies. The negro had a place in this nondescript scheme, but his place was that of registering factor of the schemes of white men whom he blindly trusted, and for whose culpability he is now vindictively execrated.

The odium attaching to Republican government in the South during the period of reconstruction is unjustly laid at the door of the negro. His ignorance, inexperience, and utter incapacity for intelligently exercising the functions of citizenship are made the source of all the venality, peculation, and mismanagement that characterized these states at that period. We may easily admit that it was a caricature on manhood suffrage to invest with civic functions ignorant beings clothed in patches, sleeping in hovels, and scarcely one remove in intelligence from their inseparable animal companions of plantation life. It would, however, evidence unpardonable ignorance in any one who said that the negro has ever been a factor in legislation or a force in government. He has in no instance controlled a state or county government, or even dictated an important nomination. He is now, as he was the first day of his enfranchisement, the partisan tool of designing white men. Nor does this fact alter, whether the negro vote in any given community is numbered by hundreds or thousands; a venial Southern white Republican is its recognized political master.

It will not exonerate those whose duplicity led the negro to ruin to plead that he is utterly lacking in sincerity of motive or steadfastness of purpose, or that he seems unable to discriminate between the true and false, either as to men or things. If it is true that he failed to discern between knavery and candor, falsehood and truth, it is largely because specious promises were employed to beguile him. It does not extenuate the culpability of white leadership to say that among all classes the strong rule and the weak obey. We grant it; but does it not follow that leadership implies moral responsibility and power?—personal obligation to do right? It was an unpardonable blunder to enfranchise the negro, but it is an execrable crime to hold him responsible for the misdeeds of those who were in every sense the actual leaders. It is the rankest injustice to shift the crimes of intelligence to the shoulders of ignorance. It is a perversion of every moral instinct, an insult to every sense of right-doing, to welcome back and honor the Northern white knave who went South penniless after the war and returned laden with the spoils of reconstructive peculation, and at the same time hurl anathemas at the black freedman whose only offence lay in faithfully doing the bidding of those who were accredited to him as guides and friends.

Neither partisan bigotry nor race prejudice should ignore facts. Less than two score years ago we had in our midst four million slaves in dense illiteracy, without the power of self-guidance, and ignorant of every principle of civilization or government policy. In that condition they were emancipated,—an act that made men and women of chattels and citizens of serfs. When enfranchisement clothed the negro with the badge of an elector, he voted the Republican ticket: that party had not only emancipated him, but conferred citizenship and suffrage. What was more natural than that he should affiliate with his friends? True, he was not conscious of the dignities or duties of citizenship, but he was anxious to learn, and after a fashion did acquire a dim apprehension of his civic functions. Had he then been blessed with honest and capable instructors, their guidance would have made a strong and stalwart man of him. But his leaders, selfish and corrupt themselves, constantly used him to subserve base purposes. To secure his vote they excited his cupidity and inflamed his passions, but they never sought to train his reason or calm his judgment. During a political canvass he was industriously sought after, cajoled, and petted; at other times he was neglected and unknown. Of course, under such conditions the negro was easily corrupted. He saw himself simply as a political commodity, to be bought and sold to the highest bidder; and he has been, and is, bought and sold in state and national conventions by men who pose as examples of integrity and champions of the rights of man. This is the political school in which the negro has been trained, and in which he has been corrupted by his friends and overawed by his enemies. He is a coward because he is a political parasite. He is corrupt because he is a partisan mendicant. Hence he is the scapegoat of every disorder, the culprit in every crime.

The Republican party is directly responsible for the political debauchery of the Southern negro; and every national Republican administration, by its policy of appointments to Federal positions, increases party corruption in that section. Self-respecting men will not engage in the execrable scramble for office that follows the advent of a Republican President; and the Republican oligarchy who constitute the several state committees, and whose chief functions are to select facile delegates to national conventions and procure offices for themselves and their obedient followers, are not apt to include such persons in their official list. Carelessness of the interest of the government and the welfare of the community will always be condoned by national executives so long as their ambition for renomination is greater than their patriotism. It is because we have full knowledge of the Southern political situation that we do not hesitate to characterize the present system of making Republican Federal appointments in the South, whether the recipients be white or black, as offensive to every sense of decency, and wholly wanting in every element of political sagacity. It certainly represents the most degrading and debauching method of office distribution to be found anywhere in the United States.

These are no reckless assertions, but sober truth, well known to every reputable white and black man in the South. Such men will testify that within their own knowledge there have been hordes of negroes appointed to Federal positions in the customs service who were not only lacking in mental and moral fitness, but were so ignorant of common business affairs that, when named as collectors of ports or postmasters, they invariably required the clerical assistance of a white man to conduct their business for them. We have no knowledge of a single negro official at the head of either branch of the government service above named who, unaided, is capable of discharging his public functions aright. These men were not put in the public service out of pure philanthropy, nor from any affection for the freedmen; it is obvious that their appointment to responsible Federal positions is made with ulterior designs, and chiefly as rewards for services rendered to the appointing power, either in state or national conventions.

We may state in this connection that we have knowledge of three negro office-holders whose combined salaries during their terms of public service exceeded $200,000, but whose private lives were execrable. Their salaries were wasted in riotous living, and to-day all of them are penniless in means and bankrupt in character. We call attention to these examples to emphasize the fact that, had proper discrimination been exercised by the appointing powers, colored men of integrity and capacity might have filled these places,—men who would not only have saved their salaries, but who would have been, in character and conduct, a credit to their country and to a sorely beset people. It is a matter of common knowledge that many Southern negro office-holders have been guilty of scandalous deportment, especially those preachers who laid aside their pulpit vestments for official garb, and who, on account of their clerical relations, were in a position to do untold evil to the credulous blacks. It is not enough that negroes perform their official duties in a creditable manner. No man lives for himself, and these men, by their degree of efficiency, represent the capacity and honesty by which the race is judged. Hence cautious discrimination should be exercised in the selection of candidates and conferment of office upon the freedmen. That, however, will not be done until it is recognized on all sides that they are still in a transitional state of development, and that only their best representatives in character and intelligence should receive political recognition and preferment. Since their emancipation negroes have been officially represented in every department of state and national government. This may not be generally known, and it is a pleasure to record that many of the elective positions which they have filled have been secured to them by the good will and suffrages of their white brethren. That they have sometimes discharged their duties in a modest way is not to their discredit, though in no particular case have they achieved distinction in the domain of politics or economics.

We have not the slightest sympathy with caste distinctions, and regard Southern race prejudices as an execrable exhibition and misconception of the spirit of liberty. As this prejudice takes form, negro office-holders are an offence to the white South. We should therefore exercise rare discrimination in making such appointments, and take only such as are qualified by the tact, experience, and knowledge of men that will render them welcome to communities. The appointment of incompetent negroes fans into flame the passions and prejudices of a people already overwrought in sectional feeling. Nor does it mend matters to say that negroes constitute the bulk of the Southern Republican party, and, as citizens, are entitled to representation in the distribution of Federal patronage. That is true. Nevertheless, it does not follow that we should ignore existing conditions, and risk the alienation of one-third of the wealth and intelligence of the nation in order to bestow Federal endowments upon, at most, a few hundred. But there are not wanting instances where colored men have been appointed to positions in the Federal service in sections where a hostile race sentiment predominated, and who, by sensible demeanor and considerate judgment, not only effectually overcame this hostility, but in its stead implanted a discriminating respect for negro manhood. For in the South, as elsewhere, caste is dumb in the presence of unblemished worth and supreme efficiency.

In dealing with the racial problem, we ought not to lose sight of the fact that the representative Southern white man is bred to negro submission. He clings with stubborn tenacity to ancestral prejudices, yet his generous nature is quick to recognize actual worth, and from no quarter does genuine negro manhood receive more substantial recognition. We would emphasize this statement. The presence of negroes in large numbers in any civic organization will deter reputable Southern white men from affiliating with it. And, under existing conditions, no Republican party of character and efficiency can be organized in the South, and never will be, so long as the freedmen numerically represent the controlling forces of such party. The negro will not be tolerated as a party associate until he has something else to contribute besides craven ignorance,—for such ignorance will never be permitted to dominate the courage and intelligence of either white or black American life. That we do not make progress in national fraternity, partisan affiliation, or race uplifting, by pursuing the method used at present, under Republican administrations, of filling Federal positions in the South, is obvious. Moreover, no change will take place until the ambitious schemes of selfishness are eliminated, and sound and wholesome principles integrated in government policy.

When it is once clearly realized that no white Republican party exists in the South, that individual Republicans are neither elected to office nor put in nomination, and that no Republican political organization is in existence in that section, other than that represented by a state executive committee, that which has preceded and that which now follows will be more fully understood. To be sure, east Tennessee, with its sparse negro population, is Republican. It would be strange indeed for a stanch Union stronghold during the Civil War to be otherwise. So are eastern Kentucky and western North Carolina. North Georgia was a Whig centre and might have been enrolled in the Republican column, had wise measures been taken during reconstruction to secure the allegiance of those hardy mountaineers. The same is true of north Alabama, and, in fact, of the whole mountain region of the South. There are sections where an occasional congressional district breaks loose from its Democratic moorings, and, for the time being, elects a Republican representative. These partisan aberrations do not affect the general conclusion that in both state and national politics our Southern section is Democratic. But, while the Democratic party is supreme in the South, it is not because all of the white voters are irrevocably committed by conviction to Democratic principles and tenacious of partisan ideal. They are not. It is because all shades of political opinion centre in a common determination to dominate and suppress the negro vote.

The negro is the ostensible representative of the Republican party. For that reason Republican principles are not openly advocated by any considerable number of Southern white people. The policy which governs the selection of Federal officials under Republican administrations is a source of constant irritation to sectional sentiment and a hindrance to the growth of a white Republican party. But we are sanguine enough to believe, notwithstanding this, that a Republican party of high character and wholesome influence will eventually exist in the South. The first step toward such a consummation would be a discontinuance of existing methods in making Federal appointments; and were we in a position to take the initiatory we should institute radical measures, and appoint but few, if any, negroes to office in the Southern states. Nor should we appoint white Republican officials in stanch Democratic communities.

WE have admission from all quarters that race friction exists. There is also universal agreement that the freedman has not measured up to the requirements of capable citizenship, nor made appreciable advance in the assimilation of national aims. Before going farther it is well to ascertain, with some degree of precision, the position taken by our white and black citizens regarding the cause of their disagreement. The contention of the whites is that the negro is a foe to good government, a menace to our civilization, and therefore ought to be excluded from active participation in governmental functions. To this indictment we understand the freedman to reply, that, though he is by the Constitution clothed with all the rights of citizenship, yet by reason of physical force and legal fraud he is effectually debarred from exercising enfranchised functions, and is shut out from the enjoyment of many of his acknowledged social rights. With the issue so joined, we turn to the negro, the aggrieved party, to seek a remedy.

But at the very threshold of the matter we meet with insuperable difficulties, and come to an overwhelming realization of the inability of the freed people to construct a rational and feasible method of self-extrication from an adverse environment. Every one admits that racial disabilities exist, yet, search as we may, nothing approaching an agreement will be discovered as to what ought to be done. This, however, has been ascertained: Among the freedmen is an outspoken desire to escape from existing conditions. And while this has as yet assumed no practical form, there are those among them who have undertaken, with no inconsiderable success, to give specific force and direction to negro unrest; and by these it is asserted that, as the freedman is denied certain rights here, he must seek them elsewhere. The proposition is advanced that the negroes of America should emigrate to Africa; and though this is by no means an original suggestion, yet as it is the only tangible solution of the race problem advanced by its accredited spokesmen, its merits ought to be examined in the light of to-day's facts. We shall say in advance that the voluntary or forcible expatriation of the American negro is a physical impossibility. Nevertheless, in view of the existing undercurrent of racial unrest, and the disposition in some quarters to force the emigration issue into prominence, some of the main features bearing on African colonial settlement, so far as they relate to our freed people, will be seriously considered.

In all wise movements, whether social, religious, political, or commercial, affecting large aggregations of humanity, certain preliminary questions must needs be settled before any feasible undertaking can be inaugurated. We assume that, first, a purpose to conduct the emigration on a sound basis under adequate leadership will be definitely outlined, and thus we would ascertain what degree of unanimity exists among American negroes in favor of African emigration. As leadership involves responsibility and power, the question arises, What are the negro's qualifications for such leadership as a movement of this sort implies? It is an observed fact that negro and Celtic leadership is susceptible to the weakness of ungovernable desire; that both acknowledge but slight amenability to wholesome restraint; and that, in the case of each, inconsiderate zeal has wrought irreparable injury to the race which it represents. Moreover, any impartial investigation of the character of negro leadership as exemplified in slavery, freedom, reconstruction, and in education, morals, religion, industry, thrift, and intelligent politics, will not, in the sober judgment of mankind, evidence a high capacity for self-government. On the contrary, such inquiry will show that negro leadership, in exercising its authority, exhibits in all its ugliness vainglorious conceit and dominating insolence, and that in such follies may be traced the genesis of many of those execrable distinctions which now thwart honest negro endeavor.

The American negro, when in leadership, has not suggested, devised, or instituted a disinterested movement for the uplifting of his people, or advanced any feasible method of race coöperation, based on self-reliance, individual energy, and industrial intelligence. For these reasons steady, sober-minded people have a profound distrust of self-accredited negro leaders, derived obviously from a knowledge and experience of their selfishness and grotesque performance. And as no evidence has come to light which would warrant the belief that any devisable negro government abroad could guarantee stability and permanence, or assure to its citizens equal and fraternal rights, it is reasonable to conclude that race segregation and isolation under these contemplated conditions will not uproot, but foster, the present elements of racial disintegration.

The administrative ability of the negro is to be judged by achievements wrought out in practical experience, through competitive trial with other races, and in comparison with existing average standards. Conspicuous examples of that which negro governments represent are to be found in Hayti and San Domingo. Neither of these constitutes what ought to be considered a stable, enlightened autonomy or an exemplary model of good government. Neither of them is in any sense managed in the interests of the people, for in each a state of chronic anarchy exists, and political uprisings are of frequent occurrence. The tendency of each of these negro governments is to dominate the masses through official surveillance; and, as peculations are rife, municipal positions are sought for personal enrichment. While a few are educated millionnaires, the great body of the people are in ignorance and poverty, and the industrial serfs of black masters.

The island of Hayti is fertile to an amazing degree; coffee, tobacco, cotton, and sugar-cane thrive, and produce enormous crops with the least manual effort, but no systematic attempt is made for their culture. The government discourages agricultural development as it does internal improvements in the matter of highways and bridges. Neither manufacturing nor mining is carried on to any appreciable extent; and, while the island is full of undeveloped mineral wealth, not the least attempt has ever been made to utilize it for commercial purposes. This is true of all other indigenous resources. It may therefore justly be said that the two negro governments in control of the island shackle manhood, despoil womanhood, and grip the Eden of the Antilles in desperation and despair. Interminable strifes and revolutions attest a degree of negro incapacity which foretokens ill for racial administrative discipline and national development. Could it be otherwise when the common condition of the people is widespread poverty and dense ignorance, and their religion a barbarous superstition that perpetually riots in unbridled license and culminates in wretchedness?

The British West Indies contribute additional evidence on this subject. The negro slaves of those islands were emancipated more than half a century ago, and invested with absolute freedom in every particular. But to this date they have not shown evidence of possessing those moral or mental qualities out of which strong characters and solid worth are evolved. Take Jamaica, the largest of the group, with a land area of 4000 square miles and a population of 700,000 blacks and less than 20,000 whites. It has a salubrious climate, magnificent mountains, rich minerals, valuable woodlands, and a fertile soil prolific in tropical and temperate vegetation. Yet these abundant natural resources are neither developed nor garnered by the indolent negroes, who precariously exist in beggarly apathy, and with such constant reversion from civilization that to-day more than half of them are barbarous savages.

To the north of us the Canadas were an asylum for fleeing bondmen when slavery was in triumphant control of the United States, and well-nigh 100,000 escaping negroes found shelter and security there under the English flag. But, though endowed with unrestricted freedom and abundant opportunity, the earlier and later generations of them have held aloof from identification with issues of provincial interest. Neither parliamentary reforms, commercial reciprocity, colonial development, papal parochialism, nor their own careless indifference to conferred rights has awakened response from them, fully clothed as they are with all the attributes of citizenship. In this connection may be stated a singular instance of negro apathy,—the rejection, namely, of an offer of allotments of public lands, made the Canadian negroes by the colonial government in 1837, which, put in the language of the negro leadership of that day, declared that, “Her Majesty's free colored subjects were not paupers, and when they wanted land they were able to buy and pay for it.” It is needless to say that negroes have never become noted for their landholdings in British territory.

There should be justification for any proposed American-African colonial settlement; and what, we may ask, is the fundamental ground of negro disaffection with his American residence? To this question no conclusive answer is made. We are met by special pleadings, whose burden of complaint is that here the negro is constantly jostled by hurrying throngs, and trodden under foot by white rapacity; hence, in consequence, he dare not stand erect like other men. In setting up this plea the fact is overlooked that, while other races gather in the fruits of achievements, he lies at the bottom of our social organism expending energy in useless murmurs. Nevertheless, this in brief may be taken as the summation of negro disagreement with American life. To remove these social disabilities, he is advised to shirk duty by cowardly flight, to stultify himself by exile, and to entail upon his children perpetual debasement. The freedman is urged to this course, notwithstanding the fact that negro expatriation would be a confession of personal inferiority, an avowal of inherent servility, an acknowledgment that the race is not by nature, training, capacity, or possibility, the equal of other American citizens.

If that be true, why go abroad? If wrongs exist here, exile will not right them. An African hut and a tropical sun will not create manhood, develop intelligence, impart industry, foster thrift, nor promote courage in illiterate, craven-hearted, shiftless people; nor will these physical agencies endue them with such transforming qualities of mind or character as will lift a confessedly inferior race to a plane of equality with American citizens. The plea is preposterous. No successful migration of a people was ever instituted by arrant cowardice. It must also be borne in mind that Africa is a far distant continent, whose inhabitants are savages, whose speech is barbarous, whose climate near the coast is execrable, whose plains are barren wastes, and whose forests are impenetrable jungles. It is to this wilderness that American negroes are invited to migrate,—a land without houses or roadways, shops or stores, factories or mechanics, agriculture or railways, schools or churches, libraries or newspapers, scholars or history, but one to which negroes have gone, and are still going, empty-handed, without money or skilful industry, knowledge or power. For what? To combat savages, to war with nature, to struggle with poverty, to live in disappointment in a savage Eden and die in despair in a sensuous paradise.

However, as neither the dismay of political revolutions nor the ceaseless tyrannies of industrial bondage have loosened the moorings of the negro, we do not believe it possible for any agency to stampede him into African emigration. To be sure, there is in the race more or less despair of the present. Nevertheless, the clouds of oppression cannot hide the sunshine of a possible freedom. But there is not the slightest ground for belief that the sober sense of the people will now, or hereafter, commit them to any illusive scheme of negro government. Neither menace nor persuasion will induce any considerable body of our freedmen to migrate to the African continent. At the same time, since some negroes are foolish enough to go, it may not be amiss to suggest that in the future our African colonists should be a sober, God-fearing class of intelligent men and women, who go abroad for conscience' sake, and under the guidance of consecrated leadership. Under such conditions, we apprehend that but few negroes could be induced to leave this country.

In consideration of this African scheme, we must recognize the fact that, in all its ceaseless migrations, humanity has ever developed outward from the tropics, and in no instance toward them. Further, no purely negro kingdom of civilization and power has ever been established or existed within the historical period. The creation of an intelligently conducted negro autonomy is not probable nor perhaps possible. Are American negroes in their present state of development capable of intelligent coöperation at home or abroad for colonization or self-government? Proof must show superiority of character and ability in work done, where the negro is now domiciled, and where all the helps of modern achievement and accessories of white experience impart an incitement and advantage to negro performance far beyond anything possible in the African wilderness. If the negro has failed to achieve distinction when surrounded by the favorable conditions which obtain here, it is hardly to be conceived that the most credulous colonist will believe himself, or others of the race, capable of winning success abroad simply through bodily transference to alien soil. If the negro cannot thrive here, he will fail there. If he is now dominated by white civilization, he will then be submerged by African heathenism.

The fact that negroes are so universally thrust to the rear in every relation, and held to secondary lines of activity in every undertaking, may not prove their inherent unfitness for broader service, yet it does invite invidious comparisons, and raises presumptions of satisfied acquiescence in their subordination. It also leads to the inference that they have not sufficient inherent capacity to resist aggressive influence—a conclusion fully sustained by the slightest examination into the present social condition of negroid peoples. It matters little whether their domicile be Mexico, Central America, the Isles of the Sea, or the southern continental republics, nor however great their numerical preponderance, racial inferiority relegates them to a minimum influence in public affairs. One may scan the globe, only to find that nowhere outside the United States have negroes attained to a commanding height of public recognition, and that nowhere else, despite obvious drawbacks here, are they treated with such uniform personal respect or political fairness.

Obviously, then, before the American negro commits himself to any scheme of racial migration to Africa, or elsewhere, he should demand of the advocates of such a movement some convincing proof of their ability to organize a negro nationality; he should have satisfactory guarantees of the institution and maintenance of stable government. Whatever evidence is submitted must have a more tangible basis than the apocryphal prestige of Africa as a mother-land, before any body of the American negro race should consent to expatriation, and embarkation on the broad sea of doubt and experiment. On the other hand, even if it were possible to bring about negro emigration to Africa, the undertaking would be without parallel in historic annals. It would be the dumping of a mass of helpless human beings on a barbarous shore, avowedly as instruments of native civilization and evangelization, but of whom the best that could be said would be that they were one remove from the aborigines themselves, and altogether barren of any uplifting qualities of impulse or character.

Soberly put, what has the American negro to offer in the way of civilization, scholastic knowledge, scientific equipment, and superior resources, to the African people? Confessedly nothing. He is not great in music, poetry, literature, mechanics, commerce, government, or Christianity. His relations here are tentative in character, and enjoyed through sufferance. In the event of migration he would go to Africa handicapped by centuries of abasement, with the degradations of bondage and his acquiescent submission in freedom permeating every fibre of his being. Under such conditions of unfitness for responsible living the exported American negroes would readily succumb to the influence of their African surroundings, which means a speedy degeneration into spiritual paupers and physical beggars. But, not content with this declaration, we further challenge the feasibility and integrity of this scheme, by denying the ability of negro colonists, as an earnest of what they might do in their proposed African colonial settlement, to produce from their ranks a single useful invention, an example of clever administrative ability, a scholarly achievement, a competent mechanic, a capable leader, an efficient professional man, an exemplary teacher, or a man of sound discretion and integrity. Until some such earnest of competence is shown, it may be questioned if the promoters of negro-American colonization deserve respect. And of the scheme itself, considered either as a religious movement or as a commercial enterprise, it is obviously without justification.

THERE is a widespread conviction in the public mind, that in morals, intelligence, industry, and thrift the freed people are not what they ought to be. A difference of opinion exists as to the causes which have wrought the negro's present condition and the influences which perpetuate his degradation; nevertheless, all sensible people are agreed that we have, in the case of the freedman, a complex and grave problem. We have carefully sought to ascertain what the negro was and is, before determining what he may become, and in so doing his miserable conditions have become apparent. The American negro is in a low state of social development, with no clear sense of his degradation or of progress from it. He is self-content; with ideals grounded in his senses and excited to activity by physical causes. The negro is also in subjection to an inheritance, wherein the mental disposition, vocal expression, and physical action of parents are largely transmitted to their children, and in which there is a visibly entailed ancestral instinct for what is coarse, vulgar, and vicious in life. He is lawless by nature, and renders at best but perfunctory obedience to lawful requirements. His persistence in resisting transformation has developed a negro social status as distinctly distasteful as it is antagonistic to sound American aims and ideals. Therefore, with the degradation of the freedmen beyond dispute, and his redemption an unaccomplished fact, the question of his regeneration requires honest and direct treatment through sincere and well-intentioned methods.

The presence of negroes in the United States creates social conditions of importance to the present and future well-being of American ethical, economic, and political existence. That such conditions may in certain states eventually precipitate questions of supremacy between African savagery and English civilization is no idle surmise. Hence a question of immediate concern to the nation is, Shall the culture and achievement of the country be materially lessened through the continued indolence and imbecility of the negro? All historical experience shows that superior and inferior civilization cannot for a long time exist in the same social organism and be perpetuated in harmonious conjunction; one or the other will be overthrown and exterminated. The negro has nothing, in word or act, worthy of preservation. Each attribute of his being is obstinately and implacably arrayed against every influence that parts him from sensuous excitement; and when he gives to any uplifting movement verbal assent, he rarely translates speech into action. Wise judgment, therefore, decrees that negro pretensions ought to be suppressed, and his evil propensities eradicated by every available means at command, even though such efforts should end in his virtual extermination.

Now, in voicing these sober convictions we are fully aware of the opportunities the negro enjoys in the way of intellectual culture and ethical training, his carelessness of which shows how improbable it is that negroes, brought up in low conditions of life, will voluntarily rid themselves of the promptings of their inheritance. We have ample corroboration of this conclusion in the condition of the three quarters of a million of negro people who live in the North, in the very heart of its civilization, and overshadowed by its Christianity. Many of these people reside in communities where they and their ancestors have dwelt for two centuries, and where they have enjoyed unrestricted access to the best schools, churches, libraries, and the other social and civic institutions of unsurpassed worth. We therefore have a right to expect to find in these people the highest and best examples of negro development that the race affords. As a matter of fact, some of the most ignorant and degraded of the American freedmen are among them.

No more conclusive test of racial incapacity could be applied to the negro than that furnished by the conditions cited. The recognized agencies of public improvement apparently furnish neither example nor inspiration to this people, who, contrary to every sense or reason, obviously shrink from contact with strong, uplifting forces, and to every intent and purpose are wholly unconscious of the existence of any environment higher than their own. Nevertheless, for any sound determination of this matter, the examples furnished by Northern negroes are inconclusive. Not only have they been invested with qualities and credited with capacities they do not possess, but the essential fact has been overlooked, that they are not a self-governing people, and are as incapable of rational self-direction as children. There are those among both the black and the white people who spurn all past experience, and wilfully ignore present conditions in professing to believe that time will develop strong and stalwart virtues in the negroes—though time, in itself, does nothing but bring men to dissolution and decay. There is no surer way to perpetuate the freedman's degradation than by giving credence to such beliefs. All change and growth must have a beginning. The law of human regeneration is inexorable. Now—is the dividing line betwixt life and death.

No fact is more strongly attested than that of human flexibility in mental and spiritual states: a truth to which the sober conscience of every man bears witness. There is in each person a force that moulds and determines the characteristic bent of any and all individual life. By choice and will, any man can pass from inferior to superior groups, and the reverse as well. It therefore lies within the power of the weakest of human races to acquire strong characters, broad-mindedness, and the courage to have intelligent convictions concerning truth and duty. The negro can be a man if he will. But in order to do so he must cease being the creature of credulous instincts that he is; he must lay aside at once and forever those habits of mind and character which justly brand him as an inferior creature.

The freedman, then, regardless of poverty or affluence, can begin at once to live an awakened and elevated life. He can be a man of truth and worth, by doing the best that in him lies, and when he has done that, an angel could do no more. There are, to be sure, a multitude of negroes who have neither ears to hear nor mind to heed these suggestions; but to the intelligent, the mere thought of such transforming possibilities ought to quicken the pulse and send the blood tingling through the veins. What amazing changes in human character will be wrought when men are brought to realize that all human regeneration,—moral, mental, physical,—is an internal process, begun and completed within the individual himself; or that other fact, that any man who yearns for a higher life can be true and do right if he so wills to do. But whether the freedmen heed these admonitions or not, the one evident fact is, that they will never atone for the past or bring light to the future until they cut off all ignoble ties and flee from all mendacious shams, and by a steadfast worship of truth and righteousness, trample under foot every racial delusion that blocks the way to their social and spiritual elevation.

The ability to conform to the requirements of enveloping conditions is the highest test of evolution for individuals or races. It is therefore evident that the first duty of the negro is to see with unequivocal rightmindedness his place and his relation and obligations to society and himself. The second, to discern with unerring instinct true men and women and true things. The third, to eschew, without evasion or subterfuge, vicious race besetments, and instead thereof plant within himself such impulses for right-doing as shall weave desire into principle, and knowledge into action. That the negro is not irrevocably bound by hereditary forms of thought and action is attested by substantial proofs within the race of personal culture and regenerative growth. So convincing is the evidence which these examples furnish, that there need be no longer any question as to the ability of the freedman to change his attitude in any respect that he wills.

It is to this end that we shall again and again, throughout this discussion, insist that man may will himself into any regenerative attitude that he pleases. What we mean by willing is identifying one's self with an object to the extent that one assimilates one's self with it. Of course we are conscious that before the negro can acquire any adequate comprehension of the essential qualities of character a complete transformation of his mental capacity, ethical ideas, social relations, and civic notions must first take place. He himself must sow the seeds of self-regeneration. But assuming a desire for regeneration, the first duty of the negro is to know himself—that is, to comprehend in an elementary sense all essential weaknesses of his nature. As it is, he is mentally dense and sensually enthralled; he has in him no indwelling spirit of self-dependence, self-help, and self-government, and he stands greatly in need of simplicity of manners as well as severity of morals. The awakened negro, who would be free from inherited degradation, needs to realize the loathsomeness of his nature. He must acquire a wholesome aversion for physical weaknesses, a deep abhorrence of hypocrisies, and a sense of the mockery of a religion that enslaves the body and corrupts the highest instincts of his soul. When he realizes such virtues of action he will emerge out of racial sloth and ignorance into character and purity, as easily as the lotus plant rises out of the Nile mud into fragrance and beauty.

The doctrine is current that human improvement is of necessity a slow process; such is, however, a pernicious fallacy. Human progress, social or material, may be set in motion instantaneously and continued indefinitely, so long as the laws of justice, of intelligence, and of equal opportunity are allowed full play, and man wills to grow. Man is the arbiter of his own destiny, with infinite possibilities of development, and as a self-determining being dwells of choice in sunshine or shadow, light or darkness. Speaking now in a fundamental sense, men are in that state in which they prefer to exist; they may, to be sure, have impulsive longings for other conditions of living, but so long as these are not concreted into facts, the presumption must be that they are content where they are. What is more obvious than that regeneration is an awakening to needs of which there was no previous sense of want, together with ability to supply the remedy. The groundwork of human growth is a recognized want, a concentration of desire, a formulation of conviction, an organized purpose, an energized action. Upon these characteristics rest the distinctions which separate men into doers and non-doers. Where inefficiency exists among individuals of a superior people, the fact that such persons belong to a race of energy and capacity for achievement gives them a tremendous advantage over members of races who, even though their equals in other respects, have no background of honorable achievement to incite them to action.

These conditions have been fully realized in the case of the negro, whose mental and manual inefficiency has been such as to excite the contempt of superiors in letters and arouse the hostility of labor in every skilled industry. The lesson taught him is, that while inequalities occur in every variety of life, like and unlike seek affinitive groups; that nature remorselessly assorts and classifies mankind into capables and incapables, and that by such inexorable and infallible methods are individual worth and racial worth attested. Racial sentiment may extenuate the fact that so far the freedman has shown no serious purpose either for social or industrial betterment. But let us have done with the folly of saying that the negro has had but three decades of opportunity for self-culture, when, as a matter of fact, he has had an equal chance with the rest of mankind from the dawn of creation. In truth, he has enjoyed superior advantages, because, had he possessed superior endowment to start with, his unimpaired identity throughout the changing cycles of time placed him in a position to hold firmly to ancestral traditions, and profit by the accumulated experience of millenniums.

The first step in social evolution is obedience to law; for even with many disadvantages on his side, a law-abiding man is always stronger than a lawless one. Coherent and capable action is unattainable without discipline; success is impossible for any people who revolt at systematic training. The second step is to discover the full measure of individual endowment, and to limit activities to such lines of endeavor as personal fitness justifies; otherwise the intensest effort becomes merely a waste of energy—a fruitless folly. Conscious endowment is the prelude to capable achievement, though there may be in races or individuals a wealth of strong qualities of which they have but dim notions, and which are only brought to light in actual endeavor. Such cases however, are rare; and where they exist, efficiency is crippled for want of previous knowledge of the essential things which make for recognition and proficiency in the industrial world. The sole discernible difference between men is their capacity for capable doing, and on that foundation the whole superstructure of individual and racial differentiation rests. The whole of humanity, therefore, regardless of color or race, may be divided into efficient and non-efficient groups.

The successful race represents the most energetic people, and racial efficiency exhibits its highest development in that class who have acquired the greatest command over themselves and the most intelligent control over the forces of nature. The latter achievement, by the way, gives to any race an immeasurable superiority over inferior types. Strong convictions make strong men, and develop strong characters. The strongest individuals within a race are those who give character to its endeavor, so in a larger sense the strong races are the triumphant nations of the world. In the highest civilization two motives lead mankind to the conflict of life: the struggle to live; the struggle to enjoy. Inferior peoples, however, whether aggregated by tribal barbarism or submerged by modern civilization, merely exist; and existence is not living. The negro has not reached the stage of prudent living nor rational enjoyment. This simple statement shows opportunities for some wisely directed activities in his behalf.

A NATION is an organized community under the jurisdiction of an established sovereignty; that is, every nation is composed of two elements, viz. government and subjects. Social organisms are created by a body of individuals having definite aims, and united for a common purpose, it may be for war, or peace, wealth and grandeur, or truth and righteousness. Whatever the controlling motive of the social compact, the organic trend of life and activity is determined by the maximum of individual preference. The justification for government is the security and happiness of the governed, whose conformity to its principles is the test of loyal citizenship. Where the social organism is based on autonomous principles, every constituent member is charged with the conservation of national aims and interests, and in proportion and to such degree as each constituent unit contributes to the general advancement of national aims and ideals, so strong in purpose and great in achievement the organism becomes. A nation at war with itself invites destruction. In government, then, whatever makes for the common good is to be fostered; whatever militates against it should be suppressed. The right of preservation, as well as common sense, decrees that all warring elements within the body politic shall be assimilated or extirpated.

Social antagonisms of more or less acuteness always arise between people within the same nation, who are in antithetical stages of development. Moreover, it is impossible for people of dissimilar experience to come into perfect accord and sympathy with each other, except on the common ground of reciprocal human service. This implies a willingness on the part of inferior endeavors to conform to the standards of superior achievements. Negro and Saxon development are in opposition; in this lies the sum and substance of their disagreement. When we speak of Anglo-Saxon civilization, however, we do not mean a particular race development, but a type of growth characteristic of a certain people. In a narrower sense it may partake more or less of pronounced racial habits. It constitutes the chief feature of American and English civilization, and it is a mode of development open to all people, for adoption and supersession of their own habits of living. Of course, such an exchange involves the giving up of many idiosyncrasies, but such surrender is in keeping with the law of progressive development for races or individuals. It may be well to add that we are not to be understood as saying that Anglo-Saxon people have developed a civilization of ethical and social completeness. Such a statement would be at variance with facts. What we do say, and what all authentic evidence substantiates, is that, so far as they have gone, their comprehension of what life and living ought to be is altogether in advance of contemporaries, and beyond anything that has hitherto evolved from the human mind.

In America we have set for our standard certain well-defined ideals toward whose consummation our best energies are directed. What may be rightly insisted upon is that all inferior types of development within our borders shall join us in seeking a realization of national aims and purposes. These are noble and lofty demands, and as they are obviously divorced from every shred of individual selfishness, they appeal only to the highest instincts of the human heart, and they must be heeded by our submerged classes if they would enjoy the blessings which flow from the development of American liberty. What we aim to make clear is the conclusion that every member of a social compact, whether of alien or native birth, is bound to acquire a comprehensive knowledge of national ideals, and to make it his primary duty to conform to them.

Homogeneous nation-making is a complex process, and especially so in a country like this, where numerous race varieties, gathered from every quarter of the globe, easily drift into factional groups, which, in ignorance of the highest functions of the government, undertake at the behest of partisan dictation to discharge the duties of American citizenship. But the United States, in a thoroughly altruistic spirit, has set for itself the task of homogeneously developing, in patriotism, education, and civilization, the people of all tongues and classes who dwell within its borders. Therefore, in pursuance of that purpose, the fusion of antagonistic races is constantly taking place. The immigrant German, Irish, French, and other nationalities, through intercourse with their native born members and other American people, are actually being incorporated and assimilated in our civilization to such a degree that original race characteristics are completely obliterated in their immediate descendants. The principles of our autonomy are free men, free speech, free opportunity, in a government of the people, by the people, for the people. All of the component parts of the nation are compelled to subscribe to these principles, or else be excluded from active participation in government affairs.

It is evident that we are at present scarcely more than an organized community of composite people, with widely varying relations, among which, though not the least in number, is a negro population that is not only set apart from the main body of the American people by physical marks, but by mental and social traits as well. It is a population in a confessedly low state of racial development, whose instincts are incompatible with, and whose acts are opposed to, American-Anglo-Saxon civilization; a people who, though set in the midst of ceaseless transformations, do not seem to realize that they have both place and functions in the ultimate composition of American life. We have already observed that republican institutions rest upon compacts entered into by a free people for their mutual welfare and protection. The Constitution of the United States confers equal rights and imposes equal obligations on all who conform to its requirements, in order to assimilate ultimately, both in conviction and endeavor, every dissentient element within the body politic.

But whatever may be our notion of federal and social assimilation, it is well to understand that mere external contact will not unite mankind; for, while some men will imitate within well-defined limits what is set before them, they will not emulate the higher characteristics of a contiguous superior type. That is, when a low and high degree of civilization are in juxtaposition, the lower will not always of its own volition assimilate with, or model itself after, the manners and language of the higher. It is possible for two races of different degrees of development to live side by side, and participate in daily superficial intercourse, using the same language and employing like symbols of expression, and yet be, as a matter of fact, separated by a spanless chasm. The strong and capable consort with the strong and capable, and unite in pushing aside the weak and incapable. Nor is it strange that inferior types should be objected to by progressive and superior races of mankind, for in any given organism no harmonious social adjustment is possible where discordant elements have unchecked sway. However much individual men may suffer as to means and methods in government, the organized social compact is in duty bound to insist upon and compel agreement with, and conformity to, the aims and purposes for which such government was instituted.

The negroes are an alien and diverse race, and differ from the main body of our people. They neither exhibit positive creative qualities, nor represent a brave, strong, self-reliant type of humanity; and they persist in clinging to race ideals and in pursuing paths diametrically opposed to those of the whites. Life, we are told, is a ceaseless struggle for existence, and survival of species is proof of adaption to environment. We take it, therefore, that when race aversion is derived from antagonistic acts of a race or type incorporated in the body politic, it is well founded, and becomes the legitimate expression of a superior people toward an inferior race. It will exist toward any class whose presence and conduct menaces and puts in jeopardy the aims and ideals of a civilization not yet removed from the tentative stages of construction. Such are the actual conditions created by the presence of the negro. And a difficulty which has beset the freedman in finding social adjustment has been the loss of forceful guidance. Left to his own volition, he has not sought, but rather has shunned, responsible social obligations.