 | THE NEGRO QUESTION. The Negro question |  |
VI.
There is now going on in several parts of the
South a remarkable development of material
wealth. Mills, mines, furnaces, quarries, railways
are multiplying rapidly. The eye that cannot
dull indeed. But many an eye, in North and
South, and to the South's loss, is crediting it
with values that it has not. To many the "New
South" we long for means only this industrial
and commercial expansion, and our eager mercantile
spirit forgets that even for making a
people rich in goods a civil order on sound
foundations is of greater value than coal or
metals, or spindles and looms. May the South
grow rich! But every wise friend of the South
will wish, besides, to see wealth built upon public
provisions for securing through it that general
beneficence, without which it is not really
wealth. He would not wish those American
States a wealth like that which once was Spain's.
He would not wish to see their society more
diligent for those conditions that concentrate
wealth than for those that disseminate it. Yet
he must see it. That is the situation, despite
the assurances of a host of well-meaning flatterers
that a New South is laying the foundations of a
permanent prosperity. They cannot be laid on
the old plantation idea, and much of that which
is loosely called the New South to-day is farthest
from it—it is only the Old South readapting the
old plantation idea to a peasant labor and mineral
products. Said a mine owner of the far
till they get rid of that idea." A lasting
prosperity cannot be hoped for without a disseminated
wealth, and public social conditions
to keep it from congestion. But this dissemination
cannot be got save by a disseminated intelligence,
nor intelligence be disseminated without
a disseminated education, nor this be brought to
any high value, without liberty, responsibility,
private inequality, public equality, self-regard,
virtue, aspirations and their rewards.
Many ask if this new material development of
the South will not naturally be followed by adequate
public provisions for this dissemination by-and-by.
There is but one safe answer: That it
has never so happened in America. From our
furthest East to our furthest West, whenever a
community has established social order in the
idea of the elevation of the masses, it has planned,
not for education and liberty to follow from
wealth and intelligence, but for wealth and intelligence
to follow from education and liberty; and
the community whose intelligent few do not
make the mass's elevation by public education
and equal public liberty the corner-stone of a
projected wealth, is not more likely to provide it
after wealth is achieved and mostly in their own
hands.
Our American public-school idea—American
at least in contrast with any dissimilar notion—
is that a provision for public education adequate
for the whole people, is not a benevolent concession
but a paying investment, constantly and
absolutely essential to confirm the safety of a
safe scheme of government. The maintenance
and growth of public education in the Southern
States, as first established principally under reconstruction
rule, sadly insufficient as it still is,
is mainly due to the partial triumph of this idea
in the minds of the Southern whites, and its eager
acceptance, with or without discordant conditions,
by the intelligent blacks, and in no region
is rightly attributable to an exceptionable increase
of wealth. Much less is it attributable, as is often
conjectured, to the influx of Northern capital and
capitalists, bringing Northern ideas with them.
It ought to go without saying, that immigration,
with or without capital, will always try to assimilate
itself to the state of society into which it
comes. Every impulse of commerce is not to
disturb any vexed issue until such issue throws
itself immediately across the path. It never purposely
molests a question of social order. So it
is in the South.
Certain public men in both North and South
have of late years made, with the kindest intentions,
make it appear that public society in the South
is doing, not all that should be done, but all it
can do, for the establishment of permanent safety
and harmony through the elevation of the lower
masses especially, in the matter of public education.
In truth, these facts do not prove the statement
they are called upon to prove, and do the
Southern States no kindness in lulling them to a
belief in it.[1] It is said, for instance, that certain
Southern States are now spending more annually
for public education, in proportion to their taxable
wealth, than certain Northern States noted
for the completeness of their public school systems.
Mississippi may thus be compared with
Massachusetts. But really the comparison is a
sad injustice to the Southern State, for a century
of public education has helped to make Massachusetts
so rich that she is able to spend annually
twenty dollars per head upon the children
in her public schools, while Mississippi, laying
a heavier tax, spends upon hers but two dollars
per head. Manifestly it is unfair to a State whose
public-school system is new to compare it with
any whose system is old. The public school
is over twice as great as that of ten States
of the New South, whose population is three and
a half times as large.[2] And yet one does not
need to go as far as the "new West" to find
States whose tax-payers spend far more for public
education than Southern communities thus
far see the wisdom or need of investing. With
one third more wealth than Virginia, and but
one-tenth the percentage of illiteracy, Iowa
spends over four times as much per year for
public instruction. With one-fourth less wealth
than Alabama, and but one-fourteenth the percentage
of illiteracy, Nebraska spends three and
a half times as much per year for public instruction.
With about the same wealth as North Carolina
and less than one-eighth the percentage of
illiteracy, Kansas spends over five times as much
per year for public education. If the comparison
be moved westward again into new regions, the
Territory of Dakota is seen making an "expenditure
in the year per capita on average attendance
in the public schools" of $25.77, being more
than the sum of the like per capita expenditures
by Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, North
Colorado it is about the same as in Dakota, while
in Nevada it is much greater and in Arizona twice
as large. As to comparative wealth, the taxable
wealth of Dakota in 1880, at least, was but one
two-thousandth part of that of the six States with
which it is compared.
Now what is the real truth in these facts?
That the full establishment of this American
public-school idea and of that elevation idea of
which it is an exponent, and which has had so
much to do toward making the people of the
Northern States the wealthiest people in the
world, waits in the South not mainly an increase
of wealth, but rather the simple consent of the
Southern white man to see society's best and
earliest safety, the quickest, greatest and most
lasting aggrandizement, in that public equality
of all men, that national citizenship, wider than
race and far wider than the lines of private
society, which makes the elevation of the masses,
by everything that tends to moral, æsthetical
and intellectual education, in school and out of
school, the most urgent and fruitful investment
of public wealth and trust. Just this sincere
confession. All the rest will follow. The black
man will not merely be tolerated in his civil and
political rights as now sometimes he is and
into, and encouraged and urged to a true understanding,
valuation and acceptance of every
public duty and responsibility of citizenship, according
to his actual personal ability to respond.
To effect this is not the herculean and dangerous
task it is sometimes said to be. The North
has 20,000,000 foreign immigrants to Americanize,
and only this way to do it. The South, for
all her drawbacks, has this comparative advantage;
that her lower mass, however ignorant
and debased, is as yet wholly American in its
notions of order and government. All that is
wanting is to more completely Americanize her
upper class, a class that is already ruling and
will still rule when the change is made; that
wants to rule wisely and prosperously, and that
has no conscious intention of being un-American.
Only this: To bring the men of best
blood and best brain in the South to-day, not to
a new and strange doctrine, but back to the
faith of their fathers. Let but this be done, and
there may be far less cry of Peace, Peace, than
now, but there will be a peace and a union between
the Nation's two great historic sections
such as they have not seen since Virginia's
Washington laid down his sword, and her Jefferson
his pen.
| THE NEGRO QUESTION. The Negro question | |