 | THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FOR
PURE GOVERNMENT. The Negro question |  |
II.
There is a part of our country, however, where
conditions are seemingly so peculiar and exceptional
that to innumerable minds both there and
throughout the nation, no theorizing on the relations
and necessities of pure and free government
can be made to appear practicably applicable.
We must grapple with the very facts in this
specific case, or else our theorizings are of no
use to those who, in the North or South, stand
distraught between two seemingly antagonistic
necessities, the one for pure, the other for free,
governments in our Southern States.
Even the initial axiom, that most men want
good government, is denied. Most white men,
yes; but here is the whole lower mass made up
of an inferior race which, we are assured, neither
knows nor cares anything about good government.
So ignorant, unintelligent, and base are
they, it is said, that to give them any larger freedom
than they are now allowed would only be
to make them easily and certainly the tools of
the most vicious misleaders of popular cupidity,
vanity and passion. To offer by genuine proffers
of fuller civil freedom to buy their cooperation
for measures looking to purer government, it is
maintained, would make them drunk with self-importance,
that the present ruling class is not strong and
pure enough to establish and maintain pure
government without the aid of the ruled. To
give the Negro the same full civil and political
freedom that the white man has, would, they
say, be fatal, because in that case white men
would never divide on questions of public policy,
lest the blacks, if not already united, should at
once unite, and under corrupt leaders seize the
reins of power.
Now to these things what can we answer?
Let us take them seriatim. First, then, as to
the statement that virtually the whole mass of
Negroes in the South care nothing for good
government, we say, that to establish such a vast
exception to so general a truth requires exhaustive
proofs. Where are they? Reconstruction
times do not furnish them. They may show
that the Reconstruction party, white and Negro,
constantly and formidably opposed by a party
exclusively white and hostile to the equal civil
liberties of whites and Negroes, did not achieve,
may be did not often earnestly try to achieve,
purity in government. But they do not prove
that the Negroes would not have been well
pleased to join pure government with free. They
only prove our premise, that there can be no
of free government keeps classes or
parties occupied with one another's actual or
possible aggressions. The great majority of the
Negroes are illiterate, improvident, reckless and
degraded. But so is the Irish peasant. So is
the Russian serf. The fact is proof presumptive
that Irish, Russian, or Negro—they are far more
concerned for a better freedom, whether economic,
civil or political, than for pure government;
but not that pure government is something
they would rather not have.
How could it be? Tens of thousands of them
own the land they till, the houses they live in.
With scarcely a very rich man among them, they
own to-day certainly not less than $100,000,000,
some say $160,000,000 worth of taxable wealth.
Over 1,000,000 of their children, half their total
school population, are enrolled in the public
schools, where their average daily attendance is
more than 600,000. Their principal industry is
agriculture, the most peaceable and peace-promoting
labor of the hand known to mankind.
Their crops in the year 1889, unless high journalistic
authority is in error, aggregated the value
of $900,000,000. Is it to be believed that the
whole mass, or any preponderating fraction of
such a people as this is so supinely indifferent to,
pure over corrupt government, that they prefer
the corrupt, other things being equal? And are
we to credit this statement on the bare, emotional
declaration of communities that a few
years ago—claiming to be the only people who
are in a position to understand the Negro—honestly
believed he would not earn his bread in a
state of freedom, and was mentally incapable of
receiving an ordinary common school education?
Must we go even further and believe that none
of them, not even a moderate number, care
enough for the purification of the governments
over them to vote for pure measures and good
rulers, even if these should boldly declare for a
removal of unjust encroachments upon their
public rights and liberties? Hundreds of thousands
of them take pains—not a few take risks—
to vote, voting far oftener for white men than
for colored. Do these prefer corrupt rulers and
measures, and for mere corruption's sake? The
answer is familiar. Their leaders, it is said, do
actually want corruption for its own sake, to
fatten on it, and in vast solid masses the great
black herd blindly follows these leaders. But
wherein lies the strange power of these leaders?
In consanguinity? They are oftener white than
colored. In promises of official patronage?
among the leaders. How then? By the literal
buying of the ballots? Ballot buying may turn
the fortune of a close election, but it can never
make whole vast masses of people vote all one
way. How then do they lead them? They lead
them by means that prevail, not because these
masses are of Negro race, nor because they are
ignorant and degraded, but because they are
human; by means of promises of deliverance
from oppressive or offensive public conditions,
from which they see other men profitably free,
and long themselves to be delivered. That men
should be willing to follow whoever is for their
induction into all and only the full measure of
American freedom, and count that their supreme
necessity, is the poorest proof in the world that
they are all opposed to pure government. It is
rarely, if ever, said that the Negroes have no
patriotism. But patriotism inevitably implies
some worthy measure of desire for pure government.
Can any one suppose there is no patriotism
anywhere among 8,000,000 of people who
cannot be worried out of the country of their
birth? The assertion that the whole mass of
Negroes in the South is inimical to pure government,
is emotional, not rational.
| THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FOR
PURE GOVERNMENT. The Negro question | |