 | THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FOR
PURE GOVERNMENT. The Negro question |  |
VII.
True, we hear voices through the Southern
press crying new schemes for avoiding the simple
necessities of free government: the establishment
of a Negro Territory; a disfranchisement
of over half the Negroes by an educational
qualification at the polls; their total disfranchisement
by the repeal of the Fourteenth Amendment;
and in the very Senate a proposition to
deport the Negro to Africa at the national
expense, although at the same time and all over
the South, men in the same party from which
the project comes are stating with new frankness
their old doctrine, that though the country shall
never belong to the Negro, the Negro simply
shall belong to the country. But the very forlornness
of these absurd projects, built, themselves,
on open confessions that the past is a
failure and that something different must be done
with all speed, is a final admission that the party
pledged to solve the Negro Question without
consulting the Negro, feels that it must change
its policy or drop from under the nation's misplaced
hopes.
The press of the nation almost with one voice
rejects the scheme of a Negro territory. We
have more Negro territories now than either
and Indian deportations and reservations
have only wronged the savage, dishonored civilization,
complicated the whole Indian question,
and still hold it over us in costly and bloody suspense
until we shall muster humanity and common
sense enough to do unto him as we would
that our Southern brother would do unto the
Negro—cease condescension, bounty, and fraud,
and show mercy, justice and human fraternity.
The proposition to repeal the Fourteenth
Amendment deserves as little respect and attention
as it is receiving. It would disfranchise
thousands of taxpayers and thousands of men
able to read and write, still leaving the franchise
with hundreds of thousands of total illiterates
paying no direct taxes. It would simply reestablish
a system of irrational race discrimination.
It is well for the honor of the good State
of Mississippi, where the proposition has arisen,
that along with it comes word that at last an
attempt has been made, with some hope of
permanent success, to abolish in that State the
Convict Lease System.
As to the South Carolina scheme to limit the
suffrage by an educational qualification, it seems
to have died at birth, smothered under the evident
fact that a State, nearly half of whose people
of school age are without public provision against
illiteracy, has no reason, as it has no right, to
hope for an honest vote to disfranchise the illiterate.
Well for it that there is no such hope. For no
people ever escapes the incubus of a large illiteracy
in its poorer classes except by providing a
system of public education ample for the whole
people; the demand for ample free education is
created not by the contraction, but by the enlargement,
of the right of suffrage. The most
suicidal thing a party of free education can do is
to favor an educational qualification of the suffrage
before free education is amply supplied; for
whenever the issue is between adequate and
inadequate provision the vote that tips the scale
aright is just the bugbear itself—the illiterate
man's vote.
I hold that to prove the moral wrong of a
thing is to prove just so far its practical worthlessness.
To disfranchise the illiterate is to make
the most defenceless part of a community more
defenceless still. There is, I know, an educational
qualification in Massachusetts, and there
are a few illiterates. But there is no illiterate
class, and the educational qualification here is
not mainly for the protection of the suffrage, but
a correctional punishment for inexcusable ignorance.
almost as much overstated as its economic loss
has been overlooked. Far the greatest danger
in a wide illiteracy is to the illiterate themselves,
and though there are reciprocal risks, the supreme
urgency for its removal is not their dangerousness
to the more fortunate and powerful classes,
but the dangerousness of those classes to them.
As for the Australian ballot system, wherever in
this great union of States it goes for the better
liberty of every honest voter, learned or ignorant,
rich or poor, and for the confusion of bribers and
bribe-takers, learned or ignorant, rich or poor,
may God give it good speed. But, alas! for public
liberty, purity or safety, wherever it is put
into use to abridge the right of suffrage. No
people is justly ready for a system of elections
that prevents the voting of the illiterate man
until it has first provided full public facility for
every such man to learn to read and write, and
has then given him fair warning and time to
learn.
The last and, it seems to me, the most irrational
scheme of all, is that embodied in the
Bill for the deportation of Negroes to Africa.
The graceful arguments of its advocates in the
Senate have been fully, ably, brilliantly answered
in the Senate, and there is no excuse for more
and confessions of Abraham Lincoln have
been much used in this debate by excellent men,
who still repudiate and antagonize the conclusions
of his latest wisdom as they once did his
earlier. Let us in that wonderful spirit of more
than Washingtonian generosity which made him
impregnable and irresistible in debate, make
every supposition of the advocates of deportation
that can be supposed. Say the bill is found
to be not unconstitutional; that hundreds of
thousands of Negroes want to go, and that
Southern white men generally will let them go,
despite the palpable fact that the men most
likely to go will be, to use an old Southern word,
the most "likely" men, the men of health,
strength, self-reliance, enterprise, and despite,
again, the fact that no large emigration can take
place without carrying away millions of ready
money with it. Every 100,000 of European
emigrants to this country bring about $8,000,000
with them. The industrial value of 100,000 unskilled
laborers is $80,000,000. Is a white immigration
likely to make up such losses? Let us
suppose even this, although no one ever yet
heard of one set of emigrants pouring into a
country from which a poorer set was pouring
out; and although if they will come at all there
deporting a single Negro.
What shall we say? We say pass your bill;
get your ships ready; proclaim free passage to
whomsoever will accept it. Only let there be
no compulsion. As a whole nation we are
branded with our fathers' sin of bringing these
people here; let us not now add to that our own
sin of driving them back. Therefore, no compulsions.
But the land is full of compulsions. The
main argument for the Negroes going is that we
are making their stay here intolerable to them.
Before we buy or hire one ship, whether these
compulsions are in South Carolina or Mississippi,
Illinois, Ohio or Massachusetts, let the compulsions
be removed. When State and Federal governments
have exhausted, as neither has yet done,
all their powers of legislation and police to make
the Negro in America as free as the white man,
then, if the Negro cannot be content, and the people
choose to bear the expense of his deportation,
let the folly be charged to him, not us, of leaving
a free land to which better men were glad to
come and fill his voided place. But let this
nation never again open the Sacred Scriptures
on Independence Day, or on the birthday of
Washington lift up its hands to God, if, as matters
now stand, it provides money or ships for
own tyrannies. This is not the way to settle, but
only to delay and hinder the settlement of the
Negro question. Emigrants have been pouring
out of Ireland for forty years, and their Government
has encouraged their going, and still Ireland
is full of Irish and the Irish Question is
not settled. Pass your Deportation Bill. Help
hundreds of thousands of able-bodied Negroes
to sail to Africa. But unless you remove the
already existing compulsions upon which you
are counting to drive them on shipboard, the
white immigrant will not come to take his place,
and the Negro and the Negro Question will be
with us still.
It is true, also, that the infatuation for buying
pure government at some other price than the
Negro's civil freedom and political coöperation
still maintains the iron rule of the one-party idea.
It is to this sentiment and policy that we owe
the enormities of Lynch-law, with its record of
crimes beyond all cavil darker and fouler than
all the robberies of Carpet-bag Governments.
For these murderous deeds are committed only
because the lovers of order and pure government
make no serious effort to prevent them, and
these make no serious effort only because to
punish these murderers would break the solid
dissent from its doctrines infamous and criminal,
the only party that ever has dared to declare
openly to this free nation that it must and will
rule, whether it represents a majority of the
people or not. Is not that the very germinating
and perpetuating principle of political corruption?
Under what strange skies, on what distant
planet, can we believe that such a tree will
put forth the flowers and fruit of pure government?
In Nashville lately a gentleman of the southern
political orthodoxy gave me this story as
strict fact: A traveller, similarly orthodox, sat
down at the large supper-table of an Arkansas
tavern. The landlord bearing two large steaming
covered vessels, identical in size and pattern,
one in each hand, passed from guest to guest
with always the same hospitable offer of choice:
"Tea or Coffee?" "Tea or Coffee." "Coffee,"
said one. He poured coffee. "Coffee," said a
second. He poured coffee. "Coffee," said a
third, fourth and fifth. Again once, twice,
thrice, the tea-pot was deferentially drawn back
and the coffee-pot poured forth its strong, black
flood. So our traveller was reached. "Tea or
coffee?" "Tea." The landlord drew back
bristling, but the next instant was gracious
forward and poured from it the same hot, rank
"Rio" that he had been pouring from the
other pot, saying as he poured, "tea! in Arkansas!
No sir. In Arkansas you take coffee
or you take nothing." Our traveller drank
it without milk. It was, after all, simply his
own one-party idea and he had to swallow it.
| THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FOR
PURE GOVERNMENT. The Negro question | |