 | THE NEGRO QUESTION. The Negro question |  |
III.
Now, as to public government, the freedman,
whatever may be said of his mistakes, has never
shown an intentional preference for anarchy.
Had he such a bent he would have betrayed
something of it when our civil war offered as
wide an opportunity for its indulgence as any
millions in bondage ever had. He has shown at
least as prompt a choice for peace and order as
said to be his in inordinate degree are only such
as always go with degradation, and especially
with a degraded status; and when, in Reconstruction
years, he held power to make and unmake
laws, amid all his degradation, all the
efforts to confine him still to an arbitrary servile
status, and all his vicious special legislation, he
never removed the penalties from anything that
the world at large calls a crime. Neither did he
ever show any serious disposition to establish
race rule. The whole spirit of his emancipation
and enfranchisement, and his whole struggle,
was, and is, to put race rule of all sorts under
foot, and set up the common rule of all. The
fear of anarchy in the Southern States, then, is
only that perfectly natural and largely excusable
fear that besets the upper ranks of society everywhere,
and often successfully tempts them to
commit inequitable usurpations; and yet a fear
of which no amount of power or privilege ever
relieves them—the fear that the stupid, the destitute
and the vicious will combine against them
and rule by sheer weight of numbers.
Majority rule is an unfortunate term, in that it
falsely implies this very thing; whereas its mission
in human affairs is to remove precisely this
danger. In fact a minority always rules. At least
for is the power to choose by what, and what
kind of, a minority it shall be ruled. What that
choosing majority shall consist of, and hence the
wisdom and public safety of its choice, will
depend mainly upon the attitude of those who
hold, against the power of mere numbers, the
far greater powers of intelligence, of virtue and
of wealth. If these claim, by virtue of their
own self-estimate, an arbitrary right to rule and
say who shall rule, the lower elements of society
will be bound together by a just sense of grievance
and a well-grounded reciprocation of distrust;
the forced rule will continue only till it
can be overturned, and while it lasts will be
attended by largely uncounted but enormous
losses, moral and material, to all ranks of society.
But if the wise, the upright, the wealthy, command
the courage of our American fathers to
claim for all men a common political equality,
without rank, station or privilege, and give their
full and free adherence to government by the consent
of all to the rule of a minority empowered by
the choice of the majority frequently appealed to
without respect of persons, then ignorance, destitution
and vice will not combine to make the
choosing majority. They cannot. They carry
in themselves the very principle of disintegration.
and sore grievance, they have no lasting powers
of cohesion. The minority always may rule.
It need never rule by force if it will rule by
equity. This is the faith of our fathers of the
Revolution, and no community in America that
has built squarely and only upon it has found it
unwise or unsafe.
This is asserted with all the terrible misrule
of Reconstruction days in full remembrance.
For, first be it said again, that sad history came
not by a reign of equal rights and majority rule,
but through an attempt to establish them while
the greater part of the wealth and intelligence of
the region involved held out sincerely, steadfastly
and desperately against them, and for the
preservation of unequal privileges and class
domination. The Reconstruction party, even
with all its taxing, stealing and defrauding, and
with the upper ranks of society at war as fiercely
against its best principles as against its bad practices,
planted the whole South with public schools
for the poor and illiterate of both races, welcomed
and cherished the missionaries of higher education,
and, when it fell, left them still both systems,
with the master-class converted to a belief in
their use and necessity. The history of Reconstruction
dispassionately viewed, is a final, triumphant
to make it safe and good, in the South as elsewhere,
is consent to it and participation in it by
the law-abiding, intelligent portions of the people,
with one common freedom, in and between high
life and low, to combine, in civil matters, against
ignorance and vice, in high life and low, across,
yet without disturbing, the lines of race or any
other line of private rank or predilection.
There are hundreds of thousands in the Southern
States who, denying this, would promptly
concede it all in theory and in practice, but for
the second form of their fear: the belief that
there would result a confusion of the races in
private society, followed by intellectual and moral
debasement and by a mongrel posterity. Unless
this can be shown to be an empty fear, our
Southern problem cannot be solved.
| THE NEGRO QUESTION. The Negro question | |