 | THE NEGRO QUESTION. The Negro question |  |
V.
Thus we see that, so far from a complete emancipation
of the freedman bringing those results
in the Southern States which the white people
there so justly abhor, but so needlessly fear, it is
the only safe and effectual preventive of those
results, and final cure of a state of inflammation
which nothing but the remaining vestiges of an
incompletely abolished slavery perpetuates. The
abolition of the present stage of siege rests with
the Southern white man. He can abolish it, if
he will, with safety and at once. The results
will not be the return of Reconstruction days,
nor the incoming of any sort of black rule, nor
the supremacy of the lower mass—either white,
black or mixed; nor the confusion of ranks and
races in private society; nor the thronging of
black children into white public schools, which
never happened even in the worst Reconstruction
days; nor any attendance at all of colored
children in white schools or of white in colored,
save where exclusion would work needless hardship;
nor any new necessity to teach children—
what they already know so well—that the public
school relation is not a private social relation;
nor any greater or less necessity for parents to
oversee their children's choice of companions in
playmating of white and colored children
as there was in the days of slavery; nor any
new obstruction of civil or criminal justice; nor
any need of submitting to any sort of offensive
contact from a colored person, that it would be
right to resent if he were white. But seven dark
American-born millions would find themselves
freed from their constant liability to public, legalized
indignity. They would find themselves, for
the first time in their history, holding a patent,
with the seal of public approval, for all the aspirations
of citizenship and all the public rewards
of virtue and intelligence. Not merely would
their million voters find themselves admitted to,
and faithfully counted at, the polls—whether
they are already or not is not here discussed—
but they would find themselves, as never before,
at liberty to choose between political parties.
These are some of the good—and there need be
no ill—changes that will come whenever a majority
of the Southern whites are willing to vote
for them.
There is a vague hope, much commoner in
the North than in the South, that somehow, if
everybody will sit still, "time" will bring these
changes. A large mercantile element, especially,
would have the South "let politics alone." It is
politics alone is doomed. There are things that
mere time can do, but only vigorous agitation
can be trusted to change the fundamental convictions
on which a people has built society. Time
may do it at last, but it is likely to make bloody
work of it. For either foundation idea on which
society may build must, if let alone, multiply
upon itself. The elevation idea brings safety,
and safety constantly commends and intensifies
itself and the elevation idea. The subjugation
idea brings danger, and the sense of danger constantly
intensifies the subjugation idea. Time
may be counted on for such lighter things as the
removal of animosities and suspicions, and this
in our Nation's case it has done. Neither North
nor South now holds, or suspects the other of
holding, any grudge for the late war. But trusting
time to do more than this is but trusting to
luck, and trusting to luck is a crime.
What is luck doing? Here is the exclusive
white party in the Southern States calling itself,
and itself only, "The South," praying the Nation
to hold off, not merely its interference, but its
counsel—even its notice—while it, not removes,
but refines, polishes, decorates and disguises to
its own and the Nation's eyes, this corner-stone
of all its own and the South's, the whole South's
"understand the negro," when, in fact, itself has
had to correct more, and more radical mistakes
about the negro since the war than all the Nation
beside; failing still, more than twenty years since
Reconstruction began and more than ten since
its era closed, to offer any definition of the freedman's
needs and desires which he can accept;
making daily statements of his preferences which
the one hundred newspapers published for his
patronage, and by himself, daily and unanimously
repudiate; trying to settle affairs on the one only
false principle of public social order that keeps
them unsettled; proposing to settle upon a sine
qua non that shuts out of its councils the whole
opposite side of the only matter in question;
and holding out for a settlement which, whether
effected or not, can but perpetuate a disturbance
of inter-state equality fatal to the Nation's peace
—a settlement which is no more than a refusal
to settle at all.
Meanwhile, over a million American citizens,
with their wives and children, suffer a suspension
of their full citizenship, and are virtually subjects
and not citizens, peasants instead of freemen.
They cannot seize their rights by force, and the
Nation would never allow it if they could. But
they are learning one of the worst lessons class
pre-occupation in their rights as a class, and
inattention to the general affairs of their communities,
their States and the Nation. Meanwhile,
too, the present one-sided effort at settlement
by subjugation is not only debasing to the
under mass, but corrupting to the upper. For
it teaches these to set aside questions of right
and wrong for questions of expediency; to wink
at and at times to defend and turn to account
evasions, even bold infractions, of their own laws,
when done to preserve arbitrary class domination;
to vote confessedly for bad men and measures
as against better, rather than jeopardize the
white man's solid party and exclusive power; to
regard virtue and intelligence, vice and ignorance,
as going by race, and to extenuate and
let go unprosecuted the most frightful crimes
against the under class, lest that class, being
avenged, should gather a boldness inconsistent
with its arbitrarily fixed status. Such results as
these are contrary to our own and to all good
government.
| THE NEGRO QUESTION. The Negro question | |