University of Virginia Library

IV.

Washington, bidding a last farewell to public
office, and uttering his parental warnings to the
people, pronounced, not largeness or universality
of freedom, nor illiteracy, nor unintelligence, but
a rankness of party spirit the worst enemy of
popular government. If he could characterize
"the alternate domination of one faction over
another" as "itself a frightful despotism," what
would he have said of an arbitrarily permanent
domination of one party over another and a culmination
of party spirit into the One-Party idea;
the idea that a certain belief and policy are so
entirely, surely and exclusively right that men
who do not assent to them are incendiary, vile,
outrageous, and not morally entitled to an equal
liberty and security under the laws with those
from whom they dissent? A State ruled by
such a sentiment is no longer under a free
government. A people seeking pure government
under that idea are trifling with destiny
and hurrying towards disaster, and in simple

humanity, if not in their own involved interest,
those who see their error ought to stop them if
there is a way to do it consistent with righteous
law.

Is there any such way? Let us look at the
situation. The Reconstruction governments in
the South; while still holding, not for Negro
domination, which they never held for, but for
equal free government for all, lost in large measure
the nation's respect and good-will by an
acute moral and financial defalcation. They were
allowed to be overturned by measures often
severely revolutionary, on the assurance of their
opponents to the nation and to the world that
their only desire and design was pure government,
and that they were more than willing and
amply able to furnish it at once and follow it
closely with the amplest measure of free government
contemplated in the Amendments to the
Constitution. Some Southern men may deny
that this was the understanding on which their
party was allowed to retake the monopoly of its
State governments. The question is not important,
for it is not proposed here to mourn the
extinction of the Reconstruction governments
as one mourns the death of the righteous, nor
to lay upon the men who destroyed them the
whole blame of the error committed. Whatever

one or another's understanding was, it cannot
for a moment be denied that this was the hope
and expectation of the great North and West.
The blame—if blame were worthy of count—
was on those—whether in North or South, in
the Republican, or Democratic, or any third or
fourth party—who comforted themselves with
the delusion that a policy of pure government
first, free government afterward, could produce
either free or pure government. Seeing at last
that this delusion is what was and is to blame,
the question who was to blame—where no side
was wrong by choice—is a question we may
sink, with its answer, forever beneath the sea
of oblivion.

Through twelve weary and distressful years
this fallacy has been given as fair a trial as anything
ever had, and to-day more manifestly than
ever before it is weighed in the balances and found
wanting. For years the show and promise of
better things joined themselves with a faith in
the all-healing power of time, peace and material
prosperity, to soothe the nation's solicitude and
sustain its hope.

The Southern State governments had hardly
changed hands, when their financial credit began
to rise with a buoyancy which proved—if such
proof had been needed—that it was only the

governments repudiated and antagonized by the
wealth-holding portion of the people that were
bankrupt, and, whether their action was justifiable
or not, it was nearer the truth to say
the people had bankrupted the governments
than that the governments had bankrupted the
people.

For a long time the sincerity and earnest diligence
of the more intelligent and liberal wing
of the Southern Conservatives bent itself to a
most commendable progressive measure; one
which had already been irrevocably begun under
the Reconstruction governments as an indispensable
adjunct to the extension of civil or political
freedom. This measure was the expansion
of the public school system, a system which,
wherever it has found large establishment—in
America, England, or elsewhere—has always
followed, not produced, the extension of the suffrage.
This measure was, and is, practicable
even under the rule of the One-Party idea,
because, while public education is the own child
of the scheme of free government first, it is
almost the only important factor of that scheme
which does not obviously antagonize the opposite
policy. And yet this opposite policy of pure
government first is not, and by nature cannot be,
the zealous promoter of the free school system

that a free government policy is sure to be. A
policy of freedom first inevitably precipitates and
perpetuates an immediate and imperative exigency
which can be met only by an entirely
ample provision for the whole people's education.
The policy of pure government first, assuming
that ignorance and impurity are much the
same thing, promises that ignorance shall therefore
not participate in government, and casting
about, now on the right hand and now on the
left, for expedients to prevent it, accepts free
schools as one, but with a divided credence and
a tame enthusiasm. This is why the Southern
States to-day have only schools enough for half
their school population, and believe they are
bearing as heavy a burden of school tax as any
people of equal means can, while the States and
territories of the West, under the ideas of free government
first and of two parties of equal rights,
are taxing themselves far heavier, even where
they have less wealth. The example of some of
these Western communities is complete proof
that the only sense in which it can be said that
the South is doing all it can for public education
is that Southern State legislators may be levying
as heavy a school tax as they can reasonably hope
to collect from a people lulled by the assurances
and methods of a policy of pure government
first.[1] It has been much reiterated in the South
and re-echoed in the North that the task of
public education in the Southern States suffers
a unique and unparalleled drawback in the fact
that while the Negroes enjoy nearly half the outlay
of the school funds, almost the entire amount
of those funds is paid by white taxpayers.
But assuming this to be quite true in every other
regard, there are two points in which it is not so.
First, the very alphabet of economics teaches us
that all taxes do not rest entirely on those from
whom they are collected, but that hundreds of
thousands of men who are too poor to be found
enumerated on the tax-rolls are for all that
reached by taxation through the medium of rents
and similar indirections. And, second, that the
fact quoted is far from being unique and unparalleled.
The only thing peculiar about it is
that this lower and unmoneyed mass, which, as
a matter of good investment in the whole public
interest, is in every State in the Union freely
accorded an enjoyment of the school funds out
of all proportion to its money contributions,
happens in the South to be a distinct race which
has been working for the last one hundred and
fifty years, but has been drawing wages only for
the last twenty-five.