 | THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FOR
PURE GOVERNMENT. The Negro question |  |
V.
Another great progressive measure which
accompanied and still accompanies the policy
of pure-government-first, though it, too, began
under the opposite régime, was one which no
policy save absolute anarchy can ever resent.
This was the development of natural resources,
the multiplication of industries, the increase of
material wealth. The party that represented
the bulk of society's landed and personal
wealth, inspired by the only policy it could
believe to be honorable or safe, entered into
entirely new relations to the public credit of
their towns, counties and States, and gave the
energy of a new hope to the making of private
fortunes. The successes of this movement have
been positively brilliant. The unadorned true
stories of Anniston and Chattanooga and Birmingham,
of Memphis and Nashville, and Atlanta
they are inspiring, a theme lingered upon by
Northern tongues and a Northern press with a
warmth that indicates a proper recognition of the
North's own great gain in the South's prosperity.
Nevertheless, the very fullness and renown of this
success has wrought two grave errors. A sagacious
and enterprising few may get rich in any
country blessed with natural resources; but no
country ever won or can win a large and permanent
prosperity save by the prosperity of its poor.
No country can ever build a sound prosperity
while it tolerates conditions that keep a large
lower mass on low wages and long hours. This
is the word, not of politicians alone, but of
economists and financiers, and this is a fact which
the sunburst of a sudden great material development
in many regions of the South has hidden in
deep shadow. That Southern men, still so largely
under the stress of Southern traditions, should
overlook this is largely natural and excusable;
but that the North, too, with its so wide and
fortunate experience of better conditions, should
not see and point out the oversight seems strange.
It may be doubted that there is a high-school
between Boston and Denver whose pupils are
not taught that the greatest source of the decay
of nations is the congestion of wealth and degradation
have yet been found in any scheme of public
society, but the search for them is the great
quest of the age, and the safety, peace and prosperity
of Europe, the Americas, and the great
Australasian colonies is mainly due to the adoption
of such noble, though incomplete, offsets
as have been found. These are equal rights and
protection to opposing parties, free schools for
the whole people, manhood suffrage, and a pure,
free ballot.
Such is one of the two great errors that have
fastened themselves upon the otherwise entirely
admirable material development of the "New
South." The other is twin to it. It is that this
material development is not only economically
sound, but that it has also a political potentiality,
and can of itself solve, and is solving, the Southern
problem. Where is its solution? The claim is
absurd. It is simply fantastical to expect a mere
aggregation of private movements for the building
of private fortunes to unravel the snarled
thread of civil and political entanglements in a
commonwealth. It may in self-defence rally to
the support of public financial credit; but farther
it is not in its nature to go. What has this one
done? We are reminded that "in the South
there are Negro lawyers, teachers, editors, dentists,
and multiplying with the increasing ability of
their race to support them." But whence
came they? Nine-tenths of those teachers and
preachers and ninety-nine hundredths of those
lawyers, editors, dentists and doctors have got
their professions in colleges built and sustained by
Northern money, and taught by Northern missionary
teachers whom the great bulk of this New
South rewards with social ostracism. They work
in peace. But what a peace! A peace bought by
silent endurance of a legalized system of arrogant
incivilities that make them, in almost every public
place, conspicuous objects of a public disdain
which is not always even silent. What single
one of those tyrannous and vulgar intrusions
of private social selection into purely public
places, has this New South of iron and coal
mines, and new railways and cotton mills, and
oil-presses removed? Not one! From the ennobling
relaxations of the drama, the opera, the
oratorio, the orchestral symphony and sonata;
from the edifying diversions of the popular lecture,
the picture gallery, and even the sacred
service and sermon of the popular preacher;
from the refining comforts of the first-class railway
coach and the public restaurant; from the
character making labors, disciplines and rewards
and divinity school, supported by Southern
money and attended by white youth; and from
the popular respect paid to those who enjoy these
things and withheld from those to whom they
are forbidden, these "Negro lawyers, teachers,
editors, dentists, doctors and preachers, working
in peace and multiplying with the increasing
ability of their race to support them," are shut
out by rules sustained by State legislation,
which refuses to share even the Decalogue on
equal terms with the Negro, but annexes to it
an eleventh and "colored" commandment—
"Thou shalt try to become a gentleman." Where
has this New South movement opened to colored
people, paying taxes or not, professionally educated
or not, the privileges of a single public
library?
Our attention is challenged to $900,000,000
worth of crops raised in the South last year.
We are not told that the producers of this vast
abundance enjoy in one full and common measure
all the public rights declared to be theirs by
the national Constitution. That falsehood so
long believed by so many even of those who
uttered it in North and South, is utterly worn
out. But we are asked if we can doubt that
such a product came from peaceful fields and
can! Did the vast wheat crops of ancient
Egypt come from peaceful fields and a well-contented
husbandry? Are her pyramids the product
of duly remunerated labor? Did the great
crop of 1860—raised when the Negroes were
half their present numbers—come from men
satisfied with their wages? From the eastern
borders of Russia, a huge wave of material development
is at present rolling eastward across
Siberia with an energy and speed until lately
supposed by Americans to be found only in our
own great, free West. The commerce of the
Volga rivals that of the Mississippi. The volume
of trade of the city of Nizhni Novogorod
rose from some $60,000,000 in 1868 to about
$120,000,000 in 1881. A great through Siberian
railway, to be completed in from three to six
years, is now in various stages of survey and construction,
whose trunk line alone will stretch
eastward to the Japan Sea, about 5000 miles beyond
Moscow. It runs already through millions
of acres of fruitful fields tilled by an industrious
peasantry. But is Siberia a free country? Spain
is a land of harvest and song. Have the laborers
in her vineyards and olive-yards a freedom that
ought to satisfy a citizen of the United States?
Has America any class of society in which we
or a Spanish measure of civil or political
liberty? There is a contentment which is more
intolerable to the order and interest of a free
country like ours, than a discontent that leaves
the ripened grain unharvested to guard the
rights of free man. Which of the two has this
industrial development, or any other outcome of
the policy of pure government first, cherished
and stimulated? For twelve years it has persuaded
an apparent majority of the nation to
leave to it the fitting of the Negro for citizenship,
even refusing national aid to lift the burden of
public education it counts insupportable; yet to
this day it has made not the slightest provision
for admitting any Negro to the full measure of
any civil or political right by virtue of acquired
fitness. The New Orleans Times-Democrat of
Nov. 5th, says, "The race issue is a national antagonism
. . . and has nothing whatever to do
with education or the lack of education. To
the Negro varnished with such learning as he is
capable of acquiring, there is even a more pronounced
antipathy than to the Negro of the
cotton-field and kitchen." "The schools," says
the Atlanta Constitution barely six months ago,
"have been in active operation for over twenty-five
years, and it is estimated that several hundred
read and write. The difficulties, however, have
increased with the progress of education, and are
now more difficult than they ever were before. . . .
Not the slightest advancement toward an adjustment
of the two races on political grounds has
been made anywhere, and even the direction of
such advance is a matter of speculation." In
plain words, after twelve years of wandering
through a night of false political traditions, these
largely sincere guides to pure government first
and free government afterwards, acknowledge at
last that they are lost in the woods under a starless
sky.
| THE SOUTHERN STRUGGLE FOR
PURE GOVERNMENT. The Negro question | |