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It is not a question of the negroes' right to rule. It is simply a question of their right to choose rulers; and as in reconstruction days they selected more white men for office than men of their own race, they would probably do so now."

But as Mr. Cable is just now out of favor at the South, I will quote another and a very high authority on Southern questions, Dr. J. L. M. Curry of Richmond, late Minister to Spain, and now Administrator of the Peabody Fund for Education at the South, who, if he has not so much of the ardor of youth, has the wisdom of age, and who, in an address before the Legislature of Georgia, used these plain words:

"I want to say to you in perfect frankness, that the man who thinks the negro problem has been settled, is either a fanatic or a fool. I stand aghast at the problem. I don't believe civilization ever encountered one of greater magnitude. It casts a dark shadow over your churches, your government, and your future. It is a great problem, which will tax your energies. Georgia was once Shermanized. Georgia, with the South Africanized, as it may be, would be a thousand times worse than Shermanized.

"But you may make the outlook as black as possible, and yet ignorance and poverty are not remedies for the situation. Better have the negroes educated; better that they should have intelligent preachers, intelligent industry, improved homes. Which is better-to brutalize and pauperize, or humanize, civilize, and Christianize? I leave it to you to settle the problem.

"There are people who say this ought to be a white man's government. I am not prepared to contest that proposition; -but I beg you to remember that the negroes-and I am glad of it-have friends at the North who are befriending them. But they are not coming to your relief. You must help yourselves, if you are helped at all.

"I know that the indications are prophetic of a race conflict. God save us from it! I know that dark shadows of the future are flung across our pathway. It is idle to shut our eyes. It is better to meet such dangers half way, even though they come no further. There is nothing per se in a white skin unless behind that skin lie the hereditary experiences of centu

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A CATASTROPHE POSTPONED.

ries of good government. I know that the negro of Africa has no invention, no discovery, no law, no literature, no government, no civilization. Why? If you put the Caucasian under the same environment, and keep him there ten or twenty centuries, there will be no invention, no science, no discovery, no history, no civilization, among Caucasians. Your ancestors and mine were once pagans and cannibals. We have become what we are, not by virtue of a white skin, but by improving government and good laws. Let the negro children get an education where yours do not let the negro be superior to you in culture and property-and you will have a black man's government. Improvement, cultivation, education, is the secret, the condition and guarantee, of race supremacy. I shall astonish you, perhaps, by saying that if the negro developes and becomes in culture, property, and civilization superior to the white man, the negro ought to rule. You are to see to it that he does not become so. The responsibility is with you."

This puts things in rather a different light. It lays the responsibility of the superiority of the negro race (if that should ever come) upon the whites themselves; while it fixes the period so far away that it would need an inspired prophet to tell the date of its coming. As the time at which a race is attaining maturity is put at "ten or twenty centuries," I think our Southern friends may safely postpone the catastrophe of negro domination to the next generation!

CHAPTER XIV.

OLD MASTERS CARING FOR THEIR OLD SLAVES.

"You people of the North do not know the negro. You draw a fancy sketch, as Mrs. Stowe did in her Uncle Tom's Cabin, and fall in love with the picture of your imagination. But that is not the real African. The negro, pure and simple-that is, apart from all romantic associations—is not an attractive creature. He is gross in body and dull in mind. He may do well enough as a laborer in the lowest kinds of work, when guided by the superior intelligence of the white man; but if you seek for anything higher than that, you will not find it. There is no fire in his eye, and no thought in his brain. If you wish to make a man of him, you must put a soul inside of his body. And his moral state is as low as his intellectual. In short, he is very far down in the scale of humanity: poor and ignorant; low of origin, and bad by nature; debased by every vice, and capable of every crime!"

Such are the colors, blacker than the skin he wears, in which some would paint the negro of the South. As these harsh words grate upon the ear of the stranger, he is tempted to reply in terms equally emphatic. But it is

180

THE NEGRO IN THE DARKEST COLORS.

better to keep silence, at least until the speaker is done. Let the blast blow itself out: it is not till the storm is past that there is any chance to hear the still, small voice of reason and of truth. Even then I should begin my protest very modestly by confessing that this wholesale. depreciation has some faint shadow of truth, just enough to give it plausibility. You say that the negro is "poor" -it is true; that he is "ignorant"-it is true; that he is "low of origin"-that also is true (although it is nothing new in human development—we can even trace back our own "great race" to a period at which it began its process of evolution at the lowest point); and if he were "bad by nature," that would be only the natural result of conditions so unfavorable. That he should be "debased by every vice, and capable of every crime," is what could be said with equal truth of thousands in all our great cities, who are born and bred under conditions equally unfavorable to virtue. I only wonder that the negro is what he is, when I think whence he came, and through what ages of suffering he has passed.

If you set out to paint him as black as you can, the materials are at hand. You may treat him as a naturalist would treat a singular variety of the human species, and set him down in your scientific catalogue as a freak of nature. You may confirm your theory by tracing his history beginning far back in the wilds of Africa, and seeing him come out of the slime and ooze of the jungle, with his very blood poisoned by malarious swamps, and his imagination haunted by murky superstitions which reflect the gloom of the forest. Traces of such an origin you may find in him still, in which he bears a resemblance to his fathers, who offered human sacrifices. I admit it all that he is the dark child of a Dark Continent, with the stamp of oppression, if not of degradation, on his

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brow. But is that any justification of wrong? However low and degraded he may be,

"A man's a man for a' that";

and the fact that he is poor and ignorant, is no reason why we should take advantage of him, to cheat him, or rob him, or oppress him. On the contrary, his very helplessness appeals to the generosity of the stronger race to reach out its powerful arm to lift him up.

And here, if I were replying to one who had pronounced this sweeping judgment on the whole African race, I would add one parting word: "If this be the result of your experience with your negroes, did it never occur to you as just possible that you were partly responsible for their intellectual and moral degradation? Good masters make good servants: why is it that yours have turned out so badly? In condemning them, you condemn yourself; and the best, indeed the only, atonement you can make for your neglect in the past, is to befriend and help them in the future."

But I will not trust myself to enter into an argument with men who in the days of their power were violent and cruel, and whose attitude towards their former dependents is still that of hatred and contempt. Nor will I be so unjust as to reckon all old masters with them. In the days of slavery slaveholders were like other men; having among them a mixture of good and bad. There were all sorts of masters as there were all sorts of men. There were hard masters, and there were kind masters: and it would not be fair that one class should suffer for the sins of the other.

Nor have their characters changed with their condition. The old master who was hard and selfish, will be hard and selfish still. But from such a poor example, I