Chapter FIVE: A Dip Into the Future

_And the individual withers,
And the world is more and more._

TENNYSON

The reader may find the foregoing discussion convincing; we think the unprejudiced reader will almost surely find it so, and yet he may not find it satisfactory. For he may urge that no solution has been propounded or foreshadowed for the problem, and that it is by no means enough merely to know what the problem is--its dangers, its difficulties, and its terrible threat. This objection is perfectly just. Up to this moment our sole concern has been to establish unshakably firm the central position, of the supreme and all-overshadowing importance of preserving the American-Caucasian blood pure and untainted and dedicated to the development of the highest humanity. But this accomplished, we have no disposition to shirk another task, to avoid another question, however delicate, disagreeable, or depressing. This question is: What has the future in store for the Negro? If social equality must be resolutely denied him forever, if he is to be treated as an outcast and a pariah because of his race and the weight of inheritance which he can never shake off from his shoulders, what hope remains? Where are the blessings of freedom? Is, then, emancipation but an apple of Sodom, turning to ashes on his lips? These are fearful questions, but we must not quail before them; we must confront them firmly, calmly, with eyes wide open to all the facts in the case, and with ears unclosed to all the teachings of history.

In the light of the foregoing, it is vain to appeal to Education. We know that many noble and excellent spirits expect wonders from this potent agency. As an educator ourself, we can have no interest or motive in unduly distrusting or minimizing its capabilities. The work that education may accomplish is undoubtedly great; and in spite of many discouraging disappointments, the task of educating the Negro will assuredly be bravely performed, in larger and larger measure, for all generations to come.

But it is a colossal error to suppose that race improvement, in the strictest sense of the term, can be wrought by education.[25] The reason is simple and easily understood: Race-improvement is organic; education is extraorganic. Any change or amelioration that affects the race, the stock, the blood, must be inherited; but education is not inherited, it is not inheritable. It must be renewed generation after generation in each individual. The Sisyphus-stone of culture is rolled with infinite toil up the steep ascent by the fathers; it thunders instantly back, and must be rolled up again with equal agony and bloody sweat by their children. All must start at the same centre of ignorance, and beat out a long and arduous path to the ever-widening circumference of the farthest knowledge. The son of the learned and the son of the unlearned have equal chance side by side in the race for learning. If the children of the cultured acquire more readily than their fellows, it is not because they have inherited parental culture, but only the inherited parental capacity for culture; not because their parents knew more, but because they had more inborn power to know. Had circumstances doomed the savant to ignorance, his children would not have suffered in their ability to learn. Nay more, if devotion to intellectual pursuits has any influence at all on the native quality of offspring, as it may possibly have in extreme cases, it would seem to be more probably hurtful than helpful; for, by impairing nutrition of the germinal cells, excessive intellectual activity may induce impotence and sterility; and the fecundity of the very highly cultured seems to have suffered measurably in Europe, if not in the United States.[26]

[25] To this truth, see various testimonies, pp. 149, 154, _et
passim_.

[26] "The tendency of human multiplication is such that the most
highly cultured families tend to disappear ... Educational
influences ... are superficial as compared to Hereditary causes."

Franz Boas, Pro. Am. Ass. for the Adv. of Science, 1894, p. 325.

These propositions lie beyond possible contradiction. We need not raise the question of the general Weismannian theory of heredity; but we must recognize, as wholly undeniable, that the characters and qualities acquired by education are not in any degree inherited. The testimony of every-day observation is, on this point, so unanimous and so overwhelming that further insistence would seem superfluous. We may refer however, to the broad, patent, universally recognized fact that centuries of culture and most careful training have never been known to improve the breed, the stock, the inherent quality of any race of men or plants or domestic animals. Wherever any of these have been organically modified, it has been by other agencies, more especially by some form of natural or artificial selection. While the extra-organic development of civilization has gone on and still goes on, and apparently will go on apace indefinitely, under the guidance of science and invention, there is no evidence of any organic improvement in man in thousands of years, since the working of natural selection ceased to be progressive. The Mesopotamian of to-day is surely not the superior of his sculptured ancestors who observed and measured the precession of the equinoxes nearly 6,000 years ago. The Jew of to-day can boast nothing above the authors of the Psalms, and of Job, and of the prophecies of Isaiah. The modern Greek may or may not have _descended_ from Homer or Pericles; but, surely, he has not _ascended_ very far. It is needless to multiply illustrations. We believe firmly in the mutability of species; but the phenomenon of the permanence, even of sub-species and varieties, is far more universal and impressive.

Education, then, can do much; but its mission is to the present--it cannot stamp itself upon the future. The limits of its efficiency, though absolutely wide, are relatively narrow and are speedily reached. It plays with man the function of care and training, of cultivation and domestication, with the lower animals and with the products of the soil. By diligent tillage, by the spade, the hoe, the plough, by irrigation and fertilization, the planter may greatly increase the yield of his field or his orchard and even refine, in a measure, the quality of his fruit or his grain. By feeding, grooming, and the like, the horse-dealer may much improve the appearance and serviceability of his horses and may even add no little to their health, vigour, and value. It would be insanity in these men to neglect or despise such artificial helps and to trust their crops and their stock to grow and to take care of themselves. The farmer and the stockman know very well that only by the highest cultivation and the most watchful attention can they secure the best results in field or fold and maintain themselves in competition with wide-awake neighbours.

But they also know, not less certainly, that the maximal results of such instrumentalities are not far away but are hemmed within a very finite circle. Care and culture soon do their best and attain at least practically their _ne plus ultra_. For any progressive improvement, whether in animal or in plant, the agriculturist knows that he must look to the seed. This he must select with the utmost skill and caution--if he would even maintain the level of excellence already reached, if he would not have the "stock" lapse back to an ancient inferior average.

All this doctrine, which every one admits so instantly and unhesitatingly in its application to wheat, corn, and cotton; potatoes, apples, and oranges; grapes and melons; sheep, cattle, swine, and horses; bees, birds, and fishes--all holds with full force and with inconceivable significance when applied to men. Education is of exceeding importance. People that neglect it thereby doom themselves to hopeless subordination; they drop out of the race for the prizes of life; they surrender unconditionally to their rivals and commercial foes. Training and culture of the highest type are necessary to secure the realization of potentialities, to make the very best of the material offered at hand; necessary, not only now and here, but everywhere and all the time. Any neglect or indifference at this point must prove fatal. The husbandman dares not deprive his corn of a single "ploughing," or leave his herd one night unprotected from the wolf and the cold.

But it is the sheerest folly to expect of education the impossible--to dream that it can affect the blood, or transmute racial qualities, or smooth down the inequalities between individuals of the same breed, much less between the breeds themselves. Why, if education could lift the Negro to the Caucasian level, to what, pray, in the meantime would it lift the Caucasian himself? We repeat, and the repetition cannot be made too emphatic, there is no hope whatever of any organic improvement, of any race betterment of the Negro, from any or from all extra-organic agencies of education or religion or civilization. Let us, then, educate the negro, to make him a more useful and productive, a law-abiding and happier member of the community; but let us not hope too much from this education, if we would not be bitterly disappointed.

Immediately after the Civil War, in the halcyon days of reconstruction, the higher education was administered copiously to the Negro, in the honest belief that it was the catholicon for his ills; and universities for the Coloured man sprang up thick about us. Here, in New Orleans, there are at least three. A sadder and at the same time a more ludicrous sight we have never beheld than on the occasion of a call upon the President of one of these _soi-disant_ universities. We waited in the ante-room for the dismissal of his class in psychology. At last the bell tapped, and half a dozen Mulatto women, the whole class, emerged from the lecture-room of this distinguished scholar, whose name was not unknown in Europe. With a look of infinite despair, which not even his mistaken enthusiasm for humanity could quite chase away, the heavy-hearted lecturer followed and proceeded to conduct us through the building to his own residence. We passed through but one room where class exercises were in progress. An olive-coloured young man was at the board, trying to explain to a Mulatto woman, the only member of the class, the mysterious nature of a perpendicular. He appeared very earnest in his exposition, but unable to awaken any answering intelligence. To us, it seemed that the force of folly could no further go; and our commiseration for the highly cultured theologian, since released from his labours, who had so utterly forgotten the famous prohibition near the close of the Sermon on the Mount, was and remains even to this day painfully intense.

We hear less nowadays of the saving efficacy of Greek, Latin, and the Calculus,[27] but all the more of the imperative necessity for industrial training--the idea which Mr. Washington has championed so vigorously and to which Mr. Carnegie has lent the sanction of his munificence. Undoubtedly this notion, if not far wiser, is at least far more practicable. While the higher culture at "coloured universities," in the vast majority of cases, merely spoils a plough-hand or house-maid, industrial training, like that given at Tuskegee, may very reasonably be expected to raise sensibly the productive efficiency of the Negro, and to elevate the general standard of his life through the formation of valuable habits of manual dexterity, of accuracy, of conscientiousness, and of thrift--not to mention occasional great gain in scientific equipment, or even some artistic awakening. One cannot deny, then, that Mr. Washington has undertaken a great and beneficent work for his race--one in which some measurable success may reasonably be hoped for.

[27] But the Boston Negroid still swears by the classics and
logarithms, and regards the recent change of front as little less
than a betrayal and surrender. Similarly, but with recognition of
the merits of Mr. Washington's idea, Dubois, in his _The Souls of
Black Folk_, and the sympathetic reviewer in _The Nation_. In
this controversy we think that Dubois and Washington are both
right and both wrong; but the higher and deeper right, as well as
wrong, belongs to the former.

But our sympathy with such rational and well-directed efforts must not blind us to near-lying limitations, which no might of man can possibly remove. Let it be said, then, boldly that the Negro will not enter generally or in great numbers into the field of skilled labour--neither in the North nor in the South. It is, of course, not unattended with danger to venture into the realm of prophecy, but in this case the bases of prediction seem particularly broad and solid. We all know that skilled labour is daily growing more and more thoroughly organized. Rightly or wrongly, for weal or for woe, it regards capital, especially combined and organized capital, if not as its enemy, at least as its exploiter, prepared at every instant to make the very most of it--to assail it at any and every exposed point, to throttle it by any and every means, and to reduce it to serfdom. As over against the might of accumulated millions, the labourer cannot fail to perceive his utter impotence--he is not even a drop of a bucket. It is only in great numbers, in compact and readily wielded organizations, that the individual workman can count for anything whatever--can find any hope of escape from the veriest servitude. It is idle to suppose that, in many years to come, capital will not continue to mass itself into formidable aggregations, or that labour will cease to array itself in firmer and firmer unions and associations for self-protection and for maintenance or elevation of the standard of life, the minimum of subsistence.

Now, to such federations of labour, to such combinations for the commonweal, involving, as they so often do, the most determined self-renunciation, the most heroic self-sacrifice, even the Caucasian nature is by no means full-grown, and the Negroid is altogether unequal. There is not the slightest probability that the great labour organizations would, in general, think of admitting to their membership an element of such notable weakness as the Negro would certainly be. Such would be the case, even if other considerations were absent. But they are present. As inferiors, accustomed to a lower standard of life and more pliant to the demands of employers, the Negroes would present the same problem and the same menace as the Chinese--only in a more aggravated form. In their admission in large numbers to the ranks of skilled labour, this latter could not fail to see a terrible and instant threat of reduced wages, of lowered life, of baser thraldom. Race prejudice, if you call it so, would blaze out immediately, and with irresistible violence. It makes not the slightest difference whether labour would be right or wrong, justified or unjustified; it would be the instinct of self-preservation fanned suddenly into vehement flame, and nothing could withstand it. As an example in point, take the violent opposition offered a few years ago by the miners of Illinois to the importation of Negro labourers; take the recent practically total expulsion of Negroes, many of them peaceable and unoffending, from various towns, districts, and counties in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, and elsewhere. Consider all this as unreasonable, as outrageous--it matters not; it shows the temper of the American-Caucasian labourer, which will hardly tolerate the competition of his equals, and certainly not of any form of labour lower than his own. And in defence of what he regards as the most important and most sacred of all his rights, he will not hesitate for an instant at the adoption of means.[28]

[28] Hear the testimony of the ablest of Negroids, Professor W.
E. B. Dubois, in his admirable sociologic study, "The
Philadelphia Negro":

"How now has this exclusion been maintained? In some cases by the
actual inclusion of the word 'white' among qualifications for
entrance into certain trade unions. More often, however, by
leaving the matter of color entirely to local bodies, who make no
general rule, but invariably fail to admit a colored applicant
except under pressing circumstances. This is the most workable
system and is adopted by nearly all trade unions" (p. 128). "To
repeat, then, the real motives back of this exclusion are plain:
A large part is simple race prejudice, always strong in working
classes and intensified by the peculiar history of the Negro in
this country. Another part, and possibly a more potent part, is
the natural spirit of monopoly and the desire to keep up wages
... Moreover, in this there is one thoroughly justifiable
consideration that plays a great part: namely, the Negroes are
used to low wages--can live on them, and consequently would fight
less fiercely than most whites against reduction" (p. 129)....
"The Negroes of the city who have trades either give them up and
hire out as waiters and laborers, or they become job workmen and
floating hands, catching a bit of carpentering here or a little
brickwork or plastering there at reduced wages" (p. 130). It is
needless to accumulate such depositions.

Accordingly, we may confidently affirm that the experiment of Mr. Washington and his Northern multi-millionaire admirers, to solve the race problem by making of the Negro a skilled labourer, may indeed be magnificent, but, in any large measure, it cannot succeed. If at any time it seemed to promise any very wide success, it would rouse a race animosity, North and South, the like of which we have not yet beheld.

What fields of employment, then, remain open to the Negroid? We answer: Those he has thus far occupied, where there is no great organized competition of the Whites. The plantation and the countless forms of personal and occasional service are undoubtedly the regions where his abilities may be most naturally and most profitably employed. There, too, his better qualities, his endowments both of mind and of body, find fullest and most useful play. Small farming and retail dealing he may also do successfully; he may teach his kind, he may preach and plead and prescribe and publish for them. Superior artisans will show themselves here and there, and occasionally abilities of still higher order will crop out, especially among Mulattoes. If they will, these can find ample scope for their powers within the ranks of their own people. _Spartam tuam exorna_ will, in all such cases, be the counsel of friendly wisdom. Vain and foolish for even the superior Negroid to try to take the kingdom of heaven by force, to conquer a position among the Whites commensurate with his abilities as a Black. Better a big frog in a small puddle than a small frog in a big puddle. In general, whatever tends towards the sharp demarcation of the two races, towards the accurate delimitation of their spheres of activity and influence, will unquestionably make for peace, for prosperity, for mutual understanding, and for general contentment. On the other hand, every attempt to blur these boundaries, to wipe out natural distinctions, to mix immiscibles, must always issue in confusion, discord, failure, reciprocal injury, and final ruin.

We think that universal history attests the correctness of this observation. Wherever border lines have been closely drawn and distinctly recognized, whether between species or races, nations or tribes, castes, classes, or individuals, there have been found at least comparative quiet, harmony, mutual regard, and even happiness. But ill-defined borders have been everywhere and everywhen the fruitful source of strife, destruction, and misery. It was with a just feeling for this great truth that the profound Gnostic, Basilides, declared that in "the restoration of all things," at "the consummation of the aeons," every element would seek its own place and there abide forever, and not as if fishes were trying to pasture with sheep upon the mountains. A kindred sense of the fitness of things is revealed here in the South (and also in the North), where one will often hear it said that "I like a Negro--in his place." This does not mean, at least it need not mean, any harshness or over-haughtiness on the part of the speaker. We have often heard it on the lips of the kindest-hearted, the most humane in their treatment of the Negro. It is a just recognition of a patent, unmistakable, and incontrovertible fact, which no humanity can amend and no sophistry can disguise. The same feeling is frequently met with among sober-minded Blacks, who, much to one's surprise sometimes, are found to resent the ambitious attempts of their fellows, generally Mulattoes, to rise above their own race and align themselves with the Whites. We affirm then that drawing the colour line, firm and fast, between the races, first of all in social relations, and then by degrees in occupations also, is a natural process and a rational procedure, which makes equally for the welfare of both.

That this process will actually go on, though with many interruptions and much opposition, we cannot doubt. The latter will be due in the main to aspiring Mulattoes, to purblind philanthropists, and to designing politicians--all three the real enemies of the Negro and the disturbers of his peace.

In spite of them, however, the process will go on, and we shall see whether the Negro be able to maintain himself in the presence of the Caucasian, though in an inferior place, playing a subordinate role, within a protected but contracted sphere of activity. Certainly not a brilliant future that opens before him, at the very best. Even the highest success might seem humble enough, but is it sure that even such a lowly victory awaits him?

Here, again, prophecy would seem to be hazardous, but we cannot fail to notice and to record some significant tokens. Of these, one of the most notable is the marked tendency of the Negroes to herd together in the cities. It is well known that the problem of securing labour in the country is becoming increasingly difficult. Many plantations have, in fact, been abandoned for no other reason than that labourers could not be found to cultivate them. Italians and other Europeans are immigrating thither, and the question is eagerly debated whether they will fill acceptably the gap left by the departing Negroes. Whether this tide cityward, which is actually decimating some sections of the Black Belt, will turn and roll back, we may not guess; but it seems unlikely. To all appearances the Negroes will stream steadily towards the towns, and gather more and more densely in certain localities.[29]

[29] "Fully ninety-four per cent. have struggled for land and
failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom. For these there
is one other avenue of escape towards which they have turned in
increasing numbers, namely, migration to town ... this is a part
of the rush to town." Dubois, _The Souls of Black Folk_, p. 162.
"The crop-lien system which is depopulating the fields of the
South is not simply the result of shiftlessness on the part of
Negroes" (p. 170). Here, again, evidence may be supplied in any
measure desired. From the census reports it appears that in the
North the same tendency is quite as strong, if not even stronger.

But this tendency deals them _death_. The mortality among the coloured population of our cities is frightful. The gravest maladies establish themselves among these unsanitated throngs and rage with ruinous virulence. In ante-bellum days pulmonary tuberculosis was infrequent among the plantation Blacks of the South; now it lashes them with a scourge of desolation, and pneumonia even more ruthlessly. Typhoid fever also ravages their ranks with fury. Still worse, contagious diseases are fearfully prevalent. Among a populace to which chastity and continence are terms almost unknown and meaningless, these must diffuse and propagate themselves like an epidemic, they must lower the general vitality, and still more directly the virility and fecundity. Hitherto, the rate of multiplication has been in a measure maintained by a high birth rate in the face of a fearful mortality. But this cannot last. The plain indications now are that the birth rate is falling and must fall, while the death rate rises with the steady influx into the towns, the abandonment of the simple and healthful modes of country life for the vice and diseases of the village.[30] Even at best, the city is an ulcer on the face of the earth, a maelstrom, a minotaur devouring the yearly tribute of the strength and beauty of the land.[31] But for the Negro, it stands ready with two-handed engine of death.

[30] For a minute study of birth and death rates, see _infra_,
pp. 225-49.

[31] To be sure, this charge holds in only very modified degree
of the modern sanitated city.

Moreover, the gloomy hopelessness of the situation must become apparent as the decades glide by. The Negro must feel that competition is becoming sharper, that his territory is becoming narrower and narrower, that twentieth-century citizenship is, like the Gospel commandment, made for those who can receive it, that he is unequal to the load cast upon him, that he is sinking beneath the burden of an honour unto which he was not born. Herewith the joyousness of life must depart, the old-time buoyancy of the race give place to a deepening despond.[32] As the generations pass on, the Negro will be hemmed every way within straiter and straiter limits, his numbers will decrease, his digit will move further to the right in the great sum of humanity--slowly, silently, steadily he will be driven to the wall. Possibly he may emigrate in large numbers to some tropical clime which nature has forbidden to the Caucasian. This would indeed be the happiest possible solution for the South, and he would be a courageous seer who would declare that this century will not see a large exodus of Negroes from the Gulf region. But we do not believe that such emigration will go northward. Our Northern friends have no more affection or use for the Negro than have we. They love to pet him and let their benevolence play about him--this so long as they can patronize him, can "offer him financial assistance," and "stick a diamond pin in his coat," and lay at his feet "the Presidency of Haiti as soon as it is conquered by an expedition now under preparation." Besides, his vote is a very important weight to throw into the scale in cases of doubtful elections. But once let the Blacks turn their faces northward in great numbers, let them begin to swarm by myriads, and derange the labour conditions, and drag down the scale of wages, and oust the Whites from their places--then philanthropy will be thrown to the winds, and the arm of the government at Washington will not be strong enough or long enough to guard these wards of the nation from violence and persecution and outrage.[33]

[32] What a note of infinite melancholy sounds through "The Souls
of Black Folk," the finest product of the Mulatto mind. In his
"The College-bred Negro," the same author, Dubois, has put the
question as to the future of his race to hundreds of these
representative Negroes and recorded their answers. It is easy to
perceive that the hopefulness of the majority is quite
artificial, based on some religious faith or moral trust, and
that the really weighty answers are given by the hopeless
minority.

[33] Events in the North, still fresh in the mind of the reader,
illustrate these statements profusely. That the Negro is steadily
losing ground industrially as well as otherwise, is witnessed
unequivocally in the most diverse quarters. Thus Dubois, "The
Philadelphia Negro," p. 43: "It cannot be denied that the main
results of the development of the Philadelphia Negro since the
war have on the whole disappointed his well-wishers.... Not only
do they feel that there is a lack of positive results, but the
relative advance compared with the period just before the war is
slow, if not an actual retrogression; an abnormal and growing
amount of crime and poverty can justly be charged to the Negro;
he is not a large taxpayer, holds no conspicuous place in the
business world or the world of letters, and _even as a workingman
seems to be losing ground_." So, too, in Chicago: "There are a
few in the trades, as carpenters, painters, etc., _but these are
decreasing_.... There is a large class of unemployed Negroes in
the city, numbering several hundreds. Could a careful census of
this class be taken, it would no doubt be found to reach into
thousands." Monro N. Work, in _American Journal of Sociol._, Vol.
6, p. 206. Everywhere throughout the South this expulsive process
has already proceeded far and stiff proceeds apace. In the
foregoing, the italics are ours.

If the Blacks should occupy and settle, should colonize, some outlying tropical region,[34] and should there start out on their own path of development, it is interesting, though not so important, to ask, What would be their probable future? We answer, though we build no argument whatever on this answer, that the experiment would most likely be a repetition of Haiti; removed from the sustaining atmosphere of European civilization, the Negro would most probably sink back into barbarism. If there be anything in the history either of man or of nature that would lead us to anticipate some other result, we know not what it is.

[34] The late Professor E. D. Cope recommended the deportation of
the Negro.

At this point our forecast has become so sombre that the optimistic reader may grow impatient with such pessimism, and may at least demand some confirmation of our vaticinations. The fact is that we have long hesitated to make public our convictions, since the role of Cassandra has few attractions, and it is only an after-thought to print them in this volume, though they were indicated, many months ago, in _The Nation_ of March 5, 1903. However, to enhearten us, within the last week we have lighted upon the corroborative testimony of perhaps the highest authority in the United States--a scholar whose opportunities for forming a judgement are certainly unsurpassed, if indeed equaled--whose abilities are not questioned, and whose freedom from prejudice is absolute. In a notable address delivered May 10, 1900, at the First Annual Conference held at Montgomery, Ala., under the auspices of the Southern Society for the promotion of the study of race conditions and problems in the South, Professor W. F. Willcox, of Cornell University, Chief Statistician of the United States Census Office at Washington, a "New Englander by birth and ancestry," declared that he could "not read the evidence as Dr. Curry apparently does," "Races, like nations, exist to serve humanity, and come and go in the long run according as they meet or fail to meet this test." "These diverse races of men may be roughly graded according to their value to humanity and their ability to improve. In any effort so to arrange them, the least serviceable and least progressive people are found to be those whose habitat secured the greatest isolation, freedom from competition and lack of incentive to improvement. Such peoples were found especially in the islands of the ocean, in the continent of Australia, in America, and in Africa." Nevertheless, Africa seems to have been the scene of most extraordinary mingling of bloods--a battle ground of widely diverse tribes;[35] in spite of this the African still belongs to "the least serviceable and least progressive people." "Those two backward races, viz., the Negro and the Malay." "When higher and lower races meet and interpenetrate, only two permanent solutions have thus far been recorded in history. Either the lower race has disappeared, or the two have fused, and in the case of especial moment to us all, and to the future of this country, I cannot believe that looking down through the centuries any other permanent solution than one of these two can be found. During the period of slavery the Negro race in the United States was protected from competition with the Whites, somewhat as it would have been by local isolation, or somewhat as domesticated animals are protected from the dangers nature throws about them. Only since emancipation has genuine competition between the races in this country existed, and during the early years after the Civil War the conditions were such as to favor the Negro race and to handicap the whites." "Notwithstanding the fact that the Negroes were aided and the whites downcast during these dark years, the white population has grown with great and increasing rapidity." "The conditions to which the white race is subject will probably never again be so unfortunate, the conditions to which the Negro race is subject will not soon, if ever, be so favorable as during the years after the Civil War." Yet notice some of the changes that have occurred during the thirty years from 1860 to 1890, brief span as this is in the life of a race.

[35] Witness Schweinfurth, one of the carefulest observers and
highest authorities: "If we could at once grasp and set before
our minds facts that are known (whether as regards language,
race, culture, history, or development) of that vast region of
the world which is comprehended in the name of Africa, we should
have before us the witness of an intermingling of races which is
beyond all precedent. And yet, bewildering as the prospect would
appear, it remains a fact not to be gainsaid, that it is
impossible for any one to survey the country as a whole without
perceiving that, high above the multiplication of individual
differences, there is throned a principle of unity (he refers to
the autochthonous black stock), which embraces well-nigh all the
population" (_Heart of Africa_, Vol. I., p. 313).

"The black belt may be defined as those counties in which the Negro population outnumbered the white. In Maryland in 1860 there were five such counties, and in 1890 only two. In Virginia there were forty-three and in 1890 only thirty-three. In North Carolina there were nineteen and in 1890 only sixteen. The group of adjoining counties in southeastern Maryland, eastern Virginia and northeast North Carolina, which formed the most northerly outpost of the black belt in 1860, has decreased in thirty years from sixty-two counties to forty-six, or almost exactly one-fourth. In 1860 Kentucky had one county belonging to the black belt, while in 1890 it had none. In 1860 northern Alabama had two counties belonging to the black belt, but in 1890 both of these had disappeared from the map. In the cotton-growing regions of the more southerly States there has been an increase of the counties belonging to the black belt, but not enough entirely to offset these changes. It seems that locally the Negroes have begun to yield ground to the whites in the regions most favorable to the latter, and that such a change is likely to continue.

"I have no time to go into the complex statistical evidence bearing upon the vitality of the Negro race, and its power to meet successfully the increasing industrial competition, to which it must be exposed, as these States fill with people, as cities spring up and prosper, and as industry, trade and agriculture become diversified and more complex. The balance of the evidence, however, seems to me to indicate for the future a continuance of changes already begun, viz., a decrease in the Negro birth-rate decidedly more rapid than the actual present or probable future decrease in the death-rate. This would result obviously in a slackening rate of increase, and then in a stationary condition, followed by slow numerical retrogression. If this anticipation should be realized, the Negroes will continue to become, as they are now becoming, a steadily smaller proportion of the population.

"The final outcome, though its realization may be postponed for centuries, will be, I believe, that the race will follow the fate of the Indians, that the great majority will disappear before the whites, and that the remnant found capable of elevation to the level of the white man's civilization will ultimately be merged and lost in the lower classes of the whites, leaving almost no trace to mark their former existence.

"Where such a lower people has disappeared, the causes of their death have been mainly disease, vice and profound discouragement. It seems to me clear that each one of these causes is affecting the Negro race far more deeply and unfavorably at the present time than it was at the date of their emancipation. The medical evidence available points to the conclusion that they are more than ever afflicted with the scourges of disease, such as typhoid fever and consumption, and with the physical ills entailed by sexual vice. I have argued elsewhere to show that both in the North and in the South crime among the Negroes is rapidly increasing. Whether the race as a whole is as happy, as joyous, as confident of the future, or thoughtless of it, as it was before the war, you, my hearers, know far better than I. I can only say that in my studies I have found not one expression of dissent from the opinion that the joyous buoyancy of the race is passing away; that they feel upon them a burden of responsibility to which they are unequal; that the lower classes of Negroes are resentful, and that the better classes [are] not certain or sanguine of the outcome. If this judgment be true, I can only say that it is perhaps the most fatal source of race as of national decay and death."

The foregoing excerpts seem to us to be the weightiest words of authority on this subject that have fallen under our notice. They deserve to be stamped in letters of gold on the walls of the Public Library in Boston and over the pulpit of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, on the lintels of the White House, and on the title-page of all future editions of _The Independent_ and _The Nation_. Of course, the superior culture and intelligence of our opponents may easily snuff out all _our_ arguments with a sneer at our straitened and archaic provincialism;--so be it: we deserve no better fate, having been born South of Mason and Dixon's line, most imprudently. But what, pray, if they deign to flutter through this volume, what will they do with this utterance of the Puritan _pur sang_, the Chief Statistician? Can they afford to dismiss it as that of "another good man gone wrong."

If then the Afro-American race stands even now at the entrance of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, what shall we say, what shall we do? Shall we weep and wail and gnash our teeth? Shall we lift up the trump of indignation against such red-handed iniquity? Shall we cry out to Heaven and to Congress against the crime of the centuries? We think that a much calmer and milder mood may well become us before such a thanatopsis. Why should the spectacle of a racial diminuendo so arouse or revolt us? Surely it is something neither unique nor uncommon. All that breathe will share their destiny. It is appointed unto men once to die. If it were the highest form of human life, we might be concerned or even confounded. But such it is not; on the contrary, it is one of the very lowest, that has hitherto enacted and promises hereafter to enact only unhistorical history. "The old order changeth, yielding place to new." The recession, the evanescence, of the Negro before the Caucasian is only one example among millions of the process of nature. The ministry of death is not maleficent; says the Cabbala, "The Lord said unto the Angel of Death, Behold I have made thee cosmocrator." In the upward mounting of the forms of life, there are no other stepping-stones than their own dead selves. The vision, then, of a race vanishing before its superior is not at all dispiriting, but inspiring rather. It is but a part of the increasing purpose of the ages, a forward creeping of the eternal dawn.

The doom that awaits the Negro has been prepared in like measure for all inferior races. Except where they are bulwarked by the climate, they must be drowned by the mounting wave of their superior rivals. To the clear, cold eye of science, the plight of these backward peoples appears practically hopeless. They have neither part nor parcel in the future history of man; they are rejected as dross from its thrice-heated furnace.

This may sound harsh and unfeeling, but in reality it is not so. We do not mean that the inferior should be treated unjustly, unkindly, inhumanly. Far from it. Let equity be dealt with an even hand. We have never given either voice or vote for any form of injustice, however specious, or plausible, or grandfatherly. The processes we have in view lie deeper than any legislation; they are inwoven in the living garment of the Godhead.

But may we not check or arrest them? May not the strong Caucasian lend a helping hand to his weaker African brother and lift him up, and the two walk along hand in hand through the centuries? This is a very idyllic picture. "Behold, how good and how pleasant for brethren to dwell together in unity." But a moment's reflection must show how inadequate and unreal this dew of Hermon. It is not hard for altruism to run suicidally mad, if one lets go the check-rein of egoism. The first and highest and unescapable duty of a race is to its self--to realize its own personality, to put forth all its powers and potencies, to unfold the full flower of its own being. It must neither be unjust nor ungenerous in its treatment of others, but neither must it attempt self-immolation--especially, as that sacrifice would be idle and unanswered. The most, the best that one race can effect for another is merely some extra-organic amelioration of condition. The organic destiny of that other, written in blood and bone and cell and plasma, lies beyond the reach of the helping hand. We must dismiss, then, this vision of a higher race stooping down with arms of love and lifting up the lower to its altitude, as merely a pious imagination. The higher race may indeed stoop down; it has often done so; but never to rise again; instantly there falls upon it the Davidic curse: "Bow down their back alway."

The fate that awaits the backward race in the presence of the advanced should appear more vividly, one would think, to no other eyes than to those of New England. "Across the ocean came a pilgrim bark, bearing the seeds of life and of death. The former were sown for you; the latter sprang up in the path of the simple native." Nor in this process of extermination, in these "centuries of dishonour," has it really been a question of fairness or unfairness, of righteousness or unrighteousness. No kind or degree of gentleness or justice could have long delayed the departure of the Indian. When North-Europeans landed on his shores, for him the clock of destiny had struck. While we may properly applaud or condemn individual and communal acts by standards of individual or communal ethics, it is not possible to judge the race by any such feeble sense. Nature is neither moral nor immoral, but supermoral. Her aeonian processes are not to be measured by our rules nor defined by our categories; they tower above good and bad; they reach beyond right and wrong. Should Roman legions have conquered Greece and girdled the Mediterranean with her civilization? Ought Babylonian empire to have lifted up its lion wings over Western Asia? We perceive at once the emptiness of such questions.

But even if it were possible for us to turn back the tide of time, to stay or slacken the rolling of the wheel of birth, would it be well or wise to do so? We venture to question it most seriously. There is a personal and even a social morality that may easily become racially immoral. There are diseases whose evolutionary function is to weed out the weak, and so preserve the future for the strong. The sufferers cannot be treated with too careful attention, too loving gentleness, too tender sympathy. It is the glory of our humanity to cherish these frail flowers, to water them with dew, to shield them from the sun, and not to suffer even the winds of summer to visit them too roughly. But not to gather from them the seed for generations to come! Let theirs be the present, but not the future. He who should discover some serum and apply it greatly to prolong their lives and give them equal chance with the vigorous in the matter of offspring, whatever thanks he might win from individuals or the community, would deserve and receive the execration of his race as its deadliest and most insidious foe. So, too, we hold it to be certain that all forms of humanitarianism that tend to give the organically inferior an equal chance with the superior in the propagation of the species, are radically mistaken; to the individual and to society they would sacrifice the race. Their error may be very amiable, but it is none the less mortal. The hope of humanity lies not in strengthening the weak, but in perfecting the strong.

Herewith, then, we close this discussion. The mistake of our opponents is here exposed in its deepest root, its inmost core. It is seen to be a mistake in philosophy, in cosmology, in the scientific interpretation of the process of nature. But what a weird light is now cast upon the War between the States, its cause, and its ultimate result! Aside from questions of political theory, the North sought to free the Negro, the South to hold him in bondage. As a slave he had led a protected, indeed a hothouse, existence and had flourished marvellously. His high-hearted champions shed torrents of blood and treasure to shatter the walls of his prison-house, to dispel the pent-up, stifling gloom of his dungeon, and to pour in upon him the free air and light of heaven. But the sun of liberty is no sooner arisen with burning breath than, lo! smitten by the breeze and the beam, he withers and dies!