Chapter II: Part 2

There is no factor in breeding of more importance than prepotency, and none which is more difficult to estimate. The term is necessarily a relative one, and, further, it may affect some characters and not others. Often it must go undetected, as in the case of the leader of a herd of wild cattle, who may be highly prepotent, but whose prepotency, unless he is mated with members of another herd displaying different characters, may pass unnoticed. Breeders claim to be able to produce cattle so prepotent that they will produce their like, however mated. A well-known dealer in highly-bred ponies used to boast that he had a filly so prepotent that, though she were sent to the best Clydesdale stallion in Scotland, she would throw a colt showing no cart-horse blood. Prepotency is usually obtained by inbreeding, which up to a certain point fixes the character of a race, and in all cases tends to check variation and reversion--the Jews, for instance, as a race are strongly prepotent--but there is no doubt that it may also arise as a sport, and this is probably its more usual origin in a state of Nature. Professor Ewart, however, believes that inbreeding is much commoner among wild animals than has usually been conceded, and he holds the opinion that the prepotency so induced has played a considerable part in the origin of species. This, if true, would to some extent take the place of Romanes’ ‘physiological selection’; for Romanes also thought that, though of great importance, variation and natural selection were insufficient to account for the origin of species without some factor which would help to mitigate the swamping effect of intercrossing--some such agency as the fences of modern farms and cattle ranches--without which the famous cattle breeds of the world would soon disappear in a general ‘regression toward mediocrity.’

In inbreeding the great difficulty of the breeder is to know when to stop. Carried too far it undoubtedly leads to degeneracy. In the ‘Domesticated Animals of Great Britain,’ Low records the case of a gentleman who inbred foxhounds to such an extent that “the race actually became monstrous and perished.” Hogs, if too closely inbred, grow hair instead of bristles; their legs become short and unable to support the body; and not only is their fertility diminished, but the mothers can not nourish the young.

So far as is known, no direct investigations have been made to test how far inbreeding may be carried in the _Equidae_; but, on the other hand, the breeding of race-horses may perhaps be looked upon as a gigantic experiment in this direction. Our English thoroughbreds can be traced back to a few imported sires--the Byerly Turk, imported in 1689; the Darley Arabian, in 1710; and the Godolphin Arabian, in 1730. Since then, by careful breeding and nutrition, they have increased on an average some eight or nine inches in height. There is, however, a widely spread impression that at present there is a marked deterioration in the staying power and in the general ‘fitness’ of the racer. The falling off is further shown by a fact commented on by Sir Walter Gilbey--viz., “the smallness of the percentage of even tolerably successful horses out of a prodigious number bred at an enormous outlay.” In support of this he quotes a sentence from the _Times_ (December 27, 1897), referring to a sale in which thirty-two yearlings had been sold for 51,250 guineas: “These thirty-two yearlings” (said the _Times_) “are represented by two winners of five races, Florio Rubattino and La Reine, who have contributed about 2,000_l._ to the total cost; and there is not, so far as can be known, a single one of the thirty others with any prospect of making a race-horse.”

If, then, it is true that the English race-horse is on the down grade, what steps should be taken to arrest this descent? Sir Everett Millais restored a pack of basset hounds by crossing them with a bloodhound, the original forefather of bassets. The resulting pups were bassets in form, but not quite bassets in color; when, however, these cross-breeds were mated with bassets the majority of the pups turned out to be perfect bassets both in shape and coloration. This indicates that one way to rejuvenate the race-horse would be to have recourse to a new importation of the best Arab mares that the plains of Arabia can produce. Breeders hesitate to adopt this course, because their present breed is not only larger but, over very short distances, fleeter than its forefathers. The shortening of the course in recent years is probably a further sign of the degeneracy of our present racers. Were new blood introduced and more three- or four-mile races instituted, we should doubtless soon have a return to the champion form of bygone days. Another method would be to import some of the racers of Australia or New Zealand and cross them with the home product. Different surroundings, food, etc., soon influence the constitution, and this being so, it would be advisable to select those horses of pure descent which have been longest subjected to these altered conditions. Thus the chance of reversion occurring would be increased.

It has been noticed more than once in the preceding pages that a young animal showing reversion is strong and vigorous. It is the belief of dog breeders that those members of an inbred litter which show reversion are the strongest and best. Similarly, experience shows that if an inbred sire and dam produce a dun-colored striped foal it almost always turns out well. Reversion is accompanied by a rejuvenescence; it is as though the young animal had appeared at an earlier period in the life history of the race, before the race had undergone those changes in the way of deterioration which so often accompany inbreeding.

Wild animals are frequently thought to be prepotent over tame ones, but of the eleven zebra-hybrids bred at Penycuik only two took markedly after their sire, the zebra Matopo.[B] There are other experiments recounted which tell the other way, and at present this matter remains in a state of considerable uncertainty.

[B] The illustration shows the difference between the facial
marks of the zebra and those of the hybrid. The latter, in
this respect, bears much the same relation to the former as
a blue-rock pigeon does to a fancy type.

This article must not close without a word or two more about the zebra-hybrids. It is mentioned above that only two out of the eleven which have already been born took strongly after their father.

Those who have seen the young hybrids playing about in the fields at Penycuik must agree that they are the most charming and compactly built little animals possible. Of Romulus, the eldest of the herd, Professor Ewart says: “When a few days old [he] was the most attractive little creature I have ever seen. He seemed to combine all the grace and beauty of an antelope and a well-bred Arab foal.... What has struck me from the first has been his alertness and the expedition with which he escapes from suspicious or unfamiliar objects. When quite young, if caught napping in the paddock, the facility with which he, as it were, rolled on to his feet and darted off was wonderful.”

The writer can fully confirm all the praise Professor Ewart lavishes on his pets; in truth, Romulus has been well described as a “bonnie colt with rare quality of bone ... and with the dainty step and the dignity of the zebra.” Remus, the offspring of the Irish mare, has been from the first more friendly than his half-brother; he objected less to the process of weaning, and, if he survives, promises to be the handsomest and fleetest of the existing hybrids.

On the whole, the hybrids are unusually hardy; only two have been lost--one, a twin, which died almost as soon as it was born, and another which lived some three months and then succumbed. It is only fair to say that the dam of the latter, who was only three years old when the hybrid was born, had been much weakened by attacks of the strongylus worm, and that she was the victim of close inbreeding. Both the zebras and the hybrids which have been under observation at Penycuik show a remarkable capacity for recovering from wounds. Accidental injuries heal with great rapidity. On one occasion the surviving twin was discovered with a flap of skin some five inches long hanging down over the front of the left fetlock. The skin was stitched into its place again, during which operation the little hybrid fought desperately and cried piteously; but it soon recovered, the wound healed, and now scarcely a scar remains. There was no lameness and no swelling either at the fetlock or above the knee. About a year ago four hybrid colts and three ordinary foals were attacked by that scourge of the stable, the strongylus worm. One of the latter died and another was reduced almost to a skeleton; the hybrids, though obviously affected, suffered much less than the others and soon recovered. It is further noticeable that the hybrids suffer less from colds and other slight ailments than the mares and horses among which they live.

There is no doubt that it is a comparatively easy matter to breed these hybrids, and that they are not only extremely attractive animals to the eye, but hardy and vigorous, possessed of great staying powers, and promising to be capable of severe work.

From what we have said, it is evident that the Penycuik experiments are of the highest interest, both practical and theoretical, and the public spirit and self-devotion shown by the Edinburgh professor in carrying them out can not be too widely recognized.

COLONIES AND THE MOTHER COUNTRY. (I.)

BY JAMES COLLIER.

We may conceive a country, with its colonies and dependencies grouped round it at unequal distances and in different directions, as a giant organism, which has its laws of growth and development, its phases of expansion, activity and decay, like all other organisms. We see it enlarging in mass, but to the last remaining amorphous, or assimilable to no known forms. We observe the heart and brain fostering, helping and sometimes hindering, directing, controlling and guarding the evolution of the nearer or remoter portions. We perceive on scrutiny threads of relationship being woven, new nervous, muscular and circulatory systems being developed, which connect the extremities with the center and unite both into an organic whole. We are struck at times with the rupture of the mass and the permanent separation of parts of it; at times we are impressed by an unexpected augmentation in previously unknown areas, as if to repair the loss of the old. We witness the extremities reacting on the original nucleus, to some extent remodeling the heart and brain and thus creating a type of organism unprecedented in Nature. And we find that of a limited number of such colossal types, ever battling for predominance, one or another gains an ascendency and the rest are reduced to a secondary rank, or, being lopped of their colonial extensions, cease to be world-wide organisms and shrink into the merely national organisms from which they sprang.

Snails put out their feelers as they go. The bolder insects and the more adventurous birds fly small or great distances in search of a feeding ground; some are carried out to sea, and become involuntary ‘discoverers’ of new lands.[C] The social organism puts out its feelers and extends in mass. The community pushes out its scouts, and a portion of it, at longer or shorter intervals, follows their lead. Thus the mother country discovers many of the territories it colonizes. Cadiz was unknown to the Eastern world till a Phœnician merchant ship was blown thither. The West African coast and the mouth of the Rhone were discovered by the Carthaginians. Libya (west of Egypt) was a _terra incognita_ to the Greeks till a Greek sailor who had been driven on its inhospitable coast informed the emigrant Theræans of its existence. The Portuguese discovered the Azores. The Spaniards discovered the West India Islands, Mexico, Peru and Florida. France discovered the country lying along the basin of the St. Lawrence and the valley of the Mississippi. Holland, through an English navigator, discovered the Hudson River and the future site of New York. England, through another alien, discovered the New England coast and that of Virginia; it discovered, or rediscovered, vast Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania and other South Sea islands; in quite recent years it discovered the sources of the Nile. All these countries have been or are about to be colonized by the peoples that discovered them.

[C] Examples of insects are given in Darwin’s ‘Journal,’ and of
birds in Wallace’s ‘Malay Archipelago.’

Discovery is chiefly the work of private enterprise. It was Phœnician and Greek traders who explored the northern and western coasts of Africa, of Spain, of Gaul, and of Britain. Scandinavian mariners, Norman and English fishermen, discovered North America. Spanish adventurers found the Canaries. The host of travelers have explored on their private account. Yet there are animals, like Mr. Thompson’s Lobo, the wolf, and Spot, the crow, able generals and leaders of large bands, who seem to direct exploratory movements. So after a while governments lend their aid when they have ends of their own or their aid is needed. The two most memorable exploring expeditions of modern times, and the most momentous in their results, were either in great part or wholly equipped by their respective governments. Two of the vessels of Columbus were impressed ships, and the equipment proceeded from the Castilian treasury, the third being fitted out by merchant mariners of Palos. The expedition of Captain Cook, which practically added a new continent to the globe, was altogether a state enterprise, and its celebrated commander was not, like Columbus, its designer and organizer, but only its director. The Portuguese discoveries of the Azores and the Cape were also state-aided. From this time forward Spanish and Portuguese adventurers received a royal license to discover, and the South American continent, with Mexico and Peru as its brightest jewels, was discovered by just such adventurers. Where a government refuses itself to discover, it may, like the States-General of Holland, assure to the enterprising a terminable monopoly of trade with newly discovered lands, and to this assurance the exploration of New York and its neighborhood and the discovery of Connecticut were due. Merchant companies have naturally a keen eye to the main chance, but those English and Dutch merchants can not be accused of timidity who chartered Cabot, Gilbert, Hudson and other daring mariners to seek a northwest passage to the East. Kings, in their private capacity, newspaper proprietors and rich individuals, from generous motives, sometimes equip and support explorers like Stanley and Winwood Reade.

Geographical, like scientific, discovery is often accidental. Phœnician and Greek traders, Spanish adventurers, Norman and English fishermen were blown by a succession of gales to Cadiz and Cyrene, the Canaries, Mexico and Newfoundland. Diaz was storm-carried southward to the Cape, where two shipwrecked mariners long afterward induced the Dutch to settle. Columbus, Cabot and Hudson sought a passage to India or China. The day comes, however, when chance gives way to a systematic art of discovery. The voyage of Columbus was the first where the end was deliberately aimed at and patiently worked up to. Under Ferdinand the Catholic maritime discovery was raised to an art. A board of eminent Spanish navigators, with Vespucci at its head, sat to construct charts and trace out routes for projected voyages. The primary object of Cook’s first voyage was astronomical, and he was scientifically equipped for discovery on that, as of course also on the two later voyages, whose sole end was the one so gloriously gained.

Prior discovery confers an indefeasible title to occupy as against any other colonizing power. Misled by a false statement, a British man-of-war entered the Mississippi presumably to take possession of Louisiana, but turned aside on being informed of the earlier French occupation. In the thirties two naval expeditions were exploring at the same time in Spencer Gulf, South Australia. Though the French gracefully yielded the _pas_ to the prior English ship, they left a mark on a number of points that still bear French names. There seems to be now no doubt that Brazil had been discovered and rediscovered by Spanish navigators before the Portuguese _carbajal_ set foot on it, but, owing to an international agreement, the discoverers ceded their claim.

Discovery does not necessarily issue in colonization. The more or less mythical discoveries of the coasts of North America and Australia in the ninth and sixteenth centuries interest the antiquarian rather than the historian. They resemble the so-called anticipations of scientific discoveries--Cesalpino’s, of Harvey; Vico’s, of Wolf and Niebuhr; Swedenborg’s, of Kant; and a host of guessers, of Darwin. As proof alone is discovery in science, so only exploration is discovery in geography. For lack of this essential element even well-certified discoveries are apt to be fruitless. Tasman’s frightened glimpse of New Zealand and his more careful coasting of Tasmania left durable marks on both countries, but only in nomenclature. They led to nothing. No Dutch settlement seems ever to have been made south of New Guinea; no northern nationality is more conspicuously absent among the colonizers of the South Seas. The earlier Portuguese discovery of the Cape of Good Hope was regarded as that of a halfway house to a more distant goal; they stopped to recruit, then hurried off to rich Cathay. The French left their names to a dozen headlands and rivers on the coast of Western Australia, but, though they often excited the suspicions of New South Wales, they made no attempt to settle.

Discovery, to assure sovereignty over the discovered country, must be followed, among animals as among men, by effective occupation. The Portuguese were roused into warlike excitement a few years ago by the advance of the Chartered Company into Mashonaland, where their settlements had long ceased to exist. Their claims to the basin of the Congo were on the same ground equally disregarded--this time by all the powers. A bit of seacoast can more easily be kept, and Delagoa Bay was assured to them by the French arbitrator. Mere occupation has at various times given a valid right to a territory. The Puritans found several islands off the New England coast to be destitute of inhabitants, and the shores so thinned of Indians by an epidemic as to be practically uninhabited. Yet they were careful to assure their title by purchase. The Manowolko Islands of the Malay Archipelago were without indigenes when the first settlers arrived. Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands were found by the mutineers of the Bounty and the convicts from New South Wales to answer to Defoe’s notion of a desert island. The first English settlers in Australia and the first French settlers in New Caledonia met with no resistance from the blacks at the initial stages of occupation. When the Boers trekked across the Vaal they entered on a country that had been left, through exterminating native wars, to the beasts of the field and the forest. The situation is very different when a rival civilized power lays claims to the territory. When Great Britain forcibly took possession of West Griqualand in 1871 she had to salve, without satisfying, the claims of the Orange Free State to one of the richest diamond fields in the world by a payment differently stated at £90,000 and over £100,000. Having to deal with a European power, she was constrained to submit to arbitration her pretensions to the so very useful and convenient Delagoa Bay. In attempting to extend British Guiana, so as to gain command of the Orinoco, she came into collision with the mightiest of American peoples, which now guards the interests of all the others. The United States refused to acknowledge the doctrine of ‘squatter sovereignty,’ and one of the preliminaries of the Venezuela arbitration was the addition to international law of the rule that a period of fifty years’ uninterrupted occupancy was required to constitute valid sovereignty. England has gone through the world, like Sir Tantalus’s man with his iron flail, beating down the weak and robbing the helpless. Yet few countries can show an equal record of honorable renunciations. It long refused to annex New Zealand, now one of the finest of its colonies. It long refused Fiji and Natal. It refused Samoa. It refused Bechuanaland for a time. It refused Angra Pequena. It would not listen to the discoverer who called on it to occupy equatorial Africa. It disavowed the action of Queensland in annexing New Guinea. It surrendered the Ionian Islands. Its constant injunction to its high commissioner in South Africa was not to advance the line of conquest. It surrendered, in 1854, its sovereignty over the Boers of the Orange River. That surrender was condemned by British governors, is still condemned by historians, and was disliked by the wealthier and more intelligent Boers; how wise and just it was is shown by the jealousy with which the republic has since watched over its independence. To its eternal honor--or rather to that of Gladstone--it nobly gave back the Transvaal to its stalwart farmers. France long relinquished Algeria and Madagascar, which her missions and commercial stations in the seventeenth century gave her a prescriptive right to occupy two centuries later. It refused to support De La Tours, and abandoned Labourdonnais and Dupleix. Through mere inertia Portugal has let slip from her hands a grand inheritance. The Dutch repressed the extension of their colony at the Cape. Java flourishes, but Dutch New Guinea lies rotting.

A species, extending beyond its original habitat, has often to battle with lower species already in possession of that portion of the earth or water. So, except in rare cases, occupation means the necessity of conquest. The Puritans, as they advanced into the interior, had to fight for the possession of New England. The nomadic Australian blacks offered no resistance to the earliest settlers, but as they were driven inward they disputed, and are still fiercely disputing, every foot of territory. As the indigenes rise in the scale, have clearings and cultivate the soil, the resistance increases. No savage peoples have cost the invaders so much in disturbance, blood and treasure as the Indians, Maoris, Kaffirs and Algerian Arabs. Mashonaland was occupied by the Chartered Company without firing a shot or losing a life, but it had soon to fight for possession. The incessant turmoil, though the waves of it spread to the remote mother country, affects the settlers mainly. The blood shed is both colonial and metropolitan. The North American settlers fought their own hard battles; though British troops engaged, to their cost, with the Indians, it was against these as allies of the French; in recent years the British garrison in Canada has been employed against the half-castes. In New Zealand colonial volunteers joined with the regular troops to defeat the Maoris, and the former were sometimes found the more efficient.

The most picturesque conquests in history were effected by private enterprise. Mexico was conquered by local recruits. Pizarro was authorized to conquer Peru in the name of the Spanish crown, and, besides various other encouragements, he received a modest sum from the Spanish treasury. But it was again by local recruits, not one of them furnished by the Spanish Government, that the conquest was made and maintained. Algeria has a very different story to tell. The troops employed in effecting a difficult conquest spread over thirty years were French from first to last. In general, it may be said that where there have been regular campaigns and pitched battles the metropolitan troops bear the brunt of the fighting. Where there is a guerrilla warfare, as with the Australian blacks, it is carried on by the colonial police or by the settlers, sometimes with the aid of the natives themselves. The Carthaginians built up their empire by native auxiliaries. The French and English conquered Canada with the Hurons and Iroquois as auxiliaries. The English mastered New Zealand with Maoris for allies, and defeated the Kaffirs with the help of the Fingoes (a related variety of the Bantu race). Rhodesia was won by a force half Kaffir. Peruvians aided Pizarro. India has been made British by armies of which four fifths were Indian. A people, like a man, contributes to its own subjugation. The expense is likewise distributed. Fifty years of intermittent war with the Kaffirs cost Great Britain twelve million pounds, and it may safely be assumed that a no smaller sum was expended in New Zealand. The colonists honorably bear their share. The premier of the latter colony told a London audience in jubilee year that it was now cheerfully paying the interest on a debt of eleven millions incurred in “holding the colony for the empire.” After a Kaffir war Cape Colony was saddled with a debt of three or four millions. Other losses fall more directly on the settlers. Probably none have borne such disasters and so much suffering as the early colonists of North America. The destruction of property in a single New Zealand campaign amounted to £150,000, and the farmers on the frontiers of Cape Colony have suffered far more severely, as those on the frontier of Queensland are suffering now. If blood and money, poured forth like water, can furnish conquest with a valid title to territory, not a few British and French colonies have been justly annexed.

The expansion of an organism or a species is determined also by its struggle with other equal organisms or species which conflict with it. The hardest fight is with individuals of the same or similar species. So are rival colonizing powers usually more formidable opponents to the acquisition of a country than its indigenes. The Carthaginians were robbed of some of their colonies by the more numerous Greeks, and the Greeks of many of theirs by the all-conquering Romans. The Swedes lost a colony to the Dutch. The short but decisive struggle between the Dutch and the English was followed by the loss of the Dutch colonies in North America and the West Indies. In the eighteenth century, after every great war a group of colonies fell into the hands of the victorious power. The West India Islands and those of the Indian Ocean were for many years tossed as in a game of battledore and shuttlecock between France and England. The possession of Canada was a bone of contention between the two countries for several decades. Seeley even maintains that the hundred years’ war ending in 1815 was a long rivalry between France and England for the New World and India. If so, it was marked by striking acts of generosity. Conquests made in Canada by England, with the efficient aid of the American colonies, were more than once given back to France. When all but two of the West India colonies were surrendered in 1814 the Foreign Minister explained that it was desired to open to France the means of peaceful expansion, and it was not the interest of England to make her a military and conquering power. The rivalry did not end with the Napoleonic wars. According to one historian, Australia was saved to the English in 1788 by six days, and for long afterward there was a constant jealousy of French occupation. Ships were sent by Australian governors to take possession of Van Diemen’s Land, of southern, western and northern Australia when it was believed that the French had designs on them. An English war ship, sent by the governor of the North Island of New Zealand to annex the rich and fertile South Island, anticipated by only a few hours a French ship dispatched for the same purpose. The rising of the French Canadians in 1838 has been described as “the last convulsion of despair of a sinking nationality.” The English, French, and now the Germans are still rivals in present and future colonizing grounds in Africa, China, and the South Seas. But no British colonist doubts that further pacific defeats (if only by being bought out of their possessions) await the French in different quarters of the globe, for it is the colonies that press forward. The North American colonies were at all times more aggressive than the mother state, as the Australasian are now. They are unconsciously on the way to become the suns of new systems.

Conquests may be made on various pretexts. The Cape was twice seized by the English to prevent it from falling into the hands of the French, and a few years later the Dutch were constrained to cede the colony to its temporary possessors. Gambetta schemed to annex and colonize the whole North African coast from Egypt to Morocco, and thus to create a _France nouvelle_ along the northern shores of the Mediterranean in place of the New France lost in Canada more than a century before, or of that still older New France on the shores of the Bosporus. In pursuance of this policy, the powers at the Berlin Conference in 1878 permitted France to occupy (not to annex) Tunis, prohibiting her, however, from fortifying its chief port. But no one doubts that the ‘regency’ there, as in Madagascar, will speedily give way to undisputed sovereignty, and Bizerta is already fortified. Writers are said to be dreamers, and Locke’s constitution for Carolina, Rousseau’s for Corsica, Bentham’s for Russia, with many another quixotic proposal, furnish proof of their simplicity or their wrong-headedness. It is nevertheless a fact that most of the new ideas that are being carried into effect are the suggestions of publicists--journalists who stand midway between men of thought and men of action. Sometimes the former contribute immediately practicable proposals. Russia, Germany, France, and Great Britain--the four grasping powers--along with Italy and Belgium, are now, after a digestive interval of thirty years, carrying out a suggestion made by Renan in 1871. The Chinese, who threw off the yoke of the conquering Mongols, belong (it appears) by ordination of Nature to the subject races. The people that produced Confucius and Lao-tze consist of laboring men who need direction and organization. China, therefore, calls for conquest. The powers have obeyed the call, and that vast and peaceful land is now undergoing dismemberment, with a view to final wholesale partition. It is a parallel to the conquest of Peru by the Spaniards. In both countries a more perfect civilization of a lower type was or will be superseded by a less perfect civilization of a higher type. In this alone lies its assumed justification. Evidently the argument may be carried far. It would justify Russia in occupying Turkey, the United States in conquering not only Spanish colonies but Spain itself. It was the moral justification of the Gothic invasions of the early Christian centuries. It is a sentence of death or (it may be) of new life to all moribund nationalities.

Other modes of acquiring colonies are by cession and by purchase. The former is often disguised conquest, like that of the Cape to England. The latter may be so as well, like that of the African diamond fields by England. Colbert bought, for less than a million francs, certain of the West India Islands and the Antilles. The United States has bought her last colonies from dying Spain for four million pounds. At no distant time the Australian colonies will probably buy France and Germany out of the Pacific, and Holland and Germany out of New Guinea. It will be none the less a moral conquest. The right of the stronger, or the more fit to colonize, will still be, as it ever has been, the sole title to possess.

By these various means habitats have been found for future colonies, spheres for future colonial expansion.

[_To be continued._]

THE FUTURE OF THE NEGRO IN THE SOUTHERN STATES.

BY PROFESSOR N. S. SHALER,

HARVARD UNIVERSITY.

Whatever danger there may be of serious conflict between the negroes and whites in the Southern States--at most but slight--is likely to arise from the fact that the old class of slaveholders, men accustomed to hold a caretaking relation to the lower race, is passing away. Already the greater number of the white people know the blacks only as they are known by the Northern folk. Race prejudice, which in the days of slavery was hardly more than formal, finding expression mainly in certain rules as to the behavior of the inferior class, is likely to increase in proportion as the two peoples become parted from one another in interests. If the present movement to disfranchise the negroes should lead to their general and permanent separation from political life, or if in elections they should again array themselves as they did immediately after the war--under the lead of white adventurers against the property interests of the commonwealth--then there may be disaster. The aim of the statesman--of every citizen in his quality of a statesman--should be to make the present political separation of the races, as far as possible, temporary. Their effort should be to develop in the blacks the qualities which may make them safe holders of the franchise, and to give that trust to all who become worthy of it. We may at once put aside all the futile expedients for other dispositions of the negroes than the simple plan of adopting them into our national life. The ancient project of returning them to Africa, the suggestions that they should be deported to some part of the American tropics, or be segregated in some one of the Southern States, are all too impracticable to deserve a moment’s attention. They must be dismissed, if for no other reason, because the labor of the negroes is needed where they now dwell. Their exodus would mean the commercial ruin of half a dozen great States. It is hardly necessary to suggest that any such action would involve a trespass upon the rights of both the whites and blacks too great to be thought of in our day.

Assuming that the only thing to do with the negroes is to shape them so that they may be fit for the place of citizens, the question is as to the steps which may be taken to attain this end. It is evident that it cannot quickly be done. Acting on the basis of our experience with immigrants from Europe, a majority of Congress concluded that all the negro needed to convert him from the slave to the truly free man was the ballot. We failed to see that between the primitive station of our race, two thousand years ago, and its present state there lay twenty centuries of toil and pain, spent in winning the state of mind of the citizen. We mocked the African with the gift of the franchise. We have now to begin where we should have begun thirty-five years ago, with measures that are proportionate to the need--with a system of education that may serve to develop the saving qualities of the race. What should this education be?

To most of us education begins with an alphabet and goes on to an indetermined limit of things that are to be had from books. The method is naturally esteemed, for we behold that the useful citizen comes forth from such teaching. Yet, logically, we might as well attribute the shape and quality of the body to the clothes it bears. The real education of our race, that which gives the most of its value to the trifle of instruction we give our children, is clearly a matter of race experience; of training in the generations of deeds since it began to pass from primitive savagery. First came the lessons in the art of continually laboring. Fortunately this lesson of labor the negro either brought with him, or learned so well in the generations of slavery that it is safely acquired. Next came the training in the occupations above the plane of simple agriculture--the industries of the forge, the loom, the ship and of military service and with it the habits of associated action. Along with these came the development of the commercial sense with the enlargements of view it gives, and from this the common sense of public affairs that makes a democracy possible. We assumed all this race training in the African when we cast him the ballot. Now that he has failed to profit by our folly, we begin to doubt whether there is, after all, the making of a citizen in him. A reasonable view of the facts leads us to conclude that he can be made a valuable citizen, provided he has a fair share of real help in the task of becoming such.

The first need of the negro is the conviction that his salvation depends upon himself. So long as he is deluded by the hope that some great external power is to lift him to the social and economic level of the whites, there is no chance that he will come to depend on himself for advancement. From this point of view, at least, it is advantageous that the attention of this country is for the time turned away from them in a search for other, and less practicable endeavors, to lift lowly peoples to the Saxon’s estate. The next is that the negroes be as rapidly as possible employed in varied craft work--work in which they may receive a larger training than the toil the fields afford. The simple yet valuable lessons of the soil-tiller they have had. For the greater number of their race, particularly those of the Guinea type, this grade of employment is as high as they may be expected to attain. Yet somewhere near one-third of the people of their color are fit for employments demanding more skill and, because of that skill, giving a better intellectual station. The mechanical employments of the day are ever gaining in their culture-giving powers. The complication of the machines which are used, and the mysterious nature of the powers which they apply, seem to make them more effective means of enlargement than the old simple tools. Those who have observed the process by which the horse-car driver of a decade ago has been converted into the motor-man of to-day have had a chance to see what the control of energies may do for them. I feel safe in saying, from the basis of personal experience with the negroes, that somewhere near one third of them are fit to be trained for mechanical employment of a fairly high grade. They will need more instruction than the average whites, but they will have a keen interest in their work, and are more likely than the whites to lead up their children in their own trades. For such employment the types which, for lack of a better name, I have termed the Zulu and the Semetic are clearly well fitted. Here and there in the South we find these people of the abler stocks already so employed.

There seems no reason to believe that there is at present enough race prejudice in the South to oppose any effective resistance to negroes entering on any such employment as that of the engineer. It is true that among the women operatives in spinning and weaving mills there has been such objection already found as to make it impossible to employ the negro and white in the same rooms. It is, however, improbable that there would be any opposition to having the black women engaged in the industry, provided the personal association with the whites was not required. Whatever resistance it would be necessary to overcome in order to make the negro free to engineering employments would proceed from the poor white class or from Northern loom operators who brought to the South the obdurate hatred of the negro which is so strong in the regions where he is rarely seen. The old slave-holding class, and those who inherit their motives, will, I am convinced, welcome the effort to open such places to well-trained blacks. As an evidence of the state of mind of this ruling class, I may relate an experience of a year or two ago in one of the most remote corners of the extreme South:

I was lodged for some days in a small rustic inn whereto came, in the evening, a dozen men of the planter class to spin yarns, smoke and drink. They had all been Confederate soldiers--some of them were the very remnants of war. Willingly they allowed the talk to be led to the question as to the future of the black people. They showed their interest in all the forms of trade schooling that could be given them, and their contempt for the results of the literary education which they have received. Repeated reference was made to the great work that Booker Washington was doing at Tuskegee, and for it there was nothing but praise. One of the men dwelt with pleasure on the fact that in the nearest large town two negroes, trained at Tuskegee, were doing all the contract building, having ‘run out’ some cheap, ill-trained whites who had long been in the business. This talk was clearly not shaped for Northern ears, for the double reason that the Southern folk are not in the least moved to such deception, and also because I was with them as one of their own people. Very many such occasions for learning the temper of the ex-slaveholder class have convinced me that at present, and until the Southern conditions are assimilated to those of the North, there will be no difficulty in developing the technical skill of the blacks arising from the disinclination of the people when they are thus employed. It is true that the old slaveholder, with his care-taking humor towards the blacks, is passing away; but his motives are likely to be continued in his descendants at least for some generations.

There are at present in the South many thousand places for which it would be easy to train negroes--places which would give them a liberal education of the kind most needed by their race. It is not too much to reckon that each year, in the development of the industries of that region, adds some thousand chances which can not well be filled from the native white people, but are likely to go to men brought from elsewhere. Every opportunity to establish a family supported by a skilled mechanic is of value. With even five per cent of the male negroes thus employed, the prospects of their future would be greatly benefited. The means for attaining this end are not difficult to find. What is needed is an extension of the system followed at Tuskegee, where youths are trained with the intent that they shall be made ready for high-grade manual labor, the general schooling being limited to what is necessary to ensure success in such practical work. A system of trade schools for negroes, sufficient to supply the present demand for skilled mechanics, is now the gravest need of the South.

It has been suggested that the troops which are required for the Federal service in tropical lands might well be recruited from the negroes. It has indeed been proposed that these soldiers should be permitted to take their families with them so that they might become permanently and contentedly established in Luzon and elsewhere in the colonies. There is no doubt but that the abler negroes, when properly officered, make excellent soldiers--at least as infantry men. The experience had with them during the Spanish War makes this point perfectly clear. It may also be reckoned that they would endure tropical climates better than the whites. It may further be said that the existence of a large and well respected force of blacks in the Federal army would unquestionably add to the social position of the negroes in the estimation of both races. Again, the return of these men to their homes, after their period of service, would be advantageous. Their training and experience would make them of much value to their people.

There are, however, certain signal disadvantages which would arise from the employment of negroes as soldiers. In the first place, it would tend to remove from the body of the folk the abler men--those to whom we should mainly look for the uplifting of their race. This evil, great in the case of all levies, would be most serious in this case; for the reason that, while with white troops the rank and file are not commonly by nature leaders of their society, they would be so with black recruits. If the choice could be made of the Guinea type, this loss would not be serious; but it certainly would fall to the more militant stocks--those to which we have to look for advancement. In the next place, we must see that the negro does not need the training in passive obedience and mere order of life that the common soldier receives. He has had that already in quite sufficient measure. He now should have the lessons of individual responsibility--of control of his life from within--lessons that civil life alone can give. Therefore, the well-wisher of the race will be inclined to oppose this project of recruiting our armies from the negroes of the Southern States. If it is determined to enlist them it would be best to limit the age of the recruits to about twenty years, and the period of active service to five years, so that the men may be returned to civil life young enough to enter on ordinary employments.

At present it is most desirable that the negroes of the South should be induced to save money, for until that habit is formed, there is little chance of lifting them in the economic scale or of developing in them the business sense, which is one of the corner-stones of civilization. It is probable that more could be done in the way of correcting the faults and stimulating the latent capacities of the race by developing this motive than by any other means. It is difficult to suggest any effective system by which this end can be attained. The general conditions of the South make rural savings-banks impossible. The receipts, at least for many years, would be too small to render the business remunerative. The only practicable method appears to be that of a Federal system operated through the post-offices. The institution of such a system appears to be justified by the two conditions: the exceeding need of such a provision and the impossibility of doing the work except through the postal machinery of which the Federal Government holds a monopoly. It may be said that this method has proved successful under other governments, and that it has been for some time established in Canada. In our own country it is clearly demanded, in all rural communities, though nowhere else so gravely as in the Southern States.

In looking over the latent possibilities of the negro people, the observer can not fail to remark their keen delight in music. Statistics on this, as on other facts, are lacking; but from what I have been able to learn, it appears probable that a far greater proportion of the blacks are sensitive to musical effects than is the case with the white people. I have indeed never been able to find a black man who was so far lacking in this sensibility that he did not enjoy the songs of his people. It is not unlikely that close inquiry would show this to be a remarkable feature in this unexplored race. As yet little effort has been made to determine the true measure of this capacity of the negro for music. It may be that they can not attain to the higher levels of the art; yet it is perfectly evident that their voices are exceptionally good, and that they have a keen native sense of time and tune. The most effective dance music I have ever heard has been made by negroes who could not read a note. When we consider how large a place music has in our life, it is a fair suggestion that this quality of the black nature might well be made the subject of experiment.

Those who look closely at the conditions of the negroes of the South are led to the belief that the existing separation in sympathy of the races is not likely long to continue. The greater number of the negroes instinctively crave a protective relation with the whites. It is the ancient disposition of the weak man to lean upon the strong which has in all ages and lands determined the relations of folk. At present the two peoples are held apart by the memories of slavery, rather than by any real personal dislike--the race prejudice which so commonly separates the Northern white from the negro. As this temporary barrier wears down, we may hope to find a new form of association arising--one in which the negroes will seek and find their friends among the trusted men of the superior race. I have seen marks of this new relation here and there, not many nor very clear, but fairly indicative of what may come about, provided the political excitement is allowed to subside and the people of the South, black and white, make their adjustments according to their motives and capacities, with no reference to the Federal power.

At first sight it will appear to most of the Northern people over-much to ask that the powers at Washington give up all efforts to deal with the needs of the negro folk--the so-called wards of the nation. Yet experience has shown the impracticability of the project of helping these negroes with the long arm of the Federal law. All that has been undertaken in this way has been fruitless or worse. The only chance for lifting the black man to the full status of the citizen is by leaving his future essentially in the hands of the masterful folk who alone can help him. We see that the ruling class in the South have a measure of interest in the status of the negro and an opportunity to benefit his state that can never belong to the people of the North. Although the country, as a whole, will, of course, suffer from the failure to elevate the blacks, the burden will lie most heavily on those with whom they dwell.

The Southern whites have given evidence of political capacity of a high order. Even their blunder in the rebellion is in good part compensated for by the sagacity with which they accepted the results of the war and turned them to the best account they could. They are not likely to cower before the vast undertakings which the uplifting of the blacks will entail; as yet, they have not accepted the task as their own. They have indeed been brought to believe that their business was to defend their own class interests, as well as they might be able to, against the attacks of the negroes, aided by the Federal power. If they are forced to see that within the limits the Federal Constitution sets to action, the responsibility for the future of their several States is in the hands of those who control their politics, we may hope to find the political and economic skill which went to the development of the system of slavery given to the advancement of the Africans. While the work must needs be done by the men who are near to it, it should receive every possible aid and sympathy from those who, because they are far away, can not effectively control the matter. The cause is so large that it needs the help of all who wish it well.

It appears to me that the time has come for an effective union of endeavor on the part of those of North and South, ex-slaveholder and ex-abolitionist alike, who wish to see the negro have, not his rights in the common sense of the word (for mere rights are a pitiful share for a man), but rather a good human chance to climb the ladder of civilization, upon which our ancestors set him. The aims of these two ancient parties surely have for a common end the best that can be done for the negro people. It is just as much a mistake to suppose that the majority of the slaveholders in a malign spirit sought to oppress and torture the blacks, as to fancy that the abolitionists desired to set the negroes over their sometime masters; for history will probably write it down that the better men of these two parties were both dealing with the same very difficult problem: that their contentions grew from a failure on both sides to see the whole of the matter.