Chapter X: Part I: propose to set forth some of the large and essential facts of the (2)

I have stated the case at the very lowest in saying that the advantages of fusion are unproved. Though it is not essential to my position, I must confess that my personal belief goes much further, and that the disadvantages of fusion are, to my thinking, proved beyond all reasonable doubt. I have not hitherto emphasized the essential and innate inferiority of the negro race, because my argument did not demand it. But the fact of this inferiority seems to me as evident as it is inevitable. However fallacious may be the boundaries between this and that European race, the boundary between the European and the African is real, and not to be argued away. The European is the fruit of untold generations of upward struggle, the African of untold generations of immobility. At the very dawn of history, the ancestors of the white American had advanced to a point beyond that which the ancestors of the Afro-American had attained when they were shipped across the Atlantic from fifty to two hundred years ago. That the negro race has some very amiable qualities is not denied. It is not denied that civilization has brought with it certain disadvantages and corruptions, and that the white savage is in some ways a more deplorable phenomenon than the black savage. Nor is it denied that the negro, in virtue of his strong imitative instinct, has, in many cases, shown a remarkable power of taking on a certain measure of civilization. But all this does not practically lessen the huge historic gap between the two races. Even if we admit the innate power of the negro to overtake the white man in intellectual grasp and moral stability, we must in reason allow him a few centuries to make up his millenniums of arrearage. Whatever it may become in the course of ten or fifteen generations, the negro race here and now is inferior to the white race, not only because of its “previous condition of servitude,” but, ultimately and fundamentally, because of its recent condition of savagery. Therefore, the white race, in accepting amalgamation, would be derogating from its birthright and climbing down the scale of humanity.

Our theorists are, on the whole, too much inclined to confound instinct with prejudice. It is absurd to class as pure prejudice the white man’s preference for the colour and facial contour of his race. This is no place for an analysis of our sense of beauty; but to maintain offhand that it is an unmeaning product of sheer habit, with no biological justification, is simply to shirk the problem and postpone analysis to dogma. Does any one really believe that the genius of Cæsar and Napoleon, of Milton and Goethe, had nothing to do with their facial angle, and could have found an equally convenient habitation behind thick lips and under woolly skulls? The negro himself (as distinct from the mulatto rhetorician) takes his stand on no such paradox. Whoever may doubt the superiority of the white race, it is not he; and it is a racial, not merely a social or economic superiority to which he does instinctive homage. It does not enter his head to champion his own racial ideal, to set up an African Venus in rivalry to the Hellenic, and claim a new Judgment of Paris between them. If wishing could change the Ethiopian’s skin there would be never a negro in America.[63] The black race, out of its poverty, spends thousands of dollars annually on “anti-kink” lotions, vainly supposed to straighten the African wool.[64] The brown belle tones her complexion with pearl powder; and many a black mother takes pride in the brown skin of her offspring, though it proclaims their illegitimacy. There can be no reasonable doubt that amalgamation, in the negro’s eyes, means an enormous gain to his race. It means ennoblement, transfiguration. It is quite natural that he should not too curiously inquire whether the gain to him would involve a corresponding loss to the white man. That is the white man’s business, not his. The one thing his instinct tells him is that, if he can break down the white man’s resistance and make the Southern States a brown or yellow man’s land, he will have achieved a splendid racial triumph.

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Footnote 63:

There is some conflict of evidence as to whether many persons of negro
blood “cross the line” or “go over to white”—that is to say conceal
and renounce the negro strain in their ancestry. Mr. Kelly Miller
states that, as a result of white persecution, “hundreds of the
composite progeny are daily crossing the colour-line and carrying as
much of the despised blood as an albicant skin can conceal without
betrayal.” (“Race Adjustment,” p. 49.) “Hundreds daily” is probably an
exaggeration; but it would appear that such cases are not infrequent;
and it is significant that negroes generally, instead of resenting
this disloyalty to their blood, enter into “a sort of conspiracy of
silence to protect the negro who crosses the line.” “Such cases,” says
Mr. Stannard Baker, “even awaken glee among them, as though the negro
thus, in some way, was getting even with the dominant white man.”

Footnote 64:

“One day, while walking in one of the most fashionable residence
districts of Atlanta, I saw a magnificent gray stone residence
standing somewhat back from the street. I said to my companion, who
was a resident of the city:

“‘That’s a fine home.’

“‘Yes; stop a minute,’ he said. ‘I want to tell you about that. The
anti-kink man lives there.’

“‘Anti-kink?’ I asked in surprise.

“‘Yes; the man who occupies that house is one of the wealthiest men
here. He made his money by selling to negroes a preparation to smooth
the kinks out of their wool. They’re simply crazy on that subject.’

“‘Does it work?’

“‘You haven’t seen any straight-haired negroes, have you?’ he
asked.”—Ray Stannard Baker.

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THE CASE FOR THE MULATTO.

It is urged, as we have already seen, that the black man’s gain would not be the white man’s loss, but that the black race would bring to the white certain qualities of which it stands sorely in need, the result of the mixture being a more competent “vehicle of all the qualities and powers that we imply by humanity.” Has experience justified this speculation? We have ample experience to go upon—in South America, in the West Indies, in the Southern States themselves. The mulatto exists and has existed for generations, not in hundreds or thousands, but in millions; in what respect has he proved himself superior to the pure Spaniard, or Portuguese, or Anglo-Saxon? Does South American history bear testimony to his political competence? Have his achievements in science, in art, in literature, in music, been superior to those of the un-Africanized peoples? Or, waiving the question of superiority, has he even, in these domains, produced meritorious work in any fair proportion to his numbers? I do not say that it is impossible to make a sort of case for him, by the ransacking of records and the employment of a very indefinite standard of values. But I do most emphatically say that no conspicuous and undeniable advantage has resulted from the blending of bloods, such as can or ought to counteract the instinctive repugnance of the South.

In a work entitled “Twentieth Century Negro Literature,”[65] published in 1901, Mr. Edward E. Cooper, a mulatto journalist, quotes Byron’s lines:—

“You have the letters Cadmus gave;
Think ye he meant them for a slave?”

and then comments as follows:—

Now Cadmus was a black African slave, captured in war; so was Æsop,
the world’s greatest fabulist; so was Terence, among the grandest of
Rome’s lyric poets; so was Pushkin, the national poet to-day of
Russia; so was Alexandre Dumas, the first, the greatest, not only of
French novelists, but of novelists of all times, and the infinite
storehouse from which all novelists draw, Honoré de Balzac and Charles
Dickens to the contrary notwithstanding.

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Footnote 65:

This volume contains portraits of ninety-seven contributors to it,
whom I have roughly classified according to their features and
apparent complexion. There are only three whom one can put down as
probably pure negroes. Of the remainder, twenty-three seem to be
predominantly negroes, but clearly not pure-bred; thirty-four are
typical mulattoes (that is to say, appear to be half black, half
white); in thirty-three the features are almost entirely Caucasian,
but the complexion is unmistakably swarthy, while in five there is
scarcely any recognizable trace of negro blood. The decoration round
the portraits in this book is curious and instructive. It consists of
a scroll-work encircling two pairs of contrasted medallions. On the
one side we have a black slave being flogged, on the other a very
light mulatto writing in a study, surrounded with books; on the one
side a negro kneeling with broken fetters on his wrists, on the other
a frock-coated mulatto on a platform, with an ice-water pitcher on his
table, lecturing with gesticulation to a crowded audience.

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This writer can scarcely mean what he says—namely, that Alexandre Dumas and the rest were all black African slaves captured in war. We must interpret him liberally, and take him to be simply asserting the literary genius of the African race, whether pure or blended. A better case than this might doubtless be made for it; but a ten times better case would still be very far from a good case. And Mr. Edward E. Cooper is a fair average specimen of the negro champion of negro genius. Another spokesman of the race, by the way, in the same collection of essays, argues that if the Southern clergy had done their duty in denouncing lynching, there would have been no assassination of President McKinley, “nor would there be anywhere such an illiberal public sentiment as would openly criticize our Chief Executive for dining a representative member of the race whose feasts even Jupiter did not disdain to grace.”[66]

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Footnote 66:

“What evil spirit has come upon the present-day Afro-American that a
people who, from the days of Homer until this generation, have borne
the epithet of ‘blameless Ethiopians’ should now be accused as the
scourge of mankind?” Kelly Miller (coloured), “Race Adjustment,” p.
77.

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A BIOLOGICAL ARGUMENT.

To wind up this attempt to place on a basis of reason the Southern horror of amalgamation, I return for a moment to Sir Sydney Olivier’s argument on the point.[67] He says:—

There may naturally be aversion on the part of and a strong social
objection on behalf of the white woman against her marriage with a
black or coloured man. There is no correspondingly strong instinctive
aversion, nor is there so strong an ostensible social objection to a
white man’s marrying a woman of mixed descent. The latter kind of
union is much more likely to occur than the former. There is good
biological reason for this distinction. Whatever the potentialities of
the African stocks as a vehicle for human manifestation, and I myself
believe them to be exceedingly important and valuable, ... the white
races are now, in fact, by far the farther advanced in effectual human
development, and it would be expedient on this account alone that
their maternity should be economized to the utmost. A woman may be the
mother of a limited number of children, and our notion of the number
advisable is contracting: it is bad natural economy, and instinct very
potently opposes it, to breed backwards from her. There is no such
reason against the begetting of children by white men in countries
where, if they are to breed at all, it must be with women of coloured
or mixed races. The offspring of such breeding, whether legitimate or
illegitimate, is, from the point of view of efficiency, an acquisition
to the community, and under favourable conditions, an advance on the
pure-bred African.

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Footnote 67:

I do not dwell on his surely unadvised initial statement that the
“barriers” between white and black “are not different in kind or in
strength from those which once separated neighbouring European
tribes.” I presume that “once” must be taken as referring to
pre-historic ages, reconstructed on scanty ethnological evidence.

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To this I have nothing to object, save that it manifestly and in its very terms does not apply to the Southern States of America. Sir Sydney does not intend it so to apply; but when he proceeds to speak of the Southern States, he somehow neglects to draw the necessary distinctions. The conditions he has in mind in the above paragraph are those of a black man’s land, not of a white man’s land. It may readily be granted that a fundamentally black community gains by the infusion of white blood, though the circumstances of the “first cross” are scarcely agreeable to civilized sentiment. There can be little beyond sheer animalism in the relations between a white man and a black woman; and such parentage cannot be reckoned the most desirable. This feeling, however, is perhaps a mere superstition; the science of eugenics is not yet far enough advanced, I take it, to afford us any authoritative guidance. Sir Sydney Olivier, at all events, rejects without hesitation the view that the mulatto is inferior, not only to the white, but to the pure black. The mulatto element in a black community, he maintains, is a distinct gain; and the larger it is the better. So far, I am quite willing to follow him; but surely the same process of reasoning, applied to a white community, must lead to exactly the opposite conclusion. It is this fundamental distinction between a black and white community that Sir Sidney either ignores, or declines to take into account. The South is obviously not a country where, “if white men are to breed at all, it must be with women of coloured races.” It is a country where a pure white race increases rapidly in spite of the disturbance (economic and sexual) undoubtedly set up by the constant propinquity of a black race. In bygone days, when the black race was a herd of human chattels, with no political or social rights, a great deal of intermixture took place. It was, as Sir Sydney would doubtless admit, morally bestial and degrading; but on the principles he lays down, and on the assumption that slavery was part of the eternal scheme of things, it was probably good policy, inasmuch as it improved the breed of the black community—the community of slaves.[68] But when the black community ceased to be, in its very nature, a thing apart—when its members became freemen and citizens, indistinguishable, in constitutional theory, from members of the white community—then the conditions entirely altered. It was one thing to produce a superior breed of slaves; it is quite another to go on producing an inferior breed of citizens, and to legalize the production of such a breed. “But I deny the inferiority!” Sir Sydney may say. “I contend that the good qualities of the white race are preserved, and are reinforced by the addition of certain very valuable qualities which are the special endowment of the black race.” It is not very easy to see why, if this argument hold good, Sir Sydney should discountenance the mating of the black man with the white woman. Either the African strain is valuable or it is not; if it is, why should there be any “bad natural economy” in such unions? Waiving this point, however, I think we have already seen pretty clearly why Sir Sydney’s argument meets with scant acceptance in the South. The plain reason is that it opposes to a deep-rooted instinct a wholly unproved speculation. The South has not discovered, in its own pretty considerable experience, the advantages of hybridism as compared with purity of white blood; nor does Sir Sydney himself advance anything that can possibly be called proof of his opinion. A white nation can scarcely be expected to renounce its racial integrity on the chance of breeding an occasional Alexandre Dumas.

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Footnote 68:

Yet I cannot but call attention once more to the doubt even on this
point. See p. 108. The general manager (a Canadian) of the company
which laid down the street-car lines in Kingston, Jamaica, reported
that “the best and most reliable of the workmen were the pure blacks.
This was found to be invariably the case.”—W. P. Livingstone, “Black
Jamaica,” p. 182.

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Sir Sydney Olivier’s biological principle, strictly and consistently applied, would issue in a law making marriage legal between any male and a female lower in the colour scale than himself, but illegal between any female and a male with a larger proportion of African blood. Such a law would, of course, be absolutely impossible of enforcement; and equally inconceivable in practice would be any other partial and restricted legalization of inter-racial unions. There is no middle course between a resolute maintenance of the legal barrier between the races and a complete acceptance of the principle of amalgamation. If the legal barrier were ever removed, it would mean such a relaxation of public sentiment as would insure the very rapid increase of the hybrid race.[69] Three or four generations would see the South a brown man’s land, with, no doubt, a rapidly narrowing white aristocracy. In another three or four generations the prevailing complexion of the North would be sensibly affected; and, finally, the whole American nation would be typically negroid, the pure white man being the more or less rare exception. For my part, I cannot but sympathize with the sentiment that violently repudiates such a contingency. I do not understand how any white man who has ever visited the South can fail to be dismayed at the thought of absorbing into the veins of his race the blood of the African myriads who swarm on every hand.

For the South itself, at any rate, the discussion is purely academic. Amalgamation is a thousand leagues remote from the sphere of practical politics. I have been endeavouring to state for outsiders the case of the South as I understand it. I may have stated it wrongly, or understated it; but no one can possibly overstate the resolve of the South that the colour line shall not be obliterated by “miscegenation.”

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Footnote 69:

Several of my critics, when this essay first appeared, misunderstood
this phrase. I do not mean that if the legal barriers were removed
white men would rush to marry black women. What I mean is that, in a
democratic community, the legal barrier could not possibly be removed
unless there had previously occurred a relaxation, or rather reversal,
of public sentiment with regard to mixed unions.

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FOUR POSSIBILITIES: IV. SEGREGATION.

Lastly, we have to consider the fourth conceivable eventuality—the geographical segregation of the negro race, whether within or without the limits of the United States.

This is usually ridiculed as an absolutely Utopian scheme, and at the outset of my investigation I myself regarded it in that light. But the more I saw and read and thought, the oftener and the more urgently did segregation recur to me as the one possible way of escape from an otherwise intolerable situation. Not, of course, the instant, and wholesale, and violent deportation of ten million people—that is a rank impossibility. Between that and inert acquiescence in the ubiquity of the negro throughout the Southern States, there are many middle courses; and I cannot but believe that the first really great statesman who arises in America will prove his greatness by grappling with this vast but not insoluble problem. And, assuredly, the sooner he comes the better.

We have seen that the negro race is not dying out, or that, if it does die out, it can only be, so to speak, at the cost of Southern civilization—through the indefinite continuance of insanitary and barbarous conditions. We have seen that the Atlanta Compromise is illusory and impracticable, that there is no reasonable hope that the two races will ever live together, yet apart—in economic solidarity, yet without social or sexual contact. We have seen that the essence of the whole situation lies in the negro’s inevitable ambition (even though it be unformulated and largely unconscious) to be drawn upward, through physical coalescence, into the white race, and the white man’s intense resolve that, on a large and determining scale, no such coalescence shall take place. Now this state of war—for such it undoubtedly is—will not correct itself by lapse of time. It will continue to degrade and demoralize both races until active measures are taken to put an end to it. Though I sympathize with the white man’s horror of amalgamation, I neither approve nor extenuate the systematic injustice and frequent barbarity in which that horror expresses itself. The present state of society in the South is as inhuman as it is inconsistent with the democratic and Christian principles which the Southern white man so loudly, and in the main sincerely, professes. The Jim Crow car, and all such discriminations in the system of public conveyance, are, I believe, necessities, but deplorable necessities none the less. The constant struggle to exclude the negro from political power is at best a negative and unproductive expenditure of energy, at worst a source of political dishonesty and corruption. The wresting of the law, whether criminal or civil, into an instrument for keeping the negro in a state of abject serfdom, is a scandal and a disgrace to any civilized community. The constant resort to lawless violence and cruelty in revenge for negro crime (real or imaginary) is a hideous blot upon the fair fame of the South, if not rather an impeachment of her sanity. The truth is, in fact, that constant inter-racial irritation leaves neither race entirely sane, and that abominable crime and no less abominable punishment are merely the acutest symptom of an ill-omened conjuncture of things, which puts an unfair and unnatural strain upon both black and white human nature. The criminal stupidity that brought the negro to America cannot be annulled by passively “making the best of it.” If its evil effects are to be counteracted, corrected, and wiped out, it must be through an active and constructive effort of large-minded statesmanship.

BACK TO AFRICA?

The deportation of the negro has been urged by many American writers, generally in a somewhat illogical fashion. They start by asserting his total incapacity for self-government, as demonstrated in Haiti, Liberia, and elsewhere, and then recommend the foundation of a new negro republic in some undefined portion of Africa. A curious scheme was put forward in 1889, in an anonymous book entitled, “An Appeal to Pharaoh,” written, I believe, by Mr. Carl McKinley, of Charleston, South Carolina. Mr. McKinley’s proposal was to promote “the voluntary and steady emigration of the active maternal element of the negro race.” He calculated that if 12,500 child-bearing females, between the ages of twenty and thirty, could every year be induced to emigrate (taking their husbands with them), the whole “maternal element” of the coloured population would be removed within fifty years. The plan was, apparently, that as soon as a child was born to a young negro couple, they were to be persuaded to emigrate, and that thus the prolific negro would gradually be transferred to the new negro commonwealth, only the sterile element of the race being left to die off at their leisure. It is unnecessary to criticize this scheme, which is now twenty years old, and does not seem to have found any serious champions. I mention it as perhaps the most carefully considered of the suggestions for an exodus to Africa.

In no form does the African project seem to me at all a hopeful one. The habitable portions of Africa are, I take it, pretty well staked out among the European Powers, so that an elaborate and costly international arrangement would be necessary before the requisite territory would be available. But supposing this difficulty overcome, would the United States be justified in simply dumping its coloured population in Africa, and then washing its hands of them? It might just as well drive them into the sea and have done with it. The negro character has shown no fitness for the very difficult task of combined pioneering and nation-building that it would have to encounter. To the lower elements in the race, the return to Africa might mean repatriation in the sense of a not unwelcome home-coming to savagery; but the better elements would suffer greatly in such a relapse, while of their own strength they probably could not resist it. Toward these better elements, and indeed toward the whole race, the United States has a responsibility that it could not, and certainly would not, shirk; so that it would in effect have to undertake the policing of a distant, troublesome, and unsatisfactory dependency, which might, in addition, not improbably involve it in international difficulties. This would be preferable to the present state of things, but still far from a desirable solution of the problem.

The same objections apply to a settlement in South America, the Philippines, or anywhere else outside the United States. Deportation, in a word, is beset with disadvantages. It would be ruinously costly and indefensibly cruel. If there ever was a time for it, that time is past.

A NEGRO STATE.

What, then, is the alternative? Manifestly, concentration within the United States—the formation of a new State which should be, not a white man’s land, but a black man’s land.

Is this physically possible? Is there enough unoccupied territory to permit of such a concentration? Of absolutely unoccupied territory there probably is not enough; but those who have studied the matter tell us that there is plenty of territory so thinly occupied that the white settlers could be removed and compensated at no extravagant cost. According to the Honourable John Temple Graves:—

Lower California might be secured. The lands west of Texas may be had.
But the Government does not need to purchase. Four hundred million
acres of Government land is yet untaken and undeveloped in the West.
Of these vast acres the expert hydrographer of the Interior Department
has reported that it is easily possible to redeem by irrigation enough
to support in plenty a population of sixty million people.

We may liberally discount this estimate, and yet leave it unquestionable that the resources of the United States are amply sufficient to admit of the establishment of a new State without any exorbitant disturbance of the existing distribution of territory.

It would be absurd for me to forecast in any detail the methods by which the concentration should be brought about. They must be devised and elaborated by the great American statesman who is to come. If he can successfully grapple with this colossal task, he will deserve to rank with Washington and Lincoln in the affections of his countrymen. It may be pretty safely predicted that he will attempt no sudden and forcible displacement of the mass of the negro race. Rather he will establish local conditions that shall tempt the younger and more enterprising negroes to migrate of their own free will; while he will probably fix by legislation a pretty distant date—say five-and-twenty years ahead—after which it shall be competent for the various State governments[70] forcibly to evict (with compensation) and transplant to the new State any negroes under, say, forty-five years of age still lingering within their boundaries. There will be no need at any time to disturb old or middle-aged negroes who are disinclined to start life afresh under new conditions.

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Footnote 70:

I assume that, the principle once accepted, there will be small
difficulty in arranging the respective rights and duties in this
matter of the central and the State governments. The colour problem is
a national concern, if ever there was one.

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The probability is, however, that if once the new State were judiciously set on foot, the difficulty would be so to moderate the westward rush as to prevent an unnecessary dislocation of the labour-market in the South. Negro labour could and would be gradually replaced by white labour; but a sudden negro exodus on a large scale would embarrass agriculture and other industries in most of the Southern States. It would be one of the main problems of the case so to regulate the flow of migration as to make it continuous, yet not excessive.

There seems to be little doubt that the negro race, as a whole, would welcome any reasonable means of escape from the galling conditions of their life in the South. On the other hand, there is no doubt whatever that all the more intelligent members of the race are staunchly and even pathetically loyal to American ideals, and would be very unwilling to live under any other than the American form of government. In the new State, they would be members of a negro community without ceasing to be American citizens. It might be necessary at first to establish some provisional government like that of an American territory or English crown colony; but as soon as the country was sufficiently settled, and the mechanism of life in full swing, there could be no difficulty or danger in admitting the new community into the Union, with full State rights. Negro education has enormously progressed since the bad old days of Reconstruction; and there is no reason to doubt that the population could furnish a competent legislature, executive and judiciary. Legislative aberrations would be checked by the Supreme Court of the United States; and if things went thoroughly wrong, and a new Haiti threatened to develop in the heart of the Republic, why, United States troops would always be at hand to hold a black mob or a black adventurer in awe. But it would doubtless be a fundamental principle that no white man could vote or hold office in the negro State, while, reciprocally, no coloured man could vote or hold office in the white States.[71] The abrogation of the Fifteenth Amendment would remove from the Constitution of the United States a constant source of trouble.

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Footnote 71:

The negro State would, of course, send to Congress its two Senators
and its due proportion of members of the Lower House.

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I am far from denying that this racial readjustment would demand a huge effort and a very large expense. In many individual cases it might cause a good deal of hardship to people of both colours. But that both colours would enormously and permanently benefit by the effort seems to me indubitable. It would be, before everything, an act of justice to the negro. It would enable him to build up a polity of his own, on lines to which his mind is already habituated. It would offer him full opportunity for the development of his talents and ambitions, unhampered by any social discriminations or disabilities. The Hampton-Tuskegee movement has been fitting great numbers of the race to carry out the necessary tasks of construction and organization involved in the material and moral upbuilding of the new community. Every aid should, of course, be afforded for the transference to the new domain of all negro universities, colleges, and similar institutions. I see little reason to doubt that the sense of new and unhampered opportunity would stimulate the mental and moral energies of the race, and beget a higher competency, a new self-respect. They would feel that they were on trial before the eyes of the world, that their future was in their own hands, and that they must vindicate their claim to the rights and liberties of civilized humanity. They would have a very fair chance of success; and in case of failure they would at worst relapse upon some sort of crown colony government. A regularly established and benevolent despotism would, at any rate, be better than the capricious and malevolent despotism to which they are now subjected in the South.

“But,” it may be said, “the rights and liberties of civilized humanity include the right to move freely hither and thither over the face of the earth. This right, at any rate, would be denied to the Afro-American, inclosed within the ring-fence of his own State.” There is, I think, a sufficient answer to this objection. The right to travel would not be denied to the negro. Nor would he be debarred from emigrating and settling abroad among any community that was willing to receive him. It is, I think, becoming more and more clear that the right of every man, white, black, or yellow, to effect a permanent settlement outside his own country, is subject to this qualification. The idea that all the world ought to belong equally to all men, and that rational development tends toward an unrestricted intermingling of races, seems to be signally contradicted by the trend of events. Is it not the great essential for the ultimate world-peace that races should learn to keep themselves to themselves?

If the negro State is established with any success, I do not believe that its inhabitants will feel it an undue restriction on their liberties that they are forbidden to settle in other parts of the Union. The population question will gradually regulate itself. A fairly civilized people, with limited opportunities of expansion, will soon realize the penalties of breeding beyond its means of subsistence.

And what of the South, when this act of justice to the negro shall have been performed? It will awaken, as from a nightmare, to the realization of its splendid destiny. No longer will one of the richest and most beautiful regions of the world be hampered in its material and spiritual development by a legacy of ancestral crime. All that is best in the South—and the Southern nature is rich in elements of magnanimity and humanity—abhors the inhuman necessities imposed upon it by the presence of the negro. The Southern white man writhes under the criticisms of the North and of Europe, which he feels to be ignorant and in great measure unjust, yet which he can only answer by an impotent, “You do not know! You cannot understand!”[72] He has to confess, too, that there is much in Southern policy and practice that even the necessities of the situation cannot excuse—much that can only be palliated as the result of a constant overstrain to which human nature ought never to be subjected. Remove the causes of this overstrain, and a region perhaps the most favoured by Nature of all in the Western Hemisphere will stand where it ought to stand—in the van, not only of civilization, but of humanity.

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Footnote 72:

“I know of no other community of white people of equal numbers in the
world to-day carrying the burden borne by those of the Southern
States.... I mean the burden of ... administering the same law for the
two most diverse races on earth; of so carrying themselves in the
various relations of daily life with these childish people that their
conduct may have the approval of their consciences; of living with a
due regard for the opinions of their fellow-men, the while oppressed
by the consciousness that their fellow-men do not, will not, or cannot
understand.”—A. H. Stone, “The American Race Problem,” p. 74.

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