Chapter C: H. Duell, (2)

The cheerful sunny temperament of the Negro is another of the many sturdy qualities which declare his fitness to withstand the blows of adverse fortune. His long training in the school of mental and moral darkness wherein he had need to cultivate a sanguine temperament to buoy him up, stands proof against dark forebodings and pessimism. The grotesque and the ludicrous find in him a joyous patron. Where others count and bewail their woes, he sees only sunshine. Gloom and sorrow melt away at his approach, while his features are ever radiant with mirth and joy. His head is up and erect with every sense attuned to the bright, and dead to the doleful. He thanks God that the lot apportioned him is fashioned by infallible wisdom, while he munches with contentment the humble crust that honest toil has brought him. Malevolence towards his fellow men is at the most a passing emotion. Wealth and the happiness attendant on it, he neither envies nor mars. He asks a chance to live, no matter how sumptuously others may fare beyond his condition. Such a being is forever beyond the pale of anarchy, and other tendencies which work to the detriment of society. In this portraiture I have drawn no ideal, but the average Negro as he is known of all men.

In peace and in war such a being is an invaluable factor in a nation's well being. As he does not envy the class which fortune has blest with good things of this world, he therefore breeds no feeling of ill will by which he might seek to level conditions, while he is equally ready to assume his share of the dangers consequent on the maintenance of the existing order of affairs.

PATRIOTISM OF THE RACE.

Another marked characteristic of race strength is love of country. The only race in this country which has more than a shadow of excuse to be indifferent to the nation's welfare is the Negro. Not unlike the dog in the fable whose devotion to his master's interest was recognized only after the sacrifice of life in that master's service, the Negro's love for his country in the civil service, on the tented field, and wherever sincere devotion should command the highest commendation, is commonly rewarded with cold indifference, or at least with damnable praise, and yet when driven, as it were, with brutal kicks and cuffs from the service and defense of his country's honor, he hangs on to the outer folds of its flag with a grim determination to maintain its glory as though that duty had been specially entrusted him by heaven. And herein again he shows the instinct of self-preservation, as people who would seek to become an appreciable power in the public affairs of their country, must be alive to every vital interest pertaining to it. To become rooted it must maintain an unyielding grasp. That the Negro is to-day only a passive member in the affairs of government, does not argue that his unflagging patriotism will not finally gain its reward. That he is quietly working now at long range to prepare himself for citizenship, means that he will in due time enter into that rich inheritance. The foaming stream is not the water carrying most matter into the ocean; the deep current which gives no evidence on its surface is the hydraulic force which forms the Delta. And so it is with the latent influence of Negro patriotism. In every essential matter pertaining to national welfare, however keen his grievance, fancied or real, his regard for the honor of the government and the maintenance of its power, induces him to throw his head-gear in air, out-yell the lustiest lung in the crowd and attest his enthusiasm by demoniac courage on the field of battle.

The chief magistrate of the nation is stricken down in the vigor of manhood and in the fullness of power. In the exercise of his great office morally and otherwise, without going out of his way, he might have benefited the race. But although he had no special claim to the Negro's regard, yet his untimely taking off has been lamented by none more sincerely than by our race. In country, in town, in state, in every section, the Negro is broadly American. Nothing that concerns this country is foreign to him, but with all there is to discourage him, what is the outcome of such steady, magnificent devotion to duty? Geologists affirm that the wondrous chasm of Niagara is the creation of trickling drops of water during myriads of ages. In like manner, the fervent, unflagging patriotism of the Negro is slowly but surely crumbling away the granite of American prejudice to give him a permanent place in the national life of this country. A nation, the bulb of which comes of a race whose love of fair play is proverbial and goes with them into every land and clime, will be constrained in the end to recognize and confirm the merit the race is developing as a strong pillar in the edifice of state.

In the heat of that terrific contest at Waterloo where charge after charge of the imperial guard seemed likely to consign the fate of Europe to the absolute sway of the little Corsican, Wellington exclaimed, to such of his staff as still remained around him, "Hot pounding this, gentlemen." But the day was at last won, and the endangered constitutional liberty of Europe leaped forth from the sea of blood, to inspire man with new hope and aspiration. As a race, we are struggling for life. Our hopes and fears are trembling in the balance against might, power, and moss-covered prejudices. A continuous pounding, directed by the impulse of a will to do, dare and succeed, will bring us victory.

But, says the carping critic, if the Negro were less patient, forbearing and more combative, if he risked less for country, and gloried more in deeds of heroism for his personal defense, he would lie truer to his self-preservation. Other races placed in condition quite similar to the Negroes have tried the experiment, and failed. They opposed simple brute force to intelligence, and they went down in the contest either to extinction or to servitude. The Britons gave way to Saxon numbers and tougher sinews, the latter bent the neck to Norman intelligence, bided their time and brought the victor down to an equality of rights and privileges. If the Negro should attempt another way, he would soon be undone.

ADAPTABILITY TO ENVIRONMENTS.

Again the adaptability of the race to environments constitutes one of the means of his endurance. In servitude as in freedom, no conditions have yet been so vigorous that the negro has not been able to adjust himself with ease. Indeed, it is not a figure of speech to assert that wherever he has suffered the most, there he has given the best proof of his vitality. His acquisition of wealth, his possession of material means in general, has been most rapid in parts where he has most obstacles to confront and encounter. He not only laughs at his misfortunes, but turns them to account. When he is ground down beyond the point of greatest resistance, he leaves for new and untried regions, with a radiant hope for a better fate. He goes to the semi-arctic lands of the West, readily becomes domesticated, and so insinuates himself into the hard, prosaic customs of the country that he at once becomes, in so far as he is not debarred from the rules of labor organizations, a sharp competitor with the wage-earner in the strife for bread. His blood has no lazy microbes to dam the current of its movement. Assure him of reasonable compensation, and his brawny arm is bared to the pick and the mattox. His ax and hoe and plow drag out wealth from mine and soil.

ACTIVE EVERYWHERE.

Wherever his lot is cast, there he enters with zest into the live sentiment of the community. No thought born of enterprise within the scope of his comprehension, no undertaking to enhance the common wealth fail to enlist his good will. He will at least talk for it and praise it, even if he has not a cent to invest. However limited by industrial conditions to few and humble ways of acquiring a livelihood, his scanty earnings are on the market to give healthy circulation to the arteries of trade. Merchants welcome him to open doors, and small dealers meet him with graceful smiles knowing he has come to apply the move-on ordinance to the jingling coin in his pocket. In church and school, in the pulpit and on the rostrum, his desire to fall in with the prevailing spirit to promote the betterment of the community, is equally pronounced.

Take as a sample the spirit of the race to absorb elevating influence from the dominant class. The African Methodist Episcopal Church is a race organization which justly challenges the admiration of every one of us no matter of what creed or sect. A race which in about one generation from a condition of base servitude can be so lively to a sense of its spiritual wants and the public weal as to advance enough to create such an organization is no mean factor in any age or country. In the show of this receptive capacity, it declares its eternal fitness to live and thrive under the blaze of the most searching civilization in the history of the world.

Take moreover, the many worthy bodies founded in the last quarter of a century for moral, mental and social elevation. All these have been inspired by the thought that if the race would hold its own, it must emulate the spirit of the country and age in which it lives.

Truly, if our coming to this land was involuntary, the genius of our being has built a home which can only be abandoned at our own will.

THE END.

I am admonished that this paper must come to a close. I am compelled to omit even by mere mention many of the exemplary virtues of the race. I have, however, touched on just enough to furnish the enquiring mind with deductions. Even the pessimist is constrained to admit that, under the circumstances, as a whole, the race has made a remarkable record, and that chiefly, because of the qualities with which he is endowed. Many historic races who have dominated mankind, made less rapid progress than we, at the point we have reached. This remarkable advancement may be ascribed in the main to the superior attributes which give us a flexible and well balanced temperament.

The hardships the race undergoes in this period of development constitute the necessary training school and the virtues which spring thence are intended as much for the betterment of the other race as for our own. We are to soften their stern qualities, while our life is to take on some of the iron of their soul.

That our nature will be largely modified by the necessities of our growth must be an accepted fact, but our merit, worth and fitness in American life will substantially be the product of our qualities as they are to-day. The past gives us assurance of glorious possibilities to come. Just how far and to what extent we are to realize the fruition of our cherished dreams of rising to the full height of honorable manhood vests chiefly with us. God has endowed us with the capacity to suffer and undergo the trials incident to race development. If we can recognize the need for this training, severe though it be, if we do not chafe and fume and fret and get angry because our deliverance has not come, we may well be comforted in the meanwhile that any device of man to deny us a share in the government of a common heritage in this land consecrated by heaven to suffering humanity, will prove a complete failure.

TOPIC XXX.

THE SIGNS OF A BRIGHTER FUTURE FOR THE AMERICAN NEGRO.

BY REV. F. J. GRIMKE, D. D.

FRANCIS J. GRIMKE, D. D.

Francis J. Grimke, clergyman, was born near Charleston, S.
C., November 4, 1850. Son of Henry and Nancy (Weston)
Grimke; attended school in Charleston; entered Lincoln
University, Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1866, and
graduated in 1870 (A. M., D. D.); graduated from Princeton
Theological Seminary in 1878. Ordained pastor of the
Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church the same year. Remained
until 1885. Took charge of Lama Street Presbyterian Church
1885-1889. Returned to Fifteenth Street Church, Washington,
D. C., in 1889, where he is still. Has published articles in
the New York Independent and New York Evangelist. Wrote
monographs on "The Negro: His Rights and Wrongs; The Forces
For and Against Him." In 1898, "The Lynching of Negroes in
the South: Its Causes and Remedy;" "Some Lessons from the
Assassination of President William McKinley," 1901; "The
Roosevelt-Washington Episode; or, Race Prejudice," 1901.
Address, 1526 L Street, Washington, D. C.

Extracts from his sermon on the race problem.

"Some of these days all the skies will be brighter,
Some of these days all the burdens be lighter,
Hearts will be happier, souls will be whiter,
Some of these days.

"Some of these days, in the deserts uprising,
Fountains shall flash while the joybells are ringing,
And the world, with its sweetest of birds, shall go singing,
Some of these days.

"Some of these days: Let us bear with our sorrow,
Faith in the future--its light we may borrow,
There will be joy in the golden to-morrow--
Some of these days."

That is my faith; I am no pessimist on this Negro problem. Terrible as the facts are, cruel and bitter as is this race prejudice, and insurmountable, almost, as are the obstacles which it sets up in our pathway, I see a light ahead, I am hopeful, I look forward to better times. And I want to tell you this morning what the ground of this hope is.

(2.) I am hopeful, because of the progress which the Negro is making in intelligence and in wealth. Think of what our condition was at the close of the war, and of what it is to-day, in these respects. That we are progressing, there can be no doubt; indeed, in view of all the circumstances, our progress has been marvelous.

Take the matter of wealth. Since freedom, hundreds and thousands of our people have become property owners in the South. Many of them are prosperous and successful farmers; thousands and hundreds of thousands of acres of land have come into their possession, hundreds and thousands of them in the cities own their own homes, and are engaged in small but lucrative business enterprises of one kind or another. They are now paying taxes on some three hundred million dollars' worth of property. That is not a very large sum, I admit, considered as the aggregate wealth of a whole race, numbering some seven or eight millions; but whether much or little, it indicates progress, and very considerable progress, and that is the point to which I am directing attention. The acquisitive faculty in the Negro is being developed; his eyes are being opened more and more to the importance of getting wealth; and slowly, but surely, he is getting it.

Educationally, the same is true. Thirty years ago there were but few educational institutions among us, but few professional men--doctors, lawyers, ministers--ministers of intelligence--teachers; but few men and women of education. Now, there are thousands of well-equipped men and women in all the professions, and thousands upon thousands of men and women of education in every part of the country. Not only are there institutions, founded especially for our benefit, crowded with students, but all the great institutions of the land are now open to us, and in all of them, with scarcely an exception, are to be found representatives of our race; and the number in such institutions is steadily increasing. The last report of the Commissioner of Education shows that in the common schools of the sixteen former slave States and the District of Columbia, there are enrolled 1,429,713 pupils, and that in these schools, some twenty-five thousand teachers are employed. It also shows that there are 178 schools for secondary and higher education, with an enrollment of over forty thousand pupils. There are, of course, thousands of our people who are still very ignorant, but that there is vastly more intelligence in the race now than at the close of the war, no one will pretend to deny. The colleges and universities, the high and normal schools, are turning out hundreds of graduates every year. The educational outlook for the race is certainly very encouraging.

In view of these two factors--the growing desire on the part of the Negro for material possessions, the fact that he is actually acquiring property, and his growing intelligence--I see signs of a brighter future for him. These are elements of power that will make themselves felt. You may deprive a poor and ignorant people of their rights, and succeed in keeping them deprived of them, but you can't hope to do that when these conditions are changed; and the point to which I am directing attention here, is that this change is taking place. All that has been done, and is being done to stimulate in the Negro this principle of acquisitiveness, and to increase his thirst for knowledge, is a harbinger of a better day. Every dollar saved, or properly invested; every atom of brain power that is developed, is a John the Baptist in the wilderness, crying, Make straight the pathway of the Negro. In proportion as the race rises in intelligence and wealth, the valleys will be filled and the mountains will be leveled, that now stand in the way of his progress, in the way of the complete recognition of all of his rights. Ignatius Donnelly, in that remarkable book of his, "Doctor Huguet," which some of you, doubtless, have read, would seem to teach the opposite of this. He attempts to show that never mind what the intellectual attainments of the Negro may be--he may be a Doctor Huguet, learned with all the learning of the schools, and cultured with all the culture of the ages--still there is no chance for him, there is no hope of his being recognized. The story as told by him is, at first, quite staggering and terribly depressing. But when we remember that, according to the story, there was but one Doctor Huguet with a black skin, and that he was poor, and that all the rest of his race were poor and ignorant, light breaks in upon the darkness, the awful pall which it casts upon us, is at once lifted. How will it be when instead of one Doctor Huguet there are hundreds and thousands of them, scholarly men and women, cultivated men and women, men and women of wealth, of large resources? It will be very different. If the Negro was indifferent to education; if he was actually getting poorer, then we might lose heart; but, thank God, the very opposite is true. His face is in the right direction. He may not be pressing on as rapidly as he might towards the goal, as rapidly as some of us might wish to see him, but it is a matter for congratulation, that he is not retrograding, nor even standing still, but is moving on. Poor? Yes, but he isn't always going to be poor. Ignorant? Yes, but he isn't always going to be ignorant. The progress that he has already made in these directions shows clearly what the future is to be. Knowledge is power; wealth is power, and that power the Negro is getting. He is not always going to be a mere hewer of wood and a drawer of water; he is not always going to be crude, ignorant. American prejudice is strong, I know; it is full of infernal hate, I know, but in the long run it will be found to be no match for the power which comes from wealth and intelligence.

(3.) I am hopeful because I have faith in the ultimate triumph of right. You remember what Lowell says in his "Elegy on the Death of Dr. Channing:"

"Truth needs no champions: in the infinite deep
Of everlasting Soul her strength abides,
From Nature's heart her mighty pulses leap,
Through Nature's veins her strength, undying tides.

* * * * *

"I watch the circle of the eternal years,
And read forever in the storied page
One lengthened roll of blood, and wrong, and tears--
One onward step of Truth from age to age.

"The poor are crushed; the tyrants link their chain;
The poet sings through narrow dungeon-grates;
Man's hope lies quenched;--and, lo! with steadfast gain
Freedom doth forge her mail of adverse fates.

"Men slay the prophets; fagot, rack, and cross
Make up the groaning records of the past;
But Evil's triumphs are her endless loss,
And sovereign Beauty wins the soul at last."

* * * * *

"From off the starry mountain-peak of song,
The spirit shows me, in the coming time,
An earth unwithered by the foot of wrong,
A race revering its own soul sublime."

And in the "Ode to France," from which I quoted on last Sabbath, the same glorious thought is expressed:--

"And surely never did thine altars glance
With purer fires than now in France;
While, in their bright white flashes,
Wrong's shadow, backward cast,
Waves cowering o'er the ashes
Of the dead, blaspheming past,
O'er the shapes of fallen giants,
His own unburied brood,
Whose dead hands clench defiance
At the overpowering good:
And down the happy future runs a flood
Of prophesying light;
It shows an Earth no longer stained with blood,
Blossom and fruit where now we see the bud
Of Brotherhood and Right."

That is my faith. The wrong may triumph for the moment, but in its very triumph is its death-knell; it cannot always prevail. God has so constituted the moral universe, has so planted in the human heart the sense of right, that ultimately justice is sure to be done. "Ever the Right comes uppermost," is no mere poetic fancy, but one of God's great laws. In the light of that law, I am hopeful. I know that things cannot go on as they are going on now, that the outrageous manner in which we are at present treated cannot always continue. It is bound to end sooner or later.

(4.) I am hopeful, because I have faith in the power of the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ to conquer all prejudices, to break down all walls of separation, and to weld together men of all races in one great brotherhood. It is a religion that teaches the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, a religion in which there is neither Greek nor Jew, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free. And this religion is in this land. There are, according to the statistics of the churches for 1898, excluding Christian Scientists, Jews and Latter Day Saints, 135,667 ministers in the United States, 187,075 churches, and 26,100,884 communicants in these churches. This would seem to be a guarantee that every right belonging to the Negro would be secured to him; that in the struggle which he is making in this country for simple justice and fair play, for manhood recognition, for such treatment as his humanity and citizenship entitle him, back of him would be found these 135,667 ministers, 187,075 churches and 26,100,884 church members. But, alas, such is not the case. These professed followers of the Lord Jesus Christ who came to seek and to save the lost, who was the friend of publicans and sinners, whose gospel was a gospel of love, and who was all the time reaching down and seeking to befriend the lowly, those who were despised and who were being trampled upon by others;--the Christ of whom it is written, "And he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears; but with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth;" and who, in speaking of himself, said, "The spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because he hath sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to comfort all that mourn; to give them a garland for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness;"--these professed followers of this wonderfully glorious Christ, instead of standing back of the poor Negro in the earnest, desperate struggle which he is making against this damnable race-prejudice, which curses him because he is down, branding him with vile epithets, calling him low, degraded, ignorant, besotted; and yet putting its heel upon his neck so as to prevent him from rising; despising him because he is down, and hating him when he manifests any disposition to throw off his ignorance and degradation and show himself a man;--in this struggle, I say, against this damnable race-prejudice, these professing Christians are often his worst enemies, his most malignant haters and traducers.

In saying that the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ is in this land, I do not therefore, base my assertion upon the fact, that there are 135,667 ministers in it, and 187,075 churches, and 26,100,884 professing Christians. No. The American Church as such is only an apology for a church. It is an apostate church, utterly unworthy of the name which it bears. Its spirit is a mean and cowardly and despicable spirit. "One shall chase a thousand," we are told in the good Book--and "two shall put ten thousand to flight." And yet with 135,667 preachers, and more than 2,000,000 church members in this land, this awful, black record of murder and lawlessness against a weak and defenseless race, still goes on. In the presence of this appalling fact, I can well understand the spirit which moved Theodore Parker--that pulpit Jupiter of his day--when in his great sermon on "The True Idea of a Christian Church," he said, "In the midst of all these wrongs and sins--the crimes of men, society and the state--amid popular ignorance, pauperism, crime and war, and slavery, too--is the church, to say nothing, do nothing; nothing for the good of such as feel the wrong, nothing to save them who do the wrong? Men tell us so, in word and deed; that way alone is safe! If I thought so, I would never enter the church but once again, and then to bow my shoulders to their manliest work, to heave down its strong pillars, arch and dome, and roof, and wall, steeple and tower, though like Samson I buried myself under the ruins of that temple which profaned the worship of the God most high, of God most loved. I would do this in the name of men; in the name of Christ I would do it; yes, in the dear and blessed name of God." And I would do it, too.

But, in spite of the shallowness and emptiness and glaring hypocrisy of this thing which calls itself the church; this thing which is so timid, so cowardly that it dares not touch any sin that is unpopular, I still believe that Christianity is in this land. To-day it is like a little grain of mustard seed, but it has entered the soil, has germinated, and is springing up. It is like the little lump of leaven which the woman hid in three measures of meal; but it has begun to work, and will go on working, diffusing itself, until the whole is leavened. God has promised to give to his Son the heathen for his inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for his possession; and in that promise this land is included. Christianity shall one day have sway even in Negro-hating America; the spirit which it inculcates, and which it is capable of producing, is sure, sooner or later, to prevail. I have, myself, here and there, seen its mighty transforming power. I have seen white men and women under its regenerating influence lose entirely the caste feeling, to whom the brother in black was as truly a brother as the brother in white. If Christianity were a mere world influence, I should have no such hope; but it is something more than a mere world influence; it is from above; back of it is the mighty power of God. The record is, "To as many as received him to them gave he power to become children of God, even to them that believed on his name, which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." It can do what no mere human power can do. Jesus Christ is yet to reign in this land. I will not see it, you will not see it, but it is coming all the same. In the growth of Christianity, true, real, genuine Christianity in this land, I see the promise of better things for us as a race.

TOPIC XXXI.

NEGRO CRIMINALITY.

BY JOHN HENRY SMYTH.

JOHN HENRY SMYTH, LL. D.

John Henry Smyth, LL. D., ex-U. S. Minister Resident and
Consul-General to Liberia, was born in the city of Richmond.
His parents were Sully Smyth of Lynchburg, Campbell County,
Va., and Ann Eliza, formerly Goode of Chesterfield County,
Va. He received his first instruction from a lady of his own
race, at a time when the laws of Virginia made it a penal
offense to teach Negroes any other thing than manual labor.
At the age of seven years he was sent to Philadelphia to be
educated. He attended the public schools of that city four
years and two private schools under the control and
direction of friends or Quakers. He graduated from the
Institute for Colored Youth, May 4, 1862. He displayed a
decided taste and aptitude for the fine arts early in life,
and at the age of sixteen years he became a student of art,
and was admitted a member of the Life School of the Academy
of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, a year before graduation. In
1870 he graduated from the Law School of Howard University.
The same year he married the daughter of Rev. John Shippen,
of Washington, D. C., Miss Fannie Ellen, a lady whom he had
the pleasure of instructing in the first elocution class of
Howard University.

For eighteen years he was in the service of the United
States, beginning as a first-class clerk and ending as
United States Minister and Consul-General. For seven years
he taught in the public schools of Pennsylvania, practiced
law in the District of Columbia, North and South Carolina.
On retiring from the diplomatic service in Liberia, two
distinctions were conferred upon Mr. Smyth, by Liberia
College, the honorary degree of LL. D., and by the President
of Liberia, the Honorable Hilery Richard Wright Johnson, the
order of Knight Commander of the Humane Order of African
Redemption. There were only two Americans so honored by the
Black Republic. At present Mr. Smyth is at the head of the
Negro Reformatory Association of Virginia, a corporation
resident in Virginia, with authority to establish reform
schools for delinquent Negro minors of both sexes in
Virginia.

The first school of the association is the Virginia Manual
Labor School, Hanover, Va., with 1,800 acres of land, 800 of
which is under cultivation. The good people of Mr. Smyth's
native city, Richmond, and friends in Massachusetts,
Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York have made possible
the purchase of the plantation known as Broad Neck, Hanover.

The principal benefactor was Mr. Collis P. Huntington of New
York, who was pleased to make a contribution of $12,000
toward this worthy and necessary charity.

We have need to felicitate ourselves as members of a great though oppressed race, that an Armstrong, the founder and promoter of this institution of practical learning, was given to us and to the nation, and that through his influence and example, Tuskegee and other similar institutions have grown into vigorous youth. Two of these seats of industrial education, through a system of race conferences, have given to us who are deprived of a popular press an opportunity to be heard in our own behalf upon subjects, the public discussion of which, through literary mediums, has been monopolized by members of the other race. Our moral delinquencies have been discussed recently at the North and in the South--at times in a sensible and at other times in a nonsensical way; arguments have been made to the world by orators and writers seemingly more interested and concerned in making the worse appear the better reason than in philosophically looking into facts or honestly seeking to discover truth. From much that has been said, it would appear to one unacquainted with the American branch of the Negro race that within thirty-five years it has become criminal, although for nearly three centuries it has been a stranger to wrongdoing, law abiding and not law breaking. Such radical change, if change there has been, in individuals or classes of people, is rare, abnormal, and must be accounted for in some other way than by the wholesale charge of inherited savagery and innate moral obliquity. Crime from an hereditary standpoint may not justly be chargeable to one race of men to the exclusion of another, to the black race more than to the white, to the yellow races more than to the white or black.

The first crime was in the first family. The sacred writings teach that God gave, mid the thunderings of the heavens, the smoking of the mountain, and the consternation of the people, the criminal code in the ten commandments, which may be found in the traditions of heathen peoples, somewhat modified, just as in the written laws of all Christian nations. Had crime not existed prior to this heavenly edict, there would have been little apparent reason for this ancient pronouncement through a Hebrew medium. The conclusion seems then to be irresistible--that mankind coveted, stole, lied, were disobedient to parents, were adulterers and murderers from the earliest times, and only ceased to be so, measurably, in proportion as the sanctions of law were strong or weak. The Christian religion and civilizations other than Christian, with their religions, growth, and development under the influence of good, wise, and godly men, have contributed more than all else, to the decrease of crime and among all classes and conditions of men. "Thou shalt not" stays the course of crime.

The history of the black or African race, since the decadence and destruction of the cities of North Africa and the Nile Delta and the loss of prestige of the peoples who held sway in them, has been shrouded and obscured, and hence gratuitous arguments are made in regard to the savagery and bestiality (which it is claimed we inherit) of the progenitors of Negro Americans that are wholly unsupported by reliable data. The acts of the Puritan fathers of New England and of the cavaliers and Huguenots of the South, toward Indian and Negro heathen in the New World--men of whom it has been facetiously said that, "they fell first upon their knees and then upon the aborigines,"--these acts, together with the horrors of the middle passage and the unrequited toil of centuries, of which the blacks were victims, must be taken into account in considering the matter of crime in connection with this race, and go far to explain a condition which otherwise would be abnormal. The baleful influences of a dead and buried past account for crime among the old and the young Negro Americans, the responsibility for which rests upon the United States rather than the Southern states, upon this nation rather than any part of it.

In Virginia and Maryland there were indentured white slaves. When the system was abolished the same conditions plagued the colonists that annoy us now. Mr. Doyle, in his work entitled _English Colonies in America_, says, "The liberated servant (white) became an idler, socially corrupt and often politically dangerous." The whites became an irresponsible, shiftless, and criminal class, just as the Negroes have become to an alarming extent since freedom. There are to-day in certain sections of the South whole neighborhoods of whites almost without moral sense and near to barbarism. It will not be pretended, however, that there has not been and is not now, criminality among the Negro race just as there was during the years of its oppression; but a condition upheld and approved by the constitution, laws, and public sentiment of the nation cannot do other than plead guilty to having contributed to this result which has so greatly affected the estimation in which good men, equally with bad men, the innocent as well as the guilty of our race, are held by the whites. I am not clanking my chains as a Negro in remembering the past, and only do so in accounting for what the unreasoning and unsympathetic are disposed to regard as abnormal criminality in the American Negro.

Negro parents under the old regime were parents physically only. The government of their children was in the hands of others. Obedience to parents enjoined by the decalogue was not rendered by children, was not encouraged by others, nor could it have been enforced by parental authority. Filial affection in the slave-child existed to an appreciable degree notwithstanding these disadvantages. Parents and children came into the possession of freedom not sufficiently understanding nor appreciating the relation of each to the other. While I am clearly of opinion that it may not be successfully shown that Negro children are more criminal in inclination than other children, their home-training, or, rather, their lack of home-training, is greatly responsible for what of criminality there is among them. Negro parents, as a rule, seem disposed not only to give larger liberty to their children than they ought, but they give absolute license in too many instances. In illustration of this fact, in cities particularly, children are allowed to go from their homes in the night-time and wander the streets amid their baleful associations until nine, ten, eleven o'clock and longer. And when they return home they do so unattended. The accounts given by them as to where they have been cannot be relied upon. Further, children are not required to be respectful to their elders of either sex. This condition does not obtain alone among children of ignorant and poor parentage, but absence of good manners is also often found among children and youths who have had fair common and high school advantages. This license has led directly and unerringly to the formation and cultivation of habits more likely to debase than elevate them. To venture criticism of parental laches or of the conduct of the young, to admonish or advise different manners and conduct from that which the inclination of the young seems to suggest, would be to run the risk of being regarded as officious or meddling, and thereby of inviting insult. Parents whose children are known to be of the class pictured are themselves timid and indisposed to insist upon obedience from them, for fear of offending them and causing them to go away from home. The inexperience and ignorance of childhood and youth, coupled with the grant of too great liberty, are responsible for the too general tendency to wrong doing.

Negro parents who were themselves victims of oppression as well as those who were born under the benign influences of freedom, have crude and unwise notions about the duty of requiring their children to do some kind of work. Too many Negro children are guarded from soiling their hands and developing their muscles with necessary and useful toil. The struggling, industrious widow as well as the well-conditioned housewife whose husband has a good home and makes a good living, seeks to relieve her children of work. This encouragement of laziness can have but one outcome--the living in the sweat of others' faces than their own. Under conditions such as these, parents possessed of radically ignorant and wrong notions about rearing their children, unconsciously cultivate tendencies which lead to criminality. To the extent that a child's mind becomes familiar with higher conditions and mind-work, to that degree does physical exertion in the way of mere muscle-work become distasteful, and as a result the child becomes less efficient as a mere bread-winner by the sweat of his brow. Education is chargeable with producing a condition for which parents and not school teachers are responsible. Complete and entire reform in our system of home-training of our boys and girls will go far to relieve youthful Negroes of just censure for ill-breeding. How far all these reflections are applicable to the rearing and training of white children is for white parents to consider.

Mr. Philip Alexander Bruce, in a recent publication in the _Contemporary Review_,[6] accounts for moral delinquencies in the young of the race by the very natural and normal disposition of Negroes, where numerically strong, to segregate themselves from the whites. In London one finds a French settlement. In nearly every large city in the United States, Germans live together. Italians, Swedes, and Norwegians settle among their congeners. It is not contended that they are less law-abiding and loyal citizens as a consequence of their nearness of living and association. Mr. Bruce enlarges upon the thought thus: "The worst impression made by that society (a Negro community) is seen in the temper of the children. Whatever may be said in condemnation of the old system, it at least not only compelled the parents to restrain, and if needful to punish their offspring for bad conduct, but it also created an atmosphere of order and sobriety in the plantations which had a more or less beneficial influence on the character of the young. As the case now stands the only discipline to which the little Negro is subject is that exercised by parents too untrained themselves to understand how to govern him properly, and in most instances too ignorant to have any just idea as to the difference between right and wrong in the ordinary affairs of life. What is the result? The child grows up without any lessons in self-control and self-improvement, or any intelligent appreciation of the cardinal principles of morality. If the child is a boy, he leaves his parents almost as soon as he can earn his own support and only too often leads for years the life of a vagabond. All the worst impulses of his nature are further encouraged by this wandering and irresponsible existence. Is it strange that, under the operation of this influence alone, the number of black criminals in the Southern states is increased to an alarming degree?"

What good effect could result from restraint exercised or punishment inflicted by parents whose judgment and will were dormant? It is only when a parent governs and controls, ignorant though he may be, that the best results can be expected to follow. Judgment, affection, and concern for the child must enter into the method of his training if the rearing is to be beneficial and helpful.

To my mind but one merit can be claimed for the old system of enslavement--a discipline as to labor which produced the best results to the master class and made the slave orderly and systematic in the performance of his tasks. Though smarting, even now, under the resultant influences of a destroyed system, we can afford to do justice to the good men and women of the white race who constituted a part of the system. Slavery as it has been known in the outside world, is not slavery as it was in the genteel and pious homes and households of the South. Here the "people" were treated almost as members of the family, "uncles" and "aunts" and "mammies" and playmates. They were necessary supplements, sharers of all great occasions of joy or sorrow, of feasts and sufferings. And the tenderest and most watchful care was bestowed on them. Consideration for the servants was the test of the "quality." Mutual influences went to make as pure, high and beautiful a civilization as the system was capable of. And no philanthropist on earth has ever had a deeper horror for the evils that have been represented as slavery in the South than many of the "quality." Nor anywhere was the wise abolition of slavery more earnestly studied and desired than by the good people of the Southern states.

In the discussion of the criminality of the Negro, too much importance is attached to mere statistics. In any discussion of an ethical character mere statistics may not be relied upon. I shall present a few which are entirely authentic but which prove little, in my opinion, prejudicial to the Negroes of to-day as compared with the Negroes of the past, and could not unless figures could be adduced, alike authentic, showing the criminality of the Negroes as bondmen; neither can comparison between the criminality of the blacks and whites be cited to the Negroes' prejudice in the light of the disparity between the races in every essential element of race growth. The foregoing facts greatly detract from any comparative criminal exhibit in which Negroes of to-day are made to figure.

The last United States census furnishes some figures which seem to be more in the Negro's favor than against him. Persons of all races in the penitentiaries of the United States in 1890 were 45,233, of which number 14,687 were colored. Prisoners in county jails, 19,538, of which number 5,577 were colored. Inmates in juvenile reformatories, 14,846, of which 1,943 were colored. Of a total of 73,045 almshouse paupers, only 6,467 were Negroes. Of murderers there were 2,739 Negroes out of a total of 4,425. In 1850 there was one criminal to 3,500 of population; in 1890 one criminal to 645 of population; whites, one to every 1,000, and blacks, one to every 284. Take the ignorance of the Negro as to secular matters, the moral torpor in which he necessarily exists, his poverty, the presumption of guilt when charged with crime, his inability to defend himself, his being forced to plead to an information or indictment _in forma pauperis_; could crime charged and established against him be less than it is? Ought not the record to be worse rather than better? Of the 14,846 juvenile delinquents given an opportunity to re-enter society and walk in the straight path through reformatories, only 1,943 were Negroes. With the doors of almshouses swung wide to 73,046 paupers, racial pride prevented poor Negroes entering these homes of mercy, and only 6,467 allowed themselves to become objects of public charity. With a larger percentage of unskilled than skilled Negro laborers in 1890, only 2,253 of 6,546 convicts whose employments were known were in the penitentiaries of the land. Of 45,233 criminals but 253 were persons who had enjoyed higher educational advantages, and not a single educated Negro figures in the enumeration.

What are the remedies for existing criminality, and how may its increase be checked? Popular secular education for whites and blacks, compulsory, if possible, erected on a broad basis of Christianity, is the only safe, enduring, moral, and economic remedy. Mere secular education may not be relied upon to restrain crime, and we must honestly own that our only hope is in the diffusion of true religion. The church should take the initiative in this matter, the state, aye, the nation should come to the assistance of the church, and of those states in which the burden is too great for them to bear it successfully. If the Holy Scriptures be not the basis of all worthy knowledge our civilization is a fraud. Individual philanthropy has done much towards aiding in the matter of education, particularly so-called higher education. May not individual wealth help to minimize ignorance, dissipate poverty, help the feeble in mind and morals of the race to robust Christian manhood? "For many men of great possessions, the voice of conscience is effective, as the contemplated grasp of the tax-gatherer could never be. Around them they see ignorance to be banished, talent missing its career, misery appealing for relief. They know that the forces of the times have brought them their large fortunes, only through co-operation and the protection of the whole community; so with justice in their hearts, as well as generosity, they found the benefactions which are doing so much to foster the best impulses of American life; and in this response to public duty they find conferred upon riches a new power and fascination."

The reform schools for juveniles throughout the North and West, and those in Virginia, represent Christian agencies for the reduction and destruction of crime in its germinal state, and are a display of wise and humane statesmanship on the part of legislators. The white people of Virginia, ever responsive to appeals in behalf of human need, made possible the Virginia Manual Labor School at Broad Neck Farm, Hanover, Virginia. It was this sentiment in behalf of moral reform among Negro children and youths that brought to the aid of this institution the interested concern of a man of wealth and national influence, whose sympathy for the poor and ignorant of his countrymen, white and black, is as broad and far-reaching as ignorance and human suffering.[7] This reformatory, opened September 12, 1899, and aided by the state February 5, 1900, began with a nucleus of five Negro boys, and has now under its guardianship fifty-two children. It has thus early demonstrated conclusively that saving and redemptive elements of character exist in Negro children no less than in those of other races; also that for tractableness and responsiveness to kindly influences, delinquent Negro children show themselves of legitimate kinship to that race among whom, as the classic writer tells us, "the gods delighted to disport themselves--the gentle Ethiopians."

I know how disposed as a race we are to wilt, to lose heart, and complain, in the glare of new exhibitions of prejudice, such as harass us in our native Virginia, and our brethren in other parts of the country. To such, I put the question: "By courage can we not lessen misfortune? Yes! A thousand times yes! Courage turns ignoble agony into beautiful martyrdom. Its alchemy is universal. Is the stake a misfortune to the martyr? It is his dearest fortune. Is oppression, prejudice, or ignorance, a misfortune to the reformer? It is the very condition of his reform. Is misunderstanding, injustice, suspicion, or contempt a misfortune to the earnest man or woman anywhere who is trying to guide his life by a more celestial trigonometry than petty minds can conceive? In one sense these things are to be deplored but in another and deeper sense nothing is to be dreaded that can be faced and known by an unfrighted human spirit. A misfortune bravely met is a fortune, and the world is full of people happy because bravely unhappy."

FOOTNOTES:

[6] _The American Negro of To-day._ Contemporary Review, February, 1900.

[7] The late Mr. C. P. Huntington of New York.

TOPIC XXXII.

THE AMERICAN NEGRO'S OPPORTUNITIES IN AFRICA.

BY WILLIAM H. HEARD.

DR. WILLIAM H. HEARD.

Dr. William H. Heard, ex-Minister Resident and Consul
General to Liberia, was born in Elbert County, Georgia, of
slave parents and therefore was a slave himself until Lee
surrendered to Grant in April, 1865. He was only fifteen
years of age at this period. He began his education at this
age, attended South Carolina University, Clark University
and Atlanta University at Atlanta, Georgia; taught school
twelve years, was elected to South Carolina Legislature from
Abbeville County in 1876, appointed railway postal clerk in
1880, but resigned this position in 1883 and entered the
ministry at Macon, Georgia. He pastored churches in Athens
and Atlanta, Georgia; Aiken and Charleston, South Carolina;
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Wilmington, Delaware;
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and was appointed Minister
Resident and Consul General to Liberia by President Grover
Cleveland February, 1895. He served this position with honor
to his race and to himself. He is one of the most successful
ministers in his denomination, and has served the best
appointments, both as pastor and as presiding elder. He is
now the pastor of Allen Temple, Atlanta, Georgia; has
written a book called the "Bright Side of African Life,"
which has a large circulation. He is now President of the
Colored National Emigration Association.