178 A CATASTROPHE POSTPONED. ries of good government. I know that the negro of Africa has no invention, no discovery, no law, no literature, no government, no civilization. Why? If you put the Caucasian under the same environment, and keep him there ten or twenty centuries, there will be no invention, no science, no discovery, no history, no civilization, among Caucasians. Your ancestors and mine were once pagans and cannibals. We have become what we are, not by virtue of a white skin, but by improving government and good laws. Let the negro children get an education where yours do not-let the negro be superior to you in culture and property-and you will have a black man's government. Improvement, cultivation, education, is the secret, the condition and guarantee, of race supremacy. I shall astonish you, perhaps, by saying that if the negro developes and becomes in culture, property, and civilization superior to the white man, the negro ought to rule. You are to see to it that he does not become so. The responsibility is with you." This puts things in rather a different light. It lays the responsibility of the superiority of the negro race (if that should ever come) upon the whites themselves; while it fixes the period so far away that it would need an inspired· prophet to tell the date of its coming. As the time at which a race is attaining maturity is put at "ten or twenty centuries," I think our Southern friends may safely postpone the catastrophe of negro domination to the next generation! CHAPTER XIV. OLD MASTERS CARING FOR THEIR OLD SLAVES. "You people of the North do not know the negro. You draw a fancy sketch, as Mrs. Stowe did in her Uncle Tom's Cabin, and fall in love with the picture of your imagination. But that is not the real African. The negro, pure and simple-that is, apart from all romantic associations-is not an attractive creature. He is gross in body and dull in mind. He may do well enough as a laborer in the lowest kinds of work, when guided by the superior intelligence of the white man; but if you seek for anything higher than that, you will not find it. There is no fire in his eye, and no thought in his brain. If you wish to make a man of him, you must put a soul inside of his body. And his moral state is as low as his intellectual. In short, he is very far down in the scale of humanity: poor and ignorant; low of origin, and bad by nature; debased by every vice, and capable of every crime!" Such are the colors, blacker than the skin he wears, in which some would paint the negro of the South. As these harsh words grate upon the ear of the stranger, he is tempted to reply in terms equally emphatic. But it is 180 THE NEGRO IN THE DARKEST COLORS. better to keep silence, at least until the speaker is done. Let the blast blow itself out: it is not till the storm is past that there is any chance to hear the still, small voice of reason and of truth. Even then I should begin my protest very modestly by confessing that this wholesale depreciation has some faint shadow of truth, just enough to give it plausibility. You say that the negro is "poor" -it is true; that he is "ignorant"-it is true; that he is "low of origin"-that also is true (although it is nothing new in human development-we can even trace back our own "great race" to a period at which it began its process of evolution at the lowest point); and if he were "bad by nature," that would be only the natural result of conditions so unfavorable. That he should be "debased by every vice, and capable of every crime," is what could be said with equal truth of thousands in all our great cities, who are born and bred under conditions equally unfavorable to virtue. I only wonder that the negro is what he is, when I think whence he came, and through what ages of suffering he has passed. If you set out to paint him as black as you can, the materials are at hand. You may treat him as a naturalist would treat a singular variety of the human species, and set him down in your scientific catalogue as a freak of nature. You may confirm your theory by tracing his history: beginning far back in the wilds of Africa, and seeing him come out of the slime and ooze of the jungle, with his very blood poisoned by malarious swamps, and his imagination haunted by murky superstitions which reflect the gloom of the forest. Traces of such an origin you may find in him still, in which he bears a resemblance to his fathers, who offered human sacrifices. I admit it all that he is the dark child of a Dark Continent, with the stamp of oppression, if not of degradation, on his WHO IS TO BLAME FOR IT? 181 brow. But is that any justification of wrong? However low and degraded he may be, “A man's a man for a' that"; and the fact that he is poor and ignorant, is no reason why we should take advantage of him, to cheat him, or rob him, or oppress him. On the contrary, his very helplessness appeals to the generosity of the stronger race to reach out its powerful arm to lift him up. And here, if I were replying to one who had pronounced this sweeping judgment on the whole African race, I would add one parting word: "If this be the result of your experience with your negroes, did it never occur to you as just possible that you were partly responsible for their intellectual and moral degradation? Good masters make good servants: why is it that yours have turned out so badly? In condemning them, you condemn yourself; and the best, indeed the only, atonement you can make for your neglect in the past, is to befriend and help them in the future." But I will not trust myself to enter into an argument with men who in the days of their power were violent and cruel, and whose attitude towards their former dependents is still that of hatred and contempt. Nor will I be so unjust as to reckon all old masters with them. In the days of slavery slaveholders were like other men; having among them a mixture of good and bad. There were all sorts of masters as there were all sorts of men. There were hard masters, and there were kind masters: and it would not be fair that one class should suffer for the sins of the other. Nor have their characters changed with their condition. The old master who was hard and selfish, will be hard and selfish still. But from such a poor example, I 182 : GOOD OLD MASTERS. turn to one of another stamp. Those whose memories reach back to a former generation, will recall many a master who was borne to his last resting place by his faithful servants, who, as they laid him down, shed bitter tears over the grave of one who had been their greatest benefactor. This feeling may have been changed in some who survived the war. There were those who were so soured by the loss of their slaves, that they could hardly bear to hear them spoken of, and muttered with a savage brutality, "Let them take care of themselves; let them go to the dogs!" But others there were who had been kind and gentle before, and were kind and gentle still. Had you by chance met one of them, you might have heard him say, "Those poor people served me faithfully while they were bondmen I will be their friend and helper now that they are free." In losing the ownership of his slaves, he did not lose his interest in them; but still cared for them, and tried to smooth their path, even though they had passed from under his control. The rupture that had come between them, was like the tearing asunder of the parts of the human body, leaving the feet to walk and the hands to seize the implements of labor, with no eyes to see, and no brain to guide them. It is hardly possible to conceive of a more helpless human being than the newly-emancipated slave--houseless, homeless; without food, with not even a hoe-cake in the cabin; having nothing, doing nothing, and earning nothing. Then it was that he needed more than ever a friend, and a friend he found in his old master, who was the first to give him something to do. He had not a sixpence to buy a peck of corn; his old master gave him wages. Above all, he needed direction, and to whom should he turn so soon as to the one who had been his guide for so many years, and who now took him by the hand like a child, and led him on till he could |