* * * * *At the moment Elise was so delivering her mind, a telegraph boy was handing Rutledge a message. He tore it open and read:"COLUMBIA, S.C, Jan. 9th, 191-."EVANS RUTLEDGE,"Washington, D.C."Exactly how old are you and where do you vote?"W. D. ROBERTSON."Evans looked around behind the telegraph-sheet as if seeking an explanation. He gazed quizzically at the messenger-boy, but that young gentleman only grinned and then looked solemn."Well," Evans muttered, "what the devil's up Robbie's back now?"He sat down and thought the thing over awhile. Then he constructed a reply."WASHINGTON, Jan. 9th, 191-."W. D. ROBERTSON, Atty.-General,"Columbia, S.C."Your telegram received. If it is official I decline to answer.Entre nousI will be thirty-one on the 29th of February at something like twenty minutes past three in the morning—they didn't have a stopwatch in the house. I vote in Cherokee County, Pacolet precinct, generally of late in a cigar-box in the shed-room of Jake Sims's store where Gus Herndon used to run a barber-shop when you and I were young, Maggie. Why? EVANS RUTLEDGE.""Send thatcollect, youngster. We'll make old Robbie pay for his impertinence.""Look here, sonny," he called to the boy who had gotten out the door, "bring any answer to that down to the Capitol. I am going to have a look at the Senate."He was sitting beside Lola DeVale in the members' gallery when the answer came."COLUMBIA, S.C, Jan. 9th, 191-.HON. EVANS RUTLEDGE,"Washington, D.C."Nothing much. The governor of South Carolina simply did not feel like giving a United States Senatorship either to a boy or to a man from another State. He is just mailing your commission as Jones's successor. Don't decline it before you hear the whole story. Congratulations to you."W. D. ROBERTSON.""This has 'an ancient and fish-like smell.' Read it," Rutledge said to Lola when he had recovered from his astonishment sufficiently to speak.She took the telegram and while she was trying to interpret its import Senator Killam came hurriedly into the gallery and seized upon Rutledge."I got a telegram from the governor half an hour ago and have been trying to find you ever since," he exclaimed. "He has appointed you—oh, you have heard, I see. Well, come right down with me. I want to present you to your colleagues."Evans could doubt no longer, and Lola DeVale had grasped the meaning of it."I am so glad to be the first to congratulate you," she said, and he felt the sincerity of her good wishes in her warm hand-grasp. Then Senator Killam carried him off.* * * * *"I know it came 'like a bolt from the blue' to you," Robertson wrote to him; "but the whys and wherefores need not mystify you. There cannot be the slightest doubt of your ability to fill the office—full to the brim; and the rest is easy. You know the old man fully intended all along to contest for the place with Jones, whose term would have expired with the old man's term as governor. Jones's demise, however, presented a problem to him that has driven him to the verge of lunacy for a week. He couldn't give himself the commission, of course. He couldn't resign and get it, for the lieutenant-governor has been the avowed supporter of LaRoque for the Senatorship. He couldn't give it to LaRoque or Pressley, for the three of them are too evenly matched.... When he finally came to the idea of appointing some one to fill the vacancy who was clearly not in the running so that the primaries might settle it among the three of them, I suggested you. He jumped at the idea.... The old man has every reason to feel kindly toward you both for your father's sake and for your own excellent work's sake, and he does not doubt your friendliness to himself.... You will have less than six months in which to make a name for yourself, but—perhaps—who can tell? ... I wish I had such an opportunity. I am heartily glad you have it."* * * * *Senator Rutledge was pitched right into the middle of the fight on the Hare Bill—and fight it was for him. Senator Killam essayed to take the young man under his wing and chaperone his conduct according to his ideas of the political proprieties, but he found that the junior Senator had a mind of his own, and could not be managed, overawed or bullied. This roused Mr. Killam's ire at once. He wasn't accustomed to it. The dead Senator Jones had never had the effrontery to think for himself; and for this youngster to presume to walk alone was more than Mr. Killam could forgive.Solely because of Mr. Killam's personal attitude and treatment of him, Rutledge wished it were over and done with long before the finish; but he never lost his nerve.* * * * *It seemed that the suspense would be ended quickly when the House under pressure of the rules passed the Hare Bill almost without debate: but when it came before the Senate it was evident at once that those dignitaries would take abundance of time to consider it,—if for no other reason than to prove to themselves they were the greatest deliberative body on earth.However, with all the Senate's deliberation the very frenzy of the Wordyfellow crowd's screams evidenced their realization that their game was balked—and that, too, in a manner that was maddening: for it left them not the frenzied pleasure of fighting their precious battle against the negro out to the end and going down to harmless defeat in pyrotechnic glory. No; it placed them in a dilemma where they must humiliate themselves by a surrender before the battle, or fight it to a barren victory at the polls, which would not only bring actual benefit to the negro in the South but also give to the Northern States the lion's share of a large appropriation.Facing this dilemma, they lost heart if they lost nothing of noise. In all of the interested States except Mississippi serious discussion of the question grew less and less rapidly, and was postponed until after the Senate should vote. In Mississippi, however, the tension was increased by the Senate's deliberation because the date set for the election on the proposed Wordyfellow amendment to the State constitution was some time before the Senate would be forced to vote. The Mississippians could not decide for their lives whether they preferred to vote on their amendment first or have the Senate vote first on the bill. With a faint hope that the bill might not pass, they were in obvious difficulties in either case.Southern Senators were overwhelmed with all manner of conflicting and confusing petitions, and as a result about one half of them favoured the bill for one reason or another, while the other half more or less bitterly opposed it. The discussion, when the bill finally came out of committee, took the widest range,—from the constitutional objections raised by the Texas Senator (whose State, having a large school-fund income, did not need the appropriation) and the savage attacks upon the negro race generally by Senator Killam, to the purely pro-educational reasoning of most of the supporting Senators from the South—among whom was Senator Ruffin—and the pro-negro speech of the young Senator Rutledge.The adjectivepro-negromay give an erroneous impression of Senator Rutledge's ideas. The term is the Senator's own. From his speech in full in theCongressional Recordthe reader may determine for himself whether the term is apt.CHAPTER XVIISenator Rutledge gave notice that on February 23d he would address the Senate on the Hare Bill. On that day the galleries were crowded to hear him, his State's delegation in the House was present in a body, accompanied by many other representatives from North and South. No one knew how he would vote, for he had listened much and talked little. He said:"Mr. President: There have been many terms used on this floor and in the public prints since this bill was introduced, by which to distinguish and define and lay open to public view the motives which are supposed to lie behind the votes that will be cast for and against it."We have heard 'unconstitutional,' 'anti-negro,' 'pro-educational,' 'watch-dog of the treasury,' and others equally descriptive if less parliamentary. I have not heard 'pro-negro.'"So, to save my friends—and enemies, if I have any—the trouble of search and imaginings, I adopt that term, 'pro-negro,' as descriptive of my attitude toward the matters affected by this bill."It is an open secret, Mr. President, that this measure, which bears the non-committal title of 'an act to promote education' is a White House production designed and introduced for the single purpose of defeating what is known as the Wordyfellow school-fund movement in the South generally, more specifically now in the State of Mississippi. Because I think it will accomplish that purpose, both general and special,—because I am 'for the negro,'—for him on his own account,—for his elevation as a race to the highest level which his essential nature in the purposes of God will permit him to attain,—because I believe the success of the Wordyfellow movement would mean his degradation, his hopeless continuance in his present low estate,—because, in a word, I ampro-negro; I shall vote for this bill."I should despise myself, sir, if I had within me other sentiments toward any man or race of men, and I feel, therefore, that it is not unbecoming in me to arrogate to myself the pure unselfishness of this motive. And yet, sir, if the love of one's race may be called a selfish passion, I must confess that right alongside of this unselfish desire for the negro's welfare, there lies in my heart a selfish passion for the progress, the multiplying prosperity and more abounding happiness of my own people, the white men and women of the South, which desire also with no less power but indeed with compelling forcefulness bids me to oppose the Wordyfellow idea with every faculty and expedient, and therefore to vote for this measure."I wish to make it clear at the outset that, while I shall heartily support this White House bill, I give not the slightest credit to the President for having prepared it and sent it here. He deserves none. The bill is a necessity, and as such I vote for it: but the President is the one man who has made it a necessity."If he had not injected into the situation his negro luncheon (and to that I will pay my respects before I have finished), my people would have defeated the Wordyfellow movement; for the battle was going our way. It is as little as President Phillips can do now to suggest this method, expensive though it is, to repair the damage he has done the negro's cause in the South. He comes praying us to pay the negro out of the difficulty in which he has involved him, andas friends of the negrothere is nothing for us to do but furnish the money, however much we may deplore the Executive folly that makes the outlay imperative."Now, Mr. President, let us inquire directly into the merits of the Wordyfellow plan. The proposed amendment to the constitution of Mississippi provides that the school fund shall be divided between the white and negro schools in proportion to the taxes paid to the State by each of the two races for school purposes. As there are six negroes to four whites in the State, and as the negroes pay less than ten per cent of the school taxes, such a division of the school fund will give the white children thirteen days' schooling to the negro's one."Such a proposition is illogical, pernicious, insane."Look at the logic of it. Governor Wordyfellow defends the general proposition by some scattering statistics which prove to his mind that education generally is not good for the negro; but he justifies the division of the school fund on the basis of contribution upon the supposed principle that the negro will get back all that he pays in and therefore cannot rightly demand more."That so-called principle will not hold water a moment. I would say to the gentlemen from the South, Mr. President,—to those who are supporting the Wordyfellow propaganda—that if they proceed on that theory they must give toeveryman what he pays into the treasury: which means that the State must expend more for the tuition of the sons of the rich than the sons of the poor. If every man has a right to demand for his own children the taxes he pays for school purposes, then the State has no right to tax one man to educate another's child—and the promoters of this idea have pulled down the whole public school system about their ears."If such a division is proposed on the ground that no sort of education is good for the negro, and we believe that, then let us take away from the negro by constitutional amendmentallthe money collected from him by the State for school purposes and give it to the white children. That would be logical, that would be sensible, that would be Scriptural. Let us be logical and sensible and fearless about this matter."But I cannot think these leaders of the Wordyfellow forces believe that, Mr. President, though I fear that they have persuaded thousands of their less intelligent following to believe it thoroughly. No, you do not believe it; but you do believe that some particular kinds of education—literary education, for example—is positively harmful to the negro, while some other particular sort—industrial education, perhaps—is beneficial and would uplift the negro race."If you admit that,—and it has been conceded on this floor by some of the leaders of the Wordyfellow movement that industrial education is good for the negro and will make a better man and a better citizen of him; then in face of the appalling menace of his ignorance and depravity which have been painted in such lurid colours here,let us by constitutional amendment give him more than his per capita share of the school tax. Yes, let us give to him proportionately in keeping with our keenest fears, our wildest terror, of the Black Peril—all if need be—to educate himin that particular line that will uplift himand make a safe citizen of him, in order that we may save ourselves alive and escape the woes of that peril. All education administered by the State is given in the exercise of a sort of quasi police power—to protect itself from the violence of ignorance: and we would be well within an ancient principle if we should lay out extraordinary funds to police the black cesspools that threaten our civic life."It is clearly demonstrable, therefore, that upon any theory of the negro's inability or limited ability to be benefited by education, or upon the assumption of its positive hurtfulness to him, the Wordyfellow amendment is absolutely illogical. The whole Wordyfellow proposition is based upon a false assumption in the first place, and the Wordyfellow remedy does not have the merit of being true even to the fictitious Wordyfellow premises. For all this agitation against the education of the negro race proceeds upon the theory that the negro is not altogether a man, that he is without the one aptitude common to all other peoples, white, yellow or red—the disposition to be uplifted in civilization by the spread of a higher intelligence among his race."That theory, Mr. President, is false! And while I believe the great majority of my people reject it despite the insistence with which it has been in small measure openly, in large measure indirectly, presented to them for acceptance, I have thought it worth while to inquire closely and specifically into the effect of thehigher literaryeducation upon the black men and women who have been so fortunate as to acquire it. I give to the Senators not only as the result of my investigation but as the result of my personal observation as a man brought up in the South, my sincere opinion that education of the negro in the usual literary studies from the kindergarten to the college, as well as along industrial lines, is as a rule beneficial and uplifting to him."It is true that a smattering of education in some instances gives a negro the idea that he is to get a living without work, and that such notions would not be wholesome if prevailing among a population which must do manual labour. This need not alarm us, however; for it is not an unusual thing for a college education to give a white boy the same notion. We do not limit his education on that account. In the post-graduate school of Hard Knocks he always finds out—and no less surely will the negro boy of similar delusion learn—especially as education becomes more and more a possession of the masses and not a privilege of the few—that the great majority of men, whether black or white, lettered or unlettered, must work, and work with their hands."Let me add, lest I be misunderstood, that while I believe the negro race as a race will be hewers of wood and drawers of water for generations to come, and that education will be beneficial to them as a toiling class, I am not of those who believe that when by education you spoil a negro field-hand you have committed a crime. I have no sympathy with a sentiment that would confine any man to a limited though respectable and honourable work when he has within him the aspiration and the ability to serve his race and his time in broader fields."Those, in a nutshell, Mr. President, are the primary reasons why I am opposed to the Wordyfellow movement, and shall vote for this bill. The secondary reasons are hardly less forceful."I want this bill passed and passed quickly in order to avoid the pernicious incidental effects of the agitation of this question among my people. It has bred and is breeding antagonisms between the white and black races in the South such as did not result from the horrors of reconstruction or the excitement of negro disfranchisement. In those issues the negro truthfully was told and well may have believed that the white man was driven to protect himself against the ignorance and depravity of the black. In this case, however, the negro feels, and rightly, that the white man would condemn him perpetually to that ignorance and depravity. From the negro's view-point the white man's motive is now what it never was before: base, worse than selfish, wantonly, vindictively cruel."Again the propagation of the Wordyfellow idea teaches incidentally that in this democratic country, where by the very nature of our institutions the welfare of each is the welfare of all, where forsooth a Christian civilization has reached its highest development, even here, the strong may desert the weak and leave them to their own pitiful devices and defences."It teaches also the doctrine—more potent for evil—that the government may take note of racial classes for the purpose of dealing out its favours and benefits with uneven hands, preferring one to the other. If it may do this when the class differences are racial, it is but half a step to the proposition that it may do so when the differences exist whether they be racial or other. It takes no seer to see that after that proposition—no,withthat proposition—comes the deluge."Such, Mr. President, are some, not all, of the incidental effects of the propagation of the Wordyfellow idea which clearly and with vast conservatism may be called pernicious. But there is yet another effect which will be inevitable upon the adoption of the Wordyfellow plan, and which has been in large measure produced already by the discussion of it, in the light of which deliberate advocacy of the Wordyfellow idea fairly may be called insane; and that is the severing of all bonds of sympathy and good-will between the races when the negro is told by white men, 'Here, take the pitiful portion that is yours, and go work out your own bitter, black salvation, alone—if you can.'"All this agitation, all our concern, is predicated upon the deadly menace which this people, numbering one-third of the population of the South and gathered in many sections in overwhelming majorities, is to our civic and industrial happiness and progress: and it does seem the sheerest insanity to sever the bonds of sympathy and helpfulness which now bind the races together, surrender all our interest and right to control in the method of the negro's uplifting, and leave him to develop along any haphazard or dangerous lines without sympathy, respect, or regard for us, our ideas, or our ideals."The negro has been enough of a problem and a terror to my people with all our ability to control him through his ignorance, his fears, his affection and his respect for us. We have been careless at times perhaps as to how we made use of these instruments for his management. The more fools we if we now throw away his affection and his respect, cut loose from him entirely, and leave him to develop under teachers of his own race who with distorted vision or prejudiced heart will replace his ignorance with a knowledge at least of his brute strength, and cancel his fears with hate."My people give freely hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly to the degraded of other lands in whom they have only the interest which Christians have in universal humanity, and they place in the calendar of the saints the names of the godly men and women who go to work personally to uplift the heathen. I do not think that in their cool senses their Christian impulses, to which is added the motive of self-interest, will permit them to cut off their contributions to and support of any instrumentality which will elevate the degraded in their own land whose depravity is so pregnant with dire possibilities to them. I pray the day to come when, among my people, it shall be thought just as praiseworthy, as noble, as saintly for a Southern white man to give his life and energies to the personal instruction, uplifting and redemption of the negroes in America as of the negroes in Africa or the heathen in any land."That prayer, Mr. President, which is sincerely from my heart, brings me to the discussion of President Phillips' negro policy. I shall not expect to see the prayer answered so long as the Chief Executive of this nation shows a disposition to deal so carelessly, so arbitrarily, with such cock-sure flippancy, with the convictions, prejudices if you will, of the brave and generous people who are face to face in their race problem not with a far-away academic question about which they may safely speculate and theorize, but face to face with a present, tangible, appalling issue in whose solution is life or death to them."To my people the consequences are so vital that they sometimes are led perhaps beyond what is really necessary in the way of defence,—for any sane man prefers to be doubly guarded against death. So it has been that while they are not favourable to the Wordyfellow plan they have been stampeded to it by the Phillips negro luncheon."Let me explain that when I speak of the President's negro policy I do not mean to include his appointments of negroes to office. I think we of the South have in these matters to some extent confused the issues, and proportionately weakened our position before the outside public. Not that I approve of appointing negroes to office in the South, for I do not. I think the weight of all considerations is against it. But the considerations either for or against it are considerations of expediency. They are not vital. If the President wishes to vindicate his negro appointments on the ground that his appointees are of his party, the best men of his party, and fairly efficient,—let him. Such reasons have been given for political appointments time out of mind, although they are not conclusive in any case and especially not in the matter of negro office-holding in the South.But let him notgo into cheap heroics such as were indulged in by a recent negro appointee, who tragically exclaimed that if his appointment was not confirmed his race would be set back thirty years!"Such rant is only ridiculous. Office-holding is not a recognized or an actual instrumentality for uplifting or civilizing a people; and it is not a theory of this or any other form of government that its mission or method is to uplift its citizenship, white or black, by making place-holders of them. It is not closing any legitimate door of hope to negro or white man to refuse him a Presidential appointment. The 'door of hope,' whatever else it may be to white or black, is not the door to a government office."The real basis of the race issue, Mr. President, has nothing to do with politics or political appointments, with office-getting or office-holding. If by some trick of chance a negro—some prodigy lofty in character and in the science and wisdom of statecraft—were President of this nation to-day, and were by unanimous consent a model Executive, the real race problem would not be affected a feather's weight. The world must understand that the Southern white people in the measures they have taken and will take to protect themselves against the negro are impelled by weightier considerations than the pre-emption of the dignities or emoluments of politics. It is true that they have taken the governments of the Southern States into their own hands, away from negro majorities in many sections. It may be true that in order to do this they have nullified provisions of the Federal constitution. But they have done so from no such small motive as a desire to hold public office."My people have all respect for the wisdom of the makers of the constitution, who framed an instrument perfectly suited to the conditions as they existed at the time and continued to exist for eighty years, prescribing the method of majority rule for a people who were of an approximately equal civic intelligence and virtue. But when the conditions were changed and a vast horde of illiterate and—in the hands of unscrupulous leaders—vicious voters were added to the electorate, stern necessity forbade them longer to give a sentimental support to so-called fundamental principles in the constitution and permit ignorance to rule intelligence and vice to rule virtue."The 'fundamental principles' in that constitution, Mr. President, are nothing more or less than wisely conceivedpolicieswhich were tried, proved, and found good under the conditions for which they were devised. The 'fundamental principle' upon which the race problem of the South may be solved will have been discovered with certainty onlyaftera solution has been accomplished by the conscientious effort and best thought of Southern white men."And they will solve this problem. It can never be settled, of course, till Southern white men acquiesce in its settlement. They will settle it in righteousness and will accept with gratefulness any suggestion which their fellow countrymen have to offer in a spirit of sympathy and helpfulness. But it may as well be understood that any such exhibition as the President's negro luncheon, which affronts the universal sentiment of the final arbiters of this question, must necessarily put further away the day of settlement. The negro problem cannot be worked out by any simple little rule o' thumb, and the negro will always be the loser by any such melodramatic display of super-assertive backbone and misinformed conscience."The President would settle this matter upon a purely theoretical academic basis, this matter that in its practical effects will not touch him nor his family nor his section, but will affect vitally the happiness, the lives, the destiny of a chivalrous people whose ideas, traditions, sentiments and convictions he carelessly ignores or impetuously insults. Such exhibitions do not become a brave man. They betoken, rather, a headstrong man, an inconsiderate man, a thoughtless man, a fanatical man. It does seem that President Phillips would have learned wisdom from the experience of his illustrious predecessor, President Roosevelt, who did somewhat less of this sort of thing once—and only once."Mr. President, it has been repeatedly said that the hostility of the white people of the South to social intermingling with the negro race is an instinct—a race instinct. I do not so consider it,—and for two reasons: first, because many men of Anglo-Saxon blood—and of these President Phillips is the most conspicuous example—do not have such an instinct; second, because instinct is not the result of reason, while the Southern white man's opposition to social recognition of the negro is defensible by the purest, most dispassionate reason. These convictions are so well fixed in the Southern mind that they may appear to be instinctive and measurably serve the purpose of instinct; but the vital objections of my people to intermingling socially with the negro are not founded in any race antipathy, whim, pretence, or prejudice. They are grounded in the clearest common sense, and as such only do I care to present or defend them."In face of the disaster to be averted, I could wish that it were an instinct; for instinct does not fail in a crisis. But men are more than beasts: the power to rise is given to them conditioned upon the chance to fall. So in this race matter: instinct does not forbid a white man to marry a black woman; instinct—more's the horror!—does not forbid a white woman to wed a negro man. For this reason it is—for the very lack of a race instinct is it—that the social intermingling of the white and black races, as advocated and practised by President Phillips, would inevitably bring to pass an amalgamation of the races with all its foul brood of evils."President Phillips, living in a section of the country where negroes are few—especially such as are of sufficient intelligence to be interesting to a man of his attainments—does not dream of amalgamation. I would not insult him by assuming such a thing. And yet upon a superficial estimate of conditions in the South he gives us this impulsive exhibition of what in one of his high official position is criminal carelessness."The positive element of crime in it is not in the affront which a Presidential negro luncheon puts upon Southern sentiment, but in the suggestion to Southern and Northern people alike that a social intermingling of the races—which means amalgamation, however blind he may be to the fact—is the solution of the race problem. The crime would be complete in all its horror if the South, if the nation, should follow his lead and achieve the logical result of his teaching."From long and intimate acquaintance with the negro's character, my people know that the Phillips negro luncheon stimulates not the negro's ambition and endeavour to improve himself as it tickles and arouses his vanity. When the ordinary darkey hears of it he thinks it not a recognition of the superior abilities of Bishop Martin and Doctor Woods, but a social recognition of the negro race; and forthwith deems himself the equal of the white man and desires unutterable things. And not without reason."The black people appreciate what the President's act means for them. They do not misinterpret its tendency. A prominent negro said in a recent mass meeting in Richmond: 'No two peoples having the same religion and speaking the same tongue, living together, have ever been kept apart. This is well known and is one of the reasons why the dominant race is crushing out the strength of the negro in the South. I am afraid we are anarchistic and I give warning that if this oppression in the South continues the negro must resort to the torch and the sword, and that the Southland will become a land of blood and desolation.'"This inflammatory utterance indicates the interpretation put by negroes upon President Phillips' open-dining-room-door policy, and the nature of the hopes and aspirations it arouses in the black man's heart. And the serious thing is the element of truth in the negro's erroneous statement. It is true as gospel that no two races of people, living together, have everintermingled sociallywithout amalgamating. It is hardly necessary to cite evidence of that fact or to give the reasons underlying it. It might be taken as axiomatic that social intermingling means amalgamation."If men and women were attracted to each other and loved and mated because of equal endowments of virtue, or intelligence, or beauty, or upon any basis of similar accomplishments, tastes, or mental, moral or physical excellences, then a gulf-stream of Anglo-Saxon blood might flow unmixed and pure through a sea of social contact with the negro race; but until love and marriage are placed among the exact sciences, social intermingling of races will ever result as it ever has resulted: in the general admixture of racial bloods."When racial barriers are broken down and it is proper for negroes and whites to associate freely and intimately, when you—white men—receive negroes on a plane of social equality, your women will marry them, your sons will take them to wife. Shall you say to your daughter of the negro whom you receive in your home: 'He is an excellent man but—do not marry him'? Shall you say to your son enamoured of a quadroon: 'She is a very worthy young woman and an ornament to our circle of friends, but—I have chosen another wife for you'? When did such considerations ever guide or curb the fancy of the youthful heart or diminish the travel to Gretna Green? No, the line never has been drawn between free social intercourse and intermarriage; and while the Southern people believe they could draw that line if any people could, they do not propose to make any reckless experiments where all is to be lost and nothing gained."A president of one of our great universities is quoted as saying: 'The Southern white sees a race danger in eating at the same table with a negro; he sees in being the host or the guest of a negro an act of race infidelity. The Northern white sees nothing of the kind. The race danger does not enter into his thoughts at all. To be the host or the guest of a negro, a Mexican or a Japanese would be for him simply a matter of present pleasure, convenience or courtesy. It would never occur to him that such an act could possibly harm his own race. His pride of race does not permit him to entertain such an idea. This is a significant difference between Northern white and Southern white.'"In noting significant differences between Northern white and Southern white this authority must have been advertent to the fact that the pride of race of his 'Northern white' does not prevent them from furnishing the overwhelming majority of interracial marriages with negroes, as well as with Chinese, Japanese and every other alien race—this, too, with a very small negro population. If the negroes were proportionately as numerous in the North as in the South and such sentiments prevailed, how long, with interracial marriages increased in numbers in proportion to opportunity, would there be an Anglo-Saxon 'Northern white' to have a pride of race? If with these facts before his eyes the distinguished educator sees no race danger in the social mingling of white and black people, it easily may be inferred that he sees no objection to amalgamation."The Southern white man does see a race danger in these social amenities, Mr. President; for he cannot view amalgamation or the faintest prospect of it with any sentiment save horror: and he fortifies himself against that danger not only with the peculiar pride of race—of which he has a comfortable supply—but with every expedient suggested by his common sense, his experience, and by the horrible example which that distinguished educator's 'Northern white' has furnished him."In providing against this danger my people are moved from without by the sight of no occasional negro such as at odd times crosses this New Englander's vision, nor from within by any unreasonable or jealous hatred of the negro such as has characterized certain 'Northern whites' from the time they burned negro orphan asylums in resentment at being drafted to fight their country's battles down to this good day when they mob a negro for trying to do an honest day's work. No! the Southern white man is driven to his defences by a sentiment void of offence toward the negro, and by the daily impending spectacle of black, half-barbarous hosts who menace the Anglo-Saxon civilization of the South and of the nation."President Phillips has modestly borrowed from one of his predecessors words with which to defend his social amenities to negroes. He quotes and says he would 'bow his head in shame' were he 'by word or deed to add anything to the misery of the awful isolation of the negroes who have risen above their race.' Two things may be said of that, Mr. President: first, isolation has been the price of leadership in all ages, and the negroes who are the pioneers of their race in their long and painful journey upward may not hope to escape it: second, the President's borrowed sentimental reason cuts the ground from under his feet, for that forcible Rooseveltian phrase, 'the misery of the awful isolation of black men who have risen above their race,' concedes the premises on which the South's contention is based, since it admits there is such a great gulf between the negroraceand therisennegro that his isolation fitly may be described in the words 'misery,' 'awful.' It is a peculiar order of Executive intellect and sensibility that can have such a keen sense of the misery which association with the lowly of his own race brings to an educated negro—who cannot in the very nature of things have put off all his hereditary deficiencies and tastes in a generation; and that yet seems not to be touched with any sense of the unspeakable misery such association and its inevitable consequences would have for my people—his Anglo-Saxon brethren—who, if there be any virtue in the refining processes of civilization, any redemptive power in the Christian religion, any progression in the purposes of God in the earth, are a thousand years ahead of the negro—any negro—in every racial excellence."Oh, but, you say, President Phillips means for us to associate only with those who are worthy, those who have 'risen.' Even that would be fatal, Mr. President. Beyond the truth already stated that considerations of merit will be forgotten and brushed aside if the social racial barrier is broken down at any point, and that social intermingling inevitably leads to intermarriage, there is a greater fact, a deeper truth, underlying this question. That fact, that truth, is that in estimating the result of mixing racial bloods not the man only and his personal accomplishments or individual culture must be considered, but his heredity, his race peculiarities and proclivities, every element that has gone into his blood."An occasional isolated negro may have broken the shackles of ignorance, measurably and admirably brought under control the half-savage passions of his nature, acquired palpable elegances of person and manner, and taken on largely the indefinable graces of culture: yet beneath all this creditable but thin veneer of civilization there slumber in his blood the primitive passions and propensities of his immediate ancestors, which are transmitted through him as latent forces of evil to burst out in his children and grandchildren in answer to the call of the wild. A man is not made in one generation or two. Every man gets the few ruling passions of his life from the numberless endowments of a hundred progenitors, and these few show out, while scores of others run so deep in his blood that they never crop out in his deeds but pass quietly on as static forces of good or evil to his children and their children before rising to the surface as dynamics in life and character."A Northern gentlewoman in a recent magazine article, defending her willingness to offer social courtesies to a prominent negro, speaks of him as one 'of whom an exquisite woman once said he has the soul of a Christian, the heart of a gentleman, and the eyes of the jungle.' That illustrates the idea perfectly, Mr. President,—the eyes of the jungle. Despite the fact that it is easier to breed up physical than temperamental qualities in man or beast, easier to breed out physical than mental or moral or spiritual blood-traits, this negro, with all his culture, with a large mixture of white blood in his veins, has yet in his very face that sinister mark—the eyes of the jungle: and in his blood who shall say what jungle passions, predilections and impulses, nobly and hardly held in check, that hark back to the African wilds from which they are so lately transplanted."A negro—any primitive being—may be developed mentally in one or two generations to the point where a certain polish has been put upon his mind and upon his manners; his purposes may be gathered and set toward the goal of final good; the whole trend of his life may be set upward: but there is yet between his new purposes and the savagery of the primitive man in him a far thinner bulwark of heredity than protects a white man from the elemental brute and animal forces of his nature. A number of educated negroes in this country to-day are superior in culture of mind and in personal morals to many white men, but even these individual shining lights of the negro race do not possess the power to endow their offspring so favourably as white men of less polish but longer seasoned hereditary strength of mental and moral fibre."It always offends a proper sense of decency to hear the suggestion that the negro may be bred up by crossing his blood with that of white men,—for the obvious reason that with our ideas of morals the most common principles of the breeder's art cannot be applied to the problem: but one single fact which eliminates such cold-blooded animal methods from our consideration is that when animals are cross-bred it is in the hope and for the purpose of combining mutually supplementary elements of strength and of eliminating supplementary weaknesses; while in this race matter the Anglo-Saxon is the superior of the negro in every racial characteristic—in physical strength and grace, in mental gifts and forces, and in spiritual excellence. Even if amalgamation did the very best that could be expected of it, it offers to the world nothing and to the white man less than nothing: for it would be a compromise, a striking of an average, by which naught is added to the total: it would pull down the strong to upraise the weak, degrade the superior to uplift the inferior: it would be a levelling process, not a method of progress.And yet amalgamation does not even that much, for it does not make an average-thick, even-thick retaining wall of culture between the hybrid product and the weaknesses of his mottled ancestry. There are always blow-holes in this mongrel culture, for heredity does not work by averages. It is an elusive combination of forces whose eccentricities and resultants cannot be formulated, calculated, or fore-determined. It is certain only that by no mere manipulation of it can the slightestadditionbe made to the stock of ancestral virtues. Only slow processes working in each individual through generation after generation can add increments of strength to racial fibre."Therefore, if the negro will insist upon somerace manipulationin order to raise the average of intelligence, thrift and morality in our national citizenship, the only safe and sane method is to take measures to restrict the increase of the negro race and let it die out like the Indian. But, you scream, that would be to suggest the annihilation of a race God has put here for some wise purpose! Even so: but amalgamation would no less surely annihilatethe race—two races—and fly in the face of a Providence that has segregated all races with no less distinctness of purpose, and so far has visited with disaster all attempts to violate that segregation."Now, Mr. President, what is the immediate past history, status and condition in Africa and America of this race with which Southern white men are asked to mingle socially? What are the racial endowments of theserisennegroes whom we are urged by lofty example to invite into our drawing-rooms upon terms of broadest equality—for upon other terms would be a mockery—as eligible associates, companions, suitors, husbands for our sisters and daughters?—for a sensible father or brother does not admit white men to his home on any other basis. Of what essential racial elements and sources is the negro, risen and unrisen alike?"Let answer the scientists and explorers, missionaries and travellers,—a long list of them, English, French, German, stretching all the way back a hundred years before there was a negro problem in the South. I quote verbatim, as nearly as the form will permit, their very words and phrases. Listen."The negro in Africa was, and is yet, in largest measure 'Without law except in its very crudest form'—'no law at all as we conceive it'—'in densest savage ignorance'—'no writing, no literature, no arts, no sciences'—'some development of perceptive and imitative faculties and of memory, but little of the higher faculties of abstract reasoning'—'in temperament intensely emotional, fitful, passionate, cruel'—'without self-control in emotional crises, callously indifferent to suffering in others, easily aroused to ferocity by sight of blood or under great fear'—'particularly deficient in strength of will, stability of purpose and staying power'—'dominated by impulse, void of foresight, unable to realize the future or restrain present desire'—'indolent, lazy, improvident, neglectful, happy-go-lucky, innately averse to labour or to care'—'given to uncleanness'—'an eater of snakes and snails, cannibal, eating his own dead'—'vilely superstitious, a maker of human sacrifices, charm-wearing, fetich-worshipping'—'of a religion grossly anthropomorphic, explaining all natural phenomena by a reference to evil spirits'—'his religion has no connection with morality, nothing to do with man's relation to man'—'thieving his beloved pastime, deception more common than theft'—'national character strongly marked by duplicity'—'lying habitually and thinking lying an enviable accomplishment'—'a more thorough and unhesitating liar than one of these negroes is not to be found anywhere'—'cruelly obliges his women to work'—'sensual, polygamous, unchaste'—'buying and selling his women'—'valuing his daughter's virginity solely as a marketable commodity'—'accounting adultery simply as a trespass upon a husband's property rights, and seduction and rape as a violence only to parent's property in daughters as destroying their marketable value'—'wifehood is but an enslavement to the husband's will'—'no conception of chastity as a virtue'—'of strong sexual passions'—'a devoted worshipper at the shrine of his phallic gods'—'sexual instincts dominate even the most public festivals, and public dances exhibit all degrees of sex suggestion.'"Those in short, Mr. President, are some of the horrible details of the bestial degradation of the west-coast Africans, from whom our slave-marts were recruited almost to the time of the Civil War, and who, says Keane, are 'the very worst sweepings of the Sudanese plateau,' and, Ellis says, are 'the dregs and offscourings of Africa.'"Such was the negro in Africa. What he is in America, only my people know. He has been the gainer at all points, the loser at none, because of his enforced residence here and his bondage to Southern white men: and yet that awful picture of the negro in Africa is so startlingly familiar to one who has spent his life in the South that he examines it closely with something of fear."He finds the colouring too vividly heavy and some details untrue for a picture of the negro in America to-day: but the negro as the Southern white man knows him is too alarmingly alike, too closely akin to, that African progenitor. He has advanced—yes! but just how much, andjust how little, from out the shadow of that awful category of horrors, my people know."They know that he has but just emerged from those depths that those bestial racial traits held in check by the man's law have only well begun to be refined by a change of environment and the slow processes of heredity: and yet we, white men of the South, are in a way advised to treat as our social equals certain immediate heirs to such a blood inheritance because, forsooth, they haverisen."We resent bitterly the insulting suggestion, however high or respectable or official its source: and we call upon you, white men of the North, to warn you against appeals for social recognition as a balm for 'the misery of the awful isolation of black men who have risen above their race.' When the blood of your daughter or your son is mixed with that of one of this race, howeverrisen, redolent of newly applied polish or bewrapped with a fresh culture, how shall sickly sentimentalities solace your shame if in the blood of your mulatto grandchild the vigorous red jungle corpuscles of some savage ancestor shall overmatch your more gentle endowment, and under your name and in a face and form perhaps where a world may see your very image in darker hue there shall be disported primitive appetites, propensities, passions fit only to endow an Ashanti warrior or grace the orgies of an African bacchanalia? In Heaven's name think to the bottom of this question!—and thinknow! Await not the day 'when your fear comethas desolation,and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you.' Do not be distracted by considerations that are superficial and incidental—such for example as the negro's record for criminal assaults upon women. The crime of rape will be abated by some means, but long after that must the negro develop before he loses his primal jungle habit of regarding woman as a personal possession. It is a matter of attitude and not of assault: and as in his fundamental attitude toward women, so in every racial characteristic the superiority of the white man is blood deep, generations old, ingrained, inherent, essential."Knowing this, my people despise President Phillips' social amenities to negroes of high degree. They do not fear the issue; but what insults and outrages them is that a personage in the highest official position, by an act in itself impulsive, empty, and futile, should put desires and hopes of miscegenation into the minds and hearts of the inflammable, muttering, passionate black masses of the South. Standing themselves ever in the shadow of dire calamity which they are facing and must face for long years to come as they painfully work out a righteous and practical solution of their problem, my people cry out to you, oh, white men of the North, of the insidious danger in these sentimental social practices of an exuberant Executive; and we tell you that, however well or ill you may guard the purity and integrity of your race, we will stand fast. Whatever else may or may not be true, we will never acknowledge any equality on the negro's side that does notovertakethe white race in its advancing civilization, and we will certainly not submit to an equality produced by degrading the white race to or toward the negro's level. We will not make with the negro a common treasure of our Anglo-Saxon blood by putting it in hotch-pot with his in a mongrel breed."The Anglo-Saxon has blazed the way of civilization for a world to follow in: but if he, the torch-bearer, the pioneer, goes back to join hands with the tribes who are following afar his torch and trail, then the progression of civilization and of character must not only stop but must actually recede for him to effect a juncture with the black and backward race in the blood of a hybrid progeny. There the fine edge would be taken off every laudable characteristic of the white man. There the splendid Anglo-Saxon spirit of leadership and initiative would be neutralized by the sluggish blood of the Ethiop race. There the Anglo-Saxon's fine energies and clear sensibilities would be deadened and muddled by the infusion of this soporific into his veins. There vile, unknown, ancestral impulses, the untamed passions of a barbarous blood, would be planted in the Anglo-Saxon's very heart."You may believe that in the dim beginning God by imperial decree set the dividing line between these races; or, less orthodox and more coldly scientific, you may know that Nature, impartial mother of men, giving her white and black sons equal endowment and an even start in body, mind and spirit, since has stood, in unerring wisdom still impartial, to watch the white bound away from the black in his rush toward that perfection of mind, of heart, of character, which she has set as goal for the striving of her children. From whichever view-point you look upon the age-long history of men and the age-long lead of white men over their black brothers,—whether evolutionist or traditionist, scientist or mystic, you offer violence to your own particular deity, be it God or Nature, when in their present measureless inequality of development you by amalgamation would beat back the white into the lagging footsteps and gross animalism of the black."Menacing thus the effectiveness and integrity of a race which is the pathfinder for the progress of a world of men, the danger is not only a race danger, but a danger to universal civilization; and the preventative is a social separation of the white and black races in Americafrom the lowest to the highest,—at least, yes in all reason, at the dictate of the plainest common sense,at least, if so be, till the black becomes approximately equal to the white in racial excellence. After which let the ethnologists take the question and give us the answer of science as to the advisability of mixing racial bloods."Naturally you ask me when the time of equality in racial excellence will come. I answer that I commit myself unreservedly to the support of every means used for the negro's uplifting; I admit—nay more, I contend—that we white men cannot be dogs in the manger with civilization; we cannot as a Christian people even hope that the negro race may not comeupto our level, nor can there be any reason why we should refuse to acknowledge that race as our equal if it shall indeed become our equal. And yet, while I would not in puny wisdom presume to foretell the purposes of God in the earth, nor to set bounds to the efficacy of his unspeakable redemption, nor to appoint the places of white, black, yellow, red or brown men in the pageantry of 'that far-off divine event toward which the whole creation moves'—yet, I say, with carefully acquired information of the negro's history and habits in Africa, and with an intimate knowledge of his present status and rate of progress toward civilization in America, I tell you frankly that the day of his approximate equality in racial excellence with the white man is beyond the furthest reach of my vision into the future."
* * * * *
At the moment Elise was so delivering her mind, a telegraph boy was handing Rutledge a message. He tore it open and read:
"COLUMBIA, S.C, Jan. 9th, 191-.
"Washington, D.C.
"Exactly how old are you and where do you vote?
"W. D. ROBERTSON."
Evans looked around behind the telegraph-sheet as if seeking an explanation. He gazed quizzically at the messenger-boy, but that young gentleman only grinned and then looked solemn.
"Well," Evans muttered, "what the devil's up Robbie's back now?"
He sat down and thought the thing over awhile. Then he constructed a reply.
"WASHINGTON, Jan. 9th, 191-.
"Columbia, S.C.
"Your telegram received. If it is official I decline to answer.Entre nousI will be thirty-one on the 29th of February at something like twenty minutes past three in the morning—they didn't have a stopwatch in the house. I vote in Cherokee County, Pacolet precinct, generally of late in a cigar-box in the shed-room of Jake Sims's store where Gus Herndon used to run a barber-shop when you and I were young, Maggie. Why? EVANS RUTLEDGE."
"Send thatcollect, youngster. We'll make old Robbie pay for his impertinence."
"Look here, sonny," he called to the boy who had gotten out the door, "bring any answer to that down to the Capitol. I am going to have a look at the Senate."
He was sitting beside Lola DeVale in the members' gallery when the answer came.
"COLUMBIA, S.C, Jan. 9th, 191-.
"Washington, D.C.
"Nothing much. The governor of South Carolina simply did not feel like giving a United States Senatorship either to a boy or to a man from another State. He is just mailing your commission as Jones's successor. Don't decline it before you hear the whole story. Congratulations to you.
"W. D. ROBERTSON."
"This has 'an ancient and fish-like smell.' Read it," Rutledge said to Lola when he had recovered from his astonishment sufficiently to speak.
She took the telegram and while she was trying to interpret its import Senator Killam came hurriedly into the gallery and seized upon Rutledge.
"I got a telegram from the governor half an hour ago and have been trying to find you ever since," he exclaimed. "He has appointed you—oh, you have heard, I see. Well, come right down with me. I want to present you to your colleagues."
Evans could doubt no longer, and Lola DeVale had grasped the meaning of it.
"I am so glad to be the first to congratulate you," she said, and he felt the sincerity of her good wishes in her warm hand-grasp. Then Senator Killam carried him off.
* * * * *
"I know it came 'like a bolt from the blue' to you," Robertson wrote to him; "but the whys and wherefores need not mystify you. There cannot be the slightest doubt of your ability to fill the office—full to the brim; and the rest is easy. You know the old man fully intended all along to contest for the place with Jones, whose term would have expired with the old man's term as governor. Jones's demise, however, presented a problem to him that has driven him to the verge of lunacy for a week. He couldn't give himself the commission, of course. He couldn't resign and get it, for the lieutenant-governor has been the avowed supporter of LaRoque for the Senatorship. He couldn't give it to LaRoque or Pressley, for the three of them are too evenly matched.... When he finally came to the idea of appointing some one to fill the vacancy who was clearly not in the running so that the primaries might settle it among the three of them, I suggested you. He jumped at the idea.... The old man has every reason to feel kindly toward you both for your father's sake and for your own excellent work's sake, and he does not doubt your friendliness to himself.... You will have less than six months in which to make a name for yourself, but—perhaps—who can tell? ... I wish I had such an opportunity. I am heartily glad you have it."
* * * * *
Senator Rutledge was pitched right into the middle of the fight on the Hare Bill—and fight it was for him. Senator Killam essayed to take the young man under his wing and chaperone his conduct according to his ideas of the political proprieties, but he found that the junior Senator had a mind of his own, and could not be managed, overawed or bullied. This roused Mr. Killam's ire at once. He wasn't accustomed to it. The dead Senator Jones had never had the effrontery to think for himself; and for this youngster to presume to walk alone was more than Mr. Killam could forgive.
Solely because of Mr. Killam's personal attitude and treatment of him, Rutledge wished it were over and done with long before the finish; but he never lost his nerve.
* * * * *
It seemed that the suspense would be ended quickly when the House under pressure of the rules passed the Hare Bill almost without debate: but when it came before the Senate it was evident at once that those dignitaries would take abundance of time to consider it,—if for no other reason than to prove to themselves they were the greatest deliberative body on earth.
However, with all the Senate's deliberation the very frenzy of the Wordyfellow crowd's screams evidenced their realization that their game was balked—and that, too, in a manner that was maddening: for it left them not the frenzied pleasure of fighting their precious battle against the negro out to the end and going down to harmless defeat in pyrotechnic glory. No; it placed them in a dilemma where they must humiliate themselves by a surrender before the battle, or fight it to a barren victory at the polls, which would not only bring actual benefit to the negro in the South but also give to the Northern States the lion's share of a large appropriation.
Facing this dilemma, they lost heart if they lost nothing of noise. In all of the interested States except Mississippi serious discussion of the question grew less and less rapidly, and was postponed until after the Senate should vote. In Mississippi, however, the tension was increased by the Senate's deliberation because the date set for the election on the proposed Wordyfellow amendment to the State constitution was some time before the Senate would be forced to vote. The Mississippians could not decide for their lives whether they preferred to vote on their amendment first or have the Senate vote first on the bill. With a faint hope that the bill might not pass, they were in obvious difficulties in either case.
Southern Senators were overwhelmed with all manner of conflicting and confusing petitions, and as a result about one half of them favoured the bill for one reason or another, while the other half more or less bitterly opposed it. The discussion, when the bill finally came out of committee, took the widest range,—from the constitutional objections raised by the Texas Senator (whose State, having a large school-fund income, did not need the appropriation) and the savage attacks upon the negro race generally by Senator Killam, to the purely pro-educational reasoning of most of the supporting Senators from the South—among whom was Senator Ruffin—and the pro-negro speech of the young Senator Rutledge.
The adjectivepro-negromay give an erroneous impression of Senator Rutledge's ideas. The term is the Senator's own. From his speech in full in theCongressional Recordthe reader may determine for himself whether the term is apt.
CHAPTER XVII
Senator Rutledge gave notice that on February 23d he would address the Senate on the Hare Bill. On that day the galleries were crowded to hear him, his State's delegation in the House was present in a body, accompanied by many other representatives from North and South. No one knew how he would vote, for he had listened much and talked little. He said:
"Mr. President: There have been many terms used on this floor and in the public prints since this bill was introduced, by which to distinguish and define and lay open to public view the motives which are supposed to lie behind the votes that will be cast for and against it.
"We have heard 'unconstitutional,' 'anti-negro,' 'pro-educational,' 'watch-dog of the treasury,' and others equally descriptive if less parliamentary. I have not heard 'pro-negro.'
"So, to save my friends—and enemies, if I have any—the trouble of search and imaginings, I adopt that term, 'pro-negro,' as descriptive of my attitude toward the matters affected by this bill.
"It is an open secret, Mr. President, that this measure, which bears the non-committal title of 'an act to promote education' is a White House production designed and introduced for the single purpose of defeating what is known as the Wordyfellow school-fund movement in the South generally, more specifically now in the State of Mississippi. Because I think it will accomplish that purpose, both general and special,—because I am 'for the negro,'—for him on his own account,—for his elevation as a race to the highest level which his essential nature in the purposes of God will permit him to attain,—because I believe the success of the Wordyfellow movement would mean his degradation, his hopeless continuance in his present low estate,—because, in a word, I ampro-negro; I shall vote for this bill.
"I should despise myself, sir, if I had within me other sentiments toward any man or race of men, and I feel, therefore, that it is not unbecoming in me to arrogate to myself the pure unselfishness of this motive. And yet, sir, if the love of one's race may be called a selfish passion, I must confess that right alongside of this unselfish desire for the negro's welfare, there lies in my heart a selfish passion for the progress, the multiplying prosperity and more abounding happiness of my own people, the white men and women of the South, which desire also with no less power but indeed with compelling forcefulness bids me to oppose the Wordyfellow idea with every faculty and expedient, and therefore to vote for this measure.
"I wish to make it clear at the outset that, while I shall heartily support this White House bill, I give not the slightest credit to the President for having prepared it and sent it here. He deserves none. The bill is a necessity, and as such I vote for it: but the President is the one man who has made it a necessity.
"If he had not injected into the situation his negro luncheon (and to that I will pay my respects before I have finished), my people would have defeated the Wordyfellow movement; for the battle was going our way. It is as little as President Phillips can do now to suggest this method, expensive though it is, to repair the damage he has done the negro's cause in the South. He comes praying us to pay the negro out of the difficulty in which he has involved him, andas friends of the negrothere is nothing for us to do but furnish the money, however much we may deplore the Executive folly that makes the outlay imperative.
"Now, Mr. President, let us inquire directly into the merits of the Wordyfellow plan. The proposed amendment to the constitution of Mississippi provides that the school fund shall be divided between the white and negro schools in proportion to the taxes paid to the State by each of the two races for school purposes. As there are six negroes to four whites in the State, and as the negroes pay less than ten per cent of the school taxes, such a division of the school fund will give the white children thirteen days' schooling to the negro's one.
"Such a proposition is illogical, pernicious, insane.
"Look at the logic of it. Governor Wordyfellow defends the general proposition by some scattering statistics which prove to his mind that education generally is not good for the negro; but he justifies the division of the school fund on the basis of contribution upon the supposed principle that the negro will get back all that he pays in and therefore cannot rightly demand more.
"That so-called principle will not hold water a moment. I would say to the gentlemen from the South, Mr. President,—to those who are supporting the Wordyfellow propaganda—that if they proceed on that theory they must give toeveryman what he pays into the treasury: which means that the State must expend more for the tuition of the sons of the rich than the sons of the poor. If every man has a right to demand for his own children the taxes he pays for school purposes, then the State has no right to tax one man to educate another's child—and the promoters of this idea have pulled down the whole public school system about their ears.
"If such a division is proposed on the ground that no sort of education is good for the negro, and we believe that, then let us take away from the negro by constitutional amendmentallthe money collected from him by the State for school purposes and give it to the white children. That would be logical, that would be sensible, that would be Scriptural. Let us be logical and sensible and fearless about this matter.
"But I cannot think these leaders of the Wordyfellow forces believe that, Mr. President, though I fear that they have persuaded thousands of their less intelligent following to believe it thoroughly. No, you do not believe it; but you do believe that some particular kinds of education—literary education, for example—is positively harmful to the negro, while some other particular sort—industrial education, perhaps—is beneficial and would uplift the negro race.
"If you admit that,—and it has been conceded on this floor by some of the leaders of the Wordyfellow movement that industrial education is good for the negro and will make a better man and a better citizen of him; then in face of the appalling menace of his ignorance and depravity which have been painted in such lurid colours here,let us by constitutional amendment give him more than his per capita share of the school tax. Yes, let us give to him proportionately in keeping with our keenest fears, our wildest terror, of the Black Peril—all if need be—to educate himin that particular line that will uplift himand make a safe citizen of him, in order that we may save ourselves alive and escape the woes of that peril. All education administered by the State is given in the exercise of a sort of quasi police power—to protect itself from the violence of ignorance: and we would be well within an ancient principle if we should lay out extraordinary funds to police the black cesspools that threaten our civic life.
"It is clearly demonstrable, therefore, that upon any theory of the negro's inability or limited ability to be benefited by education, or upon the assumption of its positive hurtfulness to him, the Wordyfellow amendment is absolutely illogical. The whole Wordyfellow proposition is based upon a false assumption in the first place, and the Wordyfellow remedy does not have the merit of being true even to the fictitious Wordyfellow premises. For all this agitation against the education of the negro race proceeds upon the theory that the negro is not altogether a man, that he is without the one aptitude common to all other peoples, white, yellow or red—the disposition to be uplifted in civilization by the spread of a higher intelligence among his race.
"That theory, Mr. President, is false! And while I believe the great majority of my people reject it despite the insistence with which it has been in small measure openly, in large measure indirectly, presented to them for acceptance, I have thought it worth while to inquire closely and specifically into the effect of thehigher literaryeducation upon the black men and women who have been so fortunate as to acquire it. I give to the Senators not only as the result of my investigation but as the result of my personal observation as a man brought up in the South, my sincere opinion that education of the negro in the usual literary studies from the kindergarten to the college, as well as along industrial lines, is as a rule beneficial and uplifting to him.
"It is true that a smattering of education in some instances gives a negro the idea that he is to get a living without work, and that such notions would not be wholesome if prevailing among a population which must do manual labour. This need not alarm us, however; for it is not an unusual thing for a college education to give a white boy the same notion. We do not limit his education on that account. In the post-graduate school of Hard Knocks he always finds out—and no less surely will the negro boy of similar delusion learn—especially as education becomes more and more a possession of the masses and not a privilege of the few—that the great majority of men, whether black or white, lettered or unlettered, must work, and work with their hands.
"Let me add, lest I be misunderstood, that while I believe the negro race as a race will be hewers of wood and drawers of water for generations to come, and that education will be beneficial to them as a toiling class, I am not of those who believe that when by education you spoil a negro field-hand you have committed a crime. I have no sympathy with a sentiment that would confine any man to a limited though respectable and honourable work when he has within him the aspiration and the ability to serve his race and his time in broader fields.
"Those, in a nutshell, Mr. President, are the primary reasons why I am opposed to the Wordyfellow movement, and shall vote for this bill. The secondary reasons are hardly less forceful.
"I want this bill passed and passed quickly in order to avoid the pernicious incidental effects of the agitation of this question among my people. It has bred and is breeding antagonisms between the white and black races in the South such as did not result from the horrors of reconstruction or the excitement of negro disfranchisement. In those issues the negro truthfully was told and well may have believed that the white man was driven to protect himself against the ignorance and depravity of the black. In this case, however, the negro feels, and rightly, that the white man would condemn him perpetually to that ignorance and depravity. From the negro's view-point the white man's motive is now what it never was before: base, worse than selfish, wantonly, vindictively cruel.
"Again the propagation of the Wordyfellow idea teaches incidentally that in this democratic country, where by the very nature of our institutions the welfare of each is the welfare of all, where forsooth a Christian civilization has reached its highest development, even here, the strong may desert the weak and leave them to their own pitiful devices and defences.
"It teaches also the doctrine—more potent for evil—that the government may take note of racial classes for the purpose of dealing out its favours and benefits with uneven hands, preferring one to the other. If it may do this when the class differences are racial, it is but half a step to the proposition that it may do so when the differences exist whether they be racial or other. It takes no seer to see that after that proposition—no,withthat proposition—comes the deluge.
"Such, Mr. President, are some, not all, of the incidental effects of the propagation of the Wordyfellow idea which clearly and with vast conservatism may be called pernicious. But there is yet another effect which will be inevitable upon the adoption of the Wordyfellow plan, and which has been in large measure produced already by the discussion of it, in the light of which deliberate advocacy of the Wordyfellow idea fairly may be called insane; and that is the severing of all bonds of sympathy and good-will between the races when the negro is told by white men, 'Here, take the pitiful portion that is yours, and go work out your own bitter, black salvation, alone—if you can.'
"All this agitation, all our concern, is predicated upon the deadly menace which this people, numbering one-third of the population of the South and gathered in many sections in overwhelming majorities, is to our civic and industrial happiness and progress: and it does seem the sheerest insanity to sever the bonds of sympathy and helpfulness which now bind the races together, surrender all our interest and right to control in the method of the negro's uplifting, and leave him to develop along any haphazard or dangerous lines without sympathy, respect, or regard for us, our ideas, or our ideals.
"The negro has been enough of a problem and a terror to my people with all our ability to control him through his ignorance, his fears, his affection and his respect for us. We have been careless at times perhaps as to how we made use of these instruments for his management. The more fools we if we now throw away his affection and his respect, cut loose from him entirely, and leave him to develop under teachers of his own race who with distorted vision or prejudiced heart will replace his ignorance with a knowledge at least of his brute strength, and cancel his fears with hate.
"My people give freely hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly to the degraded of other lands in whom they have only the interest which Christians have in universal humanity, and they place in the calendar of the saints the names of the godly men and women who go to work personally to uplift the heathen. I do not think that in their cool senses their Christian impulses, to which is added the motive of self-interest, will permit them to cut off their contributions to and support of any instrumentality which will elevate the degraded in their own land whose depravity is so pregnant with dire possibilities to them. I pray the day to come when, among my people, it shall be thought just as praiseworthy, as noble, as saintly for a Southern white man to give his life and energies to the personal instruction, uplifting and redemption of the negroes in America as of the negroes in Africa or the heathen in any land.
"That prayer, Mr. President, which is sincerely from my heart, brings me to the discussion of President Phillips' negro policy. I shall not expect to see the prayer answered so long as the Chief Executive of this nation shows a disposition to deal so carelessly, so arbitrarily, with such cock-sure flippancy, with the convictions, prejudices if you will, of the brave and generous people who are face to face in their race problem not with a far-away academic question about which they may safely speculate and theorize, but face to face with a present, tangible, appalling issue in whose solution is life or death to them.
"To my people the consequences are so vital that they sometimes are led perhaps beyond what is really necessary in the way of defence,—for any sane man prefers to be doubly guarded against death. So it has been that while they are not favourable to the Wordyfellow plan they have been stampeded to it by the Phillips negro luncheon.
"Let me explain that when I speak of the President's negro policy I do not mean to include his appointments of negroes to office. I think we of the South have in these matters to some extent confused the issues, and proportionately weakened our position before the outside public. Not that I approve of appointing negroes to office in the South, for I do not. I think the weight of all considerations is against it. But the considerations either for or against it are considerations of expediency. They are not vital. If the President wishes to vindicate his negro appointments on the ground that his appointees are of his party, the best men of his party, and fairly efficient,—let him. Such reasons have been given for political appointments time out of mind, although they are not conclusive in any case and especially not in the matter of negro office-holding in the South.But let him notgo into cheap heroics such as were indulged in by a recent negro appointee, who tragically exclaimed that if his appointment was not confirmed his race would be set back thirty years!
"Such rant is only ridiculous. Office-holding is not a recognized or an actual instrumentality for uplifting or civilizing a people; and it is not a theory of this or any other form of government that its mission or method is to uplift its citizenship, white or black, by making place-holders of them. It is not closing any legitimate door of hope to negro or white man to refuse him a Presidential appointment. The 'door of hope,' whatever else it may be to white or black, is not the door to a government office.
"The real basis of the race issue, Mr. President, has nothing to do with politics or political appointments, with office-getting or office-holding. If by some trick of chance a negro—some prodigy lofty in character and in the science and wisdom of statecraft—were President of this nation to-day, and were by unanimous consent a model Executive, the real race problem would not be affected a feather's weight. The world must understand that the Southern white people in the measures they have taken and will take to protect themselves against the negro are impelled by weightier considerations than the pre-emption of the dignities or emoluments of politics. It is true that they have taken the governments of the Southern States into their own hands, away from negro majorities in many sections. It may be true that in order to do this they have nullified provisions of the Federal constitution. But they have done so from no such small motive as a desire to hold public office.
"My people have all respect for the wisdom of the makers of the constitution, who framed an instrument perfectly suited to the conditions as they existed at the time and continued to exist for eighty years, prescribing the method of majority rule for a people who were of an approximately equal civic intelligence and virtue. But when the conditions were changed and a vast horde of illiterate and—in the hands of unscrupulous leaders—vicious voters were added to the electorate, stern necessity forbade them longer to give a sentimental support to so-called fundamental principles in the constitution and permit ignorance to rule intelligence and vice to rule virtue.
"The 'fundamental principles' in that constitution, Mr. President, are nothing more or less than wisely conceivedpolicieswhich were tried, proved, and found good under the conditions for which they were devised. The 'fundamental principle' upon which the race problem of the South may be solved will have been discovered with certainty onlyaftera solution has been accomplished by the conscientious effort and best thought of Southern white men.
"And they will solve this problem. It can never be settled, of course, till Southern white men acquiesce in its settlement. They will settle it in righteousness and will accept with gratefulness any suggestion which their fellow countrymen have to offer in a spirit of sympathy and helpfulness. But it may as well be understood that any such exhibition as the President's negro luncheon, which affronts the universal sentiment of the final arbiters of this question, must necessarily put further away the day of settlement. The negro problem cannot be worked out by any simple little rule o' thumb, and the negro will always be the loser by any such melodramatic display of super-assertive backbone and misinformed conscience.
"The President would settle this matter upon a purely theoretical academic basis, this matter that in its practical effects will not touch him nor his family nor his section, but will affect vitally the happiness, the lives, the destiny of a chivalrous people whose ideas, traditions, sentiments and convictions he carelessly ignores or impetuously insults. Such exhibitions do not become a brave man. They betoken, rather, a headstrong man, an inconsiderate man, a thoughtless man, a fanatical man. It does seem that President Phillips would have learned wisdom from the experience of his illustrious predecessor, President Roosevelt, who did somewhat less of this sort of thing once—and only once.
"Mr. President, it has been repeatedly said that the hostility of the white people of the South to social intermingling with the negro race is an instinct—a race instinct. I do not so consider it,—and for two reasons: first, because many men of Anglo-Saxon blood—and of these President Phillips is the most conspicuous example—do not have such an instinct; second, because instinct is not the result of reason, while the Southern white man's opposition to social recognition of the negro is defensible by the purest, most dispassionate reason. These convictions are so well fixed in the Southern mind that they may appear to be instinctive and measurably serve the purpose of instinct; but the vital objections of my people to intermingling socially with the negro are not founded in any race antipathy, whim, pretence, or prejudice. They are grounded in the clearest common sense, and as such only do I care to present or defend them.
"In face of the disaster to be averted, I could wish that it were an instinct; for instinct does not fail in a crisis. But men are more than beasts: the power to rise is given to them conditioned upon the chance to fall. So in this race matter: instinct does not forbid a white man to marry a black woman; instinct—more's the horror!—does not forbid a white woman to wed a negro man. For this reason it is—for the very lack of a race instinct is it—that the social intermingling of the white and black races, as advocated and practised by President Phillips, would inevitably bring to pass an amalgamation of the races with all its foul brood of evils.
"President Phillips, living in a section of the country where negroes are few—especially such as are of sufficient intelligence to be interesting to a man of his attainments—does not dream of amalgamation. I would not insult him by assuming such a thing. And yet upon a superficial estimate of conditions in the South he gives us this impulsive exhibition of what in one of his high official position is criminal carelessness.
"The positive element of crime in it is not in the affront which a Presidential negro luncheon puts upon Southern sentiment, but in the suggestion to Southern and Northern people alike that a social intermingling of the races—which means amalgamation, however blind he may be to the fact—is the solution of the race problem. The crime would be complete in all its horror if the South, if the nation, should follow his lead and achieve the logical result of his teaching.
"From long and intimate acquaintance with the negro's character, my people know that the Phillips negro luncheon stimulates not the negro's ambition and endeavour to improve himself as it tickles and arouses his vanity. When the ordinary darkey hears of it he thinks it not a recognition of the superior abilities of Bishop Martin and Doctor Woods, but a social recognition of the negro race; and forthwith deems himself the equal of the white man and desires unutterable things. And not without reason.
"The black people appreciate what the President's act means for them. They do not misinterpret its tendency. A prominent negro said in a recent mass meeting in Richmond: 'No two peoples having the same religion and speaking the same tongue, living together, have ever been kept apart. This is well known and is one of the reasons why the dominant race is crushing out the strength of the negro in the South. I am afraid we are anarchistic and I give warning that if this oppression in the South continues the negro must resort to the torch and the sword, and that the Southland will become a land of blood and desolation.'
"This inflammatory utterance indicates the interpretation put by negroes upon President Phillips' open-dining-room-door policy, and the nature of the hopes and aspirations it arouses in the black man's heart. And the serious thing is the element of truth in the negro's erroneous statement. It is true as gospel that no two races of people, living together, have everintermingled sociallywithout amalgamating. It is hardly necessary to cite evidence of that fact or to give the reasons underlying it. It might be taken as axiomatic that social intermingling means amalgamation.
"If men and women were attracted to each other and loved and mated because of equal endowments of virtue, or intelligence, or beauty, or upon any basis of similar accomplishments, tastes, or mental, moral or physical excellences, then a gulf-stream of Anglo-Saxon blood might flow unmixed and pure through a sea of social contact with the negro race; but until love and marriage are placed among the exact sciences, social intermingling of races will ever result as it ever has resulted: in the general admixture of racial bloods.
"When racial barriers are broken down and it is proper for negroes and whites to associate freely and intimately, when you—white men—receive negroes on a plane of social equality, your women will marry them, your sons will take them to wife. Shall you say to your daughter of the negro whom you receive in your home: 'He is an excellent man but—do not marry him'? Shall you say to your son enamoured of a quadroon: 'She is a very worthy young woman and an ornament to our circle of friends, but—I have chosen another wife for you'? When did such considerations ever guide or curb the fancy of the youthful heart or diminish the travel to Gretna Green? No, the line never has been drawn between free social intercourse and intermarriage; and while the Southern people believe they could draw that line if any people could, they do not propose to make any reckless experiments where all is to be lost and nothing gained.
"A president of one of our great universities is quoted as saying: 'The Southern white sees a race danger in eating at the same table with a negro; he sees in being the host or the guest of a negro an act of race infidelity. The Northern white sees nothing of the kind. The race danger does not enter into his thoughts at all. To be the host or the guest of a negro, a Mexican or a Japanese would be for him simply a matter of present pleasure, convenience or courtesy. It would never occur to him that such an act could possibly harm his own race. His pride of race does not permit him to entertain such an idea. This is a significant difference between Northern white and Southern white.'
"In noting significant differences between Northern white and Southern white this authority must have been advertent to the fact that the pride of race of his 'Northern white' does not prevent them from furnishing the overwhelming majority of interracial marriages with negroes, as well as with Chinese, Japanese and every other alien race—this, too, with a very small negro population. If the negroes were proportionately as numerous in the North as in the South and such sentiments prevailed, how long, with interracial marriages increased in numbers in proportion to opportunity, would there be an Anglo-Saxon 'Northern white' to have a pride of race? If with these facts before his eyes the distinguished educator sees no race danger in the social mingling of white and black people, it easily may be inferred that he sees no objection to amalgamation.
"The Southern white man does see a race danger in these social amenities, Mr. President; for he cannot view amalgamation or the faintest prospect of it with any sentiment save horror: and he fortifies himself against that danger not only with the peculiar pride of race—of which he has a comfortable supply—but with every expedient suggested by his common sense, his experience, and by the horrible example which that distinguished educator's 'Northern white' has furnished him.
"In providing against this danger my people are moved from without by the sight of no occasional negro such as at odd times crosses this New Englander's vision, nor from within by any unreasonable or jealous hatred of the negro such as has characterized certain 'Northern whites' from the time they burned negro orphan asylums in resentment at being drafted to fight their country's battles down to this good day when they mob a negro for trying to do an honest day's work. No! the Southern white man is driven to his defences by a sentiment void of offence toward the negro, and by the daily impending spectacle of black, half-barbarous hosts who menace the Anglo-Saxon civilization of the South and of the nation.
"President Phillips has modestly borrowed from one of his predecessors words with which to defend his social amenities to negroes. He quotes and says he would 'bow his head in shame' were he 'by word or deed to add anything to the misery of the awful isolation of the negroes who have risen above their race.' Two things may be said of that, Mr. President: first, isolation has been the price of leadership in all ages, and the negroes who are the pioneers of their race in their long and painful journey upward may not hope to escape it: second, the President's borrowed sentimental reason cuts the ground from under his feet, for that forcible Rooseveltian phrase, 'the misery of the awful isolation of black men who have risen above their race,' concedes the premises on which the South's contention is based, since it admits there is such a great gulf between the negroraceand therisennegro that his isolation fitly may be described in the words 'misery,' 'awful.' It is a peculiar order of Executive intellect and sensibility that can have such a keen sense of the misery which association with the lowly of his own race brings to an educated negro—who cannot in the very nature of things have put off all his hereditary deficiencies and tastes in a generation; and that yet seems not to be touched with any sense of the unspeakable misery such association and its inevitable consequences would have for my people—his Anglo-Saxon brethren—who, if there be any virtue in the refining processes of civilization, any redemptive power in the Christian religion, any progression in the purposes of God in the earth, are a thousand years ahead of the negro—any negro—in every racial excellence.
"Oh, but, you say, President Phillips means for us to associate only with those who are worthy, those who have 'risen.' Even that would be fatal, Mr. President. Beyond the truth already stated that considerations of merit will be forgotten and brushed aside if the social racial barrier is broken down at any point, and that social intermingling inevitably leads to intermarriage, there is a greater fact, a deeper truth, underlying this question. That fact, that truth, is that in estimating the result of mixing racial bloods not the man only and his personal accomplishments or individual culture must be considered, but his heredity, his race peculiarities and proclivities, every element that has gone into his blood.
"An occasional isolated negro may have broken the shackles of ignorance, measurably and admirably brought under control the half-savage passions of his nature, acquired palpable elegances of person and manner, and taken on largely the indefinable graces of culture: yet beneath all this creditable but thin veneer of civilization there slumber in his blood the primitive passions and propensities of his immediate ancestors, which are transmitted through him as latent forces of evil to burst out in his children and grandchildren in answer to the call of the wild. A man is not made in one generation or two. Every man gets the few ruling passions of his life from the numberless endowments of a hundred progenitors, and these few show out, while scores of others run so deep in his blood that they never crop out in his deeds but pass quietly on as static forces of good or evil to his children and their children before rising to the surface as dynamics in life and character.
"A Northern gentlewoman in a recent magazine article, defending her willingness to offer social courtesies to a prominent negro, speaks of him as one 'of whom an exquisite woman once said he has the soul of a Christian, the heart of a gentleman, and the eyes of the jungle.' That illustrates the idea perfectly, Mr. President,—the eyes of the jungle. Despite the fact that it is easier to breed up physical than temperamental qualities in man or beast, easier to breed out physical than mental or moral or spiritual blood-traits, this negro, with all his culture, with a large mixture of white blood in his veins, has yet in his very face that sinister mark—the eyes of the jungle: and in his blood who shall say what jungle passions, predilections and impulses, nobly and hardly held in check, that hark back to the African wilds from which they are so lately transplanted.
"A negro—any primitive being—may be developed mentally in one or two generations to the point where a certain polish has been put upon his mind and upon his manners; his purposes may be gathered and set toward the goal of final good; the whole trend of his life may be set upward: but there is yet between his new purposes and the savagery of the primitive man in him a far thinner bulwark of heredity than protects a white man from the elemental brute and animal forces of his nature. A number of educated negroes in this country to-day are superior in culture of mind and in personal morals to many white men, but even these individual shining lights of the negro race do not possess the power to endow their offspring so favourably as white men of less polish but longer seasoned hereditary strength of mental and moral fibre.
"It always offends a proper sense of decency to hear the suggestion that the negro may be bred up by crossing his blood with that of white men,—for the obvious reason that with our ideas of morals the most common principles of the breeder's art cannot be applied to the problem: but one single fact which eliminates such cold-blooded animal methods from our consideration is that when animals are cross-bred it is in the hope and for the purpose of combining mutually supplementary elements of strength and of eliminating supplementary weaknesses; while in this race matter the Anglo-Saxon is the superior of the negro in every racial characteristic—in physical strength and grace, in mental gifts and forces, and in spiritual excellence. Even if amalgamation did the very best that could be expected of it, it offers to the world nothing and to the white man less than nothing: for it would be a compromise, a striking of an average, by which naught is added to the total: it would pull down the strong to upraise the weak, degrade the superior to uplift the inferior: it would be a levelling process, not a method of progress.And yet amalgamation does not even that much, for it does not make an average-thick, even-thick retaining wall of culture between the hybrid product and the weaknesses of his mottled ancestry. There are always blow-holes in this mongrel culture, for heredity does not work by averages. It is an elusive combination of forces whose eccentricities and resultants cannot be formulated, calculated, or fore-determined. It is certain only that by no mere manipulation of it can the slightestadditionbe made to the stock of ancestral virtues. Only slow processes working in each individual through generation after generation can add increments of strength to racial fibre.
"Therefore, if the negro will insist upon somerace manipulationin order to raise the average of intelligence, thrift and morality in our national citizenship, the only safe and sane method is to take measures to restrict the increase of the negro race and let it die out like the Indian. But, you scream, that would be to suggest the annihilation of a race God has put here for some wise purpose! Even so: but amalgamation would no less surely annihilatethe race—two races—and fly in the face of a Providence that has segregated all races with no less distinctness of purpose, and so far has visited with disaster all attempts to violate that segregation.
"Now, Mr. President, what is the immediate past history, status and condition in Africa and America of this race with which Southern white men are asked to mingle socially? What are the racial endowments of theserisennegroes whom we are urged by lofty example to invite into our drawing-rooms upon terms of broadest equality—for upon other terms would be a mockery—as eligible associates, companions, suitors, husbands for our sisters and daughters?—for a sensible father or brother does not admit white men to his home on any other basis. Of what essential racial elements and sources is the negro, risen and unrisen alike?
"Let answer the scientists and explorers, missionaries and travellers,—a long list of them, English, French, German, stretching all the way back a hundred years before there was a negro problem in the South. I quote verbatim, as nearly as the form will permit, their very words and phrases. Listen.
"The negro in Africa was, and is yet, in largest measure 'Without law except in its very crudest form'—'no law at all as we conceive it'—'in densest savage ignorance'—'no writing, no literature, no arts, no sciences'—'some development of perceptive and imitative faculties and of memory, but little of the higher faculties of abstract reasoning'—'in temperament intensely emotional, fitful, passionate, cruel'—'without self-control in emotional crises, callously indifferent to suffering in others, easily aroused to ferocity by sight of blood or under great fear'—'particularly deficient in strength of will, stability of purpose and staying power'—'dominated by impulse, void of foresight, unable to realize the future or restrain present desire'—'indolent, lazy, improvident, neglectful, happy-go-lucky, innately averse to labour or to care'—'given to uncleanness'—'an eater of snakes and snails, cannibal, eating his own dead'—'vilely superstitious, a maker of human sacrifices, charm-wearing, fetich-worshipping'—'of a religion grossly anthropomorphic, explaining all natural phenomena by a reference to evil spirits'—'his religion has no connection with morality, nothing to do with man's relation to man'—'thieving his beloved pastime, deception more common than theft'—'national character strongly marked by duplicity'—'lying habitually and thinking lying an enviable accomplishment'—'a more thorough and unhesitating liar than one of these negroes is not to be found anywhere'—'cruelly obliges his women to work'—'sensual, polygamous, unchaste'—'buying and selling his women'—'valuing his daughter's virginity solely as a marketable commodity'—'accounting adultery simply as a trespass upon a husband's property rights, and seduction and rape as a violence only to parent's property in daughters as destroying their marketable value'—'wifehood is but an enslavement to the husband's will'—'no conception of chastity as a virtue'—'of strong sexual passions'—'a devoted worshipper at the shrine of his phallic gods'—'sexual instincts dominate even the most public festivals, and public dances exhibit all degrees of sex suggestion.'
"Those in short, Mr. President, are some of the horrible details of the bestial degradation of the west-coast Africans, from whom our slave-marts were recruited almost to the time of the Civil War, and who, says Keane, are 'the very worst sweepings of the Sudanese plateau,' and, Ellis says, are 'the dregs and offscourings of Africa.'
"Such was the negro in Africa. What he is in America, only my people know. He has been the gainer at all points, the loser at none, because of his enforced residence here and his bondage to Southern white men: and yet that awful picture of the negro in Africa is so startlingly familiar to one who has spent his life in the South that he examines it closely with something of fear.
"He finds the colouring too vividly heavy and some details untrue for a picture of the negro in America to-day: but the negro as the Southern white man knows him is too alarmingly alike, too closely akin to, that African progenitor. He has advanced—yes! but just how much, andjust how little, from out the shadow of that awful category of horrors, my people know.
"They know that he has but just emerged from those depths that those bestial racial traits held in check by the man's law have only well begun to be refined by a change of environment and the slow processes of heredity: and yet we, white men of the South, are in a way advised to treat as our social equals certain immediate heirs to such a blood inheritance because, forsooth, they haverisen.
"We resent bitterly the insulting suggestion, however high or respectable or official its source: and we call upon you, white men of the North, to warn you against appeals for social recognition as a balm for 'the misery of the awful isolation of black men who have risen above their race.' When the blood of your daughter or your son is mixed with that of one of this race, howeverrisen, redolent of newly applied polish or bewrapped with a fresh culture, how shall sickly sentimentalities solace your shame if in the blood of your mulatto grandchild the vigorous red jungle corpuscles of some savage ancestor shall overmatch your more gentle endowment, and under your name and in a face and form perhaps where a world may see your very image in darker hue there shall be disported primitive appetites, propensities, passions fit only to endow an Ashanti warrior or grace the orgies of an African bacchanalia? In Heaven's name think to the bottom of this question!—and thinknow! Await not the day 'when your fear comethas desolation,and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you.' Do not be distracted by considerations that are superficial and incidental—such for example as the negro's record for criminal assaults upon women. The crime of rape will be abated by some means, but long after that must the negro develop before he loses his primal jungle habit of regarding woman as a personal possession. It is a matter of attitude and not of assault: and as in his fundamental attitude toward women, so in every racial characteristic the superiority of the white man is blood deep, generations old, ingrained, inherent, essential.
"Knowing this, my people despise President Phillips' social amenities to negroes of high degree. They do not fear the issue; but what insults and outrages them is that a personage in the highest official position, by an act in itself impulsive, empty, and futile, should put desires and hopes of miscegenation into the minds and hearts of the inflammable, muttering, passionate black masses of the South. Standing themselves ever in the shadow of dire calamity which they are facing and must face for long years to come as they painfully work out a righteous and practical solution of their problem, my people cry out to you, oh, white men of the North, of the insidious danger in these sentimental social practices of an exuberant Executive; and we tell you that, however well or ill you may guard the purity and integrity of your race, we will stand fast. Whatever else may or may not be true, we will never acknowledge any equality on the negro's side that does notovertakethe white race in its advancing civilization, and we will certainly not submit to an equality produced by degrading the white race to or toward the negro's level. We will not make with the negro a common treasure of our Anglo-Saxon blood by putting it in hotch-pot with his in a mongrel breed.
"The Anglo-Saxon has blazed the way of civilization for a world to follow in: but if he, the torch-bearer, the pioneer, goes back to join hands with the tribes who are following afar his torch and trail, then the progression of civilization and of character must not only stop but must actually recede for him to effect a juncture with the black and backward race in the blood of a hybrid progeny. There the fine edge would be taken off every laudable characteristic of the white man. There the splendid Anglo-Saxon spirit of leadership and initiative would be neutralized by the sluggish blood of the Ethiop race. There the Anglo-Saxon's fine energies and clear sensibilities would be deadened and muddled by the infusion of this soporific into his veins. There vile, unknown, ancestral impulses, the untamed passions of a barbarous blood, would be planted in the Anglo-Saxon's very heart.
"You may believe that in the dim beginning God by imperial decree set the dividing line between these races; or, less orthodox and more coldly scientific, you may know that Nature, impartial mother of men, giving her white and black sons equal endowment and an even start in body, mind and spirit, since has stood, in unerring wisdom still impartial, to watch the white bound away from the black in his rush toward that perfection of mind, of heart, of character, which she has set as goal for the striving of her children. From whichever view-point you look upon the age-long history of men and the age-long lead of white men over their black brothers,—whether evolutionist or traditionist, scientist or mystic, you offer violence to your own particular deity, be it God or Nature, when in their present measureless inequality of development you by amalgamation would beat back the white into the lagging footsteps and gross animalism of the black.
"Menacing thus the effectiveness and integrity of a race which is the pathfinder for the progress of a world of men, the danger is not only a race danger, but a danger to universal civilization; and the preventative is a social separation of the white and black races in Americafrom the lowest to the highest,—at least, yes in all reason, at the dictate of the plainest common sense,at least, if so be, till the black becomes approximately equal to the white in racial excellence. After which let the ethnologists take the question and give us the answer of science as to the advisability of mixing racial bloods.
"Naturally you ask me when the time of equality in racial excellence will come. I answer that I commit myself unreservedly to the support of every means used for the negro's uplifting; I admit—nay more, I contend—that we white men cannot be dogs in the manger with civilization; we cannot as a Christian people even hope that the negro race may not comeupto our level, nor can there be any reason why we should refuse to acknowledge that race as our equal if it shall indeed become our equal. And yet, while I would not in puny wisdom presume to foretell the purposes of God in the earth, nor to set bounds to the efficacy of his unspeakable redemption, nor to appoint the places of white, black, yellow, red or brown men in the pageantry of 'that far-off divine event toward which the whole creation moves'—yet, I say, with carefully acquired information of the negro's history and habits in Africa, and with an intimate knowledge of his present status and rate of progress toward civilization in America, I tell you frankly that the day of his approximate equality in racial excellence with the white man is beyond the furthest reach of my vision into the future."