FOOTNOTES:[6]The annual income of twenty Negro colleges in the United States was, in 1908, $804,663.[7]London Education, Nineteenth Century, October 1903, p. 563.
[6]The annual income of twenty Negro colleges in the United States was, in 1908, $804,663.
[6]The annual income of twenty Negro colleges in the United States was, in 1908, $804,663.
[7]London Education, Nineteenth Century, October 1903, p. 563.
[7]London Education, Nineteenth Century, October 1903, p. 563.
I had heard a good deal, from time to time, about John Burns before I went to Europe, and when I reached London I took advantage of the first opportunity that offered to make my acquaintance with him a personal one. This meeting was a special good fortune to me at the time because, as I already knew, there is, in all probability, no one in England who better understands the hopes, ambitions, and the prospects of the labouring classes than the Rt. Hon. John Burns, President of the Local Government Board, himself the first labouring man to become a member of the British Cabinet.
John Burns was born in poverty and went to work at the age of ten. He had known what it is to wander the streets of London for weeks and months looking for work. He had an experience of that kind once after he had lost his job because he made a Socialistic speech. Having learned by experience the life of thatindustrial outcast, the casual labourer, he organized in 1889 the great dock labourers' strike, which brought together into the labour unions 100,000 starving and disorganized labourers who had previously been shut out from the protection of organized labour. Besides that, he has been an agitator; was for years a marked man, and at one time gained for himself the name of the "man with the red flag." He has been several times arrested for making speeches, and has once been imprisoned for three months on the charge of rioting.
Meanwhile he had become the idol of the working masses and even won the admiration and respect of the leaders of public opinion. He was elected in 1889 to the first London County Council, where he worked side by side with such distinguished men as Frederic Harrison and Lord Rosebery. He was chosen a member of parliament in 1890, where he became distinguished for the store of practical information which he accumulated during his eighteen years of practical experience in the London County Council.
When he was twenty-one years of age Mr. Burns went as an engineer to Africa, where he spent a year among the swamps of the Lower Niger, occasionally fighting alligators and devoting his leisure to the study of politicaleconomy. When he returned he spent the money he had saved in Africa in six months of travel and study in Europe.
Speaking of what he learned in Africa, Mr. Burns once said: "You talk of savagery and misery in heathen lands, but from my own experience I can tell you that there is more of all these, and more degradation of women, in the slums of London than you will see on the West Coast of Africa."
He has had a wider experience than most men with mobs, for he has not only led them, but in 1900 he defended himself with a cricket bat for two days in his home on Lavender Hill, Battersea, against a mob said to number 10,000 which hurled stones through the windows and tried to batter down the door of his house because he had denounced the Boer War in parliament.
In 1906, after he had been successful in writing something like one hundred labour laws into the acts of parliament, he accepted the position of President of Local Government and then became, as I have said, the first labouring man to accept a place in the British Cabinet.
In reply to the criticisms which were offered when he accepted this high and responsible position in the government, Mr. Burns said: "I had to choose whether, for the next tenyears, I should indulge, perhaps, in the futility of faction, possibly in the impotence of intrigue, or whether I should accept an office which in our day and generation I can make useful of good works." I have noted this statement because this is a choice which most reformers and agitators have to make sooner or later.
He recognized, as he said, that "the day of the agitator was declining and that of the administrator had begun," and he did not shrink from accepting a position where he became responsible for administering laws he had helped to make. In his present position as the head of the Local Government Board Mr. Burns is probably doing more than any other man to improve the situation of the poor man in London and in the other large cities of England.
It is a rare thing for a man who began life in poverty to find himself in middle life in a position of such power and usefulness as the head of one great branch of the British Government occupies. It is still more remarkable, however, that a man who began life as an agitator, the representative of the unemployed, the most helpless and unfortunate class in the community, should find himself, a comparatively few years later, charged with the task of carrying into effect the reforms which he had preached from the prisoner's dock in a policecourt. It is all the more fortunate for England that the Government has found a man with these qualifications, who has at the same time the training and qualities of a statesman, to carry the reforms into effect. As Mr. Burns himself once said: "Depend upon it, there are no such places for making a public man as Pentonville Prison and the London County Council."
To me, however, the most surprising thing about it all is that a man with his history and qualifications should have found his way, by the ordinary methods of politics, into a position he is so well fitted to fill. It suggests to me that, in spite of all the misery that one still may see in London, in England, at least, there is hope for the man farthest down.
It is not my purpose in this chapter to write a biography of John Burns, but rather to describe what I saw, under his direction, of what has already been done in London in the work of "reconstruction," to which I have already referred. It seemed to me, however, that it was not out of place to say something, by way of introduction, in regard to the man who is, perhaps, as much if not more than any one else responsible for the work now going on, and whose life is connected in a peculiar way with that part of the city I had opportunity to visitand with the improvements that have been made there.
John Burns was born and still lives in Battersea, a quarter of the city inhabited, for the most part, by artisans, mechanics, and labourers of various kinds, with a sprinkling of gypsy pedlers and the very poor. Battersea is directly across the river from, and in plain sight of, the Parliament Buildings, and there is a story to the effect that, as he was coming home one winter night, helping his mother carry home the washing by which she supported herself and family, they two stopped within the shadow of those buildings to rest. Turning to his mother the boy said: "Mother, if ever I have health and strength no mother shall have to work as you do."
John Burns has health and strength, and is now making a brave effort to keep that promise to his mother. Aside from Colonel Roosevelt, I do not think I ever saw a man who seemed his equal in vigour of mind and body; who seemed able to compress so much into a short space of time; or one who goes at the task before him with a greater zest. In all England I do not believe there is a man who works harder, accomplishes more for the good of his country and the world, or one who is happier in the work he is doing.
I found him late in August, when every one else connected with the government had left London on their vacation, buried deep in the details and concerns of his office, but chock-full of energy and enthusiasm.
What John Burns is doing, and the spirit in which he is doing it, will, perhaps, appear in the course of my description of a trip which I took with him through his own district of Battersea and the region adjoining it in order to see what the London County Council is doing there to make the life of the poor man better. I am sorry that I will not be able to describe in detail all that I saw on that trip, because we covered in a short time so much ground, and saw so many different things, that it was not until I had returned to my hotel, and had an opportunity to study out the route of that journey, that I was able to get any definite idea of the direction in which we had gone or of the connection and general plan which underlay the whole scheme of the improvements we had seen.
I think it was about two o'clock in the afternoon when we left the offices of the Local Government Board. Mr. Burns insisted that, before we started, I should see something of the Parliament Buildings, and he promised to act as my guide. This hasty trip through theParliament Buildings served to show me that John Burns, although he had entered political life as a Socialist, has a profound reverence for all the historic traditions and a very intimate knowledge of English history. I shall not soon forget the eloquent and vivid manner in which he summoned up for me, as we passed through Westminster Hall, on the way to the House of Commons, some of the great historical scenes and events which had taken place in that ancient and splendid room. I was impressed not only by the familiarity which he showed with all the associations of the place, but I was thrilled by the enthusiasm with which he spoke of and described them. It struck me as very strange that the same John Burns once known as "the man with the red flag," who had been imprisoned for leading a mob of workmen against the police, should be quoting history with all the enthusiasm of a student and a scholar.
In the course of our journey we passed through a small strip of Chelsea. I remember that among the other places we passed he pointed out the home of Thomas Carlyle. I found that he was just as familiar with names and deeds of all the great literary persons who had lived in that quarter of London as he was with the political history.
When he afterward told me that he had hadvery little education in school, because he had been compelled to go to work when he was ten years of age, I asked him how he had since found time, in the course of his busy life, to gain the wide knowledge of history and literature which he evidently possessed.
"You see," he replied, with a quiet smile, "I earned my living for a time as a candle maker and I have burned a good many candles at night ever since."
Mr. Burns had promised to show me, within the space of a few hours, examples of the sort of work which is now going on in every part of London. A few years ago, on the site of an ancient prison, the London County Council erected several blocks of workingmen's tenements. These were, I believe, the first, or nearly the first, of the tenements erected by the city in the work of clearing away unsanitary areas and providing decent homes for the working classes.
It was to these buildings, in which a population of about 4,000 persons live, that we went first. The buildings are handsome brick structures, well lighted, with wide, open, brick-paved courts between the rows of houses, so that each block looked like a gigantic letter H with the horizontal connecting line left out.
Of course, these buildings were, as some onesaid, little more than barracks compared with the houses that are now being erected for labouring people in some of the London suburbs, but they are clean and wholesome and, to any one familiar with the narrow, grimy streets in the East End of London, it was hard to believe that they stood in the midst of a region which a few years ago had been a typical London slum.
A little farther on we crossed the river and entered what Mr. Burns referred to as "my own district," Battersea, where he was born and where he has lived and worked all his life, except for one year spent as an engineer in Nigeria, Africa.
The great breathing place for the people of this region is Battersea Park, and as we sped along the edge of this beautiful green space, stopping to look for a moment at the refreshment booths on the cricket grounds, or to speak to a group of well-dressed boys going from school to the playgrounds, Mr. Burns interspersed his information about workmen's wages, the price of rents, and the general improvement of the labouring classes with comment on the historic associations of the places we passed. Where Battersea Park now stands there was formerly a foul and unwholesome swamp. Near here the Duke of Wellington had fought a duel with the Earl of Winchelsea, and a little farther upJulius Cæsar, nearly two thousand years ago, forded the river with one of his legions.
It was a happy and novel experience to observe the pleasure which Mr. Burns took in pointing out the improvement in the people, in the dwellings, and in the life of the people generally, and to note, in turn, the familiar and cheerful way with which all sorts of people we met on the streets greeted him as we passed.
"Hello! Johnny Burns," a group of schoolboys would call as we went by. Once we passed by a group of some fifteen or twenty workingwomen sitting in one of the refreshment booths, drinking their afternoon tea and, apparently, holding a neighbourhood meeting of some kind or other. As they recognized the man who, as member of the London County Council, had been responsible for most of the improvements that had been made in the homes and surroundings in which they lived, they stood up and waved their handkerchiefs, and even attempted a faint and feminine "hurrah for Johnny Burns," the member from Battersea.
There are 150,000 people in Battersea, but Mr. Burns seemed to be acquainted with every one of them, and when he wanted to show me the inside of some of the new "County Council houses," as they are called, did not hesitate to knock at the nearest door, where we were gladlywelcomed. The people seamed to be just as proud of their new houses, and of Mr. Burns, as he was of them.
The houses which we visited were, some of them, no more than three or four rooms, but each one of them was as neat and wholesome as if it had been a palace. They were very compactly built, but provided with every sort of modern convenience, including electric lights and baths.
There were houses of five and six rooms intended for clerks and small business men, which rented for a pound a week, and there were cheaper houses, for ordinary labouring people, which rented for two dollars per week. These houses are built directly under the direction of the London County Council, and are expected to pay 3 per cent. upon the investment, after completion.
The London County Council was not the first to make the experiment of building decent and substantial houses for the labouring classes. Some thirty years before, on what is known as the Shaftbury Park Estate, 1,200 houses, which provide homes for eleven thousand people, were erected and the investment had been made to pay.
I looked down the long lanes of little vine-covered buildings which make up this estate.It seemed as if some great army had settled on the land and built permanent quarters.
These labour colonies were interesting, not merely for the improvement they had made in the lives of a large section of the people living in this part of the city, but as the forerunner of those garden cities which private enterprise has erected at places like Port Sunlight, near Liverpool; Bourneville, in the outskirts of Birmingham, and at Letchworth, thirty-four miles from London.
Not far from Battersea Park, and in a part of the city which was formerly inhabited almost wholly by the very poor, we visited the public baths and a public washhouse where, during the course of a year, 42,000 women come to wash their clothes, paying at the rate of three cents an hour for the use of the municipal tubs and hot water. Children pay a penny or two cents for the use of the public baths. The building is also provided with a gymnasium for the use of the children in winter, and contains a hall which is rented to workingmen's clubs at a nominal price.
What pleased me most was to see the orderly way in which the children had learned to conduct themselves in these places, which, as was evident, had become not merely places for recreation, but at the same time schools of good manners.
We passed on the streets groups of neatly dressed, well-bred looking boys, with their books slung over their arms, going home from school or making their way to the park. Mr. Burns was delighted at the sight of these clean-cut, manly looking fellows.
"Look at those boys, Mr. Washington," he would exclaim, as he pointed proudly to one or another of these groups. "Isn't that doing pretty well for the proletariat?"
Then he would leap out of the automobile, before the driver could stop, put his arm around the boy nearest him and, in a moment, come back triumphant with the confirmation of his statement that the boy's father was, as he had said, only a small clerk or a letter carrier, or, perhaps, the son of a common labourer, a navvy.
When I contrasted the appearance of these well-dressed and well-behaved boys with some of those I had seen elsewhere, with the children who attend the so-called "ragged" schools, for example, I understood and shared his enthusiasm.
From Battersea Park we went to Clapham Common and, as we were speeding along through what appeared to be a quarter of well-to-do artisans' homes, Mr. Burns nodded casually in the direction of a little vine-clad cottage and said:
"That is where I live."
Although Mr. Burns now occupies one of the highest positions in the British Government, in which he has a salary of $10,000 a year, he has not yet assumed the high hat and the long-tailed coat which are the recognized uniform in London of a gentleman. On the contrary, he wears the same blue reefer coat and soft felt hat, speaks the same language, lives in the same style, and is apparently in every respect the same man that he was when he was living on the $25 a week guaranteed him by the Battersea Labour League when he entered parliament. He is still a labouring man and proud of the class to which he belongs.
It was at Clapham Common, although Mr. Burns did not mention this fact, that he was arrested for the first time, away back in 1878, for making a public speech. It was somewhere in this region also, if I remember rightly, that Mr. Burns pointed out to us a private estate on which 3,000 houses of the cheaper class had been erected.
"And mind you, there is no public house," said Mr. Burns. Instead he showed us a brand-new temperance billiard hall which had been erected to compete with, and take the place of, the bar-rooms which have disappeared.
At Lower Tooting, an estate of some thirty-eightacres, the London County Council is building outright a city of something like 5,000 inhabitants, laying out the streets, building the houses, even putting a tidy little flower garden in each separate front door yard. It was as if the London County Council had gone to playing dolls, so completely planned and perfectly carried out in every detail is this little garden city.
Mr. Burns, who has all his life been an advocate of temperance, although he had once served as pot-boy in a public house, pointed out here, as he did elsewhere, that there was no public house.
In the building of this little paradise all the architectural and engineering problems had indeed been solved. There remained, however, the problem of human nature, and the question that I asked myself was: Will these people be able to live up to their surroundings?
It is fortunate, in this connection, that in Mr. Burns the inhabitants have a leader who dares to speak plainly to them of their faults as well as their virtues and who is able, at the same time, to inspire them with an ambition and enthusiasm for the better life which is opened to them. Engineering and architecture cannot do everything, but education, leadership of the right sort, may complete what these have begun.
At Warden Street and Lydden Road, on ourway back to the city, we stopped to look for a moment at what Mr. Burns said was the most wretched part of the population in that quarter of the city. The houses were two-story dwellings, with the sills flush with the pavement, in front of which groups of lounging idle men and women stood or squatted on the pavement. A portion of the street was given up to gypsy vans, and the whole population was made up, as I learned, of pedlers and pushcart venders, a class of people who, in the very centre of civilization, manage somehow to maintain a nomadic and half-barbarous existence, wandering from one place to another with the seasons, living from hand to mouth, working irregularly and not more than half the time.
A little farther on we passed by the Price candle factory, "where I began work at a dollar a week," said Mr. Burns in passing. A group of workmen were just coming from the factory as we passed, and the men recognized Mr. Burns and shouted to him as he passed.
Then we drove on back across the Chelsea Bridge and along the river to the Parliament Buildings again. "Now," said Mr. Burns at the end of our journey, "you have seen a sample of what London is doing for its labouring population. If you went further you would see more, but little that is new or different."
Upon my arrival in London I found myself, at the end of my journey, once more at my point of departure. A few days later, October 9th, to be precise, I sailed from Liverpool for New York. I had been less than seven weeks in Europe, but it seemed to me that I had been away for a year. My head was full of strange and confused impressions and I was reminded of the words of the traveller who, after he had crossed Europe from London to Naples, and had visited faithfully all the museums and neglected none of the regular "sights," wrote to friends he had visited in Europe a letter full of appreciation, concluding with the remark: "Well, I have seen a great deal and learned a great deal, and Ithank God it is all over."
It occurs to me that the readers who have followed me thus far in my narrative may find themselves at the conclusion of this book in somewhat the same situation as myself at the end of my journey. In that case it will,perhaps, not be out of place to take advantage of this concluding chapter to do for them as well as I am able what I tried to do for myself during my hours of leisure on the voyage home—namely, make a little clearer the relation of all that I had seen and learned to the problem of the Negro and The Man Farthest Down.
I have touched, in the course of these chapters, upon many phases of life. I have had something to say, for example, in regard to the poverty, education, Socialism, and the race problems of Europe, since all these different matters are connected in one way or another with the subject and purpose of my journey and this book.
In attempting to add the moral to my story, however, and state in general terms the upshot of it all, I find myself at a disadvantage. I can, perhaps, best explain what I mean by recalling the fact that I was born a slave and since I became free have been so busy with the task immediately in front of me that I have never had time to think out my experiences and formulate my ideas in general terms. In fact, almost all that I know about the problems of other races and other peoples I have learned in seeking a solution and a way out for my own people. For that reason I should have done better perhaps to leave to some one with more learning and moreleisure than I happen to possess the task of writing about the Underman in Europe. In fact I would have done so if I had not believed that in making this journey I should gain some insight and, perhaps, be able to throw some new light upon the situation of my own people in America. Indeed, I confess that I should never have taken the time—brief as it was—to make this long journey if I had not believed it was going to have some direct relation to the work which I have been trying to do for the people of my race in America.
In this, let me add, I was not disappointed. As a matter of fact, if there was one thing more than another, in all my European experiences, which was impressed upon my mind, it was the fact that the position of the Negro in America, both in slavery and in freedom, has not been so exceptional as it has frequently seemed. While there are wide differences between the situation of the people in the lower levels of life in Europe and the Negro in America, there are still many points of resemblance, and the truth is that the man farthest down in Europe has much in common with the man at the bottom in America.
For example, the people at the bottom in Europe have been, in most cases, for the greater part of their history at least, like the Negroes in America, a subject people, not slaves, butbondmen or serfs, at any rate a disadvantaged people.
In most cases the different under-classes in Europe only gained their freedom in the course of the last century. Since that time they have been engaged in an almost ceaseless struggle to obtain for themselves the political privileges that formerly belonged to the upper classes alone.
Even in those places where the man at the bottom has gained political privileges resembling in most respects those of the classes at the top he finds, as the Negro in America has found, that he has only made a beginning, and the real work of emancipation remains to be done. The English labourer, for example, has had political freedom for a longer period of time than is true of any other representative of this class in Europe. Notwithstanding this fact, as things are, he can only in rare instances buy and own the land on which he lives. The labouring people of England live, for the most part, herded together with millions of others of their class in the slums of great cities, where air and water are luxuries. They are dependent upon some other nation for their food supplies, for butter, bread, and meat. And then, as a further consequence of the way they are compelled to live, the masses of the people find themselves part of an economic arrangement or systemwhich is so vast and complicated that they can neither comprehend nor control it.
The result is that the English labourer, of whose independence the world has heard so much, is, in many respects, more dependent than any other labouring class in Europe. This is due not to the fact that the English labourer lacks political rights, but to the fact that he lacks economic opportunities—opportunities to buy land and opportunities to labour; to own his own home, to keep a garden and raise his own food.
The Socialists have discovered that the independence of the labouring classes has been undermined as a result of the growth of factories and city life, and believe they have found a remedy.
What the Socialists would actually do in England or elsewhere, provided they should manage to get into power, is difficult to say, because, as my experience in Europe has taught me, there are almost as many kinds of Socialists as there are kinds of people. The real old-fashioned Socialists, those who still look forward to some great social catastrophe which will put an end to the present régime, believe it will then be possible to use the political power of the masses to reorganize society in a way to give every individual an economic opportunity equal to that of every other.
Taking human beings as we find them, I have never been able to see how this was going to be brought about in precisely the way outlined in the Socialist programme. Some individuals will be good for one thing, some for another, and there will always be, I suppose, a certain number who will not be good for anything. As they have different capacities, so they will have different opportunities. Some will want to do one thing and some another, and some individuals and some people, like the Jews for example, will know how to make their disadvantages their opportunities and so get the best of the rest of the world, no matter how things are arranged.
I have referred to the Socialists and the revolution they propose not because I wish to oppose their doctrines, which I confess I do not wholly understand, but because it seemed to me that, as I went through Europe and studied conditions, I could see the evidences of a great, silent revolution already in full progress. And this revolution to which I refer is touching and changing the lives of those who are at the bottom, particularly those in the remote farming communities, from which the lowest class of labourers in the city is constantly recruited.
Let me illustrate what I mean: Under theold system in Europe—the feudal system, or whatever else it may at various times have been called—civilization began at the top. There were a few people who were free. They had all the wealth, the power, and the learning in their hands, or at their command. When anything was done it was because they wished it or because they commanded it. In order to give them this freedom and secure to them this power it was necessary that vast numbers of other people should live in ignorance, without any knowledge of, or share in, any but the petty life of the estate or the community to which they belonged. They were not permitted to move from the spot in which they were born, without the permission of their masters. It was, in their case, almost a crime to think. It was the same system, in a very large degree, as that which existed in the Southern States before the war, with the exception that the serfs in Europe were white, while the slaves in the Southern States were black.
In Europe to-day the great problem to which statesmen are giving their thought and attention is not how to hold the masses of the people down but how to lift them up; to make them more efficient in their labour and give them a more intelligent share and interest in the life of the community and state of which they area part. Everywhere in Europe the idea is gaining ground and influence that the work of civilization must begin at the bottom instead of at the top.
The great medium for bringing about these changes is the school. In every part of Europe which I visited I was impressed with the multitude of schools of various kinds which are springing up to meet the new demand. The movement began earlier and has gone farther in Denmark than it has elsewhere, and the remarkable development of Danish country life has been the result. What has been accomplished in Denmark, through the medium of the country high schools, and in Germany, through the universities and technical training schools, is being industriously imitated elsewhere.
In England I found that people were saying that the reason why German manufactures had been able to compete so successfully with the English products was because Germany had the advantage of better schools. In Germany I found that the German army, organized in the first instance for the national defence, is now looked upon as a great national school, in which the masses of the people get an education and discipline which, it is claimed, are gradually raising the industrial efficiency of the nation.
There, as elsewhere, education is seeking to reach and touch every class and every individual of every class in the community. The deaf, the blind, the defectives of every description are now beginning to receive industrial education fitting them for trades in which they will be more useful to the community and more independent than it was possible for them to be when no attempt was made to fit them for any place in the life of the community.
The effect of this movement, or revolution, as I have called it, is not to "tear down and level up" in order to bring about an artificial equality, but to give every individual a chance "to make good," to determine for himself his place and position in the community by the character and quality of the service he is able to perform.
One effect of this change in point of view which I have described is that to-day there is hardly any one thing in which the people of Europe are more concerned than in the progress and future of the man farthest down.
In all that I have written in the preceding chapters I have sought to emphasize, in the main, two things: first, that behind all the movements which have affected the masses of the people, Socialism or nationalism, emigration, the movements for the reorganization of cityand country life, there has always been the Underman, groping his way upward, struggling to rise; second, that the effect of all that has been done to lift the man at the bottom, or to encourage him to lift himself, has been to raise the level of every man above him.
If it is true, as I have so often said, that one man cannot hold another down in the ditch without staying down in the ditch with him, it is just as true that, in helping the man who is down to rise, the man who is up is freeing himself from a burden that would else drag him down. It is because the world seems to realize this fact more and more that, beyond and above all local and temporary difficulties, the future of the man farthest down looks bright.
And now at the conclusion of my search for the man farthest down in Europe let me confess that I did not succeed in finding him. I did not succeed in reaching any place in Europe where conditions were so bad that I did not hear of other places, which friends advised me to visit, where conditions were a great deal worse. My own experience was, in fact, very much like that of a certain gentleman who came South some years ago to study the condition of the Negro people. He had heard that in many parts of the South the Negro was gradually sinking back into something likeAfrican savagery, and he was particularly desirous of finding a well-defined example of this relapse into barbarism. He started out with high hopes and a very considerable fund of information as to what he might expect to find and as to the places where he might hope to find it. Everywhere he went in his search, however, he found that he had arrived a few years too late. He found at every place he visited people who were glad to tell him the worst there was to be known about the coloured people; some were even kind enough to show what they thought was about the worst there was to be found among the Negroes in their particular part of the country. Still he was disappointed because he never found anything that approached the conditions he was looking for, and usually he was compelled to be contented with the statement, made to him by each one of his guides in turn, which ran something like this: "Conditions were not near as bad as they had been. A few years ago, if he had happened to have come that way, he would have been able to see things, and so forth; but now conditions were improving. However, if he wanted to see actual barbarism he should visit"—and then they usually named some distant part of the country with which he had not yet become acquainted.
In this way this gentleman, who was hunting the worst that was to be seen among the Negroes, as I was hunting the worst that was to be seen among the people of Europe, travelled all over the Southern States, going from one dark corner to another, but never finding things as bad as they were advertised. Instead of that, backward as the people were in many of the remote parts of the country, he found, just as I did in Europe, that everywhere the people were making progress. In some places they were advancing more slowly than they were in others, but everywhere there was, on the whole, progress rather than decline. The result in his case was the same as it had been in mine, the farther he went and the more he saw of the worst there was to see, the more hopeful he became of the people as a whole.
I saw much that was primitive and much that was positively evil in the conditions in Europe, but nowhere did I find things as bad as they were described to me by persons who knew them as they were some years before. And I found almost no part of the country in which substantial progress had not been made; no place, in short, where the masses of the people were without hope.
It will, perhaps, seem curious to many personsthat, after I had gone to Europe for the express purpose of making the acquaintance of the people at the bottom, and of seeing, as far as I was able, the worst in European life, I should have returned with a hopeful rather than a pessimistic view of what I saw.
The fact is, however, that the farther I travelled in Europe, and the more I entered into the life of the people at the bottom, the more I found myself looking at things from the point of view of the people who are looking up, rather than from that of the people who are at the top looking down, and, strange as it may seem, it is still true that the world looks, on the whole, more interesting, more hopeful, and more filled with God's providence, when you are at the bottom looking up than when you are at the top looking down.
To the man in the tower the world below him is likely to look very small. Men look like ants and all the bustle and stir of their hurrying lives seems pitifully confused and aimless. But the man in the street who is looking and striving upward is in a different situation. However poor his present plight, the thing he aims at and is striving toward stands out clear and distinct above him, inspiring him with hope and ambition in his struggle upward. For the man who is down there is always something to hope for, always something to begained. The man who is down, looking up, may catch a glimpse now and then of heaven, but the man who is so situated that he can only look down is pretty likely to see another and quite different place.
THE END
logo
The Country Life PressGarden City, N. Y.