Читать книгу: «The American Missionary. Volume 42, No. 05, May, 1888», страница 3

THE TIME FACTOR IN THE SOUTHERN PROBLEM

BY REV. A.H. BRADFORD, D.D.

The supreme question in English politics is the unity of the empire. The problem of the mother country is, How may the scattered colonies be joined in one body whose heart shall be London? All the other questions of the island-empire are but parts of this. This in turn is forced into prominence by the under-current of the world's aspiration for larger liberty. "The world no longer for the few, but for the many," is the watchword of an increasing number in all the nations. How to maintain the manhood of her subjects, and yet not to force the dismemberment of the empire, is the question uppermost in old England.

With us, the problem is not one of scattered colonies but of divergent people. There is in the United States the double problem of how to consolidate and preserve the interests of a nation with a long area north and south, and with the most diverse elements of population ever gathered under one flag. This is complicated by other factors. Our study is confined to those which touch what is known as the Southern question. The problems of English and American political and religious life are identical in that both are inspired by the watchword of the rising multitudes, "The world for the many."

The Southern problem is but part of the larger one of area and races. Consider a few facts. The South is peopled chiefly by two classes, native whites and native blacks. Both whites and blacks are there to remain. More whites leave the South than blacks, and the population is increasing. Emigration avoids the States chiefly inhabited by blacks. It is not probable that the exodus of whites will be very great. The population of the future will probably be of the same classes, although the proportion is rapidly changing. Native whites and native blacks, unless signs fail, will possess the land.

The Negro race is appallingly fertile. It shows no sign of decadence. It is multiplying faster than any other. The number of blacks in the United States has risen from four millions to nearly eight millions since the war. That has been entirely by natural reproduction. The increase of whites during the decade from 1870 to 1880 was twenty-nine per cent.; of blacks thirty-five per cent. If, now, we allow nine per cent. for the increase of the whites by immigration, we find that the increase of blacks over the whites by natural order is about fourteen per cent. Here, then, is a simple problem in arithmetic. If the blacks increase on an average fourteen per cent. faster than the whites, and to the South there is little immigration, how long will it be before the blacks preponderate? They will go neither to Africa, to Mexico, nor to the West Indies. They are here to stay. They are multiplying faster than their white neighbors. They are growing in consciousness of power faster than in intelligence. What is the sure result of conscious but blind power? The story of Samson answers. The problem is the new-birth of a rapidly increasing race. How long it will take may possibly be imagined from the questions which follow.

I. How long will it require for race-prejudices to go? I put that question to an intelligent colored man who had been a slave. His answer was, "Until the present generation is dead."

The conflict between classes in the South will last until they recognize that they have an identity of interests, or that they are brethren. Prejudice is neither dead nor fast dying. There is a change in the cities, but it does not reach far inland. In how many Southern States are the same privileges extended to both races in schools? in cars? in hotels? in churches? This prejudice is in the blood. Heredity and training have both fostered it. Race prejudices die slowly. For centuries the contest between Patrician and Plebeian was carried on in ancient Rome. The subject-class never affiliated with the master-class. Two or three hundred years ago a new people was introduced into the north of Ireland. The north is essentially Scottish. Its inhabitants are Protestant and phlegmatic. In the south, the religion is Romanist, and the people are mercurial. They are of the same color. They have had the same history for centuries. For nearly five hundred years, the Turk has been a disturbing factor in Europe. The Turk is Asiatic. He is surrounded by European life. How rapidly has the antipathy between races disappeared where the Turk has power? The race-lines are as distinct as if the waters of a white river and a black ran in the same channel. The Hebrews are found in all parts of the world. They are industrious, and as decent as the average man; they mingle with other people, and yet almost everywhere the prejudice against them is constant and bitter. How long before Protestant Orangemen and Catholic Irishmen will walk arm and arm in the same procession? How long before the German and Russian and Englishman will recognize the Jew as a brother? In the South, the antipathy is between black and white, between a master-class and a subject-class, between oppressed and oppressor. How long before this prejudice will disappear?

II. How much time will be required for the consciousness of having been wronged to wear from the breast and the blood of the black man? This consciousness of having been wronged is not a race-prejudice, and yet it may become one. It is hard to eradicate. It is aggravated when the same feelings are in many hearts. This is a complicated factor. Some of the blacks seem incapable of sentiments of revenge. They are too lighthearted to cherish grievances. But all are not so. The pure blacks who carry with them the consciousness of having been deeply injured, are many. What will you say of the mulattoes? A man who knows his father, and knows that his father ignores his existence, may keep it to himself, but he cannot smother his feeling. He who sees his brothers and sisters pass him on the street in carriages, living in comfort and honor, while he is poor, and nothing to them, will, in proportion as he is a man, hate the social order in which they live. Until this consciousness of having been injured and degraded vanishes, the Southern question will disturb political and social life.

III. Closely allied to the consciousness of degradation is the lack of manly feeling. Appreciation of manhood is a condition of improvement. He who thinks himself only an animal will live like one. Does this condition exist at the South? It could not be otherwise. Any one who has travelled there must have his faith in the evolution of some men from the lower animals immeasurably strengthened. Rev. Dr. Taylor, of New York, has said that he knows that the Darwinian theory cannot be true, because, if it were, "an Englishman's right arm would have developed into an umbrella long ago." But Dr. Taylor would find faces in the South which, from their resemblance to lower orders of life, might weaken his faith in his demonstration.

The black race is no more degraded than our own would be under similar circumstances, but its condition is appalling. How long will it take to develop the consciousness of manhood where all the tastes, and all the tendencies, and almost all the environment, are low and in the opposite direction? The colored people have not the help of higher and refining influences. Their tendencies have been downward, and present environment increases the tendency. Regeneration or reform is not the work of a year or a generation. The change will come only by the creation of new and higher conditions, and with the birth of a more self-respecting stock.

IV. How long will be required for the education of the colored people and the poor whites?

The author of "An Appeal to Caesar" says, "The Southern man, black or white, is not likely to be greatly different to-morrow from what he was yesterday. Generations may modify; years can only restrain. The question is not whether education, begun to-day and carried on however vigorously and successfully by the most approved agencies, would change the characteristics of to-day's masses. Not at all. The question is whether it would so act upon them as they are, would so enlighten and inform their minds, as to convince them of the mutual danger, peril, disaster, that must attend continual oppression or sudden uprising. We cannot expect to make intelligence instantly effective in the elevation of individual citizenship, or the exercise of collective power. Little by little that change must come."

About ninety per cent, of the whole colored population of the South, and about forty-five per cent. of those above ten years of age, are illiterate. In 1880, nineteen per cent., or about one in every five, of the white people of the South, and seventy-three per cent. of the colored people, could neither read nor write; and this estimate is far too large. After fifteen years of the ballot, seventy-three per cent. of the colored race of the South could neither read nor write. Much is being done to promote education by schools and charities, but what are these among so many? To meet the ignorant condition of things, the Government is doing nothing. The State governments are doing only a little. In the Southern States previous to the war there was no system of common schools. After the war there were not even old foundations to build upon. Everything had to be started de novo by those who had nothing with which to start. "We must remember," said Dr. Mayo, "that nine men out of ten of the South never saw what we call a good public elementary school. It has been said that the public school-buildings of Denver alone exceed in value all the public school-buildings of the State of North Carolina."

The average school year throughout the South, in 1880, was less than one hundred days; the average attendance less than thirty per cent. of those within school age. In a belt of States where seventy-three per cent., and probably ninety per cent., of the population are illiterate, where they are too poor to do much except keep up the struggle for existence, where there are no traditions of culture, where it has been a crime for a black man to read, where the Nation is doing nothing, and where the State, when it does its best, provides instruction which reaches only thirty per cent. of those of school age for one hundred days in a year, and where the population is increasing so rapidly that in 1900 the blacks will be in a decided majority, charity and religion are doing—what? The progress under the circumstances is amazing, but how long will it take to educate the nineteen per cent. of Southern whites, and seventy-three per cent., of Southern blacks? There is more illiteracy now than at the close of the war, because education has not kept pace with the increase of the race.

V. How long will be required for the moralizing of the lower classes of the South? Ability to make moral discriminations grows slowly. Ability to appreciate moral motives grows still more slowly. These people were trained in a school in which virtue was ignored. They have lived under conditions which have put a premium on theft. Slavery always makes thieves. The heredity of the passion for stealing is just as clearly marked as the heredity of the Roman nose or the faculty for music. The transmission of the tendency toward the gratification of the animal propensities is as definite as, and stronger than, the tendency for insanity and consumption to reproduce themselves. These people come into life blind, and find little but darkness around them. Here you have about eight millions with an ancestry which began in heathenism and has had two centuries of slavery—a people inheriting all the evils of slavery; a people who have never been trained to make moral discriminations, and whose ancestors for unknown generations have been trained still less than they; a people who have none, or at least but little, of the inspiration toward a higher moral life which comes from a healthy environment; a people whose religion is almost all emotional; who can soar on the wings of imagination and enthusiasm to heights which would make an archangel dizzy; who from paroxysms of anguish at the condition of those whose burning bodies are lighting the fires of hell, will go off and commit adultery or rob a hen-roost as complacently as if to do so were a part of their religion. This is not fiction. Religion has not meant chastity, for slavery made that impossible; it has not meant justice, for injustice forged their chains; it has not meant generosity, for they had nothing; it has been simple emotion. The ethical element has been absent, and it was through no fault of the black man.

In 1860, President Hopkins said that a greater proportion of the Sandwich Islanders could read than of the people in New England. They were educated but not moralized. There were three hundred thousand of them a century and a half ago; in 1883, there were forty-nine thousand. Education without morality is no safeguard.

Prof. Gilliam shows, from census reports, that if the population of the Southern whites increases for a century, as at present, in 1985, there will be ninety-six million whites in the Southern States, and in 1980, one hundred and ninety-two million blacks. Statistics may lie; but there is enough truth in these to give terrible emphasis to the inquiry, How long before the colored people will be sufficiently educated to need no help? How long before they will have sufficient moral discrimination to know what the commandments require? When we realize how difficult is the task of inducing men with the environment of Christian influence at the North, and in England, to live even decent lives, the wonder is that the freedmen do as well as they do. How long before we can expect a race with such antecedents and environments to be fitted to be left to themselves? What answer must be given? I am not exaggerating the picture. I am only hinting at conditions of heathenism which exist. I am least of all blaming these poor and needy people; but none the less clear and strong comes the appeal for their moral and intellectual emancipation. The moralizing of a race which has such a history, how long will that require? No people ever rose more rapidly in the world's history. That shows what is possible. It does not tell us when our work will be finished. So long as one-half of the American republic is inhabited by those whose interests are alien to the other half, there can be no permanent prosperity. It has been said that there are three essentials to the permanent unity of a nation; viz., unity of language, unity of interest and unity of religion. There is a common language between the blacks and whites, but the unity of interest is not recognized, and agreement in religion is only in name. The religion of the poor whites in the South is mechanical, and unintelligently doctrinal; the religion of the blacks is emotional and fantastic; and the religion of both blacks and whites is lacking in the ethical element. The process of political reconstruction has been progressing for twenty years and more, and is still incomplete. That is an easy work compared with what must be created intellectually, and socially, and morally. Before the Southern problem will be solved, a new stock must take the place of those who were reared in slavery; the old traditions must fade, and education, and an ethical type of Christianity, must do their work. How long will be required for that, none can tell. In the meantime, new complications may arise. The principles of socialism and anarchy are not unlikely to pervade the South, and if the masses of blacks are ever exploited by a central, unknown and irresponsible committee of agitators, the results must be a new reign of terror. The labor agitators are moving southward. It has been said that colored people have no tendencies toward socialism and anarchy. I am no prophet, but I will hazard the prediction that it will not be long before the socialistic agitator will stir up a commotion at the South that will make employers of labor and people of wealth tremble.