Page:A defence of the negro race in America from the assaults and charges of Rev. J. L. Tucker.djvu/5



This is peculiarly the age of criticism, and neither the sensitiveness nor the weakness of peoples can exempt them from its penetrating search or its pointed strictures. Criticism, however, in order to perform its functions aright, must submit to certain laws of responsibility, and be held by certain rules of restraint. It must deal with facts, and not with fancies and conjectures. It must not indulge what Butler calls the "forward and delusive faculty" of the imagination, "ever intruding beyond its sphere." It must avoid coloring its facts with the hues of its own self-consciousness or feelings. It must be rigidly just in its inferential processes. Nothing can be more ludicrous than to make a wide generalization from the narrow circle of a provincialism, and nothing more unjust.

It is because Dr. Tucker's paper "" is defective in these several points that I have undertaken, at the suggestion of reverend brethren of my own race and Church, a refutation of it. We are all fully aware of the weaknesses, and, to a large extent, of the degradation of our race in this country; for the race has been a victim race. Our children have been victimized, our men have been victimized, and alas! worse than all, our women have been victimized—generation after generation, two hundred years and more, down to the present! We make no pretense that our people, by a miraculous impulse, have of a sudden risen entirely above the malarial poison of servitude. We know better than this, and we mourn their shortcomings. But we know, also, that a marvelous change has taken place in all the sections of their life—