Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/87

Rh sexes only in play and seldom in work, with its concomitant tendency toward seclusion and helplessness among its whiter women. Withal a society strong indeed, but wholly without vigor or invention.

It was not all as dark as it might have been. Human life, thank God, is never as bad as it may be, but it is too often desperately bad. Nor do men easily realize how bad life about them is. The full have scant sympathy with the empty,—the rich know all the faults of the poor, and the master sees the horrors of slavery with unseeing eyes. True, there were flashes of light and longing here and there—noble sacrifice, eager help, determined emancipation. But all this was local, spasmodic and exceptional. The unrelenting dead brutality of human bondage to a thousand tyrants, petty wills and caprice was the rule from Florida to Missouri and from the Mississippi to the sea. Under it the wretched writhed like some great black and stricken beast. The flaming fury of their mad attempts at vengeance echoes all down the blood-swept path of slavery. In Jamaica they upturned the government and harried the land until England crept and sued for peace. In the Danish Isles they started a whirlwind of slaughter; in Hayti they drove their masters into the sea; and in South Carolina they rose twice like a threatening wave against the terror-stricken whites, but were betrayed. Such outbreaks here and there foretold the possibility of coördinate action and organic