Page:Pacific Monthly volumes 9 and 10.djvu/462

 were wrong? Can not such matters be decided by considerations of justice and wisdom?

One reads along, however, until almost the close before finding any solution of the problem presented. It is asserted again and again that social equality of the two races is impossible, and that political equality, or civil equality, means precisely the same as social equality. The argument is put in the mouth of George Harris, who says to Lowell: '*I deny it (that 'social rights are qne thing and political rights another'). Politics is but a manifestation of society. Society rests on the family. The family is the unit of civilization. The right to love and wed where one loves is the badge of fellowship in the order of humanity. The man who is denied this right in any society is not a member of it."

The argument, however, is evidently that of the white; it is not made by Professor Scarborough or Booker T. Washington, who see a distinction between civil rights and social privileges, and ask only for the former. The argument, however, such as it is, is con- fused by using the word "society" in two senses. Society in the broad sense includes all the relations of men, political as well as friendly. But in the sense of personal standing it means only the narrow limits of association in friendship. That part in civil society which defines men's relations as to nat- ural or political rights, such as to life, liberty, personal security and property, and the legal and civil means to obtain these rights, the negroes claim, and they are constitutionally given them; but the privilege of associating with the whites, calling on them, eating at the same table, dancing with them, or marrying, has not been claimed by any civil enactment, and is universally ad- mitted by them, so far as the writer has seen, to be just like the friendly rela- tions of the whites, to be controlled by mutual respect and affinity.

The educational solution of the prob- lem is rejected. Gaston, who struggles through and up, until he becomes gov- ernor, is about to make the recommen- dation, in his inaugural, that the ne-

groes must be educated along indus- trial lines. To this the preacher replies: "It's a mistake. If the negro is made master of the industries of the South he will become the master of the South. Sooner than allow him to take the bread from their mouths, the white men will kill him here, as they do at the North, when the struggle for bread becomes tragic. . . Make the neg^o a scientific and successful farmer, and let him plant his feet deep in your soil, and it will mean a race war. . . . The Ethiopian cannot change his skin, or the leopard his spots. ... If a man really believes in equality, let him prove it by giving his daughter to a negro in marriage. That is the test. When she sinks with her mulatto chil- dren into the black abyss of a negroid life, then ask him! Your scheme of education is a humbug. . . . The more you educate, the more impossible you make his position in a democracy. Education! Can you change the color of his skin, the kink of his hair, the bulge of his lips, the spread of his nose, or the beat of his heart, with a spelling book? The negro is the human don- key. You can train him, but you can- not make of him a horse. Mate him with a horse and you get a larger don- key, called a mule, incapable of pre- serving his species. What is called race prejudice is simply God's first law of nature — the instinct of self-preserva- tion."

When it is considered that any one having even a drop of negro blood is reckoned a negro, the full sweep of this summary may be understood, though it is so harsh and contemptuous as hardly to seem a sober judgment.

The only solution presented by the preacher, the spokesman of the author, is transportation. "The neg^o must ultimately leave this continent." This is the only solution offered in this vol- ume; all others are rejected; a return to slavery is discarded ; any degree of education, and all participation in gfov- ernment, and even independent indus- try, are considered impracticable. How- ever, it is evident that the solution of the race question by transporting the negro, including every one that has a