Page:Pacific Monthly volumes 9 and 10.djvu/463

 drop of negro blood, is one that cannot be taken seriously. Let alone the legal difficulties in the way of removing mil- lions of native born citizens, convicted of no crime, the industrial difficulties would rise to the point of impossibility. We are warranted in concluding, therefore, that the book presents no conclusion, and is chiefly valuable as an exposition of the feeling of many in the South over their great problem. Narrow as the scope of the book seems, hard and dry as are its sympathies, passionate as is its hatred, and contrary as seems its teaching to that of the Apostles, who declared that God had made of one blood all races of men, to dwell on all the face of the earth, and that in the estimation of Jesus there was no bond or free, Greek, Jew, Sc)rthian, Roman or Barbarian, but all one humanity, we cannot but be touch- ed anew with the pathos and extremity of the Southern people. The situation is such, with its passions and perplexities, as to affect one as when reading descriptions of Russian life, or Siberian exile — ^that the people concerned are hardly sane. Yet we cannot but think the people who express themselves as this author have little comprehension of the power and possibilities of appropriation by all men, of all races, of the mental and spiritual accumulations of the ages. Not only are the descendants of the revolutionary fathers heirs of American ideas.

The autobiographical sketches of Booker T. Washington, to whom the author of The Leopard's Spots makes no direct allusion, should be read in conclusion, to take out the impression of despair and hypochondria. It has all the solidity of a genuine life. It is not fiction. From a literary point of view it is better than either Tourgee's or Dixon's work. It is ever cheerful and hopeful, and sparkles with kindly humor. It shows a perfectly sane and happy life, engrossed in imparting what he believes to be a saving knowledge to his people and his country. It is the story of a heart full of gratitude, busy at every throb with labor, and trusting to a better future. He believes that civil rights and political guaranties will not be denied a people industrially useful. To his people, therefore, he says, Be useful; he teaches them how to raise fat hogs instead of lean ones; make two hundred and fifty bushels of sweet potatoes grow on an acre instead of fifty; be worthy of trust, and wait to be trusted; God is good, and man, on the whole, is just. Such are the teachings of this mulatto who never even knew his father, who struggled through poverty with his mother, and trudged to Hampton and received from Armstrong and his corps of Yankee teachers the training that made him at an early age known around the world. Such seem to be the ideas that he impressed, as the hope of his race, upon the President, at the dinner in the White House which so shocked the South. That there can be such a man among the colored people of the South, shows that there is a hopeful solution of the race problem.

The calm-minded man, who trusts in a happy outcome for all the prob- lems now engrossing the world's thought, will trust more and more to evolution. Not that partial type of evo- lution which simply destroys the weak and unfit, but which fits the weak for the advancing life. Not the destructive, the katabolic, feature of evolution, but the constructive — the anabolic. The evolution that not only destroys the unfavorable variations but so improves the conditions that an ever increasing number of favorable variations are se- cured. In our American society — using the term in the large sense — this evolu- tion will include the better application of the great ideas already, and for long past, at work here; the more complete and universal education, and its practical applications ; a clearer and more humane religion, teaching the unity of God, the solidarity of mankind, and a universal redemption from the ignorance and evils of the past ; and a more perfect democracy, guaranteeing to all alike security in life, liberty, and an industrial opportunity, and to the use and enjoyment and dispensation of the rewards of their own labor.