Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/54

44 of no importance whatever, only that it was a white person who was the questioner. These parents will not learn that a child taught systematically to lie to others will lie to them, and any detected prevarication with them is in the same way cruelly punished; and, as the ignorant never punish except when in a rage, it is safe to say that the life of the young darkey is not a pleasant one.

The peculiarities and monstrosities of African religion (so called) have been too often described to require many words here. In the cant of the present time, a number of Protestant denominations, each at war with the others, assume and allow to the others the title "orthodox." It is difficult for a layman to understand how twenty different bodies all teaching different faiths can all be orthodox, but so it is, and under this ruling the various African churches are all orthodox. How far are the vices, described as appertaining to the race, modified by religion? Not much. With the ordinary African religion is not a matter of doing, but entirely a matter of feeling. If one of them, after spending an entire week in vicious living, can only get up a certain amount of enthusiastic feeling during the shouting, howling, and dancing of a Sunday-night meeting, he feels that his soul is washed and that it is spotless as snow. It is the same ratiocination that convinces every convicted negro murderer that he will ascend directly from the gallows into heaven. Other more phlegmatic sinners may be compelled to wait for the judgment-day, but for him the gates of heaven stand wide open. When pardon follows sin so rapidly, it is not to be wondered at that he is ready to fall again to-morrow.

What has been written of the African people in this paper has in view those who live in the country and have but limited intercourse with minds superior to their own; a class of people who, if left to themselves, would degenerate rapidly into barbarism. But for the small leaven of more intelligent whites, the black people would soon be victims of voudoo. Indeed, it is hard to find a rural community in the South where that dreadful bugbear is not more or less believed in and feared. Often a stupid, uneducated negro secretly dominates an entire neighborhood by virtue of a self-assertion that he possesses mystic powers, and an obscure hint of a dirty little bag of miscellaneous abominations carries far more terror than ever did overseer's whip, I may defy the magician's power and openly submit myself to his supernatural malevolence, but it will do but little toward assuaging the fears of the negroes, who agree that the spells have no power over another race.

I have never had the craze of enforced education or enforced temperance; all the same, I shall be glad to see the colored people as well as the whites educated: not in high schools, with a view of deluging the country with school-teachers, but to the extent of giving every child a good common-school education. In my official character as school director (to which office I was once elected simply because