Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/33

Rh Prejudice must not be allowed a voice in its solution, and passion must be excluded from counsel. The negro will not consent to his own deportation. The Southern planters, too, would not, if they could, consent to it, nor to any agitation of it, because it unsettles and unhinges the labor that is more profitable free than it ever was or could be in the days of slavery. The negro is more intelligent now than then, and therefore more valuable because a better, a closer, and more skillful worker. Deportation is not, for these reasons, to be considered. We must, therefore, deal with the negro and treat of him with the full understanding that we can not get rid of him. His commercial value, supplementing his rights under the Federal and State Constitutions, says we can not.

What, then, is to be done with the negro? Nothing but increase the number of schools and schoolmasters, make education compulsory, and make technical education easily available to him in all parts of the South. The negro must be taught the virtue of self-reliance, and the value of the courts as his safeguard and defense under the Constitution and laws of the nation and of the States. Agitation exalts the negro to a degree of imaginary importance that people at the North can not understand. He is a sensible man within his limits of mind and comprehension, so long as he feels that he is not the center of a pet anxiety. Agitation has retarded and interfered with his growth in the past; it has proved exceedingly mischievous, and is not to be thought of in the future. It breeds dissatisfaction, raises hopes that can never be fulfilled, and tends to widen the breach between the races. For these reasons Mr. Cable's suggestion of opening the schools of the South in common to blacks and whites is not to be entertained. The race-feeling and race-prejudice that everywhere, wherever the Anglo-Saxons come in contact with the negro, keep them apart, will not brook it, nor will it permit the acceptance of the opening of concert halls, theatres, or lecture halls indiscriminately to both races. The same may be said of hotels and steamboats. It will not do to arouse prejudices—we must allay them. But even if the race-instinct theory be wrong, and it is found that there is nothing more serious than a prejudice that may disappear before the sun of truth, of justice, and of right, it is not policy to arouse it by fixed or a purposed antagonism. It will disappear in time; it will be swept away by the uplifting of the negro to a plane whence he can prove his title to as high consideration in all respects as his white brother. The education of the negro has uplifted and will uplift him, and will prove the solid and enduring cause for the effect desired, if anything can. A soft