Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/561

Rh forming empires or building stone cities, or employing a common medium of intercommunication? Mr. Blyden says lie has formed cities full of busy life and commerce; but have they ever been better than encampments, and why have they not lasted? We who write certainly do not believe in the incurable incapacity of the race, for we know of Bishop Crowther and Mr. Blyden, and have talked with negroes apparently as thoughtful and as well instructed as any Europeans; but we confess that the history of the race remains to us an insoluble puzzle, except upon the theory that there are breeds of mankind in whom that strangest of all phenomena, the arrestment of development, occurs at a very early stage. The negro went by himself far beyond the Australian savage. He learned the uses of fire, the fact that sown grain will grow, the value of shelter, the use of the bow and the canoe, and the good of clothes; but there to all appearance he stopped, unable, until stimulated by another race like the Arab, to advance a step. He did not die, like the Australian. He did not sink, like one or two varieties of the red Indian, and of the aborigines of South Africa, into a puny being hardly like a man; but he stopped at a point as if arrested by a divine will. There is not a shadow of proof that the negro described by Werne differs in any way from the negro of the time of Sesostris. It is not quite certain even that the race, when started again, would, as a race, go on improving. The Haytians, who are Christians, who are free, and who are in the fullest contact with great white races, are believed to be retrograding; and only the hopeful would believe in the future of American slaves, if they were to be expelled, as De Tocqueville thought they would ultimately be, to the islands, or, as is infinitely more probable, should the war of races ever break out, to Central America.

As far as we see, nothing really improves the negro except one of two causes—cross-breeding, and catching hold of some foreign but superior creed. The cross-breeds of the Soudan and of South Africa seem to have some fine qualities—matchless courage, for example—and under a strict but vivifying white rule might, we fancy, be brought in a century or two up to the Asiatic level. They produce generals, at all events, and chiefs with some tincture of statesmanship, and have poetry and a folk-lore of their own. Those negroes, again, who have embraced Islam do show a certain manliness, a capacity for aggregation, and a tendency, at all events, to form kingdoms, and organize armies, and obey laws, which are the first steps toward a higher civilization. It is not a high civilization, for, when all is said, a Mohammedan negro is not an ideal of humanity toward which Europeans can look with any feeling of enthusiasm; but still, it is higher, far higher, than the condition of the African pagan. The negro who embraces