Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/194

182 soil, the varied products, the hospitable welcome, the territory occupied by the negro is persistently avoided. By the census of 1880 the proportion of foreign-born in all the former slave States was 3.5 per cent; in the Northern States about twenty per cent; in eight Southern States, where the negroes abound, there was in 1880 only one and a third per cent who were of foreign birth. Mr. Lincoln, in 1858, in accounting for the repulsion, said: "There is a physical difference between the two races which will probably forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality.… I am not, or ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor of intermarrying with white people." Absorption, assimilation, is not to be dreamed of. The negro is no nearer common fellowship, equality of association, than he was in 1865. Reconstruction measures, constitutional amendments, sword and bayonet, ecclesiastical anathemas, fulminations of press and pulpit, all power of church and state and public opinion, have not altered, can not alter, what seems ineradicable. Race antagonism reaches deeper than political affiliation. If every negro at the South were to vote the Democratic ticket in every subsequent election, the race division would remain the same.

Can these differences be effaced, alienations be healed, and overshadowing perils be averted? What concerns the patriot is to find a solution for this gigantic and appalling problem. The statesman has not yet arisen, disposed to grapple with the problem, or capable of suggesting a feasible and efficacious remedy. "With the least hardship to the negro, proper recognition of his rights as a man, due regard to the just ends of our Government, and the purposes of its founders, some scheme, if possible, wise, adequate, and comprehensive, should be devised. Whatever hitherto has been suggested has been met with opposition and is justly liable to criticism. The most obvious remedy, and which has been tried with some success, is to uplift the race by means of public schools and proper religious instruction. All honor to the schools that train the youth into self-respecting manhood and womanhood! All honor for the efforts that are making to correct the debasement of slavery, to unite faith and practice, to infuse religious life with an ethical Christianity, and to form a moral basis for life and character! The crimes of both races in the South, pushed within the last few years to most brutal atrocities, show that there can be no safety for free institutions, no guarding against savage degradation, if either race be kept in crass ignorance. Both must suffer. It would be some relief from ballot-box evils and perils if the examples of New England and of Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina were followed by all the States. As "universal suffrage has no anchorage except in the people's