Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/195

Rh ," Massachusetts requires of voters a prepayment of taxes, and voting and office-holding are limited to those who can read the Constitution in the English language and write their names. What has been done by States, denominations, and individuals through schools is not discouraging to larger and better efforts, but is a stimulus to and an assurance of excellent results. The plantation system of the South, when land was in the hands of a few territorial magnates, was of very doubtful utility. A bold peasantry is a country's pride, and a small farmer should take the place of the large landed proprietor. If the negroes should acquire and hold more real estate, they would be of more value as citizens, and would have increased interest in the stability of laws, enforcing of contracts, and the preservation of State honor. An enlargement of the number of those who have a solid stake in the well-being of the country would be adding to the ranks of natural supporters of law and honor, and strengthening the true foundations on which the stability of a republican government must rest.

The congestion of the negroes aggravates the difficulties and dangers of the problem. The area of the States holding slaves in 1860 was 901,740 square miles, and of the Northern States, excluding Alaska, 2,123,860 square miles. By the census of 1890, the total population of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia, was 37.3 per cent of negroes and 62.7 per cent of whites; or, including Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, 30.7 per cent of negroes and 69.3 per cent of whites. The African citizens are localized within a narrow area. A French statesman said, "Cross the Pyrenees and Africa begins." Cross Mason and Dixon's line, or the Ohio and Potomac Rivers, and in a truer sense Africa begins, for south of that line the negroes are massed. It has been nearly forty years since slavery existed, for no one born since 1860 was ever practically a slave, and yet freedom has not diffused the seven million and a half of Africans. Despite all the traditions of bondage, all the misrepresentations of modern literature, all the exaggerated accounts of intimidation and cruelty, the South remains the home of the negro. When he is told that equality, friendship, political sympathy, and good wages may be secured by passing an invisible geographical line, he persistently refuses to be seduced across. Senator Windom, of Minnesota, advocated a plan for distributing by assisted emigration, but nothing came of it. Senator Edmunds, in discussing the Chinese question, said: "The people of Massachusetts would not be hungry for an eruption of a million of the inhabitants of Africa, … because they believe, either by instinct or education, that it is not good for the two races