Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/340

324 politician to repression. I have just remarked that I favor the giving up of nothing that is guaranteed to us by the Constitution of the United States, or that is fundamental to our citizenship. While I hold to these views as strongly as any one, I differ with some as to the method of securing the permanent and peaceful enjoyment of all the privileges guaranteed to us by our fundamental law.

In finding a remedy, we must recognize the world-wide fact that the negro must be led to see and feel that he must make every effort possible in every way possible to secure the friendship, the confidence, the co-operation of his white neighbor in the South. To do this, it is not necessary for the negro to become a truckler or a trimmer. The Southern white man has no respect for a negro who does not act from principle. In some way the Southern white man must be led to see that it is to his interest to turn' his attention more and more to the making of laws that will in the truest sense elevate the negro. At the present moment, in many cases, when one attempts to get the negro to co-operate with the Southern white man, he asks the question, "Can the people who force me to ride in a Jim Crow car, and pay first-class fare, be my best friends?" In answering such questions, the Southern white man as well as the negro has a duty to perform.

In the exercise of his political rights I should advise the negro to be temperate and modest, and more and more to do his own thinking, rather than to be led or driven by a political "boss" or by political demagogues.

I believe the permanent cure for our present evils will come though a property and educational test for voting that shall apply honestly and fairly to both races. This will cut off the large mass of ignorant voters of both races that is now proving so demoralizing a factor in the politics of the Southern States.

But most of all it will come through industrial development of the negro! It is for this reason that I have believed in General Armstrong's theory of industrial education. In the first place, industrial education makes an intelligent producer of the negro, who becomes of immediate value to the community rather than one who yields to the temptation to live merely by politics or other parasitical employments. In the next place, industrial development will make the negro soon become a property-holder, and when a citizen becomes a holder of property he becomes a conservative and thoughtful voter. He is going to think about the measures and individuals to be voted for. In proportion as the negro increases his property interests he becomes important as a taxpayer. When the negro becomes a large taxpayer, he will see that it is to his interest to consult with his white neighbor about the measures to be voted for.