Page:The Atlantic Monthly vol. 69.djvu/736

726 who lived near him. He helped them do their thinking, as he mingled with them in the daily work. He was called upon to assist whenever their unthrift pinched them. His intellect and will in a measure supplanted the native intellect and will of his hired laborers, not merely in directing their work on his farm, but also in their private matters, it being their habit to consult him. The farm proprietor thus furnished a sort of substantial will-power that governed his small community as the head of a family governs his.

This semi-patriarchal rule which exists in the exclusively agricultural community produces its own peculiar form of ethical life. The head of the farm, who does the thinking and willing for the others in all matters that are not fixed by routine, so penetrates their lives that he exercises a moral restraint over them, holding them back from crime of all kinds. Such ethical influence is, however, of the lowest and most rudimentary character in the stage next above slavery. It presupposes a lack of individual self-determination in the persons thus controlled. They are obsessed, as it were, by his will and intellect, and fail to develop their own native capacities. He rules as a clan leader, and they are his henchmen. They are repressed, and are not educated into a moral character of their own. There is little outward stimulus impelling them to exercise their independent choice. Hence agricultural communities are conservative, governed by custom and routine, taking up very slowly any new ideas.

The change to urban life through the intermediary step of village life breaks up this patriarchal clanship, and cultivates in its place independence of opinion and action. The laborer in the "mill" recognizes his right to choose his employer and his place of labor, and exercises it to a far greater degree than the farm laborer. He migrates from village to village; in the city he has before him a bewildering variety of employers to choose from. The city employer does not act as patriarch, nor permit his laborers to approach him as head of a clan. The urban life protects the laborer from the obsessing influence of the employer, and throws a far greater weight of responsibility on the individual. Hence the urban life stimulates and develops independence of character.

In the case of the Southern slave there was none of this alternation between idleness and industry, plenty and want, that comes to the poor white at the North and South by reason of his freedom. But his will and intellect were obsessed more effectually because the slave could not be allowed the development of spontaneous, independent self-activity. Since the civil war, however, the condition of the negro has changed, and in the agricultural regions it now resembles more nearly the status above described as that of the poor white in rural in contradistinction from urban surroundings. Where the country is sparsely settled the proprietor farmer retains the dominant influence. Where the villages are getting numerous the tendency to independence manifests itself in a partial revolt from the patriarchal rule of the plantation, and the struggle leads naturally to an unpleasant state of affairs for all parties. But the urban factor in the problem is certain to gain the ascendency, and we must see in the near future, with the increase of railroads and manufacturing centres, the progressive decadence of the patriarchal rule. The old system of social morality will perish, and a new one will take its place. In the formation of the new one the present danger lies.

If the negro separates entirely from the white classes so far as domestic relations are concerned, and forms his own independent family, he separates from the clan influence also, and loses the education of the white master's family in