Page:W. E. B. Du Bois - The Gift of Black Folk.pdf/210

198 men’s Bureau Act was passed. The war was over. Sometime the South must have restored home rule. When that came what would happen to the freedmen? These paths were before the nation:

1. They might abandon the freedman to the mercy of his former masters.

2. They might for a generation or more make the freedmen the wards of the nation—protecting them, encouraging them, educating their children, giving them land and a minimum of capital and thus inducting them into real economic and political freedom.

3. They might force a grant of Negro suffrage, support the Negro voters for a brief period and then with hands off let them sink or swim.

The second path was the path of wisdom and statesmanship. But the country would not listen to such a comprehensive plan. If the form of this Bureau had been worked out by Charles Sumner today instead of sixty years ago, it would have been regarded as a proposal far less revolutionary than the modern labor legislation of America and Europe. A half-century ago, however, and in a country which gave the laisser-faire economics their extremest trial the Freedmen’s Bureau struck the whole nation as unthinkable save as a very temporary expedient and to relieve the more