PART II THE PROBLEM FACED

187

II THE PROBLEM FACED

The Southern States of North America at present offer to the world a spectacle unexampled in history. It is the spectacle of two races, at the opposite extremes of the colour scale, forced to live together in numbers not very far from equal, and on a theoretic basis of political equality. In other regions where white men and black have come into close contact, the circumstances have been, and are, essentially different. In the greater part of Africa the white man is a conquering invader, living among blacks who are either entirely savage, or obviously and confessedly but little removed from savagery. No question of “social equality” arises, and the question of political rights, where it presents itself at all, is uncomplicated by any predetermined constitutional principle. In a large part of Spanish America there has been so free an intermixture of many races that it is practically impossible to draw any colour line. Families of pure European descent may hold themselves apart, but few of these regions can by any strain of language be 188called “white men’s countries.”^[47] In the British West Indies the whites are so small a percentage of the population as to constitute a natural aristocracy; and in most of the islands the two races live peaceably under the slightly tempered despotism of Crown Colony government. Moreover, the white West Indian, even though he may rarely cross the Atlantic, has always England behind him. He is a member of a great white community, which happens to control certain tropical islands, mainly inhabited by blacks. Here he may prefer to pitch his tent; but his essential citizenship is still British. His social and political relations with his black surroundings are not to him a matter of life and death. Whatever their local interest and importance, they do not touch the fountain-head of his polity, the homeland of his race.

But it is his only homeland that the Southern American finds himself compelled to share, on nominally equal terms, with a race which, whatever its merits or demerits, its possibilities or its impossibilities, stands at the extreme of physical dissimilarity from his own. This is a condition of life not easily understood by the European, and not always very vividly realized even by the 189Northern American. I have devoted some effort to realizing it, both by personal observation and through the medium of books. The details of my observations form the First Part of the present volume. In this Second Part I propose to set forth some of the large and essential facts of the situation, as nearly as I can ascertain them, and to state the general trend of the reflections these facts have suggested to me.

Numbers and Vitality of the Negro

In the first place, what are the facts as to the negro’s numbers, distribution, and rate of increase, if any? They are not easy to ascertain: partly because it is nine years since the last census was taken (1900); partly because American vital statistics are very scanty, and, where they can be obtained at all, are apt to be untrustworthy.

It would appear that, roughly speaking, one-third of the population of the seventeen Southern States is black or coloured. As against some 3 per cent. of negroes in the Northern and Western States, there are about 33 per cent. in the South. The total coloured population of the United States is generally set down at about ten million, nine million dwelling in the South and something over one million in the North and West.^[48]

190Now, are the negroes increasing? It used to be thought that they were multiplying very rapidly. Judge Tourgée, in 1884, prophesied that by 1900 they would outnumber the whites in every State from Maryland to Texas. This prediction is far from having fulfilled itself, and appears to have been based on defective enumeration in the census of 1870, which made the rate of negro increase between 1870 and 1880 seem quite inordinate. Now speculation has gone to the other extreme, and prophesies the not very distant extinction of the negro. This view is set forth with uncompromising 191emphasis by Mr. P. A. Bruce in his “Rise of the New South” (Philadelphia, 1905):

The only cloud of any portentousness hanging over the prospects of the Southern States is the continued expansion of the black population.... The fact, however, that the white inhabitants, as a body, are steadily outstripping the black in numbers, is an indication that the evils which are now created by the presence of so many negroes in the South will not relatively and proportionately grow more dangerous.... When the development of the Southern States along its present lines has reached its last stage, there is reason to think that an even greater relative decline in the numerical strength of the black population will set in. We have already pointed out the probable effect of the subdivision of Southern lands, and the growth of Southern towns, on the numerical expansion of the negro race. As injurious to that race in the end as being shut out of the general field of agriculture, or being subjected to an abnormally high rate of mortality, will be the relentless competition which is one of the conditions of modern life in all civilized communities. The vaster the growth of the Southern States in wealth and white population, the sharper and more urgent will be the struggle of the black man for existence. In order to hold even his present position as a common labourer he will have to exert himself to the utmost, and in doing so to submit to a manner of life that will be even more unwholesome and squalid than the one he now follows, and sure to lead to a great increase in the already very high rate of mortality for his race. The day will come in the South, just as it came long ago in the North, when for lack of skill, lack of sobriety, and lack of persistency, the negro will find it more difficult to stand up as a rival to the white working-man. Already it is the ultimate fate of the negro that is in the balance, not the ultimate fate of 192the Southern States in consequence of the presence of the negro. The darkest day for the Southern whites has passed.... The darkest day for the Southern blacks has only just begun.

When I find this forecast cited with approval by Dr. E. A. Alderman of the University of Virginia, it acquires some authority in my eyes; but still it seems far from convincing. It leaves out of account one probability and one certainty. The probability is that what may be called the Hampton-Tuskegee movement—industrial education and moral discipline—will in time so leaven the mass of the negro race as to make it fitter to compete with white labour, and abler to resist the destructive influences on which Mr. Bruce dwells with such gusto. I call this a probability, not a certainty, for it is hard to tell as yet whether the Hampton-Tuskegee spirit is really leavening the mass, or only playing upon the surface. The industrial college at Hampton is barely forty years old; Mr. Booker Washington’s great institute at Tuskegee came into being less than thirty years ago; and the minor offshoots of the movement are, of course, still younger. They have not had time to give any just measure of their influence in promoting the self-respect and the efficiency of the negro race. But there is no doubt whatever that they are doing a remarkable and (from the negro point of view) a beneficent work; the only doubt being as to whether the work is or is not proceeding fast enough to 193overtake and counteract the forces that make for degradation.^[49]

This, I say, is doubtful; but what is scarcely doubtful is that the South, for its own sake, cannot suffer Mr. Bruce’s prophecy to fulfil itself. The gist of the forecast is, briefly, this: the rural negro, who is admittedly prolific, and whose children survive in fair proportions, will gradually be driven into the towns, where all possible influences are leagued against his moral and physical well-being, and where the rate of negro mortality, both infant and adult, is always very high and often appalling. Thus, according to Mr. Bruce, the “Afro-American” is being inexorably hounded into the jaws of death, and must in due time perish from off the face of the earth. But what is to be the state of the South while this amiable prophecy is working itself out? If the towns are the jaws of death to the negro, what are they to the white man and his children? Putting all question of humanity aside, can any sane civic policy permit negroes to crowd in their thousands into city slums, and there to die like flies in conditions “even more unwholesome and squalid” 194than those which at present obtain? Why is the rate of negro mortality so high? Simply because the black folk are less able than the whites to resist the poisonous influences of bad sanitation, moral as well as physical. But bad sanitation, though it may be more fatal to one race than to the other, inevitably takes its toll of both. Hear what a Southern health officer has to say on this point:

We face the following issues: First: one set of people, the Caucasian, with a normal death-rate of less than 16 per thousand per annum, and right alongside of them is the negro race, with a death-rate of 25 to 30 per thousand. Second: the first-named race furnishing a normal, and the second race an abnormal, percentage of criminals.... The negro is with you for all time. He is what you will make him, and it is “up to” the white people to prevent him from becoming a criminal, and to guard him against tuberculosis, syphilis, etc. If he is tainted with disease, you will suffer: if he develops criminal tendencies, you will be affected.

What can be more certain than this? And is it to be conceived that the South will deliberately refrain from looking to its physical and moral sewerage until the negro shall have been killed off?^[50]

195It is not to be conceived, and it is not what is happening. Better sanitary conditions are everywhere being secured, though the movement is slow in the cities of the South. In the North a great improvement has already been effected. In a report on “The Health and Physique of the Negro American” (Atlanta University Publications, No. XI., 1906) we read—

Ten years ago the [negro] death-rate was twice the birth-rate in New York; to-day they are about the same, with the death-rate steadily decreasing and the birth-rate increasing. Ten years ago the birth-rate of Philadelphia was less than the death-rate; to-day it is six per thousand higher.... With the improved sanitary condition, improved education, and better economic opportunities, the mortality of the race may, and probably will, steadily decrease until it becomes normal.

If there is any permanence and any efficacy in the “wave of prohibition” that is passing over the South, it must certainly cause a great reduction in negro mortality; and it surely cannot be long before means are found to check the vending of noxious drugs. Unless, in short, the civilization of the South is to stand still while the negro dies off, there seems to be little likelihood of his 196fulfilling Mr. Bruce’s prognostic. This great and beautiful region cannot possibly find its salvation in making itself a hell for the negro.

When I quoted to Mr. Booker Washington Mr. Bruce’s death-sentence on his people, he was moved to one of his rare laughs. In Mr. Washington’s opinion, which may very well prove to be correct, the natural increase of the negro in the South about keeps pace with that of the white man. The white race, however, is being largely recruited by immigration, so that its numerical preponderance is doubtless increasing. It would appear, then, that, unless conditions very greatly alter, there is little chance of the black race out-breeding and submerging the white, but equally little chance of the black race being obliging enough to die out. “Conservative” statisticians estimate that at the close of this century there will be anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-five million negroes in America.^[51]

Taking the Southern States at large, then, we find that one person out of every three is wholly or partly of African blood. It is sometimes maintained that really pure-bred negroes are very rare; but this seems to be a mistake. Professor W. E. B. Du Bois, himself a man of mixed origin and not 197likely to underestimate the number of his own class, thinks that in two-thirds of the negroes of the United States there are no “recognizable traces” of white blood. He adds that white blood doubtless exists in many who show no trace of it; but for practical purposes this speculation may be disregarded. I think we may take it as pretty certain that if, in the South, one person out of every three is of African descent, one person out of every four is either actually or virtually a full-blooded negro. But it must not be supposed that the distribution of the races is by any means even. Some districts, such as the mountainous regions of Tennessee and West Virginia, contain hardly any negroes; while in other districts, not a few, the blacks largely outnumber the whites. These are, no doubt, the districts in which the pure-bred black most abounds.

Is there a “Negro Problem”?

Having ascertained, approximately, the numerical relations of the two races, we are now in a position to consider the problem or problems involved. And first we are confronted with the question, “Is there any real problem at all?”

Some people deny it, or at all events maintain that the problem is created solely by the almost insane arrogance and inhumanity of the Southern white man. This view lingers in the North, among the inheritors of the old abolitionist sentiment. 198In England, it has been roundly expressed by Mr. H. G. Wells, and somewhat more considerately by even so high an authority as Sir Sydney Olivier. I need scarcely say that it is a very popular view among the negroes in the South itself.

For a typical (though moderate) American utterance of this opinion the following may suffice. It is a passage from “Race Questions and Prejudices,” by a distinguished psychologist, Professor Royce of Harvard (International Journal of Ethics, April, 1906):

Scientifically viewed, these problems of ours turn out to be not so much problems caused by anything which is essential to the existence or to the nature of the races of men themselves. Our so-called race problems are merely the problems caused by our antipathies.... Such antipathies will always play their part in human history. But what we can do about them is to try not to be fooled by them, not to take them too seriously, because of their mere name. We can remember that they are childish phenomena in our lives, phenomena on a level with a dread of snakes or of mice, phenomena that we share with the cats and with the dogs, not noble phenomena, but caprices of our complex nature.

The attitude of the South, then, in the conception of Professor Royce, is no more rational than that of a woman who shrieks, jumps on a chair, and gathers her skirts about her ankles, because a mouse happens to run across the floor. I should have thought that the wiser tendency of modern science was to divine something more 199than a “caprice” in so deep-rooted an instinct as the dread even of mice. As for the dread of snakes, it was surely by a slip of the pen that Professor Royce adduced it.

Not at all dissimilar is the judgment of Mr. H. G. Wells. Hearing a great deal of loose, illogical, inconclusive talk on the colour question, and having himself taken a “mighty liking” to these “gentle, human, dark-skinned people” as he saw them in a Chicago music-hall and elsewhere, Mr. Wells formed the opinion that there was no reason at all in the Southern frame of mind. His conclusion is that “these emotions are a cult;” and by a cult he evidently means a contagious, fanatical folly.

Now, Mr. Wells is a man for whose essential wisdom I have a very high respect. If I were bound to acknowledge myself the disciple of any living thinker, I should have small hesitation in selecting him as my guide and philosopher. But his chapter on “The Tragedy of Colour” in “The Future in America” is tinged with what I cannot but take to be a dogmatic impatience of all distinctions and difficulties of race. Before writing it, he might, I think, have asked himself whether the theory of sheer race-monomania was not, perhaps, a rather too simple way of accounting for “emotions” felt with absolute unanimity (in a greater or less degree) by some twenty million Southern white people. The arguments he heard might be weak, ill-informed, inconclusive; the 200conduct in which the emotions expressed themselves might often be indefensible and abhorrent; and yet there might lie at the root of the emotions something very different from sheer unreason. I think Mr. Wells should have been chary of “indicting a nation” without more careful reflection and a closer scrutiny of evidence.

Sir Sydney Olivier, on the other hand, speaks with the authority of one who has spent many years in close contact with negroes, having been a successful administrator of large communities in which they greatly preponderate. It is impossible to suspect him of hastiness or of à priori doctrinairism. What, then, is his view? In his “White Capital and Coloured Labour” (1907), he tells us that both in visiting the United States and in discussing race questions with American visitors to Jamaica, “he found himself, as a British West Indian, unable to entirely account for an attitude of mind which impressed him as superstitious, if not hysterical, and as indicating misapprehensions of premises very ominous for the United States of the future.” He proceeds:

The theory held in the Southern States of America and in some British Colonies, comes, in substance, to this—that the negro is an inferior order in nature to the white man, in the same sense that the ape may be said to be so. It is really upon this theory that American negrophobia rests, and not only upon the viciousness or criminality of the negro. This viciousness and criminality are, in fact, largely invented, imputed, and exaggerated, 201in order to support and justify the propaganda of race exclusiveness (p. 43).

And again, in another part of his book:

My argument has been that race prejudice is the fetish of the man of short views; and that it is a short-sighted and suicidal creed, with no healthy future for the community that entertains it (p. 173).

I have very real diffidence in contesting the deliberate judgment of a man like Sir Sydney Olivier on a question which he has deeply studied; but I cannot believe with him that the problem is simply one of Southern unwisdom. On the contrary, I believe that, however unwise in much of her talk and her action, the South is in the main animated by a just and far-feeling, if not far-seeing, instinct. That there has been an infinitude of tragic unwisdom in the matter, not in the South alone, no one nowadays denies. But I believe that the problem, far from being unreal, is so real and so dishearteningly difficult that nothing but an almost superhuman wisdom, energy, and courage will ever effectually deal with it.

Let me try to give my reasons for this belief.

White Man’s Land or Brown Man’s Land?

No one, I suppose—not even Mr. Wells—would deny that the importation of the African into America was an egregious blunder as well 202as a monstrous crime. Without him the South would perhaps have developed more slowly during the eighteenth century; but she would have escaped the arrest of development which sums up her history during the nineteenth century. She would have escaped the war by which she strove, with misguided heroism, to perpetuate that arrest of development. She would have escaped the “horrors” of that Reconstruction period which still haunts her memory like a nightmare. She would have escaped the prostration and impoverishment from which she is only now beginning—though very rapidly—to recover. The negro has assuredly been her calamity in the past. To say, as negro writers often do, that he has created her wealth, is to ignore the appalling price she has paid for him. Much more truly may he be said to have created her poverty.^[52]

This, however, is certainly not the negro’s fault. He did not thrust himself upon the South: he was no willing immigrant. Historic recriminations, therefore, are perfectly idle—as idle as the attempts of Southern writers to shift responsibility for the slave trade to the shoulders of the New England States. I cast a glance back at history merely to remind the reader that the presence of the negro in America is not the result of a 203natural movement, an inevitable expansion, a migration springing from economic necessity or from deep impulses of folk-psychology. It is, on the contrary, the outcome of what may almost be called a disastrous accident—of inhuman cupidity in the slave-dealers and economic short-sightedness in the slave-owners.

The upshot, as we find it to-day, is that in a magnificent country, well outside the torrid zone, and eminently suited to be the home of a white race, one person in every three is coloured, and one person in every four is physically indistinguishable from an African savage. It would be the extravagance of paradox to maintain that this is a positively desirable condition, preferable to that of a country which presents a normal uniformity of complexion. England, for instance, would certainly not be a more desirable place of residence if one-fourth of her population were transmuted into the semblance of Dahomeyans, even supposing that the metamorphosis involved no moral or intellectual change for the worse. A monochrome civilization is on the face of it preferable to such a piebald civilization as at present exists in the Southern States.

Here at once, then, we have a difference between the South and the West Indies, which Sir Sydney Olivier seems strangely to overlook. The West Indies are not climatically fitted to be a “white man’s land”; or, if it was ever possible that they should become one, the chance was 204lost at the very outset of their history. They are once for all black men’s lands, with a sprinkling of whites governing and exploiting them. It would be much more reasonable for the black to chafe under the dominance of the white, than for the white to resent the presence of the black. But the case in the Southern States is absolutely different. They were explored, settled, organized by white men; by white men their liberties were vindicated. They are fitted by their climate and resources to be not only a white man’s land, but one of the greatest white men’s lands in the world. The black man came there only as a (terribly ill-chosen) tool for their development. When the tool ceases to be a tool and claims a third part of the heritage, the “peripeteia” is no doubt dramatic and exceedingly moral, but none the less exasperating to a generation which, after all, was personally innocent of the original crime-blunder. No one enjoys playing the scapegoat in a moral apologue; and the Southern white man would be more than human if he accepted the part with perfect equanimity. At any rate, the West Indian white man has no right to assume an air of superior virtue until the conditions of his case are even remotely analogous. The negro in the West Indies is the essence and foundation of life: in the United States he is a regrettable accident.

205Four Possibilities: I. Extinction.

It is time now that we should look more closely into the conditions of this piebald community which a violent interference with the normal course of race-distribution has established in the Southern States.

The future seems to contain four possibilities, or, rather, conceivabilities, which may be examined in turn.

(1) Things may “worry along” in the present profoundly unsatisfactory condition, until the negro gradually dies out.

(2) The education of both races, and the moral and economic elevation of the black race, may gradually enable them to live side by side in mutual tolerance and forbearance, without mingling, but without clashing.

(3) Marriage between persons of the two races may—I mean might conceivably—be legalized, and the colour-line obliterated by “miscegenation.”

(4) The negro race might be geographically segregated, by deportation or otherwise, and established in a community or communities of its own.

The first eventuality—the evanescence of the negro race—we have already examined and seen to be highly improbable. Let me only add here that there is one way in which it might conceivably be brought about—a way too horrible to be contemplated, yet not wholly beyond the bounds 206of possibility. The recurrence of such an outbreak as the Atlanta riot of 1906 might lead to very terrible consequences. On that occasion the white mob found the negroes unarmed, and wreaked its frenzy practically unopposed. But the lesson was not lost on the negroes, and a similar onslaught would, in many places, find them armed and capable of a certain amount of resistance. In that case one dares not think what might happen. Their resistance could scarcely be effectual, in the sense of intimidating and checking white violence. It would, on the contrary, infuriate the mob, and lend some show of justification to their proceedings; while the frenzy would spread from city to city, and the result might quite well be one of the darkest pages in American or any other history. Once let a dozen white men be killed by armed negroes in any city of the South, and a flame would burst out all over the land which would work untold devastation before either authority or humanity could check it. The incident would be taken as a declaration of racial war; everywhere the white mob would insist on searching for arms in the negro quarters; the negroes would inevitably attempt some panic-stricken defensive organization; and the more effective it proved, the more terrible would be the calamity to their race. Not even in the wildest frenzy, of course, could the race, or a tenth part of the race, be violently wiped out; but they might be so dismayed and terrorized as to lose that natural 207buoyancy of spirit which has hitherto sustained them, and enabled them to increase and multiply. The prophets of extinction already read hopelessness and a prescience of doom in the negro tone of mind; but, so far, I think the wish is father to the thought. The race, as a whole, is confident, in its happy-go-lucky way. But would their spirit survive a great massacre, followed by an open and chronic Negerhetze? I doubt it; and I believe it possible that in this way Mr. P. A. Bruce’s prophecy might be realized more rapidly than he anticipated.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the South lives on the brink of such a horror; but there is no denying that the elements are present which might one day bring it to pass.^[53] Sir Sydney Olivier is quite right in calling the feeling of a large class of Southerners towards the negro “hysterical” and ungoverned; and this is just the class that is handiest with its “guns.” Long and laborious treatises have been written to prove, on Biblical evidence, that the negro is a “beast,” and, on scientific evidence, that he is more nearly an ape than a man. These works, no doubt, are scarcely sane; but their insanity is by no means peculiar to their individual authors. The word “extermination” is gravely spoken by men who 208are not therefore held to be maniacs or even monomaniacs. The South, says Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois, is “simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk”; and where such a condition prevails, the possibility of sudden disaster is never far off. To recognize the possibility is not to bring it nearer, but rather to indicate the urgent need of measures that shall place it infinitely remote.

Four Possibilities: II. The Atlanta Compromise.

We pass now to the second eventuality—the gradual smoothing away of friction, so that the two races may live side by side, never blending and yet never jarring. This is the conception set forth in Mr. Booker Washington’s celebrated “Atlanta Compromise” speech of 1895, wherein he said, “In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Is this a possible—I will not say ideal, for that it manifestly is not—but a possible working arrangement?

One thing is evident at the outset—namely, that the fourteen years that have elapsed since Mr. Washington uttered this aspiration have brought its fulfilment no nearer. Both negro education and white education have advanced in the interim; the “respectable” and well-to-do class of negroes has considerably increased; but the feeling between the races is worse rather than 209better. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page used to say, “Northerners espouse the cause of the negro as a race, but dislike negroes individually; while Southerners do not dislike negroes individually, but oppose them as a race.”^[54] Ten years ago there was a large element of truth in this saying; but it becomes less and less true with every year that passes. The old-time kindliness of feeling between the ex-owner and the ex-slave is rapidly becoming a mere tradition. No common memories or sentiments hold together the new generations of the two races; they are growing up in unmitigated mutual antipathy. At best, indeed, the Southern kindliness of feeling towards the individual negro subsisted only so long as he “knew his place” and kept it; and the very process of education and elevation on which Mr. Washington relies renders the negro ever less willing to keep the place the Southern white man assigns him. In the North, too, while the dislike of the individual has greatly increased, the theoretic fondness for the race has very perceptibly cooled. Altogether, the tendency of events since 1895 has not been at all in the direction of the Atlanta Compromise. The Atlanta riot of eleven years later 210was a grimly ironic comment on Mr. Washington’s speech.

This merely means, it may be said, that education has as yet produced no sensible effect upon the inveterate and inhuman prejudice of the South. Nevertheless, time and patience may justify Mr. Washington’s optimism. There is no saying, indeed, what a great deal of time and a great deal of patience may not effect. Meanwhile, let us see what is really involved in the idea of the Atlanta Compromise.

We are to conceive, in the first place, an immense advance in the negro race—an advance in education, industry, thrift, and general efficiency. Well, this is possible enough—the negro is certainly civilizable, if not indefinitely, at any rate far beyond the average level he has yet attained. Negro crime might easily be reduced within normal limits; for the race is not inherently criminal, but is rendered so by ignorance, poverty, vice, injustice, and a thoroughly bad penal system. The next fifty years, if present influences continue to work unimpeded, may see a very large increase in the class of law-abiding, property-holding negroes, and possibly a considerable improvement even in the condition of the black proletariat. But supposing that, by the exercise of infinite patience for fifty or a hundred years, a condition something like that indicated in the Atlanta formula were ultimately attained, would it be desirable? and could it be permanent?

211The assumed improvement of conditions would, of course, imply a steady increase in the numbers of the black race; so that, even with the aid of immigration, the white race would probably not greatly add to its numerical superiority. Let us suppose that at the end of fifty years the coloured people were not as one in three, but as one in four, and that this ratio remained pretty constant. Here, then, we should have a nation within a nation, unassimilated and (by hypothesis) unassimilable, occupying one-fourth of the whole field of existence, and performing no function that could not, in their absence, be at least as well performed by assimilable people, whose presence would be a strength to the community.^[55] The black nation would be a hampering, extraneous element in the body politic, like a bullet encysted in the human frame. It may lie there for years without setting up inflammation or gangrene, and causing no more than occasional twinges of pain; but it certainly cannot contribute to the health, efficiency, or comfort of the organism. Is it wonderful that the Atlanta Compromise, supposing 212it realized in all conceivable perfection, should excite little enthusiasm in the white South?

But to imagine it realized in perfection is to imagine an impossibility—almost a contradiction in terms. We are, on the one hand, to suppose the negro ambitious, progressive, prosperous, and, on the other hand, to imagine him humbly acquiescent in his status as a social pariah. The thing is out of the question; such saintlike humility has long ceased to form any part of the moral equipment of the American negro. The bullet could never be thoroughly encysted; it would always irritate, rankle, fester. Mr. Washington’s formula in renouncing social equality is judiciously vague as to political rights. But one thing is certain—neither Mr. Washington nor any other negro leader really contemplates their surrender. It is quite inconceivable that the nation within a nation should acquiesce in disfranchisement; and the question of the negro vote will always be a disturbing factor in Southern political life. Either he must be jockeyed out of it by devices abhorrent to democratic principle and more or less subversive of political morality; or, if he be honestly suffered to cast his ballot, he will block the healthy divergence of political opinion in the South, since, in any party conflict, he would hold the balance between the two sides, and thus become the dominant power in the State. This will always be a danger so long as the unassimilated negro is forced, by his separateness, to think and act first 213as a negro and only in the second place as an American. Even if the Atlanta Compromise were otherwise realizable, the friction at this point would always continue acute.

The Crux of the Problem.

The worst, however, remains behind. If the Atlanta Compromise were possible in every other way, it would be impossible on the side of sex. For two races to dwell side by side in large numbers, and to be prohibited from coming together in legal marriage, is unwholesome and demoralizing to both. I am not thinking mainly of what Mr. Ray Stannard Baker calls “the tragedy of the mulatto.” It seems hard, no doubt, that marriage should be impossible between a white man and a girl in whose complexion, perhaps, an eighth or sixteenth part of negro blood is entirely imperceptible; but such cases are romantic exceptions, and do not constitute a serious factor in the problem. Negroes, at any rate, will tell you proudly that the young men and women of their race, however light-skinned, hold it no hardship that their choice of mates should be restricted to their own people. Whatever be the truth as to these marginal relations, they are not the essence of the matter. The essence is simply this: the youth and manhood of the white South is subjected to an altogether unfair and unwholesome ordeal by the constant presence of a multitude of physically 214well-developed women, among whom, in the lower levels, there is no strong tradition of chastity, and to whom the penalties of incontinence are very slight. To say, as many Southerners will, that there is no such thing as virtue among negro women is stupidly libellous; but it is impossible to doubt that the average standard of sexual conduct among the lower orders of the black and brown population is anything but high. And this is not a state of things that can be radically amended in one generation or in two. The completest realization of the Atlanta Compromise that is conceivable within, say, a century, would still leave the white male exposed, from boyhood upward, to a stimulation of his animal instincts which, in the peculiar circumstances of the case, cannot be otherwise than unwholesome.

We are here at the very heart of the problem. All other relations are adjustable, at a certain sacrifice; but not this one. If the two races are to live together without open and lawful intermingling, it must be at the cost of incessant demoralization to both. “Miscegenation,” in the sense of permanent concubinage and the rearing of hybrid families, may be held in check by the strong social sentiment against it,^[56] but nothing can hold in check the still more degrading casual commerce between the white man (and youth) and the coloured woman. It is probably this fact, quite as much as the hideous proclivities of the 215criminal negro male, that hardens the heart of the white woman against the black race. Nor is the unwholesomeness of the condition measured by the actual amount of laxity to which it leads. Temptation may in myriads of cases be resisted; but this order of temptation ought not to be in the air.^[57] It cannot be good for any race of men to be surrounded by strongly-accentuated Sex, which, for ulterior reasons, whereof the mere animal nature takes little account, is placed under a tabu.

I venture to say that no one—not even Mr. Washington himself—really believes in the Atlanta Compromise as a stable solution of the problem. The negroes who accept it as an interim ideal (so to speak), never doubt that it is but a stepping-stone to freedom of racial intermixture. They see that so long as constant physical propinquity endures, the colour barrier between the sexes is factitious, and in great measure unreal, and they believe that at last the race-pride of the white man will be worn down, and he will accept the inevitable amalgamation.^[58] The ultimate forces 216at war in the South are the instinctive, half-conscious desire of the black race to engraft itself on the white stock,^[59] and the no less instinctive horror of the white stock at such a surrender of its racial integrity. This horror is all the more acute—all the more morbid, if you will—because the white race is conscious of its own frailty, and knows that it is, in some sense, fighting a battle against perfidious nature. It is a hard thing to say, but I have little doubt it is true, that much of the injustice and cruelty to which the negro is subjected in the South is a revenge, not so much for sexual crime on the negro’s part, as for an uneasy conscience or consciousness on the part of the whites.^[60] It is because the black race 217inevitably appeals to one order of low instincts in the white, that it suffers from the sympathetic stimulation of another order of low instincts.

Four Possibilities: III. Amalgamation.

This brings us, of course, to the third of the conceivabilities above enumerated—the legalization of marriage between the two races. To the white South, nothing is more inconceivable: to the critics of the white South, nothing is more simple. Which of them is in the right?

It is significant that none of these outside critics puts the slightest faith in the Atlanta Compromise. They see quite clearly that the two races cannot live together and yet apart. Their solution is the obvious one of free intermixture, and they cannot understand why the South should be so inveterately opposed to it. Why make such a fuss, they say, over such a simple matter?

And then comes a long array of arguments to minimize, in general, the significance of race, and, in particular, the gap between the white race and the black. Racial purity is a vain imagination; there is no such thing, at any rate among European peoples; and if it existed it would 218only be a limitation and a misfortune to the people afflicted with it. Most of all is the Anglo-Saxon race ridiculed as a historic fallacy. The South, which boasts itself almost the last stronghold of pure Anglo-Saxondom,^[61] is told that the pure Anglo-Saxon is a myth and a superstition. As to the negro, we are assured that we were all negroes once, or something very much to that effect. At any rate, it is asserted that the Mediterranean races, with whom Western civilization originated, were in great part of negro origin. Skull-measurement and brain-weight are called in to prove—whatever the particular disputant wants to prove. Special qualities are claimed for the negro—such as a rich imagination, an innate courtesy, and a strong musical faculty; and it is argued that these are the very things of which the (so-called) Anglo-Saxon race stands most in need. Great play is made with the quasi-scientific modern Rousseauism which avers that our barbarian ancestors were better men than we, and thence argues that there is little or no real gap between the savage of to-day 219and the civilized man. Weismannism is pressed into the service to show that, as the aptitudes and tendencies that we sum up in the word civilization are acquired and therefore (it is argued) untransmissible, the white child can have profited nothing by its ancestors’ centuries of upward struggle from barbarism, while the black child cannot be in any way handicapped by his descent through untold ages of savagery. We are even assured that civilization has sprung from and must be maintained by “the commingling of all with all, the general ‘panmixture,’ the universal ‘half-breed.’”^[62]

Fortunately it is quite unnecessary that I should plunge into the mazes of ethnological controversy. It is sufficient for my present purpose to note that controversy, and very lively controversy, exists. The practical equality of the two races is so far from being a point on which all authorities are agreed, that it may rather be called a paradox which charms a certain order of mind by reason of its very audacity. So, too, with the opinion that, whether the African race be or be not inferior, it possesses qualities that the European stock needs, and ought to accept with gratitude. Whether true or false, this is, at present at any rate, a quite undemonstrated speculation. Even Sir Sydney Olivier, who maintains in general that a man of mixed race is “potentially a more competent vehicle of 220humanity,” advances no proof of the benefits of the particular mixture in question which can for a moment be expected to carry conviction to the Southern white man. The South, then, is urged by the amalgamation theorists to embark upon, or submit to, what is at best a great experiment. It is to quell its higher instincts (for so it regards them, rightly or wrongly) and commit what it feels in the marrow of its bones to be a degrading race-abnegation, in deference to a half-scientific, half-humanitarian opinion, held by certain theorists outside its own boundaries, to the effect that, after all, there is no great difference between black and white, and that the complexion of the future will certainly be a uniform yellow. Can any one blame the South for answering: “No, thank you! If you in England or in New England are tired of being white men, and sigh for the blessings of an African blend, we can send you several million negroes, of both sexes, who will no doubt be happy, on suitable terms, to intermarry with your sons and daughters. For our part, we are content with our complexion as it is. We see no reason to believe that the African slave trade was the means adopted by a beneficent Providence for the ultimate improvement of our Anglo-Saxon stock; nor, on the other hand, can we accept it as a just punishment for the sins of our fathers that our race, as a race, should be merged and obliterated in indiscriminate hybridism.”

I do not pretend, of course, that the fixed 221antipathy of the South to the very idea of amalgamation is a purely rational one. Who is so foolish as to look for pure reason in aught that concerns the obscure fundamentals of life? What I am trying to show is that, whatever irrational elements may mingle with it, the Southern sentiment has a solid and sufficient nucleus of reason. The advantages of fusion, as between such antipodal races as the white European and the black African, are, to say the least of it, unproved; and a race may be forgiven, surely, which declines to try on its own body, so to speak, so problematic and so irremediable an experiment. For, once made, this experiment cannot be unmade. The South must choose between definitely renouncing its position as a “white man’s land” or struggling to maintain it. What wonder if it feels that it has no choice in the matter?

The Races not Equal.

I have stated the case at the very lowest in saying that the advantages of fusion are unproved. Though it is not essential to my position, I must confess that my personal belief goes much further, and that the disadvantages of fusion are, to my thinking, proved beyond all reasonable doubt. I have not hitherto emphasized the essential and innate inferiority of the negro race, because my argument did not demand it. But the fact of this inferiority seems to me as evident as it is inevitable. However fallacious may be the boundaries 222between this and that European race, the boundary between the European and the African is real, and not to be argued away. The European is the fruit of untold generations of upward struggle, the African of untold generations of immobility. At the very dawn of history, the ancestors of the white American had advanced to a point beyond that which the ancestors of the Afro-American had attained when they were shipped across the Atlantic from fifty to two hundred years ago. That the negro race has some very amiable qualities is not denied. It is not denied that civilization has brought with it certain disadvantages and corruptions, and that the white savage is in some ways a more deplorable phenomenon than the black savage. Nor is it denied that the negro, in virtue of his strong imitative instinct, has, in many cases, shown a remarkable power of taking on a certain measure of civilization. But all this does not practically lessen the huge historic gap between the two races. Even if we admit the innate power of the negro to overtake the white man in intellectual grasp and moral stability, we must in reason allow him a few centuries to make up his millenniums of arrearage. Whatever it may become in the course of ten or fifteen generations, the negro race here and now is inferior to the white race, not only because of its “previous condition of servitude,” but, ultimately and fundamentally, because of its recent condition of savagery. Therefore, the white race, 223in accepting amalgamation, would be derogating from its birthright and climbing down the scale of humanity.

Our theorists are, on the whole, too much inclined to confound instinct with prejudice. It is absurd to class as pure prejudice the white man’s preference for the colour and facial contour of his race. This is no place for an analysis of our sense of beauty; but to maintain offhand that it is an unmeaning product of sheer habit, with no biological justification, is simply to shirk the problem and postpone analysis to dogma. Does any one really believe that the genius of Cæsar and Napoleon, of Milton and Goethe, had nothing to do with their facial angle, and could have found an equally convenient habitation behind thick lips and under woolly skulls? The negro himself (as distinct from the mulatto rhetorician) takes his stand on no such paradox. Whoever may doubt the superiority of the white race, it is not he; and it is a racial, not merely a social or economic superiority to which he does instinctive homage. It does not enter his head to champion his own racial ideal, to set up an African Venus in rivalry to the Hellenic, and claim a new Judgment of Paris between them. If wishing could change the Ethiopian’s skin there would be never a negro in America.^[63] The black 224race, out of its poverty, spends thousands of dollars annually on “anti-kink” lotions, vainly supposed to straighten the African wool.^[64] The brown belle tones her complexion with pearl powder; and many a black mother takes pride in the brown skin of her offspring, though it proclaims their illegitimacy. There can be no reasonable doubt that amalgamation, in the negro’s eyes, means an enormous gain to his race. It means ennoblement, transfiguration. It is quite natural that he should not too curiously inquire whether the gain to him would involve a corresponding loss to the white man. That is the white man’s business, not his. The one thing his 225instinct tells him is that, if he can break down the white man’s resistance and make the Southern States a brown or yellow man’s land, he will have achieved a splendid racial triumph.

The Case for the Mulatto.

It is urged, as we have already seen, that the black man’s gain would not be the white man’s loss, but that the black race would bring to the white certain qualities of which it stands sorely in need, the result of the mixture being a more competent “vehicle of all the qualities and powers that we imply by humanity.” Has experience justified this speculation? We have ample experience to go upon—in South America, in the West Indies, in the Southern States themselves. The mulatto exists and has existed for generations, not in hundreds or thousands, but in millions; in what respect has he proved himself superior to the pure Spaniard, or Portuguese, or Anglo-Saxon? Does South American history bear testimony to his political competence? Have his achievements in science, in art, in literature, in music, been superior to those of the un-Africanized peoples? Or, waiving the question of superiority, has he even, in these domains, produced meritorious work in any fair proportion to his numbers? I do not say that it is impossible to make a sort of case for him, by the ransacking of records and the employment of a very indefinite standard of values. But 226I do most emphatically say that no conspicuous and undeniable advantage has resulted from the blending of bloods, such as can or ought to counteract the instinctive repugnance of the South.

In a work entitled “Twentieth Century Negro Literature,”^[65] published in 1901, Mr. Edward E. Cooper, a mulatto journalist, quotes Byron’s lines:—

“You have the letters Cadmus gave;

Think ye he meant them for a slave?”

and then comments as follows:—

Now Cadmus was a black African slave, captured in war; so was Æsop, the world’s greatest fabulist; so was Terence, among the grandest of Rome’s lyric poets; so was Pushkin, the national poet to-day of Russia; so was Alexandre Dumas, the first, the greatest, not only of French novelists, but of novelists of all times, and the infinite storehouse from which all novelists draw, Honoré de Balzac and Charles Dickens to the contrary notwithstanding.

227This writer can scarcely mean what he says—namely, that Alexandre Dumas and the rest were all black African slaves captured in war. We must interpret him liberally, and take him to be simply asserting the literary genius of the African race, whether pure or blended. A better case than this might doubtless be made for it; but a ten times better case would still be very far from a good case. And Mr. Edward E. Cooper is a fair average specimen of the negro champion of negro genius. Another spokesman of the race, by the way, in the same collection of essays, argues that if the Southern clergy had done their duty in denouncing lynching, there would have been no assassination of President McKinley, “nor would there be anywhere such an illiberal public sentiment as would openly criticize our Chief Executive for dining a representative member of the race whose feasts even Jupiter did not disdain to grace.”^[66]

A Biological Argument.

To wind up this attempt to place on a basis of reason the Southern horror of amalgamation, I return for a moment to Sir Sydney Olivier’s argument on the point.^[67] He says:—

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There may naturally be aversion on the part of and a strong social objection on behalf of the white woman against her marriage with a black or coloured man. There is no correspondingly strong instinctive aversion, nor is there so strong an ostensible social objection to a white man’s marrying a woman of mixed descent. The latter kind of union is much more likely to occur than the former. There is good biological reason for this distinction. Whatever the potentialities of the African stocks as a vehicle for human manifestation, and I myself believe them to be exceedingly important and valuable, ... the white races are now, in fact, by far the farther advanced in effectual human development, and it would be expedient on this account alone that their maternity should be economized to the utmost. A woman may be the mother of a limited number of children, and our notion of the number advisable is contracting: it is bad natural economy, and instinct very potently opposes it, to breed backwards from her. There is no such reason against the begetting of children by white men in countries where, if they are to breed at all, it must be with women of coloured or mixed races. The offspring of such breeding, whether legitimate or illegitimate, is, from the point of view of efficiency, an acquisition to the community, and under favourable conditions, an advance on the pure-bred African.

To this I have nothing to object, save that it manifestly and in its very terms does not apply to the Southern States of America. Sir Sydney does not intend it so to apply; but when he proceeds to speak of the Southern States, he somehow neglects to draw the necessary distinctions. The conditions he has in mind in the 229above paragraph are those of a black man’s land, not of a white man’s land. It may readily be granted that a fundamentally black community gains by the infusion of white blood, though the circumstances of the “first cross” are scarcely agreeable to civilized sentiment. There can be little beyond sheer animalism in the relations between a white man and a black woman; and such parentage cannot be reckoned the most desirable. This feeling, however, is perhaps a mere superstition; the science of eugenics is not yet far enough advanced, I take it, to afford us any authoritative guidance. Sir Sydney Olivier, at all events, rejects without hesitation the view that the mulatto is inferior, not only to the white, but to the pure black. The mulatto element in a black community, he maintains, is a distinct gain; and the larger it is the better. So far, I am quite willing to follow him; but surely the same process of reasoning, applied to a white community, must lead to exactly the opposite conclusion. It is this fundamental distinction between a black and white community that Sir Sidney either ignores, or declines to take into account. The South is obviously not a country where, “if white men are to breed at all, it must be with women of coloured races.” It is a country where a pure white race increases rapidly in spite of the disturbance (economic and sexual) undoubtedly set up by the constant propinquity of a black race. In bygone days, when the black race 230was a herd of human chattels, with no political or social rights, a great deal of intermixture took place. It was, as Sir Sydney would doubtless admit, morally bestial and degrading; but on the principles he lays down, and on the assumption that slavery was part of the eternal scheme of things, it was probably good policy, inasmuch as it improved the breed of the black community—the community of slaves.^[68] But when the black community ceased to be, in its very nature, a thing apart—when its members became freemen and citizens, indistinguishable, in constitutional theory, from members of the white community—then the conditions entirely altered. It was one thing to produce a superior breed of slaves; it is quite another to go on producing an inferior breed of citizens, and to legalize the production of such a breed. “But I deny the inferiority!” Sir Sydney may say. “I contend that the good qualities of the white race are preserved, and are reinforced by the addition of certain very valuable qualities which are the special endowment of the black race.” It is not very easy to see why, if this argument hold good, Sir Sydney should discountenance the mating of the black man with the white woman. Either 231the African strain is valuable or it is not; if it is, why should there be any “bad natural economy” in such unions? Waiving this point, however, I think we have already seen pretty clearly why Sir Sydney’s argument meets with scant acceptance in the South. The plain reason is that it opposes to a deep-rooted instinct a wholly unproved speculation. The South has not discovered, in its own pretty considerable experience, the advantages of hybridism as compared with purity of white blood; nor does Sir Sydney himself advance anything that can possibly be called proof of his opinion. A white nation can scarcely be expected to renounce its racial integrity on the chance of breeding an occasional Alexandre Dumas.

Sir Sydney Olivier’s biological principle, strictly and consistently applied, would issue in a law making marriage legal between any male and a female lower in the colour scale than himself, but illegal between any female and a male with a larger proportion of African blood. Such a law would, of course, be absolutely impossible of enforcement; and equally inconceivable in practice would be any other partial and restricted legalization of inter-racial unions. There is no middle course between a resolute maintenance of the legal barrier between the races and a complete acceptance of the principle of amalgamation. If the legal barrier were ever removed, it would mean such a relaxation of public sentiment 232as would insure the very rapid increase of the hybrid race.^[69] Three or four generations would see the South a brown man’s land, with, no doubt, a rapidly narrowing white aristocracy. In another three or four generations the prevailing complexion of the North would be sensibly affected; and, finally, the whole American nation would be typically negroid, the pure white man being the more or less rare exception. For my part, I cannot but sympathize with the sentiment that violently repudiates such a contingency. I do not understand how any white man who has ever visited the South can fail to be dismayed at the thought of absorbing into the veins of his race the blood of the African myriads who swarm on every hand.

For the South itself, at any rate, the discussion is purely academic. Amalgamation is a thousand leagues remote from the sphere of practical politics. I have been endeavouring to state for outsiders the case of the South as I understand it. I may have stated it wrongly, or understated it; but no one can possibly overstate the resolve of the South that the colour line shall not be obliterated by “miscegenation.”

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Four Possibilities: IV. Segregation.

Lastly, we have to consider the fourth conceivable eventuality—the geographical segregation of the negro race, whether within or without the limits of the United States.

This is usually ridiculed as an absolutely Utopian scheme, and at the outset of my investigation I myself regarded it in that light. But the more I saw and read and thought, the oftener and the more urgently did segregation recur to me as the one possible way of escape from an otherwise intolerable situation. Not, of course, the instant, and wholesale, and violent deportation of ten million people—that is a rank impossibility. Between that and inert acquiescence in the ubiquity of the negro throughout the Southern States, there are many middle courses; and I cannot but believe that the first really great statesman who arises in America will prove his greatness by grappling with this vast but not insoluble problem. And, assuredly, the sooner he comes the better.

We have seen that the negro race is not dying out, or that, if it does die out, it can only be, so to speak, at the cost of Southern civilization—through the indefinite continuance of insanitary and barbarous conditions. We have seen that the Atlanta Compromise is illusory and impracticable, that there is no reasonable hope that the two races will ever live together, yet apart—in 234economic solidarity, yet without social or sexual contact. We have seen that the essence of the whole situation lies in the negro’s inevitable ambition (even though it be unformulated and largely unconscious) to be drawn upward, through physical coalescence, into the white race, and the white man’s intense resolve that, on a large and determining scale, no such coalescence shall take place. Now this state of war—for such it undoubtedly is—will not correct itself by lapse of time. It will continue to degrade and demoralize both races until active measures are taken to put an end to it. Though I sympathize with the white man’s horror of amalgamation, I neither approve nor extenuate the systematic injustice and frequent barbarity in which that horror expresses itself. The present state of society in the South is as inhuman as it is inconsistent with the democratic and Christian principles which the Southern white man so loudly, and in the main sincerely, professes. The Jim Crow car, and all such discriminations in the system of public conveyance, are, I believe, necessities, but deplorable necessities none the less. The constant struggle to exclude the negro from political power is at best a negative and unproductive expenditure of energy, at worst a source of political dishonesty and corruption. The wresting of the law, whether criminal or civil, into an instrument for keeping the negro in a state of abject serfdom, is a scandal and a disgrace to any civilized community. The 235constant resort to lawless violence and cruelty in revenge for negro crime (real or imaginary) is a hideous blot upon the fair fame of the South, if not rather an impeachment of her sanity. The truth is, in fact, that constant inter-racial irritation leaves neither race entirely sane, and that abominable crime and no less abominable punishment are merely the acutest symptom of an ill-omened conjuncture of things, which puts an unfair and unnatural strain upon both black and white human nature. The criminal stupidity that brought the negro to America cannot be annulled by passively “making the best of it.” If its evil effects are to be counteracted, corrected, and wiped out, it must be through an active and constructive effort of large-minded statesmanship.

Back to Africa?

The deportation of the negro has been urged by many American writers, generally in a somewhat illogical fashion. They start by asserting his total incapacity for self-government, as demonstrated in Haiti, Liberia, and elsewhere, and then recommend the foundation of a new negro republic in some undefined portion of Africa. A curious scheme was put forward in 1889, in an anonymous book entitled, “An Appeal to Pharaoh,” written, I believe, by Mr. Carl McKinley, of Charleston, South Carolina. Mr. McKinley’s proposal was to promote “the voluntary and steady emigration of 236the active maternal element of the negro race.” He calculated that if 12,500 child-bearing females, between the ages of twenty and thirty, could every year be induced to emigrate (taking their husbands with them), the whole “maternal element” of the coloured population would be removed within fifty years. The plan was, apparently, that as soon as a child was born to a young negro couple, they were to be persuaded to emigrate, and that thus the prolific negro would gradually be transferred to the new negro commonwealth, only the sterile element of the race being left to die off at their leisure. It is unnecessary to criticize this scheme, which is now twenty years old, and does not seem to have found any serious champions. I mention it as perhaps the most carefully considered of the suggestions for an exodus to Africa.

In no form does the African project seem to me at all a hopeful one. The habitable portions of Africa are, I take it, pretty well staked out among the European Powers, so that an elaborate and costly international arrangement would be necessary before the requisite territory would be available. But supposing this difficulty overcome, would the United States be justified in simply dumping its coloured population in Africa, and then washing its hands of them? It might just as well drive them into the sea and have done with it. The negro character has shown no fitness for the very difficult task of combined 237pioneering and nation-building that it would have to encounter. To the lower elements in the race, the return to Africa might mean repatriation in the sense of a not unwelcome home-coming to savagery; but the better elements would suffer greatly in such a relapse, while of their own strength they probably could not resist it. Toward these better elements, and indeed toward the whole race, the United States has a responsibility that it could not, and certainly would not, shirk; so that it would in effect have to undertake the policing of a distant, troublesome, and unsatisfactory dependency, which might, in addition, not improbably involve it in international difficulties. This would be preferable to the present state of things, but still far from a desirable solution of the problem.

The same objections apply to a settlement in South America, the Philippines, or anywhere else outside the United States. Deportation, in a word, is beset with disadvantages. It would be ruinously costly and indefensibly cruel. If there ever was a time for it, that time is past.

A Negro State.

What, then, is the alternative? Manifestly, concentration within the United States—the formation of a new State which should be, not a white man’s land, but a black man’s land.

Is this physically possible? Is there enough 238unoccupied territory to permit of such a concentration? Of absolutely unoccupied territory there probably is not enough; but those who have studied the matter tell us that there is plenty of territory so thinly occupied that the white settlers could be removed and compensated at no extravagant cost. According to the Honourable John Temple Graves:—

Lower California might be secured. The lands west of Texas may be had. But the Government does not need to purchase. Four hundred million acres of Government land is yet untaken and undeveloped in the West. Of these vast acres the expert hydrographer of the Interior Department has reported that it is easily possible to redeem by irrigation enough to support in plenty a population of sixty million people.

We may liberally discount this estimate, and yet leave it unquestionable that the resources of the United States are amply sufficient to admit of the establishment of a new State without any exorbitant disturbance of the existing distribution of territory.

It would be absurd for me to forecast in any detail the methods by which the concentration should be brought about. They must be devised and elaborated by the great American statesman who is to come. If he can successfully grapple with this colossal task, he will deserve to rank with Washington and Lincoln in the affections of his countrymen. It may be pretty safely predicted that he will attempt no sudden and forcible 239displacement of the mass of the negro race. Rather he will establish local conditions that shall tempt the younger and more enterprising negroes to migrate of their own free will; while he will probably fix by legislation a pretty distant date—say five-and-twenty years ahead—after which it shall be competent for the various State governments^[70] forcibly to evict (with compensation) and transplant to the new State any negroes under, say, forty-five years of age still lingering within their boundaries. There will be no need at any time to disturb old or middle-aged negroes who are disinclined to start life afresh under new conditions.

The probability is, however, that if once the new State were judiciously set on foot, the difficulty would be so to moderate the westward rush as to prevent an unnecessary dislocation of the labour-market in the South. Negro labour could and would be gradually replaced by white labour; but a sudden negro exodus on a large scale would embarrass agriculture and other industries in most of the Southern States. It would be one of the main problems of the case so to regulate the flow of migration as to make it continuous, yet not excessive.

There seems to be little doubt that the negro 240race, as a whole, would welcome any reasonable means of escape from the galling conditions of their life in the South. On the other hand, there is no doubt whatever that all the more intelligent members of the race are staunchly and even pathetically loyal to American ideals, and would be very unwilling to live under any other than the American form of government. In the new State, they would be members of a negro community without ceasing to be American citizens. It might be necessary at first to establish some provisional government like that of an American territory or English crown colony; but as soon as the country was sufficiently settled, and the mechanism of life in full swing, there could be no difficulty or danger in admitting the new community into the Union, with full State rights. Negro education has enormously progressed since the bad old days of Reconstruction; and there is no reason to doubt that the population could furnish a competent legislature, executive and judiciary. Legislative aberrations would be checked by the Supreme Court of the United States; and if things went thoroughly wrong, and a new Haiti threatened to develop in the heart of the Republic, why, United States troops would always be at hand to hold a black mob or a black adventurer in awe. But it would doubtless be a fundamental principle that no white man could vote or hold office in the negro State, while, reciprocally, no coloured man could vote or hold 241office in the white States.^[71] The abrogation of the Fifteenth Amendment would remove from the Constitution of the United States a constant source of trouble.

I am far from denying that this racial readjustment would demand a huge effort and a very large expense. In many individual cases it might cause a good deal of hardship to people of both colours. But that both colours would enormously and permanently benefit by the effort seems to me indubitable. It would be, before everything, an act of justice to the negro. It would enable him to build up a polity of his own, on lines to which his mind is already habituated. It would offer him full opportunity for the development of his talents and ambitions, unhampered by any social discriminations or disabilities. The Hampton-Tuskegee movement has been fitting great numbers of the race to carry out the necessary tasks of construction and organization involved in the material and moral upbuilding of the new community. Every aid should, of course, be afforded for the transference to the new domain of all negro universities, colleges, and similar institutions. I see little reason to doubt that the sense of new and unhampered opportunity would stimulate the mental and moral energies of the race, and beget a higher competency, a new self-respect. They would feel that they were on trial before the 242eyes of the world, that their future was in their own hands, and that they must vindicate their claim to the rights and liberties of civilized humanity. They would have a very fair chance of success; and in case of failure they would at worst relapse upon some sort of crown colony government. A regularly established and benevolent despotism would, at any rate, be better than the capricious and malevolent despotism to which they are now subjected in the South.

“But,” it may be said, “the rights and liberties of civilized humanity include the right to move freely hither and thither over the face of the earth. This right, at any rate, would be denied to the Afro-American, inclosed within the ring-fence of his own State.” There is, I think, a sufficient answer to this objection. The right to travel would not be denied to the negro. Nor would he be debarred from emigrating and settling abroad among any community that was willing to receive him. It is, I think, becoming more and more clear that the right of every man, white, black, or yellow, to effect a permanent settlement outside his own country, is subject to this qualification. The idea that all the world ought to belong equally to all men, and that rational development tends toward an unrestricted intermingling of races, seems to be signally contradicted by the trend of events. Is it not the great essential for the ultimate world-peace that races should learn to keep themselves to themselves?

243If the negro State is established with any success, I do not believe that its inhabitants will feel it an undue restriction on their liberties that they are forbidden to settle in other parts of the Union. The population question will gradually regulate itself. A fairly civilized people, with limited opportunities of expansion, will soon realize the penalties of breeding beyond its means of subsistence.

And what of the South, when this act of justice to the negro shall have been performed? It will awaken, as from a nightmare, to the realization of its splendid destiny. No longer will one of the richest and most beautiful regions of the world be hampered in its material and spiritual development by a legacy of ancestral crime. All that is best in the South—and the Southern nature is rich in elements of magnanimity and humanity—abhors the inhuman necessities imposed upon it by the presence of the negro. The Southern white man writhes under the criticisms of the North and of Europe, which he feels to be ignorant and in great measure unjust, yet which he can only answer by an impotent, “You do not know! You cannot understand!”^[72] He has to confess, too, that 244there is much in Southern policy and practice that even the necessities of the situation cannot excuse—much that can only be palliated as the result of a constant overstrain to which human nature ought never to be subjected. Remove the causes of this overstrain, and a region perhaps the most favoured by Nature of all in the Western Hemisphere will stand where it ought to stand—in the van, not only of civilization, but of humanity.

245PART III

HAVANA TO PANAMA

246

I THE AMERICAN IN CUBA

I have known few more curious sensations than that of crossing in a single night from Florida to Cuba: leaving the New World at ten p.m. and arriving at six a.m. in the Old World. For Havana is distinctly an Old World city—more so, I am told, than some of the cities of modern Spain. From the moment the steamer passes between Morro Castle and La Punta, and skirts beneath the grey and pink cliffs of the huge idle fortress of La Cabana, one feels that one has left behind the region of the Immature, and entered upon that of the Over-ripe.

I am not going to attempt a description of Havana, with its many-coloured, swarming Southern life; its arcaded side-walks; its huge windows, all barred with ornamental ironwork, at which a great part of the social life of the city is carried on; its narrow business streets, the Calle Obispo and Calle O’Reilly, in which the frequent awnings stretched from house to house create a rich golden shade; its grey old cathedral; its cool green patios framed in the 247gloom of high-arched gateways; its handsome, rather commonplace, modern squares; its Prado and its esplanade, where the restless purple waters of the Gulf of Mexico fling up, every now and then, white pillars of spray. Except for its splendid harbour, the city has no great advantage of situation, being placed on low hills, and surrounded by others not much higher. The chief impression it leaves on the mind is that of opulent colour—often garish where the hand of man has held the brush, but, where Nature has her own way, in tree, shrub, soil, ocean, and sky, indescribably and inexhaustibly gorgeous. A painter of the temperate zone would here throw away his palette, except, it may be, for the wonderful blue distances, of which, on the outskirts, one has now and then a glimpse.

A Paradise Regained.

From all that I could see and hear in Cuba, I felt thoroughly convinced that American intervention had amply justified itself, and that this noble island, after all its miseries and distractions, was now in a fair way to become as prosperous and happy as, by its natural advantages, it is entitled to be. The splendid work of cleansing and sanitation which the Americans have done in Havana I more fully appreciated after a brief inspection of a couple of unsanitated Spanish-American towns—Cartagena and Barranquilla. But cleaning-up and road-making, and the organization of public services, are not all that 248the Americans are doing. In the Cuban guide-book it was significant to note the number of places which owed their fame to having been the scene of this or that massacre or military execution. It would be premature, perhaps, to say that all that sort of thing is past and done with; but there will certainly not be much more of it; the United States will see to that. I am bound to confess that here, in my opinion, the Republic has “taken up the white man’s burden” very efficiently and in a very true sense.

The sense of prosperity was very strongly borne in upon me in Vedado, a suburb of Havana, whither I went to call upon an American gentleman, resident for many years in Cuba, to whom I had an introduction. Vedado is a great sun-baked stretch of ground between the low hills and the sea to the west of Havana, where handsome bungalow-villas are rising in great numbers. As yet it is in a somewhat raw and ragged condition; but there is evidence of wealth and activity on every hand.

The Cuban Colour-Line.

My primary object in visiting Mr. Ogden (as I shall call him) was to inquire into the relations of the white and coloured races in Cuba.

“It is very obvious,” I said, “in the streets of Havana, that, if there is any colour-line here, it is not drawn anything like as strictly as in the Southern States. I see a good many black policemen; and there are black 249motor-men and conductors on the street-cars. Among the passengers in the cars there is no distinction of colour. In the Colon Cemetery, as I came down here, I noticed that, among the thirty heroes commemorated on the Firemen’s Monument, four seemed to be pure negroes; and there were negro traits in six or seven more. Is there really no colour discrimination at all?”

“In the sense of legal disability,” said Mr. Ogden, “there is none. Socially, of course, there is a good deal, though no hard-and-fast barrier is raised between the races. Each family, each individual, draws the colour-line according to taste. But, naturally, there is a tendency for the pure white to exclude the unmistakably coloured.”

“Would a white man lose caste on marrying a coloured woman?”

“Oh, very distinctly. I could tell you of several instances.”

“But there is no serious friction—no feud—between the races?”

“At present, no; but I’m not at all sure that a race problem may not declare itself when the new Constitution comes into force in February next. We shall then have the negro in politics; and that is how trouble always arises.”

“You fear a Cuban repetition of the Reconstruction time?”

“Yes, indeed I do. The negro is susceptible to every sort of political machination. Every 250carpet-bag demagogue can make a tool of him, and that the Cuban white men won’t stand for.”

“Meanwhile, however, there is no trouble? You have not any such Reign of Terror here as there is some parts of the Southern States?”

“No. Outrages on women are practically unknown here.”

“And how do you account for the difference between Cuba and the Southern States in respect to this class of crime?”

“Well, sir, I’m a Southern man myself, and all I can say is that the nigger here don’t seem to me the same as he is at home. I believe it is partly a real difference of race. |The Pick of the Basket.| You see, most of the slave-ships used to touch at Havana before they went on to Charleston or New Orleans; and the Cuban planters used to make a study of the different races and tribes, and select the best types. The daughter of a very wealthy planter—she’s an old lady now—has told me all about it. They knew precisely the qualities of the different breeds. Some were best fitted for body-servants, some for field-work, some for handling stock, others for educating and making clerks and book-keepers of. So, you see, the Cubans got the pick of the basket, and only the lower class—the mere brawny animals—got to the United States.”

This theory did not strike me as wholly adequate to the case, nor did Mr. Ogden pretend that it was. But there may be something in it, and 251I commend it to the notice of students of negro ethnology.

“By-the-by,” Mr. Ogden continued, “there is a curious African survival among the negroes here—a sort of semi-religious society called the Ñanigo, which indulges in strange rites of its own, and occasionally in assassination.”

“When you say ‘semi-religious,’ do you mean Christian or pagan?”

“Oh, pagan entirely. The members are generally tattooed or decorated with scars and cicatrices. They come greatly to the front in Carnival time, when they parade the streets, carrying a sort of illuminated pagoda and making strange noises by grating gourds.”

The Political Situation.

The talk then strayed to politics, and Mr. Ogden gave me a no doubt one-sided, but evidently sincere, view of the situation.

“I take it,” said I, “that Cuba is now peaceful and contented?”

“Oh yes, fairly so,” said Mr. Ogden; “but capital is still shy of coming in, until the political condition is more stable.”

“What was the reason of President Palma’s downfall?”

“The sole reason was that he was too good for them—too honest, too scrupulous. Ninety-five per cent. of those who took active part in the revolution of 1906 were negroes, and the rest were, with very few exceptions, men of no standing whatever, either political or social.

252“The revolution was largely worked by the editor of a popular paper, a very able man whose sole moral quality is a total lack of hypocrisy. He said quite frankly, ‘In the old days I was always in touch with the Spanish Governor, and all sorts of good things came my way. Now, on the other hand, there’s nothing doing, and it don’t suit me.’ For a short time I ran the English page of his paper for him; and once, when he wanted me to put in something that I knew to be a blazing lie, I said to him, ‘I wonder how you can reconcile it with either your principles or your policy to print such an utter falsehood.’ He slapped his right pocket, and said, ‘My principles are here;’ his left pocket, ‘and my policy here.’

Engineering a Revolution.

“The chief of the secret service had warned Palma for some time that a revolution was brewing—that there was open talk in the cafés of his assassination or deportation. He only said, ‘Why, what is there to make a revolution about? Our credit is good, our public works are going forward, prosperity is spreading. Where should the revolution come from?’

“A party of men were suborned to enter the barracks of a company of rural guards, shoot all the men in their sleep, and seize their arms. This was to be the signal for a general rising; but the bandits were left in the lurch by their friends. Orders were given to take them alive 253or dead—preferably dead. Unfortunately they were taken alive, and have all been released by Mr. Taft, on the plea that their offence was political.

“Then a man got up a revolution in a remote province; which meant that he set a lot of niggers looting stores and carrying off canned salmon, and calico, and boots and shoes. A friend of his in Havana went down to find out the reason of this revolution. The leader explained that he had 7000 dollars of gambling debts which he couldn’t pay; and for that sum he would order off the revolution. The friend said: ‘You can’t have 7000, but I know of 3000 dollars allotted for a purpose that can stand over; I think I can get you that, and you can make a composition with your creditors.’ The leader agreed to this proposal, but Palma refused to sanction the deal, and the rising went on, and spread, and became serious.

“Palma confessed to me that the only troops he could rely on had only a few rounds of ammunition. |A Foreign Legion.| ‘Why, then,’ said I, ‘there’s only one thing to be done—we’ll telegraph to the Colt Manufacturing Company for twenty machine guns and a million rounds of ammunition; and I’ll organize the men to work them.’ Palma held up his hands in protest. ‘A million rounds! Why, that’s enough for a war!’

“The Colt Company could only deliver ten 254machine guns, but those we got; and I organized a foreign legion. It contained Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians—450 men in all. We were just ready for business when Mr. Taft arrived with the Peace Commission; and what followed I have never understood, and don’t understand to this day.

“We went on board the Des Moines to wait on Mr. Taft. He said to me, ‘Mr. Ogden, I understand you are an American citizen—then what are you doing in that uniform, and under arms? And that man there? And that man there?’ I replied, ‘Mr. Taft, I have lived in Cuba twelve years. This gentleman is an Englishman—he has been fifteen years here. This gentleman is French—he has been twenty years here. We have wives and children here; and we have formed ourselves into a foreign legion, because we think we have a right to protect our families and to preserve the peace.’

“‘What do you want me to do?’ said Mr. Taft. |Muzzling the Machine-Guns.| ‘The very thing you won’t do,’ said I. ‘How do you know?’ he said. ‘I’m a reasonable man, and I’m here to do something. How do you know it mayn’t be what you want?’

“‘Well, sir,’ said I, ‘we want you to sit still, and smoke your cigar, and do nothing.’

“‘For how long?’

“‘For twenty-four hours—at most for forty-eight.’

255“‘And meantime,’ said he, ‘you propose to keep the peace by committing an act of war?’

“‘It won’t be war, sir,’ I said. ‘These people can’t stand up for a minute before machine guns. It isn’t in them. In the first place, they haven’t more than six or eight rounds of ammunition apiece, and you know you can’t make war with six rounds of ammunition. But I don’t care though they had a million rounds—they simply cannot stand up. There’s no reason why they should. There’s no patriotism, no principle among them. They’re merely out for a little loot. If you tie our hands, and give the country over to this gang, Cuba will stink to heaven before many months are over.’

“But it was no use. Palma had to go, and now we don’t know what lies before us.

“It isn’t that the Cubans aren’t fit for political life. Many of them are, perfectly. But with the ignorant negro and low white vote, there is no saying what may happen.

“I wish to heaven President Roosevelt had just added a few words of postscript to his message to the Cubans. If he had only said, ‘Though we intend that Cuba shall have honest self-government, we don’t propose to put up with revolutions,’ all would have been well.”

256

II A GAME FOR GODS

A cloudlessly hot Sunday afternoon in Havana—I am lounging in the Parque Central, when I observe a poster announcing that a game of “Jai Alai” is at that moment in progress. The very intelligent “Standard Guide to Havana,” sold by Mr. Foster (the Cook of Cuba), notes this “famous gambling game” as one of the sights of the city; so I charter a cab, and jog through the baking streets to the “Frontón” in which it is played. You first enter a long and evil-smelling hall, with various refreshment bars, like the lower regions of a hippodrome; and then you pass into the “Frontón” itself. Imagine an amphitheatre sliced in two at its longitudinal axis; one half retained, with its shape unaltered, to serve as the auditorium; the other half converted into a titanic racquet court, 175 ft. long, 36 ft. deep, and (I imagine) something like 40 ft. high. The long wall, of course, fronts the audience, the two short walls close in the ends. The floor of the immense court is made of smooth and almost shining concrete; the walls are of stone, painted chocolate 257colour, and the long wall is marked off by perpendicular lines into seventeen compartments. The purpose of this I did not understand, for play takes place, not against this back wall, but up and down the whole length of the great court. Imagine, now, the great auditorium, tier on tier, filled with a vast crowd of excited, shouting, cheering men (there were only about a dozen women present), while bookmakers in red Basque caps move up and down in front of the first tier of seats, and permeate the higher tiers as well, yelling the odds in their raucous voices. As a vehicle for betting “Jai Alai” is generally recognized as “a curse to the community,” and the American Governor has been much blamed for tolerating it. But in itself,—as an exercise of skill, endurance, strength, agility, and grace—I do not hesitate to call it out and away the finest game I ever saw.

Readers who have been to Spain may recognize this as the Basque game of pelota. |“Partido” and “Quiniela.”| I had heard its name; but certainly its extraordinary merits had never reached my cars. Probably it is too difficult for the ordinary amateur; the professionals whom I saw are engaged at large salaries, and showed marvellous skill. But as a mere spectacle I should think it would prove attractive anywhere.^[73] The 258game is perfectly simple to understand, and there is never a dull moment in it, except the few moments of rest which the players allow themselves. Here is my guide-book’s account of it:—

Attached to a leather gauntlet worn by the players is a long, narrow, curved basket or cestus (cesta) from which the ball is hurled and in which it is caught. The small ball (pelota) is of indiarubber covered with leather, and weighs about four ounces. The players are distinguished by their dress as whites (blancos) and blues (azules). Two games are played. In one, called a partido, two blues play against two whites. In the other, called quiniela, five players participate, one against another in succession, until the winner shall have scored the game of six points.

The quiniela seemed to me more graceful and beautiful than the partido, or foursome, if not quite so exciting. The players wear the simplest costume—white drill trousers and either white or blue shirts. For a long time I was puzzled to think what familiar object the “cesta” recalled to me; but at last I hit on it—the thing is for all the world like those wicker guards which linkmen put over hansom-wheels, to save the gowns of ladies in alighting. The basket is, I take it, about two feet long. When a player lets his arm drop from the shoulder, the tip of the “cesta” is about level with his ankle.

Now, how shall I describe the actual play? It is racquets enormously magnified, and carried 259to an almost superhuman pitch of skill. Only once does the player touch the ball with his hand, and that is in leading off. |Playing the Game.| Standing about the middle of the court, he drops the ball on the floor, catches it with his “cesta” in the rebound, and sends it whizzing against the end wall. It flies back like a streak of lightning, and instantly one of the other side has it in his “cesta,” makes two or three leaps to give himself impetus, and hurls it again at the end wall. This time it is not improbable that he has put such force into his cast that the ball rebounds the whole 175 feet, strikes the opposite wall, and flashes down to the floor. Then one of his opponents must be ready to take it on the hop, and, reinforcing its movement, to send it flying once more against the end wall, of course doing his best to “place” it awkwardly for the other side. I have seen the ball returned thirty times in a single rally; but the average number would probably be some twelve or fifteen. And almost every catch and return seemed an incredible feat of skill. Just consider: here is a space of 6300 square feet, and only two players on each side—in the quiniela only one. What astounding rapidity of eye and agility of limb it must take to be always at the right spot to catch a little demon of a ball, that tears flashing about the court like a thing possessed! And the men are almost always at the right spot. They may misplace the ball or send it “out;” but it is 260the rarest thing for the ball to escape them entirely. They run, they leap, they make the most amazing whirling strokes; if the ball comes very low, they fall down, and often hurl it with the greatest accuracy from the most unconventional positions on the ground. Not once but hundreds of times that afternoon did I see things done that looked absolutely impossible. Perhaps their variety of resource is their most astonishing quality. But, wonderful as it all is, it is still more beautiful. With all their rapidity, their grace is perfect, like that of lithe, resilient, feline animals. If anything more marvellous or more graceful was done at the Olympic games, then the Greeks were athletes indeed.