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Page 10
First of all, the Negro is here, and that not of his own consent. He has
not forced himself upon the country; he has been forced to make this his
home against his will. We of the white race are responsible for his
presence. We invited him here in the most pressing manner, and would not
take "no" for an answer.
And he is here to stay. All the ingenious schemes for settling this
troublesome question by taking up the black race bodily and dropping it
in some roomy region far away from all possible contact with white
people, are utterly delusive. The Negro does not want to go elsewhere.
Having been compelled to make his home here for two centuries, he is
domesticated here, and has as good a right to remain as the white man.
Moreover, he can see as well as any one that this is the best country in
the world to live in--the land offering greatest opportunity for
advancement, the poor man's Paradise. Brought by force, he will not
relinquish his rightful hold here except by force. And we may be sure
that our National Government will never undertake the chimerical
experiment of deporting him to some other land, and pay the enormous
expense of it out of the National Treasury. Having been brought by the
providence of God to expiate its former wrongs to the black man at such
immense cost of treasure and blood, the Nation will be slow to tax
itself enormously to do him another wrong.
Moreover, it is not necessary that the races should be separated in
order to settle the difficulty that now disturbs us. All the Negro asks
is to be treated with justice and equity, and to be given a fair chance
in life. We have simply to apply the elementary principles of our common
Christianity to the problem and deal with the Negro in the spirit of the
Golden Rule and the whole difficulty vanishes. It looks as though God
had made this a polychromatic country--red, black, white and yellow--on
purpose that we might give a gospel illustration of the essential unity
of all races, and show how these rainbow tints are to be blended in the
white light of Christian brotherhood.
Nor is it desirable that the black man should leave us, even if he
wanted to. It would impoverish us in no small degree and cripple us in
our advancement. He is the natural laborer of the South, and has added,
as we shall see, immensely to its prosperity since the war, and he is to
be one of the chief factors in securing the future wealth of the
country. These reasons combine with overwhelming force to show that an
exodus is undesirable and impossible, and that the Negro is here to
stay.
And he is to be here in greatly increased numbers. The fecundity of the
race is remarkable. The 4,000,000 blacks that were freed by the
emancipation proclamation are 8,000,000 now. They multiply by births
alone 7 per cent. faster than the whites by births and immigration
combined. It is estimated that they are increasing at the rate of 500 a
day and that their numbers are now doubling every twenty years. This may
be a little exaggerated, but it is not far out of the way. If they are
increasing and continue to increase at this rate, in twenty years they
will be 16,000,000 strong, or nearly as many as the entire population of
the whole country in 1840; by 1930, they will number 32,000,000, or more
than we had of all races here at the outbreak of our Civil War; by the
middle of the next century they will number 64,000,000, or more than our
present population within the borders of the Republic. Discount this
estimate as much as you please, the increase in the colored race is sure
to be tremendous, and it is plain that the race problem will increase in
difficulty and in momentous consequences to the Nation until it is
settled on Christian principles. And the work of settling it admits of
no delay.
The Negro is to be a very important factor in promoting the future
prosperity of the country. Already it is manifest that his value to the
South as a freed man is far greater than the price formerly set upon him
as a chattel. The unrequited toil of the slave is seen in the light of
history to be the dearest kind of labor. It was frequently said after
the war that the emancipated Negro would be worthless as a laborer; that
he was naturally lazy, shiftless, and a shirk, and that he would relapse
into a vagabond. But, as a matter of fact, far more good work has been
done in the South since the war than before, and for the most part the
Negro has done it. Great crops of cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, corn,
and other staples have been raised and marketed; mines have been
developed, railroads built, manufactories established, and hundreds of
other industries opened and pushed in the new era of prosperity which
has dawned in the South; and while the capital and brains for this have
been furnished by the whites, and largely from the North, the manual
labor has been done mainly by the blacks. They have made the New South
possible. Take the single item of the cotton they have raised: The
twenty-one cotton crops from 1841 to 1861, raised by slave labor,
amounted to 58,500,000 bales; the twenty-one cotton crops from 1865 to
1885, raised by free labor, amounted to 93,500,000 bales. There was a
gain, with free labor, of nearly 35,000,000 bales, worth $2,000,000,000,
or about the full estimated value of all the slaves set free by the war.
These facts show the value of the Negro to the South simply as a common
laborer.
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