544 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



plovers of labor, and of all Americans, and tliey have been many, 

 to whom we have opened the subject. Americans seem to us, as a 

 rule, to think most kindly of the negro, to be entirely free from 

 fear of him, to be annoyed with oppression practiced on him, but 

 to be quite hopeless about his future. He will not advance, they 

 think, and would recede but for the white man. 



History certainly bears these Americans out. Throughout its 

 whole course, in the Old World as in the modern one, under the 

 most extreme variety of circumstances, no negro of the full blood 

 has ever risen to first-class eminence among mankind. Not only 

 has there been no negro philosopher, or inventor, or artist, or 

 builder ; but there has been no negro conqueror, nor, unless we 

 class Said, Mohammed's slave, as one, and Toussaint I'Ouverture 

 as another, any negro general above the rank of a guerrilla chief. 

 There seems to be no reason for this except race. People talk of 

 the seclusion of the negro : but he has always been in contact on 

 the Nile with the Egyptian, or the Greek, or the Roman, in South 

 America with the Spaniard, and in North America with the Eng- 

 lish-speaking Teuton, and he has learned very little. It is ob- 

 jected that he has been always a slave ; but so was everybody else 

 in the Roman period, most modern Italians, for example, being 

 ,the descendants of the white slaves of the Roman gentry. More- 

 over, why does the negro put up with that position, when the 

 Chinaman, and the red Indian, and even the native of India will 

 not ? It is said that he has been buried in the most " massive " 

 of the four continents, and has been, so to speak, lost to human- 

 ity ; but he was always on the Nile, the immediate road to the 

 Mediterranean, and in West and East Africa he was on the sea. 

 Africa is probably more fertile, and almost certainly richer, than 

 Asia, and is pierced by rivers as mighty, and some of them at 

 least as navigable. What could a singularly healthy race, armed 

 with a constitution which resists the sun and defies malaria, wish 

 for better than to be seated on the Nile, or the Congo, or the Ni- 

 ger, in numbers amply sufficient to execute any needed work, from 

 the cutting of forests and the making of roads up to the building 

 of cities ? How was the negro more secluded than the Peruvian ; 

 or why was he " shut up " worse than the Tartar of Samarcand, 

 who one day shook himself, gave up all tribal feuds, and from 

 the sea of Okhotsk to the Baltic, and southward to the Nerbudda, 

 mastered the world ? One Tartar family was reigning at one 

 time over China, Tartary, India, and Russia. Why has the negro, 

 who is brave as man may be, alone of mankind never emerged 

 from his jungles, and subdued neighboring races ? Why has he 

 never invented a creed of the slightest spiritual or moral merit, 

 never, in fact, risen above fetichism ? Above all, why has he re- 

 mained in Africa, for three thousand years at least, without 



