THE FUTURE OF THE NEGRO. 



545 



forming empires or building stone cities, or employing a common 

 medium of intercommunication ? Mr. Blyden says lie has formed 

 cities full of busy life and commerce ; but have they ever been 

 better than encampments, and why have they not lasted ? We 

 who write certainly do not believe in the incurable incapacity of 

 the race, for we know of Bishop Crowther and Mr. Blyden, and 

 have talked with negroes apparently as thoughtful and as well 

 instructed as any Europeans ; but we confess that the history of 

 the race remains to us an insoluble puzzle, except upon the theory 

 that there are breeds of mankind in whom that strangest of all 

 phenomena, the arrestment of development, occurs at a very early 

 stage. The negro went by himself far beyond the Australian sav- 

 age. He learned the uses of fire, the fact that sown grain will 

 grow, the value of shelter, the use of the bow and the canoe, and 

 the good of clothes ; but there to all appearance he stopped, una- 

 ble, until stimulated by another race like the Arab, to advance a 

 step. He did not die, like the Australian. He did not sink, like 

 one or two varieties of the red Indian, and of the aborigines of 

 South Africa, into a puny being hardly like a man ; but he stopped 

 at a point as if arrested by a divine will. There is not a shadow 

 of proof that the negro described by Werne differs in any way 

 from the negro of the time of Sesostris. It is not quite certain 

 even that the race, when started again, would, as a race, go on 

 improving. The Haytians, who are Christians, who are free, and 

 who are in the fullest contact with great white races, are believed 

 to be retrograding ; and only the hopeful would believe in the fu- 

 ture of American slaves, if they were to be expelled, as De Tocque- 

 ville thought they would ultimately be, to the islands, or, as is 

 infinitely more probable, should the war of races ever break out, 

 to Central America. 



As far as we see, nothing really improves the negro except one 

 of two causes — cross-breeding, and catching hold of some foreign 

 but superior creed. The cross-breeds of the Soudan and of South 

 Africa seem to have some fine qualities — matchless courage, for 

 example — and under a strict but vivifying white rule might, we 

 fancy, be brought in a century or two up to the Asiatic level. 

 They produce generals, at all events, and chiefs with some tinct- 

 ure of statesmanship, and have poetry and a folk-lore of their 

 own. Those negroes, again, who have embraced Islam do show a 

 certain manliness, a capacity for aggregation, and a tendency, at 

 all events, to form kingdoms, and organize armies, and obey laws, 

 which are the first steps toward a higher civilization. It is not a 

 high civilization, for, when all is said, a Mohammedan negro is 

 not an ideal of humanity toward which Europeans can look with 

 any feeling of enthusiasm ; but still, it is higher, far higher, than 

 the condition of the African pagan. The negro who embraces 



VOL. XXXIII. — 35 



