THE NEGRO QUESTION. 179 



The Caucasian and the negro are not simply unlike, but they are 

 contrasted, and are as far apart as any other two races of human 

 beings. They are unassimilable and immiscible without rapid de- 

 generacy. Ethnologically they are nearly polar opposites. With 

 the Caucasian progress has been upward. Whatever is great in art, 

 invention, literature, science, civilization, religion, has characterized 

 him. In his native land the negro has made little or no advance- 

 ment for nearly four thousand years. Surrounded by and in contact 

 with a higher civilization, he has not invented a machine, nor painted 

 a picture, nor written a book, nor organized a stable government, 

 nor constructed a code of law^s. He has not suppressed the slave 

 trade, which, according to recent testimony, was never more flourish- 

 ing. He has no monuments nor recorded history. For thousands 

 of years there lies behind the race one dreary, unrelieved, monotonous 

 chapter of ignorance, nakedness, superstition, savagery. All efforts 

 to reclaim, civilize. Christianize, have been disastrous failures, except 

 what has been accomplished in this direction in the United States. 



It need not be disguised, for it is the ever-present, indisputable 

 fact, that while there are alleviations of the unpleasantness, the rela- 

 tions between the negroes and their co-citizens of the Caucasian race 

 are strained and unsatisfactory. The friction, the prejudice, the 

 cleavage, is not between Teutonic and Latin on the one side and 

 Semitic on the other, nor between Saxon and Celt; it lies deeper, 

 yields less readily to palliatives and remedies, and seems a matter of 

 adjustment for the remotest future. It may hel^D to understand the 

 situation if we analyze its causes. 



The great revolution suddenly transformed the customs, tradi- 

 tions, and conditions of the two races. O^vnership gave way to free- 

 dom; compulsory and wage-unrewarded labor to absolute control of 

 person; inequality, inferiority, subjection, to equality in the eye of 

 the law; restrained locomotion to license of movement; kindness, 

 interest in life, wealth, and physical welfare, to suspicion, distress, 

 alienation. With property in man, regulated and enforced by laws 

 in the interest of the master, labor was organized, directed by intel- 

 ligent control to the development of agi'icultural resources and to 

 the building up of a society which for refinement of manners, hos- 

 pitality, and administrative capacity, has elicited praise from dis- 

 interested travelers and investigators. The negro, whatever he may 

 have attained from the discipline of slavery, was not cultivated in 

 intelligence, in manual skill, in forethought, power of initiative, in 

 thrift, and the comforts and graces of home life. When freed, 

 many were deluded by deceptive promises. They construed free- 

 dom to mean a division of property. Release from bondage led 

 to intemperance and extravagance. Accustomed to control, unac- 



