79 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



zation. It held a semibarbarous race in close contact with their 

 superiors. When that bond was loosened, those negroes who had 

 the fiber of freedom in them stood erect in independent manhood ; 

 the others sank to earth in abject hopelessness. 



Twenty-eight years have elapsed since the close of the war. 

 Those years have solved many problems and harmonized many 

 differences, but they have not solved the problem of lifting the 

 mass of the blacks to the plane of intelligent citizenship. There 

 is much secret sympathy at the North with the suppression of the 

 negro vote, because it is believed that it is not so much the result 

 of race prejudice as of the determination of an intelligent minor- 

 ity not to be ruled by an ignorant and degraded majority. To 

 begin civilization with the ballot is like beginning the Bible with 

 Revelations ; it is reading backward. Let us not reopen the ques- 

 tion of the wisdom of the Government when, hurried on by the 

 passions of both North and South, it armed the negro with the 

 ballot as his sole protection. That is done. Our problem is before 

 us. As the Oriental proverb runs : " To-day is ours ; yesterday 

 and to-morrow belong to God." 



The negro must be educated ; but how ? Education is a good 

 word, but, unfortunately, vague. It may include everything from 

 the alphabet to the whole sweep of arts and letters. It may be 

 general or technical ; physical, mental, or moral. Let us try to 

 arrive at a more definite understanding of it. There is perhaps 

 no better parallel for the education of a race than the education 

 of a child, only for every five years we must take five hundred. 

 Men fall into vice but they climb into virtue. Nothing could 

 be more unreasonable than to expect to see any marked change 

 from the conditions engendered by slavery in so brief a period as 

 thirty years ; yet we hear the accusation constantly made against 

 the negro that he is still a lazy, idle vagabond. Perhaps he is, 

 but it is only another illustration of Franklin's parable, wherein 

 Abraham is represented as wishing to cast the wanderer out of 

 his tent because he will not worship Jehovah. But the Lord re- 

 buked Abraham, saying, " Have I not borne with thee these 

 ninety and nine years, and couldst thou not bear with him one 

 night ? " 



Scarcely a day, as history measures time, has elapsed since the 

 negroes, trained for centuries to depend on others for the means 

 of livelihood, found themselves flung rudely into the grim strug- 

 gle for existence. Not a foot of land was given them by the Gov- 

 ernment. No one ever heard of a negro reservation. They were 

 left naked to their enemies, not the white men round them, but 

 those far more relentless foes, the accursed slave habits, the in- 

 heritance of generations. The fatal weakness of slavery to the 

 enslaved lies in the fact that its teachings strike at the root of 



