TWENTY YEARS OF NEGRO EDUCATION. 25 



Prejudice must not be allowed a voice in its solution, and passion must 

 be excluded from counsel. The negro will not consent to his own 

 deportation. The Southern planters, too, would not, if they could, 

 consent to it, nor to any agitation of it, because it unsettles and un- 

 hinges the labor that is more profitable free than it ever was or could 

 be in the days of slavery. The negro is more intelligent now than 

 then, and therefore more valuable because a better, a closer, and more 

 skillful worker. Deportation is not, for these reasons, to be con- 

 sidered. We must, therefore, deal with the negro and treat of him 

 with the full understanding that we can not get rid of him. His com- 

 mercial value, supplementing his rights under the Federal and State 

 Constitutions, says we can not. 



What, then, is to be done with the negro ? Nothing but increase 

 the number of schools and schoolmasters, make education compulsory, 

 and make technical education easily available to him in all parts of the 

 South. The negro must be taught the virtue of self-reliance, and the 

 value of the courts as his safeguard and defense under the Constitu- 

 tion and laws of the nation and of the States. Agitation exalts the 

 negro to a degree of imaginary importance that people at the North 

 can not understand. He is a sensible man within his limits of mind 

 and comprehension, so long as he feels that he is not the center of a 

 pet anxiety. Agitation has retarded and interfered with his growth 

 in the past ; it has proved exceedingly mischievous, and is not to be 

 thought of in the future. It breeds dissatisfaction, raises hopes that 

 can never be fulfilled, and tends to widen the breach between the 

 races. For these reasons Mr. Cable's suggestion of opening the schools 

 of the South in common to blacks and whites is not to be entertained.* 

 The race-feeling and race-prejudice that everywhere, wherever the 

 Anglo-Saxons come in contact with the negro, keep them apart, will 

 not brook it, nor will it permit the acceptance of the opening of 

 concert halls, theatres, or lecture halls indiscriminately to both races. 

 The same may be said of hotels and steamboats. It will not do to 

 arouse prejudices — we must allay them. But even if the race-instinct 

 theory be wrong, and it is found that there is nothing more serious 

 than a prejudice that may disappear before the sun of truth, of jus- 

 tice, and of right, it is not policy to arouse it by fixed or a purposed 

 antagonism. It will disappear in time ; it will be swept away by the 

 uplifting of the negro to a plane whence he can prove his title to as 

 high consideration in all respects as his white brother. The education 

 of the negro has uplifted and will uplift him, and will prove the solid 

 and enduring cause for the effect desired, if anything can. A soft an- 



* The evil effect of an attempt at mixed schools was felt in Louisiana ; the superin- 

 tendent of which State, in 1871, complained that the act forbidding the establishment of 

 public schools from which colored children should be rejected excited determined opposi- 

 tion on the part of many who would otherwise co-operate in the opening of schools, and 

 in the raising of funds for their support. 



