272 HILARY A. HERBERT 



support it, is the most defensible of all the grounds on which 

 the fifteenth amendment became part of the constitution. 

 If the negro had only possessed the qualifications which po- 

 litical science tells us are essential in those on whose shoulders 

 rest the burdens of republican government, with the ballot in 

 hand he would not only have protected himself, but he would 

 have given to the southern states, and he would have helped 

 to give to the nation, the blessings of good government. But 

 the fitness for the ballot that had been taken for granted did 

 not exist. The political structures based on negro ballots, 

 like the house of the unwise man in the Scriptures, fell because 

 they were builded upon sand. 



Out of reconstruction and the fifteenth amendment have 

 come many of the peculiar phases, and nearly all the aggra- 

 vations which now beset the race problem of the south. In the 

 days of reconstruction the teachings of political science as such, 

 and of ethnology, its handmaid, had made but little impres- 

 sion in America. Political science had been taught, it is true, 

 in William and Mary college, to Jefferson and other Virginia 

 statesmen prior to the Revolution, and there were, prior to 

 1860, in a few scattered American colleges, solitary professors 

 lecturing occasionally on the subject, but great schools of 

 political science are of recent growth. 



As our country expands it has need for wider knowledge. 

 It is dealing now not only with its negroes in the south, but 

 with Cuban and Porto Rican and Philippine populations, and 

 it needs not only accurate knowledge of all these peoples; but, 

 facing as we do a future that will bring to us questions as 

 momentous as they will be novel, the time has come when we 

 must search carefully for and familiarize our people with the 

 lessons of our own history, that our experience may be a lamp 

 to guide our feet. A few years ago Professor Cope, the great 

 naturalist, made a notable contribution to the discussion of the 

 race problem. It was a series of articles published in the Open 

 Court, discussing, from the standpoint of a naturalist, the 

 differences between the white man and the negro. He showed 

 the inferiority of the negro, and contended that the mulatto 

 was in many respects, which he carefully pointed out, inferior 

 to both his parents. Then he left the firm ground of science on 



