Black America

I have attempted to show that the negro problem in the Southern States cannot be satisfactorily solved by the limitation of the suffrage, by the surrender of any portion of the country to the control of the black majority, by education of the coloured citizen, or by miscegenation of the races. The central point of the situation is the presence of the negro in the South. If he were not there, there would be no negro difficulty. The solution, therefore, that alone promises to be thoroughly effective is his removal. His mere dissemination throughout the Union would not be sufficient. No scheme of emigration from the South to the North and West can permanently benefit the negro or settle the race question. The “colour line” is, as has been repeatedly shown, even more clearly defined in the North than in the South. Everywhere in the South, for example, one may see black and white cab-drivers, though they do not love one another, plying indiscriminately for hire, black and white bricklayers working on the same buildings, black and white compositors setting up type at adjoining cases; but in most parts of the North things are different. There, with very few exceptions, the negro is not admitted to ordinary trade-union organisations; he is remorselessly “crowded out” from every occupation and employment; and his position is, upon the whole, worse than in Georgia or Louisiana. If the seven or eight millions of coloured people were to-morrow scattered equally over the States, the South, no doubt, would be relieved, but neither the North and West nor the negro would be better off. A more radical programme of removal must be adopted by any party that earnestly desires alike the welfare of the inferior stock and the final solution of the problem. There must be another exodus from Egypt, another restoration of the captive tribes.

In its bare outline the policy with which I am about to deal is not new. One of Thomas Jefferson’s most prophetic utterances was:—“Nothing is more clearly written in the Book of Destiny than the emancipation of the blacks; and it is equally certain that the two races will never live in a state of equal freedom under the same Government, so insurmountable are the barriers which nature, habit, and opinion have established between them.”

Jefferson, who died nearly forty years before emancipation became an accomplished fact, did not omit to prepare, so far as lay in his power, for the evil which he saw approaching. With Henry Clay and others, he founded the African Colonisation Society, which established on the west coast of Africa the Negro Republic of Liberia, and, between 1820 and 1860, sent thither about 10,000 free coloured people. It may at once be admitted that the colony has not been a conspicuous success, for the American immigrants and their descendants now hardly number 5,000 souls, and, according to Mr. Charles H. J. Taylor, a late American Minister to the Republic, the place is to-day “a land of snakes, centipedes, fever, miasma, poverty, superstition, and death.” But the comparative failure of the Liberia scheme is due, in my humble opinion, rather to the principles in accordance with which it was carried out than to any inherent and necessary unfitness of the negro for colonisation. I shall later point out what appears to me to be the weak points in the Constitution of Liberia, as well as in that of Hayti. If they lie where I suspect they do, it is only natural that Jefferson and his associates and successors should have overlooked them.

Nor were Jefferson and his friends the only ones who, early in the century, sought to fend off the looming negro difficulty. In 1825 Senator Rufus King, of New York, was so far-seeing as to introduce to the United States Senate a resolution declaring that “the whole public land of the United States, with the net proceeds of all future sales thereof, shall constitute and form a fund which is hereby appropriated; and the faith of the United States is hereby pledged that the said fund shall be inviolably applied to aid the emancipation of such slaves within any of the United States, and to aid the removal of such slaves and the removal of such free persons of colour in any of the United States, as by the laws of the States respectively shall be allowed to be emancipated, to any territory or country without the limits of the United States.”

Senator King was far in advance of his day and generation, and, not unnaturally, his motion came to nothing; but it is very likely indeed that, had it been carried, there would at the present moment be no considerable number of negroes in North America. The sum of money which under his scheme would already have become available for the removal of the coloured people exceeds £50,000,000 sterling, exclusive of interest, and the lands still undisposed of are worth, at a moderate computation, a hundred millions more.

Nothing practical, however, save the Liberia experiment, was attempted in Mr. King’s day, or has been attempted since, towards the final solution of a problem which for a generation has been yearly growing graver and more dangerous.

It looks now as if the moment were about to arrive when either the question must be peaceably settled or it will settle itself by violence; and it is, therefore, worth while to consider whether the most radical and permanent solution of the difficulty is practicable, and, supposing it to be so, how it may, even at this late hour, be accomplished without force and injustice.

First, let me premise that the United States, as a whole, and not merely the South, owes an enormous debt to the negro race. Everyone admits that the institution of slavery was a crime against humanity; but everyone does not remember that for a century and more the North was particeps criminis. Some aspects of her responsibility will be found dealt with in the Appendix on Slavery in the North. It is too often forgotten that Southern slavery, up to the time of emancipation, existed under and was protected by the laws of the Union.

The debt owing to the blacks is manifold. Something is due to those who, against their will, were dragged from their homes, subjected to the untold horrors of the middle passage, and forced to labour, unrequited, for strangers. What the horrors of the middle passage were is hinted at rather than told in the log-book of Her Majesty’s ship Skipjack, which, in 1835, captured the Portuguese slaver Martha, with 447 slaves on board. The Martha had left Loango forty-three days before for Brazil with a freight of 790 slaves, of whom 353, or nearly 45 per cent., had perished from the tortures and miseries of the voyage. These tortures and miseries were not less, we may be sure, fifty or one hundred years earlier. Something, again, is due to those who, in the land of their captivity, were deprived by law of education, of the privilege of marriage, and of the guardianship of their children. More, perhaps, is due to those who, in support of the triumphant principles of the land of their captivity, shed their blood. As many as 300,000 people of colour took arms during the Civil War. And thankful recognition, if nothing beyond, is owing by the South to the subject race which, in the hour of national adversity, instead of rising to complicate the troubles of the Confederacy, was loyal, and even helpful, to the dominant class. There are other grounds of indebtedness, but they have been so fully indicated in the course of this work that I need not again specify them. My only objects here are to insist upon the fact that a heavy debt has been incurred, and to point out that the time has not yet come when the United States can say, “We are doing something tangible towards paying it off.”

In considering the practicability of the removal from the United States of the blacks and coloured people, one must bear in mind the following questions:—

Is the negro willing to go?

Can the negro be dispensed with?

How can he be removed?

Whither can he be sent?

First let me attempt to offer a reply to the question, “Is the negro willing to go?” I believe that he is, but he can best answer for himself. The Rev. T. S. Lee, a coloured clergyman of Charleston, speaking on Emancipation Day, 1890, said:—

“I believe that the ultimate solution of the so-called race problem will be emigration, from necessity, if not from choice.... For two people so distinct from each other in their physical structure, and between whom there are naturally such insurmountable barriers, to develop on separate and distinct lines, dwelling together here, is about as reasonable as for two kings to reign on the same throne at one and the same time.... We make a great mistake when we suppose that the Anglo-Saxon gave us our enfranchisement for the love he had for us ... He did it because he thought he could use us.... It is a mistaken idea for us to kneel down to the whites. The Anglo-Saxon and the black man cannot work together; one or the other will have to leave, and I am somewhat of a believer in the tale about the Lord’s fire. The fire will not burn the people, but it will be so warm that our people will have to move on or get burnt; and I rather believe that they will move on.... We must show our independence, and the sooner we do this the better. Let some of us leave—go to Africa if necessary—and show that we can get along without the Anglo-Saxon, and, by this spirit of independence, make him learn and appreciate our value. Independence and emigration are, in my opinion, the only solutions to this great question.”

And Mr. Lee does not stand alone. Bishop H. M. Turner, of Atlanta, Georgia, a leader among the negro Methodists, said, in the course of a public speech in 1889, that nothing but poverty had kept his people where they were, and that nothing but actual departure from the country could cure existing evils.

And a few days later, he said, with reference to the Morgan Bill which was then before Congress:—

“May God grant that the Bill may pass. The white people brought us here against our will. Now they ought to provide for us to leave if we desire. Besides, we must work out our destiny anyhow, and if a portion of us think we can do it better elsewhere, let the nation help us to try it. If the Bill meant compulsory expatriation, we would fight it to the death; but, as it is voluntary upon the part of the negro, let it pass as soon as possible. The negro at best is but a scullion here, and he can be no less in Africa. I am tired of negro problems, lynch law, mob rule, and continual fuss, and millions of other negroes are tired of it. We want peace at some period in our existence, and if we cannot have it here, where we were born and reared, let that portion of us who choose to try another section of the world have a little help. This nation owes the negro forty billion of dollars any way; so give us a little to emigrate upon.”

Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden, formerly of the West Indies and more recently of Sierra Leone, is another distinguished negro who advocates negro emigration from the States. More than this, in November, 1889, a negro colonisation society was established in Augusta, Georgia, to promote emigration to Africa. At about the same time a wholesale emigration of negroes to Mexico was projected, and a negro delegation visited the city of Mexico to make arrangements for it; while, a little earlier, a large scheme of negro migration from the States to the Argentine Republic was extensively advocated by most of the negro journals of the South. Unfortunately, neither Mexico nor the Argentine Republic wants the negro. The Mexican newspapers, as with one voice, bitterly attacked the scheme, and called upon their Government to be patriotic, and not to countenance a plan which would bring into the Republic a race alien in blood and language. And the Buenos Ayres Standard said:—“The darkey is destined to give the United States far more trouble some day than the detested heathen Chinee; and it would be really too cool of Jonathan to ask us here to help him out of the unsavoury mess.” The Prensa, a Spanish newspaper of the same city, declared upon the same occasion:—

“It cannot be comprehended that a country proud, as ours is, of its wonderful and rapid advancement should commit the folly of introducing an element of obstruction, offensive both to sight and smell, and with marked tendencies to laziness. The United States would ridicule South America if the latter were to accept this Greek gift.”

But these remarks do not touch the question of the negro’s readiness to migrate. There is really no doubt that he is quite ready, provided always that migration will better him, and provided also that he can accomplish it without serious immediate loss to himself.

Can he, then, be spared? The answer, I think, is “Yes.” The Birmingham, Alabama, Age-Herald took up the question in June, 1889, and thus expressed itself:—

“In the lowlands of the Mississippi delta, the river bottoms of Arkansas and Louisiana, the Alabama black belt, and the South Carolina coast, negro labour may seem indispensable; but this is simply because the big plantation system exists in those sections. It would be a blessing to the South if the big plantation system could everywhere be broken up, and small farms, occupied and cultivated by thrifty white owners, substituted. In Texas, in Georgia—in all parts of the South, in fact, except those enumerated above—the white farmers work their own fields, and work them to much better advantage than those tenanted out to negroes.... The negro can be easily dispensed with, and if he stays in the South it is painful to conceive what must be the inevitable consequence.... The negro must go, or those Southern communities where he is found in such large numbers will go to something worse than perdition.”

Upon this the Memphis Avalanche of June 8th, 1889, remarked:—

“We have no hesitation in endorsing as true everything the Age-Herald has said. There are hundreds and thousands of white labourers in the cotton fields of the South to-day. In Texas, where an immense amount of cotton is grown, a negro is frequently not seen in a day’s ride.”

The New Orleans Times-Democrat, one of the most respectable and influential of Southern journals, on June 17th, 1889, took the same view in very decided terms, and added:—

“There is no portion of the South where the whites cannot live, where they do not work more intelligently and better than the negroes, and where they do not produce larger crops per capita. The South would be more productive, richer, and more prosperous in every way if it were peopled altogether by white men.”

The Galveston, Texas, News held similar language; so did the Charleston News and Courier; so did the Atlanta Constitution, the Nashville American, the Richmond Dispatch, the Arkansas Democrat, the New Orleans Picayune, and, in brief, all the leading newspapers of the South. Indeed, I know of no important exception. Concerning the filling of the gap which would be created by the removal of the negro, the Greenville, South Carolina, News of March 17th, 1889, had already said:—

“If we can keep the white people there will be no lack of labour and population. The natural increase may be trusted to occupy every acre of available ground without the coming of new citizens; but we might reasonably hope for a great inflow of white immigration to follow the tide of coloured emigration.”

Colonel Stokes, a representative Southern, writing on the same subject, argues forcibly and convincingly against the assumption that the negro is an essential element in cotton raising. “It is generally admitted by all who are acquainted with the matter that the negroes are the most inefficient of all labourers in nearly all the fields of labour. The Southern negroes cultivate an average of not more than six or eight acres to the hand; the Northern farmer cultivates forty to sixty acres. The latter uses a great variety of improved farming implements. The negro cannot be taught to use any other than the primitive types he has been long accustomed to. Still, the planter is dependent upon the negro to till his fields simply because the negro is here and cannot be got rid of, and white labour is not available in any sufficient numbers while the field is so occupied. But it is certain that if the negro cotton-raiser could everywhere be replaced by white men, the cotton region would wear a very different aspect.”

There are even signs that the negro is being dispensed with already, and that, if he remain, his position as a labourer will deteriorate rather than improve. The Forum for December, 1889, contained a powerful article on “The Race Problem,” by Professor Scomp, of Emory College, Georgia. The writer, in summing up, says:—

“Sadly, yet with perfect conviction, we are driven to the inevitable conclusion that if the negro’s citizenship and his social and business privileges are to have play and development, it must be upon another soil than that of the whites. As equals, the races cannot and will not exist together.”

And, writing privately to Dr. E. W. Blyden, Professor Scomp thus explains his views as to one aspect of the negro’s future in the States:—

“One feature which I regard as ominous to the future of most of the Southern negroes is the steady and rapid improvement in machinery in all departments of the cotton-plantation industry; e.g., less than two months ago there was exhibited at the Georgia State Fair, at Macon, a machine for chopping cotton, by which one man, upon a kind of buggy plough, could in one day do the work, by horse-power, of more than a dozen ordinary choppers. Such machinery, generally introduced, must, for the most part, put an end to the plantation negro’s summer work and his means of subsistence. Many efforts, too, are making at the invention of a proper cotton-picking machine, and, though this has not yet succeeded to any great degree, American industry will undoubtedly prove equal to the task of invention. When that day comes the mass of Southern negroes will be practically out of an occupation and without a livelihood.”

Apart from this, the negro is now doing much less in the South than he used to do. The Charleston News and Courier, which made a careful investigation of this matter in South Carolina, county by county, a few years ago, found that 30 per cent. of the cotton was raised by white and 70 per cent. by coloured labour. In Mississippi the State census of 1880, taken coincidentally with the United States census, showed that 328,568 bales were produced by white and 627,240 bales by negro labour. In these States, with large negro majorities, nearly a third of the cotton crop was raised by the whites. Judging by these figures, it is safe to say that, including the comparatively white States of Texas and Arkansas, very nearly half the cotton is raised by the whites, whereas thirty years ago not over 400,000 bales, or one-tenth the crop, was grown by them.

If, as would appear to be the case, the negro be willing to migrate and can be dispensed with, the next questions for consideration are—How can he be removed? And whither can he be sent? The two questions are intimately allied, and may best be examined together. I think that a rough key to one of them has been furnished by Mr. J. A. D. Mitchell, who, writing on January 11th, 1890, to the Cleveland, Ohio, Gazette, a newspaper conducted by and in the interests of coloured people, says:—

“Let the United States Government assume a protectorate over such portions of the African Continent as are not already provided for, and, to enforce the claim, call for 100,000 or more American negro volunteers to assist, not only in the abolition of the slave traffic, but also in Christianising and reclaiming the African negro from heathenism and idolatry. I claim that climatic and other influences preclude the possibility of the white man accomplishing much without the aid and influence of the negro.... The necessity for forced emigration or colonisation would (either being distasteful as well as impracticable) be supplanted by a voluntary uprising of the negro to participate in reclaiming the land of his forefathers.”

There is here, I really believe, the germ, though only the germ, of a sound and useful scheme. It is not likely that the United States Government will, in our day, assume onerous protectorates in other continents; and it is not, I am convinced, desirable that, in the future home of the negro, the emigrant shall live under institutions similar to those which at present contribute so much to his discomfort. If the black were to move to what would practically be an American foreign possession, he would scarcely improve his position. He would still find himself on nominal equality with, but in actual inferiority to, the white governing powers. If not, he would have to govern himself; and for this task the negro is peculiarly unfitted. It is for this reason that Hayti and Liberia have proved failures.

Where I detect the true ring in Mr. Mitchell’s crude suggestion is in his proposal that the negro shall be given not only a country, but also a stimulus to make himself worthy of the boon. In one or other of these, to my mind, absolutely essential features, all the remaining projects of negro migration that have come under my notice are lacking.

Several Bills, aspiring to deal in an adequate manner with the race problem, have lately been brought before the notice of the United States Senate. Senator Butler, of South Carolina, asked for the appropriation of five millions of dollars in aid of negro emigration generally. Senator Gibson, of Louisiana, advocated the acquirement, as the negro’s future home, of extra-Union territory. Senator Morgan, of Alabama, brought forward a scheme of African colonisation; and Senator Call, of Florida, revived the old project of opening negotiations with Spain to secure the establishment in Cuba of a negro republic.

But all these legislators have missed the one important point. You cannot, without the use of force, ensure anything approaching to a general exodus of a whole race, unless you first provide the people with high aims, and also hold out to them a reasonable hope of improved political, social, and financial conditions. Had the Israelites seen nothing better than Egypt before them, they would never have quitted the land of Goshen; had the Babylonian captives not looked to the rebuilding of the Temple, it is doubtful whether many of them would have availed themselves of Cyrus’s permission to return to Palestine.

Speaking in the Senate on the subject of the Butler Bill, Senator Wade Hampton, who has been one of the most honoured and successful Governors of South Carolina, the blackest State in the Union, said, on January 30th, 1890:—

“I have expressed the opinion that the separation of the white and coloured races in the United States would be of permanent benefit to both.... I recognise as fully as anyone the political rights of the coloured people, and amongst these rights is that paramount one of every citizen of the Republic to choose his own home. The forcible expulsion of the negroes would not only be unlawful, but would be impolitic, unjust and cruel.... No thoughtful patriotic man would contemplate any such action. But whilst patriotism, wisdom, and an enlarged philanthropy dictate these views, it may still be a question whether some feasible plan cannot be adopted by which such coloured people as desire to seek a new home, where, under their own laws and their own government, they could work out their own destiny free from contact with the white race, could not receive the generous and fostering assistance of this great and rich Government.”

Like his brother legislators, Senator Hampton fails to grasp the necessity of giving to the negroes a motive to induce them to leave the States; like them, too, he appears to be of opinion that, no matter whither the negro may remove, he must be, if not an American subject, at least a self-governing individual. On both these points, I venture to think, his attitude is a wrong one; but on the other point which is dealt with in this extract from his speech he is right. The American Government ought, in recognition of its indebtedness, as well as from politic consideration of its own best interests, to be prepared to assist the proposed negro emigration; and on that point Senators Butler, Gibson, Morgan, and Call are in practical agreement with Senator Hampton.

One of the most conspicuous characteristics of the negro is, as I have already had occasion to point out, his childishness. Referring to the negroes of Africa, Mr. H. M. Stanley, writing in December last to The Times, said:—

“If one regards these natives as mere brutes, then the annoyances that their follies and vices inflict are, indeed, intolerable. In order to rule them and to keep one’s life amongst them, it is needful resolutely to regard them as children, who require, indeed, different methods of rule from English or American citizens, but who must be ruled in precisely the same spirit, with the same absence of caprice and anger, the same essential respect to our fellow-men.”

Another recent writer has said of them:— “They are children; children naughty or children good; pleased or angry; children to be ruled firmly, treated kindly; but always, at bottom, children.” And everyone who knows thoroughly the African negro, either in Africa or in America, can have no other estimate of his character.

This being so, is it reasonable, on the one hand, to elevate the negro, as he has been elevated in America, to a level of political and legal equality with the Caucasian; or, on the other hand, to expect this child of nature to properly govern himself? The experiment of equality has failed in America; the experiment of self-government has failed in Hayti, in Liberia, and wherever else it has been tried. Surely, then, it is as necessary, in the experiment of the future, to avoid placing the negro on a pedestal which he has proved himself incapable of occupying as it is to avoid enslaving him, oppressing him, or in any way unfairly treating him. If my contentions be sound, it results that the experiment of the future must be conducted with due regard to the following conditions:—

1. The emigrating negro must be offered a country in which he may pursue high aims, enjoy a prospect of improved political, social, and financial status, and find climate and employment suited to his needs.

2. He must not govern, but be governed. At the same time he must not be oppressed, either physically or morally; and there must be no restraint upon his improvement and advancement.

3. His emigration must be assisted, either by those who owe him a debt or by those who will benefit by his migration, or by both.

Accepting the above conditions as postulates, I may now definitely indicate what, after a long and careful study of the problem in its various aspects, seems to be the only solution that will be alike just and permanent.

The country that is most suitable for the negro is, beyond all cavil, that central belt of Africa which lies between the Sahara and the Tropic of Capricorn, and which includes the Congo Free State, Senegambia, Liberia, the British and German possessions on the Gulf of Guinea, Sierra Leone, Gaboon, Angola, Damaraland, Mozambique, Zanzibar, and the territories of the various British and German African companies. The greater part of this belt is the negro’s own country, the place whence his ancestors were kidnapped, or in which his race still dwells; and, so far as civilisation is concerned, nearly all of it is, to this day, virgin soil.

The past fifty years have witnessed the first serious attempts on the part of civilisation to open up this immense district, the riches and fertility of which no one, even now, is in a position to estimate. Very little progress has been made. The climate and general conditions are, over much of the tract, unsuitable for the majority of Europeans. European influences, nevertheless, are almost everywhere dominant; and almost everywhere there exists the framework, though not all the machinery, of just government. The crying need of the situation is more civilisation—civilisation not of a very advanced or cultured variety, but rather civilisation of a kind which, not being too much superior to native habits and modes of thought, and being, nevertheless, of a moderately progressive type, may first, if properly encouraged and led by white influence, capture the Africans and then gradually raise them with itself to higher planes.

Who are more suited to apply such modest civilisation to the blacks of Africa than the blacks of America? Africa, as a whole, will never be a white man’s country. It will not, therefore, be the scene of such race jealousies as torment the Southern States of the American Union.

At the same time, Africa, it is tolerably certain, will always have the advantage of white rule, and of a kind of white rule, moreover, that will not possess the irksome defects of white rule as it now exists in America. In no British colony, for example, is there any reason why a capable negro should not raise himself to high position and honour. In no British colony, on the other hand, does the negro govern. And I think it may also be said that in every British colony in which he is to be found the negro is a fairly happy and contented person. It is a great mistake to suppose, as many people do, that the negro objects to be governed, and to be governed firmly. On the contrary, he likes it, provided always that the government be fair as well as firm. Colonel Shepard, an acknowledged advocate of the negro, admits, with regard to the present condition of Hayti, that the whole business is a fine illustration of the futility of introducing republican institutions to a country whose people are uneducated, untrained in affairs, and incapable of self-government.

Nor is the negro hopelessly enamoured of the suffrage. He clings to it in the United States, because there it constitutes almost his only badge of humanity; but to those who will freely concede his humanity he will as freely surrender the suffrage.

By a wholesale migration, and properly conducted, of Southern negroes to Africa, America would be relieved, and Africa would be benefited.

Already this fact has, to a limited extent, been recognised and acted upon. In 1884 a plan for the introduction of Southern negro labour to the Congo district was submitted to the King of the Belgians by an American, Colonel George W. Williams; and I believe I am correct in saying that Colonel Williams was in consequence empowered to engage twelve clerks, accountants, and storekeepers at 125f. a month, and twelve mechanics and engineers at from 200f. to 300f. a month, transportation, board, lodging, and medical attendance to be provided by the Congo Free State. Five years later, in 1889, the King of the Belgians made application to the United States for twenty-four professional men and artisans to go to the Congo as representatives of the trained and educated American negro. His Majesty’s agent visited, among other places, Shaw University, at Raleigh, North Carolina, a remarkably well-conducted college for coloured students. The principal, Dr. H. M. Tupper, declared his firm belief that thousands of American negroes would, within a few years, go to the Congo country; and he said that he recognised in the opportunity a grand means of permanently improving the condition of many coloured people.

If the American negro were shown, as he easily might be shown, first, that his exodus to Africa would result in vast good to his race, and would open to him an honourable mission as a civiliser; next, that the proceeding would result in a general amelioration of his own condition; and finally, that in Africa he would escape from the discomforts and persecutions that hem in his career in America; and if, at the same time, he were offered aid to enable him to migrate to and establish himself on the soil of his fathers, I do not doubt that he would leave America, not merely in his thousands, but in his millions. He desires, above all things, a country and an aim in life. Give him those, and he will seize them gladly. But it is useless to counsel him to go to Africa, or elsewhere, unless you also hold out to him an object to be attained. And even a grand object will not alone induce him to move. He is, as a rule, poor. His investments, such as they are, are all in America. It is necessary not only to assist him to move and settle, but also to pay him generously for the little that he must surrender.

It is impossible, while considering this scheme, to avoid thinking, again and again, of the parallelism of the exodus of the Israelites, and of the Biblical conclusion, “And they spoiled the Egyptians.” The Egyptians, like the Americans, had incurred a great debt to their bondsmen, and, like the Americans, they sought to evade it, and suffered bitterly in consequence. But the payment was inevitable in Goshen, and it is inevitable in the United States. In Goshen it was paid in the form of spoils, surrendered in panic by a people who, at the last, were glad to be rid of their captives at any cost. How will it be paid in America?

One cannot foresee, but it is quite certain that it is not yet too late for it to be voluntarily tendered in cold blood, and to be gratefully accepted; and it is reasonable to suppose that delay in payment will not lessen but rather increase the amount—be it of treasure, blood, misery, or unrest—to be ultimately paid.

It would seem, therefore, that principles of ordinary economy, as well as of common justice, indicate that an effort should be made to pay off the negro as soon as possible.

It cannot be said that the Union has any lack of means. Her actual indebtedness at the conclusion of the Civil War was, roughly speaking, £551,286,000; it is now only £187,115,000, and between June 30th and October 1st, 1890, it was reduced by £14,537,000. In twenty-five years the Federal Debt has been lessened by £364,171,000, or at the average rate of over fourteen and a half millions sterling per annum; and the annual surplus available for reduction is now, as a rule, so much larger than it was a few years ago, while the debt remaining is of such very manageable proportions, that very little hardship to the United States would result from a temporary diversion—say, for thirty years—of a portion of the surplus from the purposes of the reduction of the Federal Debt to the payment of interest and gradual payment of principal of a special series of negro emigration and settlement loans.

It is calculated that an annual sum of twelve or fourteen millions sterling might thus, without undue pinching, be diverted; and this represents a very large capital amount—an amount which would probably be quite sufficient, with a certain quota of aid from outside, not only to decently transport, but to comfortably establish in Africa, every pure-blooded negro now on United States territory.

It might not be also sufficient to buy out the negro; but that might justly be assigned as a duty, in whole or in part, to the individual States concerned, seeing that they are more immediately interested than is the nation at large in getting rid of him, and that the expenditure to be incurred would sooner or later be returned to the States in the shape of payments on the re-sale of lands and buildings now belonging to the negroes.

That the United States have not already entered upon some such course is rather remarkable; for they have spent scores of millions in the payment of debts which are less pressing, and they have, indeed, been so generous in certain directions as to have incurred the reproach of unwarrantable extravagance. They have over half a million names on their pension-roll, and they pay the pensioners more than twenty millions a year, in spite of the fact that most of the persons who benefit had no legal claim upon the country at the time when the services in respect of which pensions are now paid were rendered. The pensions are not, as pensions are in England, deferred pay; they are compensations and gratuities. The Union has been lavish with them; but the Governments which have granted them have always looked forward to a return in the shape of political support, and so the sums disbursed have been regarded as profitable investments.

Hitherto, there is no doubt, American politicians as a body have not discovered that any profit can result from the payment of the nation’s indebtedness to the negro; and that is the reason why they have not dealt with the negro as they have dealt with the soldier.

But will there be no profit? The South is now stagnant under the incubus of the negro.

According to Governor Lee, of Virginia, the negro does not “pay” as a citizen. The Greenville News goes so far as to make the following estimate of the results which would follow upon the removal of two-thirds of the present coloured population from South Carolina:—

“We should lose,” it says, “$50,000 to $75,000, which is probably a full estimate of the total amount of taxes paid by coloured people; the cultivation of some land, the production of some cotton, for a time. We should have about $175,000 of the amount now used for coloured public schools for the use of white schools, nearly doubling the present terms and adding much to the facilities and comforts of teachers and scholars. We should have in the penitentiary about 100 convicts instead of 800. Our criminal courts would sit on an average from a day to a day and a half a week, nine-tenths of their time being now occupied by trying coloured persons. Our gaols would have about one-fifth of the inmates they now have, nineteen-twentieths of the prisoners now fed and kept at the cost of the taxpayers being coloured. The lunatic asylum would have one-half its present population and would cost one-half of what it now costs. The county poor-houses would contain one-half, or less, of their present population. The trial justices would have, on an average, about a case a month. These calculations are from the actual figures. What we should gain in the way of keeping white people who are now crowded out by coloured competition, the improvement of lands by intelligent and careful cultivation, and the incoming of white mechanics and farmers, are matters of further estimation.”

The Union is divided, and it is the presence of the negro that causes the division. Nearly one-eighth of the population of the Union is of alien race, and, besides being hopelessly alien, is oppressed, discontented, and dangerous. These are evils which might be abolished to the general profit. And worse evils lurk in the future. The prosecution of a race war would not be cheaper than the promotion of a negro exodus. The severance from the Union of six or eight States would be vastly more weakening to the nation as a whole. In some form the debt must be paid. Nature has never yet admitted the plea of any Statute of Limitations in cases like the one under discussion. It were well, then, to make a settlement while it can still be made peacefully and, comparatively speaking, cheaply.

If America would do its duty by the negro, those civilised nations which have established themselves in Africa would, in pursuance of their own interests, aid her. Great Britain, Germany, and France would each and all welcome the immigration to their African possessions of large and leavening bodies of American blacks. Not long ago Sir Alfred Moloney, Governor of Lagos, received a deputation from “the Brazilian and Havannah repatriates in the colony of Lagos,” and was assured that all the negroes of Brazil wished to return to the country of their ancestors. In reply, Sir Alfred Moloney said that he had induced the commercial world to take an interest in the project, and that the African Steamship Company had engaged to provide improved and cheaper facilities for negro immigrants from Brazil. He welcomed the idea of “repatriation,” and would encourage it. Much more, no doubt, would he welcome the idea of the “repatriation” of the immeasurably more civilised and less debauched American negro. The black, it is true, will not do much good for himself anywhere without white superintendence, but there is no reason why such superintendence as is necessary should not be forthcoming, and, if it be once understood that the salvation of Africa lies with the negro even more than with the white, there is every ground for believing that the American negro will rise bravely to the occasion.

Even in a greater degree than in the African possessions of Great Britain, Germany, and France does there appear to be a career for the American negro in the Congo Free State. The author of “An Appeal to Pharaoh” has indicated that State as the American negro’s promised land. A copy of the book was recently given to Mr. H. M. Stanley, a man who, having spent parts of his life not only in the Dark Continent but also in Louisiana, knows the negro both in America and in Africa. The volume drew from the traveller a very interesting letter, from which I extract the following:—

“There is space enough in one section of the Upper Congo basin to locate double the number of the negroes of the United States without disturbing a single tribe of the aborigines now inhabiting it. I refer to the immense Upper Congo forest country, 350,000 square miles in extent, which is three times larger than the Argentine Republic, and one and a half times larger than the entire German Empire, embracing 224,000,000 acres of umbrageous forest land, wherein every unit of the 7,000,000 negroes might become the owner of nearly a quarter square mile of land. Five acres of this, planted with bananas and plantains, would furnish every soul with sufficient subsistence—food and wine. The remaining twenty-seven acres of his estate would furnish him with timber, rubber, gums, dye-stuffs, for sale. There are 150 days of rain throughout the year. There is a clear stream every few hundred yards. In a day’s journey we have crossed as many as thirty-two streams. The climate is healthy and equable, owing to the impervious forest which protects the land from chilly winds and draughts. All my white officers passed through the wide area safely. Eight navigable rivers course through it. Hills and ridges diversify the scenery and give magnificent prospects. To those negroes in the South accustomed to Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, it would be a reminder of their own plantations without the swamps and the depressing influence of cypress forests. Anything and everything might be grown in it, from the oranges, guavas, sugarcane, and cotton of sub-tropical lands to the wheat of California and the rice of South Carolina. If the emigration were prudently conceived and carried out, the glowing accounts sent home by the first settlers would soon dissipate all fear and reluctance on the part of the others. But it is all a dream. The American capitalists, like other leaders of men, are more engaged in decorating their wives with diamonds than in busying themselves with national questions of such import as removing the barrier between the North and the South. The ‘open sore’ of America—the race question—will ever remain an incurable fester. While we are all convinced that the Nessus shirt which clings to the Republic has maddened her, and may madden her again, it is quite certain that the small effort needed to free themselves for ever from it will never be made.”

I am inclined to be more sanguine than Mr. Stanley was when he wrote that letter. Some solution of the race question cannot be long deferred, and surely there is enough latent justice and prudence in the American people to induce them to render the inevitable solution a peaceable and equitable one.

In a still later utterance on the subject Mr. Stanley has taken a cheerier view. The Congo Government, he declares, is favourable, and the laws are calculated to promote happiness and content. Whites cannot colonise the State, since a white man living in the Congo Valley for three years expends ten years of vitality, while women cannot retain health.

“With negroes forming the majority of its citizenship, the State would, with proper encouragement, make remarkable development, and, in time, become a great nation.... At present the Congo Free State’s government is entirely in the hands of whites, but, in my opinion, any man who can prove his capacity would receive all that any could expect.”

For the half-breed of the South another haven must be sought. He is no more the friend of the black than he is of the white. Neither desires his company. But in the West Indies, or in some parts of South and Central America, he might, no doubt, discover a land in which his existence would be a not unpleasant one.

I have discussed this great subject copiously, but very inadequately. No question at present before the world has so many aspects; and to America no question is equally important. The solution which I have advocated is costly; but it is, I believe, the only one that promises a permanent and honourable settlement of the difficulty. Any other must be imperfect, or must involve wholesale bloodshed. Until something of the kind is put into practice, the dearly bought union must remain a nominal one, and North and South must continue to cherish different aims, and to be, in effect, separate nations. Only when the negro shall have departed will the name of the United States truly represent anything more than a magnificent aspiration.

It would be ungenerous to conclude this work without some acknowledgment of the great assistance that has been rendered to me in my study of the subject by, among others, Mr. Eustace Ballard Smith, Mr. John Bigelow, Mr. P. Bigelow, Major Post, U.S.A., Mr. Chauncey M. Depew, Mr. J. W. Barnwell, Mr. G. W. Cable, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, Mr. C. M‘Kinley, Mr. S. J. E. Rawling, Mr. R. W. Gilder, and the Governors of most of the Southern States. To them, and to many others, including a number of negro gentlemen, whose names, if I have not already mentioned them incidentally, are, at their own wish, withheld, I desire to express my most grateful thanks, coupled with the sincere hope that the difficulty which interests all of them, and which is only fortunate in that it has enabled me to make their acquaintance, may, before long, cease to exist.