Note that both memos reference the 鈥渙pinions鈥� given: under Chief Justice Earl Warren鈥檚 direction, the court actually issued two separate but parallel decisions on the question of segregation in the schools, one applying to the states and one applying to the District of Columbia.

Dear Chief,

Today I believe has been a great day for America and its court. Your opinions in the segregation cases were highly appropriate and were delivered in the appropriate spirit. I expect there will be no more significant decision made during our service on the Court. I cherish the privilege of sharing in this.

To you goes the credit for the character of the opinions which produced the all important unanimity. Congratulations.

Harold H. Burton

Dear Chief,

This is a day that will live in glory. It is also a great day in the history of the Court, and not in the least for the course of deliberation which brought about the result. I congratulate you.

Felix Frankfurter

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The home life of the Indian of to-day is essentially the same as the home life of the Indian of thirty years ago. Any progress he may have made is due to change of environment, produced by the coming of white people, and the consequent passing away of old customs.

The daily routine of home life is the same, the aforesaid change produced by environment being shown by the fact that in place of the tepee the Indian once occupied, he now lives in a frame house and can boast of a well, a stable, a few fruit trees and a vegetable garden. The fact that in place of hunting wild game over the prairies, he now farms and raises good crops of corn, wheat, and oats makes but little difference in the internal workings of the home.

Long ago the Indian had a removable house suited to his requirements, a tepee or tent which was made of buckskin or canvas stretched over a pyramid formed by means of poles tied together at the top with buckskin, a house easy to carry around with him in his nomadic journeyings.

When the tribe found a place where they could settle down and live eight months in the year they built mud lodges as their permanent residences. These are dome-shaped, the frame work consisting of poles, willow branches and rushes, and from base to apex it is covered with sod several inches thick. They have wide entranceways, several feet long and high enough to permit a tall person to stand upright. They are like tunnels leading into the lodge, which is circular in form. Light and air enter by means of a large circular opening in the top of the dome, this also serving as a means of exit for the smoke. The lodge is well ventilated – warm in winter and cool in summer. Several families live in them at a time, and the only two or three now left on this reservation are used for holding councils, public gatherings and dances, as they can accommodate over a hundred people.

How often as children we used to climb upon these lodges and pick the sunflowers and grasses growing on them. Near sunset the old men would sit up on these lodges where they could pursue their meditations undisturbed and alone, and I remember looking at them reverently as I played around with the other children, for I regarded them with a great deal of awe, for to me they seemed so wise.

Trodden by hundreds of feet the earthen floor is almost as hard as stone, and coming in from the hot dusty road how gratefully cool it felt to our little bare feet as we played in and out, riding our make-believe horse made of sunflower stalks. In the center is a little hollow where the fire is built and all the cooking is done. Around this place we used to gather to listen to thrilling stories of battles with the dreaded Sioux, buffalo hunts and ghost stories. When it came to the last I used to look up fearfully at the opening above, for fear I should see a dog looking down, for it is a superstition among the Indians that if a dog looks down through this opening into the lodge some one of the company is sure to die soon. If such a thing happened the dog was killed immediately. It was always a relief to see the blue sky and stars looking down.

After a while the Indians built log houses of only one room, the roof covered with turf.

Now, on this reservation we have almost every family living in a neat frame house, one story or one story and a half high, wainscoted, plastered or papered inside; very clean and neatly painted outside. The premises are clear of rubbish.

These houses are built by the Indians with their own money, but the desire to own such houses was started several years ago when the “Connecticut Home-Building Fund” started the Home-Building Department of the Women’s National Indian Association.¹ The seed then sown has borne fruit here and elsewhere. Whether you enter with me into a tent, a mud-lodge or log house, or one of these neat frame houses you would see the same home-life going on in every one of them.

There is little variation, one day of the week being almost the same as another.

The family usually arise early – in the summer about sunrise, but in winter the breakfast is usually considerably delayed, for they follow suntime. In most cases the hostess arises and builds the fire, gets the water and cooks the simple meal. Very few have had bread, but it is now getting to be the general rule in many families to make light bread. They have biscuit made with soda or baking powder, and sometimes “fried cakes,” light brown in color and very appetizing. Coffee, sometimes fresh beef, for, in this country where there are thousands of head of cattle it is hard to get beef; sometimes fruit, dried, and in the summer potatoes and beans. You can see that their diet is very simple. The food is divided and put on plates, the coffee is poured out into cups and then the food is handed around to each individual. Usually after the meal is over the dishes are put away in a little cupboard. If it is summer the husband and men in the family go out to their work and the wife cleans up the house and begins to get the noon-meal. It is the same as breakfast. They do not do very much sewing for their clothes are simply and quickly made. The houses on the reservation are far apart and the women cannot very well pass away the time by gossip with the neighbors, as some of our white friends have the privilege of doing. What a deprivation is this! Let us all be thankful for our privileges.

The evening meal is simple, and the time between that and the retiring hour is spent in talking over the events of the day or in telling news. We have no telegraph lines or telephones, but news has a wonderfully quick way of travelling from one house to another. Rumors on a reservation are the same as rumors anywhere else. When they reach the end (?)² of their journey they have received quite an addition, and a wise person will credit only one third of the story as truth.

There are no books, pictures or recreations save the dances, and no games except cards which are used for gambling. A narrow life in some respects. The Indians are passionately fond of their children; having no books, pictures or recreations in their home life, they lavish all attention on their children. There are some cases where the step-father or step-mother, as the case may be, makes no difference whatever between their children and the step-children. They show their affection for their children also.

Some ask the absurd question, “Do the Indians really love their wives?” The Indians are human beings just as the white people are, and there are Indian men who are just as careful, watchful and affectionate to their wives as anyone would wish to see anywhere. They do not make an outward show of their affection, but I know from personal observation that they are truly devoted to each other. One day I had to pull a young woman’s tooth, and as the husband was a strong muscular man I was in hopes he would support her head for me. He sent for his brother to do it and when he saw me take the forceps up he beat a hasty retreat. I heard him walking up and down in the other room, and when they told him I was through he appeared with such a happy relieved look on his face and thanked me so earnestly. I could not help but be glad for him that she was through with her suffering. There are many instances like this that I know of. Of course, there are some cases entirely different, and where there is no happiness. But so we find it wherever we go in this world.

Indian women no longer stand in the background. Few work in the fields or do heavy work. Where it used to be the lot of the women to provide the wood, now the men get it in almost all cases. Even in so small a thing as walking or riding where the woman had to walk behind or ride in the back of the wagon, now she walks beside her husband, and in vehicles you see the woman riding beside her husband on the seat.

The old customs are fast disappearing and in place of the Indian of twenty years ago, who lived in a tent and supported himself by hunting wild game, we have an independent man who is earning his bread by his own toil, living in a frame house and learning very fast how to transact business like white people. The wife standing beside her husband shows only his true advancement, and the home is happier for this progress.

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. . . That the sacred scriptures are the alone rule of faith and practice to a Christian, all Protestants are agreed in; and must therefore inviolably maintain, that every Christian has聽a right of judging for himself聽what he is to believe and practice in religion according to that rule: Which I think on a full examination you will find perfectly inconsistent with any power in the civil magistrate to make any penal laws in matters of religion. Tho鈥� Protestants are agreed in the profession of that principle, yet too many in practice have departed from it. The evils that have been introduced thereby into the Christian church are more than can be reckoned up. Because of the great importance of it to the Christian and to his standing fast in that liberty wherewith Christ has made him free, you will not fault me if I am the longer upon it. The more firmly this is established in our minds; the more firm shall we be against all attempts upon our Christian liberty, and better practice that Christian charity towards such as are of different sentiments from us in religion that is so much recommended and inculcated in those sacred oracles, and which a just understanding of our Christian rights has a natural tendency to influence us to. . . .

The members of a civil state or society do retain their natural liberty in all such cases as have no relation to the ends of such a society. . . . Should a government therefore restrain the free use of the scriptures, prohibit men the reading of them, and make it penal to examine and search them; it would be a manifest usurpation upon the common rights of mankind, as much a violation of natural liberty as the attack of a highwayman upon the road can be upon our civil rights. And indeed with respect to the sacred writings, men might not only read them if the government did prohibit the same, but they would be bound by a higher authority to read them, notwithstanding any humane prohibition. The pretense of any authority to restrain men from reading the same, is wicked as well as vain. . . .

II. The members of a civil state do retain their natural liberty or right of judging for themselves in matters of religion. Every man has an equal right to follow the dictates of his own conscience in the affairs of religion. Everyone is under an indispensable obligation to search the scripture for himself (which contains the whole of it) and to make the best use of it he can for his own information in the will of God, the nature and duties of Christianity. And as every Christian is so bound; so he has an unalienable right to judge of the sense and meaning of it, and to follow his judgment wherever it leads him; even an equal right with any rulers be they civil or ecclesiastical. This I say, I take to be an original right of the human nature, and so far from being given up by the individuals of a community that it cannot be given up by them if they should be so weak as to offer it. Man by his constitution as he is a reasonable being capable of the knowledge of his Maker; is a moral & accountable being: and therefore as everyone is accountable for himself, he must reason, judge and determine for himself. That faith and practice which depends on the judgment and choice of any other person, and not on the person鈥檚 own understanding judgment and choice, may pass for religion in the synagogue of Satan, whose tenet is that ignorance is the mother of devotion; but with no understanding Protestant will it pass for any religion at all. No action is a religious action without understanding and choice in the agent. Whence it follows, the rights of conscience are sacred and equal in all, and strictly speaking unalienable. This right of judging every one for himself in matters of religion results from the nature of man, and is so inseparably connected therewith, that a man can no more part with it than he can with his power of thinking: and it is equally reasonable for him to attempt to strip himself of the power of reasoning, as to attempt the vesting of another with this right. And whoever invades this right of another, be he pope or C忙sar, may with equal reason assume the other鈥檚 power of thinking, and so level him with the brutal creation. A man may alienate some branches of his property and give up his right in them to others; but he cannot transfer the rights of conscience, unless he could destroy his rational and moral powers, or substitute some other to be judged for him at the tribunal of God.

But what may further clear this point and at the same time shew the extent of this right of private judgment in matters of religion, is this truth, that the sacred scriptures are the alone rule of faith and practice to every individual Christian. Were it needful I might easily show the sacred scriptures have all the characters necessary to constitute a just and proper rule of faith and practice, and that they alone have them. It is sufficient for all such as acknowledge the divine authority of the scriptures, briefly to observe, that God the author has therein declared he has given and designed them to be our only rule of faith and practice. Thus says the apostle Paul, 2 Tim. 3. 15, 16; That they are given by Inspiration from God, and are profitable for Doctrine, for Reproof, for Correction, for Instruction in Righteousness; that the Man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto every good Work. . . . Now inasmuch as the scriptures are the only rule of faith and practice to a Christian; hence every one has an unalienable right to read, enquire into, and impartially judge of the sense and meaning of it for himself. For if he is to be governed and determined therein by the opinions and determinations of any others, the scriptures cease to be a rule to him, and those opinions or determinations of others are substituted in the room thereof. . . .

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500 Fifth Ave

New York

We denounce the ever-growing oppression of our 10,000,000 colored fellow citizens as the greatest menace that threatens the country. Often plundered of their just share of the public funds, robbed of nearly all part in the government, segregated by common carriers, some murdered with impunity, and all treated with open contempt by officials, they are held in some States in practical slavery to the white community. The systematic persecution of law-abiding citizens and their disfranchisement on account of their race alone is a crime that will ultimately drag down to an infamous end any nation that allows it to be practiced, and it bears most heavily on those poor white farmers and laborers whose economic position is most similar to that of the persecuted race.

The nearest hope lies in the immediate and patiently continued enlightenment of the people who have been inveigled into a campaign of oppression. The spoils of persecution should not go to enrich any class or classes of the population. Indeed persecution of organized workers, peonage, enslavement of prisoners, and even disenfranchisement already threaten large bodies of whites in many Southern States.

We agree fully with the prevailing opinion that the transformation of the unskilled colored laborers in industry and agriculture into skilled workers is of vital importance to that race and to the nation, but we demand for the Negroes, as for all others, a free and complete education, whether by city, State, or nation, a grammar school and industrial training for all and technical, professional, and academic education for the most gifted.

But the public schools assigned to the Negro of whatever kind or grade will never receive a fair and equal treatment until he is given equal treatment in the Legislature and before the law. Nor will the practically educated Negro, no matter how valuable to the community he may prove, be given a fair return for his labor or encouraged to put forth his best efforts or given the chance to develop that efficiency that comes only outside the school until he is respected in his legal rights as a man and a citizen.

We regard with grave concern the attempt manifest South and North to deny black men the right to work and to enforce this demand by violence and bloodshed. Such a question is too fundamental and clear even to be submitted to arbitration. The late strike in Georgia is not simply a demand that Negroes be displaced, but that proven and efficient men be made to surrender their long-followed means of livelihood to white competitors.

As first and immediate steps toward remedying these national wrongs, so full of peril for the whites as well as the blacks of all sections, we demand of Congress and the Executive:

(1). That the Constitution be strictly enforced and the civil rights guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment be secured impartially to all.

(2). That there be equal educational opportunities for all and in all the States, and that public school expenditure be the same for the Negro and white child;

(3). That in accordance with the Fifteenth Amendment the right of the Negro to the ballot on the same terms as other citizens be recognized in every part of the country.

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(a) By this system, New York has neither prohibited the “free exercise” of religion nor made a law “respecting an establishment of religion” within the meaning of the First Amendment.

(b) There is no evidence in the record in this case to support a conclusion that the system involves the use of coercion to get public school students into religious classrooms.

MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS delivered the opinion of the Court.

New York City has a program which permits its public schools to release students during the school day so that they may leave the school buildings and school grounds and go to religious centers for religious instruction or devotional exercises. A student is released on written request of his parents. Those not released stay in the classrooms. The churches make weekly reports to the schools, sending a list of children who have been released from public school but who have not reported for religious instruction.

This “released time” program involves neither religious instruction in public school classrooms nor the expenditure of public funds. All costs, including the application blanks, are paid by the religious organizations. The case is therefore unlike McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203 , which involved a “released time” program from Illinois. In that case the classrooms were turned over to religious instructors. We accordingly held that the program violated the First Amendment which (by reason of the Fourteenth Amendment) prohibits the states from establishing religion or prohibiting its free exercise.

Appellants, who are taxpayers and residents of New York City and whose children attend its public schools, challenge the present law, contending it is in essence not different from the one involved in the McCollum case. Their argument, stated elaborately in various ways, reduces itself to this: the weight and influence of the school is put behind a program for religious instruction; public school teachers police it, keeping tab on students who are released; the classroom activities come to a halt while the students who are released for religious instruction are on leave; the school is a crutch on which the churches are leaning for support in their religious training; without the cooperation of the schools this “released time” program, [343 U.S. 306, 310] like the one in the McCollum case, would be futile and ineffective. The New York Court of Appeals sustained the law against this claim of unconstitutionality. The case is here on appeal. . . .

. . . . our problem reduces itself to whether New York by this system has either prohibited the “free exercise” of religion or has made a law “respecting an establishment of religion” within the meaning of the First Amendment.

It takes obtuse reasoning to inject any issue of the “free exercise” of religion into the present case. No one is forced to go to the religious classroom and no religious exercise or instruction is brought to the classrooms of the public schools. A student need not take religious instruction. He is left to his own desires as to the manner or time of his religious devotions, if any.

There is a suggestion that the system involves the use of coercion to get public school students into religious classrooms. There is no evidence in the record before us that supports that conclusion. The present record indeed tells us that the school authorities are neutral in this regard and do no more than release students whose parents so request. If in fact coercion were used, if it were established that any one or more teachers were using their office to persuade or force students to take the religious instruction, a wholly different case would be presented. Hence we put aside that claim of coercion both as respects the “free exercise” of religion and “an establishment of religion” within the meaning of the First Amendment.

Moreover, apart from that claim of coercion, we do not see how New York by this type of “released time” program has made a law respecting an establishment of religion within the meaning of the First Amendment. There is much talk of the separation of Church and State in the history of the Bill of Rights and in the decisions clustering around the First Amendment. See Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 ; McCollum v. Board of Education, supra. There cannot be the slightest doubt that the First Amendment reflects the philosophy that Church and State should be separated. And so far as interference with the “free exercise” of religion and an “establishment” of religion are concerned, the separation must be complete and unequivocal. The First Amendment within the scope of its coverage permits no exception; the prohibition is absolute. The First Amendment, however, does not say that in every and all respects there shall be a separation of Church and State. Rather, it studiously defines the manner, the specific ways, in which there shall be no concert or union or dependency one on the other. That is the common sense of the matter. Otherwise the state and religion would be aliens to each other?hostile, suspicious, and even unfriendly. Churches could not be required to pay even property taxes. Municipalities would not be permitted to render police or fire protection to religious groups. Policemen who helped parishioners into their places of worship would violate the Constitution. Prayers in our legislative halls; the appeals to the Almighty in the messages of the Chief Executive; the proclamations making Thanksgiving Day a holiday; “so help me God” in our courtroom oaths?these and all other references to the Almighty that run through our laws, our public rituals, our ceremonies would be flouting the First Amendment. A fastidious atheist or agnostic could even object to the supplication with which the Court opens each session: “God save the United States and this Honorable Court.”

We would have to press the concept of separation of Church and State to these extremes to condemn the present law on constitutional grounds. The nullification of this law would have wide and profound effects. A Catholic student applies to his teacher for permission to leave the school during hours on a Holy Day of Obligation to attend a mass. A Jewish student asks his teacher for permission to be excused for Yom Kippur. A Protestant wants the afternoon off for a family baptismal ceremony. In each case the teacher requires parental consent in writing. In each case the teacher, in order to make sure the student is not a truant, goes further and requires a report from the priest, the rabbi, or the minister. The teacher in other words cooperates in a religious program to the extent of making it possible for her students to participate in it. Whether she does it occasionally for a few students, regularly for one, or pursuant to a systematized program designed to further the religious needs of all the students does not alter the character of the act.

We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being. We guarantee the freedom to worship as one chooses. We make room for as wide a variety of beliefs and creeds as the spiritual needs of man deem necessary. We sponsor an attitude on the part of government that shows no partiality to any one group and that lets each flourish according to the zeal of its adherents and the appeal of its dogma. When the state encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities by adjusting the schedule of public events to sectarian needs, it follows the best of our traditions. For it then respects the religious nature of our people and accommodates the public service to their spiritual needs. To hold that it may not would be to find in the Constitution a requirement that the government show a callous indifference to religious groups. That would be preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe. Government may not finance religious groups nor undertake religious instruction nor blend secular and sectarian education nor use secular institutions to force one or some religion on any person. But we find no constitutional requirement which makes it necessary for government to be hostile to religion and to throw its weight against efforts to widen the effective scope of religious influence. The government must be neutral when it comes to competition between sects. It may not thrust any sect on any person. It may not make a religious observance compulsory. It may not coerce anyone to attend church, to observe a religious holiday, or to take religious instruction. But it can close its doors or suspend its operations as to those who want to repair to their religious sanctuary for worship or instruction. No more than that is undertaken here.

This program may be unwise and improvident from an educational or a community viewpoint. That appeal is made to us on a theory, previously advanced, that each case must be decided on the basis of “our own prepossessions.” See McCollum v. Board of Education, supra, p. 238. Our individual preferences, however, are not the constitutional standard. The constitutional standard is the separation of Church and State. The problem, like many problems in constitutional law, is one of degree. See McCollum v. Board of Education, supra, p. 231.

In the McCollum case the classrooms were used for religious instruction and the force of the public school was used to promote that instruction. Here, as we have said, the public schools do no more than accommodate their schedules to a program of outside religious instruction. We follow the McCollum case. But we cannot expand it to cover the present released time program unless separation of Church and State means that public institutions can make no adjustments of their schedules to accommodate the religious needs of the people. We cannot read into the Bill of Rights such a philosophy of hostility to religion.

Affirmed.

MR. JUSTICE BLACK, dissenting.

Illinois ex rel. McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203 , held invalid as an “establishment of religion” an Illinois system under which school children, compelled by law to go to public schools, were freed from some hours of required school work on condition that they attend special religious classes held in the school buildings. Although the classes were taught by sectarian teachers neither employed nor paid by the state, the state did use its power to further the program by releasing some of the children from regular class work, insisting that those released attend the religious classes, and requiring that those who remained behind do some kind of academic work while the others received their religious training. We said this about the Illinois system:

“Pupils compelled by law to go to school for secular education are released in part from their legal duty upon the condition that they attend the religious classes. This is beyond all question a utilization of the tax-established and tax-supported public school system to aid religious groups to spread their faith. And it falls squarely under the ban of the First Amendment . . . .” McCollum v. Board of Education, supra, at pp. 209-210.

I see no significant difference between the invalid Illinois system and that of New York here sustained. Except for the use of the school buildings in Illinois, there is no difference between the systems which I consider even worthy of mention. . . .
. . . Our insistence on “a wall between Church and State which must be kept high and impregnable” has seemed to some a correct exposition of the philosophy and a true interpretation of the language of the First Amendment to which we should strictly adhere. With equal conviction and sincerity, others have thought the McCollum decision fundamentally wrong and have pledged continuous warfare against it. The opinions in the court below and the briefs here reflect these diverse viewpoints. In dissenting today, I mean to do more than give routine approval to our McCollum decision.

. . . State help to religion injects political and party prejudices into a holy field. It too often substitutes force for prayer, hate for love, and persecution for persuasion. Government should not be allowed, under cover of the soft euphemism of “co-operation,” to steal into the sacred area of religious choice.

MR. JUSTICE FRANKFURTER, dissenting.

By way of emphasizing my agreement with MR. JUSTICE JACKSON?S dissent, I add a few words.

The Court tells us that in the maintenance of its public schools, “[The State government] can close its doors or suspend its operations” so that its citizens may be free for religious devotions or instruction. If that were the issue, it would not rise to the dignity of a constitutional controversy. Of course, a State may provide that the classes in its schools shall be dismissed, for any reason, or no reason, on fixed days, or for special occasions. The essence of this case is that the school system did not “close its doors” and did not “suspend its operations.” There is all the difference in the world between letting the children out of school and letting some of them out of school into religious classes. If every one is free to make what use he will of time wholly unconnected from schooling required by law?those who wish sectarian instruction devoting it to that purpose, those who have ethical instruction at home, to that, those who study music, to that?then of course there is no conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment.

. . . The pith of the case is that formalized religious instruction is substituted for other school activity which those who do not participate in the released-time program are compelled to attend. The school system is very much in operation during this kind of released time. If its doors are closed, they are closed upon those students who do not attend the religious instruction, in order to keep them within the school. That is the very thing which raises the constitutional issue. It is not met by disregarding it. Failure to discuss this issue does not take it out of the case.

. . . The deeply divisive controversy aroused by the attempts to secure public school pupils for sectarian instruction would promptly end if the advocates of such instruction would content to have the school “close its doors or suspend its operations”?that is, dismiss classes in their entirety, without discrimination?instead of seeking to use the public schools as the instrument for securing attendance at denominational classes. The unwillingness of the promoters of this movement to dispense with such use of the public schools betrays a surprising want of confidence in the inherent power of the various faiths to draw children to outside sectarian classes?an attitude that hardly reflects the faith of the greatest religious spirits.

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON, dissenting.

This released time program is founded upon a use of the State?s power of coercion, which, for me, determines its unconstitutionality. Stripped to its essentials, the plan has two stages: first, that the State compel each student to yield a large part of his time for public secular education; and, second, that some of it be “released” to him on condition that he devote it to sectarian religious purposes.

No one suggests that the Constitution would permit the State directly to require this “released” time to be spent “under the control of a duly constituted religious body.” This program accomplishes that forbidden result by indirection. If public education were taking so much of the pupils? time as to injure the public or the students? welfare by encroaching upon their religious opportunity, simply shortening everyone?s school day would facilitate voluntary and optional attendance at Church classes. But that suggestion is rejected upon the ground that if they are made free many students will not go to the Church. Hence, they must be deprived of freedom for this period, with Church attendance put to them as one of the two permissible ways of using it.

The greater effectiveness of this system over voluntary attendance after school hours is due to the truant officer who, if the youngster fails to go to the Church school, dogs him back to the public schoolroom. Here schooling is more or less suspended during the “released time” so the nonreligious attendants will not forge ahead of the churchgoing absentees. But it serves as a temporary jail for a pupil who will not go to Church. It takes more subtlety of mind than I possess to deny that this is governmental constraint in support of religion. It is as unconstitutional, in my view, when exerted by indirection as when exercised forthrightly.

As one whose children, as a matter of free choice, have been sent to privately supported Church schools, I may challenge the Court?s suggestion that opposition to this plan can only be antireligious, atheistic, or agnostic. My evangelistic brethren confuse an objection to compulsion with an objection to religion. It is possible to hold a faith with enough confidence to believe that what should be rendered to God does not need to be decided and collected by Caesar.

The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion it will cease to be free for religion?except for the sect that can win political power. The same epithetical jurisprudence used by the Court today to beat down those who oppose pressuring children into some religion can devise as good epithets tomorrow against those who object to pressuring them into a favored religion. And, after all, if we concede to the State power and wisdom to single out “duly constituted religious” bodies as exclusive alternatives for compulsory secular instruction, it would be logical to also uphold the power and wisdom to choose the true faith among those “duly constituted.” We start down a rough road when we begin to mix compulsory public education with compulsory godliness.

A number of Justices just short of a majority of the majority that promulgates today?s passionate dialectics joined in answering them in Illinois ex rel. McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203 . The distinction attempted between that case and this is trivial, almost to the point of cynicism, magnifying its nonessential details and disparaging compulsion which was the underlying reason for invalidity. A reading of the Court?s opinion in that case along with its opinion in this case will show such difference of overtones and undertones as to make clear that the McCollum case has passed like a storm in a teacup. The wall which the Court was professing to erect between Church and State has become even more warped and twisted than I expected. Today?s judgment will be more interesting to students of psychology and of the judicial processes than to students of constitutional law.

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The issues presented by Mr. Smith transcend personalities and call for the most thoughtful consideration that the intelligence of the Association can bring to bear upon them. Is there in fact a deep-seated division in the Association? Has a battle line been drawn in such a fashion that members must align themselves on the one side or the other? Is it impossible to find a synthesis that will reconcile apparent contradictions or suggest a suspension of judgment, at least for the time being? Are the facts employed by Mr. Smith to illustrate his thesis so precisely accurate in every case as to be beyond amendment in a quest for “objective truth”? Surely these questions are of more than passing importance. They concern the young members of the Association and the fate of the society. They invite us to stop for a moment to review the assumptions on which historical work is to be done in the future; and perhaps answers to them may reveal some overarching hypothesis or suggest a healing diffidence, at least.

The division which Mr. Smith makes in the Association seems to be positive and sharp. On the one side are the scholars who have made “the impressive output of sound, creditable, and in many cases masterly, works on American history during the period under review” [1884- 1934]. The works of this class of scholars “are dominated, from monograph to many-volumed work, by one clear-cut ideal that presented to the world first in Germany and later accepted everywhere, the ideal of the effort for objective truth.” Theirs was “a noble dream,” now threatened with extinction, and the hope is expressed that members of this school may go down, if necessary, “with our flags flying.” “In that case, it will be time for the American Historical Association to disband, for the intellectual assumptions on which it is founded will have been taken away from beneath it.” Here then is a clear-cut ideal, a noble dream, and the American Historical Association was “founded” on it. And who are the men who threaten this ideal, dream, and Association? They are writers who do not “consider it necessary to be impartial or even fair.” They are partial and doctrinaire. Especially doctrinaire are those who resort to an economic interpretation of history. Among the menaces to the old and true faith, mentioned by Mr. Smith, is James Harvey Robinson who once flatly declared that what is called “objective history” is simply history without an object, and proposed that historical knowledge be used to throw light on “the quandaries of our life today” ” to facilitate “readjustment and reform.” Here are the contending parties of light and darkness.

The dichotomy so presented seems to involve ideal, method, and belief in the possibility of achievement. Scholars of the Old Guard desired above all things to search for “objective truth.” Were the men whom Mr. Smith puts on the other side of the fence opposed to the ideal of the search for truth? Is the scholar who seeks knowledge useful to contemporaries wrestling with “the quandaries of our life today” unconcerned about the truth of that knowledge? His end may be different but surely he does not seek falsehood or believe that false history can be serviceable to the cause posited. Nor can it be said that the student who tries to penetrate the pageant of politics to the economic interests behind the scenes is necessarily hostile to the ideal of the search for truth. Conceivably he might be as much interested in truth as the scholar who ignores or neglects the economic aspects of history. As far as method goes, those scholars who are placed in opposition to the noble dream may be as patient in their inquiries and as rigorous in their criticism and use of documentation as the old masters of light and leading. In intentions and methods, therefore, no necessary antagonism appears to arise.

Now we come to achievement to the possibility of finding and stating the objective truth of history. Here we encounter something more difficult to fathom than intentions or methods. We encounter questions which run deeply into the nature of the human mind, the substance of history as actuality, and the power of scholarship to grasp history objectively. Beyond doubt, scholars of competence can agree on many particular truths and on large bodies of established facts. But is it possible for men to divest themselves of all race, sex, class, political, social, and regional predilections and tell the truth of history as it actually was? Can Mr. Smith鈥檚 noble dream, his splendid hope, be realized in fact? That is the fundamental issue at stake.

This theory that history as it actually was can be disclosed by critical study, can be known as objective truth, and can be stated as such, contains certain elements and assumptions. The first is that history (general or of any period) has existed as an object or series of objects outside the mind of the historian (a Gegenuber separated from him and changing in time). The second is that the historian can face and know this object, or series of objects and can describe it as it objectively existed.² The third is that the historian can, at least for the purposes of research and writings, divest himself of all taint of religious, political, philosophical, social, sex, economic, moral, and aesthetic interests, and view this Gegenuber with strict impartiality, somewhat as the mirror reflects any object to which it is held up. The fourth is that the multitudinous events of history as actuality had some structural organization through inner (perhaps causal) relations, which the impartial historian can grasp by inquiry and observation and accurately reproduce or describe in written history. The fifth is that the substances of this history can be grasped in themselves by purely rational or intellectual efforts, and that they are not permeated by or accompanied by anything transcendent God, spirit, or materialism. To be sure the theory of objective history is not often so fully stated, but such are the nature and implications of it.³

This theory of history and of human powers is one of the most sweeping dogmas in the recorded history of theories. It condemns philosophy and throws it out of doors. As practiced, it ignores problems of mind with which philosophers and theologians have wrestled for centuries and have not yet settled to everybody鈥檚 satisfaction. As developed into Historicism (it may be well to Anglicize Historismus) , it takes on all the implications of empiricism, positivism, and, if not materialism, at least that rationalism which limits history to its purely experiential aspects. If sound and appealing, it is nonetheless an all-embracing philosophy of historiography, even though it denies philosophy.

Although Ranke contributed powerfully to the growth of this historical theory, and claimed to be writing history as it actually had been, he did not in fact follow the logic of his procedure to its empirical conclusion. He opposed the philosophic method of Hegel that powerful thinker who boldly attempted to grasp the scheme entire and at the same time Ranke conceived history as, in some strange manner, “a revelation of God.” Rut he did not openly employ this belief in selecting and arranging “objectively” the facts of history as it actually had been. He did not think that man could know God as history, but he imagined that man could see “God鈥檚 finger” in human affairs and dimly grasp God鈥檚 handiwork in history. In history, as Ranke conceived it: God stood there, “wie eine heilige Hieroglyphe, an seinem Aussersten aufgefasst und bewahrt.”⁴ History was “der Gang Gottes in der Welt.”In the true spirit of Lutheran piety, Ranke flung himself down before the impenetrable mystery of things: “Allgewaltiger, Einer und Dreifaltiger, du hast mich aus dem Nichts gerufen. Hier liege ich vor deines Thrones Stufen.” Yet he fain would write history, so enclosed in mystery, as it actually had been, impartially, from the critical study of written documents. He rejected philosophy, proclaimed positive history, and still was controlled by a kind of Pantheismus.

Ranke could write history, certainly, with a majestic air of impartiality and say that he had written as it actually had been. For example, he could write of popes in a manner pleasing to both Catholics and Protestants of the upper classes. He doubtless believed that he was telling this history of the popes as it actually had been. Did he realize his claim? There is stark validity in the Jesuit objection that Ranke avoided the chief actuality of the story: Was the papacy actually what it affirmed itself to be, “an institution of the Son of God made man,” or was it a combination of false claims, craft, and man-made power?⁵ How could Ranke avoid that question and yet even claim to be writing history as it actually was?

I make no pretensions to knowing Ranke as he actually was or his motives in writing the kind of history he chose to write. But records are available to establish the fact that he did not abstain entirely from those hot political controversies which are supposed to warp the pure thought of the empirical historian. In directing the Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift he chose a way between French constitutionalism and that extreme Prussian conservatism which would yield not a point to democratic aspirations. After the July Revolution Ranke favored a confederate law against the political press and political literature a proposition that must have pleased Metternich and Gentz, who opened their archives to him.⁶ After the March upheaval of 1848 Ranke came vigorously to the support of Frederick William IV in resistance to popular demands for a constitution based on democratic principles. On this occasion the “impartial” historian proved to be a bulwark for Prussian authoritarianism against which so many “impartial” historians in the United States wrote vigorously in 1917-1918. Ranke also rejoiced in the events of 1870-1871 “as the victory of conservative Europe over the Revolution,” showing that he could not completely separate his political from his historical conceptions. Persistently neglecting social and economic interests in history, successfully avoiding any historical writing that offended the most conservative interests in the Europe of his own time, Ranke may be correctly characterized as one of the most “partial” historians produced by the nineteenth century.

Whether Ranke was fully conscious of what he was doing himself, he was able to see that other historians were writing from some angle of vision. He once said to George Bancroft: “I tell my hearers, that your history is the best book ever written from the democratic point of view. You are thoroughly consistent; adhere strictly to your method, carry it out in many directions but in all with fidelity, and are always true to it.” In making this statement, Ranke expressed the hope that it would not make Bancroft angry⁷ Bancroft was not certain that this was “high praise.” Shortly afterward he declared: “I deny the charge; if there is democracy in history it is not subjective, but objective as they say here, and so has necessarily its place in history and gives its colour as it should. . . .” Is it possible that Ranke, who was quick to discover subjective ideas in Bancroft鈥檚 writings, was totally unaware of the fact that he might be writing from the point of view of the conservative reaction in Europe? If he never applied the criterion to himself, then he was doubly “partial” and utterly devoid of any sense for reality and humor.

If, as Mr. Smith says, the “objective” method of Ranke and his school was “accepted everywhere,” it is due to history as it was to record that the conception was subjected all along to a running fire of criticism by German historians, even by those “von Fach.” Leaving aside the penetrating skepticism of Schopenhauer (who certainly was no mean thinker) and the critique of Eugen Duhring, we find searching examinations of the theory and logic of Historicism by German scholars in the early issues of the Historische Zeitschrift, and in the writings of Droysen, Ottokar Lorenz, Bernheim, and Lainprecht, for instance.⁸ There were not wanting at that time historians “die in naiver, selbstgewisser Technik ihre Historie trieben, ohne zu ahnen, an welchen theoretischen Abgriinden sie sich bewegten”; but many German scholars early went behind Ranke鈥檚 formula and challenged its validity. They did this long before a host of critical thinkers fell upon it during the opening years of the twentieth century.

And if the Ranke formula or theory of history was accepted in the United States by members of the American Historical Association, as Mr. Smith states, it is not quite in line with the facts in the case to say that it was “everywhere” accepted. Was it in reality adopted as the official creed of the Association in the good old days before ignoble, doctrinaire, and partial students appeared upon the scene? Surely the creed was never drawn up and signed by all faithful members. Whether the majority were acquainted with the philosophical discussion that had long raged around it and threw themselves positively on the Ranke side seems to be a statistical problem not yet solved. Hence judgment should be suspended.

Pending the determination of this historical fact by research, one item in the story may be cited the presidential address delivered at the opening session of the American Historical Association in 1884 by Andrew D. White. Ranke was yet living. Did Mr. White commit himself or the Association to Historicism or the Ranke formula? Emphatically, he did not, as any member can discover by reading again that noteworthy address. In fact Mr. White, with mature wisdom, recognized both sides of the problem of historiography: the special, the detailed, the verified, the documented and the philosophical. He said categorically: “While acknowledging the great value of special investigations . . . to historical knowledge in individual nations, it is not too much to say that the highest effort and the noblest result toward which these special historical investigations lead is the philosophical synthesis of all special results in a large, truth-loving, justice-loving spirit.”

“Bearing on this point, Buckle, in a passage well worthy of meditation, has placed observation at the foot of the ladder, discovery next above it, and philosophical method at the summit.” In this spirit Mr. White declared that at the annual meetings of the Association there ought to be a session or sessions dealing with special studies, and also a session or sessions “devoted to general history, the history of civilization, and the philosophy of history.” He recognized the dangers of the latter “looseness and vagueness” but thought that the consideration of both aspects of history would contribute to a sounder development of each. “These difficulties,” Mr. White warned us, “the Association must meet as they arise.”⁹

Nor did the first President, Andrew D. White, see in the use of history as an instrument of “social control” the perils to scholarship lamented by Mr. Smith. On the contrary, Mr. White closed with an exordium in line with the thought later expressed by James Harvey Robinson, whose ideal Mr. Smith puts on the other side of the fence from “a noble dream.” Mr. White proposed no neutral, value-free history. “Certainly,” he said near the close of his address, “a confederation like this of historical scholars . . . ought to elicit most valuable work in both fields [special and philosophical], and to contribute powerfully to the healthful development on the one hand of man as man, and on the other to the opening up of a better political and social future for the nation at large.” This is asking historians to do what James Harvey Robinson suggested: bring historical knowledge to bear “on the quandaries of our life today.”

Henry Adams was also once President of the American Historical Association. He cannot be placed among those who have recently invaded the circle of the pure faith and threatened to destroy the Association by “the final extinction of a noble dream,” driving Mr. Smith and his adherents to consider the frightful alternative of going down “with our flags flying.” Did Henry Adams limit the function and thought of the historian to Historicism, the Ranke formula, or neutrality in the face of life鈥檚 exigent forces? Members who care to know before they take sides in a discussion of the theory of history must read the letter which Henry Adams, as President of the Association, wrote to his colleagues as long ago as 1894.¹⁰ There he invited the members to consider what a science of history would look like and the devastating challenge which it would make to the church, the state, property, or labor. Mr. Adams, with amazing foresight, predicted a crisis in Western economy and thought, and warned his colleagues that they “may at any time in the next fifty years be compelled to find an answer, Yes or No, under the pressure of the most powerful organizations the world has ever known for the suppression of influences hostile to its safety.”

One more colleague may be mentioned. Mr. Smith has referred to H. L. Osgood as holding to the “high ideals” of the school which now seems to be threatened by doctrinaire writers. Mr. Osgood was, as Mr. Smith says, expository, analytical, and for the most part impersonal. Did Mr. Osgood imagine himself to be writing history as it actually was? His ambition was more limited. He sought to tell the truth, as best he could, about certain aspects of history. Did he imagine himself to stand outside the Zeitgeist? Not for a moment. Mr. Osgood had been one of my masters, and shortly after I presented him with a copy of my Economic Interpretation of the Constitution I asked him whether it offended him or appeared to be ultra vires? His response was positive. He said in effect: “Men of my generation grew up in the midst of great constitutional and institutional debates and our interest turned to institutional history. Profound economic questions have now arisen and students of the younger generation, true to their age, will occupy themselves with economic aspects of history.” Far from deeming this interest reprehensible, Mr. Osgood regarded it as “natural” and proper. Near the end of his life he spoke to me of the heavy hand of time that lies upon all our work, dating us, revealing our limitations.

How many other members of the older generation did in fact think their way through the assumptions and convictions enclosed in Mr. Smith鈥檚 “noble dream” and accept it whole heartedly? The data for answering that question are not at hand. How many watched carefully the development of the critical attitude toward Historicism in Europe at the turn of the century, and especially after 1914? Materials for answering that query are not available either. Judging by the files of the American Historical Review and the programs of annual meetings such philosophical issues have received scant consideration, little exploration and examination. Judging by the writings of American historians slight attention has been given to the intellectual problems involved in the choice of subjects, the selection of facts, and the construction of monographs and many-volumed works. If there has been any real searching of historical minds and hearts in the United States, any fearless and wide-reaching inquiry into preliminary assumptions, tacit or deliberate, any procedure save on the level of ingenuous convictions, historical literature bears only a few evidences of its fruits. If engines of skepticism and verification have been mercilessly applied to what passes for constructive thought, as distinguished from eclecticism and documentation, news of the fact has not spread far and wide enough in the American Historical Association to make a profound impression upon its proceedings. Some countervailing evidence may be cited, no doubt, but the exceptions would seem merely to prove the rule. It may be that the major portion of American scholars in the good old days imagined that they could discover and know the objective truth of history as it-, actually was, but there is good reason for thinking that a large number of them did not labor under that impression respecting their activities and powers.

Having indicated some grounds for holding that Historicism is not and never has been “accepted everywhere” as the official creed of the American Historical Association, it is now appropriate to inquire whether the Ranke formula is valid in itself. Can the human mind discover and state the “objective truth” of history as it actually was? Space does not admit even a brief summation of the voluminous literature dealing with this conception and demonstrating, if not its delusive character, its rejection by scholars and thinkers of high competence in Europe. Those American students who care to examine the history and nature of the European revolt against Historicism may find guidance in Croce, History: its Theory and Practice, in Heussi, Die Krisis des Historismus, and in the numerous works cited by Heussi as supporting evidence. In these volumes is presented the development of historical thought which culminated in the rejection of the Ranke theory and its formulation as Historicism.

At this point only a bare outline of the argument is possible, but it may be given, very inadequately, in the following propositions:

I. The idea that history took place in the past as actuality outside the mind of the contemporary historian is accepted as the commonsense view.

2. The historian is not an observer of the past that lies beyond his own time. He cannot see it objectively as the chemist sees his test tubes and compounds. The historian must “see” the actuality of history through the medium of documentation. That is his sole recourse.

3. The documentation (including monuments and other relics) with which the historian must work covers only a part of the events and personalities that make up the actuality of history. In other words multitudinous events and personalities escape the recording of documentation. To realize the significance of this, as Heussi says, it is only necessary to consider an effort to describe the battle of Leipzig alone, to say nothing of the Napoleonic wars or the history of the Roman Empire.

4. Not only is the documentation partial. In very few cases can the historian be reasonably sure that he has assembled all the documents of a given period, region, or segment. In most cases he makes a partial selection or a partial reading of the partial record of the multitudinous events and personalities involved in the actuality with which he is dealing.

5. Since the history of any period embraces all the actualities involved, and since both documentation and research are partial, it follows that the total actuality is not factually knowable to any historian, however laborious, judicial, or faithful he may be in his procedures. History as it actually was, as distinguished, of course from particular facts of history, is not known or knowable, no matter how zealously is pursued “the ideal of the effort for objective truth.”

6. The idea that there was a complete and actual structurization of events in the past, to be discovered through a partial examination of the partial documentation, is pure hypothesis, as Th. Lessing shows in his Geschickte als Sinngebung des Sinntosen.

7. The events and personalities of history in their very nature involve ethical and aesthetic considerations. They are not mere events in physics and chemistry inviting neutrality on the part of the “observer.”

8. Any overarching hypothesis or conception employed to give coherence and structure to past events in written history is an interpretation of some kind, something transcendent. And as Croce says, “transcendency is always transcendency, whether it be thought of as that of a God or of reason, of nature, or of matter.”

9. The historian seeking to know the past, or about it, does not bring to the partial documentation with which he works a perfect and polished neutral mind in which the past streaming through the medium of documentation is mirrored as it actually was. Whatever acts of purification the historian may perform he yet remains human, a creature of time, place, circumstance, interests, predilections, culture. No amount of renunciation could have made Andrew D. White into a Frederick Jackson Turner or either of them into a neutral mirror.

10. Into the selection of topics, the choice and arrangement of materials, the specific historian鈥檚 “me” will enter. It may enter with a conscious clarification of philosophy and purpose or, as Croce says, surreptitiously, without confession or acknowledgment.

11. The validity of the Ranke formula and its elaboration as Historicism is destroyed by internal contradictions and rejected by contemporary thought. The historian鈥檚 powers are limited. He may search for, but he cannot find, the “objective truth” of history, or write it, “as it actually was.”

Now we come to the validity of an antithesis of the Ranke formula the economic interpretation of history. Is it partial, in the sense that it does not cover all the events of history? It certainly is. Surely none will contend that it could be otherwise than partial in its scope. Is it “the correct” interpretation of history? If the word interpretation is taken to mean “explanation,” then neither it nor any other historical hypothesis can be regarded as valid and final, on the ground that in the nature of things documentation and the human mind the past as it actually was cannot be known. If the word be taken, however, in a manner equally admissible under linguistic usage, to mean simply the writer鈥檚 version, construction, or conception of his subject, then an economic interpretation is merely what it professes to be a version, not the absolute truth, of history.

Seekers after truth in particular and general have less reason to fear it than they have to fear any history that comes under the guise of the Ranke formula or Historicism. It bears its own warning. A book entitled An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, like every other book on history, is a selection and an organization of facts; but it serves advance notice on the reader, telling him what to expect. A book entitled The Formation of the Constitution or The Making of the Constitution is also a selection and organization of facts, hence an interpretation or conception of some kind, but it does not advise the reader at the outset concerning the upshot to be expected.

Does an economic interpretation, open and avowed, violate the “ideal of the effort for objective truth”? Not necessarily. The historian who searches out and orders economic aspects of life, events, and interests may possibly be as zealous in his search for truth as any other historian searching out and ordering his facts in his way. Is the student who seeks an economic interpretation more partial, in the sense of partisanship, or more doctrinaire than the historian, who assumes that he can know the past as it actually has been? Not necessarily. He may conceivably view the structure of classes, their ideologies, formulas, projects, and conflicts as coldly and impartially as any disciple of Ranke that the American Historical Association has furnished.

Did the economic interpretation of history, as Mr. Smith alleges, have “its origin, of course, in the Marxian theories”? I cannot speak for others, but so far as I am concerned, my conception of the economic interpretation of history rests upon documentation older than Karl Marx Number X of the Federalist, the writings of the Fathers of the Republic, the works of Daniel Webster, the treatises of Locke, Hobbes, and Machiavelli, and the Politics of Aristotle as well as the writings of Marx himself.

Yet I freely pay tribute to the amazing range of Marx鈥檚 scholarship, and the penetrating character of his thought. It may be appropriate to remind those who may be inclined to treat Marx as a mere revolutionary or hot partisan that he was more than that. He was a doctor of philosophy from a German university, possessing the hallmark of the scholar. He was a student of Greek and Latin learning. He read, besides German, his native tongue, Greek, Latin, French, English, Italian, and Russian. He was widely read in contemporary history and economic thought. Hence, however much one may dislike Marx鈥檚 personal views, one cannot deny to him wide and deep knowledge and a fearless and sacrificial life. He not only interpreted history, as everyone does who writes any history, but he helped to make history. Possibly he may have known something. At least the contemporary student, trying to look coldly and impartially on thought and thinkers in the field of historiography, may learn a little bit, at least, from Karl Marx.

But that does not mean that any economic interpretation of history must be used for the purposes which Marx set before himself. It may well be used for opposite purposes. It has been. It may be again. Or it may be employed as the basis for impartiality and inaction on the ground that a conflict of mere material interests cannot be a matter of concern to virtue itself. In other words there is nothing in the nature of an economic interpretation of history that compels the interpreter to take any partisan or doctrinaire view of the struggle of interests. In fact such an interpretation of the Constitution is less liable to invite a surge of feeling than Mr. Smith鈥檚 interpretation that the formation and adoption of the Constitution was “a contest between sections ending in the victory of straight-thinking national-minded men over narrower and more local opponents.” An economic interpretation does not inquire whether men were straight-thinking or crooked-thinking. It inquires not into their powers of mind or virtues, but into the nature and effects of their substantial possessions. Nor is it necessarily in conflict with Mr. Smith鈥檚 conclusions. It pushes the inquiry one step further than he does. It asks how it happened that some men were national-minded and others were local-minded, and perhaps throws some light upon the subject.

What conclusions, then, may be drawn from this excursion, hurried and cursory, into historiography, for members of the American Historical Association? In my opinion, they are as follows: The formula of Ranke and its extension as Historicism do not and have never formed an official creed for the Association. From Andrew D. White down to the present moment there have been members who have believed that the wider and deeper philosophic questions involved in the interpretation of history should be considered as having an importance equal to, if not greater than, the consideration of documentation, special studies, and writings done on the assumption that history “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” can be known and expounded by historians. The Ranke formula and Historicism are not the official creed of the Association and ought not to be, for they now lie amid the ruins of their own defeat. Nor are the other creeds placed in antithesis to the “noble dream” by Mr. Smith deemed official. They should not be. No school that makes pretensions to exclusive omniscience or exclusive virtue, that claims to know history as it actually was can long escape the corroding skepticism that search and thought bring to it. It is undesirable to invite the Association to split over two absolutes. It is not necessary for any member, faction, or group, however large or small, to feel that a war to the hilt is on and that the one or the other must go down with, or without, “flying colors.”

The task before the American Historical Association seems to be something other than that of deepening a division artificially made. The collection, preservation, and publication of archives must be carried on with ever increasing zeal. All the engines of criticism, authentication, and verification, so vigorously used by the German school, must be employed with all the powers of intelligence available. Monographic studies must be promoted. But this is not enough.

The philosophic side of historiography, as Andrew D. White warned the Association, must also receive the consideration required for all constructive work in historical writing. The effort to grasp at the totality of history must and will be continued, even though the dream of bringing it to earth must be abandoned. This means a widening of the range of search beyond politics to include interests hitherto neglected economic, racial, sex, and cultural in the most general sense of the term. Certainly by this broadening process the scholar will come nearer to the actuality of history as it has been. The distinction between particular facts that may be established by the scientific method and the “objective” truth of history must be maintained, if illusions are to be dispelled.

Still more pressing, because so generally neglected, is the task of exploring the assumptions upon which the selection and organization of historical facts proceed. In the nature of things they proceed upon some assumptions concerning the substance of history as actuality. We do not acquire the colorless, neutral mind by declaring our intention to do so. Rather do we clarify the mind by admitting its cultural interests and Patterns interests and patterns that will control, or intrude upon, the selection and organization of historical materials. Under what formulas is it possible to conceive history? What types of controlling patterns are to be found in the declarations of historical writers, in the diverse opinions of the world at large, and in the works of historians already before us? Instead of waging a war, followed by victory or defeat, we need to provide for the Association鈥檚 annual meetings a section or sections dealing with the assumptions and procedures of historiography. What do we think we are doing when we are writing history? What kinds of philosophies or interpretations are open to us? Which interpretations are actually chosen and practiced? And why? By what methods or processes can we hope to bring the multitudinous and bewildering facts of history into any coherent and meaningful whole? Through the discussion of such questions the noble dream of the search for truth may be brought nearer to realization, not extinguished; but in the end the members of the American Historical Association will be human beings, not immortal gods.

¹Am. Hist. Rev., XL, 439-449.Return to text

²If the historian could do this, then so far as he covers the past there would be nothing left for posterity to do. The task of writing the history of countries and periods could be definitively discharged. To that extent students would have no work before them excep that of reading the masters. A new historical treatment of an age would be as unthinkable as a new multiplication table. Return to text

³Karl Heussi, Die Krisis des Historismus (Tiibingen, 1932), pp. 1-21. Return to text

⁴Friedrich Meinecke, DieIdee der Staatsrason (Munich, 3d ed., 1929) , pp. 469 ff. Return to text

⁵Benedetto Croce, History: its Theory and Practice (New York, 1921), p. 300. ” Tertitun non datur.” Return to text

⁶Historische Zeitschrift, XCIII, 78. Return to text

⁷M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Life and Letters of George Bancroft (New York, 1908), 11, 83. Return to text

⁸Heussi, p. 24. On Ranke鈥檚 substitution of Universal History for the Philosophy of History, Henri See remarks: “Conception, qui, aujourd hui, nous parait de pensee assez pauvre, depuis que I鈥檋orizon de l鈥檋istorien s鈥檈st singulikrenlent Llargi.” Science ef philosophie de l鈥檋istoire (2d ed., Paris, 1933), pp. 20-21; citing Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme (Vol. III, Gesammelte Schriften, Tubingen, 1992). Return to text

⁹American Historical Association, Papers, I, 49-72. Return to text

¹⁰Ibid., Annual Report, 1894, pp. 17-23. Reprinted in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (New York, 1920) pp . 125 ff. Return to text

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It is, then, the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence and cruelty. To bring this hope to fruition, we are compelled daily to turn more and more to a conscientious study of the phenomena of race-contact,鈥攖o a study frank and fair, and not falsified and colored by our wishes or our fears. And we have in the South as fine a field for such a study as the world affords,鈥攁 field, to be sure, which the average American scientist deems somewhat beneath his dignity, and which the average man who is not a scientist knows all about, but nevertheless a line of study which by reason of the enormous race complications with which God seems about to punish this nation must increasingly claim our sober attention, study, and thought, we must ask, what are the actual relations of whites and blacks in the South? and we must be answered, not by apology or fault-finding, but by a plain, unvarnished tale.

In the civilized life of to-day the contact of men and their relations to each other fall in a few main lines of action and communication: there is, first, the physical proximity of homes and dwelling-places, the way in which neighborhoods group themselves, and the contiguity of neighborhoods. Secondly, and in our age chiefest, there are the economic relations,鈥攖he methods by which individuals co枚perate for earning a living, for the mutual satisfaction of wants, for the production of wealth. Next, there are the political relations, the co枚peration in social control, in group government, in laying and paying the burden of taxation. In the fourth place there are the less tangible but highly important forms of intellectual contact and commerce, the interchange of ideas through conversation and conference, through periodicals and libraries; and, above all, the gradual formation for each community of that curious tertium quid which we call public opinion. Closely allied with this come the various forms of social contact in everyday life, in travel, in theatres, in house gatherings, in marrying and giving in marriage. Finally, there are the varying forms of religious enterprise, of moral teaching and benevolent endeavor. These are the principal ways in which men living in the same communities are brought into contact with each other. It is my present task, therefore, to indicate, from my point of view, how the black race in the South meet and mingle with the whites in these matters of everyday life.

First, as to physical dwelling. It is usually possible to draw in nearly every Southern community a physical color-line on the map, on the one side of which whites dwell and on the other Negroes. The winding and intricacy of the geographical color line varies, of course, in different communities. I know some towns where a straight line drawn through the middle of the main street separates nine-tenths of the whites from nine-tenths of the blacks. In other towns the older settlement of whites has been encircled by a broad band of blacks; in still other cases little settlements or nuclei of blacks have sprung up amid surrounding whites. Usually in cities each street has its distinctive color, and only now and then do the colors meet in close proximity. Even in the country something of this segregation is manifest in the smaller areas, and of course in the larger phenomena of the Black Belt.

All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities. A Negro slum may be in dangerous proximity to a white residence quarter, while it is quite common to find a white slum planted in the heart of a respectable Negro district. One thing, however, seldom occurs: the best of the whites and the best of the Negroes almost never live in anything like close proximity. It thus happens that in nearly every Southern town and city, both whites and blacks see commonly the worst of each other. This is a vast change from the situation in the past, when, through the close contact of master and house-servant in the patriarchal big house, one found the best of both races in close contact and sympathy, while at the same time the squalor and dull round of toil among the field-hands was removed from the sight and hearing of the family. One can easily see how a person who saw slavery thus from his father鈥檚 parlors, and sees freedom on the streets of a great city, fails to grasp or comprehend the whole of the new picture. On the other hand, the settled belief of the mass of the Negroes that the Southern white people do not have the black man鈥檚 best interests at heart has been intensified in later years by this continual daily contact of the better class of blacks with the worst representatives of the white race.

Coming now to the economic relations of the races, we are on ground made familiar by study, much discussion, and no little philanthropic effort. And yet with all this there are many essential elements in the co枚peration of Negroes and whites for work and wealth that are too readily overlooked or not thoroughly understood. The average American can easily conceive of a rich land awaiting development and filled with black laborers. To him the Southern problem is simply that of making efficient workingmen out of this material, by giving them the requisite technical skill and the help of invested capital. The problem, however, is by no means as simple as this, from the obvious fact that these workingmen have been trained for centuries as slaves. They exhibit, therefore, all the advantages and defects of such training; they are willing and good-natured, but not self-reliant, provident, or careful. If now the economic development of the South is to be pushed to the verge of exploitation, as seems probable, then we have a mass of workingmen thrown into relentless competition with the workingmen of the world, but handicapped by a training the very opposite to that of the modern self-reliant democratic laborer. What the black laborer needs is careful personal guidance, group leadership of men with hearts in their bosoms, to train them to foresight, carefulness, and honesty. Nor does it require any fine-spun theories of racial differences to prove the necessity of such group training after the brains of the race have been knocked out by two hundred and fifty years of assiduous education in submission, carelessness, and stealing. After Emancipation, it was the plain duty of some one to assume this group leadership and training of the Negro laborer. I will not stop here to inquire whose duty it was,鈥攚hether that of the white ex-master who had profited by unpaid toil, or the Northern philanthropist whose persistence brought on the crisis, or the National Government whose edict freed the bondmen; I will not stop to ask whose duty it was, but I insist it was the duty of some one to see that these workingmen were not left alone and unguided, without capital, without land, without skill, without economic organization, without even the bald protection of law, order, and decency,鈥攍eft in a great land, not to settle down to slow and careful internal development, but destined to be thrown almost immediately into relentless and sharp competition with the best of modern workingmen under an economic system where every participant is fighting for himself, and too often utterly regardless of the rights or welfare of his neighbor.

For we must never forget that the economic system of the South to-day which has succeeded the old 谤茅驳颈尘别 is not the same system as that of the old industrial North, of England, or of France, with their trades-unions, their restrictive laws, their written and unwritten commercial customs, and their long experience. It is, rather, a copy of that England of the early nineteenth century, before the factory acts,鈥攖he England that wrung pity from thinkers and fired the wrath of Carlyle. The rod of empire that passed from the hands of Southern gentlemen in 1865, partly by force, partly by their own petulance, has never returned to them. Rather it has passed to those men who have come to take charge of the industrial exploitation of the New South,鈥攖he sons of poor whites fired with a new thirst for wealth and power, thrifty and avaricious Yankees, shrewd and unscrupulous Jews. Into the hands of these men the Southern laborers, white and black, have fallen; and this to their sorrow. For the laborers as such there is in these new captains of industry neither love nor hate, neither sympathy nor romance; it is a cold question of dollars and dividends. Under such a system all labor is bound to suffer. Even the white laborers are not yet intelligent, thrifty, and well trained enough to maintain themselves against the powerful inroads of organized capital. The results among them, even, are long hours of toil, low wages, child labor, and lack of protection against usury and cheating. But among the black laborers all this is aggravated, first, by a race prejudice which varies from a doubt and distrust among the best element of whites to a frenzied hatred among the worst; and, secondly, it is aggravated, as I have said before, by the wretched economic heritage of the freedmen from slavery. With this training it is difficult for the freedman to learn to grasp the opportunities already opened to him, and the new opportunities are seldom given him, but go by favor to the whites.

Left by the best elements of the South with little protection or oversight, he has been made in law and custom the victim of the worst and most unscrupulous men in each community. The crop-lien system which is depopulating the fields of the South is not simply the result of shiftlessness on the part of Negroes, but is also the result of cunningly devised laws as to mortgages, liens, and misdemeanors, which can be made by conscienceless men to entrap and snare the unwary until escape is impossible, further toil a farce, and protest a crime. I have seen, in the Black Belt of Georgia, an ignorant, honest Negro buy and pay for a farm in installments three separate times, and then in the face of law and decency the enterprising Russian Jew who sold it to him pocketed money and deed and left the black man landless, to labor on his own land at thirty cents a day. I have seen a black farmer fall in debt to a white storekeeper, and that storekeeper go to his farm and strip it of every single marketable article,鈥攎ules, ploughs, stored crops, tools, furniture, bedding, clocks, looking-glass,鈥攁nd all this without a warrant, without process of law, without a sheriff or officer, in the face of the law for homestead exemptions, and without rendering to a single responsible person any account or reckoning. And such proceedings can happen, and will happen, in any community where a class of ignorant toilers are placed by custom and race-prejudice beyond the pale of sympathy and race-brotherhood. So long as the best elements of a community do not feel in duty bound to protect and train and care for the weaker members of their group, they leave them to be preyed upon by these swindlers and rascals.

This unfortunate economic situation does not mean the hindrance of all advance in the black South, or the absence of a class of black landlords and mechanics who, in spite of disadvantages, are accumulating property and making good citizens. But it does mean that this class is not nearly so large as a fairer economic system might easily make it, that those who survive in the competition are handicapped so as to accomplish much less than they deserve to, and that, above all, the personnel of the successful class is left to chance and accident, and not to any intelligent culling or reasonable methods of selection. As a remedy for this, there is but one possible procedure. We must accept some of the race prejudice in the South as a fact,鈥攄eplorable in its intensity, unfortunate in results, and dangerous for the future, but nevertheless a hard fact which only time can efface. We cannot hope, then, in this generation, or for several generations, that the mass of the whites can be brought to assume that close sympathetic and self-sacrificing leadership of the blacks which their present situation so eloquently demands. Such leadership, such social teaching and example, must come from the blacks themselves. For some time men doubted as to whether the Negro could develop such leaders; but to-day no one seriously disputes the capability of individual Negroes to assimilate the culture and common sense of modern civilization, and to pass it on, to some extent at least, to their fellows. If this is true, then here is the path out of the economic situation, and here is the imperative demand for trained Negro leaders of character and intelligence,鈥攎en of skill, men of light and leading, college-bred men, black captains of industry, and missionaries of culture; men who thoroughly comprehend and know modern civilization, and can take hold of Negro communities and raise and train them by force of precept and example, deep sympathy, and the inspiration of common blood and ideals. But if such men are to be effective they must have some power,鈥攖hey must be backed by the best public opinion of these communities, and able to wield for their objects and aims such weapons as the experience of the world has taught are indispensable to human progress.

Of such weapons the greatest, perhaps, in the modern world is the power of the ballot; and this brings me to a consideration of the third form of contact between whites and blacks in the South,鈥攑olitical activity.

In the attitude of the American mind toward Negro suffrage can be traced with unusual accuracy the prevalent conceptions of government. In the fifties we were near enough the echoes of the French Revolution to believe pretty thoroughly in universal suffrage. We argued, as we thought then rather logically, that no social class was so good, so true, and so disinterested as to be trusted wholly with the political destiny of its neighbors; that in every state the best arbiters of their own welfare are the persons directly affected; consequently that it is only by arming every hand with a ballot,鈥攚ith the right to have a voice in the policy of the state,鈥攖hat the greatest good to the greatest number could be attained. To be sure, there were objections to these arguments, but we thought we had answered them tersely and convincingly; if some one complained of the ignorance of voters, we answered, 鈥淓ducate them.鈥� If another complained of their venality, we replied, 鈥淒isfranchise them or put them in jail.鈥� And, finally, to the men who feared demagogues and the natural perversity of some human beings we insisted that time and bitter experience would teach the most hardheaded. It was at this time that the question of Negro suffrage in the South was raised. Here was a defenceless people suddenly made free. How were they to be protected from those who did not believe in their freedom and were determined to thwart it? Not by force, said the North; not by government guardianship, said the South; then by the ballot, the sole and legitimate defence of a free people, said the Common Sense of the Nation. No one thought, at the time, that the ex-slaves could use the ballot intelligently or very effectively; but they did think that the possession of so great power by a great class in the nation would compel their fellows to educate this class to its intelligent use.

Meantime, new thoughts came to the nation: the inevitable period of moral retrogression and political trickery that ever follows in the wake of war overtook us. So flagrant became the political scandals that reputable men began to leave politics alone, and politics consequently became disreputable. Men began to pride themselves on having nothing to do with their own government, and to agree tacitly with those who regarded public office as a private perquisite. In this state of mind it became easy to wink at the suppression of the Negro vote in the South, and to advise self-respecting Negroes to leave politics entirely alone. The decent and reputable citizens of the North who neglected their own civic duties grew hilarious over the exaggerated importance with which the Negro regarded the franchise. Thus it easily happened that more and more the better class of Negroes followed the advice from abroad and the pressure from home, and took no further interest in politics, leaving to the careless and the venal of their race the exercise of their rights as voters. The black vote that still remained was not trained and educated, but further debauched by open and unblushing bribery, or force and fraud; until the Negro voter was thoroughly inoculated with the idea that politics was a method of private gain by disreputable means.

And finally, now, to-day, when we are awakening to the fact that the perpetuity of republican institutions on this continent depends on the purification of the ballot, the civic training of voters, and the raising of voting to the plane of a solemn duty which a patriotic citizen neglects to his peril and to the peril of his children鈥檚 children,鈥攊n this day, when we are striving for a renaissance of civic virtue, what are we going to say to the black voter of the South? Are we going to tell him still that politics is a disreputable and useless form of human activity? Are we going to induce the best class of Negroes to take less and less interest in government, and to give up their right to take such an interest, without a protest? I am not saying a word against all legitimate efforts to purge the ballot of ignorance, pauperism, and crime. But few have pretended that the present movement for disfranchisement in the South is for such a purpose; it has been plainly and frankly declared in nearly every case that the object of the disfranchising laws is the elimination of the black man from politics.

Now, is this a minor matter which has no influence on the main question of the industrial and intellectual development of the Negro? Can we establish a mass of black laborers and artisans and landholders in the South who, by law and public opinion, have absolutely no voice in shaping the laws under which they live and work? Can the modern organization of industry, assuming as it does free democratic government and the power and ability of the laboring classes to compel respect for their welfare,鈥攃an this system be carried out in the South when half its laboring force is voiceless in the public councils and powerless in its own defence? To-day the black man of the South has almost nothing to say as to how much he shall be taxed, or how those taxes shall be expended; as to who shall execute the laws, and how they shall do it; as to who shall make the laws, and how they shall be made. It is pitiable that frantic efforts must be made at critical times to get lawmakers in some States even to listen to the respectful presentation of the black man鈥檚 side of a current controversy. Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with courtesy or consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape.

I should be the last one to deny the patent weaknesses and shortcomings of the Negro people; I should be the last to withhold sympathy from the white South in its efforts to solve its intricate social problems. I freely acknowledge that it is possible, and sometimes best, that a partially undeveloped people should be ruled by the best of their stronger and better neighbors for their own good, until such time as they can start and fight the world鈥檚 battles alone. I have already pointed out how sorely in need of such economic and spiritual guidance the emancipated Negro was, and I am quite willing to admit that if the representatives of the best white Southern public opinion were the ruling and guiding powers in the South to-day the conditions indicated would be fairly well fulfilled. But the point I have insisted upon, and now emphasize again, is that the best opinion of the South to-day is not the ruling opinion. That to leave the Negro helpless and without a ballot to-day is to leave him, not to the guidance of the best, but rather to the exploitation and debauchment of the worst; that this is no truer of the South than of the North,鈥攐f the North than of Europe: in any land, in any country under modern free competition, to lay any class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, at the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows, is a temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and seldom will withstand.

Moreover, the political status of the Negro in the South is closely connected with the question of Negro crime. There can be no doubt that crime among Negroes has sensibly increased in the last thirty years, and that there has appeared in the slums of great cities a distinct criminal class among the blacks. In explaining this unfortunate development, we must note two things: (1) that the inevitable result of Emancipation was to increase crime and criminals, and (2) that the police system of the South was primarily designed to control slaves. As to the first point, we must not forget that under a strict slave system there can scarcely be such a thing as crime. But when these variously constituted human particles are suddenly thrown broadcast on the sea of life, some swim, some sink, and some hang suspended, to be forced up or down by the chance currents of a busy hurrying world. So great an economic and social revolution as swept the South in 鈥�63 meant a weeding out among the Negroes of the incompetents and vicious, the beginning of a differentiation of social grades. Now a rising group of people are not lifted bodily from the ground like an inert solid mass, but rather stretch upward like a living plant with its roots still clinging in the mould. The appearance, therefore, of the Negro criminal was a phenomenon to be awaited; and while it causes anxiety, it should not occasion surprise.

Here again the hope for the future depended peculiarly on careful and delicate dealing with these criminals. Their offences at first were those of laziness, carelessness, and impulse, rather than of malignity or ungoverned viciousness. Such misdemeanors needed discriminating treatment, firm but reformatory, with no hint of injustice, and full proof of guilt. For such dealing with criminals, white or black, the South had no machinery, no adequate jails or reformatories; its police system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police. Thus grew up a double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred on the black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimination. For, as I have said, the police system of the South was originally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not simply of criminals; and when the Negroes were freed and the whole South was convinced of the impossibility of free Negro labor, the first and almost universal device was to use the courts as a means of re毛nslaving the blacks. It was not then a question of crime, but rather one of color, that settled a man鈥檚 conviction on almost any charge. Thus Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of injustice and oppression, and upon those convicted in them as martyrs and victims.

When, now, the real Negro criminal appeared, and instead of petty stealing and vagrancy we began to have highway robbery, burglary, murder, and rape, there was a curious effect on both sides the color-line: the Negroes refused to believe the evidence of white witnesses or the fairness of white juries, so that the greatest deterrent to crime, the public opinion of one鈥檚 own social caste, was lost, and the criminal was looked upon as crucified rather than hanged. On the other hand, the whites, used to being careless as to the guilt or innocence of accused Negroes, were swept in moments of passion beyond law, reason, and decency. Such a situation is bound to increase crime, and has increased it. To natural viciousness and vagrancy are being daily added motives of revolt and revenge which stir up all the latent savagery of both races and make peaceful attention to economic development often impossible.

But the chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime. And here again the peculiar conditions of the South have prevented proper precautions. I have seen twelve-year-old boys working in chains on the public streets of Atlanta, directly in front of the schools, in company with old and hardened criminals; and this indiscriminate mingling of men and women and children makes the chain-gangs perfect schools of crime and debauchery. The struggle for reformatories, which has gone on in Virginia, Georgia, and other States, is the one encouraging sign of the awakening of some communities to the suicidal results of this policy.

It is the public schools, however, which can be made, outside the homes, the greatest means of training decent self-respecting citizens. We have been so hotly engaged recently in discussing trade-schools and the higher education that the pitiable plight of the public-school system in the South has almost dropped from view. Of every five dollars spent for public education in the State of Georgia, the white schools get four dollars and the Negro one dollar; and even then the white public-school system, save in the cities, is bad and cries for reform. If this is true of the whites, what of the blacks? I am becoming more and more convinced, as I look upon the system of common-school training in the South, that the national government must soon step in and aid popular education in some way. To-day it has been only by the most strenuous efforts on the part of the thinking men of the South that the Negro鈥檚 share of the school fund has not been cut down to a pittance in some half-dozen States; and that movement not only is not dead, but in many communities is gaining strength. What in the name of reason does this nation expect of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in severe economic competition, without political rights, and with ludicrously inadequate common-school facilities? What can it expect but crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the dogged struggles of the fortunate and more determined who are themselves buoyed by the hope that in due time the country will come to its senses?

I have thus far sought to make clear the physical, economic, and political relations of the Negroes and whites in the South, as I have conceived them, including, for the reasons set forth, crime and education. But after all that has been said on these more tangible matters of human contact, there still remains a part essential to a proper description of the South which it is difficult to describe or fix in terms easily understood by strangers. It is, in fine, the atmosphere of the land, the thought and feeling, the thousand and one little actions which go to make up life. In any community or nation it is these little things which are most elusive to the grasp and yet most essential to any clear conception of the group life taken as a whole. What is thus true of all communities is peculiarly true of the South, where, outside of written history and outside of printed law, there has been going on for a generation as deep a storm and stress of human souls, as intense a ferment of feeling, as intricate a writhing of spirit, as ever a people experienced. Within and without the sombre veil of color vast social forces have been at work,鈥攅fforts for human betterment, movements toward disintegration and despair, tragedies and comedies in social and economic life, and a swaying and lifting and sinking of human hearts which have made this land a land of mingled sorrow and joy, of change and excitement and unrest.

The centre of this spiritual turmoil has ever been the millions of black freedmen and their sons, whose destiny is so fatefully bound up with that of the nation. And yet the casual observer visiting the South sees at first little of this. He notes the growing frequency of dark faces as he rides along,鈥攂ut otherwise the days slip lazily on, the sun shines, and this little world seems as happy and contented as other worlds he has visited. Indeed, on the question of questions鈥攖he Negro problem鈥攈e hears so little that there almost seems to be a conspiracy of silence; the morning papers seldom mention it, and then usually in a far-fetched academic way, and indeed almost every one seems to forget and ignore the darker half of the land, until the astonished visitor is inclined to ask if after all there is any problem here. But if he lingers long enough there comes the awakening: perhaps in a sudden whirl of passion which leaves him gasping at its bitter intensity; more likely in a gradually dawning sense of things he had not at first noticed. Slowly but surely his eyes begin to catch the shadows of the color-line: here he meets crowds of Negroes and whites; then he is suddenly aware that he cannot discover a single dark face; or again at the close of a day鈥檚 wandering he may find himself in some strange assembly, where all faces are tinged brown or black, and where he has the vague, uncomfortable feeling of the stranger. He realizes at last that silently, resistlessly, the world about flows by him in two great streams: they ripple on in the same sunshine, they approach and mingle their waters in seeming carelessness,鈥攖hen they divide and flow wide apart. It is done quietly; no mistakes are made, or if one occurs, the swift arm of the law and of public opinion swings down for a moment, as when the other day a black man and a white woman were arrested for talking together on Whitehall Street in Atlanta.

Now if one notices carefully one will see that between these two worlds, despite much physical contact and daily intermingling, there is almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of the other. Before and directly after the war, when all the best of the Negroes were domestic servants in the best of the white families, there were bonds of intimacy, affection, and sometimes blood relationship, between the races. They lived in the same home, shared in the family life, often attended the same church, and talked and conversed with each other. But the increasing civilization of the Negro since then has naturally meant the development of higher classes: there are increasing numbers of ministers, teachers, physicians, merchants, mechanics, and independent farmers, who by nature and training are the aristocracy and leaders of the blacks. Between them, however, and the best element of the whites, there is little or no intellectual commerce. They go to separate churches, they live in separate sections, they are strictly separated in all public gatherings, they travel separately, and they are beginning to read different papers and books. To most libraries, lectures, concerts, and museums, Negroes are either not admitted at all, or on terms peculiarly galling to the pride of the very classes who might otherwise be attracted. The daily paper chronicles the doings of the black world from afar with no great regard for accuracy; and so on, throughout the category of means for intellectual communication,鈥攕chools, conferences, efforts for social betterment, and the like,鈥攊t is usually true that the very representatives of the two races, who for mutual benefit and the welfare of the land ought to be in complete understanding and sympathy, are so far strangers that one side thinks all whites are narrow and prejudiced, and the other thinks educated Negroes dangerous and insolent. Moreover, in a land where the tyranny of public opinion and the intolerance of criticism is for obvious historical reasons so strong as in the South, such a situation is extremely difficult to correct. The white man, as well as the Negro, is bound and barred by the color-line, and many a scheme of friendliness and philanthropy, of broad-minded sympathy and generous fellowship between the two has dropped still-born because some busybody has forced the color-question to the front and brought the tremendous force of unwritten law against the innovators.

It is hardly necessary for me to add very much in regard to the social contact between the races. Nothing has come to replace that finer sympathy and love between some masters and house servants which the radical and more uncompromising drawing of the color-line in recent years has caused almost completely to disappear. In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood; in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches,鈥攐ne can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and street-cars.

Here there can be none of that social going down to the people,鈥攖he opening of heart and hand of the best to the worst, in generous acknowledgment of a common humanity and a common destiny. On the other hand, in matters of simple almsgiving, where there can be no question of social contact, and in the succor of the aged and sick, the South, as if stirred by a feeling of its unfortunate limitations, is generous to a fault. The black beggar is never turned away without a good deal more than a crust, and a call for help for the unfortunate meets quick response. I remember, one cold winter, in Atlanta, when I refrained from contributing to a public relief fund lest Negroes should be discriminated against, I afterward inquired of a friend: 鈥淲ere any black people receiving aid?鈥� 鈥淲hy,鈥� said he, 鈥渢hey were all 产濒补肠办.鈥�

And yet this does not touch the kernel of the problem. Human advancement is not a mere question of almsgiving, but rather of sympathy and co枚peration among classes who would scorn charity. And here is a land where, in the higher walks of life, in all the higher striving for the good and noble and true, the color-line comes to separate natural friends and co-workers; while at the bottom of the social group, in the saloon, the gambling-hell, and the brothel, that same line wavers and disappears.

I have sought to paint an average picture of real relations between the sons of master and man in the South. I have not glossed over matters for policy鈥檚 sake, for I fear we have already gone too far in that sort of thing. On the other hand, I have sincerely sought to let no unfair exaggerations creep in. I do not doubt that in some Southern communities conditions are better than those I have indicated; while I am no less certain that in other communities they are far worse.

Nor does the paradox and danger of this situation fail to interest and perplex the best conscience of the South. Deeply religious and intensely democratic as are the mass of the whites, they feel acutely the false position in which the Negro problems place them. Such an essentially honest-hearted and generous people cannot cite the caste-levelling precepts of Christianity, or believe in equality of opportunity for all men, without coming to feel more and more with each generation that the present drawing of the color-line is a flat contradiction to their beliefs and professions. But just as often as they come to this point, the present social condition of the Negro stands as a menace and a portent before even the most open-minded: if there were nothing to charge against the Negro but his blackness or other physical peculiarities, they argue, the problem would be comparatively simple; but what can we say to his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime? can a self-respecting group hold anything but the least possible fellowship with such persons and survive? and shall we let a mawkish sentiment sweep away the culture of our fathers or the hope of our children? The argument so put is of great strength, but it is not a whit stronger than the argument of thinking Negroes: granted, they reply, that the condition of our masses is bad; there is certainly on the one hand adequate historical cause for this, and unmistakable evidence that no small number have, in spite of tremendous disadvantages, risen to the level of American civilization. And when, by proscription and prejudice, these same Negroes are classed with and treated like the lowest of their people, simply because they are Negroes, such a policy not only discourages thrift and intelligence among black men, but puts a direct premium on the very things you complain of,鈥攊nefficiency and crime. Draw lines of crime, of incompetency, of vice, as tightly and uncompromisingly as you will, for these things must be proscribed; but a color-line not only does not accomplish this purpose, but thwarts it.

In the face of two such arguments, the future of the South depends on the ability of the representatives of these opposing views to see and appreciate and sympathize with each other鈥檚 position,鈥攆or the Negro to realize more deeply than he does at present the need of uplifting the masses of his people, for the white people to realize more vividly than they have yet done the deadening and disastrous effect of a color-prejudice that classes Phillis Wheatley and Sam Hose in the same despised class.

It is not enough for the Negroes to declare that color-prejudice is the sole cause of their social condition, nor for the white South to reply that their social condition is the main cause of prejudice. They both act as reciprocal cause and effect, and a change in neither alone will bring the desired effect. Both must change, or neither can improve to any great extent. The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary tendencies and unreasoning drawing of the color-line indefinitely without discouragement and retrogression. And the condition of the Negro is ever the excuse for further discrimination. Only by a union of intelligence and sympathy across the color-line in this critical period of the Republic shall justice and right triumph,鈥�

鈥淭hat mind and soul according well,

May make one music as before,

But vaster.鈥�

The post “Of the Sons of Master and Man,” from The Souls of Black Folk appeared first on 澳门六合彩开奖直播.

A large share of the thought and activity of the white South, of the black South and that section of the North especially interested in my race was directed during the years of the reconstruction period towards politics, or towards matters bearing upon what were termed civil or social rights. The work of education was rather slow and covered a large section of the South; still I think I am justified in saying that in the public mind the Negro鈥檚 relation to politics overshadowed nearly every other interest, The little attention just as is true at the present time. The appointment of one publicity through the daily press than the founding of a school, or some important discovery in science.

With reference to the black man鈥檚 political relation to the state and Federal Governments, I think I am safe in saying that for many years after the Civil War, there were sharp and antagonistic views between the North and the South, as well as between the White South and the Black South. At practically every point where there was a political question to be decided in the South the blacks would array themselves on one side, and the whites on the other. I remember that very soon after I began teaching school in Alabama, an old colored man came to me just prior to an election. He said; “You can read de newspaper and most of us can鈥檛 but dar is one thing dat you don鈥檛, and dat is how to vote down here; and we wants you to vote as we does.” He added, “I tell you how we does, we watches de white man; we keeps watching de white man; de nearer it gets to 鈥檒ection time de more we watches de white man. We watches him till we finds out which way he gwine to vote. After we find out which way he gwine鈥檙 vote, den we votes 鈥檢actly de other way; den we knows we鈥檚 right.”

Stories on the other side might be given showing that a certain class of white people, both at the polls and in the Legislatures voted just as unreasonably in opposing politically what they thought the Negro or the North wanted, no matter how much benefit might ensue from a contrary action. Unfortunately such antagonism did not end with matters political, but in many cases, affected the relation of the races in nearly every walk of life. Aside from political strife, there was naturally deep feeling between the North and the South on account of the war. On nearly every question growing out of the war, which was debated in Congress, or in political campaigns, there was the keenest difference and often the deepest feeling. There was almost no question of even a semi-political nature, or having a remote connection with the Negro upon which there was not sharp and often bitter division between the North and the South. It is needless to say that in many cases the Negro was the sufferer. He was being ground between the upper and nether millstones. Even to this day, it is well nigh impossible, largely by reason of the force of habit in certain states to prevent state and even local campaigns from being centered in some form upon the black man. In states like Mississippi, for example, where the Negro ceased nearly a score of years ago, by operation of law, to be a determining factor in politics, he forms in some way the principal fuel for campaign discussion at nearly every election. The said feature of this is, as I have indicated in a previous chapter, to prevent the presentation before the masses of the people of matters pertaining to local and state improvements the masses from receiving the broad and helpful education which every political campaign should furnish, and, what is equally unfortunate, it prevents the youth from seeing and hearing on the platform the great political leaders of the two national parties. During a national campaign, few of the great Democratic leaders debate national questions in the South, because it is felt that the old antagonism to the Negro politically will keep the South voting one way, Few of the great Republican leaders appear on Southern platforms, because they feel that nothing will be gained.

But this is somewhat aside from my purpose, which is, I repeat, to make plain that in all political matters, there was for years after the war no meeting grounds of agreement for the two races, or for the North and South. Upon the question of the Negro鈥檚 civil rights as embodied in what was called the Civil Rights Bill there was almost the same sharp line of division between the races, and, in theory, at least, between the Northern and Southern whites, largely because the former were supposed to be giving the blacks social recognition and encouraging intermingling between the races. The white teachers who came from the North to work in missionary schools, received for years little recognition or encouragement from the rank and file of their own race. The lines were so sharply drawn in the public schools, they would have no dealings with the Northern white woman, who, perhaps, taught Negro children from the same family in a missionary school.

I want to call attention here to a phase of Reconstruction policy which is often overlooked. All now agree that there was much in Reconstruction that was unwise and unfortunate. However, we may regard that policy, and much as we may regret mistakes, the fact is too often overlooked that it was during the Reconstruction Period that a public school system for the education of all the people of the South was first established in most of the states. Much that was done by those in charge of Reconstruction legislation has been overturned, but the public school system still remains. True, it has been modified and improved, but the system remains, and is every day growing in popularity and strength.

As to the difference of opinion between the North and the South regarding Negro education, I find that many people, especially in the North, have the wrong conception of the attitude of the Southern whit people, It is and has been very generally thought that what is termed “Higher Education” of the Negro, has been from the first opposed by the white South. This opinion is far from being correct. I remember that in 1881, when I began the work of establishing the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, practically all the white people who talked to me on the subject took it for granted that instruction in the Greek, Latin, and modern languages would be one of the main features of our curriculum. I heard no on oppose what he though our course of study was to embrace. In face, there are many white people in the South oat the present time who do not know that instruction in the dead languages is not given at the Tuskegee Institute. In further proof of what I have said, if one would go through the catalogs maintained by the states for Negro people, and managed by Southern white people, he will find in almost every case that instruction in the higher branches is given with the consent and approval of white officials. This was true as far back as 1880. It is not unusual to meet at this time Southern white people who are as emphatic in their belief in the value of classical education as a certain element of colored people themselves. In matters relating to political and civil rights, the breach was broad, and without apparent hope of being bridged; even in the matter of religion, practically all the denominations had split on the subject of the Negro, though I should add that there is now, and always has been, a closer though, and more co-operation in matters of religion between the white and colored people in the South than is generally known. But the breach between the white churches in the South and North remains.

In matters of education the difference was much less sharp. The truth is that a large element in the South had little faith in the efficacy of the higher or any other kind of education of the Negro. They were indifferent, but did not openly oppose: on the other hand, there has always been a potent element of white people in all the Southern States who have stood out openly and bravely for the education of all the people, regardless of race. This element has thus far been successful in shaping and leading public opinion, and I think that it will continue to do so more and more. This statement must not be taken to mean that there is yet an equitable division of the school funds raised by common taxation, between the two races in many sections of the South, though the Southern States deserve much credit for what has been done.

I wish, however, to emphasize the fact that while there was either open antagonism or indifference in the directions I have named; it was the introduction of industrial training into the Negro鈥檚 education that seemed to furnish the first basis for anything like united and sympathetic interest and action between the two races in the South, and between the whites in the North and those in the South. Aside from its direct benefit to the black race, industrial education has furnished a basis for mutual faith and cooperation, which has meant more to the South, and to the work of education than has been realized.

This was, at the least, something in the way of construction. Many people, I think, fail to appreciate the difference between the problems now before us and those that existed previous to the civil war. Slavery presented a problem of destruction; freedom presents a problem of construction.

From its first inception the white people of the South had faith in the theory of industrial education, because they had noted, what was not unnatural, that a large element of the colored people at first interpreted freedom to mean freedom from work with the hands. They naturally had not learned to appreciate the fact that they had been worked, and that one of the great lessons for free men to learn is to work. They had not learned the vast difference between working and being worked. The white people saw in the movements to teach the Negro youth the dignity, beauty and civilizing power of all honorable labor with the hands, something that would lead the Negro into his new life of freedom gradually and sensibly, and prevent his going from on extreme of life to the other too suddenly. Furthermore, industrial education appealed directly to the individual and community interest of the white people. They saw at once that intelligence coupled with skill would add wealth to the community and to the state, in which both races would have an added share. Crude labor in the days of slavery, they believed could be handled and made in a degree profitable, but ignorant and unskilled in a state of freedom could not be made so. Practically every white man in the South was interested in agricultural or in mechanical or in some form of manual labor; every white man was interested in all that related to the home life, — the cooking and serving of food, laundering, dairying, poultry-raising and house keeping in general. There was no family whose interest in intelligent and skillful nursing was not now and then quickened by the presence of a trained nurse, As already stated, there was a general appreciation of the fact that industrial education of the black people direct, vital and practical bearing upon the life of each white family in the South; while there was no such appreciation of the results of mere literary training. If a black man became a lawyer, a doctor, a minister, or an ordinary teacher, his professional duties would not ordinarily bring him in touch with the life of the white portion of the community, but rather confine him almost exclusively to his own race. While purely literary or professional education was not opposed by the white population, it was something in which they found little or no interest, beyond a confused hope that it would result in producing a higher and better type of Negro manhood. The minute it was seen that through industrial education the Negro youth was not only studying chemistry, but also how to apply the knowledge of chemistry to the enrichment of the soil, or to cooking, or to dairying, and that the student was being taught not only geometry and physics, but their application to blacksmithing, brickmaking, farming, and what not, then there began to appear for the first time a common bond between the two races and co-operation between the North and South.

One of the most interesting and valuable instances of the kind that I know of is presented in the case of Mr. George W. Carver, one of our instructors in agriculture at Tuskegee Institute. For some time it has been his custom to prepare articles containing information concerning the conditions of local crops, and warning the farmers against the ravages of certain insects and diseases. The local white papers are always glad to publish these articles, and they are read by white and colored farmers.

Some months ago a white land-holder in Montgomery Couth asked Mr. Carver to go through his farm with him for the purpose of inspecting it. While doing so Mr. Carver discovered traces of what he thought was valuable mineral deposit, used in making a certain kind of paint. The interest of the land-owner and the agricultural instructor at once became mutual. Specimens of the deposits were taken to the laboratories of the Tuskegee Institute and analyzed by Mr. Carver. In due time the land-owner received a report of the analysis, together with a statement showing the commercial value and application of the mineral. I shall not go through the whole interesting story, except to say that a stock company, composed of some of the best white people in Alabama, has been organized and is now preparing to build a factory for the purpose of putting their product on the market. I hardly need add that Mr. Carver has been freely consulted at every step, and his service generously recognized in the organization of the concern, When the company was being formed, the following testimonial among others was embodied in the printed copy of the circular:–

“George W. Carver, Director of the Department of Agriculture, Tuskegee, Alabama, says: —

“The pigment is an ochreous clay. Its value as a paint is due to the presence of ferric oxide, of which it contains more than any of the French, Australian, American, Irish, or Welsh ochres. Ferric oxides have long been recognized as the essential constituents of such paints as Venetian red, Turkish red, oxide red, Indian red, and scarlet. They are most durable, being quite permanent when exposed to light and air. As a stain they are most valuable.”

In further proof of what I wish to emphasize, I think I am safe in saying that the work of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, under the late General S.C. Armstrong was the first to receive any kind of recognition and hearty sympathy from the Southern white people, and General Armstrong was, perhaps, the first Northern educator of Negroes who won the confidence and co-operation of the white South. The effects of General Armstrong鈥檚 introduction of industrial education at Hampton, and its extension to the Tuskegee Institute in the far South, are now actively and helpfully apparent in the splendid work being accomplished for the whole South by the Southern Education Board with Mr. Robert C. Ogden at its head, and by the General Education Board which was organized with Mr. William H. Baldwin, Jr., as its president. Mr. Baldwin has since died and Mr. Ogden has been elected president. Without the introduction of manual training it is doubtful whether such work as is now being wrought through these two boards for both races in the South, could have been possible within a quarter of a century to come. Later on in the history of our country it will be recognized and appreciated that the far-reaching and statesmanlike efforts of these two boards for general education in the South, and with the co-operation and assistance of such men as Mr. George Foster Peabody, Dr. Wallace Buttrick, Mr. John D. Rockefeller of the North, and Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy, Chancellor Hill, Dr. Alderman, Dr. McIver, Dr. Dabney, and others of the South, will have furnished the material for one of the brightest and most encouraging chapters in the history of our country. The fact that we have reached the point where men and women who were so far apart twenty years ago can meet in the South and discuss freely from the same platform questions relating to the industrial, educational, political, moral, and religious development of the two races, marks a great step in advance. It is true, however, that as yet the Negro has not been invited to share in these discussions.

Aside from the reasons that I have given showing why the South favored industrial education, coupled with intellectual and moral training, many of the whites saw, for example, that the Negroes who were master carpenters and contractors, under the guidance of their owners, could become till greater factors in the development of the South if their children were not suddenly removed from the atmosphere and occupations of their fathers, and if they could be taught to use the thing in hand as a foundation for higher growth. Many of the white people were wise enough to see that such education would enable some of the Negro youths to become more skillful carpenters and contractors, and that if they laid an economic foundation in this way in their generation, they would be laying a foundation for a more abstract education of their children in the future.

Again, a large element of people in the South favored manual training for the Negro because they were wise enough to see that the South was largely free from the restrictive influences of the Northern trades unions, and that such organizations would secure little hold in the South so long as the Negro kept abreast in intelligence and skill with the same class of people elsewhere. Many realized that the South would be tying itself to a body of death if it did not help the Negro up. In this connection I want to call attention to the fact that the official records show that within one year about one million foreigners came into the United States. Notwithstanding this number, practically none went into the Southern States; to be more exact, the records show that in 1892 only 2,278 all told went into the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. One ship sometimes bring as many to New York. Various reasons are given to explain why these foreigners systematically avoid the South. One is that the climate is so hot; and another is that they do not like they do not like the restrictions thrown about the ballot; and still another is the presence of the Negro in so large numbers. Whatever the true reason is, the fact remains that foreigners avoid the South, and the South is more and more realizing that it cannot keep pace with the progress being made in other parts of the country if a third of its population is ignorant and without skill.

The South must frankly face this truth, that for a long period it must depend upon the black man to do for it what the foreigner is now doing for the great West. If, by reason of his skill and knowledge, one man in Iowa learns to produce as much corn in a season as four men can produce in Alabama, it requires little reasoning to see that Alabama will buy most of her corn from Iowa.

Another interesting result of the introduction of industrial education for the Negro has been its influence upon the white people of the South; and, I believe, upon the whites of the North, as well. This phase of it has proved of interest in making hand training a conciliatory element between the races.

In 1883 I was delivering an address on industrial education before the Colored State Teachers鈥� Association of one of our Southern States. When I had finished, some of the teachers began to ask the State Superintendent of Education, who was on the program, some questions about the subject. He politely but firmly stopped the questions by stating that he knew absolutely nothing about industrial training, and had never heard it discussed before. At that time there was no such education being given at any white institution in that state. With one or two exceptions, this case will illustrate what was true of all the Southern States. A careful investigation of the subject will show that it was not until after industrial education was started among the colored people, and its value proved, that it was taken up by the Southern white people.

Manual training or industrial and technical schools for the whites have, for the most part, been established under state auspices, and are at this time chiefly maintained by the states. An investigation would also show that in securing money from the state legislatures for the purpose of introducing hand work, one of the main arguments used was the existence and success of industrial training among the Negroes. It was often argued that the white boys and girls would be left behind unless they had the opportunities for securing the same kind of training that was being given the colored people.

Although it is, I think, not generally known, it is a fact that since the idea of industrial or technical education for white people took root within the last few years, much more money is spent annually for such education for the whites than for the colored people. Anyone who has not looked into the subject will be surprised to find how thorough and high grade the work is. Take, for example, the State of Georgia, and it will be found that several times as much is being spent at the Industrial College for white girls at Milledgeville, and at the technical schools for whites at Atlanta as is being spent in the whole state for the industrial education of the Negro youths. I have met no Southern white educators who have not been generous in their praise of the Negro schools for taking the initiative in hand training. This fact has again served to create in matters relating to education a bond of sympathy between the two races in the South. Referring again to the influence of industrial training for the Negro in education, in the Northern States, I find, while writing this article, the following announcement in the advertisement of what is perhaps the most high-priced and exclusive girls鈥� seminary in Massachusetts: 鈥�

In planning a system of education for young ladies with the view of fitting them for the greatest usefulness in life, the idea was conceived of supplementing the purely intellectual work by practical training in the art of home management and its related subjects.

It was the first school of high literary grade to introduce courses in Domestic Science into the regular curriculum.

The results were so gratifying as to lead to the equipment of Experiment Hall, a special building, fitted for the purpose of studying the principles of Applied Housekeeping. Here the girls do the actual work of cooking, marketing, arranging menus, and attend to all the affairs of a well-arranged household.

Courses are arranged also in sewing, dress-making, and millinery; they are conducted on a similar practical basis, and equip the student with a thorough knowledge of the subject.

A dozen years ago I do not believe that any such announcement would have been made.

Beginning with the year 1877, the Negro in the South lost practically all political control; that is to say, as early as 1885 the Negro scarcely had any members of his race in the Nation Congress or state legislatures, and long before this date had ceased to hold state offices. This was true, notwithstanding the protests and fervent oratory of such strong races leaders as Frederick Douglass, B.K. Bruce, John R. Lynch, P.B.S. Pinchback, and John M. Langston, with a host of others. When Frederick Douglass, the greatest man that the race has produced, died in 1895, it is safe to say that the Negro in the Southern states, with here and there a few exceptions, had practically no political control, or political influence, except in sending delegates to national conventions, or in holding by appointment a few federal positions. It became evident to many of the wise Negroes that the race would have to depend for its success in the future less upon political agitation and the opportunity for holding office, and more upon something more tangible and substantial. It was this period in the Negro鈥檚 spirit and ambition of the colored people most depressed, that the idea of industrial or business development was introduced and began to be made prominent. It did not take the more level-headed members of the race long to see that while the Negro in the South was surrounded by many difficulties, there was practically no line drawn and little race discrimination in the world of commerce, banking, storekeeping, manufacturing, and the skilled trades, and in agriculture; and in this lay his great opportunity. They understood that while the whites might object to a Negro鈥檚 being postmaster, they would not object to his being president of a band, and in the latter occupation they would give him assistance and encouragement. The colored people were quick to see that while the Negro would not be invited as a rule to attend the white man鈥檚 prayer-meeting, he would be invited every time to attend the stockholder鈥檚 meeting of a business concern in which he had an interest, and that he could buy property in practically any portion of the South where the white man could buy it. The white citizens were all the more willing to encourage Negro in this economic or industrial development, because they saw that the prosperity of the Negro meant also the prosperity of the white man. They say, too, that when a Negro became the owner of a home and was a taxpayer, having a regular trader or other occupation, he at once became a conservative and safe citizen and voter; one who would consider the interests of his whole community before casting his ballot; and, further, one whose ballot could not be purchased.

One case in point is that of the twenty-eight teachers at our school at Tuskegee who applied for life-voting certificates under the new constitution of Alabama, not one was refused registration, and if I may be forgiven a personal reference, in my own case, the Board of Registers were kind enough to send me a special request to the effect that they wished me not to fail to register as a life voter. I do not wish to convey the impression that all worthy colored people have been registered in Alabama, because there have been many inexcusable, and unlawful omissions; but, with few exceptions, the 2,700 who have been registered represent the best Negroes in the state.

Though in some parts of the country he is now misunderstood, I believe that the time is going to come when matters can be weighed soberly and when the whole people are going to see that President Roosevelt is, and has been from the first, in line with this policy, that of encouraging the colored people who by industry and economy have won their way into the confidence and respect of their neighbors. Both before and since he became President I have had many conversations with him, and at all times I have found him most enthusiastic in his desire to help all the people of the South.

The growth of the race in industrial and business directions within the last few years cannot perhaps be better illustrated than by what is now the largest secular national organization among the colored people, the National Negro Business League. This organization brings together annually, as I have elsewhere described, hundreds of men and women who have worked their way up from the bottom to the point where they are now in some cases bankers, merchants, manufacturers, planters, etc. The sight of this body of men and women would surprise a large part of American citizens, who do not know the better side of Negro life.

It ought to be stated frankly here that at first, and for several years after the introduction of industrial training at such educational centers as Hampton and Tuskegee, there was opposition from colored people and from portions of those Northern white people engaged in education and missionary work among the colored people in the South. Most of those who manifested such opposition were, I believe, actuated by the highest and most honest motives. From the first the rank and field of the blacks were quick to see the advantages of industrial training, as is shown by the fact that industrial schools have always been overcrowded. Opposition to industrial training was based largely on the old and narrow ground that it was something that the Southern white people favored, and therefore must be against the interests of the Negro. Again, others opposed it because they feared that it meant the abandonment of all political privileges, and the higher or classical education of the race. They feared that the final outcome would be the “materialization” of the Negro and the smothering of his spiritual and aesthetic nature. Others felt that industrial education had for its object the limitation of the Negro鈥檚 development, and the branding him for all time as a special hand-working class.

Now that enough time has elapsed for those who opposed it to see that it meant none of these things, opposition, except from a very few of the colored people living in one or two Northern cities away from the problem has ceased, and this system has the enthusiastic support of the Negroes and of most of the whites who formerly opposed it. All are beginning to see that it was never meant that all Negro youths should secure industrial education, any more than it is meant that all white youths should pass through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or the Amherst Agricultural College, to the exclusion of such training as is given at Harvard, Yale or Dartmouth; but that in a peculiar sense a large proportion of the Negro youths needed to have that education which would enable them to secure an economic foundation, without which no people can succeed in any of the higher walks of life.

It is because of the fact that the Tuskegee Institute began at the bottom, with work in the soil, in wood, in iron, in leather, that it has now developed to the point where it is able to furnish employment as teachers to twenty-eight Negro college graduates of the best colleges in the country. This is about three times as many Negro college graduates as any other institution in the United States for the education of colored people employs, the total number of officers and instructors at Tuskegee being about one hundred and ten, and excluding clerks, stenographers and helpers of various kinds.

Those who once opposed this, see now that while the Negro youth who becomes skilled in agriculture and a successful farmer may not be able himself to pass through a purely literary college, he is laying the foundation for his children and grandchildren to do it if desirable. Industrial education in this generation is contributing in the highest degree to make what is called higher education a success. It is now realized that in so far as the race has intelligent and skillful producers, the greater will be the success of the minister, lawyer, doctor, and teacher. Opposition has melted away, too, because all men now see that it will take a long time to “materialize” a race, millions of which hold neither houses nor railroads, nor bank stock, nor factories, nor coal and gold mines.

Another reason for the growth of a better understanding of the objects and influence of industrial training, is the fact, as before stated, that is has been taken up with much interest and activity by the Southern whites, and that it has been established at such universities as Cornell in the East, and in practically all the state colleges of the Great West.

It is now seen that the result of such education will be to help the black man to make for himself an independent place in our great American life. It was largely the poverty of the Negro that made him the prey of the designing politicians immediately after the war; and wherever poverty and lack of industry exist today, one does not find in him that deep spiritual life which the race must in the future possess in a higher degree.

To those who still express the fear that perhaps too much stress is put upon industrial education for the Negro, I would add that I should emphasize the same kind of training for any people, whether black or white, in the same stage of development as the masses of the colored people.

For a number of years this country has looked to Germany for much in the way of education, and a large number of America鈥檚 brightest men and women are sent there each year. The official reports who that in Saxony, Germany, alone there are 287 industrial schools, or one such school to centuries of wealth and culture. In the South I am safe in saying that there is not more than one effective industrial school for every 400,000 colored people.

A recent dispatch from Germany says that the German Emperor has had a kitchen fitted up in the palace for the single purpose of having his daughter taught cooking. If all classes and nationalities, who are in most cases thousands of years a head of the Negro in the arts of civilization, continue their interest in industrial training, I cannot understand how any reasonable person can object to such education for a large part of a people who are in the poverty-stricken condition that is true of a large element of my race, especially when such hand training is combined, as it should be, with the best education of head and heart.

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Salaam Alaikum. I suppose I should take time to explain what I mean when I say “Salaam Alaikum.” Actually, it鈥檚 an expression that means “peace,” and it鈥檚 one that is always given to one鈥檚 brother or to one鈥檚 sister. It only means “peace be unto you.” So, when I say “A Salaam Alaikum” or “Salaam Alaikum” and others reply, “Alaikum Salaam,” why, they鈥檙e just returning the peace. It means we鈥檙e all at peace with one another, as brothers and sisters.

Now, brothers and sisters, first I want to thank those of you who have taken the time to come through that snow, which almost turned me back myself, and come out where we can try and put our heads together and get a better understanding of what is going on, what we鈥檝e been through and what we鈥檙e all concerned about. As Sister Sharon has already pointed out, and I think she did so beautifully, during recent years our people have been struggling for some kind of relief from the conditions we鈥檙e confronted by.

When you go back over the period of struggle, I think it would be agreed that we鈥檝e gone through different patterns of struggle, that we鈥檝e struggled in different ways. Each way that we tried never produced what we were looking for. If it had been productive, we would have continued along that same way. We鈥檝e tried probably more different methods than any people. But at the same time, I think we鈥檝e tried more wrong methods than any other people, because most others have gotten more freedom than we have. Everywhere you look, people get their freedom faster than we do. They get more respect and recognition faster than we do. We get promises, but we never get the real thing. And primarily because we have yet to learn the proper tactic or strategy or method to bring freedom into existence.

I think that one of the things that has caused our people in this country to try so many methods is that times have changed so rapidly. What would be proper ten years ago would not have been proper seven years ago, or five years ago, or three years ago. Times change so quickly that if you and I don鈥檛 keep up with the times, we鈥檒l find ourselves with an umbrella in our hand, over our head, when the sun is out. Or we鈥檒l find ourselves standing in the rain, with the umbrella inside the door. If we don鈥檛 keep up with what鈥檚 going on, we will not be able to display the type of intelligence that will show the world we know what time it is and that we know what is happening around us . . . .

Several persons have asked me recently, since I鈥檝e been back, “What is your program?” I purposely, to this day, have not in any way mentioned what our program is, because there will come a time when we will unveil it so that everybody will understand it. Policies change, and programs change, according to time. But objective never changes. You might change your method of achieving the objective, but the objective never changes. Our objective is complete freedom, complete justice, complete equality, by any means necessary. That never changes. Complete and immediate recognition and respect as human beings, that doesn鈥檛 change, that鈥檚 what all of us want. I don鈥檛 care what you belong to鈥� you still want that, recognition and respect as a human being. But you have changed your methods from time to time on how you go about getting it. The reason you change your method is that you have to change your method according to time and conditions that prevail. And one of the conditions that prevails on this earth right now, that we know too little about, is our relationship with the freedom struggle of people all over the world.

Here in America, we have always thought that we were struggling by ourselves, and most Afro-Americans will tell you just that鈥攖hat we鈥檙e a minority. By thinking we鈥檙e a minority, we struggle like a minority. We struggle like we鈥檙e an underdog. We struggle like all of the odds are against us. This type of struggle takes place only because we don鈥檛 yet know where we fit in the scheme of things. We鈥檝e been maneuvered out of a position where we could rightly know and understand where we fit into the scheme of things. It鈥檚 impossible for you and me to know where we stand until we look around on this entire earth. Not just look around in Harlem or New York, or Mississippi, or America鈥攚e have got to look all around this earth. We don鈥檛 know where we stand until, we know where America stands. You don鈥檛 know where you stand in America until you know where America stands in the world. We don鈥檛 know where you and I stand in this context, known to us as America, until we know where America stands in the world context.

When you and I are inside of America and look at America, she looks big and bad and invincible. Oh, yes, and when we approach her in that context, we approach her as beggars, with our hat in our hands. As Toms, actually, only in the twentieth-century sense, but still as Toms. While if we understand what鈥檚 going on this earth and what鈥檚 going on in the world today, and fit America into that context, we find out she鈥檚 not so bad, after all; she鈥檚 not very invincible. And when you find out she鈥檚 not invincible, you don鈥檛 approach her like you鈥檙e dealing with someone who鈥檚 invincible.

As a rule, up to now, the strategy of America has been to tuck all of our leaders up into her dress, and besiege them with money, with prestige, with praise, and make them jump, and tell them what to tell us. And they always tell us we鈥檙e the underdog, and that we don鈥檛 have a chance, and that we should do it nonviolently and carefully; otherwise, we鈥檒l get hurt or we鈥檒l get wasted. We don鈥檛 buy that.

Number one, we want to know what are we? How did we get to be what we are? Where did we come from? How did we come from there? Who did we leave behind? Where was it that we left them behind, and what are they doing over there where we used to be? This is something that we have not been told. We have been brought over here and isolated-you know the funniest thing about that: they accuse us of introducing “separation” and “isolation.” No one is more isolated than you and I. There鈥檚 no system on earth more capable of thoroughly separating and isolating a people than this system that they call the democratic system; and you and I are the best proof of it, the best example of it. We were separated from our people, and have been isolated here for a long time.

So thoroughly has this been done to us that now we don鈥檛 even know that there is somebody else that looks like we do. When we see them, we look at them like they鈥檙e strangers. And when we see somebody that doesn鈥檛 look anything like us, we call them our friends. That鈥檚 a shame. It shows you what has been done to us. Yes, I mean our own people鈥檞e see our people come here who look exactly like we do, our twins, can鈥檛 tell them apart, and we say, “Those are foreigners.” Yet we鈥檙e getting our heads busted trying to snuggle up to somebody who not only doesn鈥檛 look like us, but doesn鈥檛 even smell like us.

So you can see the importance of these meetings on Sunday nights during the past two or three weeks, and for a couple more weeks. It is not so much to spell out any program; you can鈥檛 give a people a program until they realize they need one, and until they realize that all existing programs aren鈥檛 programs that are going to produce productive results. So what we would like to do on Sunday nights is to go into our problem, and just analyze and analyze and analyze; and question things that you don鈥檛 understand, so we can at least try and get a better picture of what faces us.

I, for one, believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what it is that confronts them, and the basic causes that produce it, they鈥檒l create their own program; and when the people create a program, you get action. When these “leaders” create programs, you get no action. The only time you see them is when the people are exploding. Then the leaders are shot into the situation and told to control things. You can鈥檛 show me a leader that has set off an explosion. No, they come and contain the explosion. They say, “Don鈥檛 get rough, you know, do the smart thing.” This is their role 鈥� they鈥檙e there just to restrain you and me, to restrain the struggle, to keep it in a certain groove, and not let it get out of control. Whereas you and I don鈥檛 want anybody to keep us from getting out of control. We want to get out of control. We want to smash anything that gets in our way that doesn鈥檛 belong there.

Listen to the last part of what I said: I didn鈥檛 just say we want to smash anything that gets in our way. I said we want to smash anything that gets in our way that doesn鈥檛 belong there. You see, I had to give you the whole thing, because when you read it, you鈥檒l hear we鈥檙e going to smash up everybody. No, I didn鈥檛 say that. I said we鈥檒l smash up anything that gets in the way that doesn鈥檛 belong there. I mean that. If it doesn鈥檛 belong there, it鈥檚 worthy to be smashed. This country practices that 鈥� power. This country smashes anything that gets in its way. It crushes anything that gets in its way. And since we鈥檙e Americans, they tell us, well, we鈥檒l do it the American way. We鈥檒l smash anything that gets in our way.

This is the type of philosophy that we want to express among our people. We don鈥檛 need to give them a program, not yet. First, give them something to think about. If we give them something to think about, and start them thinking in a way that they should think, they鈥檒l see through all this camouflage that鈥檚 going on right now. It鈥檚 just a show 鈥� the result of a script written by somebody else. The people will take that script and tear it up and write one for themselves. And you can bet that when you write the script for yourself, you鈥檙e always doing something different than you鈥檇 be doing if you followed somebody else鈥檚 script.

So, brothers and sisters, the thing that you and I must have an understanding of is the role that鈥檚 being played in world affairs today, number one, by the continent of Africa; number two, by the people on that continent; number three, by those of us who are related to the people on that continent, but who, by some quirk in our own history, find ourselves today here in the Western hemisphere. Always bear that in mind that our being in the Western hemisphere differs from anyone else, because everyone else here came voluntarily. Everyone that you see in this part of the world got on a boat and came here voluntarily; whether they were immigrants or what have you, they came here voluntarily. So they don鈥檛 have any real squawk, because they got what they were looking for. But you and I can squawk because we didn鈥檛 come here voluntarily. We didn鈥檛 ask to be brought here. We were brought here forcibly, against. our will, and in chains. And at. no time since we have been here, have they even acted like they wanted us here. At no time. At no time have they even tried to pretend that we were brought here to be citizens. Why, they don鈥檛 even pretend. So why should we pretend?

Look at the continent of Africa today and see what position it occupies on this earth, and you realize that there鈥檚 a tussle going on between East and West. It used to be between America and the West and Russia, but they鈥檙e not tussling with each other any more. Kennedy made a satellite out of Russia. He put Khrushchev in his pocket; yes, he did 鈥� lost him his job. The tussle now is between America and China. In the camp of the West, America is foremost. Most other Western nations are satellites to America. England is an American satellite. All of them are satellites, perhaps with the exception of France. France wants America to be her satellite. You never can tell what the future might bring. Better nations than this have fallen, if you read history. Most of the European Communist nations are still satelliting around Russia. But in Asia, China is the center of power.

Among Asian countries, whether they are communist, socialist 鈥� you don鈥檛 find any capitalist countries over there too much nowadays. Almost every one of the countries that has gotten independence has devised some kind of socialistic system, and this is no accident. This is another reason why I say that you and I here in America 鈥� who are looking for a job, who are looking for better housing, looking for a better education 鈥� before you start trying to be incorporated, or integrated, or disintegrated, into this capitalistic system, should look over there and find out what are the people who have gotten their freedom adopting to provide themselves with better housing and better education and better food and better clothing.

None of them are adopting the capitalistic system because they realize they can鈥檛. You can鈥檛 operate a capitalistic system unless you are vulturistic; you have to have someone else鈥檚 blood to suck to be a capitalist. You show me a capitalist, I鈥檒l show you a bloodsucker. He cannot be anything but a bloodsucker if he鈥檚 going to be a capitalist. He鈥檚 got to get it from somewhere other than himself, and that鈥檚 where he gets it–from somewhere or someone other than himself. So, when we look at the African continent, when we look at the trouble that鈥檚 going on between East and West, we find that the nations in Africa are developing socialistic systems to solve their problems.

There鈥檚 one thing that Martin Luther King mentioned at the Armory the other night, which I thought was most significant. I hope he really understood what he was saying. He mentioned that while he was in some of those Scandinavian countries he saw no poverty. There was no unemployment, no poverty. Everyone was getting education, everyone had decent housing, decent whatever 鈥� they needed to exist. But why did he mention those countries on his list as different?

This is the richest country on earth and there鈥檚 poverty, there鈥檚 bad housing, there鈥檚 slums, there鈥檚 inferior education. And this is the richest country on earth. Now, you know, if those countries that are poor can come up with a solution to their problems so that there鈥檚 no unemployment, then instead of you running downtown picketing city hall, you should stop and find out what they do over there to solve their problems. This is why the man doesn鈥檛 want you and me to look beyond Harlem or beyond the shores of America. As long as you don鈥檛 know what鈥檚 happening on the outside, you鈥檒l be all messed up dealing with this man on the inside. I mean what they use to solve the problem is not capitalism. What they are using to solve their problem in Africa and Asia is not capitalism. So what you and I should do is find out what they are using to get rid of poverty and all the other negative characteristics of a rundown society.

Africa is strategically located, geographically between East and West; it鈥檚 the most valuable piece of property involved in the struggle between East and West. You can鈥檛 get to the East without going past it, and can鈥檛 get from the East to West without going past it. It sits right there between all of them. It sits snuggled into a nest between Asia and Europe; it can reach either one. None of the natural resources that are needed in Europe that they get from Asia can get to Europe without coming either around Africa, over Africa, or in between the Suez Canal which is sitting at the tip of Africa. She can cut off Europe鈥檚 bread. She can put Europe to sleep overnight, just like that. Because she鈥檚 in a position to; the African continent is in a position to do this. But they want you and me to think Africa is a jungle, of no value, of no consequence. Because they also know that if you knew how valuable it was, you鈥檇 realize why they鈥檙e over there killing our people. And you鈥檇 realize that it鈥檚 not for some kind of humanitarian purpose or reason.

Also, Africa as a continent is important because of its tropical climate. It鈥檚 so heavily vegetated you can take any section of Africa and use modern agricultural methods and turn that section alone into the breadbasket for the world. Almost any country over there can feed the whole continent, if it only had access to people who had the technical know-how to bring into that area modern methods of agriculture. It鈥檚 rich. A jungle is only a place that鈥檚 heavily vegetated–the soil is so rich and the climate is so good that everything grows, and it doesn鈥檛 grow in season 鈥� it grows all the time. All the time is the season. That means it can grow anything, produce anything.

Added to its richness and its strategic position geographically is the fact of the existence of the Suez Canal and the Strait of Gibraltar. Those two narrow straits can cut off from Europe anything and everything Europe needs. All of the oil that runs Europe goes through the Suez Canal, up the Mediterranean Sea to places like Greece and Italy and Southern Spain and France and along through there; or through the Strait of Gibraltar and around on into England. And they need it. They need access through the Suez. When Nasser took over the Suez, they almost died in Europe. It scared them to death–why? Because Egypt is in Africa, in fact, Egypt is in both Africa and Asia . . . .

Before the Suez Canal was built, it was all one, you couldn鈥檛 really make a distinction between Africa and Asia. It was all one. When President Nasser took the Suez Canal, that meant that for the first time the Suez Canal was under the complete jurisdiction of an African nation, and it meant that other nations had to cater to this African nation if they wanted to survive, if they didn鈥檛 want their oil and other sources of supply cut off. Immediately this had an effect on European attitudes and European economic measures. They began to try and devise new means, new routes, to get the things that they needed.

Another reason the continent is so important is because of its gold. It has some of the largest deposits of gold on earth, and diamonds. Not only the diamonds you put on your. finger and in your ear, but industrial diamonds, diamonds that are needed to make machines 鈥� machines that can鈥檛 function or can鈥檛 run unless they have these diamonds. These industrial diamonds play a major role in the entire industrialization of the European nations, and without these diamonds their industry would fall.

You and I usually know of diamonds for rings 鈥� because those are the only diamonds we get close to, or the only diamonds within our line of thinking. We don鈥檛 think in terms of diamonds for other uses. Or baseball diamonds 鈥� some of us only get that far.

Not only diamonds, but also cobalt. Cobalt is one of the most valuable minerals on this earth today, and I think Africa is one of the only places where it is found. They use it in cancer treatment, plus they use it in this nuclear field that you鈥檝e heard so much about. Cobalt and uranium 鈥� the largest deposits are right there on the African continent. And this is what the man is after. The man is after keeping you over here worrying about a cup of coffee, while he鈥檚 over there in your motherland taking control over minerals that have so much value they make the world go around. While you and I are still walking around over here, yes, trying to drink some coffee 鈥� with a cracker.

It鈥檚 one of the largest sources of iron and bauxite and lumber and even oil, and Western industry needs all of these minerals in order to survive. All of these natural minerals are needed by the Western industrialists in order for their industry to keep running at the clip that it鈥檚 been used to. Can we prove it? Yes. You know that France lost her French West African possessions, Belgium lost the Congo, England lost Nigeria and Ghana and some of the other English-speaking areas; France also lost Algeria, or the Algerians took Algeria.

As soon as these European powers lost their African possessions, Belgium had an economic crisis 鈥� the same year she turned the Congo loose. She had to rearrange her entire economy and her economic methods had to be revised, because she had lost possession of the source of most of her raw materials 鈥� raw materials that she got almost free, almost with no price or output whatsoever. When she got into a position where she didn鈥檛 have access to these free raw materials anymore, it affected her economy. It affected the French economy. It affected the British economy. It drove all of these European countries to the point where they had to come together and form what鈥檚 known as the European Common Market. Prior to that, you wouldn鈥檛 hear anything about a European Common Market.

Being the gateway to Southwest Africa, Southern Rhodesia, Basutoland, Swaziland, and South Africa, the Congo is a country on the African continent which is so strategically located geographically that if it were to fall into the hands of a real dyed-in-the-wool African nationalist, he could then make it possible for African soldiers to train in the Congo for the purpose of invading Angola. When they invade Angola, that means Angola must fall, because there are more Africans than there are Portuguese, and they just couldn鈥檛 control Angola any longer. And if the Congo fell into good hands, other than Tshombe, then it would mean that Angola would fall, Southern Rhodesia would fall, Southwest Africa would fall and South Africa would fall. And that鈥檚 the only way they would fall. When these countries fall, it would mean that the source of raw material, natural resources, some of the richest mineral deposits on earth, would then be taken away from the European economy. And without free access to this, the economy of Europe wouldn鈥檛 be worth two cents. All of your European countries would be of no more importance than a country like Norway, which is all right for Norwegians, but has no influence beyond that. It鈥檚 just another country stuck up some place in the northern part, like Sweden and some of those places. Every European country would be just as insignificant as the smallest insignificant country in Europe right now 鈥� if they lost the rest of Africa. Because the rest of Africa that鈥檚 still colonized is the part of the African continent that鈥檚 still backing up the European economy. And if the economy of Europe was to sink any farther, it would really wash away the American economy. American economy can never be any stronger than the European economy because both of them are one. It鈥檚 one and the same economy. They are brothers.

I say this because it is necessary for you and me to understand what is at stake. You can鈥檛 understand what is going on in Mississippi if you don鈥檛 understand what is going on in the Congo. And you can鈥檛 really be interested in what鈥檚 going on in Mississippi if you鈥檙e not also interested in what鈥檚 going on in the Congo. They鈥檙e both the same. The same interests are at stake. The same sides are drawn up, the same schemes are at work in the Congo that are at work in Mississippi. The same stake 鈥� no difference whatsoever.

Another frightening thing for this continent and the European continent is the fact that the Africans are trying to industrialize. One of the most highly industrialized African nations is Egypt. They have had a limited source of power up to now, but they are building a dam in upper Egypt, where the black Egyptians live. I was there, I took some pictures– I鈥檓 going to show you some movies, probably on the first Sunday in January, a week from next Sunday. The Aswan Dam is something that everybody should see. The Aswan is being built on the Nile in the heart of the desert, surrounded by mountains. One of the most outstanding things about this dam isn鈥檛 so much its miraculous technical aspects, but the human aspects.

When you build a dam in an area where there鈥檚 already vegetation, that鈥檚 one thing. But this dam is being built in an area where there鈥檚 no vegetation. Once this river is dammed, it will create a lake in the middle of the desert which will set up a water cycle 鈥� rain, you know, clouds, and all of that stuff 鈥� and it will turn the desert into a civilization, into a very fertile valley. In order for this artificial lake to be built in that way, from that dam, it washed away the homes of the Nubians–people who look just like you and I do, who have been living there for thousands of years. They had to replace them, they had to transplant them from where they were living for thousands of years to another area.

This in itself was an operation that would hold you spellbound if you could see all the aspects of it. It meant taking a people from one place and putting them in another place. The place where they had been was antiquated. Their methods, their customs, their homes were thousands of years old. But overnight these people, who lived that far in the past, were taken to new cities that had been built by the government. Modern cities, where they had modern schools, modern rooms in which to live, and modern hospitals. When you go into these new cities that are Nubian villages, the first thing you always see is a mosque. Their religion is Islam, they鈥檙e Muslims.

The Egyptian government, the revolutionary government, differs from most revolutions in that it鈥檚 one of the few revolutions that have taken place where religion has not been minimized. In most revolutions, religion is immediately de-emphasized. Eventually that revolution loses something. Always. But the thing about the Egyptian revolution was that it never de-emphasized the importance of religion. In these new cities, the first thing they build is a mosque, so people can practice their religion. Then they build schools so the people can be educated free; and then they build hospitals. They believe that the religious aspect keeps the people spiritually and morally balanced, and then everyone should have the best education and free hospitalization.

These new villages actually reflect the whole motive behind the Egyptian revolution. I found this quite interesting. I was there and could study it for two months. It鈥檚 a balanced revolution. I go for revolution, but revolution should always do something for the people and it should always keep them balanced. You don鈥檛 find anybody that鈥檚 more revolutionary than those people over there in Egypt; they鈥檙e revolutionary, they鈥檙e involved in every revolution that鈥檚 going on on the African continent right now.

So the Aswan Dam creates enough additional power to make it possible to step up or speed up the industrialization of that particular African nation. And as their industrialization is stepped up, it means that they can produce their own cars, their own tractors, their own tools, their own machinery, plus a lot of other things. Not only Egypt, but Ghana too. Ghana is building a dam, they鈥檙e damming the Volta River. There鈥檚 the Volta High Dam, and it鈥檚 being built for the purpose of increasing the power potential of Ghana, so that Ghana also can increase its industrial output.

As these African nations get in a position to increase their own power and to industrialize, what does it mean? It means that where they now are a market for American goods and America鈥檚 finished products, and a market for European finished products, when they鈥檙e able to finish their own products, they will be able to get their products cheaper because they鈥檙e putting their own raw materials into the finished products. Now the raw materials are taken from Africa, shipped all the way to Europe, used to feed the machines of the Europeans, and make jobs for them, and then turned around and sold back to the Africans as finished products. But when the African nations become industrialized, they can take their own products and stick them in the machines and finish them into whatever they want. Then they can live cheaper. The whole system will be a system with a high standard of living but a cheaper standard of living.

This standard of living automatically will threaten the standard of living in Europe because it will cut off the European market. European factories can鈥檛 produce unless they have some place to market the products. American factories can鈥檛 produce unless she has some place to market her products. It is for this reason that the European nations in the past have kept the nations in Latin America and in Africa and in Asia from becoming industrial powers. They keep the machinery and the ability to produce and manufacture limited to Europe and limited to America. Then this puts America and the Europeans in a position to control the economy of all other nations and keep them living at a low standard.

These people are beginning to see that. The Africans see it, the Latin Americans see it, the Asians see it. So when you hear them talking about freedom, they鈥檙e not talking about a cup of coffee with a cracker. No, they鈥檙e talking about getting in a position to feed themselves and clothe themselves and make these other things that, when you have them, make life worth living. So this is the way you and I have to understand the world revolution that鈥檚 taking place right now.

When you understand the motive behind the world revolution, the drive behind the African and the drive behind the Asian, then you get some of that drive yourself. You鈥檒l be driving for real. The man downtown knows the difference between when you鈥檙e driving for real and when you鈥檙e driving not for real. As long as you keep asking about coffee, he doesn鈥檛 have to worry about you; he can send you to Brazil. So these dams being set up over there in different parts of the continent are putting African nations in a position to have more power, to become more industrial and also to be self-sustained and self-sufficient.

In line with that: In the past it was the world bank, controlled again by Europeans and from Europe, that subsidized most of the effort that was being made by African nations and Asian nations to develop underdeveloped areas. But the African nations are now getting together and forming their own bank, the African bank. The details of it aren鈥檛 as much in my mind as I would like them to be, but when I was in Lagos, Nigeria, they were having a meeting there. It was among African bankers and African nations, and the Organization of African Unity, which is the best thing that has ever happened on the African continent, had taken up as part of its program the task of getting all of the African nations to pool their efforts in creating an African bank, so that there would be an internal bank in the internal African structure to which underdeveloped African nations can turn for financial assistance in projects that they鈥檙e trying to undertake that would be beneficial to the whole continent . . . .

Politically, Africa as a continent, and the African people as a people, have the largest representation of any continent in the United Nations. Politically, the Africans are in a more strategic position and in a stronger position whenever a conference is taking place at the international level. Today, power is international, real power is international; today, real power is not local. The only kind of power that can help you and me is international power, not local power. Any power that鈥檚 local, if it鈥檚 real power, is only a reflection or a part of that international power. If you think you鈥檝e got some power, and it isn鈥檛 in some way tied into that international thing, brother, don鈥檛 get too far out on a limb.

If your power base is only here, you can forget it. You can鈥檛 build a power base here. You have to have a power base among brothers and sisters. You have to have your power base among people who have something in common with you. They have to have some kind of cultural identity, or there has to be some relationship between you and your power base. When you build a power base in this country, you鈥檙e building it where you aren鈥檛 in any way related to what you build it on. No, you have to have that base somewhere else. You can work here, but you鈥檇 better put your base somewhere else. Don鈥檛 put it in this man鈥檚 hand. Any kind of organization that is based here can鈥檛 be an effective organization. Anything you鈥檝e got going for you, if the base is here, is not going to be effective. Your and my base must be at home, and this is not at home.

When you see that the African nations at the international level comprise the largest representative body and the largest force of any continent, why, you and I would be out of our minds not to identify with that power bloc. We would be out of our minds, we would actually be traitors to ourselves, to be reluctant or fearful to identify with people with whom we have so much in common. If it was a people who had nothing to offer, nothing to contribute to our well-being, you might be justified, even though they looked like we do; if there was no contribution to be made, you might be justified. But when you have people who look exactly like you, and you are catching hell, to boot, and you still are reluctant or hesitant or slow to identify with them, then you need to catch hell, yes. You deserve all the hell you get.

The African representatives, coupled with the Asians and Arabs, form a bloc that鈥檚 almost impossible for anybody to contend with. The African-Asian-Arab bloc was the bloc that started the real independence movement among the oppressed peoples of the world. The f i r s t coming together of that bloc was at the Bandung conference … .

To show you the power of that bloc and the results that they鈥檝e gotten and how well the Europeans know it: On the African continent, when I was there, one thing I noticed was the twenty-four-hour-a-day effort being made in East Africa to turn the African against the Asian; and in West Africa to turn the African against the Arab; and in parts of Africa where there are no Asians or Arabs, to turn the Muslim African against the Christian African. When you go over there and study this thing, you can see that it is not something that鈥檚 indigenous, it鈥檚 not a divisive situation that鈥檚 indigenous to the African himself. But someone realizes that the power of the oppressed black, brown, red and yellow people began at the Bandung conference, which was a coalition between the Arab and the Asian and the African, and how much pressure they鈥檝e been able to put on the oppressor since then.

So, very shrewdly they have moved in. Now when you travel on the continent, you see the African in East Africa is being sicked on the Asian 鈥� there鈥檚 a division taking place. And in West Africa he鈥檚 being sicked on the Arab — there鈥檚 a division taking place. And where the oppressor, this ingenious oppressor, 鈥� diabolically ingenious 鈥� where he hasn鈥檛 found an Asian to sic the African on, or an Arab to sic the African on, he uses the Muslim African against the Christian African. Or the one that believes in religion against the one that doesn鈥檛 believe in religion. But the main thing he鈥檚 doing is causing this division, division, division to in some way keep the African, the Arab and the Asian from beating up on him.

He鈥檚 doing the same thing in British Guiana. He鈥檚 got the black Guianians down there fighting against the so-called Indians. He鈥檚 got them fighting each other. They didn鈥檛 fight each other when the British were there in full control. If you notice, as long as the place was an old-style colony, no fight. But as soon as the British are supposed to be moving away, the black one starts fighting the red one. Why? This is no accident. If they didn鈥檛 fight before, they don鈥檛 need to fight now. There鈥檚 no reason for it. But their fighting each other keeps the man on top. The fact that he can turn one against the other keeps the man on top.

He does the same thing with you and me right here in Harlem. All day long. I turned on the radio last night. I heard them say, every hour on the hour, that James Farmer, the head of CORE, was going to Africa, Egypt and Israel. And they said the reason he was going was because he wanted to correct false statements made by black nationalist leader Malcolm X when he was over there. If I hadn鈥檛 had this experience before, immediately I would have started blasting Farmer. But I called him up today. He said he didn鈥檛 know what they were talking about. But why do they do it? They do it to make us fight each other. As long as we鈥檙e fighting each other, we can鈥檛 get at the man who should be fought against from the start. Do you understand? Once we see the strategy that they use at the international level, then we can better understand the strategy that they use at the national and at the local level.

Lastly, I would like to point out my understanding of what I think is the position taken in African policy. Their policy, in a nutshell, is positive neutrality, non-alignment. They don鈥檛 line up either way. Africa is for the Africans. And the Africans are for the Africans. The policy of the independent African states, by and large, is positive neutrality, non-alignment. Egypt is a good example. They take from East and West and don鈥檛 take sides with either one. Nasser took everything Russia could give him, and then put all the communists in jail. Not that I mean the communists should necessarily have been put in jail. For the communist is a man, a capitalist is a man, and a socialist is a man. Well, if all of them are men, why should they be put in jail, unless one of them is committing a crime? And if being a communist or being a capitalist or being a socialist is a crime, first you have to study which of those systems is the most criminal. And then you鈥檒l be slow to say which one should be in jail.

I cite that as an example just to show what this positive neutrality means: If you want to help us, help us; we鈥檙e still not with you. If you have a contribution to make to our development, do it. But that doesn鈥檛 mean we鈥檙e with you or against you. We鈥檙e neutral. We鈥檙e for ourselves. Whatever is good for us, that鈥檚 what we鈥檙e interested in. That doesn鈥檛 mean we鈥檙e against you. But it does mean we鈥檙e for ourselves.

This is what you and I need to learn. You and I need to learn how to be positively neutral. You and I need to learn how to be non-aligned. And if you and I ever study the science of non-alignment, then you鈥檒l find out that there鈥檚 more power in non-alignment than there is alignment. In this country, it鈥檚 impossible for you to be aligned–with either party. Either party that you align yourself with is suicide. Because both parties are criminal. Both parties are responsible for the criminal condition that exists. So you can鈥檛 align yourself with a party.

What you can do is get registered so that you have power 鈥� political potential. When you register your political potential, that means your gun is loaded. But just because it鈥檚 loaded, you don鈥檛 have to shoot until you see a target that will be beneficial to you. If you want a duck, don鈥檛 shoot when you see a bear; wait till you see a duck. And if you want a bear, don鈥檛 shoot when see a duck; wait till you see a bear. Wait till you see what you wan 鈥� hen take aim and shoot!

What they do with you and me is tell us, “Register and vote.” Don鈥檛 register and vote 鈥� register! That鈥檚 intelligent. Don鈥檛 register and vote 鈥� you can vote for a dummy, you can vote for a crook, you can vote for another who鈥檇 want to exploit you. “Register” means being in a position to take political action any time, any place and in any manner that would be beneficial to you and me; being in a position to take advantage of our position. Then we鈥檒l be in a position to be respected and recognized. But as soon as you get registered, and you want to be a Democrat or a Republican, you are aligning. And once you are aligning, you have no bargaining power 鈥� none whatsoever.

We鈥檝e got a program we are going to launch, which will involve the absolute maximum registering of as many of our people as we can. But they will be registered as independents. And by being registered as independents, it means we can do whatever is necessary, wherever it鈥檚 necessary, and whenever the time comes. Do you understand?

So, I say in my conclusion, we have a lady that I want to introduce you to, who I think is one of the best freedom fighters in America today. She鈥檚 from Mississippi, and you鈥檝e got to be a freedom fighter to even live in Mississippi. You鈥檝e got to be a freedom fighter to live anywhere in this country, but especially Mississippi. This woman has been in the forefront of the struggle in Mississippi. I was on a program with her this afternoon. . . .

As I mentioned today 鈥� and you鈥檒l probably read about it tomorrow; they鈥檒l blow it up, and out of context 鈥� what we need in this country (and I believe it with all my heart, and with all my mind, and with all my soul) is the same type of Mau Mau here that they had over there in Kenya. Don鈥檛 you ever be ashamed of the Mau Mau. They鈥檙e not to be ashamed of. They are to be proud of. Those brothers were freedom fighters. Not only brothers, there were sisters over there. I met a lot of them. They鈥檙e brave. They hug you and kiss you 鈥� glad to see you. In fact, if they were over here, they鈥檇 get this problem straightened up just like that.

I read a little story once, and Mau Mau proved it. I read a story once where someone asked some group of people how many of them wanted freedom. They all put up their hand. Think there were about 300 of them. Then the person says, “Well, how many of you are ready to kill anybody who gets in your way for freedom?” 澳门六合彩开奖直播 fifty put up their hands. And he told those fifty, “You stand over here.” That left 250 sitting who wanted freedom, but weren鈥檛 ready to kill for it. So he told this fifty, “Now you wanted freedom and you said you鈥檇 kill anybody who鈥檇 get in your way. You see those 250? You get them first. Some of them are your own brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers. But they鈥檙e the ones who stand in the way of your freedom. They鈥檙e afraid to do whatever is necessary to get it and they鈥檒l stop you from doing it. Get rid of them and freedom will come naturally.”

I go for that. That鈥檚 what the Mau Mau learned. The Mau Mau realized that the only thing that was standing in the way of the independence of the African in Kenya was another African. So they started getting them one by one, all those Toms. One after another, they鈥檇 find another Uncle Tom African by the roadside. Today they鈥檙e free. The white man didn鈥檛 even get involved–he got out of the way. That鈥檚 the same thing that will happen here. We鈥檝e got too many of our own people who stand in the way. They鈥檙e too squeamish. They want to be looked upon as respectable Uncle Toms. They want to be looked upon by the white man as responsible. They don鈥檛 want to be classified by him as extremist, or violent, or, you know, irresponsible. They want that good image. And nobody who鈥檚 looking for a good image will ever be free. No, that kind of image doesn鈥檛 get you free. You鈥檝e got to take something in your hand and say, “Look, it鈥檚 you or me.” And I guarantee you he鈥檒l give you freedom then. He鈥檒l say, “This man is ready for it.” I said something in your hand 鈥� I won鈥檛 define what I mean by “something in your hand.” I don鈥檛 mean bananas.

So, we are honored to have with us tonight not only a freedom fighter, but some singers on that program today 鈥� I think they鈥檙e all here; I asked them to come out tonight because they sang one song that just knocked me out. I鈥檓 not one who goes for “We Shall Overcome.” I just don鈥檛 believe, we鈥檙e going to overcome, singing. If you鈥檙e going to get yourself a .45 and start singing “We Shall Overcome,” I鈥檓 with you. But I鈥檓 not for singing that doesn鈥檛 at the same time tell you how to get something to use after you get through singing. I realize I鈥檓 saying some things that you think can get me in trouble, but, brothers, I was born in, trouble. I don鈥檛 even care about trouble. I鈥檓 interested in one thing alone, and that鈥檚 freedom–by any means necessary. So I鈥檒l bring you now the country鈥檚 number one freedom-fighting woman.

(Mrs. Hamer speaks.)
Now you see why Mississippi is in trouble. And I hope that our brothers, especially our brothers here in Harlem, listened very well, very closely, to what I call one of this country鈥檚 foremost freedom fighters. You don鈥檛 have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is be an intelligent human being. And automatically, your intelligence makes you want freedom so badly that you鈥檒l do anything, by any means necessary, to get that freedom. And I want Mrs. Hamer to know that anything we can do to help them in Mississippi, we鈥檙e at their disposal. One of the things that we will definitely provide you with, because I think it鈥檚 the only real help that you can get down there: You can let those hooded people know that, from here on in, when they start taking the lives of innocent black people, we believe in tit for tat.

If I were to go home and find some blood on the leg of one of my little girls, and my wife told me that a snake bit the child, I鈥檇 go looking for the snake. And if I found the snake, I wouldn鈥檛 necessarily take time to see if it had blood on its jaws. As far as I鈥檓 concerned the snake is the snake. So if snakes don鈥檛 want someone hunting snakes indiscriminately, I say that snakes should get together and clean out their snakey house. If snakes don鈥檛 want people running around indiscriminately chopping off the heads of snakes, my advice to snakes would be to keep their house in order. I think you well understand what I鈥檓 saying. Now those were twenty-one snakes that killed those three brothers down there. Twenty-one 鈥� those are snakes. And there is no law in any society on earth that would hold it against anyone for taking the heads of those snakes. Believe it, the whole world would honor you or honor anyone who did what the federal government refused to do.

We should let them know that we believe in giving them what they deserve. There are brothers around the country right now, a lot of them, who feel like I do, a lot of them who feel like I do. I鈥檝e even met white students who feel that way. When they tell me that they鈥檙e liberal, I tell them, “Great, go get me one of those snake heads.” I鈥檓 sincere about this. I think that there are many whites who are sincere, especially at the student level. They just don鈥檛 know how to show their sincerity. They think that they鈥檙e showing sincerity by going down there and encouraging our people to be nonviolent. That鈥檚 not where it鈥檚 at. Since they鈥檙e white, they can get closer to whitey than we can. They can put on a sheet and walk right on into camp with the rest of them.

I鈥檓 telling you how to do it: You鈥檙e a liberal; get you a sheet. And get you something up under that sheet that you know how to use, and walk right on in that camp of sheeted people with the rest of them. And show how liberal you are. I鈥檒l come back and shake your hand all day long. I鈥檒l walk you around Harlem and tell everybody what a good white person you are. Because you鈥檝e proved it. But I don鈥檛 accept any nonviolent liberals. This doesn鈥檛 mean that you鈥檝e got to be violent; but it does mean that you can鈥檛 be nonviolent
(Introduces Freedom Singers.)

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Mr. Pearson belongs to the melancholy or pessimist school, which has become so prominent in England during the last two or three decades, and which has been represented there for half a century. In fact, the note of despondency seems to be the dominant note among Englishmen of high cultivation at the present time. It is as marked among their statesmen and publicists as among their men of letters. Mr. Balfour being particularly happy in his capacity to express in good English, and with much genuine elevation of thought, a profound disbelief in nineteenth century progress, and an equally profound distrust of the future toward which we are all travelling. For much of this pessimism and for many of the prophecies which it evokes, there is no excuse whatsoever. There may possibly be good foundation for the pessimism as to the future shown by men like Mr. Pearson; but hitherto the writers of the stamp of the late “Cassandra” Greg who have been pessimistic about the present, have merely betrayed their own weakness or their own incapacity to judge contemporary persons and events. The weakling, the man who cannot struggle with his fellow-men and with the conditions that surround him, is very apt to think these men and these conditions bad; and if he has the gift of writing, he puts these thoughts down at some length on paper. Very strong men, moreover, if of morose and dyspeptic temper, are apt to rail at the present, and to praise the past simply because they do not live in it. To any man who will consider the subject from a scientific point of view, with a desire to get at the truth, it is needless to insist on the fact that at no period of the world鈥檚 history has there been so much happiness generally diffused among, mankind as now.

At no period of the world鈥檚 history has life been so full of interest, and of possibilities of excitement and enjoyment as for us who live in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This is not only true as far as the working classes are concerned, but it is especially true as regards the men of means, and above all of those men who also possess brains and ambition. Never before in the world鈥檚 history have there been such opportunities thrown open to men, in the way of building new commonwealths, exploring new countries, conquering kingdoms, and trying to adapt the governmental policy of old nations to new and strange conditions. The half-century which is now closing has held out to the people who have dwelt therein some of the great prizes of history. Abraham Lincoln and Prince Bismarck have taken their places among the world鈥檚 worthies. Mighty masters of war have arisen in America, in Germany, in Russia; Lee and Grant, Jackson and Farragut, Moltke, Skobeleff, and the Red Prince. The work of the chiefs of mechanical and electrical inventions has never been equalled before, save perhaps by what was done in the first half of this same century. Never before have there been so many opportunities for commonwealth builders; new States have been pitched on the banks of the Saskatchewan, the Columbia, the Missouri, and the Colorado, on the seacoast of Australia, and in the interior of Central Africa. Vast regions have been won by the sword. Burmah and Turkestan, Egypt and Matabeleland, have rewarded the prowess of English and Russian conquerors, exactly as, when the glory of Rome was at its height, remote Mediterranean provinces furnished triumphs to the great military leaders of the Eternal City. English administrators govern subject empires larger than those conquered. by Alexander. In letters no name has been produced that will stand with the first half-dozen of all literature, but there have been very many borne by men whose effect upon the literatures of their own countries has been profound, and whose works will last as long as the works of any men written in the same tongues. In science even more has been done; Darwin has fairly revolutionized thought; and many others stand but a step below him.

All this means only that the opportunities have been exceptionally great for the men of exceptionally great powers; but they have also been great for the men of ordinary powers. The workingman is, on the whole, better fed, better clothed, better housed, and provided with greater opportunities for pleasure and for mental and spiritual improvement than ever before. The man with ability enough to become a lawmaker has the fearful joy of grappling with problems as important as any the administrators and legislators of the past had to face. The ordinary man of adventurous tastes and desire to get all out of life that can be gotten, is beyond measure better off than were his forefathers of one, two, or three centuries back. He can travel round the world; he can dwell in any country he wishes; he can explore strange regions; he can spend years by himself in the wilderness, hunting great game; he can take part in a campaign here and there. Whithersoever his tastes lead him, he finds that he has far greater capacity conferred upon him by the conditions of nineteenth-century civilization to do something of note than ever a man of his kind has before. If he is observant, he notes all round him the play of vaster forces than have ever before been exerted, working, half blindly, half under control, to bring about immeasurable results. He sees going on before his eyes a great transfer of population and civilization, which is making America north of the Rio Grande, and Australia, English-speaking continents; which has filled Central and South America with States of uncertain possibilities; which is creating for the first time a huge Aryan nation across the entire north of Asia, and which is working changes in Africa infinitely surpassing in importance all those that have ever taken place there since the days when the Bantu peoples first built their beehive huts on the banks of the Congo and the Zambezi. Our century has teemed with life and interest.

Yet this is the very century at which Carlyle railed: and it is strange to think that he could speak of the men at that very moment engaged in doing such deeds, as belonging to a worn-out age. His vision was clear to see the importance and the true bearing of England鈥檚 civil war of the seventeenth century, and yet he remained mole-blind to the vaster and more important civil war waged before his very eyes in nineteenth-century America. The heroism of Naseby and Worcester and Minden hid from him the heroism of Balaklava and Inkerman, of Lucknow and Delhi. He could appreciate at their worth the campaigns of the Seven Years鈥� War, and yet could hardly understand those waged between the armies of the Potomac and of Northern Virginia. He was fairly inspired by the fury and agony and terror of the struggle at Kunnersdorf; and yet could not appreciate the immensely greater importance of the death-wrestle that reeled round Gettysburg. His eyes were so dazzled by the great dramas of the past that he could not see the even greater drama of the present. It is but the bare truth so say that never have the rewards been greater, never has there been more chance for doing work of great and lasting value, than this last half of the nineteenth century has offered alike to statesman and soldier, to explorer and commonwealth-builder, to the captain of industry, to the man of letters, and to the man of science. Never has life been more interesting to each to take part in. Never has there been a greater output of good work done both by the few and by the many.

Nevertheless, signs do not fail that we are on the eve of great changes, and that in the next century we shall see the conditions of our lives, national and individual, modified after a sweeping and radical fashion. Many of the forces that make for national greatness and for individual happiness in the nineteenth century will be absent entirely, or will act with greatly diminished strength, in the twentieth. Many of the forces that now make for evil will by that time have gained greatly in volume and power. It is foolish to look at the future with blind and careless optimism; quite as foolish as to gaze at it only through the dun-colored mists that surround the preachers of pessimism. It is always best to look facts squarely in the face, without blinking them, and to remember that, as has been well said, in the long run even the most uncomfortable truth is a safer companion than the pleasantest falsehood.

Whether the future holds good or evil for us does not, it is true, alter our duty in the present. We must stand up valiantly in the fight for righteousness and wisdom as we see them, and must let the event turn out as it may. Nevertheless, even though there is little use in pondering over the future, most men of intelligence do ponder over it at times, and if we think of it at all, it is well to think clearly.

Mr. Pearson writes a forecast of what he believes probably will, or at least very possibly may, happen in the development of national life and character during the era upon which we are now entering. He is a man who has had exceptional advantages for his work; he has studied deeply and travelled widely; he has been a diligent reader of books and a keen observer of men. To a careful training in one of the oldest of the world鈥檚 universities he has added long experience as an executive officer in one of the world鈥檚 youngest commonwealths. He writes with power and charm. His book is interesting in manner, and is still more interesting in matter, for he has thought deeply and faithfully over subjects of immense importance to the future of all the human race. He possesses a mind of marked originality. Moreover, he always faithfully tries to see facts as they actually are. He is, it seems to me, unduly pessimistic; but he is not pessimistic of set purpose nor does he adopt pessimism as a cult. He tries hard, and often successfully, to make himself see and to make himself state forces that are working for good. We may or may not differ from him, but it behooves us, if we do, to state our positions guardedly; for we are dealing with a man who has displayed much research in getting at his facts and much honesty in arriving at his rather melancholy conclusions.

The introduction to Mr. Pearson鈥檚 book is as readable as the chapters that follow, and may best be considered in connection with the first of these chapters, which is entitled “The Unchangeable Limits of the Higher Races.” I am almost tempted to call this the most interesting of the six chapters of the book, and yet one can hardly do so when absorbed in reading any one of the other five. Mr. Pearson sees what ought to be evident to every one, but apparently is not, that what he calls the “higher races,” that is, the races that for the last twenty-five hundred years (but, it must be remembered, only during the last twenty-five hundred years) have led the world, can prosper only under conditions of soil and climate analogous to those obtaining in their old European homes. Speaking roughly, this means that they can prosper only in the temperate zones, north and south.

Four hundred years ago the temperate zones, were very thinly peopled indeed, while the tropical and sub-tropical regions were already densely populated. The great future in the world鈥檚 history for the last four centuries has been the peopling of these vast, scantily inhabited regions by men of the European stocks; notably by men speaking English, but also by men speaking Russian and Spanish. During the same centuries these European peoples have for the first time acquired an enormous ascendancy over all other races. Once before, during the days of the Greco-Macedonian and Roman supremacy, European peoples possessed a somewhat similar supremacy; but it was not nearly as great, for at that period America and Australia were unknown, Africa south of the Sahara was absolutely unaffected by either Roman or Greek, and all but an insignificant portion of Asia was not only without the. pale of European influence, but held within itself immense powers of menace to Europe, and contained old and peculiar civilizations, still flourishing in their prime. All this has now been changed. Great English-speaking nations have sprung up in America north of the Rio Grande, and are springing up in Australia. The Russians, by a movement which has not yet fired the popular imagination, but which all thinking men recognize as of incalculable importance, are building a vast State in northern Asia, stretching from the Yellow Sea to the Ural Mountains. Tropical America is parcelled out among States partly of European blood, and mainly European in thought, speech, and religion; while tropical Asia and Africa have been divided among European powers, and are held in more or less complete subjection by their military and civil agents. It is no wonder that men who are content to look at things superficially, and who think that the tendencies that have triumphed during the last two centuries are as immutable in their workings as great natural laws, should speak as if it were a mere question of time when the civilized peoples should overrun and occupy the entire world, exactly as they now do Europe and North America.

Mr. Pearson points out with great clearness the groundlessness of this belief. He deserves especial praise for discriminating between the importance of ethnic, and of merely political, conquests. The conquest by one country of another populous country always attracts great attention at the time, and has wide momentary effects; but it is of insignificant importance when compared with the kind, of armed settlement which causes new nations of an old stock to spring up in new countries. The campaigns carried on by the lieutenants of Justinian against Goth and Vandal, Bulgarian and Persian, seemed in the eyes of civilized Europe at that time of incalculably greater moment than the squalid warfare being waged in England between the descendants of Low Dutch sea-thieves and the aboriginal British. Yet, in reality, it was of hardly any consequence in history whether Belisarius did or did not succeed in overthrowing the Ostrogoth merely to make room for the Lombard, or whether the Vandal did or did not succumb to the Roman instead of succumbing to the Saracen a couple of centuries later; while it was of the most vital consequence to the whole future of the world that the English should supplant the Welsh as masters of Britain.

Again, in our own day, the histories written of Great Britain during the last century teem with her dealings with India, while Australia plays a very insignificant part indeed; yet, from the standpoint of the ages, the peopling of the great island-continent with men of the English stock is a thousand fold more important than the holding Hindoostan for a few centuries.

Mr. Pearson understands and brings out clearly that in the long run a conquest must fail when it means merely the erection of an insignificant governing caste. He shows clearly that the men of our stock do not prosper in tropical countries. In the New World they leave a thin strain of their blood among and impose their laws, language, and forms of government on the aboriginal races, which then develop on new and dimly drawn lines. In the Old World they fail to do even this. In Asia they may leave a few tens of thousands, or possibly hundreds of thousands, of Eurasians to form an additional caste in a caste-ridden community. In tropical Africa they may leave here and there a mulatto tribe like the Griquas. But it certainly has not yet been proved that the European can live and propagate permanently in the hot regions of India and Africa, and Mr. Pearson is right in anticipating for the whites who have conquered these tropical and sub-tropical regions of the Old World, the same fate which befell the Greek kingdoms in Bactria and the Chersonese. The Greek rulers of Bactria were ultimately absorbed and vanished, as probably the English rulers of India will some day in the future鈥攆or the good of mankind, we sincerely hope and believe the very remote future鈥攖hemselves be absorbed and vanish. In Africa south of the Zambezi (and possibly here and there on high plateaus north of it,) there may remain white States, although even these States will surely contain a large colored population, always threatening to swamp the whites; but in tropical Africa generally, it does not seem possible that any white State can ever be built up. Doubtless for many centuries European adventurers and Arab raiders will rule over huge territories in the country south of the Soudan and north of the Tropic of Capricorn, and the whole structure, not only social, but physical, of the negro and the negroid peoples will be profoundly changed by their influence and by the influence of the half-caste descendants of these European and Asiatic soldiers of fortune and industry. But it is hardly possible to conceive that the peoples of Africa, however ultimately changed, will be anything but negroid in type of body and mind. It is probable that the change will be in the direction of turning them into tribes like those of the Soudan, with a similar religion and morality. It is almost impossible that they will not in the end succeed in throwing off the yoke of the European outsiders, though this end may be, and we hope will be, many centuries distant. In America most of the West Indies are becoming negro islands. The Spaniard, however, because of the ease with which he drops to a lower ethnic level, exerts a much more permanent influence than the Englishman upon tropic aboriginal races; and the tropical lands which the Spaniard and Portuguese once held, now contain, and always will contain, races which, though different from the Aryan of the temperate zone, yet bridge the gulf between him and the black, red, and yellow peoples who have dwelt from time immemorial on both sides of the equator.

Taking all this into consideration, therefore, it is most likely that a portion of Mr. Pearson鈥檚 forecast, as regards the people of the tropic zones, will be justified by events. It is impossible for the dominant races of the temperate zones ever bodily to displace the peoples of the tropics. It is highly probable that these people will cast off the yoke of their European conquerors sooner or later,and will become independent nations once more; though it is also possible that the modern conditions of easy travel may permit the permanent rule in the tropics of a vigorous northern race, renewed by a complete change every generation.

Mr. Pearson鈥檚 further proposition is that these black, red, and yellow nations, when thus freed, will threaten the dominance of the higher peoples, possibly by military, certainly by industrial, rivalry, and that the mere knowledge of the equality of these stocks will cow and dispirit the higher races.

This part of his argument is open to very serious objections. In the first place, Mr. Pearson entirely fails to take into account the difference in character among the nationalities produced in the tropics as the result of European conquest. In Asia, doubtless, the old races now submerged by European predominance will reappear, profoundly changed in themselves and in their relations to one another, but as un-European as ever, and not appreciably affected by any intermixture of European blood. In Africa, the native States will probably range somewhere between the Portuguese half-caste and quarter-caste communities now existing on certain of the tropic coasts, and pastoral or agricultural communities, with a Mohammedan religious cult and Asiatic type of government, produced by the infusion of a conquering semitic or hamitic caste on a conquered negro people. There may be a dominant caste of European blood in some of these States, but that is all. In tropical America, the change has already taken place. The States that there exist will not materially alter their form. It is possible that here and there populations of Chinese, pure or half-caste, or even of coolies, may spring up; but taken as a whole these States will be in the future what they are now, that is, they will be by blood partly white, but chiefly Indian or negro, with their language, law, religion, literature, and governmental system approaching those of Europe and North America.

Suppose that what Mr. Pearson foresees comes to pass, and that the black and yellow races of the world attain the same independence already achieved by the mongrel reddish race. Mr. Pearson thinks that this will expose us to two dangers. The first is that of actual physical distress caused by the competition of the teeming myriads of the tropics, or perhaps by their invasion of the temperate zones. Mr. Pearson himself does not feel any very great anxiety about this invasion assuming a military type, and I think that even the fear he does express is unwarranted by the facts. He is immensely impressed by the teeming population of China. He thinks that the Chinese will some day constitute the dominant portion of the population, both politically and numerically, in the East Indies, New Guinea, and Farther India. In this he is probably quite right; but such a change would merely mean the destruction or submersion of Malay, Dyak, and Papuan and would be of hardly any real consequence to the white man. He further thinks that the Chinese may jeopardize Russia in Asia. Here I am inclined to think he is wrong. As far as it is possible to judge in the absence of statistics, the Chinaman at present is not increasing relatively as fast as the Slav and the Anglo-Saxon. Half a century or so more will put both of them within measurable distance of equality with him, even in point of numbers. The movement of population in China is toward the south, not the north; the menace is real for the English and French protectorates in the south; in the north the difficulty hitherto has been to keep Russian settlers from crossing the Chinese frontier. When the great Trans-Siberian railroad is built, and when a few millions more of Russian settlers stretch from the Volga to the valley of the Amoor, the danger of a military advance by the Chinese against Asiatic Russia will be entirely over, even granting that it now exists. The Chinaman never has been, and probably never will be, such a fighter as Turk or Tartar, and he would have to possess an absolutely overwhelming superiority of numbers to give him a chance in a war of aggression against a powerful military race. As yet he has made no advance whatever towards developing an army capable of offensive work against European foes. In China there are no roads; the military profession is looked down on; Chinese troops would be formidable only under a European leader, and a European leader would be employed only from dire necessity; that is to repel, not to undertake an invasion. Moreover, China is merely an aggregate of provinces with a central knot at Pekin; and Pekin could be taken at any time by a small trained army. China will not menace Siberia until after undergoing some stupendous and undreamed-of internal revolution. It is scarcely within the bounds of possibility to conceive of the Chinaman expelling the European settler from the lands in which that settler represents the bulk of a fairly thick population, not merely a small intrusive caste. It is, of course, always possible that in the far-distant future (though there is no sign of it now) China may travel on the path of Japan, may change her policy, may develop fleets and armies; but if she does do this, there is no reason why this fact should stunt and dwarf the people of the higher races. In Elizabeth鈥檚 day the Turkish fleets and armies stood toward those of European powers in a far higher position than those of China, or of the tropics generally, can ever hope to stand in relation to the peoples of the temperate zones; and yet this did not hinder the Elizabethan Age from being one of great note both in the field of thought and in the field of action.

The anticipation of what might happen if India became solidified seems even more ill-founded. Here Mr. Pearson鈥檚 position is that the very continuance of European rule, doing away with war and famine, produces an increase of population and a solidity of the country, which will enable the people to over-throw that European rule. He assumes that the solidified and populous country will continue to remain such after the over-throw of the Europeans, and will be capable of deeds of aggression; but, of course, such an assumption is contrary to all probabilities. Once the European rule was removed, famine and internecine war would again become chronic, and India would sink back to her former place. Moreover, the long continuance of British rule undoubtedly weakens the warlike fibre of the natives, and makes the usurer rather than the soldier the dominant type.

The danger to which Mr. Pearson alludes, that even the negro peoples may in time become vast military powers constituting a menace to Europe, really seems to belong to a period so remote that every condition will have changed to a degree rendering it impossible for us to make any estimate in reference thereto. By that time the descendant of the negro may be as intellectual as the Athenian. Even prophecy must not look too many thousand years ahead. It is perfectly possible that European settlements in Africa will be swamped some time by the rising of natives who outnumber them a thousand to one, but it is not possible that the negroes will form a military menace to the people of the north, at least for a space of time longer than that which now separates us from the men of the River Drift. The negroid peoples, the so-called “hamitic,” and bastard semitic, races of eastern middle Africa are formidable fighters; but their strength is not fit for any such herculean tasks.

There is much reason to fear the industrial competition of these races; but even this will be less formidable as the power of the State increases and especially as the democratic idea obtains more and more currency. The Russians are not democratic at all, but the State is very powerful with them; and therefore they keep the Chinese out of their Siberian provinces, which are being rapidly filled up with a population mainly Slav, the remainder of which is being Slavicized. From the United States and Australia the Chinaman is kept out because the democracy, with much clearness of vision, has seen that his presence is ruinous to the white race Nineteenth century democracy needs no more complete vindication for its existence than the fact that it has kept for the white race the best portions of the new world鈥檚 surface, temperate America and Australia. Had these regions been under aristocratic governments, Chinese immigration would have been encouraged precisely as the slave trade is encouraged of necessity by any slave-holding oligarchy, and the result would in a few generations have been even more fatal to the white race; but the democracy, with the clear instinct of race selfishness, saw the race foe, and kept out the dangerous alien. The presence of the negro in our Southern States is a legacy from the time when we were ruled by a trans-oceanic aristocracy. The whole civilization of the future owes a debt of gratitude greater than can be expressed in words to that democratic policy which has kept the temperate zones of the new and the newest worlds a heritage for the white people.

As for the industrial competition, the Chinaman and the Hindoo may drive certain kinds of white traders from the tropics; but more than this they cannot do. They can never change the status of the white laborer in his own home, for the latter can always protect himself, and as soon as he is seriously menaced, always will protect himself, by protective tariffs and stringent immigration laws.

Mr. Pearson fears that when once the tropic races are independent, the white peoples will be humiliated and will lose heart: but this does not seem inevitable, and indeed seems very improbable. If the Englishman should lose his control over South Africa and India, it might indeed be a serious blow to the Englishman of Britain; though it may be well to remember that the generation of Englishmen which grew up immediately after England had lost America, accomplished feats in arms, letters, and science such as, on the whole, no other English generation ever accomplished. Even granting that Britain were to suffer as Mr. Pearson thinks she would, the enormous majority of the English-speaking peoples, those whose homes are in America and Australia, would be absolutely unaffected; and Continental Europe would be little more affected than it was when the Portuguese and Dutch successively saw their African and Indian empires diminish. France has not been affected by the expulsion of the French from Hayti; nor have the freed negroes of Hayti been capable of the smallest aggressive movement. No American or Australian cares in the least that the tan-colored peoples of Brazil and Ecuador now live under governments of their own instead of being ruled by viceroys from Portugal and Spain; and it is difficult to see why they should be materially affected by a similar change happening in regard to the people along the Ganges or the upper Nile. Even if China does become a military power on the European model, this fact will hardly affect the American and Australian at the end of the twentieth century more than Japan鈥檚 effort to get admitted to the circle of civilized nations has affected us at the end of the nineteenth.

Finally, it must be borne in mind that if any one of the tropical races ever does reach a pitch of industrial and military prosperity which makes it a menace to European and American countries, it will almost necessarily mean that this nation has itself become civilized in the process; and we shall then simply be dealing with another civilized nation of non-aryan blood, precisely as we now deal with Magyar, Fin, and Basque, without any thought of their being ethnically distinct from Croat, Rouman, or Wend.

In Mr. Pearson鈥檚 second chapter he deals with the stationary order of society, and strives to show that while we are all tending toward it, some nations, notably France, have practically come to it. He adds that when this stationary state is reached, it will produce general discouragement, and will probably affect the intellectual energy of the people concerned. He further points out that our races now tend to change from faith in private enterprises to faith in State organizations, and that this is likely to diminish the vigorous originality of any race. He even holds that we already see the beginning of a decadence, in the decline of speculative thought, and still more in the way of mechanical inventions. It is perfectly true that the laissez-faire doctrine of the old school of political economists is receiving less and less favor; but after all, if we look at events historically, we see that every race, as it has grown to civilized greatness, has used the power of the State more and more. A great State cannot rely on mere unrestricted individualism, any more than it can afford to crush out all individualism. Within limits, the mercilessness of private commercial warfare must be curbed as we have curbed the individual鈥檚 right of private war proper. It was not until the power of the State had become great in England, and until the lawless individualism of feudal times had vanished, that the English began that career of greatness which has put them on a level with the Greeks in point of intellectual achievement, and with the Romans in point of that material success which is measured by extension through settlement, by conquest, by triumphant warcraft and statecraft. As for Mr. Pearson鈥檚 belief that we now see a decline in speculative thought and in mechanical invention, all that can be said is that the facts do not bear him out.

There is one side to this stationary state theory which Mr. Pearson scarcely seems to touch. He points out with emphasis the fact, which most people are prone to deny, that the higher orders of every society tend to die out; that there is a tendency, on the whole, for both lower classes and lower civilizations to increase faster than the higher. Taken in the rough, his position on this point is undoubtedly correct. Progressive societies, and the most progressive portions of society, fail to increase as fast as the others, and often positively decease. The great commanders, great statesmen, great poets, great men of science of any period taken together do not average as many children who reach years of maturity as a similar number of mechanics, workmen, and farmers, taken at random. Nevertheless, society progresses, the improvement being due mainly to the transmission of acquired characters, a process which in every civilized State operates so strongly as to counterbalance the operation of that baleful law of natural selection which tells against the survival of some of the most desirable classes. Mr. Balfour, by the way, whose forecast for the race is in some respects not unlike Mr. Pearson鈥檚, seems inclined to adopt the view that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited; a position which, even though supported by a few eminent names, is hardly worth serious refutation.

The point I wish to dwell upon here, however, is that it is precisely in those castes which have reached the stationary state, or which are positively diminishing in numbers, that the highest culture and best training, the keenest enjoyment of life, and the greatest power of doing good to the community, are to be found at present. Unquestionably, no community that is actually diminishing in numbers is in a healthy condition: and as the world is now, with huge waste places still to fill up, and with much of the competition between the races reducing itself to the warfare of the cradle, no race has any chance to win a great place unless it consists of good breeders as well as of good fighters. But it may well be that these conditions will change in the future, when the other changes to which Mr. Pearson looks forward with such melancholy are themselves brought about. A nation sufficiently populous to be able to hold its own against aggression from without, a nation which, while developing the virtues of refinement, culture, and learning, has yet not lost those of courage, bold initiative, and military hardihood, might well play a great part in the world, even though it had come to that stationary state already reached by the dominant castes of thinkers and doers in most of the dominant races.

In Mr. Pearson鈥檚 third chapter he dwells on some of the dangers of political development, and in especial upon the increase of the town at the expense of the country, and upon the growth of great standing armies. Excessive urban development undoubtedly does constitute a real and great danger. All that can be said about it is that it is quite impossible to prophesy how long this growth will continue. Moreover, some of the evils, as far as they really exist, will cure themselves. If townspeople do, generation by generation, tend to become stunted and weak, then they will die out, and the problem they cause will not be permanent; while on the other hand, if the cities can be made healthy, both physically and morally, the objections to them must largely disappear. As for standing armies, Mr. Pearson here seems to have too much thought of Europe only. In America and Australia there is no danger of the up-growing of great standing armies: and, as he well shows, the fact that every citizen must undergo military training is by no means altogether a curse to the nations of Continental Europe.

There is one point, by the way, although a small point, where it may be worth while to correct Mr. Pearson鈥檚 statement of a fact. In dwelling on what is undoubtedly the truth, that raw militia are utterly incompetent to make head against trained regular forces, he finds it necessary to explain away the defeat at New Orleans. In doing this, he repeats the story as it has been told by British historians from Sir Archbald Alison to Goldwin Smith. I hasten to say that the misstatement is entirely natural on Mr. Pearson鈥檚 part; he was simply copying, without sufficient careful investigation, the legend adopted by one side to take the sting out of defeat. The way he puts it is that six thousand British under Pakenham, without artillery, were hurled against strong works defended by twice their numbers, and were beaten, as they would have been beaten had the works been defended by almost any troops in the world. In the first place, Pakenham did not have six thousand men; he had almost ten thousand. In the second place, the Americans, instead of being twice as numerous as the British, were but little more than half as numerous. In the third place, so far from being without artillery, the British were much superior to the Americans in this respect. Finally, they assailed a position very much less strong than that held by Soult when Wellington beat him at Toulouse with the same troops which were defeated by Jackson at New Orleans. The simple truth is that Jackson was a very good general, and that he had under him troops whom he had trained in successive campaigns against Indians and Spaniards, and that on the three occasions when he brought Pakenham to battle鈥攖hat is, the night attack, the great artillery duel, and the open assault鈥攖he English soldiers, though they fought with the utmost gallantry, were fairly and decisively beaten.

This one badly-chosen premise does not, however, upset Mr. Pearson鈥檚 conclusions. Plenty of instances can be taken from our war of 1812 to show how unable militia are to face trained regulars; and an equally striking example was that afforded at Castlebar, in Ireland, in 1798, when a few hundred French regulars attacked with the bayonet and drove in headlong flight from a very strong position, defended by a powerful artillery, five times their number of English, Scotch, and Irish militia.

In Mr. Pearson鈥檚 fourth chapter he deals, from a very noble standpoint, with some advantages of national feeling. With this chapter and with his praise of patriotism, and particularly of that patriotism which attaches itself to the whole country, and not to any section of it, we can only express our hearty agreement.

In his fifth chapter, on “The Decline of the Family” he sets forth, or seems to set forth, certain propositions with which I must as heartily disagree. He seems to lament the change which is making the irresponsible despot as much of an anomaly in the family as in the State. He seems to think; that this will weaken the family. It may do so, in some instances, exactly as the abolition of a despotism may produce anarchy; but the movement is essentially as good in one case as in the other. To all who have known really happy family lives, that is to all who have known or have witnessed the greatest happiness which there can be on this earth, it is hardly necessary to say that the highest ideal of the family is attainable only where the father and mother stand to each other as lovers and friends, with equal rights. In these homes the children are bound to father and mother by ties of love, respect, and obedience, which are simply strengthened by the fact that they are treated as reasonable beings with rights of their own, and that the rule of the household is changed to suit the changing years, as childhood passes into manhood and womanhood. In such a home the family is not weakened; it is strengthened. This is no unattainable ideal. Everyone knows hundreds of homes where it is more or less perfectly realized, and it is an ideal incomparably higher than the ideal of the beneficent autocrat which it has so largely supplanted.

The final chapter of Mr. Pearson鈥檚 book is entitled “The Decay of Character.” He believes that our world is becoming a world with less adventure and energy, less brightness and hope. He believes that all the great books have been written, all the great discoveries made, all the great deeds done. He thinks that the adoption of State socialism in some form will crush out individual merit and the higher kinds of individual happiness. Of course, as to this, all that can be said is that men differ as to what will be the effect of the forces whose working he portrays, and that most of us who live in the American democracy do not agree with him. It is to the last degree improbable that State socialism will ever be adopted in its extreme form, save in a few places. It exists, of course, to a certain extent wherever a police force and a fire department exist; and the sphere of the State鈥檚 action may be vastly increased without in any way diminishing the happiness of either the many or the few. It is even conceivable that a combination of legislative enactments and natural forces may greatly reduce the inequalities of wealth without in any way diminishing the real power of enjoyment or power for good work of what are now the favored classes. In our own country the best work has always been produced by men who lived in castes or social circles where the standard of essential comfort was high; that is, where men were well clothed, well fed, well housed, and had plenty of books and the opportunity of using them; but where there was small room for extravagant luxury. We think that Mr. Pearson鈥檚 fundamental error here is his belief that the raising of the mass necessarily means the lowering of the standard of life for the fortunate few. Those of us who now live in communities where the native American element is largest and where there is least inequality of conditions, know well that there is no reason whatever in the nature of things why, in the future, communities should not spring up where there shall be no great extremes of poverty and wealth, and where, nevertheless, the power of civilization and the chances for happiness and for doing good work shall be greater than ever before.

As to what Mr. Pearson says about the work of the world which is best worth doing being now done, the facts do not bear him out. He thinks that the great poems have all been written, that the days of the drama and the epic are past. Yet one of the greatest plays that has ever been produced, always excepting the plays of Shakespeare, was produced in this century; and if the world had to wait two thousand years after the vanishing of the Athenian dramatists before Shakespeare appeared, and two hundred years more before Goethe wrote his one great play, we can well afford to suspend judgment for a few hundred years at least, before asserting that no country and no language will again produce another great drama. So it is with the epic. We are too near Milton, who came three thousand years after Homer, to assert that the centuries to come will never more see an epic. One race may grow feeble and decrepit and be unable to do any more work; but another may take its place. After a time the Greek and Latin writers found that they had no more to say; and a critic belonging to either nationality might have shaken his head and said that all the great themes had been used up and all the great ideas expressed; nevertheless, Dante, Cervantes, Moliere, Schiller, Chaucer, and Scott, then all lay in the future.

Again, Mr. Pearson speaks of statecraft at the present clay as offering fewer prizes, and prizes of less worth than formerly, and as giving no chance for the development of men like Augustus Caesar, Richelieu, or Chatham. It is difficult to perceive how these men can be considered to belong to a different class from Bismarck, who is yet alive; nor do we see why any English-speaking people should regard a statesman like Chatham, or far greater than Chatham, as an impossibility nowadays or in the future. We Americans at least will with difficulty be persuaded that there has ever been a time when a nobler prize of achievement, suffering, and success was offered to any statesman than was offered both to Washington and to Lincoln. So, when Mr. Pearson speaks of the warfare of civilized countries offering less chance to the individual than the warfare of savage and barbarous times, and of its being far less possible now than in old days for a man to make his personal influence felt in warfare, we can only express our disagreement. No world-conqueror can arise save in or next to highly civilized States. There never has been a barbarian Alexander or Caesar, Hannibal or Napoleon. Sitting Bull and Rain-in-the-Face compare but ill with Von Moltke; and no Norse king of all the heroic viking age even so much as began to exercise the influence upon the warfare of his generation that Frederick the Great exercised on his.

It is not true that character of necessity decays with the growth of civilization. It may, of course, be true in some cases. Civilization may tend to develop upon the lines of Byzantine, Hindoo, and Inca; and there are sections of Europe and sections of the United States where we now tend to pay heed exclusively to the peaceful virtues and to develop only a race of merchants, lawyers, and professors, who will lack the virile qualities that have made our race great and splendid. This development may come, but it need not come necessarily, and, on the whole, the probabilities are against its coming at all.

Mr. Pearson is essentially a man of strength and courage. Looking into the future, the future seems to him gray and unattractive; but he does not preach any unmanly gospel of despair. He thinks that in time to come, though life will be freer than in the past from dangers and vicissitudes, yet it will contain fewer of the strong pleasures and of the opportunities for doing great deeds that are so dear to mighty souls. Nevertheless, he advises us all to front it bravely whether our hope be great or little; and he ends his book with these fine sentences: “Even so, there will still remain to us ourselves. Simply to do our work in life, and to abide the issue, if we stand erect before the eternal calm as cheerfully as our fathers faced the eternal unrest, may be nobler training for our souls than the faith in progress.”

We do not agree with him that there will be only this eternal calm to face; we do not agree with him that the future holds for us a time when we shall ask nothing from the day but to live, nor from the future but that we may not deteriorate. We do not agree with him that there is a day approaching when the lower races will predominate in the world and the higher races will have lost their noblest elements. But after all, it matters little what view we take of the future if, in our practice, we but do as he preaches, and face resolutely whatever fate may have in store. We, ourselves, are not certain that progress is assured; we only assert that it may be assured if we but live wise, brave, and upright lives. We do not know whether the future has in store for us calm or unrest. We cannot know beyond peradventure whether we can prevent the higher races from losing their nobler traits and from being overwhelmed by the lower races. On the whole, we think that the greatest victories are yet to be won, the greatest deeds yet to be done, and that there are yet in store for our peoples, and for the causes that we uphold, grander triumphs than have ever yet been scored. But be this as it may, we gladly agree that the one plain duty of every man is to face the future as he faces the present, regardless of what it may have in store for him, turning toward the light as he sees the light, to play his part manfully, as a man among men.

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