IV
Difficult as the realisation of a perfect fellowship between men and women may be, it presents a problem comparatively easy of solution by the side of that entailed in the division of a community by a colour-line. In itself the colour-line is not insuperable; its difficulty lies in its symbolical character as representing a difference and an inferiority of tradition and history. The chief difficulty in the United States arises out of the memory of the former slavery of the negro population; and the consequent persistence of a prejudice against according equal treatment to a class regarded as, if not sub-human, at least permanently inferior in capacity. It is useless to press the assumption that a necessary physical aversion must always separate the white from the black, in the face of the existence of a vast number of palpably cross-bred persons in the community. This does not, of course, mean that mixed marriages should be encouraged or regarded as normal. The problems raised by miscegenation are much too difficult to permit us to remove the colour-line by the off-hand method of race-fusion. The fusion of two races separated from one another not only by the memory of two centuries of slavery but by unnumbered centuries of widely different culture, would probably create more problems than it solved. The colour-line would be superseded by a multiplicity of shade-lines; and confusion would be worse confounded. It is probable that the level of the more advanced race would be depressed more than that of the more backward race would be raised. Houston Chamberlain is probably right (in spite of his capacity for being so frequently and so colossally wrong) in holding that the finest racial types are produced by the fusion of two peoples not too widely separated in physical and historical character, followed by close inbreeding. The gulf between black and white in America and South Africa is far too deep, as yet at least, to make the removal of the colour-line by fusion a subject of hopeful discussion.
But equally the solution is not to be found in segregation—certainly so far as these two countries are concerned. The admixture of the black and the white elements in the population has gone much too far to make segregation a practical proposition. It would, moreover, have the distinct disadvantage of stereotyping two different types of cultural development within the same commonwealth and of consequently endangering its unity by setting up the possibility of rivalry and antagonism. In any two-race community the ideal must be to secure so far as may be possible a substantial identity of outlook and culture; and this is to be done not by segregation, but by contact.
But it is just this “contact” that is denied to the negro race both in America and South Africa. The races are really segregated as effectually as though they lived in separate reservations; they live in quite different cultural “climates.” The negro though no longer a chattel-slave yet constitutes a servile class; the duties assigned to him in the community are essentially of a menial kind. It is characteristic of his position in America that the higher ranks of military command are closed to him; and while a woman has made her way to Congress, there is as yet no negro congressman; the idea is still barely thinkable. Yet no community has thrived permanently which permitted a helot class to exist within itself; and the position of the negro—now that education is quickening his mind to the sense of class-disinheritance and race-consciousness—may become a grave menace to the inner harmony of the Republic.
The logic of Lincoln’s proclamation has yet to be worked out in the minds of white Americans. To abolish slavery is not indeed to make a black man white; nor does it at once equip him for the responsibilities of freedom. But it does confer citizenship upon him; and the gift of citizenship should be validated by two things; first, by a frank and generous recognition of equality of standing, and second, by a thorough-going policy of education. Perhaps the former was more than could be justly expected. Just as the slave was ill-equipped for freedom, so the white man could hardly rise at once to the plane of regarding the negro as his free and equal brother. But it is a fair criticism of the public treatment of the negro that he has not been supplied with the opportunity of rising to his white brother’s plane of culture. There have been voluntary philanthropic efforts in this direction, but this work should not have been left to the precarious chances of charity. Just because negro emancipation was a public act, the full cultural education of the negro was a public responsibility.
By reason of this failure on the part of the white man, the negro has not advanced to such a point as two generations of liberty would seemingly entitle us to expert. He has inevitably retained much of the mentality and many of the habits of his servitude; and these are effectual bars to that type of social contact which the negro’s growth requires. That there is no inherent impossibility in educating the negro up to the average plane of the Anglo-Saxon has been proved in a multitude of instances; and people who are devoid of race-prejudice find no difficulty in establishing frank and fruitful fellowship with educated coloured persons.
America and Great Britain in her dominions and dependencies have to face the logic of their democratic ideals by a sustained resolution to provide the opportunity to their coloured fellow-citizens to reach their own plane of culture. As things are they deny their democratic professions by permitting their race prejudices to consign their coloured fellow-citizens to a condition of permanent social inferiority. If they wish to be democratic in fact and not merely in name, they will need to be true to the implications of their democracy through everything, even through the physical repugnances which the personal habits of backward races are apt to evoke. The colour problem was created for this generation by its forbears—by those who sold and owned slaves and those who established colonies in distant countries. But though the problem is not of our making, we cannot absolve ourselves from the moral responsibility which it lays upon us; and it is only by means of an inveterate good-will that we shall discharge this responsibility. Such a good-will must rest upon the truth—however unpalatable to our prejudices it may be—that the black man whether in New York or in Cape Town is equally with ourselves endowed with the human differentia of personality, and that he is morally entitled to all the rights of life and light and liberty that we claim for personality. With this truth must be accepted the task imposed upon us by our superior advantages (which like our responsibilities we owe to our fathers), to raise the more backward races with whom we live to a plane on which there can be free and enriching fellowship between them and ourselves. We cannot hopefully go on to make the world safe for a principle of common life which our present habits show that we do not believe in at home.