THE CLAIM OF SELF-INTEREST.
The claim of the three despised races in the United States is enforced by a motive of self-interest, by the relation of their leavening to the future prosperity and even perpetuity of our nation. Especially is this true of the freedmen, as large enough in their numbers to have weight, and endowed with privileges which make their numbers powerful for good or evil.
So large a mass, if it be corrupt, is also corrupting. Here are three lepers; I can but hint at their diseases. They are full of wounds and bruises and putrifying sores. You shrink and shudder at the picture. But, my brother, they are at your very door. What shall we do with them? This sickness is not unto death. Worse than that; it is perpetuated and transmissible; but it may be cured. The power of Christ, who touched the leper with His life-giving hand, is still with us. But we must go in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. We cannot bar the negro out; he has the right to sit in our midst, even among the senators of the land; and if he be still ignorant, and immoral, and superstitious, he will spread corruption around him. The only way to prevent him from contaminating us is to let virtue go forth from us to convert and cleanse him. And the question is, is there enough in us to do it? The very presence of vice and ignorance is contaminating; it conducts all evil influence and spreads it. The swamp malaria which fills the air, while it chokes the hovels of the poor, can by no means be kept out of the palaces of the rich. The foul odors of Hunter’s Point pay no respect to the brown-stone fronts of Murray Hill. If one member suffers, all the body is afflicted.
Do you say, “It is not our concern”? But it is every one’s concern. Is the ignorance and vice of your own town or city not your concern? You have to pay for it dearly. Your taxes for police, for courts and for prisons are only a small part of what it levies on you. It, too, pervades the air and mingles its deadly poison with it, and you breathe it in. You are proof against it; it only imperceptibly lessens the tone of your health and vigor. But your neighbor is not, and perhaps your son or daughter is not; and in the traps which line our streets your son or my son may stumble and fall; or behind the shaded windows where the snares are laid, your son or my son may go to ruin.
It is so in the nation. If the leaven be not more active and more potent than the mass, it will be itself unleavened and spoiled.
But there is a greater peril to us than the mere presence of ignorance and vice in its power. By the chances of war, and for the sake of its success, 1,000,000 slaves were made citizens. They were armed with the rifle and the ballot. With the rifle they turned the day of strife to the day of settlement; but with the ballot, if left slaves as to their intelligence and manliness, they may make of peace fatal disaster. Till they can exercise this solemn trust with wise discretion, and with conscientious fidelity, it is a perilous trust in their hands. One million more votes added to the vast number which are swayed by demagogues of either party, increase by a fearful percentage the dangers of the land.
In their Christian education is our only surety for the future. Education for their intelligence, and Christianity for their morals, and as a foundation on which both intelligence and virtue may rest secure.
The same danger would be swelled by the numbers of the Indians and the Chinese if they were citizens. As it is, the Indian can only become so by forswearing all the relations which are most sacred to him, and which mean to him family and religion. And the Chinaman, it has just been decided, cannot vote, at least in California, because he is neither white enough nor black enough.
But it is the part of every wise man to see the danger, and to do what he can to avert it. The Federal Government cannot do what is needful. The States will not do it. Christian charity, with far-sighted wisdom and self-denying philanthropy, can alone be relied on for the work required—the training of these races. It is an illustration of the truth, that all self-interests are met, not by a narrowly planned seeking of them, but by that broader conformity to the great law of love which, loving God first, has love for each one in his place, and seeks the highest good of all. In that is wrapped up, concealed sometimes, but surely there, our own gain and good.