EXCEPTIONS AND THE RULE.
There may be exceptions which, after all, confirm the rule to which they do not wholly conform, but to say that it is by exceptions the rule is to be proven, is to betray a blind adhesion to maxims whose claim to credence is their antiquity alone.
A partial and hasty generalization from two or three particulars suffices for the enunciation of a general law applicable to all cases. The declaration of a more careful investigator that a number of particular facts are not harmonious with the law as enunciated is met, not with a revision of the law, but with the assertion that exceptions do not invalidate, but prove the rule.
A naturalist in the tropics describes water as being under all circumstances a fluid. The solid block of ice which drifts for the first time into his field of observation he will not accept as disproving his doctrine, but as being the exception necessary to confirm it.
It becomes a matter of interest to know in what way exceptions do confirm what they seemingly disprove, and how many maybe admitted before we shall revise our classifications and re-state our general rule, because false in its old form. Unquestionably an indisputable exception proves at least that the rule is not universal, and suggests that there may be a thousand more facts out of harmony with it.
Anglo-Saxon prejudice and conceit have laid it down as a general rule, a law of race, that the negro is only a somewhat superior grade of monkey, incapable of any high degree of intellectual development; that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, and the best use he can be put to is to make a target of him for the training of our soldiers in musket firing.
The American Missionary Association has been engaged for the past score of years in developing exceptions to these dicta, and it is time to raise the question seriously whether these only prove the rule or demand its revision!
We respectfully submit that the experiments made show a large number of exceptions; in fact, the number has been numerous exactly in proportion to the largeness of our opportunities and facilities for developing them. A serious doubt ought by this time to take possession of the public mind whether $32,000,000 spent in Indian wars during the past dozen years is not rather expensive target practice, and whether the results shown by those who, under great disadvantages, have been attempting to civilize and Christianize the Indians, are not of such character as to demand most emphatically that our method of dealing with them shall be changed.
We also challenge attention to the results of our educational experiments in the South, as demanding in all fairness that they shall be made on a national scale, and not simply by the private enterprise of philanthropists.
It is time the old answer of ignorance and stupid imbecility that exceptions only prove the rule should be thrown to the dogs, and we should as a nation convert the dangerous elements with which we have so wickedly and foolishly dealt into sources of national power and safety.