EMANCIPATION IN BRAZIL—WHAT IS TO FOLLOW?
It is a curious fact that, in precisely the last fifty years, slavery has been abolished by the four great nations holding the greatest number of slaves and representing the three great forms of the Christian religion—the Protestant, the Greek and the Roman Catholic.
Thus England, a Protestant power, emancipated her slaves in the West Indies in 1838; Russia, of the Greek Church, freed her serfs in 1861; the United States, a Protestant nation, emancipated her slaves in 1863; and now, Brazil, a Roman Catholic empire, completes the circle by emancipating her slaves in 1888.
While these facts are remarkable, and present cause for profound gratitude to God, there is yet a lesson of vital importance to be learned which Brazil needs to understand, and which, indeed, the other nations are not fully practicing.
In the British West Indies, very few white people remained after emancipation, and the blacks lacked their guidance and example; and besides this, it was years afterwards before the British Government made any adequate provision for the education of the ex-slaves. From these two causes have come nearly all the evils that have grown out of the emancipation.
Russia presents a still more striking lesson. In 1861, as the result of a great national movement towards constitutional liberty, her fifty millions of serfs were emancipated. The next year, she celebrated the thousandth anniversary of her national existence, and the enthusiasm for a free government was intensified. But all these hopes were dashed—no new constitution was given, the Czar ruled autocratically as before, the serfs were not educated or enfranchised, and largely sunk into ignorance and intemperance. The result of all has been nihilism, and the Czar lives in hourly fear of death, and rules his people by terror, the prison and Siberia.
The United States has done far better. It enfranchised the slave and made him a citizen; the National Government, through the Freedmen’s Bureau, expended several millions of dollars for his education; the States organized public school systems, and the benevolent people of the North rendered still more effective service, being the first to introduce the work, acting always, when permitted, in co-operation with the Bureau and with the States, and continuing its work, blending the educational largely with the religious. But in spite of all this, a dark cloud gathers on our horizon—the blacks are not allowed the free enjoyment of their guaranteed rights, and the facilities for educational and religious enlightenment are entirely inadequate. Three millions of the blacks of ten years of age and upward, in 1880, could not write. America needs not only to ponder these facts, but to act upon them promptly, if it would avert the impending danger.
In these facts Brazil should read her warning. If her ex-slaves are left in ignorance and vice, she has her work only begun, and the last end may be worse than the beginning. The laws of Brazil have favored gradual emancipation. It was the work of a woman that completed it. In the absence of the Emperor, who was sick in Italy, his daughter, as Regent, issued the final decree.
May we not hope that the womanly wisdom and philanthropy which dictated the initial act may prompt to the persevering use of the means of the last great duty? And may we not hope that, as thousands of the educated women of the North devoted themselves to the uplifting of the blacks in the Southern States, so their sisters in Brazil may give the crowning glory to emancipation in Brazil?