ADDRESS OF REV. F.P. WOODBURY, D.D.
I feel that I have learned a great deal to-day; and as the last speaker spoke concerning Africa, an idea has come into my mind which I may express. Here we have on one side of the great ocean, Africa; on the other side, America. We have here a race conflict; on the one side eight millions of blacks, we will say, and perhaps eight millions of irreconcilable whites on the other. And these dominant eight millions of white men maintain, with the utmost pertinacity—and they have the power in their right hand so far as we can see—that they propose to rule and keep down those eight millions of black men. I have seen the title of a book recently published, "An Appeal to Pharoah," which is vouched for as a calm and temperate discussion of the question whether, after all, we are not going to get by this race difficulty by a great deportation to Africa. It is a good deal to raise the question of eight millions of men leaving one country and going across the ocean and settling in another continent. But isn't there something in it after all? Might it not compose the differences? I know that the cost would be very large, but careful estimates go to show that the cost is not anywhere near the amount we spent in our civil war. On the one side, we have these eight millions of black men—ignorant, very largely superstitious, still somewhat above those of the same color in Africa, and plunged here into an antagonism which is deep, and bitter, and hopeless. On the other side, we have these eight millions of white people who do not accept the results of the war. Isn't it better that eight millions shall go? I don't know. I think it deserves serious consideration.
But when the question arises for practical consideration, I think there is another and a little deeper question that we ought to remember, and that is this: Which eight millions ought to go? Is it these who have been faithful to the American flag, who are straight in the line of progress that this republic proposes to maintain, who are in the line of the development of all the ages, who are looking upward? Or is it the eight millions who are hopelessly side-tracked by the purposes of infinite God, and who are standing here in this republic, undertaking to maintain a conflict that is necessarily one of despair, as sure as God is at the head of the universe? Expatriation if you please, deportation if you will; but consider the question whether it shall be eight millions of American patriots who are to be sent over to Africa or eight millions who have come out of a rebellion and maintain their seditious and rebellious attitude to-day.
My friends, we all know that we are going to live together. There is no more baseless theory on God's earth than that we are going to take eight millions of men and send them out of this country, because they want to learn something, because they want to live like men and be men and citizens, and because God has put them here for our work and our education. I tell you, my friends, the immediate problem seems to me only one form of a larger problem. What is the problem of the planet to-day? Is it not the problem as to which of two theories shall maintain itself concerning the masses which are at the base of society? Isn't that the problem in every nation? Isn't it the problem here concerning white and black, red and yellow alike? There is no possible doubt about it. The labor problem, do you call it? Here is one theory which holds that the masses shall be kept down. Here is the other system which maintains that they shall be elevated. We have got to live with them in the world, for I imagine there is nobody talking about sending them to the moon. Don't you know, and I know that the world is growing smaller every year? Talk about neighborhood—look over this continent. Germany is here; Ireland is here; France is here; China is here; Africa is here. We are neighbors to everybody. We are touching elbows across the ocean all the time. If you send anybody to Africa, why, he is only next door; and by and by we shall have air ships that will float up over there in a few hours! How are you going to manage this thing? We have got to live together in this world, and nearer and nearer to one another with every generation; and this country may just as well be the field in which to try the experiment out as any other country on the face of the globe. I think we are going to try it out to the end. There are symptoms of it all around.
But the conflict is here; it is in the air. It is not a conflict by sword. You know they tell the legend among the old mediæval stories that in one of the great battles on one of the plains of Europe, after the quiet darkness of the night had settled over the scene, the field strewn all over with the forms of the mangled and the dead, there were seen in the shuddering midnight air to rise spirit forms maintaining the deadly conflict there, and carrying on the battle of the day. It seems to me, in some sense, true of us. The sword has done what the sword could do; it can do no more. But the conflict is here in the air, pronouncing itself with every event that drifts across our horizon. Harvard sets its seal on the brow of Clement Morgan, and the Memphis Avalanche has no other word for him than to call him "that dusky steer with the crumpled forelock."
My friends, we are going right forward in the field of conflict, which is the field of victory. One with God is a majority, and we are thousands with God. And we have on our side the weak and the helpless, too. I don't want any better aid than that. You know that Burke in that magnificent invective against Warren Hastings, when he rose to the very climax of it and told the story of those atrocious tortures to which the poor and ignorant and misguided peasants of India had been put, how they had had their fingers tied together and mashed with hammers, and other unmentionable things had been done to them, appealed to the parliament and said that if they should refuse justice those mashed and disabled hands, lifted high to Heaven in prayer, would call down the power of God for their deliverance. Is it not worse to mash and disable a mind and a soul than a hand? I tell you the prayers of the poor are on our side; and if we had nothing of all this magnificent achievement of this Association to look upon, we could look on those hands raised and those souls crying out from the social bondage of to-day, as they did from the physical bondage of a few years ago, and know that if God be for us we need not care who or what is against us.