It is perhaps inevitable that Americans should frequently be irritated by the tone of the comments in English papers on the lynchings of negroes which occur in the South. Some of these incidents are barbarous and disgraceful beyond any possibility of palliation, but it is certain that if Englishmen understood the conditions in the South better they would also understand that in some cases it is extremely difficult to blame the lynchers. Many of those people who in London (or in Boston) are loudest in condemnation of outrages upon the negro would if they lived in certain sections of the South not only sympathise with but participate in the unlawful proceedings.
It has already been mentioned that among the men in New Orleans who assisted at the summary execution of the Italian Mafiotes there were, it is believed, an ex-Governor of the State and a Judge: men, that is to say, as civilised and of as humane sentiments as the members of any club in Pall Mall. They were not bloodthirsty ruffians, but gentlemen who did what they did from a stern sense of necessity. It has been my lot to live for a while in a community in which the maintenance of law and order depended entirely on a self-constituted Vigilance Committee; and the operations of that committee were not only salutary but necessary. It has also been my lot to live in a community where the upholders of law and order were not strong enough to organise a Vigilance Committee. I have been one of three or four who behind closed doors earnestly canvassed the possibilities of forming such an organisation, and neither I nor any of the others (among whom I remember were included one attorney-at-law and one mining engineer and surveyor) would have hesitated to serve on such a committee could it have been made of sufficient strength to achieve any useful purpose, but the disparity between our numbers and those of the "bad men" who at that time controlled the community was too obvious to give us any hope of being able to enforce our authority. There may, therefore, be conditions of society infinitely worse than those where order is preserved by lynch law; and I make no doubt that neither I myself nor any fellow-member of my London Club would, if living in one of the bad black districts of the South, act otherwise than do the Southern whites who live there now.
What is deplorable is not the spirit which prompts the acts of summary justice (I am speaking only of one class of Southern "outrage") but the conditions which make the perpetration of those acts the only practicable way of rendering life livable for white people; and for the responsibility for these conditions we must go back either to the institution of slavery itself (for which it should be remembered that England was to blame) or to the follies and passions of half a century ago which gave the negro the suffrage and put him on a plane of political equality with his late masters.[303:1] If, since then, the problem has grown more, rather than less, difficult, it has not been so much by the fault of the Southern white, living under conditions in which only one line of conduct has been open to him, as of Northern philanthropists and negro sympathisers who have helped to keep alive in the breasts of the coloured population ideas and ambitions which can never be realised.
The people of the North have of late years come to understand the South better, and whereas what I have said above would, twenty years ago, have found few sympathisers in any Northern city, I believe that to-day it expresses the opinion of the large majority of Northern men. I also believe that the necessary majority could be secured to repeal so much of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution as would be necessary to undo the mistake which has been committed. It is true that in some Southern States the majority of the blacks are practically disfranchised now; but it would remove a constant cause of friction and of political chicanery if the fact were recognised frankly that it is not possible to contemplate the possibility of the negro ever becoming the politically dominant race in any community where white people live. There is no reason to believe that the two races cannot live together comfortably even though the blacks be in a large majority, but there must be no question of white control of the local government and of the machinery of justice.
Taking away the franchise from the negro would not, of course, put an end to many of the social difficulties of the situation, but, the present false relations between the two being abolished, those difficulties are no more than have to be dealt with in every community. There would be a chance for the negroes as a race to develop into useful members of the community, as negroes, filling the stations of negroes and doing negroes' work, along such lines as those on which Mr. Booker Washington is working. The English have had a wide experience of native races in all parts of the world and they have not yet found the problem of living with them and of holding at least their respect, together with some measure of their active good-will, anywhere insoluble. To an Englishman it does not seem that it should be insoluble in the United States. He is rather inclined to think that the rapidity with which the negro of the South would work out his economic salvation, if once the political difficulty were removed, would depend chiefly on the ability of the race to produce a continuity of men like Mr. Booker Washington, with, perhaps, the concurrent ability of the north to produce men (shall I say, like the late W. H. Baldwin?) to co-operate with the leaders and teachers of the blacks and to interpret them and their work to the country.
The Englishman in England is chiefly impressed by the stories of Southern outrages upon the blacks and he gets therefrom an erroneous idea of the character of the Southern white. An Englishman who studies the situation on the spot is likely to acquire great sympathy with the Southern white and to condemn only the political ineptitude which has made the existing conditions possible.
Whether Mr. Roosevelt's course has been the one best adapted to facilitate a solution of the difficulties it would be idle to enquire. The laws being as they are, and he being the kind of man he is and, as President, entrusted with the duty of seeing that the laws are faithfully executed, he could not have taken a different line. Another man (and an equally good man) might have refrained from making one or two of his appointments and from entertaining Mr. Washington at the White House. But if Mr. Roosevelt did not do precisely those things, he would not do fifty other of the things which have most endeared him to the people.
In this connection, it may be that there will be readers who will think that in many things which I say, when generalising about the American people as a whole, I fail to take into proper account the South and characteristics of such of the people of the South as are distinctively Southern. It is not from any lack of acquaintance with the South; still less from any lack of admiration of or affection for it. But what has been said of New York may in a way be said of the South, for whatever therein is typically Southern to-day is not typically American; and all that is typically Southern is moreover rapidly disappearing. In the tremendous activity of the new national life which has been infused into the country as a result of its solidification and knitting together of the last thirty years, there is no longer room for sectional divergences of character. They are overwhelmed, absorbed, obliterated; and the really vital parts of the South are no longer Southern but American. What has the spirit of Atlanta in Georgia, of Birmingham in Alabama, of any town in the South-west, from St. Louis to Galveston, to do with the typical spirit of the South? However strong Southern sentiment may still be, what is there of the Southern spirit even in Richmond or in Louisville? I need hardly say that America produces no finer men than the best Virginian or the best Kentuckian, but, with all his Southern love and his hot rhetoric, the man of this generation who is a leader among his fellows in Kentucky or in Virginia is so by virtue of the American spirit that is in him and not by virtue of any of the dying spirit of the old South.
