But Mr. Dixon is a pioneer in the matter of seeking to attain his end by an attempt to thoroughly discredit the Negroes, to stir up the baser passions of men against them and to send them forth with a load of obloquy and the withering scorn of their fellows the world over, sufficient to appall a nation of angels.
Mark the essentially barbarous character of Mr. Dixon's method of warfare.
There is the good and the bad in all men. The world has learned since the days of the Christ that by far the best means of obtaining the largest results of unalloyed good is by appealing to the best that there is in men rather than to the worst. In no respect is the reactionary character of Mr. Dixon's crusade more apparent than in his attempt to attain his ends through his appeals to the worst that there is in men.
Mankind has been grouping itself from time immemorial, according to certain physical likenesses, and each race or group has had more or less of prejudice against alien groups. It has been the one struggle of the higher human instincts to enable men, in spite of differences of form, of feature, to find a common bond of sympathy linking mankind together.
Uncle Tom's Cabin grappled in the mire of Southern slavery and lifted a despised and helpless race into living sympathy with the white race at the North. To cut these chords of sympathy and re-establish the old order of repulsion, based upon the primitive feeling of race hatred is the first item on Mr. Dixon's programme.
The adopting of a course so patently barbaric stamps Mr. Dixon as a spiritual reversion to type, violently out of accord with the best tendencies of his times.
The very opposite of Mr. Dixon is Professor Nathaniel F. Shaler, of Harvard, himself a Southerner, who approaches this same grave question of the relation of the races and seeks to prepare the American people for the consideration of the subject free from the distorting influence of prejudice.
A SERIOUS HANDICAP.
The cultivation of race hatreds on the part of Mr. Dixon and others who labor with him, if successful will react on the American people sadly to their detriment. The wonderful activity of American industries call loudly for the world as a market for their goods. The dark races of the world, now backward in the matter of manufacturing, must largely furnish these markets. The cloven foot of America's race prejudice will make itself manifest, and its owner will find it increasingly difficult to secure a ready purchaser for his goods.
We have a hint of what will happen in the awakened darker world in the boycott of American goods by the Chinese, because of the rude treatment by American custom officials, of unoffending Chinese, a treatment born of the spirit of race hatred.