MR. DIXON IS SHREWD.
Let us now take note of the various artifices resorted to by Mr. Dixon to unhorse the Negro in the esteem of the North and bestow his place upon those who would repress him.
In his first Anti-Negro book, Mr. Dixon was shrewd enough not to make a Southerner who was persona non grata to the North the hero of the story. The poor old Ex-Confederate soldier, rank secessionist, the real hero and dominating figure of his times, in this book is tied out in the back yard, while the post of honor is given to a little boy whose father fought most unwillingly against the Union. Mr. Dixon's choosing for a hero this lad, whose father wore a confederate uniform over a union heart, forcibly reminds one of the reply of the whimpering soldier whom the captain was upbraiding for cowardice under fire.
"You act as though you were a baby," angrily shouted the captain to the frightened soldier.
"I wish I was a baby and a gal baby at that," whimpered the soldier, reasoning that "gal babies" were exempt not only from that battle, but from all others.
While Mr. Dixon was in search of a hero that would be far removed from what was regarded as treason in those days he might have made assurance doubly sure by doing further violence to the predominating sentiment of the day by making his hero—not his heroine—a "gal" baby.
MR. DIXON SCOFFS.
One of the brightest pages in the history of this nation will be that which tells the story of those men and women of the North, who, over the protests of loved ones, faced the ostracism of their kind in the South that they might open the Negroes' eyes to the hitherto forbidden glories of modern civilization and take care that the spiritual was not lost sight of in the new maze of world wonders. Withered indeed must be the soul that could scoff at such moral heroism, and yet that is just what Mr. Dixon does. He suggests that the people who produced a Washington and a Jefferson hardly needed missionaries to perform work among the Negroes within their borders.
But it must be borne in mind that as a part of the propaganda in favor of retaining the Negro in slavery, the white people of the South thoroughly committed themselves to the doctrine of the ineffaceable, inherent inferiority of the Negro, and had no largeness of faith in his possibilities along lines of higher culture. It is evident, then, that if salvation was to come at all, it was to come from a source that deemed such an outcome possible.