Mr. Bryce finds:
“In these hot lowlands the Negro lives much as he lived on the plantations in the old days, except that he works less, because a moderate amount of labor produces enough for his bare subsistence ... he is scarcely at all in contact with any one above his own condition. Thus there are places, the cities especially, where the Negro is improving industrially because he has to work hard and comes into constant relation with the whites; and others where he need work very little, and where being left to his own resources, he is in danger of relapsing into barbarism.”
The writer lays it down specifically:
“Contact with the whites is the chief condition for the progress of the Negro. Where he is isolated or where he greatly outnumbers the whites, his advance will be retarded.... Yet he is often no better off at the North where the white laborers may refuse to work with him and where he has no more chance than in the South of receiving, except in very exceptional cases, any sort of social recognition from any class of whites, while in the cities everywhere he is met by the competition of the generally more diligent and more intelligent whites. So the Negro is after all better off in the South and on the land, than anywhere else.”[306]
Contrasting the views of Booker Washington and DuBois, he finds a cultured group which declare they do not seek social equality with the whites, yet in spite of the fact, stressed, that where he is isolated or where he greatly outnumbers the whites, his advance will be retarded, a condition of the South, building upon such a foundation, Mr. Bryce does not hesitate to declare, that because, at the North, “the white laborers may refuse to work with him ... the Negro is after all better at the South.”
Apparently in the view of this great Englishman, the risk of a relapse into barbarism is not as serious a matter to the Negro, as exposure to the cold shoulder or angry scowl of a white laborer; and so he dismisses the Negro and his future with an attempt to epitomize the philosophy of Dr. Washington into what is really Mr. Bryce’s imperious conviction, viz, that there is:
“no use in resisting patent facts, that all that the Negro can do at present, and the most effective thing, that, with a view to the future, he could do, is to raise himself in intelligence, knowledge, industry, thrift, whatever makes for self help and self respect.”
But even while this epitome was appearing in print for the first time, the inability of the great author to fully plumb the depths of Dr. Washington’s political philosophy was shown by the New York Age, the leading colored paper of the United States, which, upon the nomination of Mr. Taft for the presidency in 1908, published what was asserted to be the facsimile of the telegram sent him by Dr. Washington, to the effect that he expected to see him elected and by his (Washington’s) people, as no doubt he was, to a very great degree, by their votes in the Northern States.
If then—
“a systematic effort has been made to settle colored people in Indiana, to hold that State in the Republican column”[307]—