surely a way had been found for the colored man to do more than Mr. Bryce thought he could. He can move out of that section where in mass his vote was destructive into that one, in which it is sought, and there cast it for what he deems his interest.
If in 1908, the Negroes moved into the North for the purpose of supporting Mr. Taft and defeating Mr. Bryan, they did what they had a right to do, and under conditions which made it hardly possible that it could inflict much damage, even if the vote was cast more as a commodity of merchandise is disposed of, than as an exercise of a free man’s franchise; for no matter for whom cast, it could hardly swamp the opposition. When, as a mass of delegates from the South, however, four years later in 1912, the Negroes assisted Mr. Taft’s friends in party convention assembled, to secure for him the renomination for the presidency, against the wish of one, deemed by many as the most powerful cleansing factor of the Republican party, the evil effects flowing from so great and determinative occupation with politics by the Negroes of the South, became so apparent to many earnest Northern men, that the reported view of Mr. Roosevelt, as to the distinction between the exercise of the right by the Negro in the South and out of it, did not seem so strange.
To extreme Negrophiles, of course, it is merely an indication of the marvelous progress of what is called the Southern “color psychosis.” It is in fact one of the many illustrations constantly appearing, of the realization of the fact that, when invested too swiftly and fully with power and privilege, backward people are apt to stumble; and in this connection it might be well to consider the morality of the Negroes of South Africa, thirteen years after the overthrow of the Boer republics, under whose rule they had been protected from the oppression of the more savage members of their race; but nevertheless kept in a distinctly menial condition.
A report appearing in 1913 in that country is, in itself, some evidence of the value of the suggestion made by the author of this work to the great New York paper, which in 1890 had invited ideas to be suggested to it.
An impartial study of the color psychosis of these two little white republics in a sea of blacks, cut off to a great degree from the influence of European and American ideas, as they were in 1890; but evolving not only a people, stated by the London Lancet to be the finest physical specimens in the world; but also a Botha and a Smuts, surely must have been of great educational value to the United States. Here is the report ten years after South African Reconstruction:
“Cape Town, June 9, 1913: The report of the committee appointed to inquire into the assaults by natives on white women shows that the misgivings on the subject were only too well founded. The figures during the twelve years (from the period of the overthrow of the republics to the date) rise from a total of eleven convictions in 1901 to seventy in 1912. The increase is most in Transvaal, next in Natal and then in Cape Colony. Generally speaking the Commission attributes the increase mainly to diminished respect on the part of the natives for the whites, this in turn being due to a variety of causes, chiefly to the contact of natives with degenerate or criminal whites. A potent cause of this criminality and degeneracy on the Rand is the illicit liquor traffic. The Commission also uses extremely plain language regarding what is described as the almost criminal carelessness of white women in the treatment of their native house-boys. It has been the custom to allow them to bring the early coffee into the bedroom of the mistress of the house and that of her daughters, where he has an opportunity of seeing them in a state of undress they would not dream of showing themselves in to a white man. The Commission states that cases, though few, have undoubtedly occurred, in which the white mistress or servants have played Potiphar’s wife to the house boy’s Joseph. In other words charges have been trumped up. The chief legal recommendation is the imposition of a penalty on the intercourse of a male black with a female white or a male white with a female black.”[308]
The Englishman, in 1921 is just commencing to see some virtue in the Boer who, until very recently, has shared with the South Carolinian the distinction of being the most vilified of all people. Like the South Carolinian, the Boer believes that, between the races, “familiarity breeds contempt.” Both peoples hold to their views very tenaciously. No change has ever induced the white people of South Carolina to alter their attitude against divorce. Perhaps this is one of the reasons which has induced the advanced thinkers of the higher civilizations to generalize most fiercely against the white inhabitants of this small State of the Union.
In 1910, Sir Harry Johnston produced his book “The Negro in the New World.” The author, a traveler and student, at the suggestion of President Roosevelt, brought to the consideration of his subject much knowledge and not a little temper. The aim of the book is popularity. From a scroll below the map of the Western Hemisphere, the heads of Dr. Burghardt DuBois and Booker T. Washington project, silent witnesses to an entirely colored United States with the exception of the tips of New England and Florida; but as all of England, France and Italy are colored, no reflection is evidently intended. In his preface, with amusing naivete, he confesses:
“Dealing with slavery under the British, I feel obliged to show with what terrible cruelties this institution was connected in the greater part of the British West Indies, and possibly also in British Guiana before 1834. Nor did these cruelties cease entirely with the abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery. They were continued under various disguises until they culminated in the Jamaica Revolt of Moratt Bay in 1865. Since 1868 the history of the British West Indies, so far as the treatment of the Negro and the colored man is concerned has been wholly satisfactory, taking into consideration all the difficulties of the situation.”[309]
When he reaches that part of his book which is to show: