Obedience to law, willing and invariable submission to law, is one of the highest qualities of a nation, and one of the chief promoters of national elevation. Antagonism to law, a spirit which rejects the restraints of law, depraves the individual conscience and retards national progress.
Can any fraud, evasion, or contrivance whatever be practised or connived at, without by so much impairing the moral sense and character of a people as well as of an individual? Can any deflection whatsoever, no matter how inexorable the occasion, from the path of absolute rectitude be tolerated without inflicting an injury on that sense of justice and right, which, allied to unflinching courage, constitutes a nation’s virtue? Who will say that the moral sense of our people now is as lofty as it was in the days of our fathers, when men voted with uplifted faces for the candidate of their choice?
The press of a portion of the land is filled with charges of injuries to the Negro. The real injury is not to him, but to the White. From opposition to law to actual lawlessness is but a step. This then is the first danger.
The physical peril from the overcrowding among our people of an ignorant and hostile race is not more real than this which threatens our moral rectitude; but it is more apparent.
Senator Hoar, of Massachusetts, speaking on the floor of the United States Senate on the 23d of February, 1889, in speaking of the South, said:
“I make these remarks with full knowledge of the difficult problem that awaits us, and the problem that especially concerns our friends south of Mason and Dixon’s line; but I remember when I make them that the person hears the sound of my voice this moment who, in his lifetime, will see fifty million Negroes dwelling in those States.”
Can language paint in stronger colors the peril which confronts us? The senator went on to depict the evils which might ensue. “If you go on,” he said, “with these methods which are reported to us on what we deem pretty good evidence, you are sowing in the breast of that race a seed from which is to come a harvest of horror and blood, to which the French Revolution or San Domingo is light in comparison.”
Senator Hoar, like most others of his latitude, thinks that he knows the Negro, and understands the pending question. He does not. Had he understood the true gravity of that problem, his cheek, as he caught the echo of his own words, would have blanched at the thought of the peril he is transmitting to his children and grandchildren; not the peril, perhaps, of fire and massacre, but a peril as deadly, the peril of contamination from the overcrowding of an inferior race. All other evils are but corollaries; the evil of race-conflict, though not so awful as the French Revolution or San Domingo; the evil of growing armies with their menace to liberty; the evil of race-degeneration from enforced and constant association with an inferior race: these are some of the perils which spring from that state of affairs and confront us. At one more step they confront the rest of the Anglo-American people to-day. For the only thing that stands to-day between the people of the North and the Negro is the people of the South. The time may come when the only thing that will stand between the Negro and the people of the North will be the people of the South.
II
The chief difficulty in the solution of the question exists in the different views held as to it by the two sections. They do not understand it alike. They stand as widely divided as to it to-day as they stood forty years ago. Their ultimate interests are identical; their present interests are not very widely divergent. Their opposite attitudes as to it must, therefore, be due to error somewhere. One or the other section must be in error as to it; possibly neither may be exactly right.