“With such advantages, a race that had natural genius ought to have made great progress in a hundred years. But where are the men that it should have produced to be the leaders of their people? We find not one who has taken rank as a man of action or a man of thought; as a thinker or a writer; as artist or poet; as discoverer or inventor. The whole race has remained on one dead level of mediocrity.
“If any man ever proved himself a friend of the African race it was Theodore Parker, who endured all sorts of persecution and social ostracism, who faced mobs and was hissed and hooted in public meetings, for his bold championship of the rights of the Negro race. But rights are one thing, and capacity is another. And while he was ready to fight for them he was very despondent as to their capacity for rising in the scale of civilization. Indeed, he said in so many words: ‘In respect to the power of civilization, the African is at the bottom, the American Indian next.’ In 1857 he wrote to a friend: ‘There are inferior races which have always borne the same ignoble relation to the rest of men and always will. In two generations what a change there will be in the condition and character of the Irish in New England. But in twenty generations the Negroes will stand just where they are now; that is, if they have not disappeared.’
“That was more than thirty years ago. But to-day I look about me here in Massachusetts, and I see a few colored men; but what are they doing? They work in the fields, they hoe corn, they dig potatoes; the women take in washing. I find colored barbers and white-washers, shoe-blacks and chimney-sweeps; but I do not know a single man who has grown to be a merchant or a banker, a judge or a lawyer, a member of the legislature or a justice of the peace, or even a selectman of the town. In all these respects they remain where they were in the days of our fathers. The best friends of the colored race, of whom I am one, must confess that it is disappointing and discouraging to find that with all these opportunities they are little removed from where they were a hundred years ago.”[82]
But suppose that the statements of others, whose observation has enabled them to pick out a well-to-do lawyer or dentist or doctor or restaurateur, be different, it only proves that in individual instances they may rise to a fair level; it simply emphasizes the fact that these are exceptions to the great rule, and does not in the least affect the argument, which is that the Negroes as a race have never exhibited much capacity to advance; that as a race they are inferior to other races.[83]
Opportunity is afforded us to examine the Negro’s progress in two countries in which a civilization was created for him, and he was surrounded by every condition helpful to progress.
The first is Liberia. There he had a model republic founded by the Caucasian solely for his benefit, with freedom grafted in its name. It was founded in as splendid hopes as even this Republic itself. Christendom gave it its assistance and its prayers. How has the Negro progressed there? Let one of his own race tell the story, one who was thought competent to represent there the United States. Mr. Charles H. J. Taylor, late Minister from the United States to Liberia, has given a picture of life in Liberia, which cannot be equalled save in some other country under the same rule. He says, in a paper published in the Kansas City Times, April 22, 1888:
“Not a factory, mill, or workshop, of any kind, is to be found there. They (the government) have no money or currency in circulation of any kind. They have no boats of any character, not even a canoe, the two gunboats England gave them lying rotten on the beach.”... “Look from morn till night you will never see a horse, a mule, a donkey, or a broken-in ox. They have them not. There is not a buggy, a wagon, a cart, a slide, a wheelbarrow, in the four counties. The natives carry everything on their heads.”
The whole picture presented is hopeless.
If this were an isolated instance we might think that climatic influences or the proximity of a great savage continent had affected the result. But we have nearer home a yet more striking illustration, a yet more convincing proof that the real cause was the Negro’s inability to govern, his incapacity to rise.
For a hundred years now the Negro has cast his influence over sundry of the West Indies, and has had sole possession of one. With this Republic constructed by our fathers before him for a model, he has since 1804 been masquerading at governing Hayti, one of the most fertile spots that Spain ever ruled.