Outwardly, if you choose, the country is like one of the pretentious houses of its rich citizens—new, smug, complacently commonplace—but within, like the house again, it is filled with rare bits gathered out of every age and country and jumbled together in utter confusion. If you ride down Seventh street in a horse-car, you are in a psychological curio-shop. On one side, very likely, is a Russian Jew just from the Steppes; on the other, a negro with centuries of heathendom and slavery hinting themselves in lip and eye; the driver is a Fenian, with the blood of the Phoenicians in his veins; in front of you is a gentleman with the unmistakable Huguenot nose, and chin; while an almond-eyed pagan, disguised behind moustache and eye-glasses, courteously takes your fare and drops it for you in the Slawson box. Nowhere do all the elements of Tragedy and Comedy play so strange a part as on the dead-level of this American stage. It is because it is so dead a level that we fail to see the part they play—because "furious Goth and fiery Hun" meet, not on the battle-field, but in the horse-car, dropping their cents together in a Slawson box.
For example, as to the tragedy.
I met at dinner not long ago a lady who was introduced to me under a French name, but whose clear olive complexion, erect carriage and singular repose of manner would indicate her rather to be a Spaniard. She wore a red rose in the coils of her jetty hair, and another fastened the black lace of her corsage. Her eyes, which were slow, dark and brilliant, always rested on you an instant before she spoke with that fearless candor which is not found in the eyes of a member of any race that has ever been enslaved. I was told that her rank was high among her own people, and in her movements and voice there were that quiet simplicity and total lack of self-consciousness which always belong either to a man or woman of the highest breeding, or to one whose purpose in life is so noble as to lift him above all considerations of self. Although a foreigner, she spoke English with more purity than most of the Americans at the table, but with a marked and frequent recurrence of forcible but half-forgotten old idioms; which was due, as! learned afterward, to her having had no book of English literature to study for several years but Shakespeare. I observed that she spoke but seldom, and to but one person at a time; but when she did, her casual talk was the brimming over of a mind of great original force as yet full and unspent. She was, besides, a keen observer who had studied much, but seen more.
This lady, in a word, was one who would deserve recognition by the best men and women in any country; and she received it here, as many of the readers of Lippincott, who will recognize my description, will remember. She was caressed and feted by literary and social celebrities in Washington and New York; Boston made much of her; Longfellow and Holmes made verses in her honor; prying reporters gave accounts of her singular charm and beauty to the public in the daily papers.
She was accompanied by two of the men of her family. They did not speak English, but they were men of strong practical sense and business capacity, with the odd combination in their character of that exaggerated perception of honorable dealing which we are accustomed to call chivalric. They had, too, a grave dignity and composure of bearing which would have befitted Spanish hidalgos, and beside which our pert, sociable American manner and slangy talk were sadly belittled. These men (for I had a reason in making particular inquiries concerning them) were in private life loyal friends, good citizens, affectionate husbands and fathers—in a word, Christian men, honest from the marrow to the outside.
Now to the strange part of my story, revolting enough to our republican ears. This lady and her people, in the country to which they belong, are held in a subjection to which that of the Russian serf was comparative freedom. They are held legally as the slaves not of individuals, but of the government, which has absolute power over their persons, lives and property. Its manner of exercising that power is, however, peculiar. They are compelled to live within certain enclosures. Each enclosure is ruled by a man of the dominant race, usually of the lower class, who, as a rule, gains the place by bribing the officer of government who has charge of these people. The authority of this man within the limits of the enclosure is literally as autocratic as that of the Russian czar. He distributes the rations intended by the government for the support of these people, or such part of them as he thinks fit, retaining whatever amount he chooses for himself. There is nothing to restrain him in these robberies. In consequence, the funds set aside by the government for the support of its wretched dependants are stolen so constantly by the officers at the capital and the petty tyrants of the separate enclosures that the miserable creatures almost yearly starve and freeze to death from want. Their resource would be, of course, as they are in a civilized country, to work at trades, to farm, etc. But this is not permitted to them. Another petty officer is appointed in each enclosure to barter goods for the game or peltry which they bring in or crops that they manage to raise. He fixes his own price for both his goods and theirs, and cheats them by wholesale at his leisure. There is no appeal: they are absolutely forbidden to trade with any other person. The men of my friend's family—educated men and shrewd in business as any merchant of Philadelphia—when at home were liable to imprisonment and a fine of five hundred dollars if they bought from or sold to any other person than this one man. They are, too, taught no trade or profession. Each enclosure has its appointed blacksmith, carpenter, etc. of the dominant class, who, naturally, will not share their profits by teaching their trade to the others.
Within the enclosures my friend and her people, no matter how enlightened or refined they may be, are herded, and under the same rules, as so many animals. They cannot leave the enclosure without passes, such as were granted to our slaves before the war when they wished to go outside of the plantation. This woman, when seated at President Hayes's table, the equal in mind and breeding of any of her companions, was, by the laws of her country, a runaway, legally liable to be haled by the police back to her enclosure, and shot if she resisted. She and her people are absolutely unprotected by any law. It is indeed the only case, so far as I know, in any Christian country, in which a single class are so set aside, unprotected by any law. When our slaves were killed or tortured by inhuman masters, there was at least some show of justice for them. The white murderer went through some form of trial and punishment. The slave, though a chattel, was still a human being. But these people are not recognized by the law as human beings. They cannot buy nor sell; they cannot hold property: if with their own hands they build a house and gather about them the comforts of civilization and the wife and children to which the poorest negro, the most barbarous savage, has a right, any man of the dominant class can, without violating any law, take possession of the house, ravage the wife and thrust the children out to starve. The wrong-doer is subject to no penalty. The victim has no right of appeal to the courts. Hence such outrages are naturally of daily occurrence. Not only are they perpetrated on individuals, but frequently there is a raid made upon the whole of the inmates of one enclosure—whenever, in fact, the people in the neighborhood fancy they would like to take possession of their land. The kinsmen of my friend, with their clan numbering some seven hundred souls—a peaceable, industrious Christian community, living on land which had belonged to their ancestors for centuries—were swept off of it a few years ago at the whim of two of their rulers: their houses and poor little belongings were all left behind, and they were driven a thousand miles into a sterile, malarious region where nearly half of their number died. The story of their sufferings, their homesickness and their despair on the outward journey, and of how still later some thirty of them returned on foot, carrying the bones of those who had died to lay them in their old homes, is one of the most dramatic pages in history. De Quincey's "Flight of a Tartar Clan" does not equal it in pathos or as a story of heroism and endurance. At the end of their homeward journey, when almost within sight of their homes, the heroic little band were seized by order of the ruler of their enclosure and committed to prison. The tribe are still in the malarious swamps to which they were exiled. Strangers hold their farms and the houses which they built with their own hands.
The anomalous condition of a people legally ranking as animals, and not human beings, would naturally produce unpleasant consequences when they are criminally the aggressors. When they steal or kill they cannot be tried, sent to jail or hung as if they were human in the eye of the law. The ruler of each enclosure is granted arbitrary power in such cases to punish at his discretion. He is judge, jury, and often executioner. He has a control over the lives of these people more absolute than that of any Christian monarch over his subjects. If he thinks proper to shoot the offender, he can call upon the regular army of the country to sustain him. If the individual offender escapes, the whole of the inmates of the enclosure are held responsible, and men, women and children are slaughtered by wholesale and without mercy.
My readers understand my little fable by this time. It is no fable, but a disgraceful truth.
The government under which a people—many of whom are educated, enlightened Christian gentlemen—are denied the legal rights of human beings and all protection of law is not the absolute despotism of Siara or Russia, but the United States, the republic which proclaims itself the refuge for the oppressed of all nations—the one spot on earth where every man is entitled alike to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The only people in the world to whom it denies these rights are not its quondam slaves, not pagans, not runaway convicts, not the offscourings of any nation however degraded, but the original owners of the country.