The law of restitution is one which the religion of the Old Testament enforces, and which the New Testament does not relax. It applies, as all laws do, most pressingly to individuals, but it reaches out, as all laws do, to nations and to races.
We have wronged the Negro, the Indian and the Chinaman—all three—and they therefore call on us, on our American nation, and on our English-speaking people, for redress, and for all that we can do to atone for past neglect—not only for past neglect, but injustice. Need I recite?
It was in 1620 that the first slave ship landed her human freight upon the shores of Virginia, and, from that time for more than two centuries the deadly traffic was continued, and men, women and children were bought and sold like animals. We need not say, “But this was a Southern crime; we and our fathers were not guilty.” For two-thirds of that time, the whole nation were alike in it. Northern ships and Northern capital carried on the importation later than that. Our Northern fathers gave it up largely, it is true, as it is charged, because what was for the time profitable in South Carolina and in Georgia, did not pay in Massachusetts and Vermont. It was not until 1825 that the slaves were set free in the State of New Jersey. We do not propose to depict the evils and the sins of slavery. Thank God, they are in the past, save as the consequences are upon us still.
I grant that good may have been done; that, in the end, it may be shown that elevation and enlightenment have followed from even this contact with a superior civilization and religion. God causes the wrath of man to praise Him; and even the sinful and the selfish acts of men are made the servants of His will. But that is hardly to be put to the credit of the thus indirect instruments of good. Rather, by what this good lacks of that which Christian motive and effort might have accomplished, we are guilty before God.
The horrors enacted and still enacting on the dark continent of Africa—for the slave trade still continues—the enforced ignorance and enforced vice of two centuries and a half, the engrafting of the vices of civilization upon those of heathendom, are the charges which this nation has to meet before the bar of God. It is a debt which never can be paid. Is there no claim on us from the American Negro?
How is it with the Indian? The original occupants of the territory now covered by these United States, and its possessors, as much as wandering hunters can be the owners of the soil, our fathers found them. What have they gained from us? The greed of the white man has pursued them from that day to this. From place to place they have been driven. Bargains have been broken and treaties violated, in almost every instance, first by the white man. The true history of almost every Indian war (so called) has been begun by the violence or provoked by the faithlessness of the white man. It was true of the Modoc, the Sitting Bull and the Nez Percès wars, and that evidently.
What have we given the red man? Whisky and powder; the vices of civilization, and the means of war. A few missionaries have been among them, devoting themselves, with heroic self-denial, to the work of educating and elevating them, and, wherever the tribes among which they have labored have been far enough away to escape the too frequent trader and the settler, they have been teachable, have come to occupy farms, and learned to labor and to pray.
Perhaps the halting and uncertain policy of the government has been its worst crime toward them for these last thirty years. And now, even under the peace policy, which has done very much for them, their disabilities are of the greatest.
How can you expect to rouse ambitions for industry and intelligence among men who are not allowed to hold a title to the farms they have cleared, or the houses they have built, and who may be ordered, at the will of the government (which is often only the will of envious neighbors), to a new Reservation? How can you expect to Christianize a man, whose wrongs are unavenged, and who is hunted by an army if he avenges them himself? And yet, of the less than 300,000 Indians, over 40,000 can read, 12,000 attended school last year, 27,000 are church members. The government spent about one dollar a head in their education last year. It has cost, for forty years, about forty dollars a head—$12,000,000 annually—to fight them. Do we owe them anything?
And the Chinaman? He is not a very large factor yet in our population. He owes the opium habit in some degree, at least, to the exigencies of English commerce. His account with this country has not been running very long yet. But it will be all we can do, if we do our utmost to Christianize him, to keep the account current balanced.