[We extract from the valuable address given at the Boston anniversary, by the Rev. Albert H. Heath, of New Bedford, Mass., his second division (all we can find room for), in which he treats forcibly of one most important aspect of our home work. In other portions of the address he spoke at length of our special obligations to these people and of the work in the light of a genuine Christian philanthropy. We commend these strong words to careful reading and thought.]
Self-protection is to be taken into consideration in this work. What effect, we may well inquire, is it going to have upon the beloved institutions of our land if these races are not Christianly educated? It is possible that many will feel that the Indian, whatever our treatment of him, can never offer any serious menace to our civil life; we may safely let him go, as his fathers have gone before him, marching before our fixed bayonets toward the setting sun. And if this military policy is to prevail, we shall all be glad when he has made his last trail across the plain and echoed his last shrill war-whoop amid the mountains’ fastnesses. But, after all, friends, it may be there is a God in Heaven who will remember and avenge the red man’s wrong. “They that take the sword shall perish with the sword,” is not alone to be found in Scripture. It is written in our constitutions; it is a fundamental law of our being; and history bears abundant testimony that it is no dead letter. We ought to remember this law as we press the Indian from his God-given right. It may be that we, the children of the Pilgrims, may yet find ourselves driven from our Eastern homes and the institutions which the century has helped us to build, while the red hand of Nihilism holds sway over the graves of our fathers, and crowds us, as we are to-day crowding the Indian, into the track of the setting sun.
But whatever may be the result of our treatment of the Indian, there can be no doubt what will be the effect if the Negro and the Chinaman are left uneducated and unchristianized. Already do we feel the hand of the black man in our politics; our ears have distinctly heard the low rumbling, and we have felt the shudder beneath our feet which betokens an eruption. Before we know it Vesuvius may be belching forth its fiery flood, darkening the sky and spreading far and wide its river of death. Nor will the exodus greatly change the matter. The demagogue and the office-seeker are a genus that thrives in all climes. They may be more poisonous at the South, as most reptiles are that breed under a tropical sun; but the frosts of the North do not kill them any more than they kill the larvæ of the insects which every April sun hatches into life. It only needs the warmth of an election to quicken them and bring them in buzzing swarms around your ears. There will be corrupt politicians in Kansas who will rob them of their political rights as readily as those in the South. It matters little where they dwell; even in New York or Boston they would find themselves still in the reign of demoniacal possession. While they remain an ignorant class they will be a dangerous class. To be shot and intimidated may not be, after all, their worst political fate; to be corrupted with bribery would be equally bad. The electioneering purse, in the hand of the Northern office-seeker, might prove as potent in robbing them of their rights as the pistol which Southern chivalry may point at their devoted heads. Let us not, therefore, cheer ourselves, nor encourage these, our colored friends, that there is any holy land in these United States to which they may go in solemn exodus and be safe. Wherever they may be, ignorance is their greatest curse; nothing but education and Christianization will dispel this shadow that is darkening their lives, and lift this yoke of bondage that is now galling their necks, and in no other way can they be converted into useful citizens. They are an element of danger to the Republic, until, like our Northern children, they grow up under the shadow of the school-house. It is possible that all are not aware how great is the weight of this ignorance, which is like loose ballast in the ship of State, ready at any sudden lurch to change sides and carry us to the bottom. We and our legislators have been most thoughtless in our treatment of this question. In a single day, by legislative enactment, we put the ballot into the hand of a million men, not one of whom knew a letter of the alphabet. A more suicidal blow has seldom been aimed at the heart of this Republic. We have given, almost indiscriminately, the right of suffrage to these Southern States, and yet in sixteen of them seventy-five out of every hundred of the population, according to the census of 1870, are growing up entirely without school advantages. At the present moment a majority of the voters in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina are without the ability either to read or write. In either of these States, or in all of them, any election can be carried by sheer weight of ignorance. Seventeen hundred thousand men, according to a statistical report which has been put into my hands, at the last national election cast the ballot which they could neither read nor write. No wonder we were plunged into confusion. Had not a kindly Providence been on our side we should have been plunged into anarchy. And this scene waits to repeat itself in 1880. The next President of these States will be elected to his high position by sheer force of ignorance—ignorance manipulated and controlled by men whose hearts are as black with treason to-day as they were in ’61. No thoughtful man can look upon these facts and not tremble for the safety of his country.
So, also, is the ignorant and unchristianized Chinaman making himself felt in our politics. He casts no ballot, he holds no office. He does not come to the polls to drink and smoke and sell himself to the highest bidder on election day; and yet his political influence already is as wide as the continent; his unwelcome ghost stalks through the halls of Congress, and broods over every political or religious convention that is holden between the two oceans. Already have we seen one sovereign State changing the terms of its constitution and revolutionizing its laws out of pure regard for the Chinaman. And, still more significant, we have seen our great National Congress voting to change the very genius of the Government, and to shut the doors that have for a hundred years stood open, and which we mean shall not be closed for a hundred years to come; and we will write over these open doors in letters of fire, so that the most distant islands of the sea may read: “This is the world’s asylum, free to the oppressed of all nations.” Now, I doubt not there are evils connected with the coming of the heathen Chinaman. There is oppression and sorrow brought home to many hearts. I feel that there must be more or less of pollution in his touch. I pity the State into which this old world sewerage empties itself. But the remedy is not in building walls, though they be heaven-high, on our Chinaward side. This evil can be handled and neutralized only by the Christian virtue that is in us. Can we convert this heathen material—permeate it with Christian thought? Can we assimilate it and weave it into the civil fabric we are making? If so, it will do us no harm; otherwise it will rankle like poison in our blood, and possibly work our destruction in the end. This question should not be settled in the political arena. It is a moral, a religious question. The forces that are needed now are those that lie in the hand of the Christian church. We must permeate this festering mass with the leaven of Christ, and we must do it speedily. The evil is growing. Politicians are beginning to treat it, and therefore it is rapidly growing worse. It cannot be cured by legislative enactment. Legislation knows of no instrumentality, save that the civil statute ultimately seeks support in the bayonet. Before we know it, this question may be baptized in blood. Those western shores are far away. The Rocky Mountain wall lifts up a tremendous barrier to separate us and make us twain; only one little thread of iron binds us together and makes us one. Let us not wait until the whole Pacific slope bristles with rebellion as the South did in ’61; but let us pour the strains of our Christian influence over the mountains. If we can Christianize this heathen mass, then the trouble is over, the danger passed. Self-protection, then, affords a most powerful motive in the prosecution of this work.
Albert H. Heath.
SUNDAY-SCHOOL LETTERS.
The interest of the Sunday-schools in our Southern work has been increasing during the past year. The concert exercise has taken well, and many schools have sent us their first contributions.
How many of the schools connected with our churches understand clearly our offer in regard to correspondence from the field, we do not know. It is this: any Sunday-school which contributes ten dollars or more annually to the work of the A. M. A., if they request it, is entitled to a quarterly letter from one of our missionaries.
The “Children’s Page” of this number of the Missionary contains such a letter. It is bright and interesting to both teachers and scholars. The following letter from a superintendent tells of the interest excited by such letters in his school.