THE STRONG AND THE WEAK.
BY PROF. G. N. MARDEN, COLORADO SPRINGS, COL.
Injustice seems never more flagrant than when committed by the prosperous and powerful against the poor and weak. If the moral test of civilization, as of society, is its care for its weakest members, we hardly dare to measure our country by the history of its treatment of the Negro, the Indian and the Chinaman.
The diagram above is designed to illustrate the numerical strength of the white element of the United States, as compared with three other elements of the population. The large bordered square (whose side is ten centimeters) represents our country’s total population—a round fifty millions. The colored population—not less than six and a half millions—is signified by the square in the lower right hand corner. Close beside it is the little square which stands for the size of the Indian—about three hundred thousand souls; the shaded portion of the square means the wild Indians—about fifty thousand. The dreaded Chinese element of our population can be seen by looking for the minute square, which represents one hundred thousand.
This diagram, in enlarged form, can be effectively used in the Missionary Concert. To a large square of stout paper, smaller squares of different colored paper may be pinned. Correct proportions for paper or for blackboard illustrations would be, following the order of the size of the population, 50, 18, 3.87 and 2.23 centimeters respectively; or, in inches, about 192/3, 71/10, 11/2 and 7/8. These figures denote the base lines of the respective squares.
How the powerful white man looms up and looms over the little group of the three ill-treated races huddled in the corner!
The black block makes no insignificant figure, after all, and its rapid growth suggests that to have, through neglect, a dense body of such dimensions depressed by ignorance were a blunder matched only by the wickedness of oppression. The size of the Indian and the Chinaman suggests strongly the outrageous meanness of ill-using them; it makes more striking the absurdity of a war policy against the red man, and of the demagogue’s appeal to fear on account of the presence of the Chinaman.
What an opportunity, on our own shores, for strength to help weakness, for knowledge to help ignorance, for wealth to help poverty, and so to fulfil the law of a Christian civilization!
Surely it is high time for us to heed the weighty saying of John Milton: “A nation ought to be but as one huge Christian personage, one mighty growth or stature of an honest man, as big and compact in virtue as in body; for look, what the ground and causes of single happiness to one man, the same we shall find them to a whole state.”