It would be well for those who complain of the slow progress made for better feelings and sentiments among the Southern whites in regard to the negroes, and their manifest unwillingness to accord to them their rights, quietly to digest a recent letter from the Superintendent of Schools in Cambridge, Mass., who explains that he has not employed properly qualified colored teachers in that city, simply because there is so much color prejudice among the people that he deems it inexpedient to do so.
We know of a young colored woman, a graduate of the high-school of the town in which she lives, admitted by all parties to be the best scholar of her class, and one of the best ever graduated from the school, who cannot find employment in the profession for which she has so ably qualified herself, only because she has a trace of negro blood in her veins. When Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and we may as well include the whole of New England, have reached and occupied sufficiently long to feel comfortable upon it, the ground which they insist the South ought to take at one bound, the South may be more favorably affected by their preaching of equal rights.
EXCEPTIONS AND THE RULE.
There may be exceptions which, after all, confirm the rule to which they do not wholly conform, but to say that it is by exceptions the rule is to be proven, is to betray a blind adhesion to maxims whose claim to credence is their antiquity alone.
A partial and hasty generalization from two or three particulars suffices for the enunciation of a general law applicable to all cases. The declaration of a more careful investigator that a number of particular facts are not harmonious with the law as enunciated is met, not with a revision of the law, but with the assertion that exceptions do not invalidate, but prove the rule.
A naturalist in the tropics describes water as being under all circumstances a fluid. The solid block of ice which drifts for the first time into his field of observation he will not accept as disproving his doctrine, but as being the exception necessary to confirm it.
It becomes a matter of interest to know in what way exceptions do confirm what they seemingly disprove, and how many maybe admitted before we shall revise our classifications and re-state our general rule, because false in its old form. Unquestionably an indisputable exception proves at least that the rule is not universal, and suggests that there may be a thousand more facts out of harmony with it.
Anglo-Saxon prejudice and conceit have laid it down as a general rule, a law of race, that the negro is only a somewhat superior grade of monkey, incapable of any high degree of intellectual development; that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, and the best use he can be put to is to make a target of him for the training of our soldiers in musket firing.