A critical time is this. These millions cannot be left much longer in their ignorance without danger to the public peace. Vice does not tend to produce virtue. Ignorance does not tend to produce knowledge. Let the feeling settle down on the colored youth that all avenues for intellectual culture are closed against them, and ambition for improvement will soon disappear, and when the brood of evils to which ignorance is the prolific parent has been once fairly let loose upon the land, it may be too late to remedy the mischief. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” says the wisdom of the ages. The demand of the hour is, “Let the wisdom of the ages be put to practical use.” Recorded in books, tossed from lip to lip, it profits little; it must be put into action. No question presses upon the Christian and patriotic thought of our land with greater urgency, or bears within it farther reaching consequences, than this same question of the education of our negro population. The hour of opportunity is now. We ask the friends of the Freedmen to heed this second call that comes to them, to prosecute the work of Christian education among the negroes, with a greater zeal and greater enthusiasm than ever before. If we are faithful, a rich harvest will be ours to reap.
THE NEGRO FOR HIS PLACE.
PROF. C. C. PAINTER.
An intelligent Christian woman, fairly representative, we believe, of the best friends of the negro, herself engaged in the work of negro education as an amateur, in the literal meaning of the word, during her annual sojourn in the South, said to us recently that she did not believe in the attempt of Fisk, Howard, Atlanta and like schools to give this people a higher education. They should be taught the three R’s, and how to work, and so fitted for their place in life. She esteemed it an unfortunate mistake and blunder that they should be disqualified for it by a classical education.
An associate editor of one of our largest dailies, a widely influential man, commended, not simply by its excellence, but by way of contrast, the work done at Hampton, not because in the pursuit of its own aims it left the work of higher education to other schools, but because it taught its negro pupils to work, and did not make fools of them by teaching them Latin and Greek, and this, not because he is opposed to higher education for any one, but because such an education unfitted the negro for his place. These friends are not alone in the opinion that the place of the negro is definitely known, and that is one which demands and allows a very limited range of intellectual power, and requires the exercise of his muscles chiefly.
We respectfully submit that the only possible apology for slavery as it existed in this country was based upon the assumption that the white man had the right to determine just the place in the scale of being that the black man should occupy. He stood forth as the authorized interpreter of nature, and maintained that both nature and Noah had settled it that the sons of Ham were fitted alone to be the servants of their brethren.
When we have assented to the proposition that nature has allotted to a race a certain position, we have assented, logically, to the further and co-ordinate proposition that it should be fitted for the place and kept in it; thus the whole code of slave laws stands approved and justified.
There has been much discussion, and there will probably be a great deal more, as to the proper place and exact sphere of woman; and with more show of reason, for she constitutes not a race, but a class; and nature has indicated in the fact of sex some of the possibilities of her nature and duties of her sphere; has decided some things as possible, and some as impossible to her. She cannot be the father of a family; but what she may be intellectually, morally, spiritually, as a mother, as a woman, can be known only when she has opened before her unlimited opportunity for her untrammeled powers. She may not transcend nature’s limitations, but she ought to insist that man’s ignorance and prejudice shall not prove a more insuperable bar to what she may do.