Mrs. George Haven Putnam, in a very charming essay in the Contemporary Review for December, discusses “The Lady of the Slave States.” She deals gently enough with her subject; she says that the slave-owner’s wife like everybody else with slavery was blighted by its curse, but she demolished very effectually the myth of the gracious fascinating woman of culture who ruled family and estate by the charm of her personality.
The ante-bellum Southern lady never had much to say for herself and was in short not “the Gothic saint in her niche” that tradition pictures, but a kindly little creature surrounded by “Orientalism” and little better off, so far as opportunities for development went, than any lady of the harem.
Mrs. Putnam quotes Miss Martineau, who traveled extensively through the slave States, to show how the system limited the white women and made them “the greatest slaves on the plantation.” Patience was the supreme virtue of the ante-bellum lady—they made the best of a bad state of affairs. Logic she had little or none, and her up-bringing tended to make her a delightful girl but a middle-aged woman of only moderate attractions. And while she was often very kind to her slaves her sensibilities seemed in some measure blunted by perpetual sight of suffering and injustice.
When the war ended the ex-mistresses of slaves showed how good was the material that had been buried under the “Orientalism” of the plantation.
RACE PREJUDICE IN THE ORIENT.
Race Prejudice: An address by Melville E. Stone to the Quill Club, New York City.
The best review of this remarkable little pamphlet will be a few extracts from its pages:
What is to be the outcome? What does all this mean for the future of the world? Let us view the problem from the political, the commercial and the moral aspects. How long will the 6,000 soldiers we have in the Philippines be able to keep our flag afloat among 8,000,000 of natives? How long will the 75,000 English soldiers in India be able to maintain British sovereignty over 300,000,000 of Asians? Believe me, these are not idle questions. They are up to us for an answer, whether we will or no, and upon our ability to make answer will depend the future of what we are pleased to call our Western civilization. I would not be an alarmist, and yet I would have you feel that Macauley’s suggestion of the New Zealander on a broken arch of London Bridge, sketching the ruins of St. Paul, has come to be more than an extravagant figure of speech. And I am convinced that there is real danger awaiting us unless we mend our ways. It is not the Asian who needs educating; it is the European. I am not worrying half so much about the heathen in his blindness as I am about the Christian in his blindness. Asia is awake and preparing for the coming struggle. And we are doing very much to force the issue and to prepare her for the contest. For a century we have been sending at enormous cost our missionaries to all parts of the hemisphere to civilize. There may be doubt as to the amount of proselyting we have been able to accomplish; there can be no possible doubt of the work we have done to strengthen the Asian people politically and commercially.
We shall never meet the problems growing out of our relation with the Far East unless we absolutely and once for all put away race prejudice. I believe the European snob in Asia is distinctly the enemy of the civilized West. And his coadjutor in this country is a fitting criminal yoke-fellow. Let me give you some illustrations of what I mean—cases which came under my personal observation. From Bombay to Yokohama there is not a social club at any port or treaty point where a native, whatever his culture or refinement, will be admitted. At the Bengal Club at Calcutta last year a member in perfectly good standing innocently invited an Eurasian gentleman—that is, one who is half native and half European—to dine with him. It became known that the invitation had been extended, and a storm of opposition broke among the members. The matter was finally adjusted by setting aside the ladies’ department of the club, and there the offending member and his unfortunate guest dined alone. The next day the member was called before the board of governors and notified that another like breach of the rules would result in his expulsion. The beating of native servants and workmen in India is a daily and hourly occurrence. It formerly was so at Hong Kong and Shanghai, but Mr. Sprague, the representative of the Standard Oil Company at Shanghai, told me that since the Russo-Japanese war the natives would not stand it, and that all beating of them by Europeans in that city had ceased.
The son of a maharaja goes to England, is educated at Oxford or Cambridge, is lionized in the West End of London—mayhap he is honored with an invitation to Windsor. When he goes back home he may enter no white man’s club; if he be fortunate enough to be invited to a white man’s function, no white woman will dance or associate with him; and if by any luck he should marry a European, he, his wife and his children become outcasts. Although native troops, like the Sikhs, have shown undying loyalty to the British flag and on frequent occasions have exhibited courage in the highest degree, no one of them ever has or ever can achieve the Victoria Cross.