The only safe way up for the negro appears to lie in the industrial field, in mechanical employments, where his race may not weigh against him, and where head and hands may help one another to profit of mind and pocket—in business of varied kinds where he may get money, and with it the station that, in the common view, nothing else will afford him; in good work done for his race such as will give him the dignity in the eyes of all men that the master of Tuskegee has won. It is very much better for a negro youth, and for his race, that he should be a successful blacksmith, farmer or engineer, than a lawyer or physician, hindered and shunned, sorely burthened as he is sure to be by the cross that his fellowmen force him to bear. Therefore, unless they are willing to betake themselves to countries where the government is in the control of mixed peoples, thereby escaping the worst evils of race prejudice, it seems best for negroes not to seek the so-called learned professions, but to win their way on the lines where they will find less resistance—on ways quite fit for a man, even if not the highest.
It has been suggested that our colonies may afford a field for professionally educated negroes; but there, if they are to be ruled by the home government, it is likely that they will find a white caste in control. We may thus expect that the same essential disfranchisement will be found there as at home. Moreover, as before remarked, this project of sending to far lands the individual of ability who is needed at home, can not commend itself to those who feel the need which is with us, a need that calls for all the capacity we can hope to develop among the black people. It is clearly not a time to consider a proposition to export these abler youths of the black population.
Back of all our projects to bring the negroes of the South to the full station of citizens, to get rid of the contempt and the consequences of the contempt in which they are, as a race, so generally held, is the grave question as to the practicability of framing a social and political system in which men of such diverse origin may have a substantially equal chance. It must be granted that in no modern state of high grade has this problem been fairly solved. The instances from the tropical colonies of Great Britain are not really apposite; but there seems no fundamental difficulty to contend with in order to attain this end. With cultivated people of their own race about them the better negro youth would not be deprived of that element of education. We have taken into our political family races scarcely less different in motives from our own than are the negroes, making no kind of objection to their sharing the commonwealth with us. In certain ways it is true that a nation loses strength where it fails to have its elements closely knit together. But it may be doubted whether these losses are not more than compensated for by the gains that arise from diversities such as would come from the introduction into our system of a body of folk with the capacities which our Africans are likely with thorough training to develop.
In this matter there are but two courses open to us—one of folly, the other of wisdom. We may leave the black people to work out their own salvation as best they may, to lie as a mass at the bottom of our society, except so far as the abler men who may arise among them help their struggling fellows. The result of this will be the perpetuation of all the existing evils. Or we may set to work, after the true manner of our folk, with the full knowledge that the task is very great, but that we have the strength to see it done. With this spirit we may accomplish the noblest work that men have ever undertaken in any nation.
To the people of the South we may fairly say: “These negroes were brought here by your forefathers, and thus tied to the land. In their training as slaves, they were given an opportunity to rise far above their primitive savagery. You have seen in serious trials how, as a race, they are trustworthy. They are now your fellow-citizens in name, but are in a condition to be a permanent menace to your commonwealth. Properly aided on their way upward, they may be of great value to your descendants.” To the people of the North we may plead for all the help they can give; for hardly less than the Southerners, their ancestors shared in the actions which brought the negroes to this country. They gave the blacks the semblance of citizenship by the process of emancipation. If the work stops there, it may be questioned whether it was a boon to the masses of the folk it made nominally free. To be what it was meant to be, then, it needs more than enactments. There must be long continued and devoted labor, wisely directed.
A necessary part of the work of a true emancipation of the negro is a careful inquiry into the history and former status of the people. Such an inquiry, placed and kept in good hands, is a necessary preliminary to sagacious action. It may serve to unite the men of all parts of the country in a work that so nearly concerns us all. There is not, nor is there likely to arise, a situation that so calls for intelligent patriotism as this we are sorely neglecting. We may go far away and rear an empire with our armies; but if we leave these, our neighbors, without a fair chance to develop the good that is in them, we shall have lost our real opportunity for great deeds—mayhap we shall fix among us evils that in the end will drag us down.
THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE LANDS.
By Professor W. M. Davis.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
The most important principles established in physical geography during the nineteenth century are that the description of the earth’s surface features must be accompanied by explanation, and that the surface features must be correlated with their inhabitants. During the establishment of these evolutionary principles, exploration at home and abroad has greatly increased the store of recorded facts; the more civilized countries have been in large part measured and mapped; the coasts of the world have been charted; the less civilized continents have been penetrated to their centers. This harvest of fact has been an indispensable stimulus to the study of physical geography; yet it can not be doubted that the spirit which has given life to the letter of the subject is the principle of evolution—inorganic and organic. This is especially true of the geography of the lands.