In the West Indies God poured His blessings with lavish hand upon the island of Haiti. The French went there and built up a civilization. The Revolution of 1789 freed the negroes who were held in slavery by the whites, and civil war soon followed.
The blacks outnumbered the whites and the climate was their ally. Yellow fever did for them what frost did for the Russians when Napoleon struck at their liberties. They achieved freedom, and they have had it, not for thirty years, but for a hundred years.
What have your people done with their freedom in Santo Domingo, Doctor? Back, back into barbarism, voodooism, human sacrifice, social and political anarchy they have plunged; and their history is one long blood-stained record of backsliding from the standard which the French had already established. Even now your black brethren in Santo Domingo are beseeching the white man of the United States to do that which they are unable to do—administer national affairs. In self-defense this Government may have to treat Santo Domingo as Great Britain treats Jamaica, both governments acting upon the demonstrated fact that the blacks, left to themselves, are incapable of self-government and race development.
But before entering into a comparison of racial progress, Doctor, it is in order to note the fact that you accredit the negro with only thirty years of freedom. Why, Doctor, the negro race, as a race, has enjoyed just as long a period of freedom as the Celts, the Latins, the Anglo-Saxons and the Slavs.
The black race in Africa was as free as the Indian race in North America.
During the thousand years in which the whites were painfully creating the civilization which you now enjoy, your race, in its native home, was doing pretty much the same things which the red race was doing in North America. Your people were running about in the woods, naked, eating raw meat, eternally at war—tribe with tribe—steeped in ignorance, vice and superstition, with an occasional lapse into human sacrifice and cannibalism.
Your race, as a race, is free now in Africa, as it has been since the dawn of history:—where is the civilization which it worked out for itself? It does not exist; it never did exist.
The negro has been absolutely unable to develop as a race when left to himself. Nowhere, at any time, has he developed a system of agriculture, or commerce, or manufactures, made headway in mining or engineering, or conceived a system of finance. Never has he produced a system of laws, institutions of state, religious organization, or worked out a political ideal. Never has he created a literature, or developed original capacity for the fine arts. His foot has never even crossed the threshold of the world of creative painting, sculpture, music, architecture Into the realms of science, in the domain of original thought, in the higher reaches of mental power where the human mind grapples with vast problems, material and spiritual, the problems of time and eternity, the negro has never entered. No word has ever fallen from his lips that was not the echo of what some white man had already said. He has sometimes put his foot in the white man’s track, but that is the best he has ever done.