How careful is nature to protect all things which are young.
“Youth is not for work,” she says, and she writes it from the stars of the daisy field to the stars of heaven.
There is no flower which does not shelter its unblossomed buds, if necessary, even with thorns. The wild doe hides her fawn in the bush; the king of beasts hides his in the desert caverns.
Only man has decreed in his selfishness that his children must lose their childhood to the greed of gold.
As for the negro himself, here are some plain, never-lying, physiological, bred-in-the-bone truths about him which the sooner the world recognizes, the easier will the problem of his being be. The Negro is first and always an imitator. He cannot originate. He cannot go upward, save as he copies from the whites, and if that prop be removed, he will quickly go back into barbarism. There is something wanting in the Negro character—in the very fibre of his being—that says as plainly as God can say it of a race: “Thus far shalt thou go and no further.” And left to himself for centuries on the most fertile continent of the globe, he has remained to-day where he was at creation’s dawn. Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Rome, the Saxon—all these civilizations have been added to the world, and still the Negro remains as God made him.
There are some people who think they can improve on the Almighty’s plan. The Maker of All did not intend that the Negro should be a white man in a black skin, as some who are solving the Negro problem would think. If He had, He would have made him like the white man and given him that indefinable, inexplicable quality that makes the white man a doer of deeds, a fighter, an advancer, a dreamer, a conqueror. The Negro is none of these. He is merely a good natured, inferior man, a non-combative race, made for some purpose of labor, to be directed always by a superior mind, and in his highest development an imitator.
There has been so much said on the Negro problem lately that I have inadvertently, as it were, thrown out this. It is good for one to be set straight now and then, on first principles. It is easy for man to get all wrong if he starts out on a wrong hypothesis.
In a letter from a correspondent in Medicine Lodge, Kans., the other day, appears a sentence we have been looking for all our lives. “Facts, ideals and a thrill,” he says, “is a terse definition of every great story,” and he is kind enough to say that Trotwood’s fills the definition. “Facts, ideals and a thrill”—I should love to know just who originated that boiled-down recipe for real literature. If I might advise all of my writers (and I am called on daily by letters to help advise many of them), I would say adopt that motto and go write your story. As for us hereafter, we will nail it to our masthead and try to build up to it.