Democracy is limited to those nations whose citizens possess these peculiar and lofty qualifications of mind and character. It is limited to nations which are blessed with unity and solidarity among its people. It is further limited to nations which have grown into the practice of democracy during long experience. Instead of asking what nations and peoples are likely to fail at democracy, we had better start by inquiring as to what few nations are fortunate enough to possess all of these qualifications which, taken together, make democracy possible.
Democracy, we shall all agree, can not develop among the Australian bushmen. It will not develop among the gypsies. It will not develop, for a long time, among the African Negroes. Democracy will grow slowly among the white peoples of central and eastern Europe. It will probably grow much more slowly among the brown and yellow peoples of Asia. We can best advance the cause of democracy in our time by saving it and developing it in those countries where it has been already pretty well established. Surely the greatest possible service we can render the cause of democracy among the peoples not yet wholly fitted for its practice is to give them a high and striking example of its success in our own country. The supreme battle for democracy in this our day is taking place in the minds and hearts of American citizens. There is no immediate cause for doubt and worry concerning the preservation of democracy in Great Britain and France. There is cause for deepest concern in our own country, whose democracy is threatened from every side, by greedy and designing powers above, as by a great mass of incompetent, unprincipled and undemocratic voters from below.
The American Negro as Ward of The Nation
Grover Cleveland once declared that one American problem for which he saw no solution whatever was the problem of the Negro. If we were in The land of the beginning again, that country of our dreams, we should, of course, not bring the Negro to our shores. It is easy to idealize our American ancestors, but no doubt they made enough errors in their time. Their most gigantic blunder, one to make Providence himself almost despair of humanity, was the Afro-American slave trade. "Man's inhumanity to man" brings at last the greatest of all sorrows upon him who works the inhumanity.
The first emotion that thought of the great problem of the Negro must awaken in the hearts of all Americans is humility. Before Almighty God we must resolve in this matter to do justice, and more than justice. Here more than any other place, we must be moved by Christlike kindness and love. The bane of us Americans, in all periods of our history, has been carelessness. We have a tendency to let things drift from bad to worse. Such has been particularly the case with reference to our attitude toward the Negro. It is high time that we applied to our public thinking some of that sounder knowledge of society and social laws which recent years have given to us.
Why should the simple truth give offense to anybody? The Negro in Africa is a childish barbarian. Left to himself, he has never at any time or place evolved even the beginning of a civilization. Do what we may in the way of an education, the mind of the pure Negro, compared to the white, on the average does not get beyond the age of twelve years. To ignore this fact is to get into error from the start. Continue to ignore this fact, especially in the execution of larger national policies, and we shall invite, as we have done in the past, trouble that is deep and dangerous. Two facts should be remembered if we would make real progress in this discussion. The first is that only those who live among the Negro and so learn to know him at first hand can really understand his manifold traits. To sit down five hundred miles from the nearest considerable Negro population and write books about the Negro is not likely to help much.
The second fact to be kept constantly in mind relates to our population of mixed blood. Every distinguished leader of the Negro race in the United States has been part white. In fact, a majority of the more distinguished have contained only a small infusion of Negro blood. It is the presence of this Mulatto element which clothes the whole problem in porcupine quills. It is this portion of our colored population which is restless and often unhappy to the point of bitterness because of our present policy with reference to the Negro. If there were no mixed population to consider our problem would not be nearly so difficult.