A Dual Paradox.
Of all historic ironies this is surely the bitterest—that the Republic founded to demonstrate eighteenth-century ideals of human equality should have been fated to provide their most glaring reductio ad absurdum. This is far from an original observation: but there is another paradox in the case which is not so generally recognized. It is that the most religious of modern peoples should all the time be flying in the face of the plainest dictates of Christianity. The South is by a long way the most simply and sincerely religious country that I ever was in.[[21]] It is not, like Ireland, a priest-ridden country; it is not, like England, a country in which the strength of religion lies in its social prestige; it is not, like Scotland, a country steeped in theology. But it is a country in which religion is a very large factor in life, and God is very real and personal. In other countries men are apt to make a private matter of their religion, in so far as it is not merely formal; but the Southerner wears his upon his sleeve. There is a simple sincerity in his appeal to religious principle which I have often found really touching. I have often, too, been reminded of that saying of my Pennsylvanian friend: “The South may be living in the twentieth century, but it has skipped the nineteenth.” The Southerner goes to the Gospels for his rule of life, and has never heard of Nietzsche; yet I am wholly unable to discover how the system of race-discriminations is reconcilable with the fundamental precepts of Christianity. It is far easier to find in the Old Testament the justification of slavery than in the New Testament the justification of the Jim Crow car, the white and black school, and the white and black church.[[22]] This is not necessarily a condemnation of the Southerner’s attitude; I do not think that the colour problem was foreseen in the New Testament. Christianity is one thing, sociology another, and the Southerner’s logical error, perhaps, lies in not keeping the distinction clear.[[23]] But I am sure there are many sincere and earnest Christians in the South who will scarce be at ease in heaven unless they enter it, like a Southern railway station, through a gateway marked “For Whites.”
[20]. Is this one of what Mr. E. G. Murphy calls “the divine inconveniences of a Republic”?
[21]. “The fancied home of the cavalier is the home of the nearest approach to puritanism and to the most vital protestant evangelicalism in the world to-day.”—Dr. E. A. Alderman: “The Growing South,” p. 20.
[22]. “The result of the war was the complete expulsion of negroes from white churches.... The Methodist Church South simply set its negro members bodily out of doors. They did it with some consideration for their feelings ... but they virtually said to all their black members, ‘You cannot worship God with us.’ There grew up, therefore, the Coloured Methodist Episcopal Church.... From the North now came those negro church bodies born of colour discrimination in Philadelphia and New York in the eighteenth century; and thus a Christianity absolutely divided along the colour-line arose. There may be in the South a black man belonging to a white church to-day; but if so, he must be very old and very feeble. This anomaly—this utter denial of the very first principle of the ethics of Jesus Christ—is to-day so deep-seated and unquestionable a principle of Southern Christianity that its essential heathenism is scarcely thought of.” W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro in the South,” p. 174. I have been told, but make the statement “with all reserve,” that no colour-line is drawn in Roman Catholic churches in the South.
[23]. The perils of biblical argument may be illustrated by this passage from “An Appeal to Pharaoh,” a book of which I shall have more to say later (p. 235): “The same inspired authority who tells us that ‘God made the world ... and hath made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on the face of the earth,’ reminds us in the same breath that He Himself ‘hath determined the bounds of their habitations.’” But if, on this principle, the presence of the negro in America is a breach of divine ordinance, what are we to say of the presence of the white man in America?
IX
EDUCATION AND THE DEMONSTRATION FARM
Enormous undeveloped or half-developed fertility is the impression one receives on every hand in the South; but the lack of development belongs to a state of things soon to pass away. There can be little doubt that the South stands on the threshold of an agricultural Golden Age.[[24]] It is being brought about mainly by three agencies: (1) The United States Department of Agriculture; (2) The General Education Board of New York; (3) the boll-weevil, which, entering Texas from Mexico in 1899, has extended its ravages over the States of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and part of Mississippi, and at one time threatened the ruin of the whole cotton industry. It may seem odd that this unwelcome invader should be reckoned among the factors that are promoting agricultural development; but, in a very real sense, he has served as a pioneer to the movement.
Dr. Wallace Buttrick, of the General Education Board, was so kind as to give me an outline of the course of events.