If then the Afro-American race stands even now at the entrance of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, what shall we say, what shall we do? Shall we weep and wail and gnash our teeth? Shall we lift up the trump of indignation against such red-handed iniquity? Shall we cry out to Heaven and to Congress against the crime of the centuries? We think that a much calmer and milder mood may well become us before such a thanatopsis. Why should the spectacle of a racial diminuendo so arouse or revolt us? Surely it is something neither unique nor uncommon. All that breathe will share their destiny. It is appointed unto men once to die. If it were the highest form of human life, we might be concerned or even confounded. But such it is not; on the contrary, it is one of the very lowest, that has hitherto enacted and promises hereafter to enact only unhistorical history. "The old order changeth, yielding place to new." The recession, the evanescence, of the Negro before the Caucasian is only one example among millions of the process of nature. The ministry of death is not maleficent; says the Cabbala, "The Lord said unto the Angel of Death, Behold I have made thee cosmocrator." In the upward mounting of the forms of life, there are no other stepping-stones than their own dead selves. The vision, then, of a race vanishing before its superior is not at all dispiriting, but inspiring rather. It is but a part of the increasing purpose of the ages, a forward creeping of the eternal dawn.
The doom that awaits the Negro has been prepared in like measure for all inferior races. Except where they are bulwarked by the climate, they must be drowned by the mounting wave of their superior rivals. To the clear, cold eye of science, the plight of these backward peoples appears practically hopeless. They have neither part nor parcel in the future history of man; they are rejected as dross from its thrice-heated furnace.
This may sound harsh and unfeeling, but in reality it is not so. We do not mean that the inferior should be treated unjustly, unkindly, inhumanly. Far from it. Let equity be dealt with an even hand. We have never given either voice or vote for any form of injustice, however specious, or plausible, or grandfatherly. The processes we have in view lie deeper than any legislation; they are inwoven in the living garment of the Godhead.
But may we not check or arrest them? May not the strong Caucasian lend a helping hand to his weaker African brother and lift him up, and the two walk along hand in hand through the centuries? This is a very idyllic picture. "Behold, how good and how pleasant for brethren to dwell together in unity." But a moment's reflection must show how inadequate and unreal this dew of Hermon. It is not hard for altruism to run suicidally mad, if one lets go the check-rein of egoism. The first and highest and unescapable duty of a race is to its self—to realize its own personality, to put forth all its powers and potencies, to unfold the full flower of its own being. It must neither be unjust nor ungenerous in its treatment of others, but neither must it attempt self-immolation—especially, as that sacrifice would be idle and unanswered. The most, the best that one race can effect for another is merely some extra-organic amelioration of condition. The organic destiny of that other, written in blood and bone and cell and plasma, lies beyond the reach of the helping hand. We must dismiss, then, this vision of a higher race stooping down with arms of love and lifting up the lower to its altitude, as merely a pious imagination. The higher race may indeed stoop down; it has often done so; but never to rise again; instantly there falls upon it the Davidic curse: "Bow down their back alway."
The fate that awaits the backward race in the presence of the advanced should appear more vividly, one would think, to no other eyes than to those of New England. "Across the ocean came a pilgrim bark, bearing the seeds of life and of death. The former were sown for you; the latter sprang up in the path of the simple native." Nor in this process of extermination, in these "centuries of dishonour," has it really been a question of fairness or unfairness, of righteousness or unrighteousness. No kind or degree of gentleness or justice could have long delayed the departure of the Indian. When North-Europeans landed on his shores, for him the clock of destiny had struck. While we may properly applaud or condemn individual and communal acts by standards of individual or communal ethics, it is not possible to judge the race by any such feeble sense. Nature is neither moral nor immoral, but supermoral. Her æonian processes are not to be measured by our rules nor defined by our categories; they tower above good and bad; they reach beyond right and wrong. Should Roman legions have conquered Greece and girdled the Mediterranean with her civilization? Ought Babylonian empire to have lifted up its lion wings over Western Asia? We perceive at once the emptiness of such questions.
But even if it were possible for us to turn back the tide of time, to stay or slacken the rolling of the wheel of birth, would it be well or wise to do so? We venture to question it most seriously. There is a personal and even a social morality that may easily become racially immoral. There are diseases whose evolutionary function is to weed out the weak, and so preserve the future for the strong. The sufferers cannot be treated with too careful attention, too loving gentleness, too tender sympathy. It is the glory of our humanity to cherish these frail flowers, to water them with dew, to shield them from the sun, and not to suffer even the winds of summer to visit them too roughly. But not to gather from them the seed for generations to come! Let theirs be the present, but not the future. He who should discover some serum and apply it greatly to prolong their lives and give them equal chance with the vigorous in the matter of offspring, whatever thanks he might win from individuals or the community, would deserve and receive the execration of his race as its deadliest and most insidious foe. So, too, we hold it to be certain that all forms of humanitarianism that tend to give the organically inferior an equal chance with the superior in the propagation of the species, are radically mistaken; to the individual and to society they would sacrifice the race. Their error may be very amiable, but it is none the less mortal. The hope of humanity lies not in strengthening the weak, but in perfecting the strong.
Herewith, then, we close this discussion. The mistake of our opponents is here exposed in its deepest root, its inmost core. It is seen to be a mistake in philosophy, in cosmology, in the scientific interpretation of the process of nature. But what a weird light is now cast upon the War between the States, its cause, and its ultimate result! Aside from questions of political theory, the North sought to free the Negro, the South to hold him in bondage. As a slave he had led a protected, indeed a hothouse, existence and had flourished marvellously. His high-hearted champions shed torrents of blood and treasure to shatter the walls of his prison-house, to dispel the pent-up, stifling gloom of his dungeon, and to pour in upon him the free air and light of heaven. But the sun of liberty is no sooner arisen with burning breath than, lo! smitten by the breeze and the beam, he withers and dies!
CHAPTER SIX
THE ARGUMENT FROM NUMBERS