friends? In the language of the Liberian Declaration of Rights, "Public sentiment, more powerful than law, will ever frown him down." The negro, pure and simple, may rely upon it that for him the most enthusiastic of his benefactors sees nothing but the lowest occupations. In the case of the most liberal of his advocates he will have occasionally to exclaim, Et tu, Brute! A writer in the Methodist Quarterly Review for January, 1875, on "The Negro," has the following among the closing sentences of an able and plausible defense of the race: Without the negro the top-stone of our national greatness will not be lifted to its predestined lofty altitude for centuries yet to come. Expatriate the negro, and our cotton-fields whiten no more; our turpentine orchards become silent as the grave; our rice-fields grow up into canebrakes, sheltering the alligator and wild boar. But does the American conscience ever look forward to the time when, in the United States, the negro will have any common interest in, or any, the slightest possible, control over, the political and financial elements of the country-when he will be needed as a part of the directing agency in the halls of legislation, in counting-houses, and in banking establishments? Mr. Parton, in the "North American Review," says: The South is most happy in possessing the negro; for it is through his assistance that there will be the grand agriculture in the Southern States, which cannot flourish unless there is a class to labor and individuals to contrive. The Southern farmer, by the black man's help, can be a "scholar and a gentleman," and at the same time secure and elevate the black man's life. Such utterances "give color to the idea" that the negro was made to live and improve only in the service and under the guidance of a superior. If this view is correct, then why does not the great Creator allow the elect masters to have free access and safe incursion into the natural home of the created slaves, and live in a land where they might hold their predestined protégés in unlimited numbers and in comfortable service? Why did He make for the slaves so magnificent a country, and surround it with a wall of fire, so that if the master comes to the threshold he either beats a hasty retreat or perishes in the attempt to penetrate? "Massa run away, No; the destiny of the negro and his marvelous country is veiled from the view of the outside world according to the wise and beneficent purposes of Omniscience. "God is his own interpreter, And he will make it plain." He can wait, if the impatient Caucasian cannot. The American Missionary Association, whose publications we have prefixed to this paper, in their work of lofty and noble purpose throughout the South are endeavoring to prepare the negro for higher spheres of labor than "cotton-fields, turpentine orchards, and rice-fields." Every negro who is at all acquainted with matters in the United States must have the highest admiration for that Association. Almost alone among the benevolent institutions of that land in the days of the great struggle, they never for one moment yielded to the imperious dictates of an oligarchical monopoly, but gave expression to the idea which they inscribed upon their banner, that one of the chief purposes of their organization was to resist the tyranny of the autocracy which doomed the negro to perpetual servitude. No one could be enrolled among the members of their society who was "a slave-holder." They have the gratitude of the negro race. But history will have a brighter page than even that with which to adorn their annals when she comes to recount the devotion and sacrifices of the hundreds who have been sent forth under their auspices as uplifters of the prostrate host in the South, to whom, left as they were paralyzed by slavery, free movement and real progress were intrinsically impossible without the aid of such agencies as the American Missionary Association. As time rolls on the romance which clings to those heroes who fought to unfetter the body of the slave will fade. beside the halo which will surround those who have labored to liberate his mind. We have read with the deepest interest the report and some of the addresses made at the Thirty-second Anniversary of this Association, held in October, 1878, as well as letters from various portions of the field under its supervision. In reading the accounts of the struggles and sufferings of the missionaries, their sorrows and disappointments, their battles and their vic tories among the lowly in remote and sequestered districts, it is often impossible to repress the tears-tears of sympathy, of gratitude, and of joy. At the Annual Meeting Rev. C. M. Southgate said: We heard words of hearty praise this afternoon, telling of the success of the work. They tell hardly enough. But these efforts should be redoubled. We want more institutions like those at Atlanta, New Orleans, Charleston, and the other large Southern cities where high culture and intelligence rule. The scholarship can be compared without fear with similar grades at the North. I never heard in our boasted common schools such recitations as I have heard from boys as black as the blackest. I know what Yale and Harvard and Dartmouth can show; but in Greek and Latin those colored students can rival their excellence. The culture in morals and manners is at least not inferior, nor the relig ious instruction less fruitful. The report from the Churches shows as large and as healthy success as we can show here. The young men and women in these institutions have an intense longing to be at work for the Master. The desperate condition of their race rests upon them like a pall. God is making them his prophets, and speaking through them, and sending redemption. Rev. Dr. Bascom, in a letter from Alabama, says: I see abundant proofs of the beneficent work of your Society here. Could its influence have been exerted in like manner among all our colored people of the South, the problem so perplexing to politicians and philanthropists, as to the future of this class in our country, would have been already solved. The committee on the "Normal Work of the Association " reported that: The eagerness of the colored people to obtain at least a rudimentary education has ever been a most encouraging sign. The young man who last year walked fifty miles with his trunk upon his back that he might enter school, recalls the zeal of the late Dr. Godell, of Constantinople, who, in his youth, also walked sixty miles with a trunk strapped upon his back, that he might enter Phillips Academy, at Andover. The demand for teachers from the normal schools-quite beyond the ability to supply them -is one of the surest indications that the schools are meeting an urgent need. We regret that Professor Hartranft, in his able address on the "Five Tests of American Civilization," should have spoken of the "brutality of the negro." In what portion of the United States has that "brutality" been shown? Such a charge is in flagrant contradiction to all the testimony borne of the negro by those who know him best. And here we must venture to enter our earnest protest against the use of such phrases as "The Despised Races," which we see frequently used of late in the publications of the American Missionary Association. The Rev. Joseph Cook addressed the Association on the "Three Despised Races," and he was followed by Rev. C. M. Southgate on "Puritanism and the Despised Races." Such expressions as "The Despised Race" and "The Dark Continent," applied to the negro and his ancestral home, have not, we fancy, the most salutary effect either upon those who employ them or upon those to whom they refer; in the one they often beget arrogance; in the other, servility or resentment. They do more than serve the ad captandum purposes for which they are probably intended. In using "great plainness of speech" the instructors of humanity should be "wise as serpents and harmless as doves," which, according to a negro interpreter, means "an ounce of serpent to a pound of dove." Moreover, the whole of the rest of mankind does not hold the European, in view of his past history, in such unqualified admiration as to admit without serious question that he has a right to embody in terse phrases, and to parade in the titles of books, pamphlets, and addresses his contempt for other races. There are those of other races who also sneer and scorn and "despise." Some of the proceedings of Baker and Stanley in Africa must frequently have impressed the natives with the feeling that those energetic travelers came from much "darker continents" than any their unsophisticated imaginations had ever before suggested to them. The African now coming forward through education and culture cannot have unlimited respect for all the qualities of the European races: "A people with a passion for taking away the countries of others and dignifying the robbery as conquests; and whose systematic cruelty has been shown for ages in chaining, buying, and selling another race. "Hearest thou, O God, those chains By Christians wrought? Those who those chains have worn Christians have hither borne, Christians have bought.'" The intelligent negro feels that the part of the oppressor is not less to be despised than the part of the oppressed that the part of the man-stealer and man-seller is far more contemptible than the part of the man stolen and sold. And this he will feel more and more. The brilliancy of the universal and prolonged success which has given the European the idea that he has a right to despise others and to proclaim the fact-the glories which have followed in the wake. of his progress and conquests are getting sadly dimmed in the light of a fuller understanding of the Gospel of Christ. Under the searching criticisms of rising intellects imbued with the essence of a Christian philosophy and influenced by the spirit of a science properly so called, those brutal instincts which received the eulogiums of the past are finding their proper recognition as elements of character to be reprobated and suppressed. The Bosworth Smiths of to-day are superseding the Carlyles of yesterday. Might no longer makes right. The motto on the British coat-of-arms is being slightly altered-not "God and my Right," but "God and the Right." Whatever "smacks of saltpeter" is being deprecated and condemned. eloquent author of "Carthage and the Carthaginians: Says the It is equally reprehensible, whether it be the plunder of half of Europe by the representative of one of its most enlightened nations, the arch-robber of modern times, Napoleon, or the sack of a Chinese palace by those whom the Chinese had a right, in this instance at least, to style barbarians. If good men and great nations have hitherto often followed the example of Cicero in drawing a broad contrast between the extortions of a Verres and the high-handed plunder of Marcellus, a Warren Hastings, or a Napoleon, it is because they have not yet reached the moral standard which condemns the public robber; they look askance only at a thief. t History, then, as it is read by the thinking negro, will not diminish the vehemence of his protest against the injustice of being regarded by the European as belonging to a "despised race," nor lessen the grounds of his desire to reciprocate the Lord Salisbury's Speech in the House of Lords, 1879. "Carthage and the Carthaginians." By R. Bosworth Smith, M.A., Assistant Master in Harrow School, etc. London: Longmans, Green, & Co. 1878. When Dr. Johnson expressed a hope that he might never hear of the Punic Wars again he never anticipated any thing like this brilliant and charming work-this startling investment in flesh and blood of the dry bones of Carthaginian history. |