more closely identified in touch and bearing with the best expressions of modern civilization. They believe, despite the negro's degradation and oppression, that he is here to right his wrongs, to correct his mistakes, to train his intellect, to discipline his courage, — not for alien sequestration, but to the end that he may take and hold his rightful place in American citizenship.

CHAPTER XIII

FEASIBLE REGENERATION

THERE is a widespread conviction in the public mind, that in morals, intelligence, industry, and thrift the freed people are not what they ought to be. A difference of opinion exists as to the causes which have wrought the negro's present condition and the influences which perpetuate his degradation; nevertheless, all sensible people are agreed that we have, in the case of the freedman, a complex and grave problem. We have carefully sought to ascertain what the negro was and is, before determining what he may become, and in so doing his miserable conditions have become apparent. The American negro is in a low state of social development, with no clear sense of his degradation or of progress from it. He is self-content; with ideals grounded in his senses and excited to activity by physical causes. The negro is also in subjection to an inheritance, wherein the mental disposition, vocal expression, and physical action of parents are largely transmitted to their children, and in which there is a visibly entailed ancestral instinct for what is coarse, vulgar, and vicious in life. He is lawless by nature, and renders at best but perfunctory obedience to lawful require

ments. His persistence in resisting transformation has developed a negro social status as distinctly distasteful as it is antagonistic to sound American aims and ideals. Therefore, with the degradation of the freedmen beyond dispute, and his redemption an unaccomplished fact, the question of his regeneration requires honest and direct treatment through sincere and well-intentioned methods.

The presence of negroes in the United States creates social conditions of importance to the present and future well-being of American ethical, economic, and political existence. That such conditions may in certain states eventually precipitate questions of supremacy between African savagery and English civilization is no idle surmise. Hence a question of immediate concern to the nation is, Shall the culture and achievement of the country be materially lessened through the continued indolence and imbecility of the negro? All historical experience shows that superior and inferior civilization cannot for a long time exist in the same social organism and be perpetuated in harmonious conjunction; one or the other will be overthrown and exterminated. The negro has nothing, in word or act, worthy of preservation. Each attribute of his being is obstinately and implacably arrayed against every influence that parts him from sensuous excitement; and when he gives to any uplifting movement verbal assent, he rarely translates speech into action. Wise judgment; therefore, decrees that negro pretensions ought to be suppressed,

and his evil propensities eradicated by every available means at command, even though such efforts should end in his virtual extermination.

Now, in voicing these sober convictions we are fully aware of the opportunities the negro enjoys in the way of intellectual culture and ethical training, his carelessness of which shows how improbable it is that negroes, brought up in low conditions of life, will voluntarily rid themselves of the promptings of their inheritance. We have ample corroboration of this conclusion in the condition of the three quarters of a million of negro people who live in the North, in the very heart of its civilization, and overshadowed by its Christianity. Many of these people reside in communities where they and their ancestors have dwelt for two centuries, and where they have enjoyed unrestricted access to the best schools, churches, libraries, and the other social and civic institutions of unsurpassed worth. We therefore have a right to expect to find in these people the highest and best examples of negro development that the race affords. As a matter of fact, some of the most ignorant and degraded of the American. freedmen are among them.

No more conclusive test of racial incapacity could be applied to the negro than that furnished by the conditions cited. The recognized agencies of public improvement apparently furnish neither example nor inspiration to this people, who, contrary to every sense or reason, obviously shrink from contact with

strong, uplifting forces, and to every intent and purpose are wholly unconscious of the existence of any environment higher than their own. than their own. Nevertheless, for any sound determination of this matter, the examples furnished by Northern negroes are inconclusive. Not only have they been invested with qualities and credited with capacities they do not possess, but the essential fact has been overlooked, that they are not a self-governing people, and are as incapable of rational self-direction as children. There are those among both the black and the white people who spurn all past experience, and wilfully ignore present conditions in professing to believe that time will develop strong and stalwart virtues in the negroes though time, in itself, does nothing but bring men to dissolution and decay. There is no surer way to perpetuate the freedman's degradation than by giving credence to such beliefs. All change and growth must have a beginning. The law of human regeneration is inexorable. Now — is the dividing line betwixt life and death.

No fact is more strongly attested than that of human flexibility in mental and spiritual states: a truth to which the sober conscience of every man bears witness. There is in each person a force that moulds and determines the characteristic bent of any and all individual life. By choice and will, any man can pass from inferior to superior groups, and the reverse as well. It therefore lies within the power of the weakest of human races to acquire strong