better things. Now, the Southern common-school public entreats the Nation to help plant in every district in this illimitable realm this peculiar American institution and make it so good that it may become the center of a true American civilization and the pride and joy of millions yet unborn.

Some of our Northern people believe that national aid, as described, would injure the South. A class of social theorists oppose the common school itself on this ground, and the most specious arguments against national aid come from this quarter. I do not here argue the fundamental question, on which the American people has made up its mind. But the theory that self-help is the mainspring of public prosperity, though true in general, in this application is the right theory in the wrong place. It would help a good many ambitious and dogmatic social theorists in our country to follow their books less and study the American people more. They would learn that the American people is not to be judged by the estimate, reasonable enough, of a European peasantry, demoralized by centuries of paternal despotic government, so childish that manhood must be shot into it from a Krupp cannon or punched into it by a soldier's bayonet. The American people has a mighty digestion for every sort of material aid, and so far has grown strong and self-reliant as such aid has come. Chicago burns up in a day, takes all the money the world will give or lend, and in twenty years becomes the wonder of the continent. If our social science philosopher will get a pocketful of excursion tickets, for an outing through the fourteen Northwestern States between Niagara Falls and Alaska, he will confront an original object-lesson in national aid to American civilization that may convince him "there are more things" in the United States of America "than are dreamed of in his philosophy."

In 1788 the new American Republic accepted the gift of the vast territory now included in the five older Western States, and began that system of persistent national aid to American civilization which, stimulating the self-help of the people, has made Ohio, the oldest daughter of the Union, the rival of New York as the pivotal political State and the new West the dominant power in the Republic. The Nation offered a farm to every man who would go West, and a generous grant of lands for common schools and colleges. In 1803 the nation purchased Louisiana, from the Gulf to the crest of the great mountains, and in 1850 went into an expensive war to gain the Pacific Coast and the empire eastward. Thus, beyond the Mississippi, the Nation obtained by trade or the greater outlay of war every foot of ground to the Pacific, with new millions for Alaska. The Nation has spent who knows how much in clearing this wide realm of savages, subsidizing the great avenues of travel, lifting the valleys and leveling the mountains, over which countless swarms of people have gone in to possess the new paradise. In the civil war it made new grants for agricultural and mechanical colleges, and gave millions of money and valuable public properties for the schooling of the freedmen. More than one Western State has bottomed its school fund on the distributed surplus revenue of 1836. The old East has poured money into the West for half a century, to build churches and schools. In every way American enterprise and Christian philanthropy could suggest, the new West has been crammed and rammed and coaxed and prodded with material aid from this and every land. Now, our philosopher will, of course, expect to find these fourteen States the most thoroughly "demoralized" portion of the Union. He will learn that Western American life does not adjust itself to the little formulas that seem so comprehensive to a portion of our speculative "scholars in politics," for these fourteen States, which have received more outside aid for education than any people on earth, have done and are now doing more than any other people for the training of their youth. Their common-school system, with its upper-story high and normal school and State university, spite of its defects, is the broadest system of public instruction and training for free citizenship in Christendom. Where would our imperial Western country have been had this petty crotchet of the new social philosophy, now the favorite dogma of some of our circles of exclusive culture, been the law of public 8819-17

economy for the past seventy-five years? The moving power of American civilization is self-help, generonsly aided by public encouragement, to deal with the broadening opportunities of American life.

Our sixteen Southern States are becoming the new opening land of the Republic. The original settlement was chiefly in the garden spots, and left the amazing mineral, manufacturing, and other resources of these mighty Commonwealths almost untouched. The supreme need of the South is a big lift from the whole country to get on the ground an educational arrangement that, in due time, shall hoist its laboring class to something like the intelligence and skill of the rest of the Union. Till that is done the South is a strong man chained to a live-oak tree in a Louisiana swamp. That achieved, immigration with capital flows in; and the splendid drama of Western civilization is repeated to the inspiring strains of "Hail Columbia," from Washington to California.

This is the Southern educational situation, its achievements, necessities, and prospects as I see it. I need not repeat that it forces upon us a problem too great for solution by any spasmodic effort. No famous man, no religious sect, no system of private aid can do for the South what its progressive educational public assures us must be done. This mighty work-the gradual uplifting of the lower story of civilization in sixteen States-has already been well inaugurated by the Southern educational public. It is because that home public has done and is doing so much that I plead with the people of the North and the Nation to extend the helping hand. For, in all these movements that involve the national life, we shall lean on broken reeds while we depend on sects and parties, the low self-interest of commerce, or the amiable whims of society for deliverance. Under the gracious Providence which has never forgotten this Republic we must rely on the American people, moving all together, to do a work so immense in extent, at best so gradual in its results on the Nation's life. And by the people in this connection I mean the whole American people, slowly instructed, elevated, and guided in the ways of justice, freedom, religion, and intelligent power by that growing public everywhere that discerns the real signs of the times. Then, from State and Nation shall come up a sublime response to the majestic words, written in the memorable ordinance that gave civic life to the new Northwest: 66 Religion, morality, and knowledge being essential to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall be forever encouraged."

V.

THE NEGRO AMERICAN CITIZEN IN THE NEW AMERICAN LIFE.

An address delivered at the conference on the Negro, Lake Mohonk, N. Y., July, 1890.

During the past ten years of a ministry of education among the Southern people in all the Southern States, I have been often challenged to formulate my opinion concerning the present condition and future outcome of the Negro. My invariable answer is: I have come to this portion of the country as an out-and-out advocate of the universal education of the heart, the head, and the hand possible for all orders and conditions of the American people. I believe the Christian religion, as it lay in the mind and shone forth in the speech and life of the great Teacher and Savior of man, includes this idea of education. All the progress this world has seen out of old pagan conditions of race, caste, society, and government, has been the work of this mighty regenerating influence. I hold it the deadliest treason and revolt against the Christian civilization, a backing down into paganism, or a worse lapse into the slough of despond of absolute atheism and secularism, to impeach the power of this divine agency to cure all our American ills.

I began my present ministry of education ten years ago, in the Southern States, in full faith in this gospel of the reconstruction of the whole Republic from "the remainder of wrath" that still vexes its progress and looms like a black despair over its least advanced portion. And, although I can not pretend to have converted or convinced anybody, I have seen with what an uplifting of the soul the better sort of the Southern people welcome any man who, in honesty of purpose, love of country and of all his countrymen, endeavors to get down to the bottom facts of the situation, with a just appreciation of the position of all true men, and with an invincible hope and a holy obstinacy in standing by the bright side of God's providence in American affairs. The fact that one man can go through all these States, among all classes, everywhere testifying to the grandeur of the full American idea and urging the people to live up to the vision of the fathers, with all but universal acceptation, so that the discords in this ministry have hardly been enough to emphasize the harmonies, is to me an assurance that the same line of work, assumed by a greater man and finally adopted by the influential classes of our people, will shape the highway out of the present complications.

My only recipe for the solution of all these problems that still divide the country is the putting on of that judicial and resolute Christian attitude of mind that insists on looking at all the facts of the case, setting them in their proper relations, all the time searching for the elements of progress which are the vital centers. It seems to me that a great portion of the misunderstanding and conflict at present is the result of a practical inability in the masses of the people to rise to this position and the mischievous pertinacity of too many leaders of public opinion everywhere in keeping the national mind engrossed with the temporary and unessential facts of the case. With no disposition to misrepresent or misunderstand anybody, I respond to your call to tell my experience as an observer of the Southern situation, especially as it concerns the Negro citizen in the sixteen Southern States of the Union, as I have seen him during a virtual residence in these States for ten years past.

It would seem that thoughtful Christian people might at least endeavor to realize the simple gospel rule of "doing as they would be done by" in the judgment of each other in an affair so momentous, where mistakes are fraught with such mournful possibilities as in this great discussion. It is easy to see how much of the difficulty comes from this inability to "put one's self in the place" of his opponent.

Would it not be possible for a larger number of our foremost Southern leaders, in church, state, and society, to try to appreciate the motives and temper of the loyal people of the North in the great act of conferring full American citizenship on the Negro, after his emancipation, 25 years ago? I do not defend any injustice, tyranny, reckless experimenting with government itself, that followed that act; no thoughtful man defends such things to-day; but I do hold that no true conception of this matter can be had by any man who honestly believes that this exaltation of the Negro to full American citizenship was either an act of sectional revenge, a narrow and ferocious partisan policy, or the reckless experiment of an excited sentimentalism. If ever a people, in a great and national emergency, acted under a solemn sense of responsibility to God, humanity, patriotism, and republican institutions, I believe the conviction of the loyal Northern people, that shaped the acts of reconstruction, is entitled to this judgment, and will so abide in history. It was the most memorable testimony of a national government, just rescued from desperate peril, solemnized by the death of its venerated leader, to its faith in popular institutions recorded in the annals of mankind.

But it must be acknowledged that the very nobility of the act that conferred the highest earthly distinction of full American citizenship on a nation of newly emancipated slaves, of an alien race, involved the penalty of great injustice to its object. It was inevitable that the Nation, having committed itself to this daring experiment, would watch its success from an ideal point of observation. So, for the past twenty years, one misfortune of the negro citizen has been that the portion of the country that won his freedom and lifted him to this proud eminence could do no otherwise than judge him out of its own lofty expectation, piecing out its almost complete ignorance of any similar people or situation by repeated drafts on a boundless hope, an almost childlike trust, and a deep religious faith, proven by the cheerful giving of $50,000,000 and the sacrifice of the service of noble men and women of priceless value in the effort to realize the great expectation of the Nation.

Again, is it more than plain justice that the leading mind of the loyal North, that saved the Union to nationality and freedom in 1865, should endeavor to represent to itself the actual point of view of the Southern people concerning this act of reconstruction then and, to a great extent, in the present time? I know that the most painful lesson of history is the difficulty of such comprehension of an aristocratic form of society by a people for a century trained in the school of a prond and successful democracy. Not one educated man in a thousand in the United States can put himself in the place of one of the great Tory leaders or scholars of Great Britain or listen with anything but impatience to the account that any European government or the Catholic Church can give of itself. How much more difficult for the average New England or Western citizen to understand the attitude of mind with which an old Southern planter or a modern Southern politician must contemplate this sudden and portentous upheaving of 5,000,000 freedmen to the complete endowment of American citizenship at the close of the great war.

For surely, at first sight, no body of 5,000,000 people could be imagined less qualified by its past to justify such expectations than the negro freedmen. Three hundred years ago the Negro was a pagan savage, inhabiting a continent still dark with the shadow of an unrecorded past. A hundred years ago the ancestors perhaps of a majority of the 7,000,000 Negroes now in the United States were in the same condition. Of no people on the face of the earth is so little known to-day as of the African ancestors of the American Negro. Of various tribes, nationalities, and characteristics, perhaps with an ancestry as varied as the present inhabitants of the European na

tionalities, these people were cast into a state of slavery which confounded all previous conditions and only recognized the native ability of each man or woman in "the survival of the fittest" in the struggle for existence on the plantation and in the household.

Once more: It has never been realized by the loyal North, what is evident to every intelligent Southern man, what a prodigious change had been wrought in this people during its years of bondage, and how without the schooling of this era the subse. quent elevation of the emancipated slave to full American citizenship would have been an impossibility. During this brief period of tutelage, briefest of all compared with any European race, the Negro was sheltered from the three furies of the prayer book-sword, pestilence, and famine-and was brought into contact with the upper strata of the most powerful of civilized peoples, in a republic, amid the trials, sacrifices, and educating influences of a new country, in the opening years of "the grand and awful time" in which our lot is cast. In that condition he learned the three great elements of civilization more speedily than they were ever learned before. He learned to work. He acquired the language and adopted the religion of the most progressive of peoples. Gifted with a marvelous aptitude for such schooling, he was found, in 1865, farther "out of the woods " of barbarism than any other people at the end of a thousand years. The American Indian, in his proud isolation, repelled all these beneficent changes; and to-day the entire philanthropy, religion, and statesmanship of the Republic are wrestling with the problem of saving him from the fate of the buffalo.

I find only in the broad-minded and most charitable leaders of our Northern affairs any real understanding of the inevitable habit of mind which the average Southern citizen brings to the contemplation of the actual condition or possibilities of the negro American citizen. With a personal attachment to the Negro greater than is possible for the people of the North; with habits of forbearance and patient waiting on the infirmities, vices, and shortcomings of this people, which to the North are unaccountable and well nigh impossible of imitation; with the general willingness to cooperate, as far as the comfort and the personal prosperity of its old slaves are concerned, is it strange that this act of statesmanship should appear to him as the wildest and most reckless experiment in the annals of national life? Even the most intelligent and conservative parent finds it difficult to believe his beloved child is competent to the duties of manhood or womanhood, and only with a pang does he see the dear boy or girl launch out on the stormy ocean of life. What, then, would be the inevitable feeling of the dominant Southern class, to whom the Negro had only been known as a savage slowly evolving into the humbler strata of civilization as a dependent chattel, when, at the end of a frightful war, it found itself in a state of civil subjugation to its old bondmen? No subject race ever reveals its highest aspirations and aptitudes to its master race, and it is not remarkable that only the most observing and broad-minded of the Southern people, even yet, heartily believe in the capacity of the Negro for civil, social, or industrial coöperation with any of the European peoples.

Now, say what we will, this obstinate inability and sometimes unwillingness to put one's self in the place of the opposition have been the most hopeless feature of the case, the real "chasm" between the leading minds of the North and South. So to-day, while even partisan politics seems to pause in uncertainty on the steep edge of a dark abyss, when noble and humane people all over the country seem to be falling into despondency, when an ominous twilight, threatening a storm, is peopled by all the birds of ill omen, and "the hearts of men are shaken with fear," I am glad that we have been summoned here to look things squarely in the face, to bring a varied experience to bear on a new and more careful consideration of the whole matter, and by the guidance of a Christian insight endeavor to see the hopeful elements of the situation. We do not need to rehearse our separate knowlege of the shadowy side of the new South. The shadows we have always with us, every