第179章

I confess that this cry of abolition has been made peculiarly displeasing to me by the fact that the Northern abolitionist is by no means willing to give even to the negro who is already free that position in the world which alone might tend to raise him in the scale of human beings--if anything can so raise him and make him fit for freedom. The abolitionists hold that the negro is the white man's equal. I do not. I see, or think that I see, that the negro is the white man's inferior through laws of nature. That he is not mentally fit to cope with white men--I speak of the full-blooded negro--and that he must fill a position simply servile. But the abolitionist declares him to be the white man's equal. But yet, when he has him at his elbow, he treats him with a scorn which even the negro can hardly endure. I will give him political equality, but not social equality, says the abolitionist. But even in this he is untrue. A black man may vote in New York, but he cannot vote under the same circumstances as a white man. He is subjected to qualifications which in truth debar him from the poll. A white man votes by manhood suffrage, providing he has been for one year an inhabitant of his State; but a man of color must have been for three years a citizen of the State, and must own a property qualification of 50l. free of debt. But political equality is not what such men want, nor indeed is it social equality. It is social tolerance and social sympathy, and these are denied to the negro. An American abolitionist would not sit at table with a negro. He might do so in England at the house of an English duchess, but in his own country the proposal of such a companion would be an insult to him. He will not sit with him in a public carriage, if he can avoid it. In New York I have seen special street cars for colored people. The abolitionist is struck with horror when he thinks that a man and a brother should be a slave; but when the man and the brother has been made free, he is regarded with loathing and contempt. All this Icannot see with equanimity. There is falsehood in it from the beginning to the end. The slave, as a rule, is well treated--gets all he wants and almost all he desires. The free negro, as a rule, is ill treated, and does not get that consideration which alone might put him in the worldly position for which his advocate declares him to be fit. It is false throughout, this preaching.

The negro is not the white man's equal by nature. But to the free negro in the Northern States this inequality is increased by the white man's hardness to him.

In a former book which I wrote some few years since, I expressed an opinion as to the probable destiny of this race in the West Indies.

I will not now go over that question again. I then divided the inhabitants of those islands into three classes--the white, the black, and the colored, taking a nomenclature which I found there prevailing. By colored men I alluded to mulattoes, and all those of mixed European and African blood. The word "colored," in the States, seems to apply to the whole negro race, whether full-blooded or half-blooded. I allude to this now because I wish to explain that, in speaking of what I conceive to be the intellectual inferiority of the negro race, I allude to those of pure negro descent--or of descent so nearly pure as to make the negro element manifestly predominant. In the West Indies, where I had more opportunity of studying the subject, I always believed myself able to tell a negro from a colored man. Indeed, the classes are to a great degree distinct there, the greater portion of the retail trade of the country being in the hands of the colored people. But in the States I have been able to make no such distinction. One sees generally neither the rich yellow of the West Indian mulatto nor the deep oily black of the West Indian negro. The prevailing hue is a dry, dingy brown--almost dusty in its dryness. I have observed but little difference made between the negro and the half-caste--and no difference in the actual treatment. I have never met in American society any man or woman in whose veins there can have been presumed to be any taint of African blood. In Jamaica they are daily to be found in society.

Every Englishman probably looks forward to the accomplishment of abolition of slavery at some future day. I feel as sure of it as Ido of the final judgment. When or how it shall come, I will not attempt to foretell. The mode which seems to promise the surest success and the least present or future inconvenience, would be an edict enfranchising all female children born after a certain date, and all their children. Under such an arrangement the negro population would probably die out slowly--very slowly. What might then be the fate of the cotton fields of the Gulf States, who shall dare to say? It may be that coolies from India and from China will then have taken the place of the negro there, as they probably will have done also in Guiana and the West Indies.