Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/273

This page needs to be proofread.
THE NEGRO
249

cated as a solution of the race problem the establish- ment in the Philippines of a negro State, where no white man should be allowed to vote. He said in part: The experiment of political equality has had thirty- eight years of trial, backed by the power of the Fed- eral Government, and by the sympathy of the world. It has failed. From the beginning to the hour that holds us, it has failed. " The races are wider apart and more antagonistic than they were in 1865. There is less of sympathy, and more of tension than the races have known since the terrible days of reconstruction made chaos in the South. " Four decades after his emancipation, the negro is in point of fact less a freeman and infinitely less a citi- zen than he was in 1868. The tumult of the times about us proclaims the continued existence and the unreconciled equations of the problem that he makes, and in the common judgment of mankind the legend failure is written large and lowering above the tot- tering fabric of his civil rights. " A Chinese wall of prejudice shuts out the South on this question from the sympathy of the American people, and although fraternal platitudes may cross it, and political affiliations may scale it, and commer- cial interchange may run its electric wires under and above it, and although but recently military loyalty has seemed to shatter it, this wall stands, in the sight of God and of nations, and hedges in the South as a separate and peculiar people, hindered with misappre- hension, held aloof in prejudice, and fretted by a criti- cism which, if sometimes founded in philanthropy, is too often expressed in passion and answered in bit- terness. " And so long as the problem stands the old slave States of the South, unwillingly, protestingly, despair- ingly, and yet inevitably, must be and will be the con- tinuing gap in the magnificent line of our National unity.