Black and White | Page 4

"great
unwashed" majority, but individuals as well, who prefer to ride upon
the wave of success as the champions of great wrongs rather than to go
into retirement as the champions of just principles. The voice of the
Charmer is all too powerful to be successfully resisted.
Republics have always been fruitful of demagogues. Such vermin find
the soil of democratic government the most fertile and congenial for
their operations, because the audiences to which they speak, the
passions to which they appeal, are not always of the most reflective,
humane or enlightened. Demagogues are the parasites of republics; and
that our country is afflicted with an abnormal number of them is to be
expected from the tentative nature of our institutions, the extent of our
territory and the heterogeneity of our vast population.
Under our government all the peoples of the world find shelter and
protection--save the African (who was formerly used as a beast of
burden and now as a football, to be kicked by one faction and kicked

back by the other) and the industrious Chinaman, who was barred out
by the over-obsequiousness of the Congress of the nation, in deference
to the Sand-Lot demagogues of the Pacific coast, headed by Denis
Kearney, because it was desirable to conciliate their votes, even at the
expense of consistency and the unity of the Constitution. That great
document, while constantly affirmed to be the most broad and liberal
compact ever devised for the governance of man, has always been
found to be narrow enough to serve the purposes of the slave oligarch
and the make-shifts of the party in power; and has always afforded
ample shelter and protection to the lazzaroni of Italy, the paupers of
Ireland, and the incendiary spirits of other countries, but yet cannot
shield a black man, a citizen and to the manor born, in any common,
civil or political right which usually attaches to citizenship.
A putative citizen of the United States commits murder in the
jurisdiction of a friendly power, and the Chief Executive of fifty
millions of people deems it incumbent upon him as the head of the
faction to which he belongs to "call the attention of Congress" to the
fact, ostensibly in the interest of justice and fair-play, but obviously to
court the good will of the American sympathizers of the assassin.
While on the contrary, within a few hundred miles of the National
capital, an armed mob of citizens shoot down in cold blood a dozen of
their fellow-citizens, but the Chief of the Nation did not deem it at all
pertinent or necessary to "call the attention of Congress" to the matter.
And why? Because, forsooth, the newspapers, voicing the wishes of the
rabble and the cormorants of trade, cry down the "Bloody Shirt,"
proclaiming, with brazen effrontery, that each State is "sovereign," and
that its citizens have a perfect right to terrorize and murder one another,
if they so desire. The Bible declares that "Righteousness exalteth a
nation; but sin is a reproach to any people." God save the Union!
But such argument is indicative, not only of American politics but of
Caucasian human nature as well--that human nature which seldom rises
above self-interest in business or politics. If you have abundance of
money, the merchant is all accommodation, the lawyer all smiles; if
you have votes that count, politicians cannot be too obsequious, too
affable, too anxious to serve you. But if you simply have common

humanity, clothed in the awful majesty of a just cause, you appeal in
vain to the cormorants of trade, the harpies of law, or the demagogues
of power. Unless you are of the salt salty, unless you are clothed in
broadcloth and fine linen, you cannot obtain even a respectful hearing.
It took the Abolitionists full thirty years to convince the American
people, the ministry of Christ included, that slavery was, pure and
simple, a "Covenant with death and an agreement with hell;" and then,
sad to say, they were convinced against their wills. Their sense of
justice had become so obtuse as to wholly blunt the sense of reason, the
brotherly sympathy of a common race-feeling, and the broad, liberal
and just inculcations of Jesus Christ. The nation was sunk to the moral
turpitude of Constantinople; and not even a John crying in the
wilderness could arouse it to a sense of the exceeding foulness in the
midst of which it grovelled, or of the storm gathering on the distant
horizon.
Although the abolition of slavery had been agitated for more than thirty
years, the nation, which was ruled by politicians of the usual mental
caliber, was startled at the defiant shot upon Fort Sumter--the shot that
echoed the downfall of the foulest institution which has sapped the
vitality of any