Black and White | Page 8

such uprisings of races and classes reduced to a condition of absolute
despair. The American negro is no better and no worse than the Haytian
revolutionists headed by Toussaint l'Overture, Christophe and the
bloody Dessalaines.
I do not indulge in the luxury of prophecy when I declare that the

American people are fostering in their bosoms a spirit of rebellion
which will yet shake the pillars of popular government as they have
never before been shaken, unless a wiser policy is inaugurated and
honestly enforced. All the indications point to the fulfillment of such
declaration.
The Czar of Russia squirms upon his throne, not because he is
necessarily a bad man, but because he is the head and center of a
condition of things which squeezes the life out of the people. His
subjects hurl infernal machines at the tyrant because he represents the
system which oppresses them. But the evil is far deeper than the throne,
and cannot be remedied by striking the occupant of it-the throne itself
must be rooted out and demolished. So the Irish question has a more
powerful motive to foment agitation and murder than the landlord and
landlordism. The landlord simply stands out as the representative of the
real grievance. To remove him would not remove the evil; agitation
would not cease; murder would still stalk abroad at noonday. The real
grievance is the false system which makes the landlord possible. The
appropriation of the fertile acres of the soil of Ireland, which created
and maintains a privileged class, a class that while performing no labor,
wrings from the toiler, in the shape of rents, so much of the produce of
his labor that he cannot on the residue support himself and those
dependent upon him aggravates the situation. It is this system which
constitutes the real grievance and makes the landlord an odious loafer
with abundant cash and the laborer a constant toiler always upon the
verge of starvation. Evidently, therefore, to remove the landlord and
leave the system of land monopoly would not remove the evil. Destroy
the latter and the former would be compelled to go.
Herein lies the great social wrong which has turned the beautiful roses
of freedom into thorns to prick the hands of the black men of the South;
which made slavery a blessing, paradoxical as it may appear, and
freedom a curse. It is this great wrong which has crowded the cities of
the South with an ignorant pauper population, making desolate fields
that once bloomed "as fair as a garden of the Lord," where now the
towering oak and pine-tree flourish, instead of the corn and cotton
which gladdened the heart and filled the purse. It was this gigantic

iniquity which created that arrogant class who have exhausted the
catalogue of violence to obtain power and the lexicon of sophistry for
arguments to extenuate the exceeding heinousness of crime. How could
it be otherwise? To tell a man he is free when he has neither money nor
the opportunity to make it, is simply to mock him. To tell him he has
no master when he cannot live except by permission of the man who,
under favorable conditions, monopolizes all the land, is to deal in the
most tantalizing contradiction of terms. But this is just what the United
States did for the black man. And yet because he has not grown learned
and wealthy in twenty years, because he does not own broad acres and
a large bank account, people are not wanting who declare he has no
capacity, that he is improvident by nature and mendacious from
inclination.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment
for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist
within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.--Art.
XIII. Sec. 1 of the Constitution.
[4] All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to
the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the
State in which they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law
which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the
United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or
property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its
jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws--XIVth Amendment,
Section 1.
[5] The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied
or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account of race,
color, or previous condition of servitude.--XVth Amendment, Sec. 1.
[6] While I write these lines, the daily newspapers furnish the following
paragraph. It is but one of the waifs that are to be found in the
newspapers day by day. There is always