The American Missionary | Page 4

blessing to others.
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IMMIGRANTS AND NEGROES.
The Immigrant question challenges attention. Shall immigrants be welcomed, restricted or prohibited? In the early days of the Republic, when the revolutionary war had welded the people together and our boundless territory begged for occupancy, we welcomed the oppressed of all nations. Later, the welcome has been responded to by such a rushing, heterogeneous and even dangerous mass that we are compelled to pause. Restriction is talked of, but the line of discrimination is hard to be fixed. No committee at Castle Garden can detect anarchists, criminals, or even the poor, if that line should be chosen. Prohibition--exclusion is talked of--nay, is enacted stringently against the Chinese. If need be, it may extend to all. So there is a way of averting this evil.
But the Negro question cannot be put away. The Negroes are here. They outnumber the immigrants that have come to our shores in the last thirty years, and have a foothold upon the soil as valid as the Aryan race, whether we consider the date of their coming or the labor they have put upon the land.
There is a strange disposition to shrink from the Negro question. Some avoid it by flippantly denying the danger; others turn from it because they are appalled by it. Thus an able writer on Immigration in a recent number of the Century passes the topic with this awe-stricken remark: "This problem (of the Negro) cannot be touched practically; ancient wrongs bind the nation hand and foot, and its outcome must be awaited as we await the gathering of the tempest--powerless to avert, and trembling over the steady approach" (The italics are ours.) This is not wise; it is not manly. Why try to avert the evils of immigration, or any other, if we are meanwhile only to await tremblingly the doom that is to come on us from the conflict with the Negro?
There is a strong disposition to gather hope from the newly-developed manufacturing interests in the South. But this is delusive. The South is essentially a rural population; the new industries will necessarily be confined to a few localities, and will reach but slightly the wide agricultural region, and will scarcely touch the Negroes. And more than all this, these industries will only be importing into the South the struggle between labor and capital, which so vexes us at the North. Instead, therefore, of solving the old difficulties at the South, they will add a new one.
The danger of a war of races is scouted at the North; it is not at the South. This is natural. The North is not in immediate contact with the danger; the South is. When the war of the rebellion was impending, the North refused to believe in its coming; and when it came, one of the wisest statesmen of the North, Mr. Seward, predicted that it would "not last sixty days." No such delusion prevailed in the South. Many of the best men there, nay, nearly all the border States, dreaded its coming and held back as long as possible, but they were swept into the flood they foresaw and could not avert.
Thoughtful men at the South now have no rose-colored views about the Negro problem. They fear the impending conflict. With them the supremacy of the white race is the settled point, but they see in the growing numbers, intelligence and restlessness of the Negroes an increasing danger that will only be aggravated by delay. Why should not the North and South alike manfully face the question of a war of races? What will it mean? What will be its end? If the whites and the blacks of the South alone engage in it, the blacks will be exterminated. Nothing less will meet the case. If the North mingle in the struggle, it must be to help the whites or the blacks. If to help the whites, that will mean the more rapid defeat and slaughter of the blacks; if the North help the blacks and save them from destruction, then we shall be worse off than we are now, the two races will be together with enmities aroused a thousand fold!
But why not face the more hopeful question: Is there a remedy? There is! The teacher and the preacher, the spelling-book and the Bible, the saviours of men, the reformers of society, the uplifters of races, are spreading over the South. They go to the manufacturing towns--the Birminghams and the Annistons--they go to the large cities with their common and normal schools, their medical, law and theological seminaries. When the pupils become teachers, they go into the smaller towns, they go into the rural districts, on the small farms, everywhere instructing, encouraging and stimulating the people, leading them to more intelligent industries, to