I have not
attempted in this book to deal adequately with the question of the
negro. I have refrained for a reason that may seem somewhat sensational;
that I do not think I have anything particularly valuable to say or
suggest. I do not profess to understand this singularly dark and
intricate matter; and I see no use in men who have no solution filling
up the gap with sentimentalism. The chief thing that struck me about the
coloured people I saw was their charming and astonishing cheerfulness.
My sense of pathos was appealed to much more by the Red Indians; and
indeed I wish I had more space here to do justice to the Red Indians.
They did heroic service in the war; and more than justified their
glorious place in the day-dreams and nightmares of our boyhood. But the
negro problem certainly demands more study than a sight-seer could give
it; and this book is controversial enough about things that I have
really considered, without permitting it to exhibit me as a sight-seer
who shoots at sight. But I believe that it was always common ground to
people of common sense that the enslavement and importation of negroes
had been the crime and catastrophe of American history. The only
difference was originally that one side thought that, the crime once
committed, the only reparation was their freedom; while the other
thought that, the crime once committed, the only safety was their
slavery. It was only comparatively lately, by a process I shall have to
indicate elsewhere, that anything like a positive case for slavery
became possible. Now among the many problems of the presence of an alien
and at least recently barbaric figure among the citizens, there was a
very real problem of drink. Drink certainly has a very exceptionally
destructive effect upon negroes in their native countries; and it was
alleged to have a peculiarly demoralising effect upon negroes in the
United States; to call up the passions that are the particular
temptation of the race and to lead to appalling outrages that are
followed by appalling popular vengeance. However this may be, many of
the states of the American Union, which first forbade liquor to
citizens, meant simply to forbid it to negroes. But they had not the
moral courage to deny that negroes are citizens. About all their
political expedients necessarily hung the load that hangs so heavy on
modern politics; hypocrisy. The superior race had to rule by a sort of
secret society organised against the infe