Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

their very existence depends on its right solution. Nor are they wholly to blame for its presence. The slaveships of the Republic sailed from your portsthe slaves worked in our fields. You will not defend the traffic, nor I the institution. But I do here declare that in its wise and humane administration, in lifting the slave to the heights of which he had not dreamed in his savage home, and giving him a happiness he has not yet found in freedomour fathers left their sons a saving and excellent heritage. In the storm of war, this institution was lost. I thank God as heartily as you do, that human slavery is gone forever from American soil. But the freedman remains, and with him a problem without precedent or padel. Note its appalling conditions. Two utterly dissimilar races on the same soil-with equal political and civil rights—almost equal in numbers, but terribly unequal in intelligence and responsibility each pledged against fusion-one for a century in servitude to the other, and freed at last by a desolating war-the experiment sought by neither but approached by both with doubt--these are the conditions. Under these, adverse at every point, we are required to carry these two races in peace and honor to the end. Never, sir, has such a task been given to mortal stewardship Never before in this Republic has the white race divided on the rights of an alien race. The red man was cut down as a weed, because he hindered the way of the American citizen. The yellow man was shut out of this Republic because he was an alien and an inferior. The red man was owner of the land-the yellow man highly civilized and assimilable-but they hindered both sections and are gone. But the black man, clothed with every privilege of government, affecting but one section, is pinned to the soil, and my people commanded to make good at any hazard, and at any cost, his full and equal heirship of American privilege and prosperity. It matters not that every other race has been routed or excluded, without rhyme or reason. It matters not

that wherever the whites and blacks have touched, in any era or in any clime, there has been irreconcilable violence. It matters not that no two races however similar have ever lived anywhere at any time, on the same soil with equal rights, in peace. In spite of these things we are commanded to make good this change of American policy which has not, perhaps, changed American prejudice-to make certain here what has elsewhere been impossible between whites and blacks-and to reverse, under the very worst conditions, the universal verdict of racial history.

We give the world this year a crop of 7,500,000 bales of cotton, worth $450,000,000, and its cash equivalent in grain, grasses, and fruit. This enormous crop could not have come from the hands of sullen and discontented labor. It comes from the peaceful fields in which laughter and gossip rise above the hum of industry, and contentment runs with the singing plow. It is claimed that this ignorant labor is defrauded of its just hire. I present the tax books of Georgia, which show that the negro, twenty-five years ago a slave, has in Georgia alone $10,000.000 of assessed property, worth twice that much. Does not that record honor him and vindicate his neighbors? What people, penniless, illiterate, has done so well? For every Afro-American agitator, stirring the strife in which alone he prospers, I can show you a hundred negroes, happy in their cabin homes, tilling their own land by day, and at night taking from the lips of their children the helpful message their State sends them from the school-house door. And the school-house itself bears testimony. In Georgia we added last year $250,000 to the school fund, making a total of more than $1,000,000--and this in the face of prejudice not yet conquered-of the fact that the whites are assessed for $368,000,000, the blacks for $10,000,000, and yet 49 per cent of the beneficiaries are black children -and in the doubt of many wise men if education

ps or can help our problem. Charleston, with her

taxable values cut half in two since 1860, pays more in proportion for public schools than Boston. Although it is easier to give much out of much, than little out of little, the South, with one-seventh of the taxable property of the country, with relatively larger debt, having received only one-tenth as much of public lands, and having back of its tax books none of the half billion of bonds that enrich the North, yet gives nearly one-sixth of the public-school fund. The negro vote can never control in the South, and it would be well if partisans at the North would understand this. I have seen the white people of a State set about by black hosts until their fate seemed sealed. But, sir, some brave man, banding them together, would rise, as Elisha rose in beleaguered Samaria, and, touching their eyes with faith, bid them look abroad to see the very air "filled with the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof." If there is any human force that cannot be withstood, it is the power of the banded intelligence and responsibility of a free community. Against it, numbers and corruption cannot prevail. It cannot be forbidden in the law or divorced in force. It is the unalterable right of every free community—the just and righteous safeguard against an ignorant or corrupt suffrage. It is on this, sir, that we rely in the South. Not the cowardly menace of mask or shotgun; but the peaceful majesty of intelligence and responsibility, massed and unified for the protection of its homes and the preservation of its liberty. That, sir, is our reliance and our hope, and against it all the powers of earth shall not prevail. You may pass force bills, but they will not avail. You may surrender your own liabilities to federal election law-this old State which holds in its charter the boast that it "is a free and independent commonwealth "-it may deliver its election machinery into the hands of the government it helped to create-but never, sir, will a single state of this Union, North or South, be delivered again to control of an ignorant and inferior race.

We wrested our State government

from negro supremacy when the Federal drum beat rolled closer to the ballot-box and Federal bayonets hedged it deeper about than will ever again be permitted in this free government. But, sir, though the cannon of this Republic thundered in every voting district of the South, we still should find in the mercy of God the means and the courage to prevent its reëstablishment-Henry W. Grady.

MORMON WIFE NUMBER ONE, ON THE ARRIVAL OF NUMBER TWENTY-ONE.

Our husband has brought home another wife,
'Twas lonesome with twenty round,

And so the church sealed in number twenty-one,
And now a new favorite is found.
She'll sit at the head of the table too,

Be foremost in everything.

Her whims will be law, and she'll be the first
To have a new bonnet next spring.

I married Joe Smith thirty years ago,
My Mormon belief was firm;

But when he brought home a second wife more,
My conscience began to squirm.

For while the Smith family were always famed
For being of numerous breed,

The thought of him having a single wife more,
Was far from my Mormon creed.

I thought, when we married, us two was one,
One flesh should the twain ever be ;
Us wives now make twenty-odd kinds of flesh,
As bad as town hash can be.

Instead of my being a better half

And queen of his home and heart,

He has brought me to one twenty-first of one-half, Or more than a forty-twoth part.

I, once a whole woman, am dwindled down
To the forty-twoth part of a man.

And what will I do, if he still goes on
Pursuing his Mormon plan?

My children's mixed up with his other wives' children,

Till now when a young one falls,
We twenty-odd mothers of ninety-three kids,
Can't tell whose it is that squalls.

He's married the sisters of wives he's got,
Till children can't tell

If ma is mother or auntie, or if their pa
Is father or uncle-in-law.

And I, who was first in his heart, am last,
Each year crowded further back.

I am growing old so fast,

And I'll die without getting a seal-skin sacque.

Last week I just asked him for twenty cents,

He looked at me cold and blank;

Then pointing to us twenty-one wives, he sighed, "D'ye think I'm a Rothschild's bank?

And now here's one more to divide us,
She'll get the lion's share,

[ocr errors]

Except when she grabs at his old bald head,
She won't get her share of hair.

But some day the angel of God will come
And the poor man must go;

How mournful the funeral rites will be
With all us widders in woe;
Our forty-two eyes a sheddin' tears,
Our ninety-three children round,
How stylishly grand the procession will be
Stretched out to the burying-ground.

And when we are all lying side by side,
Smith's grave-yard will be immense;

The children's white head-stones all in a row
Will look like a picket fence;

« AnteriorContinuar »