The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-05-27

is not necessarily physical; it may De
 moral: but contact with the white man is necessary to keep the negro rom retrogression. He has never invented anything-not letters, nor arts. nor aI chitecture. nor has he voluntarily adopted anything, except rum and nre- arms. He taught himself to handle im- plements and weapons, both or the ruo- est and most elementary kind; and ne can talk.
 There his development stops. In ar chftecture he has not progressed beyond the cave, the hove1 and the nest. In letters he has not devised a symbol for sound. Tn science his digits represent the sum total of his capacity for com putation. Art poetry. music--it Is the same old story! Religion, law, meoi- cine-today the natives of Uganda are perishing by thousands from strange epid .naic known as the sleeping sick ness" The prevailing scientific con viction is that it Is caused by pois- onous insect of the mosquito species. to whose attacks the negro is pecu- liarly exposed from the fact that, un- like the Hindoo, for example, he has not yet got so far as to invent garments and cover his nakedness. And the worst of 1t Is that, being thus, he is stationary. The instinct as well as the desire for development is lacking Such being the indisputabie fact, Baker, writing in 1865. closes his long emu meration of conditions with startling corollary: 50 long as 1t Is generally considered that the negro and the white man are to be governed by the same laws and guided by the same manage ment so long will the former remain a thorn in the side of every community to which he may unhappily belong"
 If true, this strikes at the very root of our American polity-the equality of man sfore the law. We can not conform to it. If the fact must be con ceded.-so much the worse for the fact; by all good Americans at least the the ory will none the less be maintained, the principle confidently asserted. We are thus confronted by condition. The existence of an uneradicable and in- surmountable race difference is indis- putable. The white man and the black man can not flourish together, the lat ter being considerable In number, under the same system of government. Draw ing apart, they will assuredly become antagonistlc An opposite theory can be maintained, and will work with more or less friction where the white greatly dominates, and the black element is negligible quantity; when, however, the black predorninates, the theory breaks down, and some practical solution Is reached not in conformity with It. As Hamlet was led to observe In quite different connection, This was some- time a paradox, but now the time gives it proof"
 What, then, Is to be our American outcome? The negro squats at our hearthstone; we can neither assimilate nor expel him. The situation in Egypt Is comparatively simple. The country will be developed by European money and brain; and the African will find his natural place in the outcome. Facts ed in harmony with them. VIII the results reached there react on us In America? Who now can say? The problem is intricate; the work done by those who were in political control at the close of our civil war was work done in utter ignorance of ethnologic law and total disregard of unalterable fact. Starting the movement wrong. 1t will be yet productive of incalculable injury to us. The negro, after eman- cipation, should have been dealt with, not as political equal, much less forced into a position of superiority: he should have been treated as a ward and dependent, firmly, but in a spirit of kindness and absolute justice. Practi- cally impossible as policy then, this Is not less so now. At best, 1t Is some- thing which can only be slowly and tentatively approxirnated Neverthe- less, fl Is not easy for one at all ob- servant to come back from Egypt and the Soudan without a strong suspicion that we will in America make small D -ogress towards a solution of our race problem until we approach 1t in less of a theoretic and humanitarian and more of 8 scientific spirit. Equality re- suits not from law, but exists because things are in essentials like; and a po- litical system which works admirably when applied to homogeneous equals re- suits only In chaos when generalized into a nostrum to be administered uni versally. It has been markedly so of late with us.