Part 4

Now, my friends, we have gained one thing in the history of our treatment of the Indian, and we have gained one thing in the history of our treatment of the negro. It has been demonstrated by a sufficient number of individual instances that both these races, having their own peculiarities and their own defects, as the white man has his own peculiarities and his own defects, are fit for civilization, for law, for education, for the family, for the home, for the arts and the industries which belong to civilization and peace. Take the case of the negro, whom we have not all learned to respect as we should. I sat in the House of Representatives with seven members of the negro race, and you could not find seven men in that House, chosen on any principle of selection, who were the equals of those seven men, or who certainly were their superiors, in everything that indicated the conduct of an honorable, sensible and capable representative of the people. I should like to have you take the Congressional Record, and read the speeches of the old slave-masters, and then put by their side the speeches of the slaves! Why, the great orator and statesman of the Southern Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, when he came back to the public service, announced weeks beforehand a speech that he proposed to make upon a political question of the day. The House and the country were in expectation. Mr. Stephens gave months of his best thought and his best care to the preparation of that speech; and when he finished delivering it, a full-blooded negro got up, and, on the moment, answered the argument which had been made by the great champion of the slave-holding race and overthrew it. When our illustrious senator died, his eulogy was pronounced throughout the land from the lips of orator and poet and friend. Massachusetts called to her service, perhaps, the two most brilliant and accomplished orators in the country, Mr. Curtis and Mr. Schurz; and still the one eulogy of Charles Sumner which more than any other deserves to go down into literature and to be found in the school-books of coming generations, is that pronounced by Robert B. Elliot, of South Carolina. It is too late. If you do not educate these black people, it is not because they are your inferiors; it is because, in your selfishness and greed, you prefer to do something else with your money than to expend it for the benefit of these American citizens.

But, my friends, as I have said, I did not come here to enter upon an argument in behalf of a cause in which this audience, at least, is already enlisted. I come to express to you nothing but gratitude, nothing but hope. It is no time for despair. I notice that our friends, especially the clergymen who spoke to us, reexamined, somewhat, the foundations of our religious faith in their speeches, as if they thought that science or unbelief had shaken a little the strength of the old faith in the minds of men. I don’t believe it. Undoubtedly, modern science has stripped our religious faith of some of the frame-work, of some of the imagery, of some of the associations with which the vision and the imagination of our early childhood had surrounded it; but it seems to me that, judging as we should judge of the progress of mankind, by the state and depth of its religious faith, and by the perfectness of its obedience to the moral law, humanity reached its high-water mark on the day of President Garfield’s funeral. Three thousand millions of mankind, at the same hour, in this country and across the sea, bowed their heads in a common grief and rose up to do a common honor to the simple qualities of love, courage, religious faith, obedience to the will of God, exhibited by one man and by one woman whom freedom had called to her high places.

Why, my friends, you know how it is. Every speaker and every auditor knows how an emotion is multiplied by the size of the audience that feels it. You utter a jest to your neighbor which will hardly create a smile, or you make a remark with pathos in it, which will hardly move him; but say the same thing to a great audience of three or four thousand people, and in every man’s heart that feeling is multiplied and intensified by the knowledge that the same feeling is experienced by every other person. You all know how that is. Now, science, the telegraph and the press enabled the emotion of human sorrow, at the time of Garfield’s funeral, to be felt over the entire civilized world. Do you think, speaking of science having injured the cause of religion or Christianity, that the telegraph and the printing-press are the products of cold, hard science—that there is no religion or morality in them? Yet, of what evil passion would they have rendered the service of conveying it to the whole of mankind at once? Could any base man, could any mere intellectual power, could any man of wealth, could any Napoleon, could any conqueror, have swayed mankind as this simple President of ours and his wife did on that day? The power in this universe that makes for evil, and the power in this universe that makes for righteousness, measured their forces. A poor, feeble fiend shot off his feeble bolt; a single human life was stricken down; and, lo, a throb of Divine love thrills a planet!

But, my friends, those of us, young or old, who are enlisted in the service of God’s moral law, who pour out their wealth or do their work in life in obedience to the doctrine, “He that hath done it unto the least of one of these, hath done it unto Me,” works in the service of the Master, who never will be shaken on His throne, and whose rewards are sure.

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EXTRACTS OF ADDRESSES RELATING TO GENERAL WORK.

VALUE OF CONSECRATION.—Christ honors alabaster boxes that are broken, and in a moment their costly ointment is shed forth and lost forever. He honors a service not according to its commercial value, not according to the results that appear in the reports of societies, but he honors a sacrifice for the purity of the principle in which it is made and the completeness of soul with which it is rendered. I believe that the church is a unit; I believe that the church is one—the body of Christ, and that Christ calls upon his body to be a living sacrifice to himself. As any blemish on the lamb that was brought to the temple for offering neutralized its value, so any blemish in our hearts, in the withholding of a complete self-sacrifice, is a blemish on that “living sacrifice” which the Lord Jesus Christ calls upon us and prompts us to make. Nay, more, I believe that the very offering of one has its effect upon all, and that there is this vicarious suffering and this vicarious holiness, and that God Almighty looks down into the dark places of the world, and He regards those places a little less dark and a little less dreadful when He sees the light of one poor flame burning upon one solitary altar.

Let this, then, be the principle on which you go. You can do very little; we individually do very little in this world; but you can put yourself into it, you can give yourself to it, and then you have made the grandest possible consecration and offering.—_Rev. E. N. Packard._

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THE REWARD OF WORK FOR THE LOWLY.—I remember to have read of a traveler who was shipwrecked. He seemed to have been a dissolute, young Englishman, though of culture enough to read and write. He was held captive on one of the South Sea islands for several years, the natives keeping him out of sight whenever a vessel was near-by. They saw that he was of a superior culture to themselves, and they had built him a hut and given him everything to make him happy. They waited on his instructions and he taught them many things, and for years he had blessed them as much as a dissolute, immoral man could. Finally, however, he managed to escape. One day he saw a ship approaching the island, and he got behind some rocks and put off in a canoe. The natives saw him and made after him. It was a race for life. He finally succeeded in getting so near the vessel that they threw him a rope and pulled him on board—a strange looking creature, all his clothes in tatters and his hair unshorn. He was in great agitation, but as soon as he could speak he told them his story, and there was this fleet of canoes crowding around the vessel to corroborate his account. And the natives took up a wail, that he was going away from them, he, their only link to the civilized world, was going to leave them, and their hearts were full of sorrow. They wanted him to come back and give them one farewell embrace; but he would not trust himself in their midst. But they did this: the sailors tied a rope around him and lowered him over the side of the ship, and then the natives rowed by in their canoes and kissed the poor scoundrel’s feet in token of gratitude.

Oh, what a blessing it is to be permitted to lift others! How thankful those colored people at the South are for their teachers and helpers! It is a success, thank God! See the gratitude that swells up in their hearts; see their eagerness to follow their instructions; see the endeavors they make to copy the examples that are set before them.

* * * We are enabled to be personal sharers in this work; and we can, by prayer and alms, thus express to Him who is over all, God, blessed forever, our thanksgiving.—_Rev. A. H. Plumb._

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HOPE FOR THE FUTURE.—[This veteran friend of the Freedman, after enlarging upon the evils to which the country is exposed by prevailing ignorance and vice, continued as follows:]

Is there any light? When Judge Tourgee wrote his first book, “The Fool’s Errand,” there appeared to be a sort of hopelessness in all the air; but the next book, “Bricks without Straw,” let the light through the crevices. He discovered and unfolded the remedy. It is educate! Educate the masses by educating the children! It is the fear of God and the love of man in active operation which make the individual his brother’s keeper, his brother’s helper. It is by expanding the individual conscience to take in fully and largely his individual responsibility, and re-awakening it among those who are more or less enlightened already.

The American Missionary Association is the mother of a big household. She is pure, sweet-tempered, patient and persevering. She entered the field of contest early and is proud of her scars. She has stood at the doors of church pews which would not open, and endured the contempt and derision of the unthinking in her school-house receptions; her sons have lost arms and legs and lives in her service; but she looks ever forward for her final reward, when vast multitudes shall rise up to call her blessed. My friends, give help to this Association, and you help in the most direct way the cause of Universal Education.

But let me say a word for Howard University. It has received pronounced commendation from both the friends and the enemies of colored men. A representative friend says of it: “It recognizes the complete manhood of a man and the complete womanhood of a woman.” An enemy says: “It makes gentlemen and ladies of niggers!”

It duly claims for itself equality of rights for all men, and limits knowledge not to color but to capacity. May the Lord bless and prosper it till its students and graduates shall be honored in all the world!

The Fisk University will ever be memorable for the wonderful struggle, perseverance and final success of the Jubilee Singers. Theirs is the history, in a brief compass, of their race. It is a prophecy to which we of this generation should take heed. Here were slavery, emancipation, want; then journeyings almost without hope—none except in God; then the dawn, broadening and widening till the full day came! Turned out of hotels in hate; pushed from railways in disgust and blasphemy; then received with delight and honor by kings and princes, queens and princesses everywhere; men, women and children crying with joy at the plaint of their song, and clapping their hands by the thousands in their praise!

May we not take this bright history as a harbinger of good—as a spur to more and more activity to the pupils’ foster-mother, the American Missionary Association—as a call to individual duty on the part of us who make up its membership—yea, as in some degree an offset to the grievous evils that afflict our land? Ah, may we not, resolving to be better and do better ourselves, look steadily forward, and, like your own poet, say:

“I have not seen, and may not see, My hopes for man take form in fact; But God will give the victory In due time; in that faith I act”?

—_Gen. O. O. Howard._

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ELEVATION OF THE DEGRADED.—When I received an invitation to speak at this meeting, I had arranged my business engagements for the week, and I sent word back that I could not come; but I was asked to reconsider it, and so I have canceled two of my engagements for the purpose of being here, not that I am to interest you with a speech, but to show my earnest love for the great movement carried on by this society.

When a man steps out from his own specialty, he generally makes a failure of it; and I don’t know but I shall make a failure in attempting to speak to you on this theme to-night.

But this meeting and all these meetings are a grand contradiction to the infidel utterance, that those who love God the best love their fellow-men the least. We give such a sentence as that the flat contradiction as an abominable and outrageous falsehood. What is it that prompts men to endeavor to ameliorate the condition of their fellow-men? There is no benevolence worth anything that does not come from the New Testament Christianity. Love for Christ, it is that which induces us to bring those who are straying away into the fold. And this is the idea of this society, if I understand it.

Now you know as well as I do that a reformed drunkard can operate upon a drunkard better than a man who never was an intemperate man; and a converted thief will do more good among thieves than a man who has always been honest; and one who has been converted from the lowest grade of sin can go down into the very depths to lift up those who are as debased as he or she was.

With regard to educating the colored people, I have heard people say: “O, there is no use trying to educate them.” I have heard the remark that they are “a stupid lot.” No, they are not! If you know anything about them, you know they are not stupid. They will say wonderful things. I grant you a good many of them are ignorant; but I tell you, although they may be ignorant, utterly ignorant, yet you will hear brighter, smarter things from them than you will hear from the ignorant in the North, as a general thing. Why, what do you think of the negro who, when asked why he didn’t fight in the time of the war, said, “Because I don’t want to fight.” “Well, but they are fighting for the negro.” “I know they are; but did you ever see two dogs fighting for a bone?” “Yes.” “Well, did you ever see the bone fight?”

There is something, I say, in the education of the colored man—though why they call him “colored,” I don’t know. A man was once asked if he was colored; he said no, he was “born so”—something to build on in themselves. And then there is their desire for education. We here in the North can hardly conceive the earnest desire of those people to learn. When Straight University was burned, I received a letter asking me for some books; and I had the privilege of sending some two or three hundred volumes to them. I was told in the letter that on the very morning after the fire the scholars assembled, and, standing among the ruins, they sang, “Hold the Fort,” and then formed themselves into classes all around about the ruins that they might not lose their lessons.

I have an idea—I shall get bewildered here a little, because I am talking about education, and I never was educated myself—that education may not make a man a better Christian, but it will make him a more useful Christian. One poor woman, living in a smoky cabin, when asked how she could endure to live in such a smoke, said: “Why, honey, I’se thankful to de good Lord to get anything to make a smoke of.” There was a good deal of ignorance, but there was true thanksgiving. Another one said: “God whips you and leaves you alone sometimes, to see if you won’t work; but la, it’s just like a baby—as soon as you cry He hears ye!” Some of the most beautiful sentiments have been uttered by those who are the most ignorant; but when we are appointing men to preach the Gospel, my opinion is that education is needed, and we must so arrange the machinery of the American Missionary Association that hundreds of thousands of men who are now waiting the opportunity to preach the everlasting Gospel intelligently shall be brought into the field of labor.

O, it is a glorious work, this lifting, lifting up of the low, this ministering to those who are poor, this helping those who have no helper! It is a grand work, and I thank God that there is such an Association as this, stretching out its hands and its arms in every direction to lay hold on those for whom the world has cared so little.—_John B. Gough, Esq._

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THE NEGRO WORTH SAVING.—It may be put down as a sure thing that our estimate of men, in the long run, determines what we do for them. Our theories of human nature are the measure of our philanthropies. I am not going to sacrifice much for any man whom I reckon as utterly and hopelessly insignificant. Christian philanthropy is not a sentiment, nor an emotion, but a practical principle; and principles are ideas vitalized and set in movement by convictions. Suppose, for instance, that you assume that men are incapable and cannot be made capable of self-government. I think your political philanthropy will not take a very democratic type. If a colored man—black, red, or whatever—is not fit, and cannot be made fit, for the political suffrage, then we shall have white men’s suffrage, and the question of fitness will inevitably determine the whole matter. If negro suffrage had any rational ground, and was not a wild and desperate venture, it was grounded in the theory that the negro could be made capable for the exercise of the political suffrage, and the men who had faith enough in him to give him the suffrage, assumed that there would be found men who would have faith enough in him to fit him for the exercise thereof.

Again, suppose you assume that the Christian churches are incompetent to manage their own ecclesiastical affairs within the limits of a true Christian and ecclesiastical fellowship. I think your ecclesiastical fellowship will not take a very Congregational type. Of course, we must have a strong central government that will manage the affairs of such incompetence. It has been assumed that the colored people of the South are unfit for the superior intelligence of our Congregationalism, or that Congregationalism is not sufficiently spectacular and sensational to fit the primitive wants of the colored people. I will not characterize such heresy as that as it seems to me it ought to be characterized. At any rate, I think it a most beggarly begging of the whole question; and if it be true, then the occupation, ecclesiastically at least, of this society is gone.

The truth is, friends, our ecclesiastical, like our political philanthropy, is grounded on faith in men—intelligent, Christian faith in the manhood, capacities and possibilities of men; and when that faith is gone, the bottom is out and we must have new foundations.

Or suppose we assume that the children in our homes are only animals, or are fit only for the mechanical drudgery of life. I think our domestic and educational philanthropy will not take, to say the least of it, a very civilized type. Yung Pow says that it is of far more importance whether an angel or a devil educate the child than whether a learned doctor or a simpleton teach him; that is, the virtue that educates is of far more importance than the intelligence that instructs—which, in a certain way, of course, is true. But what is the use of debating the relative importance of virtue and intelligence where they are co-ordinate? The highest virtue demands intelligence, and the highest intelligence demands virtue. But suppose it to be true that the child is very likely to find the doctor or the simpleton, as well as the angel or the evil demon, what then? Of course, we want the angel in our homes and in our schools; but I submit that we want the doctor, too, or his equivalent. We have got to look out for the devil in our homes and in our schools; but I submit that we have got to look out for the simpleton, too. It is not virtue, it is not goodness alone that educates; it is intelligence as well; and what we want is a broad, noble, manly and Christian intelligence that estimates aright the manhood possibilities of every man—that will assume the Christian standard of estimate, which is not, I submit, the materialist’s estimate, nor the secularist’s estimate, nor the politician’s estimate, nor the Pharisee’s estimate. We want a faith in men that will not prejudge either case against them, and undertake to determine on _à priori_ grounds just the precise measure of men’s capacity, and just what they are able to accomplish. We want a faith that understands that we are not dealing with material substances nor merely mechanical aptitudes, but with a higher range of powers that are to fit the coming man or woman for a worthy service in the social and political world, and in the kingdom of our God.—_Rev. L. O. Brastow, D.D._

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A GLANCE AT THE SOUTH.—There is something interesting, as you go through the South at the present time, in watching the progress of events. It is a region, speaking of it as a whole, that strikes the Northern man with many peculiarities. One is, where is the population that made that stern resistance to the Northern arms? The cities are all small; there are no villages; whence came that force that withstood us so many years, and withstood us with such might? And then again, you are struck with many things so different from what we find at the North. You may ride whole days and find very few Southern people with whom you can have any opportunity of conversing. There is usually a car on the train which the colored people devote to themselves, but they only ride from station to station. You find but few of the white people traveling, and yet since the close of the war there has been a visible growth; and I am a firm believer in a new South that is dawning. There is coming to be a gradually renewed intercourse between the people of the North and the people of the South, and step by step we shall find new interests awakening and a closer linking than there has been for many a year.

But one of the most interesting phases of the South, from whatever stand-point, is the colored population. They are a remarkable people. They number six and a half millions by the last census. You know that it used to be said that when slavery should take away its fostering care, we should find large inroads made upon their numbers, and like the Indians, they would gradually waste and disappear. But what is the story of the two censuses of 1870 and 1880? The increase of the whole population of this country for the past ten years has been a little over 30 per cent. Of this, the white population has increased 28 per cent. and a fraction over, and the colored population 34 per cent. and a fraction over. So that, although the white population has been benefited by the enormous immigration, of which we so often speak and boast, yet by almost six per cent. the colored population has won in the race.