William Benjamin Smith

“ It must release energies and potencies already present and in high tension—it cannot create them; it may be an occasion, it cannot be a cause. You may ignite a match by friction, but not a piece of chalk.
The civilization of any people is the slow and toilsome growth of centuries, an unfolding of the people's spirit itself. Its virtue, its essence lies in this very fact. How then shall such a product be imposed upon an alien and inferior race? They cannot receive it; they can put it on only as an outer garment; it can never become truly theirs, the efflorescence of their own souls. ”

“ He does not corrupt legislatures, he does not thwart justice, he does not evade the Constitution, he does not defy the acts of Congress, he does not frame tariff schedules, he does not assume divine vice-gerency, he does not water stock and crush competition and servilize millions, he does not even buy and sell franchises, nor divide rake-offs, nor stuff ballot boxes, nor muzzle the press, nor indulge in other such venialities. But is there any one that does not know the reason? The Negro is not equal to these iniquities. There fail him both ability and opportunity. ”

“ The sun, the moon, the stars, the firmament, the ocean, the plains, the mountains, the forests, the rivers, the seasons, eclipses and precessions, day and night, morning and evening, fire and frost, ice and vapour, wind and cloud, thunder and lightning, life and death, health and disease, dreams and shadows—all these multiform materials of construction have offered themselves in practically equivalent quantity and quality to the phantasy of every race and every age. The reactions have varied widely, and have boldly characterized the genius of each people. ”

“ What has the future in store for the Negro? If social equality must be resolutely denied him forever, if he is to be treated as an outcast and a pariah because of his race and the weight of inheritance which he can never shake off from his shoulders, what hope remains? Where are the blessings of freedom? Is, then, emancipation but an apple of Sodom, turning to ashes on his lips? ”

“ Has it just happened that, in all quarters of the world and under all climatic and topographic conditions, East and West, North and South, beneath the tropics and within the frozen circles, by the sea and amid the mountains, in snow, in sand, in forest—that everywhere and everywhen the Caucasian has manifested the same all-conquering, overmastering qualities—not always good or kind or just, but always strong, always striving, always victorious? ”

“ But he who supposes that the South will ever waver a hair's breadth from her position of uncompromising hostility to any and every form of social equality between the races, deceives himself only less than that other who mistakes her race instinct, the palladium of her future, for an ignorant prejudice and who fails to perceive that her resolution to maintain White racial supremacy within her borders is deepest-rooted and most immutable precisely where her civic virtue, her intelligence, and her refinement are at their highest and best. ”

“ Just here we must insist that the South, in this tremendous battle for the race, is fighting not for herself only, but for her sister North as well. It is a great mistake to imagine that one can be smutched and the other remain immaculate. Up from the Gulf regions the foul contagion would let fly its germs beyond the lakes and mountains. The floods of life mingle their waters over all our land. Generations might pass before the darkening tinge could be seen distinctly above the Ohio, but it would be only a question of time. ”

“ Accordingly, we should not say that the Greek civilization with its language, its art, its science, its philosophy, its eloquence, its literature, its civil and military life, was the outgrowth of the Greek genius, the native faculty of the Hellenic race, but rather that this genius, this spiritual faculty, this unrivalled intellectual-artistic endowment of the Greeks, was the continuous resultant at each moment in the history of the race of the collective culture-experiences through which, up to that moment, it had passed. ”

“ The moment the bar of absolute separation is thrown down in the South, that moment the bloom of her spirit is blighted forever, the promise of her destiny is annulled, the proud fabric of her future slips into dust and ashes. No other conceivable disaster that might befall the South could, for an instant, compare with such miscegenation within her borders. Flood and fire, fever and famine and the sword—even ignorance, indolence, and carpet-baggery—she may endure and conquer while her blood remains pure; but once taint the well-spring of her life, and all is lost—even honour itself. ”

“ What she does maintain is, that in the South the colour line must be drawn firmly, unflinchingly—without deviation or interruption of any kind whatever.
It may be too much to affirm that in all extra-social matters—in politics, in business, in literature, in science, in art, everywhere but in society—even the best sentiment or practice of the South is eager to give the Negro strict justice, or ample scope, or free opportunity. Southerners are merely human; and there is, perhaps, no great historical example of an inferior race or class treated with all proper consideration by the superior. ”

“ These centuries have indeed been centuries of enslavement, but certainly not of debasement nor any form of retrogression. For slavery is and has been, from time immemorial, practically universal in the fatherland of the Negro—slavery more cruel and degrading and inhuman than is known elsewhere on the globe. We enter into no details, unwilling to make our pages needlessly repulsive. In fact, the training of servitude in the South has worked mightily for the Negro's advancement—not unlike the domestication of the lower animals. ”

“ There is a personal and even a social morality that may easily become racially immoral. There are diseases whose evolutionary function is to weed out the weak, and so preserve the future for the strong. The sufferers cannot be treated with too careful attention, too loving gentleness, too tender sympathy. It is the glory of our humanity to cherish these frail flowers, to water them with dew, to shield them from the sun, and not to suffer even the winds of summer to visit them too roughly. But not to gather from them the seed for generations to come! ”

“ It must be renewed generation after generation in each individual. The Sisyphus-stone of culture is rolled with infinite toil up the steep ascent by the fathers; it thunders instantly back, and must be rolled up again with equal agony and bloody sweat by their children. All must start at the same centre of ignorance, and beat out a long and arduous path to the ever-widening circumference of the farthest knowledge. ”

“ However, the outlook is not hopeless to him who has a sense of the world to come, who lives in his race, who feels the solidarity of its present with its future as well as with its past. "Of men that are just, the true saviour is Time." Besides, it seems not at all strange that a disease, chronic through centuries, should require centuries for its cure, that the multiplied echoes of the curse of African slavery should go sounding on, even to the years of many generations. ”

“ Laugh as you will at the haughtiness of the ignorant Southerner, at his scorn of the Negro, perhaps his superior, it is this very race self-respect that is the rock of his salvation. As Bernhard Moses points out, it was because the Anglo-Saxon so cherished this feeling that he refused to amalgamate with the Indians—a proud and in some ways superior race—but drove them relentlessly, and often, it may be, unrighteously before him into the sea. ”

“ Once again, if millennial contact and intermingling of such near affinities as Teuton and Alpine Kelt have not availed to efface their distinguishing features, either of body or of mind—if the wonted ancestral fires still live in the remote descendants—how can we hope for aught else from the mixture of European and African? Will not the slumberous apathy in which the Dark Continent broods away its æons surely fall upon the people that drink its blood into their own veins? Not to anticipate such a result is to scorn analogy, to despise science, to defy history. ”

“ It is idle to talk of education and civilization and the like as corrective or compensative agencies. [2] All are weak and beggarly as over against the almightiness of heredity, the omniprepotence of the transmitted germ-plasma. Let this be amerced of its ancient rights, let it be shorn in some measure of its exceeding weight of ancestral glory, let it be soiled in its millennial purity and integrity, and nothing shall ever restore it; neither wealth, nor culture, nor science, nor art, nor morality, nor religion—not even Christianity itself. ”

“ We grant the abstract possibility that the bee or the ant may harbour in itself higher potentialities for development than even man himself. We even think it wholesome to bear this thought in mind. Nevertheless, such may-be's lie infinitely beyond the range of the practical vision; they cannot enter into our calculations of futurity. So, too, we grant that, in the centuries of milleniums to come, it is possible that the Negro's nature may receive some surpassing uplift: he may sprout eagle pinions, and far outfly the wildest dreams of Caucasian fancy. ”

“ The interpenetration in our democratic society is too thorough. Here and there the Four Hundred may isolate themselves, but only for a time and imperfectly. Who knows when the scion of a millionaire may turn into a motorman, or the son of a peasant hew his way to the Capitol? Let the mongrel poison assail the humbler walks of life, and it will spread like a bubonic plague through the higher. The standing of the South would be lost irretrievably. Though her blood might still flow pure in myriad veins, yet who could prove it? ”

“ Granted the completest social separation in the South, where the danger is instant and fearful, is it also right or demanded in the North, where the danger is distant or wholly unreal? Why not social separation and the race standard in the South, but social equality and the standard of personal merit in the North? We apprehend that such will be the position of many fair-minded men at the North, and perhaps we may hope for no greater concession. ”

“ That they no longer meet with such extraordinary favour in the North is largely due to the fact that they have uniformly, when in numbers, sadly disappointed the hopes of their benefactors and well-wishers. It seems plain, moreover, that a really strong and highly endowed blood would triumph with equal ease over excessive favour and over unjust disfavour. Would any such discrimination keep down the Anglo-Saxon? Would he not "make by force his merit known"? And have twenty centuries of race prejudice and outrageous persecution availed to repress or depress the all-victorious sons of Israel? ”

“ The race that can produce such "very large brains" is the race of advancement and culture; they shine like stars in the firmament of history, and the multitudes steer their courses thereby. It is these exceptions that mark out the line between progress and stagnation, between civilization and barbarism; a race that is deficient in such exceptions is a race already condemned. ”

“ We congratulate our friends in the North that they can play with fire without fear of burns; that they can wine and dine amiable and interesting Negroes as rare birds of passage, with no thought of ulterior consequences—at least, to themselves. Their wealth, their power, their culture, their grandeur, but more than all else, their excessive preponderance in numbers, preclude the thought that in many generations their blood could be perceptibly tinged with tides from Africa. With us of the South, alas! ”

“ Not only must we, in accordance with the law of Deviation from the Average, interpret this excess of "very large brains" as implying a higher general level, but the meaning and value of these exceptions are incalculable. [18] Who can estimate the import of the one brain in a million, when it is the brain of Moses or Mohammed, of Aristotle or Archimedes, of Vergil or Galilei, of Leibnitz or Voltaire, of Darwin or Washington? Such brains are the foci of the orbits of history; such men blaze out the pathways for the feet of their kind. ”