Indivisibility

“ When they have wished to depress and subjugate a race they have slammed the doors of their history on them, and left them alone, spiritless and forlorn, passed by and forgotten by the Ages, despised of themselves and of their neighbours. ”

“ Is it possible for a person to be entirely naturalized?—that is, to be denationalized, to cast off the prejudice and traditions of one country and take up those of another; to give up what may be called the instinctive tendencies of one race and take up those of another. ”

“ Whatever may be the inward differences of nations, races, individualities, however distinct may be the external forms of states, religious conceptions and customs, however irreconcilable the conflict of classes—over all these differences, created by ourselves through centuries, hovers the dark and menacing spectre of the universal consciousness of the tragic quality of life and the poignant sense of the loneliness of man in the world. ”

“ Can it be that a higher civilization bears within itself something which is incompatible with the existence of inferior races? Do the dominion exercised by the stranger, the invasion of the land, and the violence done to religion and customs inspire these men, once so free and proud, with such despair that they refuse to have any posterity? ”

“ We have long been accustomed by habits of speech, fictions of law, and also by the results of introspection, to consider each person as constituting an indivisible unity. Actual researches utterly modify this current notion. ”

“ Those writers who emphasize heredity in social evolution point to this as an evidence of the [Pg 25] inherent disabilities of the race; while those who emphasize environment point out the immense handicap everywhere imposed on the race by law, custom, and prejudice. ”

“ We have here the example of a civilization that is accepted and dominant, no longer through the convictions of the peoples who live under it, but by their exhaustion, their weakness, and their indifference. ”

“ The diversities and repulsions of race which have been ordained, no doubt, for some wise purpose, are intended, perhaps, only for this state of existence. Another life may present a new order of things in which no such distinctions exist. ”

“ And here was an indolent nobility, with no high aims or opportunities, but cultivating a vicious way of life, as if it were an art, and the only one which they cared to learn. Here was a population, high and low, that had no genuine belief in virtue ”

“ And hence my race, with mental and physical habits as free as the waters which flow from the hills, become restive under the rules of civilized life; dwindle to their graves under the control of laws, customs, and forms, which have grown out of the endless vices, and the factitious virtue of another race. ”

“ Therefore the fundamental difficulty for the rise of primitive people, namely, that an individual which has risen to the level of the higher civilization is still looked upon as belonging to an inferior race, did not prevail. ”

“ The infectious air of civilization penetrated to the remotest corner of their solitudes. Their ignorant and credulous nature, unable to cope with the intellect of a superior race, absorbed only its vices, yielding up its own simplicity and nobleness for the white man's diseases and death. ”

“ The soil which slavery claimed, baptized with blood becomes the Promised Land of the freedman and poor white. The late master wonders at the mockery of Fate. Ignorance marvels at the power of Knowledge. Love overleaps the barriers of prejudice, and Faith laughs at the Impossible. ”

“ However it has come about, the human races, as we find them in history, are complex; and one of the chief consequences has been to throw into disorder most of the primitive characteristics of each type. ”

“ The decline, the oppression, almost the annihilation of one race of mankind has been seen here. We may see now upon the same soil, rising to prominence, men of another race who talk of liberty for themselves, and are preparing for a long and glorious future for their descendants. ”

“ It is strange, it is passing strange, that human societies and governments and institutions should degenerate as soon as they become rich and powerful; but such is the fact,--a sad commentary on the doctrine of a necessary progress of the race, or the natural tendency to good, which so many cherish, but than which nothing can be more false, as proved by experience and the Scriptures. Why were the antediluvians swept away? Why could not those races retain their primitive revelation? ”

“ The nomadic and hunter states of society never embraced within themselves the elements of perpetuity. They have ever existed, indeed, like a vacuum in the system of nature, which is at every moment in peril, and subject to be filled up and destroyed by the in-rushing of the surrounding element. ”

“ When they have attained a measure of independence, when they speak the tongue and read the books and begin to share the ideas of the dominant race, they resent the inferiority, be it legal or social, to which they find themselves condemned. ”

“ I had descended, then, not only into an inhabited world—not only into a world of men, who, however they might differ in outward form, must resemble in their wants, ideas, and habits, in short, in mind if not in body, the lords of my own planet—but into a civilised world and among a race living under a settled order, cultivating the soil, and taming the brutes to their service. ”

“ Having divided existence, then, into two distinct kinds, the next question is—to what account do we propose turning the discrimination? If it is of no practical use in removing difficulties and in throwing light upon the obscurer phenomena of man, it is worthless, and must be discarded as a barren and mere hair-splitting refinement. ”

“ She sees it taking away from them the restraints of their native culture, and in all too many cases leading them into a life of dissipation, disgrace, and decay; or, if it does not do this, yet separating the men from their people. ”

“ Through a strong net, and mounts upon the wind,
Though with her plumes impaired. If they, whose souls
Should open while they range the richer fields
Of merry England, are obstructed less
By indigence, their ignorance is not less
Nor less to be deplored. ”

“ At the present time there is a tendency to rectify these inequalities, whether in regard to our own or to other races, and there can be little doubt that in the course of time, all that remains of the various races of mankind will be brought under the influence of one civilization. ”

“ It would be very absurd to imagine that the inhabitants of one State are worse than the inhabitants of another, unless some peculiar circumstances, of universal influence, tend to make them so. Human, nature is everywhere the same ”

“ They constitute a class by themselves—a class out of which no individual can be elevated, and below which, none can be depressed. And this is the difficulty, the invariable and insuperable difficulty in the way of every scheme for their benefit. Much can be done for them—much has been done ”

“ Within its own circle it may build up a civilization that shall be a humble imitation of the civilization of the white race, a race that has had a start of thousands of years. We must be patient, helping when we can, not hindering. ”

“ Thousands of men who have come here from the Old World have raised themselves to positions of honor and independence and wealth as they never could have done in their native lands. And yet these disturbers would upset it all, a system that for a hundred years and more we have tried and found not wanting. ”

“ There is no disposition here to overlook or minimize the menace to our social and civic life involved in the presence of vast masses of undigested, unassimilated population of whatever race or kind—even of our own people, herded in colonies, dominating large communities, illiterate as regards our history and ideals, ignorant of our language, traditions, and customs. ”

“ These lamentable tribes of darkness have no longer merely the desperate audacity of actions, they possess the heedless audacity of mind. A sign that they are losing the sense of their criminality, and that they feel, even among thinkers and dreamers, some indefinable support which the latter themselves know not of. ”

“ Their whole life, public and private, physical and moral, is unrolled before us, and it becomes possible to reconstruct, with the aid of the most authentic materials, that which constitutes the personality of races and mainly determines their value. ”

“ How should we think such a problem through, not simply as Negroes, but as men and women of a new century, helping to build a new world? And first of all, here is no simple question of race antagonism. ”

“ Their poverty, their ignorance and their servile estate render them as yet largely ineligible for social fusion with a race whose pride is fed not only by the record of its achievements but by a constant comparison with a less developed and less fortunate race, which it has held so long in subjection. ”

“ In the calm light of this day it passes the understanding that a people burdened with the problem of two inferior races—one, slaves, and the other, not slaves only because they possessed not one attribute of the slave—should have thus expressed themselves with any literal intent. ”

“ They are truly the disinherited of all the ages. Though they may not be unhappy, they can be called nothing less than wretched. Is the fault one of race, or government, or religion? Much could be said on all these points, both for and against ”

“ Where this race has rejected the benefits of civilization, it seems almost invariably to have arisen from the prejudices naturally excited in their minds by the vices of the worst part of the white population, and the calamities which they have caused by the introduction of ardent spirits! ”

“ Whithersoever we turn, the laws of custom, which have governed the uncivilized races for count [Pg ix] less generations, are breaking down; the old isolation which kept their blood pure is vanishing before railway and steamship communication which imports alien labourers to work for European settlers; and ethnologists of the future, having no pure race left to examine, will have to fall back upon hearsay evidence in studying the history of human institutions. ”

“ Curious, and yet apparently inevitable, that our customs seem designed to carry death to all the so-called inferior races, whom at a bound we force to bridge a period which it has taken us a thousand years to pass. ”

“ They will wonder how it was that an intellect remarkable for originality and independence, matchless in vigour, fertility, and clearness, continued so long shrouded in convictions imbibed so early as to be akin to prejudices, and was outstripped in the process of emancipation by inferior minds. ”

“ The race having been leveled to a common plane, there has been a gradual dying out of individuality. The inevitable curtailment of individual aims, individual struggle, individual ambitions, has naturally resulted in producing a featureless type of character, common to all. ”

“ It seems, indeed, a strange phenomenon that in such different races, so far removed in locality, customs so singular—to our ideas so revolting and unnatural, and certainly so painful and inconvenient—should either have been perpetuated for an enormous lapse of time, if the supposition of a common origin be entertained, or else have developed themselves independently. ”

“ Indeed, all peoples, when at a certain stage of race-culture, and the multitudes in all civilizations, are just that bundles of confused and conflicting ideas, impulses, and practices, which have never been unified into a consistent "character." ”

“ They simply look on themselves as a race apart, a race (if we may believe them) which is weak and oppressed, and obliged to deal crookedly, but which also keeps its stiff-necked and contemptuous pride. ”

“ I own that the fine humanity of this institution affected me strongly as I stood looking at the knot of dark-visaged, strangely apparelled men, and considered what would be their fate if this Home were not at hand to help them, to receive them, to interpret their wants, and to assist them to return to their native countries. ”