Master race

“ That is the rock on which our whole race in America is to be built up. Our leaders are to address themselves to this main and master endeavor—viz., to free them from false ideas and injurious habits, to persuade them to the adoption of correct principles, to lift them up to superior modes of living, and so bring forth, as permanent factors in their life, the qualities of thrift, order, virtue, and manliness. ”

“ I can see a world where Labor reaps its full reward and work and worth go hand in hand. I can see a race without disease of flesh or brain, shapely and fair, the married harmony of form and function, and as I look, life lengthens, joy deepens, love canopies the earth, while over all in the great dome there shines the eternal star of hope.”
And in that crowning hour men and women can walk the highlands side by side and enjoy the enrapturing vision of a land without a master, a land without a slave; a land radiant and resplendent in the perfect triumph of the brotherhood of all mankind. ”

“ The finer the art the more universal its qualities. And yet there is no poem and no picture that is absolutely without the marks of its master; and the marks of the master mean the marks of his race,—in fact, the racial indications are inversely in number to those of the individual; the deeper a man buries his personality in his work the stronger the indications of his race. ”

“ We showed, in a previous volume, what an historical race is, and how, its character once formed, it possesses, as the result of the laws of heredity such power that its beliefs, institutions, and arts—in a word, all the elements of its civilisation—are merely the outward expression of its genius. We showed that the power of the race is such that no element can pass from one people to another without undergoing the most profound transformations. ”

“ Meantime that ill-fated, much-injured race which the Proclamation respects will lose somewhat of the dejection sculptured for ages in their bronzed countenance, uttered in the wailing of their plaintive music,—a race naturally benevolent, docile, industrious, and whose very miseries sprang from their great talent for usefulness, which, in a more moral age, will not only defend their independence, but will give them a rank among nations. ”

“ Again it came to me with overpowering force that the supreme need of our race is leading, that the supreme task is to discover leading, to forget oneself in realising the collective purpose of the race. ”

“ Who are to be the agents to lift up this people of ours to the grand plane of civilization? Who are to bring them up to the height of noble thought, grand civility, a chaste and elevating culture, refinement, and the impulses of irrepressible progress? It is to be done by the scholars and thinkers, who have secured the vision which penetrates the center of nature, and sweeps the circles of historic enlightenment; and who have got insight into the life of things, and learned the art by which men touch the springs of action. ”

“ We come from the same stock and the same northern hive, but have pursued different courses, and have not now the same blood in our veins. One race takes naturally to politics, for which it has an aptitude and capacity, the other as naturally to music and painting, to science and philosophy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This discovery that a race is transformed by its action upon itself and upon the elements it absorbs from without, wipes away at a stroke the popular belief in “predestined races” or providential “great men” appearing at crucial moments and riding victorious across the world. ”

“ By it a race must rise or fall, succeed or fail, and in the last analysis mere sentiment counts for little. During the next half-century and more, my race must continue passing through the severe American crucible. We are to be tested in our patience, our forbearance, our perseverance, our power to endure wrong, to withstand temptations, to economize, to acquire and use skill; in our ability to compete, to succeed in commerce, to disregard the superficial for the real, the appearance for the substance, to be great and yet small, learned and yet simple, high and yet the servant of all. ”

“ This spirit necessarily carries with it intense pride of race, or of nation, as the case may be, and ramifies the whole mass, inspiring and shaping its thought and effort, however humble or exalted these may be,—as it takes "all sorts and conditions of men" to make up a social order, instinct with the ambition and the activity which work for "high thinking and right living," of which modern evolution in all directions is the most powerful illustration in history. ”

“ There you will be head and chief of all, for there is money enough for a thousand horses; and your father was a white man, and these are the days when the white man rules. Like clouds before the sun are the races of men, and one race rises and another falls. ”

“ And as the great mass of mankind, white and black, must ever be laborers and followers, and as all the avenues of trade and commerce, learning, culture, and civil and political distinctions, are open to all, this "mixed race" must eventually become sharp competitors for the supremacy in this country. ”

“ He has the opportunity now, and there is no one to stay his march upward, on the contrary, there are helping hands everywhere, and incentives such as no other race in the world ever had or will ever have.
He may look back to his ancestral days with as much pride as any other race, and he may point to the magnificent ruins of the departed glories of his race to prove that his origin is to be found in as high a type of civilization as compared to any other race. ”

“ Doubtless, the democratic spirit that now seems to be sweeping the world will, if it continues to spread, revolutionize our whole conception of history, bringing us to realize that the glory of the race is not the glory of a chosen few, but that it radiates from the precious heroic stuff of common human lives. ”

“ I answer, first of all, that the rising intelligence of this race, the educated, thinking, scholarly men, who come out of our schools trained and equipped by reading culture; they are the men who are to handle this great subject. Who else can be expected to attempt it? Do you think that men of other races will encourage our cultivated men to parade themselves as mere carpet knights of politics, and they themselves assume the added duty of the moral and material restoration of our race? Never! They expect every people to bear somewhat the burdens of their own restoration and upbuilding ”

“ If the supreme act of a race is war, if its supreme thought is its religion, and its supreme poems, its language—deeds, thoughts, and poems to which the whole race has contributed—so in manifold, potent, if unperceived ways the State affects those energizings in art and thought which seem most independent of the State. ”

“ The golden age of the colored race is right ahead of us. The concept, superiority, is something strange. That joy which civilization has been for centuries draining out of the white race, is stored in them; civilization has killed. If we are to continue to create, something will have to come to light our hearts, and then later on to warm them.
We shall soon have good writing from them, the colored race, painting, music, art, in every department of creative accomplishment. ”

“ It will greatly abridge their labours in reading, nay, it will tell them what books do not teach; and it will impress upon their senses and upon their memories the living portraits of a race, distinguished by inextinguishable ardour, unbounded ingenuity, and indomitable determination—a race now fast eluding the projects of the politician, the researches of the curious, and soon to cease from demanding even the sympathies of the humane and conscientious. ”

“ Nature intended him for a savage state; every instinct, every impulse of his soul inclines him to it. The white race might fall into a barbarous state, and afterwards, subjected to the influence of civilization, be reclaimed and prosper. ”

“ Imagine that race moving through a long and varied experience under this powerful impression, now loyal to it, now rebelling against it, now misinterpreting it, now led by the voice of some prophet to understand it more fully and feel it more profoundly, but never wholly losing it for a single generation. Imagine the history of that race, its poetry, the biography of its famous men and women, the messages of its moral reformers, conceived and written in constant relation to that strongest factor of conscious life, the sense of the presence and power of the Eternal. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the race itself is yet before you, and he alone in that Isthmian struggle will win the nobler than pine-leaf crown, who, to culture and discipline of the mind adds culture and discipline of the heart. ”

“ I further stated, that, in my judgment, a tolerably well conducted press, in the hands of persons of the despised race, by calling out the mental energies of the race itself; by making them acquainted with their own latent powers; by enkindling among them the hope that for them there is a future; by developing their moral power; by combining and reflecting their talents—would prove a most powerful means of removing prejudice, and of awakening an interest in them. ”

“ They must at last meet their equals face to face, called to them as steel to magnet by some inner affinity. This is a law of life both for individuals and races, and, when this is realized, we know nothing will put an end to race conflicts except the equally determined and heroic development of the spiritual, moral, and intellectual forces which disdain to use the force and fury of material powers. ”

“ Take moreover, the many worthy bodies founded in the last quarter of a century for moral, mental and social elevation. All these have been inspired by the thought that if the race would hold its own, it must emulate the spirit of the country and age in which it lives. ”

“ They only, whose intellect is so loftily developed, are fit to guide the present civilisation to the point of glory which it has yet to reach, and it is they who are the leaders of the triumphant type of to-day, they to whom our present race looks up as the ideal of all that is most splendid in intellectual power. Not amongst them, then, should we seek the beginnings of the Coming Race, of the Race that shall be ”

“ When it is considered what humanity, what resources of mental and moral power, the traits of the blonde race betoken, – its accession to empire marks a new and finer epoch, wherein the old mineral force shall be subjugated at last by humanity, and shall plough in its furrow henceforward. ”

“ What shall we do towards developing our character, adding our quota to the civilization and strength of the country, diversifying our industry, and practising those lordly virtues that conquer success, and turn the world's dread laugh into admiring recognition? The white race has yet work to do in making practical the political axiom of equal rights, and the Christian idea of human brotherhood ”

“ Turning to real history, there can be no doubt, first, as to the widespread, nay, universal, prevalence of the race idea, the race spirit, the race ideal, and as to its efficiency as the vastest and most ingenious invention for human progress. ”

“ To ensure racial and social progress, nothing will take the place of leadership, of genius. A race of nothing but mediocrities will stand still, or very nearly so; but a race of mediocrities with a good supply of men of exceptional ability and energy at the top, will make progress in discovery, invention and organization, which is generally recognized as progressive evolution. ”

“ That you have got to bring to the settlement of it all the brain power, all the penetration, all the historical reading, and all the generous devotedness of heart that you can command; and (2) that in the endeavor to settle this question that you are not to make the mistake that it is external forces which are chiefly to be brought to bear upon this enormity. No race of people can be lifted up by others to grand civility. The elevation of a people, their thorough civilization, comes chiefly from internal qualities. ”

“ They are an open, living illustration of the power of education and modern civilization. The lesson to be learned from them is, that what a race so sunk in savagery and barbarism can do, is much more within 80the reach of the Colored Americans who have a great and noble ancestry back to which they may look with admiration and feel an incentive to continue to advance—it is in them. ”

“ If we fail here, with traditions and history such as are ours behind us, can we succeed elsewhere? The Great Emancipator speaks to us at this hour and furnishes the solution for all our race problems. "Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and the other race, and the other race being inferior and therefore must be placed in an inferior position. ”

“ But the moral progress of the race did not go hand-in-hand with its intellectual advances. The human race had gradually become divided into two parts—those who had great brain power and those who had very little. ”

“ It follows that racial superiority and inferiority are partly matters of the intellectual and spiritual evolution which guides one race after another into periods of great ascent too often followed by sad and catastrophic decline. ”