ment which is forward rather than backward, all cannot be wrong with the several units and factors of its civilization. II. But the question may arise-how fares it with the slower elements? It is true that in every stream the less rapid currents, somewhat retarding the onward movement of the whole, become the occasion of disturbing eddies. But in the general progress the sluggish elements are also taken forward; the apparent friction and fury are not always so destructive as may appear, and it is only through the processes of contact and disturbance-of which the whirling eddy is the product-that these slower currents are given something of the momentum of the faster. That through the past ten years the antagonism between the races has been upon the increase is obvious enough. Through the operation of causes, upon which I have dwelt more fully in an earlier paper,* "race prejudice"-on the part of each populationhas been intensified. Similar forces have been also in operation at the North. Both in politics and in industry the negro has seen among white men the rise of the "professional enemy;" and, for that matter, among our negroes the same type of "enemy" has arisen against the white man. It is also true that the professional race antagonist is no isolated phenomenon-that he has sought his profession because it pays, and that it pays only because there are ignorant voters, with crude and irresponsible antipathies to be interpreted and represented. He is a product of the mob as well as the mob's exponent. The hatreds of race have thus become the refuge of the political charlatan. At the North the passions of the unsuspecting negro are played upon by such insincere devices as the introduction of national bills for the pensioning of the ex-slaves, as well as by the familar heroics in which "the platform" denounces things which no responsible party seriously intends to rectify, and promises things which no responsible party intends for a moment to undertake. At the South, upon the other hand, the ignorant white man is regaled with "apprehensions" concerning the negro and the North; and local leaders, who would scorn to make selfish use of the negro's pas *See The Task of the Leader; The Sewanee Review, the University of the South, January, 1907; by Edgar Gardner Murphy. sions, stoop to such ignoble use of the fears and passions of the ignorant brethren of their own blood that in some of our localities success in politics has meant little else than a shallow but sinister capacity for the setting of one class of ignorant human beings in senseless, pitiless hatred against another. As between the man who seeks office through the exploitation of the ignorance of the black race, and the man who seeks office through the exploitation of the lower passions of the white race, one hardly knows where to bestow the sorry distinctions of a despicable pre-eminence. It is to be remembered, however, that so far as the negro is concerned, a result which might have been foreknown has followed upon the rise of the professional Caucasian. While there has been some increase in the number of the negro's detractors, there has also been an increase in the number of his friends. An excessive animus, through the force of reaction, is partially yielding its own correctives.* At no time since his emancipation has there been, at the South, so much explicit defence of the negro's better qualities, or so much public and private insistence upon the truth that, in her own interest, the South must be governed in relation to all her difficulties by the counsels of right feeling and good sense. It is unfortunate that the country at *Damaging as is our more violent leadership, it is not so general or so representative as has often been assumed. In the course of a recent conversation, a well-known writer brought the Souch under severe indictment because of the political positions accorded to certain of our narrower men: "They must be representative," said he, "or they would not be elected." I challenged him to name them. Upon careful thought he could think of but four in the whole South (a territory reaching from Maryland to Mexico and comprising a population of more than twenty-five million souls). Of these four not one could have been elected on the negro issue alone, and two had been chosen quite as much in spite of their race animosities as by reason of them. Three of them, after brief terms of office, have failed of endorsement by popular vote, and the fourth -while continued in office by reason of sterling personal qualities and because of the length and variety of his public services-will certainly be succeeded by a man of different type. Unfortunately, however, there are many men in our minor offices who have fought their way to power by appeal to the crudest racial hatreds. Yet the demagogic use of class antagonisms is as familiar at the North as at the South; and the essential standards of the people of both sections should always be interpreted in the light of Mr. Lecky's observation, in reference to the United States, "that pure democracy is one of the least representative of governments. In hardly any other country does the best life and energy of the nation flow so habitually apart from politics. Hardly any other nation would be so grossly misjudged if it were mainly judged by its politicians and its political life."Democracy and Liberty; W. E. H. Lecky, Vol. I., p. 114. large hears little of our "negro question" except the sensational, and that the outer world is so unfamiliar with the normal expressions of the judiciary, the press, the pulpit, the university, and-above all-of the domestic fireside in our Southern States. The sanest force in the South-always representing the real secret of our equilibrium-is the average home. It must be frankly recognized, however, that even between the masses of the two races the sense of estrangement has been growing. Irritations upon both sides have become increasingly acute. Is this alienation always to take sharper and sharper forms? Does it represent an irresistible and permanently prevailing tendency, or is it the reflection of abnormal conditions-conditions peculiar to the present period in the history of our racial contact, and destined, therefore, to be slowly modified? That the normal and characteristic differences between the races are likely to disappear, I would be the last to predict. The more fundamental distinctions between them are likely to persist, and, in so far as they do not persist, the antagonisms of race (paradox though it may seem) are likely to be accentuated rather than decreased. But while it seems measurably certain that the broader lines of racial cleavage are likely to endure, such a result need involve no continuation of the present bitterness and no increasing tendency toward the deepening of our antipathies. For if the conditions within which the two races at present find themselves are indeed peculiar and abnormal, then we may reasonably expect that the sharper irritations which spring from these conditions will be transitional and temporary. Moreover, our situation may be getting worse merely as a stage in the process by which it is to become better. Turning, therefore, to the natural history of our race relations, perhaps I can best express its significance through the medium of an illustration: Let us assume that the enforced physical proximity of the two races in the South, their common fate and their mutual dependence, may be represented by two individuals of different strength and aptitudes who have been unequally yoked together. In their progress from a state of bondage to a state of ultimate freedom their relations will be marked by three stages: the stage of forced interdependence; the stage of partial dependence and imperfect freedom; and the stage of mutual emancipation. In the first stage we shall find comparative peace; each, knowing his dependence upon the other, will be inclined to make the best of things. As all friction will involve a tugging at the chains, and as this tugging at the chains will cut the limbs of the stronger as well as of the weaker, there will be a tendency to control exasperations; and some basis for a working adjustment of relations will be sought and held. But the breaking up of this association is inevitable; for, as there is a slave at each end of every chain which holds one man in bondage to another, the relation has borne as oppressively upon the strong as upon the weak. We come, therefore, to the second stage; a stage in which we find the bondage breaking up and the enforced physical interdependence partially dissolved. As the new relations of freedom (on both sides) become possible, the old constraints become increasingly hateful; long suppressed exasperations rise to the surface, the struggle for emancipation (on the part of each) leads temporarily to the forgetfulness of that normal and proper interdependence of men of which society itself is the expression. The hunter knows that the effort to unleash two animals who may be held together by several bonds will often lead to combat. The chains cannot all be snapped at once; the impulsive realization of a partial freedom leads to an eager straining at the remaining ties, a straining which chafes the still fettered limbs, inflicts suffering, rouses resentment and impels blind retaliation. Thus the two individuals of whom we have been thinking are, in this second stage, at the period of greatest difficulty. To both there still remains enough of enforced interdependence to continue the disadvantages of the past without its advantages; to both there accrue the disadvantages as well as the advantages of freedom. Liberty, partially tested and enjoyed, makes the remaining shackles only the more galling. Each man is free enough to understand-or to misunderstand-his rights, but not quite free enough fully to perceive his duties. Resentments are easier than comprehension. Each is likely, in view of their bitter common history, to attribute the miseries of his condition to the partner in bondage rather than to their common fate. The pas sions of self-interest, no longer dominated by the absolute neces sity for peace, and strengthened by the instinctive perception o a freer destiny, rouse each to the impulsive assertion of his individual life; and the first phase of this assertion is a blow at the human being whose enforced companionship is of the essence of the old bondage and whose continuing necessity seems to be the negation of the new freedom. If you are bound with twenty ropes to a man unlike yourself you will discover within yourself a wise inclination to get along with him as well as you can; if, some day, you find that eighteen of the twenty ropes are cut and that you are bound by only two, you will find within yourself a passionate tendency to put your whole strength into getting utterly rid of him forever. To sit down with him, mutually and calmly to determine how you may jointly untie the remaining knots, would be the better method; but it would imply that each could be trusted not to do the other an injury in the process, that an agreement might possibly be reached, and that the moral power to understand each other had survived the long period of artificial constraint; otherwise men do not speak the same language. And as these conditions are pondered, and as the actual possibilities of our average human nature are considered, one is led to the conclusion that, in such a case, the second stage in the common emancipation of these two individuals-the period of partial freedom from an enforced relationship-is always likely to be a period of struggle. same There is, however, a third stage. As these individuals pass out of an interdependence which has been constrained and artificial, they soon discover that they are still alive and at work upon the soil. Their bondage is behind them, but a common country is before them and a common humanity within them. They must have relations, the one to the other, the free relations of a normal interdependence, and to their mutual advantage these relations will tend to become the relations of peace. The more relentless antagonisms between man and man or between class and class are always incidental and abnormal; for war,-whether military, industrial or social-is always temporary, incidental. The moral momentum of the universe is against it. Things have an inherent tendency to adjustment, to co-ordination, to harmony. The two races which we have represented by two individual types |