24 JANUARY 1891, Page 9

A NEGRO EMIGRATION FROM AMERICA. T HE able correspondent of the

Times who has for many weeks past been describing the condition of the Negro problem in the United States, has concluded a series of exceedingly instructive letters by a proposal even feebler than the one with which, as we fancied, he was about to end. We thought he inclined to the perfectly practicable plan of leaving the Gulf States to the Negroes; and we pointed out that, deprived of White guidance, the Blacks would sink, as under such circumstances they always have sunk, back to their African level. The Negro cannot rise, except under White influence--else why has he not risen on the Niger and the Congo F—and the Whites of the Union, in ceding to him the Gulf States, would only be left with six Haytis on their hands. The end of that plan would be re-conquest, and a military rOgime fatal to the true development of American institutions. The corre- spondent, however, was not advocating this plan, but another which is indefinitely more imbecile. He actually believes, or says he believes, that the Negro problem, which he has described so well, can be solved by a scheme of assisted emigration to the banks of the Congo. He might as well suggest that the way to make a swift communication between the Atlantic and Pacific is to tunnel under North America. The physical means of transporting a nation of seven millions five thousand miles by sea do not exist, and cannot be created even by. the unequalled resources of the United States. It taxes a continent to export two hundred thousand of its children every year, and at that rate the effort, which would cost at least four millions sterling annually, would not even succeed in keeping down the natural increment of the black population of the States. No race has ever emigrated by sea at this pace, and the Negro, half-informed, unenergetic, and unaccustomed to self-sacrifice dictated by ambition, is entirely incapable of assisting in the effort. The Whites of the United States would have to do the whole work,—that is, they would for a century have to send abroad an army of three hundred thousand persons, half of them women, and maintain them for at least one year upon the territory to be occupied, a feat from which even the Americans, with their almost limitless capacity for bearing taxation, would be sure to shrink. During the process, the States, thus depleted of their workers, would be slowly but certainly reduced to ruin, while the world would be full of outcries at the horrible sufferings which would be sure to accom- pany such a vast removal of populations wholly without organising ability, disinclined to labour without pay, as all emigrants at first must do, and entirely devoid of that instinct of citizenship which even in wild lands from the first protects the members of the white emigrating races. Two populations like that of Ireland would have to be transported across an ocean nearly twice as wide as the Atlantic, in a stream which could not in any way be regulated by the demand for labour, and out of means to be provided from the taxation of a people which, ex hypotliesi, must necessarily be hostile to the emigrants. It is a dream even wilder than that which those are dreaming who fancy that emigration will settle the economic difficulties of the Old World, and who forget that for every couple which departs, there is a couple left behind waiting anxiously for the chance of taking their place, and multiplying in their turn. The dreamers assume that the white men would bear the gigantic cost of the enterprise, which is not in the least proved, for the white men, as regards Negroes, are not really philanthropic ; and that the black men would move willingly, which is contrary to all we know of uncivilised populations. Why should the Negroes of the Union wish to quit America for Africa? America is their birthplace, they are flourishing in its climate, they earn sufficient for their subsistence, they all speak English, and though they are on points subjected to injustice, they suffer as little direct oppression as any coloured population in the world. Why should they go through the horrors of a vast emigration in order to reach a land with a climate not more suited to them, and in which the majority, who are at home poor peasants and artisans, will be peasants and artisans still, with less re- turn for labour indefinitely more severe ? We do not believe there would be the slightest willingness to go, though we fully admit that able Negroes like Dr. Blyden fancy such willingness could be produced by preaching, and we regard the whole project as a fantasy having for origin another fantasy, that the United States of America are never to suffer long from anything disagreeable. Why not ? Those States are, it is true, democratic ; but we know of no divine law, revealed either in writing or in the facts of history, which relieves democratic States of the troubles their cir- cumstances or their conduct have produced to worry them. Democrats have no exemption from the evils of life, nor is John Burns less liable to neuralgia than Lord Salisbury. England has the Irish to deal with, Germany has the Socialists, Italy has the Neapolitans, and Russia has, in her own opinion at all events, the Jews, and each must deal with its inconveniences, even if they should be felt through continuous centuries. They can no more expel the populations they dislike than they can extirpate them, and neither can the Americans. Even if their complaints are well founded, they must just put up with those who cause them, as they put up with the stony soil of the Eastern States, or the semi-tropical climate of the South, accepting their misfortunes, like their liability to consumption and bad teeth, as circumstances which God has made inherent in their constitutions. To talk of ridding themselves of seven millions of their own population, whether by fair means or by foul, is simple nonsense. They must accept them, and either render them less inconvenient by a new method of treatment, or endure them, as we English endure our weather, with outward querulousness and secret resignation. As we have before said, we believe the Negro difficulty in the United States is enormously exaggerated by people whose secret idea is, that under democratic institutions no large community is ever to be permanently uncomfortable. The infinite majority of mankind are permanently uncom- fortable, and will always remain so. There is nothing whatever in the situation of the two races, except their unnatural and temporary equality at the polling-booth, to induce them to declare war on one another ; nor will they declare war. Apart from their unjust treatment as to the vote—which they ought not to have, but having, ought to use in freedom —the Negroes have little to complain of, except that they are looked down on ; and social con- tempt would not be cured by any social war. They are not prevented from working even so much as " blacklegs " are in England, it being explicitly acknowledged by the Times' correspondent that white men labour with them side by side. They like squatting on small farms, and nobody dreams of preventing their squatting, or interferes with them even when they form, as they have recently done, a vast "Alliance," or Trade-Union, of coloured farmers. They are not forbidden to rise by any law or any custom except the one which ordains that if they rise, white people will not employ them, a rule which will be abolished the moment it is inconvenient. They are no doubt ill-treated about hotels and theatres, which ought to be free to all ; but, on the other hand, they have per- fect liberty to set up all the inns and theatres they can support of their own. Granting their grievances, they are not the kind of grievances for which great ignorant popu- lations rise in insurrection, or for which they are willing to expatriate themselves from their own laud. On the other hand, the Whites have no substantial grievances against them, except their claim to an equality in political rights, which, as experience shows, deteriorates civilisation. They are not injured either by the Negro w.orking or refusing to work ; for if he works, his work is beneficial, and if he refuses to work, he starves without taxing the white man. The Negro proclivity towards committing rape is no doubt, if it exists in the degree alleged, a serious cause of quarrel ; but then, the white man who makes the laws, or can make the laws, can deal with it with any severity he thinks expedient or just. There is nothing between the races except dislike, and dislike can exist for ages without producing a civil war, which both races alike know would be fatal to their comfort and prosperity. They must, as Providence has brought them together, find some modus vivendi under which they can consent to exist side by side on the same soil ; and the moment the necessity becomes pressing, so that the alternatives are an agreement or a sanguinary quarrel, they will find one. Employers and employed all over Europe, and especially on the Con- tinent, are constantly complaining that they cannot and will not any longer work together ; but, nevertheless, they do work, just because they must. Neither of them give up their claims, neither of them moderate their language, neither of them are free from just charges of occasional oppression ; but they are forced to live together, and being forced, they get along somehow in a more or less dis- agreeable manner. That disagreeableness justly offends philanthropists ; but it will not be cured, though it may be ameliorated, and will not lead to any cataclysmal results. The world is not a wholly agreeable place, either in America or -anywhere else, but its disagreessbles are usually surmounted by expedients, so that the majority can live in peace. To attempt to turn the Southern States into so many Paradises by expelling a third of their population, is simply foolish, nor can we bring ourselves to believe that any such attempt will be made. We dare say a good many of the more spirited Negroes will emigrate to Africa ; but they will not be missed, and when they return, it is very doubtful if their accounts will induce any very large numbers to follow their example. No one can say what the future of any continent may be ; but certainly as yet, the especial place where Negroes have not flourished, and have not been happy, and have not established pro- gressive communities, has been Africa. There is not a petty State in Asia which may not call itself civilised. when compared with Liberia, where everybody speaks English and everybody has rights ; and what would. the Congo State, if filled with American blacks, be but a colossal Liberia ?