THE NEGRO IN THE NEW WORLD.*
SIR HARRY JOHNSTON has devised a new type of travel book, which might be termed the encyclopaedic. His Uganda Protectorate, his Liberia, his George Grenfell and the Congo, are no mere record of journeys, but deal with the different countries in all their aspects, political, economic, ethnological, and physical. They are magnificently illustrated with draw- ings and photographs which really illuminate the text. His new work is the most ambitious, and in many ways the best, of the series. He has taken an immense subject—the whole history of the negro in America—and not content with that he has prefaced it with an elaborate account of negro anthro- pology, which, by the way, will not pass unquestioned by fellow- workers in this branch of study. The historical material is collected from a vast number of authorities, and in thus clarifying and arranging a complex and often recondite subject Sir Harry Johnston has performed a task of great historical value. In addition, he gives us a full account of the present status of the negro throughout the New World. This is the travel section of the book, and it is done with great vividness and charm. The descriptions of tropical and sub- tropical scenery and of native life show the enthusiasm of the true Nature-lover and the born traveller, and the illustrations are a delightful ally. Lastly, we have the author's specula- tions on negro character and the negro future. These are always sober and well reasoned, and form a useful corrective to the pessimism which is fashionable on this matter among the imperfectly informed. The white races have a heavy task of atonement for three centuries of wrongdoing. It is pleasant to know that this work is not without hope.
Slavery under the Spaniards had for its area chiefly Cuba and Hispaniola. Spain has been unjustly abused as a colonising Power. She was guilty of many senseless atrocities in the early days towards the aborigines (whom Sir H. Johnston calls Amerindians); but the Northern Powers were not blameless in this respect, and it is to be said in Spain's behalf that the influence of the Church, and especially of Religious Orders like the Jesuits and the Dominicans, speedily interfered to protect the Indians. So far as the negro was concerned the Spanish record is one of the best. It was always possible for a slave to acquire his freedom, and even in servitude he was lodged and fed well. Once free, the law took no note of difference of colour, provided there was con- formity to the Roman Catholic religion. The Spanish Slave Code of 1789 was one of the mildest of slavery laws known to history. The Latin races, indeed, seem never to have felt that colour repulsion which made Dutch and English treat the negro like some noxious wild animal. In the chapter on Cuba Sir H. Johnston tells the story of the reconstruction by the United States, one of the most admirable pieces of work performed by a civilised Power. An interesting fact is the large immigration nowadays from Spain. A few years ago it looked as if the negroes would swamp the whites, but these recent immigrants have " decided the balance in favour of a white Cuba." In Brazil the Portuguese treated the aborigines fairly well, and though less humane to the negroes than the Spaniards, yet far surpassed the Teutonic races. In Brazil, as elsewhere in America, the Roman Church was singularly enlightened in its native policy. To-day the country is largely administered by men of coloured origin. " At the present moment there is scarcely a lowly or a highly placed Federal or Provincial official, at the head of or within any of the great departments of State, that has not more or less Negro or Amerindian blood in his veins." France under Louis XIV. promulgated a " Code Noir " which lacked nothing in humanity, and on the whole her record is a good one. France's great blunder in Haiti was with the
• The Negro in the New World. By Sir Harry H. Johnston. London; Methuen and Co. [Ma. net.]
mulattoes. She allowed an educated coloured class to grow up, and denied them the rights of citizenship. Sir H. Johnston
tells again the fine story of Toussaint Louverture, probably the greatest negro in history, and well worthy of one of
Wordsworth's finest sonnets. The story of Haiti since his day has been an unhappy one. One part of the island, San Domingo, has found security under the broad wing of the United States. But the negro Republic of Haiti is still in confusion. The necessity of defending herself, which was a real necessity during the larger part of the nineteenth century, has turned her into a parody of a military Power. The result to-day is that she is very poor, and very badly governed, though the present President is an improvement on his predecessors. The country people are exceptionally hard- working and honest, and, indeed, the account of the State which Sir H. Johnston gives is the most favourable we have read. " She has it in her to become a happy, wealthy, and respected negro community, if she will cut herself off from the preposterous traditions of her ridiculous past, cease to dress up in grotesque military uniforms, to be for ever marching to and fro to military music, and wasting her substance on warlike stores." There is one curious point about French rule. Wherever she has been France has left an abiding impress upon the negroes. Paris is still the
capital city for the larger part of the dark-skinned people of the New World.
The story of Dutch, British, and American slavery in the
New World is a black one. Sir H. Johnston thinks that it is well that we should remember how bad it was, for time is
beginning to colour and obscure the evils which our grand- fathers saw clearly enough. He therefore gives many instances of cruelty, which are horrible reading. Apart from the iniquitous laws, the temptations to human nature to cast off all decency when it finds itself in a position of absolute power over flesh and blood led to the most morbid perver- sions. " Their story should be written ever and again lest we forget.' Given the same temptations and the same oppor- tunities, there is sufficient of the devil still left in the white man for the three hundred years' cruelties of negro (or other) slavery to be repeated, if it were worth the white man's while, and public opinion could be drugged or purchased." The worst record seems to be that of the Dutch in Guiana ; then comes that of the Southern States ; and Britain in the West Indies and Guiana makes a good third. Connoisseurs in the horrible will find enough to satisfy them in these chapters. Sir H. Johnston tells the story of Governor Eyre, an indefensible business when looked at fifty years after, and he relieves his narrative by some delightful descriptions of Jamaican scenery and natural history. There is a useful little intercalary chapter on the abolitionist movement in Great Britain. Then follows the story of the Southern States, and the long series of Constitutional and legal questions which culminated in the Civil War. Our one criticism is that the author is unfair to the Judges of the Supreme Court with regard to the "Dred Scott " decision. He calls it "a signal instance in history of the inhumanity of pedants in the law ; of judges to whom the administration of the law is not in the first place the enunciation of perfect justice, but a fascinating puzzle game, a kind of chess, with absolutely no regard for the feelings of the chessmen." This is perilously near nonsense. A Judge has to administer the law as he finds it, not to "enunciate perfect justice "; it is the duty of statesmen to amend the law if it is bad. About the badness there can be no serious question :—
"The steady perusal of the many books and pamphlets pub- lished between 1830 and 1865 dealing with the maltreatment of slaves in the Southern States, as well as the speeches made in Congress by Charles Sumner and others, leaves even the hardened reader and the cynical with a feeling of nausea, perhaps even with a desire for some posthumous revenge on the perpetrators of this outrage on humanity, worse than anything recorded in the nine- teenth century of the Turk in Europe or the European in Congo- land. Until I went through this course of reading I vaguely thought of John Brown as a violent, half-crazy old man, of William Lloyd Garrison as a well-meaning fanatic, and the host of Northern denunciators of the South between 1850 and 1860 as ' inebriated with the exuberance of their own verbosity.' I only wonder now they kept themselves so much under control, that ten thousand men did not march behind John Brown to clear out this Augean stable."
The last chapters are pleasanter reading, for they deal with the work of atonement. There is a most interesting account of the two great institutions for negro education, Hampton
under Dr. Hollis Primal and Tuskegee under Dr. Booker Washington. These Colleges are mainly technical in their purpose, and turn out yearly a host of experts in different trades and professions, as well as the best kind of teachers. The aim of a man like Booker Washington is to give the negro race self-confidence, by showing it that it can take its place on equal terms in the labour market of the world, " to create, by dispersed tuition, a great middle class of educated coloured people, who shall gradually replace the illiterate, unskilled, dirty, improvident Negroes of the South and East, and yet not unduly swell the ranks of the negro lawyers, doctors, and clergy." (We wish, by the way, that Sir Harry Johnston in his praiseworthy zeal for practical instruction had refrained from a stupid and violent attack upon classical education. Greek and Latin may be unnecessary subjects at Tuskegee, but why write nonsense like this ?— " How many ideas are there in any of these classical writers, except perhaps Plato, Aristotle, and Homer, which cannot be —for the ordinary man and woman—crystallised into a dozen quotations in English ? ") Sir H. Johnston's conclusion is that, bad as the past has been, nowhere in the world has the negro been given such a chance of development as in the United States, and nowhere has he availed himself so fully of his opportunities. He sees a great future for the race if, like the Jews, they turn their energies to moneymaking, and so farce the world to accept them :— " The solution will probably be that the two races—white- skinned and brown-skinned—will co-exist in amity and common American citizenship on the 3,000,000 square miles of the united States. Whilst ten millions of Aframericans aro slowly increasing to twenty millions between Florida and Alaska, two, three, four, five millions of Euramericans will be leaving the North American continent for Central America and South America and the paradises of the West Indies. For in cleansing Cnba and in making the Panama Canal, the white American has learned the secret of the Tropics.'
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