OCR Text |
Show i ; The South and the Negro. . Since .the. great war the. South has. .advanced wonderfully.' We do not believe that the story of that advance can he paralleled in the history of any pother country. The. war left the. South a i wreck; the flower of her people killed or j maimed, tho social system, completely trans- formed, and .without capital. But the innate J pluck and brain of the white race rose to meet the ; unparalleled conditions and has triumphed mag- niflceritl But before the war the negro wag. a slave ,W6. toiled without . reward.. ,Tol free him f the South believed was an appalling mistake; to 'V give him citizenship was in its estimation a ; crime unspeakable. 4 The people accepted the edict of the war, but : they never have accepted the Idglcal result of the 4 war. Senator Tillman is perhaps the best ox- ample ofttte spirit behind it all. By nature he is i an honest man, but make him' the" judge of a dif- foronce, no matter of- what nature, between a white and a black man, and he would at once de- ( cide in favor of the white, and would be honest I in his decision.- This illustrates ' why -the negro A -has never had a fair chance in the South since t the war. When a negro has wronged a white man he has always Buffered; when a white man. has wronged a negro, he .has invariably escaped 'j punishment t ' Tho general verdict of the South is that the freed negro as a laborer is practically worthless, or at least utterly unreliable. Have Southern t men really tried to change that and improve the !, black man? When a Southern man employs a f colored man does he treat him as he does a whlt4 laborer? Is he as careful to see that he i as 4 well housed, fed and paid as though jjwerS ! white? We notice there has been trouble with and the killing of some Italian laborers. Does this not I possibly come- from the old carelessness in that section of the rights of "more laborers"? And suppose now that the people generally in ', the South should determine that Inasmuch as, j, I under the law, the black man has the same l rlghtt a the white man, his treatment should ' be thf same; that if a white -man wronged a col- t preft in'ah that .white man should be punished; i that tho negro should be granted all his legal i rights; would not the race question down there be settled? Suppose this had been the rule ever j since Appomattox, would not the advancement of 1 I the South, "wonderful as it has been, have been vastly magnified? 1 . Of course we can imagine a Southern man reading the above and hear him exclaim: "The" man .who wrote that, had better mind his own 'affpjrs j!md not try to write ,on themes that he kniiwB nothing about." But that does not matter. Newspaper men have a right to discuss any question ques-tion they please so long as in doing so they violate vio-late no rights of other men; and we have never yet seen half as much peace and good will and prosperity as when the full sentiment of . the "tionVmUriity has been that no man can be so high as to violate the laws without punishment, or so Iqw that he was not entitled to every right and all the protection which, in theory at least, is given by the laws. |