Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, June 1899: Volume LV — John Shaqi
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, June 1899: Volume LVVarious
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, June 1899: Volume LV
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
We find in the South the presence of two distinct peoples, with
irreconcilable racial characteristics and diverse historical
antecedents. The Caucasian and the negro are not simply unlike, but
they are contrasted, and are as far apart as any other two races of
human beings. They are unassimilable and immiscible without rapid
degeneracy. Ethnologically they are nearly polar opposites. With the
Caucasian progress has been upward. Whatever is great in art,
invention, literature, science, civilization, religion, has
characterized him. In his native land the negro has made little or no
advancement for nearly four thousand years. Surrounded by and in
contact with a higher civilization, he has not invented a machine, nor
painted a picture, nor written a book, nor organized a stable
government, nor constructed a code of laws. He has not suppressed the
slave trade, which, according to recent testimony, was never more
flourishing. He has no monuments nor recorded history. For thousands
of years there lies behind the race one dreary, unrelieved, monotonous
chapter of ignorance, nakedness, superstition, savagery. All efforts
to reclaim, civilize, Christianize, have been disastrous failures,
except what has been accomplished in this direction in the United
States.
It need not be disguised, for it is the ever-present, indisputable
fact, that while there are alleviations of the unpleasantness, the
relations between the negroes and their co-citizens of the Caucasian
race are strained and unsatisfactory. The friction, the prejudice, the
cleavage, is not between Teutonic and Latin on the one side and
Semitic on the other, nor between Saxon and Celt; it lies deeper,
yields less readily to palliatives and remedies, and seems a matter of
adjustment for the remotest future. It may help to understand the
situation if we analyze its causes.
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