The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in EuropeWashington, Booker T.
History
The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe
Washington, Booker T.
Poor -- Europe; Working class -- Europe
Sixty years ago most of the peasants in this village to which I have
referred were serfs, and it was not until two years ago that the
Government gave them all the right to vote. Nevertheless, at the
present time the people in this village are represented by one of their
own number in the Imperial Parliament at Vienna. I stopped on my way
through the village at the little store kept by this man. I found two
young girls tending the store, his daughters, but the representative
himself was not at home.
I do not know why I should mention this circumstance here, except that
I was impressed by the contrast in the reply of these two men, the one
coming from a peasant in Poland and the other from an Englishman in
London.
It is generally said that the Negro represents in America the man
farthest down. In going to Europe I had in mind to compare the masses
of the Negro people of the Southern States with the masses in Europe
in something like the same stage of civilization. It would not be
difficult to compare the Negro in the South with the Polish peasant,
for example, because the masses of the Poles are, like the masses of
the Negroes, an agricultural people.
I know no class among the Negroes in America, however, with whom I
could compare the man at the bottom in England. Whatever one may say of
the Negro in America, he is not, as a rule, a beggar. It is very rarely
that any one sees a black hand stretched out for alms. One does see,
to be sure, too many idle and loafing Negroes standing on the street
corners and around the railway stations in the South, but the Negro is
not, as a rule, a degenerate. If he is at the bottom in America, it
is not because he has gone backward and sunk down, but because he has
never risen.
Another thing in regard to the Negro: although he is frequently poor,
he is never without hope and a certain joy in living. No hardship he
has yet encountered, either in slavery or in freedom, has robbed the
Negro of the desire to live. The race constantly grew and increased in
slavery, and it has considerably more than doubled in freedom. There
are some people among the members of my race who complain about the
hardships which the Negro suffers, but none of them yet, so far as I
know, has ever recommended "race suicide" as a solution of the race
problem.
I mention this because I found just the contrary to be the case in
England. I do not think that anything I saw or heard while I was in
England gave me a more poignant impression of the hardships of the
labouring man in England than the discovery that one of the most widely
read weekly papers in England, under the caption of "The White Slaves
of Morality," was making a public campaign in favour of reducing the
size of the families among the working classes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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