The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V: Political EssaysLowell, James Russell
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The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V: Political Essays
Lowell, James Russell
United States -- Politics and government -- 1861-1865; United States -- Politics and government -- 1865-1869
But will it be enough to make the freedmen landholders merely? Must we
not make them voters also, that they may have that power of
self-protection which no interference of government can so safely,
cheaply, and surely exercise in their behalf? We answer this question
in the affirmative, for reasons both of expediency and justice. At
best, the difficulty, if not settled now, will come up again for
settlement hereafter, when it may not be so easy of solution. As a
matter of expediency, it is always wisest to shape a system of policy
with a view to permanence, much more than to immediate convenience.
When things are put upon a right footing at first,--and the only right
footing is one which will meet the inevitable demands of the future as
well as the more noisy ones of the present,--all subsidiary relations
will of necessity arrange themselves by mutual adaptation, without
constantly calling for the clumsy interference of authority. We must
leave behind us no expectation and no fear of change, to unsettle men's
minds and dishearten their industry. Both the late master and the late
slave should begin on the new order of things with a sense of its
permanence on the one hand and its rightfulness on the other. They will
soon learn that neither intelligence can do without labor, nor labor
without intelligence, and that wealth will result only from a clearly
understood and reciprocally beneficial dependence of each upon the
other. Unless we make the black a citizen, we take away from the white
the strongest inducement to educate and enlighten him. As a mere
proletary, his ignorance is a temptation to the stronger race; as a
voter, it is a danger to them which it becomes their interest to
remove. It is easy to manage the mob of New York for the time with
grape-shot, but it is the power for evil which their suffrage gives
them that will at last interest all classes, by reform and education,
to make it a power for good.
Under the head of expediency comes also this other
consideration,--that, unless made citizens, the emancipated blacks,
reckoned as they must be in the basis of representation, and yet
without power to modify the character of the representatives chosen,
will throw so much more power into the hands of men certain to turn it
to their disadvantage, and only too probably to our own. This mass, if
we leave it inert, may, in any near balance of parties, be enough to
crush us; while, if we endow it with life and volition, if we put it in
the way of rising in intelligence and profiting by self-exertion, it
will be the best garrison for maintaining the supremacy of our ideas,
till they have had time to justify themselves by experience. Have we
endured and prosecuted this war for the sake of bringing back our old
enemies to legislate for us, stronger than ever, with all the
resentment and none of the instruction of defeat?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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