Every man who thinks at all, must know that home is the fountain head,
the inspiration, the foundation and main support, not only of all
social virtue but of all motives to human progress, and that no people
can prosper, or amount to much, unless they have a home, or the hope of
a home. A man who has not such an object, either in possession or in
prospect, is a nobody and will never be anything else. To have a home,
the Negro must have a country, and he is an enemy to the moral progress
of the Negro, whether he knows it or not, who calls upon him to break
up his home in this country, for an uncertain home in Africa.
But the agitation on this subject has a darker side still. It has
already been given out that if we do not go of our own accord, we
may be forced to go, at the point of the bayonet. I cannot say that
we shall not have to face this hardship, but badly as I think of the
tendency of our times, I do not think that American sentiment will ever
reach a condition which will make the expulsion of the Negro from the
United States by any such means, possible.
Yet, the way to make it possible is to predict it. There are people
in the world who know how to bring their own prophecies to pass. The
best way to get up a mob, is to say there will be one, and this is what
is being done. Colonization is no solution, but an evasion. It is not
repentance but putting the wronged ones out of our presence. It is not
atonement, but banishment. It is not love, but hate. Its reiteration
and agitation only serves to fan the flame of popular prejudice and to
add insult to to injury.
The righteous judgment of mankind will say if the American people could
endure the Negro’s presence while a slave, they certainly can and ought
to endure his presence as a free man.
If they could tolerate him when he was a heathen, they might bear
with him now that he is a Christian. If they could bear with him when
ignorant and degraded, they should bear with him now that he is a
gentleman and a scholar.
But even the Southern whites have an interest in this question. Woe to
the South when it no longer has the strong arm of the Negro to till its
soil, “and woe to the nation when it shall employ the sword to drive
the Negro from his native land.”
Such a crime against justice, such a crime against gratitude, should it
ever be attempted, would certainly bring a national punishment which
would cause the earth to shudder. It would bring a stain upon the
nation’s honour, like the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hand. The waters of
all the oceans would not suffice to wash out the infamy. But the nation
will commit no such crime. But in regard to this point of our future,
my mind is easy. We are here and are here to stay. It is well for us
and well for the American people to rest up on this as final.
EMANCIPATION CRIPPLED. LANDLORD AND TENANT.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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