Читать книгу Samantha on the Race Problem онлайн

24 страница из 88

“It was a generous and charitable idea, looking on it from one side, but from another side it looked risky, very risky, and it looked dangerous to the further peace and perpetuity of that Union.

“A little delay might not have done any harm—a little delay in giving them the full rights of citizenship.

“And it might, Heaven knows, have been as well if the slaves had had a gradual bringing up of mind and character to meet the needs of legal responsibility, if they had not been at once invested with all the rights and responsibilities which well-trained Christian scholars find it so difficult to assume, if they had not been required to solve by the ballot deep questions of statesmanship, the names of which they could not spell out in the newspaper.

“Could such ignorance make them otherwise than a dangerous element in politics, dangerous to themselves and dangerous to the welfare of the Union?

“Tossed back and forth as they were between two conflicting parties, in their helplessness and ignorance becoming the prey of the strongest faction, compelled, at the point of the sword and the muzzle of the revolver, to vote as the white man made them—the law of Might victorious over the Right—it was a terrible thing for the victim, and a still worse one for the victor.