Volume Ii Part 9 (1/2)

During the present century the artists of this country have gallantly and n.o.bly endeavored to maintain and to elevate their standard [cheers], and have not perhaps in that great task always received that a.s.sistance which could be desired from the public taste which prevails around them.

But no one can examine even superficially the works which adorn these walls without perceiving that British art retains all its fertility of invention [cheers], and this year as much as in any year that I can remember, exhibits in the department of landscape, that fundamental condition of all excellence, intimate and profound sympathy with nature.

[Cheers.]

As regards literature one who is now beginning at any rate to descend the hill of life naturally looks backwards as well as forwards, and we must be becoming conscious that the early part of this century has witnessed in this and other countries what will be remembered in future times as a splendid literary age. [Cheers.] The elder among us have lived in the lifetime of many great men who have pa.s.sed to their rest--the younger have heard them familiarly spoken of and still have their works in their hands as I trust they will continue to be in the hands of all generations. [Cheers.] I am afraid we cannot hope for literature--it would be contrary to all the experience of former times were we to hope that it should be equally sustained at that extraordinarily high level which belongs, speaking roughly, to the first fifty years after the peace of 1815. That was a great period--a great period in England, a great period in Germany, a great period in France, and a great period, too, in Italy. [Cheers.]

As I have said, I think we can hardly hope that it should continue on a perfect level at so high an elevation. Undoubtedly the cultivation of literature will ever be dear to the people of this country; but we must remember what is literature, and what is not. In the first place, we should be all agreed that bookmaking is not literature. [”Hear!”] The business of bookmaking I have no doubt may thrive and will be continued upon a constantly extending scale from year to year. But that we may put aside. For my own part if I am to look a little forward, what I antic.i.p.ate for the remainder of the century is an age not so much of literature proper--not so much of great, permanent and splendid additions to those works in which beauty is embodied as an essential condition of production, but I rather look forward to an age of research. [Cheers.] This is an age of great research--of great research in science, great research in history--an age of research in all the branches of inquiry that throw light upon the former condition whether of our race, or of the world which it inhabits [cheers]; and it may be hoped that, even if the remaining years of the century be not so brilliant as some of its former periods, in the production of works great in themselves, and immortal,--still they may add largely to the knowledge of mankind; and if they make such additions to the knowledge of mankind, they will be preparing the materials of a new tone and of new splendors in the realm of literature. There is a sunrise and sunset.

There is a transition from the light of the sun to the gentler light of the moon. There is a rest in nature which seems necessary in all her great operations. And so with all the great operations of the human mind. But do not let us despond if we seem to see a diminished efficacy in the production of what is essentially and immortally great. Our sun if hidden is hidden only for a moment. He is like the day star of Milton:--

”Which anon repairs his drooping head And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore, Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.”

[Cheers.]

I rejoice in an occasion like this which draws the attention of the world to topics which ill.u.s.trate the union of art with literature and of literature with science, because you have a hard race to run, you have a severe compet.i.tion against the attraction of external pursuits, whether those pursuits take the form of business or pleasure. It is given to you to teach lessons of the utmost importance to mankind, in maintaining the principle that no progress can be real which is not equable, which is not proportionate, which does not develop all the faculties belonging to our nature. [Cheers.] If a great increase of wealth in a country takes place, and with that increase of wealth a powerful stimulus to the invention of mere luxury, that, if it stands alone, is not, never can be, progress. It is only that one-sided development which is but one side of deformity. I hope we shall have no one-sided development. One mode of avoiding it is to teach the doctrine of that sisterhood you have a.s.serted to-day, and confident I am that the good wishes you have expressed on behalf of literature will be re-echoed in behalf of art wherever men of letters are found. [Loud cheers.]

HENRY W. GRADY

THE RACE PROBLEM

[Speech of Henry W. Grady at the annual banquet of the Boston Merchants' a.s.sociation, at Boston, Ma.s.s., December 12, 1889. Mr. Grady was introduced by the President of the a.s.sociation, Jonathan A. Lane, as the spokesman for the South on the subject he was to treat. His speech electrified his hearers, and was the feature of the occasion.]

MR. PRESIDENT:--Bidden by your invitation to a discussion of the race problem--forbidden by occasion to make a political speech--I appreciate, in trying to reconcile orders with propriety, the perplexity of the little maid, who, bidden to learn to swim, was yet adjured, ”Now go, my darling, hang your clothes on a hickory limb and don't go near the water.”

The stoutest apostle of the Church, they say, is the missionary, and the missionary wherever he unfurls his flag, will never find himself in deeper need of unction and address than I, bidden to-night to plant the standard of a Southern Democrat in Boston's banquet hall, and to discuss the problem of the races in the home of Phillips and of Sumner. But, Mr.

President, if a purpose to speak in perfect frankness and sincerity; if earnest understanding of the vast interests involved; if a consecrating sense of what disaster may follow further misunderstanding and estrangement; if these may be counted to steady undisciplined speech and to strengthen an untried arm--then, sir, I shall find the courage to proceed.

Happy am I that this mission has brought my feet at last to press New England's historic soil and my eyes to the knowledge of her beauty and her thrift. Here within touch of Plymouth Rock and Bunker Hill--where Webster thundered and Longfellow sang, Emerson thought and Channing preached--here in the cradle of American letters and almost of American liberty, I hasten to make the obeisance that every American owes New England when first he stands uncovered in her mighty presence. Strange apparition! This stern and unique figure--carved from the ocean and the wilderness--its majesty kindling and growing amid the storms of winter and of wars--until at last the gloom was broken, its beauty disclosed in the suns.h.i.+ne, and the heroic workers rested at its base--while startled kings and emperors gazed and marvelled that from the rude touch of this handful cast on a bleak and unknown sh.o.r.e, should have come the embodied genius of human government and the perfected model of human liberty! G.o.d bless the memory of those immortal workers, and prosper the fortunes of their living sons--and perpetuate the inspiration of their handiwork.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _HENRY WOODFIN GRADY Photogravure after a photograph from life_ ]

Two years ago, sir, I spoke some words in New York that caught the attention of the North. As I stand here to reiterate, as I have done everywhere, every word I then uttered--to declare that the sentiments I then avowed were universally approved in the South--I realize that the confidence begotten by that speech is largely responsible for my presence here to-night. I should dishonor myself if I betrayed that confidence by uttering one insincere word, or by withholding one essential element of the truth. Apropos of this last, let me confess, Mr. President, before the praise of New England has died on my lips, that I believe the best product of her present life is the procession of 17,000 Vermont Democrats that for twenty-two years, undiminished by death, unrecruited by birth or conversion, have marched over their rugged hills, cast their Democratic ballots and gone back home to pray for their unregenerate neighbors, and awake to read the record of 26,000 Republican majority. May the G.o.d of the helpless and the heroic help them, and may their st.u.r.dy tribe increase.

Far to the South, Mr. President, separated from this section by a line--once defined in irrepressible difference, once traced in fratricidal blood, and now, thank G.o.d, but a vanis.h.i.+ng shadow--lies the fairest and richest domain of this earth. It is the home of a brave and hospitable people. There is centred all that can please or prosper humankind. A perfect climate above a fertile soil yields to the husbandman every product of the temperate zone. There, by night the cotton whitens beneath the stars, and by day the wheat locks the suns.h.i.+ne in its bearded sheaf. In the same field the clover steals the fragrance of the wind, and the tobacco catches the quick aroma of the rains. There are mountains stored with exhaustless treasures; forests--vast and primeval; and rivers that, tumbling or loitering, run wanton to the sea. Of the three essential items of all industries--cotton, iron and wood--that region has easy control. In cotton, a fixed monopoly--in iron, proven supremacy--in timber, the reserve supply of the Republic. From this a.s.sured and permanent advantage, against which artificial conditions cannot much longer prevail, has grown an amazing system of industries. Not maintained by human contrivance of tariff or capital, afar off from the fullest and cheapest source of supply, but resting in divine a.s.surance, within touch of field and mine and forest--not set amid costly farms from which compet.i.tion has driven the farmer in despair, but amid cheap and sunny lands, rich with agriculture, to which neither season nor soil has set a limit--this system of industries is mounting to a splendor that shall dazzle and illumine the world. That, sir, is the picture and the promise of my home--a land better and fairer than I have told you, and yet but fit setting in its material excellence for the loyal and gentle quality of its citizens.h.i.+p. Against that, sir, we have New England, recruiting the Republic from its st.u.r.dy loins, shaking from its overcrowded hives new swarms of workers, and touching this land all over with its energy and its courage. And yet--while in the Eldorado of which I have told you but fifteen per cent. of its lands are cultivated, its mines scarcely touched, and its population so scant that, were it set equidistant, the sound of the human voice could not be heard from Virginia to Texas--while on the threshold of nearly every house in New England stands a son, seeking, with troubled eyes, some new land in which to carry his modest patrimony, the strange fact remains that in 1880 the South had fewer northern-born citizens than she had in 1870--fewer in '70 than in '60. Why is this? Why is it, sir, though the sectional line be now but a mist that the breath may dispel, fewer men of the North have crossed it over to the South, than when it was crimson with the best blood of the Republic, or even when the slaveholder stood guard every inch of its way?

There can be but one answer. It is the very problem we are now to consider. The key that opens that problem will unlock to the world the fairest half of this Republic, and free the halted feet of thousands whose eyes are already kindling with its beauty. Better than this, it will open the hearts of brothers for thirty years estranged, and clasp in lasting comrades.h.i.+p a million hands now withheld in doubt. Nothing, sir, but this problem and the suspicions it breeds, hinders a clear understanding and a perfect union. Nothing else stands between us and such love as bound Georgia and Ma.s.sachusetts at Valley Forge and Yorktown, chastened by the sacrifices of Mana.s.sas and Gettysburg, and illumined with the coming of better work and a n.o.bler destiny than was ever wrought with the sword or sought at the cannon's mouth.

If this does not invite your patient hearing to-night--hear one thing more. My people, your brothers in the South--brothers in blood, in destiny, in all that is best in our past and future--are so beset with this problem that their very existence depends on its right solution.

Nor are they wholly to blame for its presence. The slave-s.h.i.+ps of the Republic sailed from your ports, the slaves worked in our fields. You will not defend the traffic, nor I the inst.i.tution. But I do here declare that in its wise and humane administration in lifting the slave to heights of which he had not dreamed in his savage home, and giving him a happiness he has not yet found in freedom, our fathers left their sons a saving and excellent heritage. In the storm of war this inst.i.tution was lost. I thank G.o.d as heartily as you do that human slavery is gone forever from American soil. But the free man remains.

With him a problem without precedent or parallel. Note its appalling conditions. Two utterly dissimilar races on the same soil--with equal political and civil rights--almost equal in numbers, but terribly unequal in intelligence and responsibility--each pledged against fusion--one for a century in servitude to the other, and freed at last by a desolating war, the experiment sought by neither but approached by both with doubt--these are the conditions. Under these, adverse at every point, we are required to carry these two races in peace and honor to the end.

Never, sir, has such a task been given to mortal stewards.h.i.+p. Never before in this Republic has the white race divided on the rights of an alien race. The red man was cut down as a weed, because he hindered the way of the American citizen. The yellow man was shut out of this Republic because he is an alien, and inferior. The red man was owner of the land--the yellow man highly civilized and a.s.similable--but they hindered both sections, and are gone! But the black man, affecting but one section, is clothed with every privilege of government and pinned to the soil, and my people commanded to make good at any hazard, and at any cost, his full and equal heirs.h.i.+p of American privilege and prosperity.

It matters not that every other race has been routed or excluded without rhyme or reason. It matters not that wherever the whites and the blacks have touched, in any era or in any clime, there has been an irreconcilable violence. It matters not that no two races, however similar, have lived anywhere, at any time, on the same soil with equal rights in peace! In spite of these things we are commanded to make good this change of American policy which has not perhaps changed American prejudice--to make certain here what has elsewhere been impossible between whites and blacks--and to reverse, under the very worst conditions, the universal verdict of racial history. And driven, sir, to this superhuman task with an impatience that brooks no delay--a rigor that accepts no excuse--and a suspicion that discourages frankness and sincerity. We do not shrink from this trial. It is so interwoven with our industrial fabric that we cannot disentangle it if we would--so bound up in our honorable obligation to the world, that we would not if we could. Can we solve it? The G.o.d who gave it into our hands, He alone can know. But this the weakest and wisest of us do know; we cannot solve it with less than your tolerant and patient sympathy--with less than the knowledge that the blood that runs in your veins is our blood--and that, when we have done our best, whether the issue be lost or won, we shall feel your strong arms about us and hear the beating of your approving hearts!

The resolute, clear-headed, broad-minded men of the South--the men whose genius made glorious every page of the first seventy years of American history--whose courage and fort.i.tude you tested in five years of the fiercest war--whose energy has made bricks without straw and spread splendor amid the ashes of their war-wasted homes--these men wear this problem in their hearts and brains, by day and by night. They realize, as you cannot, what this problem means--what they owe to this kindly and dependent race--the measure of their debt to the world in whose despite they defended and maintained slavery. And though their feet are hindered in its undergrowth, and their march c.u.mbered with its burdens, they have lost neither the patience from which comes clearness, nor the faith from which comes courage. Nor, sir, when in pa.s.sionate moments is disclosed to them that vague and awful shadow, with its lurid abysses and its crimson stains, into which I pray G.o.d they may never go, are they struck with more of apprehension than is needed to complete their consecration!

Such is the temper of my people. But what of the problem itself? Mr.

President, we need not go one step further unless you concede right here that the people I speak for are as honest, as sensible and as just as your people, seeking as earnestly as you would in their place to rightly solve the problem that touches them at every vital point. If you insist that they are ruffians, blindly striving with bludgeon and shotgun to plunder and oppress a race, then I shall sacrifice my self-respect and tax your patience in vain. But admit that they are men of common sense and common honesty, wisely modifying an environment they cannot wholly disregard--guiding and controlling as best they can the vicious and irresponsible of either race--compensating error with frankness, and retrieving in patience what they lose in pa.s.sion--and conscious all the time that wrong means ruin--admit this, and we may reach an understanding to-night.