In studying the discontent in this country which takes the form of a labor movement, one is at first struck by its illogical aspects. So far as it is an organized attempt to better the condition of men by a.s.sociation of interests it is consistent. But it seems strange that the doctrine of individualism should so speedily have an outcome in a personal slavery, only better in the sense that it is voluntary, than that which it protested against. The revolt from authority, the a.s.sertion of the right of private judgment, has been pushed forward into a socialism which destroys individual liberty of action, or to a state of anarchy in which the weak would have no protection. I do not imagine that the leaders who preach socialism, who live by agitation and not by labor, really desire to overturn the social order and bring chaos. If social chaos came, their occupation would be gone, for if all men were reduced to a level, they would be compelled to scratch about with the rest for a living. They live by agitation, and they are confident that government will be strong enough to hold things together, so that they can continue agitation.

The strange thing is that their followers who live by labor and expect to live by it, and believe in the doctrine of individualism, and love liberty of action, should be willing to surrender their discretion to an arbitrary committee, and should expect that liberty of action would be preserved if all property were handed over to the State, which should undertake to regulate every man's time, occupation, wages, and so on. The central committee or authority, or whatever it might be called, would be an extraordinary despotism, tempered only by the idea that it could be overturned every twenty-four hours. But what security would there be for any calculations in life in a state of things in expectation of a revolution any moment? Compared with the freedom of action in such a government as ours, any form of communism is an iniquitous and meddlesome despotism. In a less degree an a.s.sociation to which a man surrenders the right to say when, where, and for how much he shall work, is a despotism, and when it goes further and attempts to put a pressure on all men outside of the a.s.sociation, so that they are free neither to work nor to hire the workmen they choose, it is an extraordinary tyranny. It almost puts in the shade Mexican or Russian personal government. A demand is made upon a railway company that it shall discharge a certain workman because and only because he is not a member of the union. The company refuses. Then a distant committee orders a strike on that road, which throws business far and wide into confusion, and is the cause of heavy loss to tens of thousands who have no interest in any a.s.sociation of capital or labor, many of whom are ruined by this violence. Some of the results of this surrender of personal liberty are as illegal as illogical.

The boycott is a conspiracy to injure another person, and as such indictable at common law. A strike, if a conspiracy only to raise wages or to reduce hours of labor, may not be indictable, if its object cannot be shown to be the injury of another, though that may be incidentally its effect. But in its incidents, such as violence, intimidation, and in some cases injury to the public welfare, it often becomes an indictable offense. The law of conspiracy is the most ill-defined branch of jurisprudence, but it is safe to say of the boycott and the strike that they both introduce an insupportable element of tyranny, of dictation, of interference, into private life. If they could be maintained, society would be at the mercy of an irresponsible and even secret tribunal.

The strike is illogical. Take the recent experience in this country. We have had a long season of depression, in which many earned very little and labor sought employment in vain. In the latter part of winter the prospect brightened, business revived, orders for goods poured in to all the factories in the country, and everybody believed that we were on the eve of a very prosperous season. This was the time taken to order strikes, and they were enforced in perhaps a majority of cases against the wishes of those who obeyed the order, and who complained of no immediate grievance. What men chiefly wanted was the opportunity to work.

The result has been to throw us all back into the condition of stagnation and depression. Many people are ruined, an immense amount of capital which ventured into enterprises is lost, but of course the greatest sufferers are the workingmen themselves.

The methods of violence suggested by the communists and anarchists are not remedial. Real difficulties exist, but these do not reach them. The fact is that people in any relations incur mutual obligations, and the world cannot go on without a recognition of duties as well as rights. We all agree that every man has a right to work for whom he pleases, and to quit the work if it does not or the wages do not suit him. On the other hand, a man has a right to hire whom he pleases, pay such wages as he thinks he can afford, and discharge men who do not suit him. But when men come together in the relation of employer and employed, other considerations arise. A man has capital which, instead of loaning at interest or locking up in real estate or bonds, he puts into a factory.

In other words, he unlocks it for the benefit partly of men who want wages. He has the expectation of making money, of making more than he could by lending his money. Perhaps he will be disappointed, for a common experience is the loss of capital thus invested. He hires workmen at certain wages. On the strength of this arrangement, he accepts orders and makes contracts for the delivery of goods. He may make money one year and lose the next. It is better for the workman that he should prosper, for the fund of capital acc.u.mulated is that upon which they depend to give them wages in a dull time. But some day when he is in a corner with orders, and his rivals are competing for the market, and labor is scarce, his men strike on him.

Conversely, take the workman settled down to work in the mill, at the best wages attainable at the time. He has a house and family. He has given pledges to society. His employer has incurred certain duties in regard to him by the very nature of their relations. Suppose the workman and his family cannot live in any comfort on the wages he receives. The employer is morally bound to increase the wages if he can. But if, instead of sympathizing with the situation of his workman, he forms a combination with all the mills of his sort, and reduces wages merely to increase his gains, he is guilty of an act as worthy of indictment as the strike. I do not see why a conspiracy against labor is not as illegal as a conspiracy against capital. The truth is, the possession of power by men or a.s.sociations makes them selfish and generally cruel. Few employers consider anything but the arithmetic of supply and demand in fixing wages, and workingmen who have the power, tend to act as selfishly as the male printers used to act in striking in an establishment which dared to give employment to women typesetters. It is of course sentimental to say it, but I do not expect we shall ever get on with less friction than we have now, until men recognize their duties as well as their rights in their relations with each other.

In running over some of the reasons for the present discontent, and the often illogical expression of it, I am far from saying anything against legitimate a.s.sociations for securing justice and fair play. Disa.s.sociated labor has generally been powerless against acc.u.mulated capital. Of course, organized labor, getting power will use its power (as power is always used) unjustly and tyrannically. It will make mistakes, it will often injure itself while inflicting general damage. But with all its injustice, with all its surrender of personal liberty, it seeks to call the attention of the world to certain hideous wrongs, to which the world is likely to continue selfishly indifferent unless rudely shaken out of its sense of security. Some of the objects proposed by these a.s.sociations are chimerical, but the agitation will doubtless go on until another element is introduced into work and wages than mere supply and demand. I believe that some time it will be impossible that a woman shall be forced to make shirts at six cents apiece, with the gaunt figures of starvation or a life of shame waiting at the door. I talked recently with the driver of a street-car in a large city. He received a dollar and sixty cents a day. He went on to his platform at eight in the morning, and left it at twelve at night, sixteen hours of continuous labor every day in the week.

He had no rest for meals, only s.n.a.t.c.hed what he could eat as he drove along, or at intervals of five or eight minutes at the end of routes. He had no Sunday, no holiday in the year.

Between twelve o'clock at night and eight the next morning he must wash and clean his car. Thus his hours of sleep were abridged. He was obliged to keep an eye on the pa.s.sengers to see that they put their fares in the box, to be always, responsible for them, that they got on and off without accident, to watch that the rules were enforced, and that collisions and common street dangers were avoided. This mental and physical strain for sixteen consecutive hours, with scant sleep, so demoralized him that he was obliged once in two or three months to hire a subst.i.tute and go away to sleep. This is treating a human being with less consideration than the horses receive. He is powerless against the great corporation; if he complains, his place is instantly filled; the public does not care.

Now what I want to say about this case, and that of the woman who makes a shirt for six cents (and these are only types of disregard of human souls and bodies that we are all familiar with), is that if society remains indifferent it must expect that organizations will attempt to right them, and the like wrongs, by ways violent and destructive of the innocent and guilty alike. It is human nature, it is the lesson of history, that real wrongs, unredressed, grow into preposterous demands. Men are much like nature in action; a little disturbance of atmospheric equilibrium becomes a cyclone, a slight break in the levee 'a creva.s.se with immense destructive power.

In considering the growth of discontent, and of a natural disregard of duties between employers and employed, it is to be noted that while wages in nearly all trades are high, the service rendered deteriorates, less conscience is put into the work, less care to give a fair day's work for a fair day's wages, and that pride in good work is vanishing. This may be in the nature of retaliation for the indifference to humanity taught by a certain school of political economists, but it is, nevertheless, one of the most alarming features of these times. How to cultivate the sympathy of the employers with the employed as men, and how to interest the employed in their work beyond the mere wages they receive, is the double problem.

As the intention of this paper was not to suggest remedies, but only to review some of the causes of discontent, I will only say, as to this double problem, that I see no remedy so long as the popular notion prevails that the greatest good of life is to make money rapidly, and while it is denied that all men who contribute to prosperity ought to share equitably in it. The employed must recognize the necessity of an acc.u.mulated fund of capital, and on the other hand the employer must be as anxious to have about him a contented, prosperous community, as to heap up money beyond any reasonable use for it. The demand seems to be reasonable that the employer in a prosperous year ought to share with the workmen the profits beyond a limit that capital, risk, enterprise, and superior skill can legitimately claim; and that on the other hand the workmen should stand by the employer in hard times.

Discontent, then, arises from absurd notions of equality, from natural conditions of inequality, from false notions of education, and from the very patent fact, in this age, that men have been educated into wants much more rapidly than social conditions have been adjusted, or perhaps ever can be adjusted, to satisfy those wants. Beyond all the actual hardship and suffering, there is an immense mental discontent which has to be reckoned with.

This leads me to what I chiefly wanted to say in this paper, to the cause of discontent which seems to me altogether the most serious, altogether the most difficult to deal with. We may arrive at some conception of it, if we consider what it is that the well-to-do, the prosperous, the rich, the educated and cultivated portions of society, most value just now.

If, to take an ill.u.s.tration which is sufficiently remote to give us the necessary perspective, if the political economists, the manufacturers, the traders and aristocracy of England had had chiefly in mind the development of the laboring people of England into a fine type of men and women, full of health and physical vigor, with minds capable of expansion and enjoyment, the creation of decent, happy, and contented homes, would they have reared the industrial fabric we now see there? If they had not put the acc.u.mulation of wealth above the good of individual humanity, would they have turned England into a grimy and smoky workshop, commanding the markets of the world by cheap labor, condemning the ma.s.s of the people to unrelieved toil and the most squalid and degraded conditions of life in towns, while the land is more and more set apart for the parks and pleasure grounds of the rich? The policy pursued has made England the richest of countries, a land of the highest refinement and luxury for the upper cla.s.ses, and of the most misery for the great ma.s.s of common people. On this point we have but to read the testimony of English writers themselves. It is not necessary to suppose that the political economists were inhuman. They no doubt believed that if England attained this commanding position, the acc.u.mulated wealth would raise all cla.s.ses into better conditions. Their mistake is that of all peoples who have made money their first object. Looked at merely on the material side, you would think that what a philanthropic statesman would desire, who wished a vigorous, prosperous nation, would be a strong and virile population, thrifty and industrious, and not mere slaves of mines and mills, degenerating in their children, year by year, physically and morally. But apparently they have gone upon the theory that it is money, not man, that makes a state.

In the United States, under totally different conditions, and under an economic theory that, whatever its defects on paper, has nevertheless insisted more upon the worth of the individual man, we have had, all the same, a distinctly material development. When foreign critics have commented upon this, upon our superficiality, our commonplaceness, what they are pleased to call the weary level of our mediocrity, upon the raging unrest and race for fortune, and upon the tremendous pace of American life, we have said that this is incident to a new country and the necessity of controlling physical conditions, and of fitting our heterogeneous population to their environment. It is hardly to be expected, we have said, until, we have the leisure that comes from easy circ.u.mstances and acc.u.mulated wealth, that we should show the graces of the highest civilization, in intellectual pursuits. Much of this criticism is ignorant, and to say the best of it, ungracious, considering what we have done in the way of substantial appliances for education, in the field of science, in vast charities, and missionary enterprises, and what we have to show in the diffused refinements of life.

We are already wealthy; we have greater resources and higher credit than any other nation; we have more wealth than any save one; we have vast acc.u.mulations of fortune, in private hands and in enormous corporations.

There exists already, what could not be said to exist a quarter of a century ago, a cla.s.s who have leisure. Now what is the object in life of this great, growing cla.s.s that has money and leisure, what does it chiefly care for? In your experience of society, what is it that it pursues and desires? Is it things of the mind or things of the senses?

What is it that interests women, men of fortune, club-men, merchants, and professional men whose incomes give them leisure to follow their inclinations, the young men who have inherited money? Is it political duties, the affairs of state, economic problems, some adjustment of our relations that shall lighten and relieve the wrongs and misery everywhere apparent; is the interest in intellectual pursuits and art (except in a dilettante way dictated for a season by fashion) in books, in the wide range of mental pleasures which make men superior to the accidents of fortune? Or is the interest of this cla.s.s, for the most part, with some n.o.ble exceptions, rather in things grossly material, in what is called pleasure? To come to somewhat vulgar details, is not the growing desire for equipages, for epicurean entertainments, for display, either refined or ostentatious, rivalry in profusion and expense, new methods for killing time, for every imaginable luxury, which is enjoyed partly because it pleases the senses, and partly because it satisfies an ign.o.ble craving for cla.s.s distinction?

I am not referring to these things as a moralist at all, but simply in their relation to popular discontent. The astonishing growth of luxury and the habit of sensual indulgence are seen everywhere in this country, but are most striking in the city of New York, since the fashion and wealth of the whole country meet there for display and indulgence,--New York, which rivals London and outdoes Paris in sumptuousness. There congregate more than elsewhere idlers, men and women of leisure who have nothing to do except to observe or to act in the spectacle of Vanity Fair. Aside from the display of luxury in the shops, in the streets, in private houses, one is impressed by the number of idle young men and women of fashion.

It is impossible that a workingman who stands upon a metropolitan street corner and observes this Baccha.n.a.lian revel and prodigality of expense, should not be embittered by a sense of the inequality of the conditions of life. But this is not the most mischievous effect of the spectacle. It is the example of what these people care for. With all their wealth and opportunities, it seems to him that these select people have no higher object than the pleasures of the senses, and he is taught daily by reiterated example that this is the end and aim of life. When he sees the value the intelligent and the well-to-do set upon material things, and their small regard for intellectual things and the pleasures of the mind, why should he not most pa.s.sionately desire those things which his more fortunate neighbors put foremost? It is not the sight of a Peter Cooper and his wealth that discontents him, nor the intellectual pursuits of the scholar who uses the leisure his fortune gives him for the higher pleasures of the mind. But when society daily dins upon his senses the lesson that not manhood and high thinking and a contented spirit are the most desirable things, whether one is rich or poor, is he to be blamed for having a wrong notion of what will or should satisfy him? What the well-to-do, the prosperous, are seen to value most in life will be the things most desired by the less fortunate in acc.u.mulation. It is not so much the acc.u.mulation of money that is mischievous in this country, for the most stupid can see that fortunes are constantly shifting hands, but it is the use that is made of the leisure and opportunity that money brings.

Another observation, which makes men discontented with very slow acc.u.mulation, is that apparently, in the public estimation it does not make much difference whether a man acquires wealth justly or unjustly. If he only secures enough, he is a power, he has social position, he grasps the high honors and places in the state. The fact is that the toleration of men who secure wealth by well known dishonest and sharp practices is a chief cause of the demoralization of the public conscience.

However the lines social and political may be drawn, we have to keep in mind that nothing in one cla.s.s can be foreign to any other, and that practically one philosophy underlies all the movements of an age. If our philosophy is material, resulting in selfish ethics, all our energies will have a materialistic tendency. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that, in a time when making money is the chief object, if it is not reckoned the chief good, our education should all tend to what is called practical, that is, to that which can be immediately serviceable in some profitable occupation of life, to the neglect of those studies which are only of use in training the intellect and cultivating and broadening the higher intelligence. To this purely material and utilitarian idea of life, the higher colleges and universities everywhere are urged to conform themselves. Thus is the utilitarian spirit eating away the foundations of a higher intellectual life, applying to everything a material measure. In proportion as scholars yield to it, they are lowering the standard of what is most to be desired in human life, acting in perfect concert with that spirit which exalts money making as the chief good, which makes science itself the slave of the avaricious and greedy, and fills all the world with discontented and ign.o.ble longing. We do not need to be told that if we neglect pure science for the pursuit of applied science only, applied science will speedily be degraded and unfruitful; and it is just as true that if we pursue knowledge only for the sake of gain, and not for its own sake, knowledge will lose the power it has of satisfying the higher needs of the human soul. If we are seen to put only a money value on the higher education, why should not the workingman, who regards it only as a distinction of cla.s.s or privilege, estimate it by what he can see of its practical results in making men richer, or bringing him more pleasure of the senses?

The world is ruled by ideas, by abstract thought. Society, literature, art, politics, in any given age are what the prevailing system of philosophy makes them. We recognize this clearly in studying any past period. We see, for instance, how all the currents of human life changed upon the adoption of the inductive method; no science, no literature, no art, practical or fine, no person, inquiring scholar, day laborer, trader, sailor, fine lady or humblest housekeeper, escaped the influence.

Even though the prevailing ethics may teach that every man's highest duty is to himself, we cannot escape community of sympathy and destiny in this cold-blooded philosophy.

No social or political movement stands by itself. If we inquire, we shall find one preponderating cause underlying every movement of the age. If the utilitarian spirit is abroad, it accounts for the devotion to the production of wealth, and to the consequent separation of cla.s.ses and the discontent, and it accounts also for the demand that all education shall be immediately useful. I was talking the other day with a lady who was doubting what sort of an education to give her daughter, a young girl of exceedingly fine mental capacity. If she pursued a cla.s.sical course, she would, at the age of twenty-one, know very little of the sciences. And I said, why not make her an intellectual woman? At twenty-one, with a trained mind, all knowledges are at one's feet.

If anything can correct the evils of devotion to money, it seems to me that it is the production of intellectual men and women, who will find other satisfactions in life than those of the senses. And when labor sees what it is that is really most to be valued, its discontent will be of a n.o.bler kind.

THE EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO

By Charles Dudley Warner

At the close of the war for the Union about five millions of negroes were added to the citizenship of the United States. By the census of 1890 this number had become over seven and a half millions. I use the word negro because the descriptive term black or colored is not determinative. There are many varieties of negroes among the African tribes, but all of them agree in certain physiological if not psychological characteristics, which separate them from all other races of mankind; whereas there are many races, black or colored, like the Abyssinian, which have no other negro traits.

It is also a matter of observation that the negro traits persist in recognizable manifestations, to the extent of occasional reversions, whatever may be the mixture of a white race. In a certain degree this persistence is true of all races not come from an historic common stock.

In the political reconstruction the negro was given the ballot without any requirements of education or property. This was partly a measure of party balance of power; and partly from a concern that the negro would not be secure in his rights as a citizen without it, and also upon the theory that the ballot is an educating influence.

This sudden transition and shifting of power was resented at the South, resisted at first, and finally it has generally been evaded. This was due to a variety of reasons or prejudices, not all of them creditable to a generous desire for the universal elevation of mankind, but one of them the historian will judge adequate to produce the result. Indeed, it might have been foreseen from the beginning. This reconstruction measure was an attempt to put the superior part of the community under the control of the inferior, these parts separated by all the prejudices of race, and by traditions of mastership on the one side and of servitude on the other. I venture to say that it was an experiment that would have failed in any community in the United States, whether it was presented as a piece of philanthropy or of punishment.

A necessary sequence to the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the negro was his education. However limited our idea of a proper common education may be, it is a fundamental requisite in our form of government that every voter should be able to read and write. A recognition of this truth led to the establishment in the South of public schools for the whites and blacks, in short, of a public school system. We are not to question the sincerity and generousness of this movement, however it may have halted and lost enthusiasm in many localities.

This opportunity of education (found also in private schools) was hailed by the negroes, certainly, with enthusiasm. It cannot be doubted that at the close of the war there was a general desire among the freedmen to be instructed in the rudiments of knowledge at least. Many parents, especially women, made great sacrifices to obtain for their children this advantage which had been denied to themselves. Many youths, both boys and girls, entered into it with a genuine thirst for knowledge which it was pathetic to see.

But it may be questioned, from developments that speedily followed, whether the ma.s.s of negroes did not really desire this advantage as a sign of freedom, rather than from a wish for knowledge, and covet it because it had formerly been the privilege of their masters, and marked a broad distinction between the races. It was natural that this should be so, when they had been excluded from this privilege by pains and penalties, when in some States it was one of the gravest offenses to teach a negro to read and write. This prohibition was accounted for by the peculiar sort of property that slavery created, which would become insecure if intelligent, for the alphabet is a terrible disturber of all false relations in society.

But the effort at education went further than the common school and the primary essential instruction. It introduced the higher education.

Colleges usually called universities--for negroes were established in many Southern States, created and stimulated by the generosity of Northern men and societies, and often aided by the liberality of the States where they existed. The curriculum in these was that in colleges generally,--the cla.s.sics, the higher mathematics, science, philosophy, the modern languages, and in some instances a certain technical instruction, which was being tried in some Northern colleges. The emphasis, however, was laid on liberal culture. This higher education was offered to the ma.s.s that still lacked the rudiments of intellectual training, in the belief that education--the education of the moment, the education of superimposed information, can realize the theory of universal equality.

This experiment has now been in operation long enough to enable us to judge something of its results and its promises for the future. These results are of a nature to lead us seriously to inquire whether our effort was founded upon an adequate knowledge of the negro, of his present development, of the requirements for his personal welfare and evolution in the scale of civilization, and for his training in useful and honorable citizenship. I am speaking of the majority, the ma.s.s to be considered in any general scheme, and not of the exceptional individuals --exceptions that will rapidly increase as the ma.s.s is lifted--who are capable of taking advantage to the utmost of all means of cultivation, and who must always be provided with all the opportunities needed.

Millions of dollars have been invested in the higher education of the negro, while this primary education has been, taking the whole ma.s.s, wholly inadequate to his needs. This has been upon the supposition that the higher would compel the rise of the lower with the undeveloped negro race as it does with the more highly developed white race. An examination of the soundness of this expectation will not lead us far astray from our subject.

The evolution of a race, distinguishing it from the formation of a nation, is a slow process. We recognize a race by certain peculiar traits, and by characteristics which slowly change. They are acquired little by little in an evolution which, historically, it is often difficult to trace. They are due to the environment, to the discipline of life, and to what is technically called education. These work together to make what is called character, race character, and it is this which is transmitted from generation to generation. Acquirements are not hereditary, like habits and peculiarities, physical or mental. A man does not transmit to his descendants his learning, though he may transmit the apt.i.tude for it. This is ill.u.s.trated in factories where skilled labor is handed down and fixed in the same families, that is, where the same kind of labor is continued from one generation to another. The child, put to work, has not the knowledge of the parent, but a special apt.i.tude in his skill and dexterity. Both body and mind have acquired certain transmissible traits. The same thing is seen on a larger scale in a whole nation, like the j.a.panese, who have been trained into what seems an art instinct.

It is this character, quality, habit, the result of a slow educational process, which distinguishes one race from another. It is this that the race transmits, and not the more or less accidental education of a decade or an era. The Brahmins carry this idea into the next life, and say that the departing spirit carries with him nothing except this individual character, no acquirements or information or extraneous culture. It was perhaps in the same spirit that the sad preacher in Ecclesiastes said there is no "knowledge nor wisdom in the grave, whither thou goest."

It is by this character that we cla.s.sify civilized and even semi-civilized races; by this slowly developed fibre, this slow acc.u.mulation of inherent quality in the evolution of the human being from lower to higher, that continues to exist notwithstanding the powerful influence of governments and religions. We are understood when we speak of the French, the Italian, the Pole, the Spanish, the English, the German, the Arab race, the j.a.panese, and so on. It is what a foreign writer calls, not inaptly, a collective race soul. As it is slow in evolution, it is persistent in enduring.

Further, we recognize it as a stage of progress, historically necessary in the development of man into a civilized adaptation to his situation in this world. It is a process that cannot be much hurried, and a result that cannot be leaped to out of barbarism by any superimposition of knowledge or even quickly by any change of environment. We may be right in our modern notion that education has a magical virtue that can work any kind of transformation; but we are certainly not right in supposing that it can do this instantly, or that it can work this effect upon a barbarous race in the same period of time that it can upon one more developed, one that has acquired at least a race consciousness.

Before going further, and in order to avoid misunderstanding, it is proper to say that I have the firmest belief in the ultimate development of all mankind into a higher plane than it occupies now. I should otherwise be in despair. This faith will never desist in the effort to bring about the end desired.

But, if we work with Providence, we must work in the reasonable ways of Providence, and add to our faith patience.

It seems to be the rule in all history that the elevation of a lower race is effected only by contact with one higher in civilization. Both reform and progress come from exterior influences. This is axiomatic, and applies to the fields of government, religion, ethics, art, and letters.

We have been taught to regard Africa as a dark, stolid continent, unawakened, unvisited by the agencies and influences that have transformed the world from age to age. Yet it was in northern and northeastern Africa that within historic periods three of the most powerful and brilliant civilizations were developed,--the Egyptian, the Carthaginian, the Saracenic. That these civilizations had more than a surface contact with the interior, we know. To take the most ancient of them, and that which longest endured, the Egyptian, the Pharaohs carried their conquests and their power deep into Africa. In the story of their invasions and occupancy of the interior, told in pictures on temple walls, we find the negro figuring as captive and slave. This contact may not have been a fruitful one for the elevation of the negro, but it proves that for ages he was in one way or another in contact with a superior civilization. In later days we find little trace of it in the home of the negro, but in Egypt the negro has left his impress in the mixed blood of the Nile valley.

The most striking example of the contact of the negro with a higher civilization is in the powerful medieval empire of Songhay, established in the heart of the negro country. The vast strip of Africa lying north of the equator and south of the twentieth parallel and west of the upper Nile was then, as it is now, the territory of tribes distinctly described as Negro. The river Niger, running northward from below Jenne to near Timbuctoo, and then turning west and south to the Gulf of Guinea, flows through one of the richest valleys in the world. In richness it is comparable to that of the Nile and, like that of the Nile, its fertility depends upon the water of the central stream. Here arose in early times the powerful empire of Songhay, which disintegrated and fell into tribal confusion about the middle of the seventeenth century. For a long time the seat of its power was the city of Jenne; in later days it was Timbuctoo.

This is not the place to enlarge upon this extraordinary piece of history. The best account of the empire of Songhay is to be found in the pages of Barth, the German traveler, who had access to what seemed to him a credible Arab history. Considerable light is thrown upon it by a recent volume on Timbuctoo by M. Dubois, a French traveler. M. Dubois finds reason to believe that the founders of the Songhese empire came from Yemen, and sought refuge from Moslem fanaticism in Central Africa some hundred and fifty years after the Hejira. The origin of the empire is obscure, but the development was not indigenous. It seems probable that the settlers, following traders, penetrated to the Niger valley from the valley of the Nile as early as the third or fourth century of our era. An evidence of this early influence, which strengthened from century to century, Dubois finds in the architecture of Jenne and Timbuctoo. It is not Roman or Saracenic or Gothic, it is distinctly Pharaonic. But whatever the origin of the Songhay empire, it became in time Mohammedan, and so continued to the end. Mohammedanism seems, however, to have been imposed. Powerful as the empire was, it was never free from tribal insurrection and internal troubles. The highest mark of negro capacity developed in this history is, according to the record examined by Barth, that one of the emperors was a negro.