|
It has been some time since Mr. George Cable preached his new doctrine of "Social Equality" in the Century, and we have waited in vain to hear a single Southern white man approve or support it. Mr. Cable declares that he is speaking for the South and as a Southerner. "I believe," he told a correspondent of the New York Tribune the other day, "that the more intelligent element of the South agree with me." If so, "the more intelligent element" has refused to say so. Mr. Cable has not met with a single supporter, but the entire South has repudiated his policy, not the press only, but all the public men, the leaders in literature and political economy. They have met his sentimentality with the sternest facts, have shown that his theory is false, rests on a false foundation and is mischevious and dangerous. . . . A few years ago Mr. Cable himself wrote: "I was in New England once -- a year ago -- and I felt that I had never really been at home until then." If Mr. Cable ever spoke the truth it was when he said this. He is a New Englander, who has been accidentally born in the South, as he himself says; he looks on the South and Southern ideas as a New Englander. We do not object to this, and are open to his criticism, but let him not pretend to criticize us as a true son of the South . . . [This editorial then goes on a great length to "disprove" Cable's demographic argument, introducing a long ennumeration of population figures and birth rates with the following:]. . . Mr. Cable's pretense that the South is threatened with Africanization has been heard before; but his figures about the increase of negroes as compared with the whites are his own. They are pure inventions out of his own head, as much creatures of his fertile imagination as Mme. Delicieuse or Jean-ah Poquelen. He never got them from the census of from any table or book of statistics, and must have invented them to support his queer theory of saving the South from Africanization by giving everything to the negro. As a matter of fact his figures are false, and the idea that the negro race is increasing more rapidly than the whites and threatening to make a Hayti of this country is utterly without foundation. ["The negro race is a prolific one, but its prolificness is decreasing and . . . it will grow each year a smaller element of our population" concludes this part of the editorial. It then concludes its attack on what it calls Cable and "a few" others' "negromania" with this paragraph:]Mr. Cable attacks not the South alone, but the white race the wide world over, with his proposition that there is no race caste or prejudice. That prejudice is not restricted to the South. It is greater in the North than here. There are more paths and employments open to negroes in the Southern than in the New England States. Nor is this prejudice peculiar to this country, but the Englishman in India has the same sense of superiority to the Hindoo native, the same caste feeling which distinguishes the white race the world over, which has preserved it and its civilization pure, which has made it the dominant race of the world to teach, instruct and improve the others. |