of some political party. The heart knows, however, that the incumbents are recognized with an involuntary wince. They are tolerated by reason of their fewness. The mass of the blacks are held back in their state of toil. It is the mandate of American instinct.
We say American instinct—which is, that America is for Americans, not for German, Irish, or African, as such. The German here rises and rules, not as a German; nor the Irishman as an Irishman. When the German gets out his naturalization papers, he theoretically gets out of his German skin. Practically, he gets out of it in a generation or two, through intermarriage and association; mingles freely and equally with the mass of population; and, in the attainment of the highest social or political privilege or distinction, is limited solely by the worth of his individuality. The rise and rule of the African must be, according to American spirit, after the same method. Disappearing in the mass of population, he must lose the African cast, and transform himself, by intermarriage and social association, into an actual American; for he could be no American, however the letter of the law might read, who, after the lapse of a century, should retain the exclusive hue and affinity of a stranger race. But this transformation is impossible, seeing the blacks stand apart from the whites, and make a distinct and alien people. Any advancement of the blacks is an advancement of the African, as such; and the advancement of individuals, here and there, above the laboring level, is the vanguard of the race's advancement.
The advancement of the blacks, therefore, becomes a menace to the whites. No two free races, remaining distinctly apart, can advance side by side, without a struggle for supremacy. The thing is impossible. The world has never witnessed it, and a priori grounds are all against it. Hence, the whites instinctively oppose the black invasion (as it were), and seek to keep this people below the labor-line; and a large superiority, at present, in numbers, and a vastly larger superiority in intelligence and wealth, make them easily, and perhaps without conscious effort, successful.
But a fundamental social law is thus broken—a law, under whose operation, in a free social state, the poor, lower, laboring class naturally rise, while the rich upper class descend; and no law, whatever the sphere to which it belongs, can be broken with impunity. To the discontent arising from this source may be traced the periodic exodus movement among the negroes. Politicians, for party ends, have assigned other causes, and declared that "exodus" means bull-dozing, Ku-kluxing, imposition, oppression, enforced pauperism, etc. These are all wide of the mark. Since the Southern States have been under the rule of its intelligent population, the blacks, as a whole, and in the main, have been free in the exercise of political rights; and, moreover, they have prospered as never before. The underlying cause of the exodus fever, stimulated to some extent by railroad men and other side
