It sometimes seems as if half the American people were losing the power
to apply logical processes to the ordinary affairs of life.
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 crevasse with immense destructive
power.
EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO
[CW#18][cwneg10.txt]3114
But slavery brought about one result, and that the most difficult in the
development of a race from savagery, and especially a tropical race, a
race that has always been idle in the luxuriance of a nature that
supplied its physical needs with little labor. It taught the negro to
work, it transformed him, by compulsion it is true, into an industrial
being, and held him in the habit of industry for several generations.
Perhaps only force could do this, for it was a radical transformation.
I am glad to see that this result of slavery is recognized by Mr. Booker
Washington, the ablest and most clear-sighted leader the Negro race has
ever had.
Conceit of gentility of which the world has already enough.
It is this character, quality, habit, the result of a slow educational
process, which distinguishes one race from another.
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