The Old System of Slaver;/. 127
port, R. I., had their origin in the slave trade, and the social mag- nates who have inherited these fortunes might take with perfect right as their coat of arms a handcuffed negro, the design which Queen Elizabeth gave to Captain John Hawkins for his escutcheon, when she knighted him as a reward for the benefit that he had conferred on Christendom in originating the slave trade from the coast of Africa to America. John Fiske tells us the story.
But the Virginians knew the negro. Although his industrial edu- cation on the Southern plantations had raised him. far above the bloody and cannibalistic barbarism of his home in Africa, the Vir- ginians knew that to emancipate him as the chivalrous young legis- lator proposed would be to " turn loose lions and bears among them, ' ' as old Peter Minor said. They foresaw one of the consequences of emancipation the danger to which a hundred thousand husbands and fathers of the South must to-day leave their homes exposed if they leave them ungarded for an hour. Each day's newspapers make it impossible to deny this state of things. All Christendom is crying shame on the barbarous lynchings that are occurring in the States of the North as well as of the South, but even New England must concede that the provocation in the North is trifling compared with that in the South. Since President Roosevelt has twice sug- gested the barbarities practiced by Filipinos as palliation for the guilt of the tortures which so many of his soldiers have been convicted of using on "insurgent" Filipinos, none should forget the provoca- tion, without a parallel in history, for the lynchings in the Southern States.
A suggestion from Grover Cleveland has great weight with many good and wise men, but some curious and interesting recollections are suggested by his recommendation in a late address "that tech- nical schools for negroes be dotted all over the South." A very elaborate exposition of the need for technical education of the people in place of the kind that has been till now given was published some years since as a report of the Department of Education at Washing- ton with all the authentication that the Government could give it, and its recommendations have been largely adopted. In setting forth the need for this great change this report declares that the existing public school system is such a failure that something radically dif- ferent must be substituted for it. The concession of failure is hardly less complete than that lately made by another authority of the very highest rank, President Eliot, of Harvard University, in addresses made to two great educational assemblies in two New England States.
