Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/48

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42
THE NEGRO

all "earnest and successful preachers, and wholly unconscious of hypocrisy. Their sins, universally known, did not diminish their influence with their race. It was impossible to doubt their absolute sincerity."

"A much darker picture," says Keane in his work on the negro, "is presented by the independent negro commonwealths of Hayti, for eighty years the scene of almost uninterrupted fratricidal strife."

Throughout the entire historic period of man's career upon earth the chapter on the negro is practically a record of the lowest savagery, soon lapsing back into mere tradition of wild and untutored tribes. People whose social institutions are at the lowest possible level, with an undiluted fetichism, with the worship of ancestors for a religion, coupled with torture, cruelty, slavery and cannibalism, and a common belief in sorcery. Where not checked by the presence of the European in the middle Congo Basin the native shambles are still hung with the choice cuts of human bodies, and they continue to be sold in the open market place. (See Appendix, Note 1. Page 183.) Many of these people see their near relatives in the negroes of the United States. In Africa, they even barter their dead relatives, and those securing the corpses in this way eat them, and that with great relish (Stanley: Heart of Africa, Vol. II. pp. 18, 19). They will even disinter them for the same purpose, and eat them after decomposition has set in. Those negroes who still practice this in Africa are several millions in number, and are the close blood relations of the race as we have them represented in the United States. To quote Professor Keane once more on the state of the African