The Weekly University Courier
The Largest College Journal Circulation in the United States.
Phrased Every Friday Morning by the COURIER COMPANY
DENT, HOGEBOOM, E. C. ESTERLY, President, Secretary
EDITORIAL STAFF:
CHARLES JOHNSON, EDITOR IN-CHIEF,
ASSOCIATES:
J. M. SHELLBARGER, SIDNEY PHILLIPS, EMMA BARTELL, E. E. SQUIRRE, MAME TISDALE GERTRUDE CHOTTY, ROSE NELSON.
BUSINESS MANAGERS:
J. A. MUSHRUSH, MARK OTIS.
P. T. FOLEY, Printer, Lawrence, Kas
Entered at the post-office at Lawrence, Kansas as second-class matter.
UNIVERSITY DIRECTORY.
PHI GAMMA DELTA fraternity, Meets in the Eldridge House block, third floor.
PHI DELTA THETA, Meets on second floor of Opera House block.
PHI KAPPA PSI, Meets on third floor of Opera House block.
SIGMANU, Meets in the Eldridge House block, third floor.
SIGMANCH, Meets on the fourth floor East of the Opera House block.
BETHA THETA PI, Meets on fourth floor of the Opera House block.
KAPPA KAPPA GAMMA, Meets every Saturday afternoon at the homes of members.
KAPPA ALPHA THETA, Meets every Saturday afternoon in the Eldridge House block.
I. C. SOROSIS, Meets every Saturday afternoon in homes of members.
ORATORICAL ASSOCIATION; J. A. Prescott, President; W. H. Brown, Secretary, Executive Committee; J. A. Mushrush, V. L. Kellogg, C. E. Street.
BASE BALL ASSOCIATION; Manager, Prof. A. W. Wilcox, Captain of the nine, Charles Vooris.
UNIVERSITY SCIENCE CLUB, Meets in Snow Hall.
PHILOLOGICAL CLUB, Meets in room No. 30 every Friday at 9 p.m.
TENNIE ASSOCIATION; President, F. E. Reed; Secretary, F. H. Kellogg; Treasurer, W. A. Snow.
COURIER COMPANY; President, Dent Hogeboom; Secretary, Esterly.
IF OUR contemporary will consult the markings of the judges in the late contest and count delivery half, as it is counted in the State, the bump of egotism, which it has developed to so remarkable a degree of late, will probably resume its normal size.
THE business managers desire to thank the Courier subscribers for the liberal manner in which they are paying up their subscriptions. Let the good work go on. Let those who are still behind, send in their dollar and help maintain the Courier's present high grade of excellence.
THE graduates of Yale have decided to commemorate the victories won in recent years by that university in rowing, baseball, football, and other athletic contests by uniting in a dinner at Delmonico's next February. The graduates claim that these victories, beginning in 1880, when for the first time a system of graduate advice and assistance was organized, have far exceeded expectation and deserve recognition. It is thought that an expression of enthusiasm and approval by Yale graduates on this subject will encourage future contests, and keep alive and stimulate the general practice of athletics among the undergraduates.
A meeting of the graduates will be held at Delmonico's at 4:30 o'clock next Monday afternoon for the purpose of appointing a committee of arrangements for the dinner. The gentlemen having the matter in hand are Brayton Ives, '61; George A. Peters, '42; Alexander H. Stevens, '54; Henry E. Howland, '54; Frederick W. Stevens, '58; Buchanan Winthrop, '62; Charles D. Ingersoll, '64; George A. Adee, '67; J. Fred Kernochan, '68; M. Dwight Collier, '66; James M. Varnum, '68; William C. Gulliver, '70; Howard Mansfield, '71; Otto T. Bannard, '76; R. A. Peabody, Jr., '81; William Pollock, '82; William H. L. Lee, '69; George E. Dodge, '70; Frank Jenkins, '74; Julian W. Curtiss, '79; Russell A. Bigelow, '82; Robert Appleton, '86; Paul K. Ames, '86, and Oliver G. Jennings, '87.
The Race Problem.
The following oration, given fourth place in the contest, was thought by many to deserve a higher rank. In compliance with numerous requests made duing the past week Mr. Mushrush has consented to its publication.-Ed.
All advancement is through difficulties. The solution of the difficulties in a nations career frequently taxes the genius of its wisest statesmen and tests its national strength. The great national problem of the U.S. has proven most vexatious and difficult. For years the people regarded him as a public enemy who should even mention that such a problem existed. The North was awed into silence by the South. The rights of humanity were trampled upon with seeming impunity. When no longer conscience could turn a deaf ear to the cries of an oppressed race, the people rose in arms. They overcame slavery with the sword. Four million human beings were liberated from bondage. The nation rejoiced that it had finally solved its problem. The trunk of slavery had indeed fallen, but the roots of that dreaded curse remained. From these roots has sprung up a noxious growth of ignorance, of prejudice and of crime. Our people absorbed in business interests or ambitious schemes have allowed this growth to spread unnoticed and unrestrained, until, to-day, no question, whether economic or political, religious or social, is of such vital importance to the future of our republic as the Race Problem.
And yet, to-day, this question excites but passing notice. It is shunned by the politician as dangerous to personal interests; neglected by the people as though the American nation were the special protege of the Almighty. If any great evil threatens our national existence with a characteristic complacency, we let it alone, believing that if let alone it will cure itself. With a sublime sense of security, verging dangerously near the ridiculous, we have come to be devout believers in our destiny, our future, our luck. Sinrply because we are Americans we laugh to scorn the dangers which may threaten other nations. We neglect the laws of society forgetful that for every grain of errort here, must be paid down a corresponding grain of retribution. It is this spirit of neglect, this senseless trifling with danger, which makes the race problem to-day sothreatening, so terrible. Closely connected with this spirit in its relation to the race problem is the spirit of sectional feeling in the
U. S. Ever since our nation has had an existence there has been a North and a South whose principles, whose policy and whose motives have been radically different. This feeling of sectionalism has grown and has fastened itself upon the nation. War left it unscathed; it has lived to block and check the consideration of this problem. While on the one hand it has incited legislation in behalf of the negro, on the other hand it has thwarted the execution of the laws enacted and has inspired distrust throughout all sections of the country as to the motives of the legislators.
The condition of the negro in America has always been such as to excite the pity and compassion of human men. Brought from Africa in a wild savage state and sold into slavery, for two hundred and fifty years he was kept in the densest of ignorance. His condition was little better than that of the brute The laws governing him were a refinement of cruelty, a travesty on justice, a mockery of the enlightenment and civilization of the nineteenth century. The slave only learned the name of liberty when it was finally written in the blood of a nation. Emancipation gave him his freedom. Reconstruction placed the ballot in his hands. The slave was made a co-ordinate ruler with his former master. A second time our people rejoiced that they had solved the problem; a second time they rested from their labors. But mark you, they had only written the terms of the equation and had left it to solve itself. Against the intelligence, the wealth and the pride of a haughty people were arrayed the passions and prejudices of an ignorant race intoxicated with the power of freedom after two centuries of servitude. Liberty itself will fit no man for the exercise of sovereign power. The proper use of that God given right must be learned before its privileges can be enjoyed.
The South to-day presents a phenomenal state of society. Within her borders two free races are living under the same government. Separated by color and by marked natural characteristics, by pride, by passion and by prejudice, these two races have come to regard each other as enemies. This feeling of enmity with little to alleviate and much to excite it, has assumed gigantic proportions and bids fair to involve one section of our country in bloody strife.
The white man of the South is proud haughty and exclusive. Reared among slaves and taught that slavery was a divine institution he still regards the negro as an inferior species of the human family, fit only for servitude and degradation. That the negro may ever become his equal he will not admit. He can not, nay he will not tolerate the rule and government of the colored race in its present condition. Bitter indeed was the day, when, gallled by defeat, he had to free his slaves and perhaps reduce himself to poverty. But far more bitter was the day when placed upon the same level with the beings in whom he had once trafficked, he was compelled to recognize the negro as his political in politics. The negro as a political integer in the South has now practically disappeared. The reign of the white man is again supreme. But it requires constant vigilance of the people to maintain it. They do not propose that ignorance shall dictate their laws, dispense their justice or shape their policy. "Born: to rule," they cannot submit to a servile class their lives, their fortune and their honor. Theirs is the wealth and intelligence, theirs the cultivation and
refinement, theirs the honor and glory of their country. Proud of that country and jealous of their rights and their honor, these people regard it as an unbearable insult, that a class ninety per cent of whom can neither read nor write, a class which they have always despised and ruled should now demand a share in their government. They see the negro gradually outnumbering them. They see their country gradually coming nearer and nearer the domination of the hated race. In 1900, or eleven years hence, at the present rate of gain, the negro race will have a majority in eight of the Southern states. Goaded to desperation by the thought, the whites have resisted with force. Outbreaks have ensued, 'tis too, true that violence and crime have stained the fair name of the South. But what man is here tonight who would sit calmly by and see the government of his State made sacred by the memory of brave deeds and centuries of ancestral greatness and power, pass into the hands of an ignorant, wretched, despised class Kansas with her John Brown and her Jim Lane, her border wars and her heroic struggles for freedom, with all her sympathies for the colored man, his wrongs and his woes, would never submit to the domination of such a power as the present colored race in the South. Nor while the South retains her traditions of superiority, her pride and her prejudice will she ever submit to what seems to her so manifest a degradation, so great a disgrace.
To meet this struggle she is quietly gathering her forces together. Let but the report of a negro uprising be heralded forth and these forces assemble with remarkable dispatch. The lines of conflict are fast forming. There they stand; wealth against poverty; pride against prejudice; intelligence against ignorance, in unbroken array from the Potomac to the Rio Grande.
Legislation alone can not right the wrongs of a nation. Back of that legislation must stand public opinion. The rights guaranteed the negro by the constitution of the United States, and solemnly granted by the Southern states themselves, could only be maintained by armed force. The moment that force was withdrawn, his power was overthrown. Deprived of his rights and privileges he is almost as powerless to help his race today as he was when a slave. Whatever of freedom he possesses, he enjoys only at the hands of a minority, who openly declare that under no circumstances will the white population of the South submit to the government or domination of the Negro race. Such acts and such declarations have maddened his revengeful spirit. He can not but feel that he who held him in bondage for centuries, he who waged war for the continuation of that bondage and who finally defrauded him of his liberties by violence is his enemy and unfit to be the gaurdian of his rights.
That disturbances and outbreaks are less frequent now than a few years ago, does not prove that the danger is lessening, or that the colored man is content. The weaker race has only ceased to carry on a useless struggle. The
It is the inflexible rule of development that the inferior race in a republic of freemen tends to rise and become the dominant power. The pages of history declare it, the experience of nations has proven it. Generations may elapse before the colored race has reached that development. But if the races continue to drift apart, if passion is still inflamed by haughtiness and oppression, conflict is inevitable.
Negro has not forgotten his taste of liberty. Constant brooding over his wrongs will not inspire him with forgiveness. He will never forget that he was enslaved by the white man. It is folly to think it. Who of you can read of an indignity to our nation without a desire for revenge? Who of you can read of the insults heaped upon our ancestors by the British without a feeling of burning indignation? Yet these insults are to the wrongs of slavery as the little rill is to the raging torrent that leaps down Niagara's mighty steep. To the negro orator of a century hence, these wrongs willurnish an endless theme for eloquence. An eloquence that will fan race prejudice into a consuming flame, unless that prejudice be restrained by wisdom and intelligence.
Nor are these all the wrongs that rankle in the bosom of the colored man. The South may be justified in protecting itself from the mass of ignorance which threatened its institutions. But by all the laws of right, of justice and of humanity it was bound to enlighten this people which it had so long held in the darkness of bondage. Yet to the cry of the negro for knowledge the South has been supremely indifferent. Deprived of his rights and his privileges because of his ignorance, he has been kept ignorant that this denial might be continued. Deprived of a voice in the laws that govern him, he is denied a hand in their execution. His life, his liberty, his all is at the mercy of those whom he regards his enemies.
How may this conflict be averted? Shall the question be met and decided, or will you continue to sow to the wind of neglect and reap the whirlwind of disaster? The question is one of national importance. It comes home to each one of you and demands a solution.
Not always will this race submit. Its demands for right and justice can not always be scorned. Some day, unless his wrongs are righted, the Negro will revolt against his oppressors and wreak a terrible and a bloody revenge. Some day, unless our people awake to their danger, there will be enacted within our borders a fearful tragedy, and our nation will writhe in; the toils of a second French revolution.
Centuries are required to change the manners and customs of a people, a generation may wipe out their prejudices. We may not live to see the day when the Negro and the white man will meet upon the same level, but we may do much to alleviate the present state of jealousy and distrust. Knowledge is the foe of ignorance, universal intelligence the great enemy of superstition and wrong. It is a powerful influence in controlling the acts and restraining the passions of men. An ignorant class is always a dangerous element in a free republic. The whole people must be educated in order to become intelligent factors in their own government. They must remember that "ignorance is the curse of God, knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to Heaven." Then, like the murky fog before the kindly beams of the morning sun, will the blinding mist of ignorance, of passion and of false pride in the South be forever scattered to the four winds of Heaven by the beneficent rays from the lamp of knowledge; our people live in peace, our nation be one of fraternity and equality.
Miss Mame Monroe, and Miss Helen Simpson were initiated into the mysteries of the Kappa Alapha Theta fraternity at the residence of Miss Webster last Saturday evening.
Sin and a interest in W deal scope build plete way, ficial of M has man
so that Hopi
ted he yy, a,
rope rupee has
has this of N
feeling prof
profl the be
the be ce
exis