18 There is a very different policy, that of compromise. You know whither it has long been leading you ! It is that which the South imposed on you yesterday ; it is that which she will bring back to you to-morrow, if you do not put an end to the negro question without her aid. VI. The negro question, in the opinion of some men, has but one rational solution—the expatriation of the former slaves. This rational solution is the solution of insanity. A race is not exported. The nations who have had the misfortune to attempt, or the greater misfortune to succeed in it, have imprinted an ineffaceable blot on their fame. Spain expelled the Moors, France expelled the Huguenots, Russia is endeavoring to rid herself of the Poles. And what has always happened, whatever may have been their first intentions ? By attempting impossibilities, they have been led to atrocities. There is a force of events in great social crimes which carries us whither we would not go. We dream of a peaceful and beneficent expatriation, we make for ourselves bucolics, we already see the proscribed race surrounded with the joys of the fields, in their new country, flowing with milk and honey. These courted yet far from innocent visions, however, correspond to no realities. The fact is; that the people whose happiness we thus pretend to insure, desire to be happy in their own way, which is not ours. We wish to give them a new country, they are attached to the old one. It becomes necessary, therefore, to root them out, harshly and violently. And the work is never finished ; it must be constantly begun anew ; we are exasperated at pursuing an end which we never attain, and the moment soon comes when we harden ourselves into cruelty almost without remorse. That cases of voluntary expatriation may occur, that the peculiar situation of Hayti, Cuba, and Mexico, may open prospects to the negroes by which a number may wish to
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=