AMERICAN RACIAL TROUBLES.

Waikato Argus, Volume VI, Issue 449, 17 June 1899, Page 1 (Supplement)

AMERICAN RACIAL TROUBLES.

The liberation of slaves in the United States has not proved an unmixed blessing to the negro race. The line of demarcation which separates the white and and black races in America is one that time only makes more distinct. The old feeling of slave and master has not died out, notwithstanding the modicum of freedom accorded to the erstwhile slaves. In almost all the ordinary walks of life there is absolutely no fusion of the races, which keep apart quite as much as they did in the old slave days. The feeling of repulsion for the negro in the average American mind is not understood by us. •The occasional contact with a ' coloured person' is quite a diSerent matter from having their presence obtruded upou one at every point in the business of life. The American people positively refuse to associate with the negroes, who have their own separate institution", and so keep apart from the dominant race. The innate hatred of the negro is given expression to in occasional outbursts of wild savagery, such as was evinced in Georgia the other day, when a negro was burnt to death amid a pile of wood soaked with kerosene, while aa excited crowd of 2000 men and womeu witnessed the fiendish act. The victim was supposed to have outraged a woman ; but a negro preacher was lynched the same day to appease the vengeance of the maddened crowd, and since then the work of lynching negroes has gone merrily forward in Georgia. It is only in the United States that such things cculd be ; for under British rule the lives of the humblest are as solicitously cared for as those ot the higest. But in America the popular feeling against the negro is so pronounced that public opinion virtually protects the perpetrators of such fiendish crimes. The American newspapers are clamouring for emigration of the negroes, whose marvellous fecundity theatens to destroy the balance of power between the two races, so that at the present rate of progression the black race will suon outnumber the whites in the Southern Stfttes, When the negro becomes the dominant race in point of numbers ho will not always calmly submit to the racial disabilities and indignities that have been heaped upon his head by the ruling class. That the negroes would consent to wholcsalo deportation to Afriea is more than doubtful, for to them the United States is as much their native land as to the average American. The problem is a difficult one ; but surely it will never be solved by murder or outrage. There is always the danger of retaliation, and in acts of savagery the black man will not allow himself to be outdone by the white. In seams past understanding why, in a civilised country, the subjects of the nation cannot be made amonable to law and order; but these outrages are not new to American people.