A gentlemanly nature must
shrink from it. There may be in it a certain amount of
what is vulgarly termed pluck, and perhaps courage. But
what of that? Everybody more or less admires pluck.
Everybody worships courage, if it be of a high order, but
who allows that pluck or even courage is an excuse for
passion or its consequences? The whites may admire pluck
in the negro, as in other races, but they will never
admit unwarrantable obtrusiveness, or rudeness, or
grossness, or any other ungentlemanly trait, and no more
in the negro than in others. This is quite just. A negro
would not allow it even in another.
I did not intend to discuss social equality here, but
as it is not entirely foreign to my subject I may be
pardoned a word or so upon it.
Social equality, as I comprehend it, must be the natural,
and perhaps gradual, outgrowth of a similarity of instincts
and qualities in those between whom it exists. That is to
say, there can be no social equality between persons who
have nothing in common. A civilized being would not accept
a savage as his equal, his socius , his friend. It would
be repugnant to nature. A savage is a man, the image of
his Maker as much so as any being. He has all the same
rights of equality which any other has, but they are
political rights only. He who buried his one talent to
preserve it was not deemed worthy to associate with him
who increased his five to ten.
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