THE NEGRO.

Northland Age, Volume VI, Issue 3, 6 September 1909, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE NEGRO.

IN HIS HABIT AS HE LIVES, The negro, as a rule, despises * culture, so highly venerated by thtf * Asiatics, Chaldeans, Chinese, Israel- 1 ites, and Persians, and recognised since the days of Aristotle as the most important of all the sciences.! If it flourished amongst the tians, Carohaginians, and Abyssinians, the battle-horses of negro man* iacs, these were Semitico-Hamitts, the noble blood of Africa. His highest ambition is to be a petty trader,whilst his thick skull, broad bones, and cold porous leathery skin, point him out as a born "hewer of wood and drawer of water." The cruelty of the negro is, likd that of a schoolboy, the blind impulse of rage combined with want of sympathy. Thus he thoughtlessly, tortures and slays his prisoners, as the youth of England torment and kill cats. lie fails in the domestication of the lower animals, because he is deficient in forbearance with them ; in a short time his violence will permanently ruin the temper of a horse ; and he will starve to death the English dog, for which perhaps he has paid a high price. * Ihe negro has never inpented an alphabet, a musical scale, or any other element 0 f knowledge. Music and dancing, his passions arc, as arts, still in embryo. He cultivates oratory ; and so do all barbarians. r He is eternally singing, but he has no idea of poetry. His painting and statuary are, like his person, ungraceful and grotesque ; whilst his , art, like his mind, is arrested by the hand of Nature. His year is a rainy season, his moons have no names ; and of an hour he has not the remotest conception. His techno’ogy consists of weaving, cutting canoes, making rude weapons, and in S some places practising a rough w metallurgy. The negro, in mass, will not improve beyond a certain point, and that not respectable ; he mentally remains a child, and is never capable of a genet alisat'on. Mans character is everywhere, to some extent, the gift of climate. Tha tropics engender but few wants, exercise is more painful than pleasant, therefore there is little work. Our transition state in Europe has at least this consolation, that we can look forward to a permanent improvement in type ; to stoexing . the world with a higher order of ' man. But in Africa, before progress can be general, it appears that the negro must become extinct by being absorbed into the negroid. The negro is nowhere worse than at home, where he is a curious mixture of cowardice a nd ferocity. With the barbarous dread and horror of death, he delights in the torments and the destruction of others, and with more than the usual savage timidity, his highest boast is that of heroism. He is nought but self ; he lacks even the rude virtue of hospitality, and ever, as Commander Forbes has it, he “baits with a sprat to catch a mackerel."—From “A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome,," by Sir Richard F. Burton.