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322 DOUGLASS' MONTHLY September 1860. [[line]] [[3 columns]] [[column 1]] [[bold]] DALLAS AND DELANY. --- [[/bold]] Some of our American journals, to whom [[italics]] black [[/italics]] in anything else than in the human heart, is a standing offense, are just now 'taking on ' very ruefully about what they are pleased to call a flagrant insult offered to the American Minister, Mr. G. M. DALLAS, by Lord BROUGHAM, at a meeting of the International Statistical Society, held in London. Small pots boil quick, and soon dry up; but they do boil terribly while they are at it. It would hardly be safe to say whereunto our present wrath would carry us, were we not somewhat restrained and held down by the onorous burdens of electing our President for the next four years. As an American, and being of the unpopular complexion, we are rather glad to see this sensitiveness. The most disgusting symptoms sometimes raise hopes for the recovery of the patient, and it may be so in this case. The startling offense of the venerable and learned LORD BROUGHAM, was that he ventured to call the attention of Mr. DALLAS, the American Minister Plenipotentiary, to the fact that a ' [[italics]] negro [[/italics]] ' was an acting member of the meeting of the International Statistical Society. This was the offense.--There was no mistaking the point. It struck home at once. MR. DALLAS felt it. It choked him speechless. He could say nothing. The hit was palpable. It was like calling the attention of a man, vain of his personal beauty, to his ugly nose, or to any other deformity.--DELANY, determined that the nail should hold fast, rose, with all his blackness, right up, as quick and as graceful as an African lion, and received the curious gaze of the scientific world. It was complete. Sermons in stones are nothing to this. Never was there a more telling rebuke administered to the pride, prejudiced and hypocrisy of a nation. It was saying: MR. DALLAS, we make members of the International Statistical Society out of the sort of men you make merchandize of in America. DELANY, in Washington, is a [[italics]] thing [[/italics]]; DELANY, in London, is a [[italics]] man [[/italics]]. You despise and degrade him as a beast; we esteem and honor him as a gentleman. Truth is of no color, MR. DALLAS, and to the eye of science a man is not a man because of his color, but because he is a man and nothing else. To our thinking, there was no truth more important and significant brought before the Statistical Society. DELANY'S presence in that meeting was, however, something more than a rebuke to American prejudice. It was an answer to a thousand humiliating inquiries respecting the character and qualifications of the colored race. Lord BROUGHAM, in calling attention to him, performed a most noble act, worthy of his life-long advocacy of the claims of our hated and slandered people. There was doubtless something of his sarcastic temper shown in the manner of his announcement of DELANY; but we doubt not there was the same genuine philanthropic motive at bottom of his action, which has distinguished him through life. A man covered with honor, associated with the history of his country for more than half a century, conspicuous in many of the mightiest transactions of the greatest nation of modern times, between eighty and ninety years old, is not the man to indulge a low propensity to insult.--He had a better motive than the humiliation of DALLAS. The cause of an outraged and much despised race came up before him, and [[/column 1]] [[column 2]] he was not deterred from serving it, though it should give offense. But why should Americans regard the calling attention to their characteristic prejudice against the colored race as an insult? Why do they go into a rage when the subject is brought up in England? The black man is no blacker in England than in America.--They are not strangers to the negro here; why should they make strange of him there?--They meet him on every corner here; he is in their corn-fields, on their plantations, in their houses; he waits on their tables, rides on their carriages, and accompanies them in a thousand other relations, some of them very intimate. To point out a negro here is no offense to any body. Indeed we often offer large rewards to any who will point them out. We are so in love with them, that we will hunt them; and of all men, our Southern brethren are most miserable when deprived of their negro associates. Why then should we be offended by being asked to look at a negro in London. We look at him in New York, and Mr. DALLAS has often been called to look at the negro in Philadelphia. The answer to these questions may be this: In America the white man sees the negro in that condition to which the white man's prejudice and injustice assigns him. He sees him a proscribed man, the victim of insult and social degradation. In that condition he has nothing against him. It is only when the negro is seen [[italics]] without [[/italics]] these limitations that his presence raises the wrath of your genuine American Christian. When poor, ignorant, hopeless and thoughtless, he is rather an amusement to his white fellow-citizens; but when he bears himself like a man, conscious of the God-like characteristics of manhood, determined to maintain in himself the dignity of his species, he becomes an insufferable offense. This explains MR. DALLAS, and explains the American people. It explains also the negroes themselves. It is often asked why the negroes do not rise above the generally low vocations in which they are found? Why do they consent to spend their lives in menial occupations?--The answer is, that it is only here that they are not opposed by the fierce and bitter prejudice which pierces them to the quick the moment they attempt anything higher than is considered [[italics]] their place [[/italics]] in American society. Americans thus degrade us, and are only pleased with us when so degraded. They tempt us on every side to live in ignorance, stupidity and social worthlessness, by the negative advantage of their smiles; and they drive us from all honorable exertion by meeting us with hatred and scorn the instant we attempt anything else. Had MR. DELANY been a poor, mean, dirty, ignorant negro, incapable of taking an honorable place among gentlemen and scholars, Mr. DALLAS could have turned the specimen to the account of his country. But the article before him was a direct contradiction to his country's estimate of negro manhood. He had no use for him, and was offended when his attention was called to him. There was still another bitter ingredient in the cup of the American minister. Men can indulge in very mean things when among mean men, and do so without a blush. They can even boast of their meanness, glory in their shame when among their own class, but who, when among better men, will hang their heads [[/column 2]] [[column 3]] like sheep-stealing dogs the moment their true character is made known. To hate a negro in America is an American boast, and is a part of American religion. Men glory in it. But to turn up your nose against the negro in Europe is not quite so easy as in America, especially in the case of negro morally and intellectually the equal of the American Minister. [[line]] [[bold]] INSURRECTIONARY MOVEMENTS IN TEXAS. ---- [[/bold]] Since the publication of our last [[italics]] Monthly [[/italics]]--if letter-writers and newspaper reports from that quarter of the country may be credited--a most alarming and dangerous plot has been discovered in the northern counties of Texas among the 'contented and happy' slaves in that region, the alleged parties to which have been visited by a vengeance as summary and sanguinary as the half-savage slaveholders in that country well know how to inflict. The accounts thus far published bear unmistakable marks of having been inspired by alarm and terror. The events which they describe are doubtless grossly exaggerated, and are more intended to spread alarm among the interested slaveholders, and to put them on their guard against possible surprise, than to tell the exact truth of what has been discovered. The wicked flee when no man pursueth, and the thief thinks each bush an officer. Most of the evidence of the existence of these alleged insurrectionary movements in Texas, according to the Texas papers themselves, was wrung out by the terror-stricken tyrants under the most heart-rending torture, the application of the whip, and amid the shrieks and agony of their helpless victims. Determined to find their slaves guilty, any assertion of their innocence only protracted and intensified the torture, and the only hope of a moment's relief was found in confession. Preposterous and shocking and uncertain as this barbarous method is of obtaining evidence, it is the natural and prime necessity of slavery above all systems of tyranny. The relation of master and slave, so often defended as a Bible institution, domestic and patriarchal in its character, makes the slave nothing short of a sullen and ever contriving foe of his master, divested of every motive, except fear, to respect either his life or his property. It is a relation of reciprocal hate, fraud and cruelty, in which each party is put under the strongest temptations to injure and ruin the other. This is the inherent quality of slavery; the luxury of robbing the laborer of his hire, and giving him naught for his work, carries with it ever and always the social poison of settled and gloomy malignity. Eternal justice has decreed a heavy heart, transient sleep, restless apprehension, frightful forebodings to all those who seek to purchase ease and luxury at the expense of the unpaid toil of men and women, robbed of their liberty. They who sow to the wind must expect to reap the whirlwind. Slavery is a standing invitation to violence, and one of the most hopeful indications which slavery is now giving of its speedy fall in this country, is to be found in the frequent stampedes of slaves and the desperate insurrectionary movements among them. Every such uprising, however, unsuccessful, is of startling significance, striking through and through all the flimsy logic and learning flung up, like Chinese forts of paper and paint, to conceal and protect the weak and unnatural slave system. [[/column 3]]
