WHITES AND BLACKS OR THE QUESTION SETTLED 32

CHAPTER V. SHALL THE WHITE MAN AND THE NEGRO SEPARATE? 

Commence and do your first work over. Every land has a remedy for its own ills. All Negro "meetings", before adjournment, take on a political complexion, and that, of course, makes the politicians coming from said "meetings", offensive to the rulers of the South. It appears that politics is made a business, paramount to everything else. This is wrong. While no one, of proper intelligence, demands that you shall stop taking a part in politics, it is thought best that you should regard politics as an incident, and not as the only occupation requiring attention.

The thing which injures the colored people most is the stress which they place on politics as a panacea for all their ills. Less politics and more land is what the Negro wants.

Stay here. Go to work and learn well your duties as citizens. Ellis, a colored man from Texas, now in Mexico, in the interest of a few deceived, deluded blacks, has succeeded in having the lawmakers of that Republic sanction, by legislative enactment, the coming of Negroes from the United States among them; provided they will live in that part of Mexico unfit for Mexican settlement. On the twenty-second day of November, the following "associated press" dispatch appeared in all the large papers of the United States:

"Mexican newspapers state that Negro colonists will only be permitted to settle in fever districts on the coast."

Stay here; this is your country as well as the white man's; cultivate and maintain an amicable relation with the people of this section. Do nothing which will destroy amity; have a proper regard for the rights of others, and you will never have cause to complain because your next door neighbor is a white man.

As to whether you shall go to Africa or stay here, I reproduce my interview with an Atlanta Constitution reporter, published December 31. 1887. I understand Dr. E. W. Blyden, a West Indian linguist, is now in this country. He is challenged to meet me in public debate, if he cares to, and prove false my assertions. He is here, by the grace of God, although the Liberians led him through the streets of Monrovia with a rope around his neck, for a cause, as I am informed, which I do not care to mention. Liberia is Latrobe's and Coppinger's graveyard, set apart for the destruction and burial of American Negroes.