The law of restitution is one which the religion of the Old Testament enforces, and which the New Testament does not relax. It applies, as all laws do, most pressingly to individuals, but it reaches out, as all laws do, to nations and to races.
We have wronged the Negro, the Indian and the Chinaman—all three—and they therefore call on us, on our American nation, and on our English-speaking people, for redress, and for all that we can do to atone for past neglect—not only for past neglect, but injustice. Need I recite?
It was in 1620 that the first slave ship landed her human freight upon the shores of Virginia, and, from that time for more than two centuries the deadly traffic was continued, and men, women and children were bought and sold like animals. We need not say, “But this was a Southern crime; we and our fathers were not guilty.” For two-thirds of that time, the whole nation were alike in it. Northern ships and Northern capital carried on the importation later than that. Our Northern fathers gave it up largely, it is true, as it is charged, because what was for the time profitable in South Carolina and in Georgia, did not pay in Massachusetts and Vermont. It was not until 1825 that the slaves were set free in the State of New Jersey. We do not propose to depict the evils and the sins of slavery. Thank God, they are in the past, save as the consequences are upon us still.
I grant that good may have been done; that, in the end, it may be shown that elevation and enlightenment have followed from even this contact with a superior civilization and religion. God causes the wrath of man to praise Him; and even the sinful and the selfish acts of men are made the servants of His will. But that is hardly to be put to the credit of the thus indirect instruments of good. Rather, by what this good lacks of that which Christian motive and effort might have accomplished, we are guilty before God.
The horrors enacted and still enacting on the dark continent of Africa—for the slave trade still continues—the enforced ignorance and enforced vice of two centuries and a half, the engrafting of the vices of civilization upon those of heathendom, are the charges which this nation has to meet before the bar of God. It is a debt which never can be paid. Is there no claim on us from the American Negro?