A Voice from the South quotes

Attorneys for the plaintiff and attorneys for the defendant, with bungling gaucherie have analyzed and dissected, theorized and synthesized with sublime ignorance or pathetic misapprehension of counsel from the black client.

One important witness has not yet been heard from.

The summing up of the evidence deposed, and the charge to the jury have been made—but no word from the Black Woman.

… then the facts of any particular period of history may seem to deny it, I for one do not doubt that the source of the vitalizing principle of woman’s development and amelioration is the Christian Church, so far as that church is coincident with Christianity.

Christ gave ideals not formulae.

The Gospel is a germ requiring millennia for its growth and ripening. It needs and at the same time helps to form around itself a soil enriched in civilization, and perfected in culture and insight without which the embryo can neither be unfolded or comprehended.

and every attempt to elevate the Negro, whether undertaken by himself or through the philanthropy of others, cannot but prove abortive unless so directed as to utilize the indispensable agency of an elevated and trained womanhood.

A race cannot be purified from without.

Preachers and teachers are helps, and stimulants and conditions as necessary as the gracious rain and sunshine are to plant growth. But what are rain and dew and sunshine and cloud if there be no life in the plant germ?

We too often mistake individuals’ honor for race development and so are ready to substitute pretty accomplishments for sound sense and earnest purpose.

A stream cannot rise higher than its source.

The atmosphere of homes is no rarer and purer and sweeter than are the mothers in those homes. A race is but a total of families. The nation is the aggregate of its homes.

A stream cannot rise higher than its source. The atmosphere of homes is no rarer and purer and sweeter than are the mothers in those homes.

A race is but a total of families.

The nation is the aggregate of its homes. As the whole is sum of all its parts, so the character of the parts will determine the characteristics of the whole. These are all axioms and so evident that it seems gratuitous to remark it;

There must be something of human nature in it, the same as that which brought about that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” that He might “draw” us towards God.

Men are not “drawn” by abstractions.

Only sympathy and love can draw, and until our Church in America realizes this and provides a clergy that can come in touch with our life and have a fellow feeling for our woes, without being imbedded and frozen up in their “Gothic antipathies,” the …

Men are not “drawn” by abstractions.

Only sympathy and love can draw

, and until our Church in America realizes this and provides a clergy that can come in touch with our life and have a fellow feeling for our woes, without being imbedded and frozen up in their “Gothic antipathies,” the good bishops are likely to …

The battle is one of sacrifice and hardship, but our duty is plain. We have been recipients of missionary bounty in some sort for twenty-one years. Not even the senseless vegetable is content to be a mere reservoir.

Receiving without giving is an anomaly in nature.

Nature’s cells are all little workshops for manufacturing sunbeams, the product to be given out to earth’s inhabitants in warmth, energy, thought, action. Inanimate creation always pays back an equivalent.

“In ordinary,” says he, “we have a snappish criticism which watches and contradicts the opposite party. We want the will which advances and dictates [acts]. Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself, shall not be defended.

Complaining never so loud and with never so much reason, is of no use.

What cannot stand must fall; and the measure of our sincerity and therefore of the respect of men is the amount of health and wealth we will hazard in the defense of our right.”

How is it I see no police here, and yet the streets are as quiet and orderly as if there were an officer of the law standing on every corner.”

Mrs. Johnston replied, “Oh, yes; there are vicious persons in Oberlin just as in other towns⁠—but our girls are our police.”

With from five to ten hundred pure-minded young women threading the streets of the village every evening unattended, vice must slink away, like frost before the rising sun:

and I claim that at the present stage of our development in the South she is even more important and necessary.

Let us then, here and now, recognize this force and resolve to make the most of it⁠—not the boys less, but the girls more.

There can be no true test of national courtesy without travel. Impressions and conclusions based on provincial traits and characteristics can thus be modified and generalized. Moreover, the weaker and less influential the experimenter, the more exact and scientific the deductions.

Courtesy “for revenue only” is not politeness, but diplomacy.

Any rough can assume civility toward those of “his set,” and does not hesitate to carry it even to servility toward those in whom he recognizes a possible patron or his master in power, wealth, rank, or influence.

… avoid complications and unwarranted reactions, so the Black Woman holds that her femineity linked with the impossibility of popular affinity or unexpected attraction through position and influence in her case makes her a touchstone of American courtesy exceptionally pure and singularly free from extraneous modifiers.

The man who is courteous to her is so, not because of anything he hopes or fears or sees, but because he is a gentleman.

I would eliminate also from the discussion all uncharitable reflections upon the orderly execution of laws existing in certain states of this Union, requiring persons known to be colored to ride in one car, and persons supposed to be white in another.

Did he not catch and reveal her own secret by his sympathetic listening as she “would constantly sing a more wonderful song or tell a more marvellous tale” in the souls he met around him?

“Stand off! I am better than thou!” has never yet painted a true picture, nor written a thrilling song, nor given a pulsing, a soul-burning sermon.

’Tis only sympathy, another name for love—that one poor word which, as George Eliot says, “expresses so much of human insight”—that can interpret either man or matter.

It cannot seem less than a blunder, whenever the exponents of a great reform or the harbingers of a noble advance in thought and effort allow themselves to seem distorted by a narrow view of their own aims and principles.

All prejudices, whether of race, sect or sex, class pride and caste distinctions are the belittling inheritance and badge of snobs and prigs.

The philosophic mind sees that its own “rights” are the rights of humanity. That in the universe of God nothing trivial is or mean;

Not Protestant vs. Catholic, then; not Luther vs. Leo, not Dominicans vs. Augustinians, nor Geneva vs. Rome;—but humanity rationally free, vs. the clamps of tradition and superstition which had manacled and muzzled it.

The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class⁠—it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.

Now unless we are greatly mistaken the Reform of our day, known as the Woman’s Movement, is essentially such an embodiment, if its pioneers could only realize it, of the universal good.

Hers is every interest that has lacked an interpreter and a defender.

Her cause is linked with that of every agony that has been dumb⁠—every wrong that needs a voice.

It is no fault of man’s that he has not been able to see truth from her standpoint.

She stands now at the gateway of this new era of American civilization. In her hands must be moulded the strength, the wit, the statesmanship, the morality, all the psychic force, the social and economic intercourse of that era.

To be alive at such an epoch is a privilege, to be a woman then is sublime.

In this last decade of our century, changes of such moment are in progress, such new and alluring vistas are opening out before us, such original and radical suggestions for the adjustment of labor and capital, of government and the governed, of the family, the …

A harmless looking man was once asked how many there were in his family.

“Ten,” he replied grimly; “my wife’s a one and I a zero.”

In that family there was harmony, to be sure, but it was the harmony of a despotism—it was the quiet of a muzzled mouth, the smoldering peace of a volcano crusted over.

Caste and prejudice mean immobility. One race predominance means death. The community that closes its gates against foreign talent can never hope to advance beyond a certain point.

Resolve to keep out foreigners and you keep out progress.

Home talent develops its one idea and then dies. Like the century plant it produces its one flower, brilliant and beautiful it may be, but it lasts only for a night. Its forces have exhausted themselves in that one effort.

Be ready each individual element—each race, each class, each family, each man to reply “I engage to undertake an honest man’s share.”

God and time will work the problem.

You and I are only to stand for the quantities at their best, which he means us to represent.

“Who ever reads an American book?” it was scornfully asked in the eighteenth century.

Imitation is the worst of suicides; it cuts the nerve of originality and condemns to mediocrity

: and ’twas not till the pen of our writers was dipped in the lifeblood of their own nation and pictured out its own peculiar heartthrobs and agonies that the world cared to listen.

No man can prophesy with another’s parable. For each of us truth means merely the representation of the sensations and experiences of our personal environment, colored and vivified—fused into consistency and crystallized into individuality in the crucible of our own feelings and imaginations.

The mind of genius is merely the brook, picturing back its own tree and bush and bit of sky and cloud ensparkled by individual salts and sands and rippling motion.

And paradoxical as it may seem, instead of making us narrow and provincial, this trueness to one’s habitat, this appreciative eye and ear for the tints and voices of one’s own little wood serves but to usher us into the eternal galleries and choruses of …

And yet I do not think we should quarrel with An Imperative Duty because it lacks the earnestness and bias of a special pleader. Mr. Howells merely meant to press the button and give one picture from American life involving racial complications.

The kodak does no more; it cannot preach sermons or solve problems.

Besides, the portrayal of Negro characteristics was by no means the main object of the story, which was rather meant, I judge, to be a thumbnail sketch containing a psychological study of a morbidly sensitive conscience hectoring over a weak and vacillating will and fevered …

a conclusion which, to my mind, is a most illogical one.

If the cultivated black man cannot endure the white man’s barbarity⁠—the cure, it seems to me, would be to cultivate the white man.

Civilize both, then each will know what is due from man to man, and that reduces at once to a minimum the friction of their contact.

It is my opinion that the canvas awaits the brush of the colored man himself.

It is a pathetic⁠—a fearful arraignment of America’s conditions of life, that instead of that enrichment from the years and days, the summers and springs under which, as Browning says,

“The flowers turn double and the leaves turn flowers,”—

The fact is, a sense of freedom in mind as well as in body is necessary to the appreciative and inspiring pursuit of the beautiful.

A bird cannot warble out his fullest and most joyous notes while the wires of his cage are pricking and cramping him at every heart beat.

His tones become only the shrill and poignant protest of rage and despair.

What I hope to see before I die is a black man honestly and appreciatively portraying both the Negro as he is, and the white man, occasionally, as seen from the Negro’s standpoint.

There is an old proverb “The devil is always painted black⁠—by white painters.” And what is needed, perhaps, to reverse the picture of the lordly man slaying the lion, is for the lion to turn painter.

Then too we need the calm clear judgment of ourselves and of others born of a disenchantment similar to that of a little girl I know in the South, who was once being laboriously held up over the shoulders of a surging throng to catch …

… of ourselves and of others born of a disenchantment similar to that of a little girl I know in the South, who was once being laboriously held up over the shoulders of a surging throng to catch her first glimpse of a real live president.

“Why Nunny,” she cried half reproachfully, as she strained her little neck to see⁠—“It’s nuffin but a man!”

When we have been sized up and written down by others, we need not feel that the last word is said and the oracles sealed. “It’s nuffin but a man.”

Know thyself, and know those around at their true weight of solid intrinsic manhood without being dazzled by the fact that littleness of soul is often gilded with wealth, power and intellect.

There can be no nobility but that of soul, and no catalogue of adventitious circumstances can wipe out the stain or palliate the meanness of inflicting one ruthless, cruel wrong.

’Tis not only safer, but nobler, grander, diviner,

Keep true to your own ideals. Be not ashamed of what is homely and your own. Speak out and speak honestly. Be true to yourself and to the message God and Nature meant you to deliver.

The young David cannot fight in Saul’s unwieldy armor.

Let him simply therefore gird his loins, take up his own parable and tell this would-be great American nation “A chile’s amang ye takin’ notes;”

but you don’t know how I feel. You don’t know how sick I was on that nasty ship!” And so your rhetoric cannot annihilate the association of ideas. He feels; you know. But he will outgrow his feeling—and you are content to wait.

Just as impervious to reason is the man who is dominated by the sentiment of race prejudice.

You can only consign him to the fatherly hand of Time; and pray that your own mental sight be not thus obscured and your judgment warped in your endeavors to be just and true.

The calculation may be made in the same way and on the same principle that we would estimate the value of any commodity on the market.

Men are not very unlike watches.

We might estimate first the cost of material—is it gold or silver or alloy, solid or plated, jewelled or sham paste.

The materials that go to make the man, the probabilities of his character and activities, the conditions and circumstances of his growth, and his quantum of resistance and mastery are the resultant of forces which have been accumulating and gathering momentum for generations.

So that, as one tersely expresses it, in order to reform a man, you must begin with his great grandmother.

A few years ago a certain social scientist was struck by a remarkable coincidence in the name of a number of convicts in the State prison of New York.

One thing is certain, the flaws that are simply ingrained in the timber are not our responsibility.

A man is to be praised primarily not for having inherited fine tools and faultless materials but for making the most of the stuff he has, and doing his best in spite of disadvantages and poor material.

The individual is responsible, not for what he has not, but for what he has; and the vital part for us after all depends on the use we make of our material.

A man is to be praised primarily not for having inherited fine tools and faultless materials but for making the most of the stuff he has, and doing his best in spite of disadvantages and poor material.

The individual is responsible, not for what he has not, but for what he has; and the vital part for us after all depends on the use we make of our material.

Many a passable article has by diligent workmanship been made even from inferior material. And this brings us to our second item of value—Labor.

This is a most important item. It would seem sometimes that it is labor that creates all value.

A gold mine is worth no more than common clay till it is worked.

The simple element of labor bestowed on iron, the cheapest and commonest of metals, multiplies its value four hundred thousand times, making it worth sixty-five times its weight in gold, e.g.:

What a piece of work, indeed!

Education, then, is the safest and richest investment possible to man.

It pays the largest dividends and gives the grandest possible product to the world—a man. The demand is always greater than the supply—and the world pays well for what it prizes.

If thirty-five colored persons out of every thousand are, from any cause whatever, lost in the making, the remaining nine hundred and sixty-five will have to share the loss among them. This is an unavoidable law.

No man can dissociate himself from his kind.

The colored gentleman who keeps his horses, fares sumptuously, and lives in luxury is made to feel the death gasps of every squalid denizen of the alley and poorhouse.

This is an unavoidable law. No man can dissociate himself from his kind. The colored gentleman who keeps his horses, fares sumptuously, and lives in luxury is made to feel the death gasps of every squalid denizen of the alley and poorhouse.

It is God’s own precaution to temper our self-seeking by binding our sympathies and interests indissolubly with the helpless and the wretched.

What our men of means need to do, then, is to devote their money, their enlightened interest, their careful attention to the improvement of sanitation among the poor.

It is an enormous waste of values to harness the whole man in the narrow furrow, plowing for bread. There are other hungerings in man besides the eternal all-subduing hungering of his despotic stomach.

There is the hunger of the eye for beauty, the hunger of the ear for concords, the hungering of the mind for development and growth, of the soul for communion and love, for a higher, richer, fuller living⁠—a more abundant life!

And every man owes it to himself to let nothing in him starve for lack of the proper food. “What is man,” says Shakespeare, “if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed!”

and insisting that the world owes them a living! To be sure the world owes them nothing of the kind.

The world would consider it a happy riddance from bad rubbish if they would pay up their debt and move over to Mars.

Every day they live their unproductive bodies sink and destroy a regular portion of the world’s values. At the very lowest estimate, a boy who has reached the age of twenty, has already burned up between three and four thousand dollars of the world’s possessions.

Previous to 1793 America was able to produce unlimited quantities of cotton, but unable to free the fibre from the seeds.

Eli Whitney came to the rescue of the strangled industry and perfected a machine which did the work needed. The deliverance which he wrought was complete.

The following year America’s exports of cotton to England were increased from not one pound in previous years to 1,600,000 pounds. He gave dollars.

If you should ever come to Cambridge or near headquarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favored by the Muses, and to whom nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations. I am, with great respect,

That girl paid her debts in song.

In South Carolina there are two brothers, colored men, who own and conduct one of the most extensive and successful farms in this country for floriculture.

Their roses are famous throughout Europe and are specially prized by the French for striking and marvellous beauty.

The Loiseaux brothers send out the incense of their grateful returns to the world in the sweet fragrance of roses.

Some years ago a poor and lowly orphan girl stood with strange emotions before a statue of Benjamin Franklin in Boston. Her bosom heaved and her eyes filled as she whispered between her clenched teeth, “Oh, how I would like to make a stone man?”

… is under a most sacred obligation not to squander the material committed to him, not to sap its strength in folly and vice, and to see at the least that he delivers a product worthy the labor and cost which have been expended on him.

A sound manhood, a true womanhood is a fruit which the lowliest can grow.

And it is a commodity of which the supply never exceeds the demand. There is no danger of the market being glutted. The world will always want men. The worth of one is infinite. To this value all other values are merely relative.

A sound manhood, a true womanhood is a fruit which the lowliest can grow. And it is a commodity of which the supply never exceeds the demand. There is no danger of the market being glutted. The world will always want men.

The worth of one is infinite.

To this value all other values are merely relative. Our money, our schools, our governments, our free institutions, our systems of religion and forms of creeds are all first and last to be judged by this standard:

… ethics—if it does not turn out better, nobler, truer men and women—if it does not add to the world’s stock of valuable souls—if it does not give us a sounder, healthier, more reliable product from this great factory of men—I will have none of it.

I shall not try to test your logic, but weigh your results⁠—and that test is the measure of the stature of the fullness of a man.

You need not formulate and establish the credibility and authenticity of Christian Evidences, when you can demonstrate and prove the present value of Christian men.

and if we contribute a positive value in those things the world prizes, no amount of negrophobia can ultimately prevent its recognition.

And our great “problem” after all is to be solved not by brooding over it, and orating about it, but by living into it.

A strange contrast his cold, intellectual eye to the eager, strained, hungry faces that surge by in their never ending quest of wealth, fame, glory, bread.

Mark his pallid cheek and haggard brow, and the fitful gleam of those restless eyes like two lone campfires on a deserted plain.

Why does that smile, half cynical, half sad, flit across his countenance as he contemplates these mighty heartthrobs of human passions and woes, human hopes and human fears?

Earth’s skepticism looking on at the protean antics of earth’s enthusiasms. Speculative unbelief, curiously and sneeringly watching the humdrum, commonplace, bread-and-butter toil of unspeculative belief.

Lofty, unimpassioned agnosticism, that thinks⁠—face to face with hobbling, blundering, unscientific faith, that works.

“Sir: I perceive you are not drawn into the whirlpool of hurrying desires that sweep over earth’s restless sons. Your philosophy, I presume, lifts you above the toils and anxieties the ambitions and aspirations of the common herd.

Whether this prolonged throb of consciousness exist after its external possibilities have been dissolved—I cannot tell. That is to me—a horrible plunge—in the dark!

I stand at the confluence of two eternities and three immensities.

I see, with Pascal, only infinities in all directions which envelop me like an atom—like a shadow which endures for a moment and—will never return!