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Updated: June 2, 2025
Some people imagine that there is something anomalous, peculiar, or local in the race prejudice that binds all Negroes together; but this clan spirit is a characteristic of all savage and semi-civilized peoples. It should be well understood by this time that no foreign race inhabiting this country and acting together politically can dominate the native whites.
It is not Imperialism when duty keeps us among these chaotic, warring, distracted tribes, civilized, semi-civilized, and barbarous, to help them, as far as their several capacities will permit, toward self-government, on the basis of those civil rights.
We need not assume that the cultural change was sudden or absolute. Ancient Yoruba had the cruelty of a semi-civilized land, but it was not dominant or tyrannical. Modern Benin and Dahomey showed traces of skill, culture, and industry along with inexplicable cruelty and bloodthirstiness. But it was the slave trade that turned the balance and set these lands backward.
Bearers take up their loads, fighters look to their arms, the soiled and gaudy finery of the semi-civilized sons of the Prophet contrasting with the shining skins of the naked Wangoni, even as the Winchester and Snider rifles and great sheath-knives and revolvers of the first do with the broad spears and tufted hide shields of the latter.
Though cruel and vindictive, she was also shrewd and resolute, and semi-civilized races are not ruled with rose-water. She could only maintain order by making herself feared, and even civilized governments often act on the principle that the end justifies the means.
Also, some knowledge of metals was found among most of the semi-civilized people. The Mexicans and the Peruvians were in a state of semi-civilization when they were discovered by the whites the first time. They, built many extensive temples and houses, erected frequently upon pyramids, the pyramids themselves being supported by stone walls.
We have continued them and widened their sphere as occasions have presented themselves, exerting a successful influence even over unchristian and semi-civilized governments, of which an instance has very recently been furnished, in the assurances given by the Khedive of Egypt to our minister residing at his court, that he is taking vigorous measures to suppress the slave-trade, which is still carried on in the interior of Africa; and that we may believe his promise that he will not relax his exertions till it is extinguished, at least in the region on the north of the equator.
Like the dogs of most semi-civilized peoples, they are but imperfectly trained to obey; and the natives dislike checking them in their attacks upon anybody, arguing that so doing interferes with the courage and ferocity of their attack when called upon for a legitimate occasion.
This is particularly true in the United States, where the position of women is higher than in any other civilized or semi-civilized country, and the old assumption of their intellectual inferiority has been most successfully challenged. The American dinner-table, in truth, becomes a monument to the defective technic of the American housewife.
Turning over Mindanao to those crudely Mohammedan semi-civilized Moros would indeed be 'like granting self-government to an Apache reservation under some local chief, as Mr. Roosevelt, in the campaign of 1900, ignorantly declared it would be to grant self-government to Luzón under Aguinaldo.
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