Through Afro-American

PART I SOUTHWARD HO! — I ON THE THRESHOLD — II THE BLACK MAN’S PARADISE — III THE NIGHTMARE OF THE SOUTH — IV RHETORIC IN LOUISVILLE — V — VI TWO LEADERS — VII A WHITE TYPE AND A BLACK — VIII IN THE BLACK BELT — IX EDUCATION AND THE DEMONSTRATION FARM — X NEW ORLEANS — XI CRIME-SLAVERY AND DEBT-SERFDOM [27] — XII AN INDUSTRIAL UNIVERSITY — XIII HAMPTON: AN AFTERMATH — XV THE CITY OF A HUNDRED HILLS — XVI PROHIBITION — XVII THE NEGRO HOME AND THE NEGRO CHURCH — XVIII CHARLESTON — XIX THE FRINGE OF FLORIDA

The scene is Chicago; the occasion, a luncheon-party at the Cliff-Dwellers’ Club. All the intellect and talent of the Middle West (I am credibly assured) are gathered round one long table. I mention to an eminent man of letters that I am going into the South.

“Well,” he says, “you are going into a country that is more foreign to me than most parts of Europe. I do not understand the Southern people, or their way of looking at things. I never feel at home among them. The one thing I have in common with them is a strong antipathy to the black man.”

This, of course, is only an individual point of view; but many other men are listening, and, while some nod assent, no one protests.

But here is another point of view. A few days later I met an old friend, a Philadelphian, who said, “I like the South and the Southerners. They are men of our own stock and our own tongue—even the ‘poor whites’ whom slavery and the hookworm have driven to the wall. In the 4North we are being jostled and elbowed aside by the foreigner, who murders our speech, and knows nothing and cares nothing about our history or traditions. Yes; give me the South. It is true that, intellectually, it scarcely exists. The Southerner may be living in the twentieth century, but he has skipped the nineteenth. His knowledge of literature, for instance, if he have any at all, stops at the Waverley Novels and ‘The Corsair.’ But I’m not sure that that isn’t part of the charm.”

Thus early did I learn that no two men can talk to you about the South without flatly contradicting each other.

It was evident that my plan must be simply to gather views and impressions as I went along, and trust to sifting and co-ordinating them later.

An invitation, equivalent to a command, called me to Washington. |Nearing the Colour-line.| For a whole day my slow train dragged wearily through Northern Ohio; and in the course of that day two young couples in succession got into my car, who interested me not a little. In each case it seemed to me that the girl had a streak of black blood in her, while the young man was in each case unimpeachably white. As to one of the girls, I was practically certain; as to the other I may have been mistaken. Her features were aquiline and she was uncommonly handsome; but the tint of her skin, and more especially of 5her eyeballs, strongly suggested an African strain. Both girls were lively, intelligent, well-spoken, well-dressed, well-mannered—distinctly superior, one would have said, to the commonplace youths by whom they were accompanied. Yet I felt pretty certain that a few hours’ travel would have taken them into regions where they would be forbidden by law to sit in the same railroad-car, and where marriage between them would be illegal.^[1]

At any rate, even supposing that in these particular cases my conjecture was mistaken, it was not on the face of it improbable. On the other side of the Ohio River, these girls would have had, so to speak, to clear themselves of the suspicion of African blood, else any association on equal terms between them and their male companions would have been regarded as an outrage. This seemed a senseless and barbarous state of affairs. But I was there to observe, not (as yet) to form conclusions; and I kept my mind open, wondering whether, in the coming weeks, I should discover any reason or excuse for the apparent barbarism.

In Indiana, rain; in Ohio, torrents; at Pittsburg, a deluge. But when I awaken next morning, 6just on Mason and Dixon’s line, the sun is shining on the woods of Maryland, and I feel at once that the South and the spring are here. |“Summer is i-cumen in.”| These spring coppices are far richer in colour than any of our English woods. They run the whole gamut of green, from the blue-green of the pine to the silver-green of the poplar and the gold-green of the birch; and the greens are freely interspersed with red and yellow foliage, and with white and pink blossoms. The red is that of the maple, whose blush at birth is almost as vivid as its flush in death.

The new Union Station at Washington is a vast and grandiose palace of shining white. Its “concourse” (a new American word for the central hall of a station) seems a really impressive piece of architecture. But it is a Sabbath Day’s journey from the platforms to the cabs; and the porters seem to be making a Sabbath Day of it, for I cannot find a single one. Let me not embark, however, on the endless story of a traveller’s tribulations. Every country has its own inconveniences, and recriminations are not only idle but mischievous.

The city of Washington is one great sea of exquisite green, out of which the buildings rise like marble rocks and islands. Yes, I am in the South; the leafless elms of New England and the shrewd, bracing blasts of New York are left behind.

7And this day of sunshine was the first of many days. Save for a few thunder-showers, the South was to be all sunshine for me.

And with the sunshine—the Negro. Here he is in his thousands, and in his deepest dye. |A Question of Elbow-room.| In the North one sees him now and then, but he is swamped and submerged in the crowds of the great cities. To be very clearly conscious of his presence you must go to special quarters of New York or Chicago. “Coloured persons” (seldom pure blacks) are waiters at hotels and clubs, but no longer at the best hotels and clubs. The Pullman porter is always coloured; so are most, if not all, of the ordinary railway porters—when there are any. But “at the North” (as they say here) you have to go out of your way to find any problem in the negro. The black strand in the web of life is not yet particularly prominent—whatever it may be destined to become.

But here in Washington the web of life is a chequer of black-and-white—a shepherd’s tartan, I think they call it. In 1900 there were over 85,000 negroes in the city—now there must be at least 100,000, in a total population of considerably under a quarter of a million, or something like the population of Nottingham.

Imagine nearly half the population of Nottingham suddenly converted into black and brown people—people different not only in colour but in many other physical characteristics from you and 8me. Imagine that all the most striking of these differences are in the direction of what our deepest instincts, inherited through a thousand generations, compel us to regard as ugliness—an ugliness often grotesque and simian.^[2] Imagine that this horrible metamorphosis--or, if you shy at the word “horrible,” let us say fantastic—imagine this fantastic metamorphosis to have taken place as a punishment for certain ancestral crimes and stupidities, of which the living men and women of to-day are personally innocent. Can you conceive that, after the first shock of surprise was over, Nottingham would take up life again as a mere matter of course, feeling that there was no misfortune in this mingling of incongruities, no problem in the adjustment of their relations?

Do not object that in Washington there has 9been no sudden metamorphosis, but that the condition of things has gradually come to pass through the slow operation of historic forces. That makes no real difference, save that the Washingtonian has no “first shock of surprise” to get over. The essence of the matter is that half of the elbow-room of life is taken up by an alien race. Even disregarding, as (perhaps) temporary and corrigible, the condition of hostility between the races, we cannot but see in the bare fact of their juxtaposition in almost equal numbers, and, theoretically, on a standing of equal citizenship, an anomalous condition of affairs, as to the probable outcome of which history affords us no guidance.

Walk the streets of Washington for a single day, and you will realize that the colour-problem is not, as some English and Northern American writers assume, a chimera sprung from nothing but the inhuman prejudice of the Southern white. It is not a simple matter which a little patience and good-temper will presently arrange. It is a real, a terrible difficulty, not to be overcome by happy-go-lucky humanitarianism.

It may be a great pity that Nature implanted race-instincts deep in our breasts—Nature has done so many thoughtless things in her day. But there they are, not to be ignored or sentimentalized away. They are part of the stuff of human character, out of which the future must be shaped. The wise statesman will no more 10disregard them than the wise carpenter will disregard the grain of a piece of timber—or the knots in it.

One principle I arrived at very early in this investigation—namely, that black is not always white, nor white invariably black.

It was my good fortune to have for my hosts in Washington two active sympathizers with the negro. The husband hails from a North-Western State; the wife is a New Englander. They knew personally some of the Abolitionist leaders, and are still full of their spirit.

They related to me cruel and deplorable incidents in the everyday life of the streets.

“One afternoon,” said my host, “I was sitting peaceably in a street-car, when I was suddenly conscious of an altercation between the conductor and a coloured man. The absolute rights of the matter I don’t know, but it had somehow arisen out of a recent modification of the ‘transfer’ system, which the coloured man probably did not understand. I had scarcely realized what was happening, before men were standing on the seats of the car, shouting, ‘Kill the d——d nigger! We’ll all stand by you! All Virginia is behind you!’ The motor-man detached the heavy brass handle by which he works the car, ran up to the negro, and had actually raised it 12to strike. I interposed, and told the man that, if anything happened, he would get into trouble for leaving his post. He replied: ‘The nigger’s abusive,’ but sullenly went back to his platform.”

“Was the nigger abusive?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t hear him say anything; but it is quite possible that he had been ‘sassy.’ All I know is that he stood his ground like a man, with that yelling crowd around him.”

“And what happened?”

“Oh, the thing blew over. The negro walked away, and the crowd dispersed. As I took my seat again in the car, the man next me said, ‘If that had happened in South Carolina, he would have been a dead nigger.’”

“Not long ago,” my hostess said, “I was in a crowded street-car. |Street-Car Episodes.| A black woman with a baby got in, and had to stand. You know how our Washington cars are constantly rounding corners; and at every curve the woman was nearly thrown from her feet. Presently one of two white shop-girls who were sitting near her rose and gave the mother her place. The two girls soon after got out; and as they passed me, the one who had kept her seat said to the other, ‘I wonder you would do such a thing!’ ‘Didn’t you see she had a baby?’ the other replied; so, after all, we are not quite without humanity.”

“But tell about the two boys,” my host put in.

13“Oh, that was two or three years ago. I noticed in a street-car a very distinguished-looking old man with two boys of about fourteen and twelve, evidently his grandsons. I thought what very nicely-mannered boys they were. A white woman got in, and, the car being full, the elder boy rose and gave her his seat. Immediately after, a mulatto woman got in, very well and quietly dressed—entirely a lady in manner and appearance. The younger boy was rising to give her his seat, when the elder pushed him down angrily, saying quite aloud, ‘I thought you knew better than to get up for a nigger.’”

“Did the lady hear?”

“Oh, perfectly. It was most painful.”

“And what said the distinguished grandfather?”

“He smiled, and nodded to the elder boy.”

I took out my pocket-book and handed my hostess a cutting I had made a few days before. It was a letter signed “Edgar S. Walz,” and ran thus:

“Yes,” said my hostess, as she handed back the cutting; “you will find these differences.”

“Of course,” I said, “Mr. Roosevelt is a Northerner.”

“I’m afraid that doesn’t always mean liberality of feeling nowadays,” was the reply. “I should rather say Mr. Roosevelt is Mr. Roosevelt.”

My host is a chief of department in a large Government office.

“Have you any coloured people working under you?” I asked him.

“Not long ago,” he replied, “a coloured girl was sent to me—I think because they knew that I would ‘kick’ less than any other chief of department. It was suggested to me that I should assign her some special work by herself. I refused. ‘No,’ I said, ‘if she comes to me at all, she follows the regular routine.’ I made a point of speaking to the three most responsible young women among my clerks—all girls of good family and standing—and telling them they must behave well to her.”

“And how did they behave?”

“Oh, well enough, on the surface; there was no trouble; but she was quietly sent to Coventry. Soon afterwards a Russian girl entered the department, who knew nothing and cared nothing about our prejudices. She made friends with the 15coloured girl; but when she sat at the same table with her in the lunch-room, the quadroon herself said to her, ‘You mustn’t do this; you’ll get into trouble with the others. They don’t behave badly to me; but when I seat myself even at the other end of a long table they make an excuse to move away.’”

“How are negroes placed in these positions?” I asked.

“Why, through various political ‘pulls.’”

“Do you think it a wise policy to try to break down the colour-line here and there—at this point and that—by the nomination of negroes to Government appointments?”

“Ah, that is just the question.”

“Meantime,” I asked, “are matters getting better or worse?”

“Oh, worse—decidedly worse,” said my hostess. “They are coming to something like open war. For instance, I constantly see stone-fights between white boys and black boys in the open space outside our house. That doesn’t mean much, perhaps; for boys will be boys everywhere. But sometimes lately the white boys have seemed to go frantic, and have begun stoning black men and women who were going peaceably about their business. Once I had to telephone to the police to interfere, or I believe there would have been a riot.”

“I am told that in New York the white and black street-boys play amicably together.”

16“Yes,” said my host, “that is because the blacks are comparatively few. The tension increases in the direct ratio of the number of negroes.”

This I find to be essentially, if not quite universally, true. What is the inference? Is it not at bottom an instinct of self-preservation that spurs the South to inhumanity—an unreasoning, or half-reasoned, panic fear of racial submergence? There are many other factors in the situation; but I think, beyond all doubt, this is one.

“You can see any day on the street-cars,” said my host, “the embitterment of feeling. Formerly a black man would always rise and give his seat to a white woman; now he aggressively refrains from doing so.”

I repeated this to a friend in Baltimore, a gentleman of an old Southern family, who had fought for the Confederacy, even while he realized that the institution of slavery was doomed. |A Pessimistic View.| “You must remember,” he said, “that the problem is acute in Washington. The Washington negro is particularly bumptious and intolerable. Immediately after the war, Washington was the black man’s paradise. They flocked there in their thousands, thinking that the Government was going to do everything for them, and that there was nothing they had not a right to expect. That spirit still survives and makes trouble.”

“And how do you feel as to the way things 17are shaping? Do you see any actual or probable improvement in the relations of the races?”

“What shall I say?” he replied. “I do all I can to put the matter out of my thoughts. I do not personally feel the pinch of the problem. My children are in the North, and my life here pursues an even routine. I have old coloured servants, with whom I get on very well. But I am constitutionally a pessimist, and I confess I do not see how the thing is going to work out.”

“Education?” I suggested.

“Education is all very well; but if it removes some difficulties it raises others. It tends to make the negro unwilling to work where he is wanted, and desirous of working where he is not wanted—at any rate by the white artisan who is in the field before him. The industrial education of the black race, which is in some quarters regarded as a panacea, will no doubt do a great deal of good; but we cannot close our eyes to the fact that it will intensify race-friction in the labour market.”

“Still, you are not one of the Southerners who want to keep the black ignorant—who think that education, as a whole, merely teaches him ‘not to know his place’?”

“That is an outworn and impossible point of view. But you can understand that even the reasonable Southerner feels a certain bitterness on the subject of education when he sees the black child marching off to a school provided by 18Northern philanthropy, while the child of the ‘poor white’ goes into the cotton-factory.”^[3]

“You say you have black servants?”

“Oh yes, I have; and many people still have. But you know the race as a whole is turning against domestic service. I have friends in Mobile, Alabama, who tell me that their servants make the most fantastic conditions. For instance, they won’t do a stroke of work after three o’clock. If you want a meal after that hour, you must prepare and serve it yourself. As for the abstraction of household stuff from the kitchen, it is carried on openly and systematically—they call it ‘Cook’s excursion.’ In the case of domestic service, in fact, the difficult conditions which are being felt all over the world are intensified by—what shall I call it?—the race pride, or the race resentment, of the black. Domestic service was one of the badges of slavery; and now, if he or she will undertake it at all, it must be on such terms as shall remove from it all taint of servility.”

“A very natural feeling,” I remarked.

“No doubt; but not calculated to relieve the friction between the races.”

My original plan had been to go from Washington to Hampton, Virginia, and see the great industrial school for negroes and Indians established by General Samuel Armstrong, the alma mater of Mr. Booker Washington, and consequently of Tuskegee. But I found that both the President of Hampton and the President of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville were to be at a Southern Education Conference at Memphis; so, instead of going due south into Virginia, I turned my face south-westward towards Kentucky and Tennessee. But I determined to “stop off” for a day at Virginia Hot Springs, where some friends had invited me to visit them.

Virginia Hot Springs is nothing but a huge rambling hotel, with a number of “cottage” dependencies. |A Happy Valley.| The hotel company has bought up the whole mountain-valley, and runs it like a little kingdom. It is a delightful place; the air fresh and sparkling, the hotel and cottages sufficiently 20picturesque, the basin of the valley entirely given up to the brilliant sward of the golf-course. Around the hotel runs a spacious “piazza,” with innumerable rocking-chairs. A score of buggies and saddle-horses, at the disposition of the guests, gather round the steps. Inside, every American luxury is at command. You move noiselessly on deep-piled carpets; the news-stand is heaped with the latest magazines and novels; there is a little row of shops where you can buy hats and frocks, jewellery and bric-à-brac, at fifty per cent. over Fifth-avenue prices; and—most indispensable luxury of all—there is a stock- and share-broker’s office, and there are long-distance telephones, whereby you can keep in touch with Wall Street and the various Exchanges. That curious oval excrescence at one corner of the building is the ballroom. It opens into the great hall of the hotel, called “Peacock Walk”; for here the ladies assemble after dinner to air their “rags” and their diamonds.

My friends chartered a buggy, and drove me after lunch to Warm Springs, an old Colonial health-resort, where it is on record that General Washington came to nurse his gout; and thence to a point called Flagstaff Hill, or something of the sort, where we had a glorious view over an endless stretch of hill-country, running far into West Virginia. But, oh! the reckless, suicidal waste of timber that is going on here, as almost everywhere in America. Here, however, it is 21sheer thoughtlessness that is at work—not the criminal cupidity which is converting the forests of Maine and New Hampshire into wood-pulp, and ruining for generations to come the climate, the fertility, the water-power of the country.

Our talk, of course, strays (not through my leading) to the question of the negro.

“I have two cousins,” says Mrs. X., “who are sisters. One of them devotes all her spare money to the amelioration of the black race, while personally she loathes them and shrinks from them. The other has no philanthropic feeling whatever; she regrets that slavery was ever abolished; but she likes the black people personally; she goes among them, and nurses them when they are ill—just as she would a favourite horse or dog. That is in Philadelphia, where, as you know, I was born.”

“And you yourself—how do you feel on the subject?”

“I had lived so much abroad that I had no very definite feeling towards the black race, one way or another, until a few summers ago, when I spent some time at Aiken, South Carolina, where the bulk of the population is black. I don’t think I am hysterical, but I assure you it was an almost intolerable sensation to walk down the main street of Aiken, even at midday, under the eyes of those hundreds of great hulking blacks, staring at you with half-suppressed insolence. It gives me a little shudder now to think of it.”

22“Last year,” said her husband, “I was shooting in North Carolina, in a district where the population is pretty evenly divided between white and black. I boarded in a farmer’s family. The grandfather had fought in the war, of course on the Confederate side; the father and mother were solid, unpretending, intelligent people. There was a school-house only a mile and a half away, but they could not let their two daughters go to it. They could not let them stir away from home unprotected. They had to pay for their education at home, while at the same time they were being taxed for the education of the negro children of the district. That is not a pleasant state of affairs.”

Some time afterwards, I stated this case to a loading educator of negroes, a man widely recognized as one of the best friends of the race.

“Do you think,” I asked him, “that these girls could not safely have gone to school? Or was their parents’ action the result of groundless, or, at any rate, exaggerated, panic—as of one who should forbid his children to pass through a wood lest a tree should fall upon them?”

“It would depend on the district,” was the reply. “In some districts the girls could have gone to school safely enough; in others, no!”

This, I think, was a terrible admission; for, after all, a “safe” district can only be one in 23which no outrage has occurred; and that is no guarantee against its occurring to-morrow.^[4] What father, what husband, is going to rest on such security?

Here, then, I was face to face with the most hideous factor in the problem—that which keeps popular sentiment in the South chronically inflamed and exasperated. Again and again, at every turn, I came upon it; not only in the shape of revolting stories, but in accounts of the constant and most burdensome precautions which the state of affairs imposes.

To give only one instance: I asked an American long resident in Havana whether there was any trouble of this nature in Cuba. “No,” he said, “practically none. It’s true that about a year ago a sort of half-witted black was accused of an outrage on a mulatto woman, and committed suicide in prison to escape the garotte; but I believe an American nigger has since confessed that he was the real culprit. It’s very different,” he went on, “in my native State, Louisiana. I have two sisters married there. The husband of one of them never dares to leave his home unless he takes his wife with him. The husband of the 24other is compelled to leave home for days at a time; but he keeps a loaded shot-gun in every room in the house, and he has made his wife practice till she is a very fair shot, both with gun and revolver. There isn’t a white man in the country districts that doesn’t take similar precautions.”

Think what it means to have this nightmare constantly present to the mind of every woman and girl of a community—at any rate in the country districts, and on the outskirts of the towns. |A Malign Enchantment.| No doubt the state of “nerves” it sets up is responsible for many errors and cruelties. Many attempted outrages may be purely imaginary. Negroes may have been lynched or shot down, not only for crimes they themselves did not commit, but for crimes that were never committed at all.^[5] But there are quite enough authentic cases of crime—denied by nobody—to justify the horror of the South.^[6] It is all very well to say that it is the precautions taken, and most of all the lynchings, that suggests the crime to vagrant, dissolute, drink-and-drug-ruined negroes. That is probably 25in great measure true—the evil moves in a vicious circle. But who or what is to break the circle of malign enchantment? Education? Yes, perhaps; but education is at best a slow process. I cannot to-day throw my revolver into the Mississippi because I hope that fifty years hence my grandson may have no use for it.

“During the war,” a very intelligent coloured man said to me, “the planters’ wives and children were left to the protection of the negroes. |Who is to Blame?| Not a single case of outrage occurred, and scarcely a case of theft or breach of trust. Had we been the lecherous brutes we are now supposed to be, we should have written the darkest page in history, and brought the Southern armies home to the defence of their own hearthstones.”

That is true. It is admitted on every hand that the conduct of the slaves during the war was, on the whole, excellent, and in many cases touchingly beautiful.^[7] And therein lies, by the way, not, certainly, an apology for slavery, but a proof that its most melodramatic horrors were exceptional. But what matters the admission 26that the malignant and bestial negro did not exist forty years ago, if it has to be admitted in the same breath that he exists to-day?

What has bred him? Who is responsible for his existence? History may one day apportion the burden between the doctrinaire self-righteousness of the respectable North, the rascality of the “carpet-bag” politician, the stiff-necked pride of the South, and the vanity, the resentfulness, and the savagery of the negro himself. But what avails recrimination or apportionment of blame, while the monstrous evil—none the less monstrous because it necessarily awakens a morbid imagination on both sides—exists and calls aloud to be dealt with? While the relations of the two races remain as they are, there can be no doubt that an act of brutal lust often justifies itself to a semi-savage imagination as an act of war—a racial reprisal. And who shall say that a state of war does not exist?

Few sensible men in the South have now a word to say for lynching.^[8] It has proved itself 27as ineffectual in practice as it is unjustifiable in theory. |Lynch Law.| It cannot even be palliated as an ungovernable reaction of horror at the particular atrocity here in question; seeing that, as a matter of fact, more negroes are lynched for mere murder than for outrages on women.^[9] There seems to be little hope, however, of a cessation of lynchings in the near future. The Southern Press abounds with evidences that the lynching impulse is strong, and is with difficulty held in check^[10] even when the provocation is comparatively trifling.

28One thing seems to me certain—namely, that crimes against women, and all sorts of negro crime, will be far more effectually checked when respectable and well-disposed negroes can feel reasonably confident that people of their race will be treated with common fairness in white courts of law. At present it is certain that they can feel no such confidence. But, in making this statement, I am anticipating matters. The point is one to which I must return later.

Louisville, Kentucky, is not an attractive city. It is as flat as my hand; its atmosphere is grimy; its buildings vary from the commonplace to the mean. It has one or two of the dumpy sky-scrapers—only some ten or twelve storeys high—which are indispensable to the self-respect of every American city of a certain size; but one feels that they are products of mere imitative ostentation, not of economic necessity. In Louisville the names, or numbers, of the streets are scarcely ever stuck up. It is characteristic of a half-grown American town that you can generally read the names of streets which have no houses in them; but when the houses are built, the name-boards seem to be thrown away.

I am apt to estimate the civilization of a city by inspecting its book-stores; but during a long day in Louisville I could not find a single one. No doubt I failed to look in the right place; but I certainly perambulated the leading business streets. I was reminded of a couplet from I know not what poet—

30Let me hasten to add that in all the other cities I visited I found one or more fairly well-supplied book-stores.

For reasons I have elsewhere stated at length, an American barber’s shop is an abomination to me. |Tonsorial Sarcasm.| Among the least of its terrors is the interminable time occupied by the disgusting processes to which you are submitted. However, I had time on my hands in Louisville, and, being a vagrant with no fixed abode, had no conveniences for shaving myself. So I ventured into a “tonsorial parlour.”

I was “attended” by a white “artist”; for this is one of the trades from which the negro is being rapidly ousted all over the South.^[11]

“Have you special seats for coloured people in the street-cars here”? I asked my torturer.

“No,” he replied, “we haven’t. They can sit wherever they please. And, what’s more, they won’t sit beside each other, but insist on plumping themselves down alongside of white folks. If I had my way, they’d ride on the roof.” I need scarcely remark that, as American street-cars 31have no outside seats, this was an ironical recommendation.

It was with some hesitancy that I offered a tip to this champion of the dignity of the white man. But he showed no resentment.

I had been recommended to call on Mr. A. B. Shipton (I alter the name), a coloured lawyer of some prominence. |A Negro Lawyer.| Entering his office, I found a man of aquiline features and tawny rather than brown complexion, carrying on a conversation through the telephone. From its matter I gathered that he was talking to his wife; and this conjecture was confirmed when he, so to speak, rang off with two sounding kisses into the instrument. The trait was characteristic; for the domestic negro is very domestic indeed.

He now put on his gold-rimmed eye-glasses and read my letter of introduction, all the time smoking a long pipe, which he had kept alight even while at the telephone. I presently found that some of his habits in relation to the use of tobacco savoured of the period of “Martin Chuzzlewit”; but he was a man whom one instinctively, and with no effort, met on the equal terms on which one would meet a member of his profession in England.

As I was well accredited, he received me with cordiality and talked freely. Not only freely, indeed, but copiously; not only copiously, but with rhetorical finish and emphasis. I soon 32realized that I was listening to extracts from speeches which he was in the habit of delivering.

Looking back upon the whole tenor of our interview, I find it curiously like the talk which a sixteenth-century Englishman might have held with a Spanish or Venetian Jew. Mr. Shipton related, indeed, a series of wrongs, injustices, and humiliations; but the ever-recurring burden of his tale was a celebration of the material progress of his race, the wealth they were amassing, the homes they were founding, the heroism they were developing in the teeth of adverse circumstance.

“As you go southward, sir,” he said, “people will tell you over and over again that they, the Southern whites, alone know the negro and know how to deal with him. That is precisely the reverse of the truth. They do not know the negro, because they won’t know him. They won’t enter into any sympathetic relation with him.

“It was different in the days of slavery, no doubt. Then, in most cases, there was a certain amount of human intercourse between the slave and the master. But the growing white generation has no approach to the knowledge of the black man (to say nothing of sympathy with him) that its grandfathers had in ante-bellum days.

“Is race-prejudice weakening at all? It is not weakening, but altering, and that in an ominous way. Thirty years ago the prejudice was against the ignorant, shiftless and thriftless 33black; now it is against the thrifty and industrious, the refined and the cultured—against those, in a word, who come into competition with the middle-class white.^[12]

“Just think, sir, what we have done! Forty years ago, when slavery came to an end, we were four million ignorant, homeless, schoolless, friendless creatures. Now there are ten millions of us, and we have a hundred colleges, thousands of schools, tens of thousands of homes. We pay taxes on a billion dollars’ worth of property.^[13]

“Forty years ago we had no business men, no professional men. Now we have painters, poets, architects, inventors, merchants, lawyers, doctors, 34divines. And yet we are shut off from the body-politic. We have to submit to taxation without representation. Even those of us who cannot be defrauded of our votes are excluded from the councils of the party which would not exist without us. That” (with peculiar bitterness) “is what they call the lilywhite policy!^[14]

“But, sir, we are uncomplaining. If there is a colour-problem, it is not we who raise it. No! it is the unprincipled white politician who finds anti-negro agitation a popular plank in his platform.

“Even under this government of the two races by and for the one race, the negro is loyal to the country which he has enriched by his labour, hallowed by his graves, watered with his blood.

“We are a docile and an instinctively religious race. You will find few negro atheists or infidels. We are susceptible to any and all of the forms of the Christian religion. We are Methodists or Baptists among the Methodists and Baptists, Presbyterians among the Presbyterians, Episcopalians among the Episcopalians, Roman Catholics among the Roman Catholics.”

I could not but think this remark significant of much—of far more, indeed, than the speaker realized.

“Are you excluded from municipal as well as from political life?” I asked.

35“Even more strictly, if possible,” was the reply. “All municipal offices are in the hands of ‘sho’ ’nuff white folks,’ though they may be Dagos, or Germans, or Slavs. Of course the city government and the police department are run by the Irish. No negro holds a job higher than that of washing spittoons in the Court House. Yet in this city we pay taxes on three millions of property.

“But this is the saving trait of the negro’s character: shut off from all other activities, he goes on quietly and uncomplainingly working, educating himself, and accumulating property.^[15] For the righting of our wrongs we must look to the negroes in those States where they hold the balance of power—in Ohio, Indiana, Connecticut, New Jersey, and others. And think what an element we are destined to form in the body politic! In fifty years we shall be twenty-five millions; next century we shall be fifty millions. Not a drop of our blood is lost to us—the whites take care of that. If you haven’t got but a sixteenth part of black blood, you’re a negro all right.”

36Twenty-five millions in fifty years! Next century fifty millions! I did think of it; and it was a thought to give one pause. Perhaps a more careful estimate would somewhat reduce the figures. Cautious statisticians, proceeding on the best available data, place the probable number of negroes at the beginning of the next century somewhere about 35,000,000—that is to say, some 10,000,000 more than the whole population of the eighteen Southern States at last census.^[16]

As I left Mr. Shipton I asked whether his practice was mainly among his own people. “Yes,” he said; “ninety nine per cent. of it; though, by-the-by, I got divorces for a couple of white men the other day.”

And now a word of amends to Louisville. An hour before sunset I took a car down all the long length of Broad Street, till it landed me at the entrance to Shawnee Park. |An Idyll.| This expanse of lush and yet delicate verdure is embraced by a bend of the majestic Ohio. The steep banks of the river are nobly wooded, and you look across the splendid sheet of water to what might be primeval forest beyond. In that soft sunset hour, the air was full of the scent of flowering shrubs. A mocking-bird was singing in a thicket; far off I heard voices of children playing, and, on the river, the clunk of a pair of oars in rowlocks; but within sight there were only two lovers on a grassy mound, 37and a student bent over his book. As the sun touched the trees of the opposite bank and threw a glow over the yellow eddies of the great river, I thought it would be hard to picture a more peaceful, a more beautiful, a more idyllic scene. So even Louisville is not without its charms.

“DISCRIMINATION” IN MEMPHIS

A night’s railway journey on the Illinois Central carries you from Louisville to Memphis, Tennessee, and from the Ohio to the Mississippi. You strike the Father of Waters some time before you reach Memphis. Here two sets of literary associations were awakened in my mind. We passed through miles of swampy, malarial-looking forests, with snake-like vines binding the trees together; and every here and there would come a clearing on the river-bank, still bristling with huge gaunt stumps of dead timber, and showing a melancholy cabin or two, which forcibly recalled the Eden of “Martin Chuzzlewit.” And then, again, in some quiet backwater, we would see a great raft of lumber, with a hut or tent on it—the very raft of Huckleberry Finn and Jim. So strongly have the great rivers always appealed to my imagination that the first thing I did in Memphis was to go down to the wharf and ascertain whether I could not travel at least part of the way to New Orleans by steamer. There are plenty of huge sternwheel boats, still on the river; but alas! their movements 39are not arranged in view of passenger traffic. Only in short stages, and at great expenditure of time, could I have carried out my ambition. Baffled at Memphis, I still hoped to take boat from Vicksburg to Natchez; but I found that I should have to wait two days for a boat, and should then spend two more days in covering a distance which I could do by rail in a single night. So, except for a short excursion at New Orleans, I did not go a-sailing on the waters of the Mississippi.

Memphis is a much brighter, cleaner, more alert and prosperous-looking place than Louisville. |Charity and Colour.| There are shops on Main Street that would make a good figure in Paris; and at night it is as gay with electricity as the “Great White Way” of New York. When I arrived, Memphis was evidently in the thick of some excitement. The side-walks of Main Street were crowded with ladies, young and—less young, who were making dashes at every male passer-by, and seeking to pin a square purple badge to the lapel of his coat. It was soon evident that life was not worth living unless you wore one of these badges; so I secured one, at the expense of half-a-dollar, and on examining it found that it was inscribed—“Tag-Day for the Tennessee Home for Incurables.” This was, in fact, a sort of Hospital Saturday, and the tag pinned to your coat was a certificate that you had paid up.

40The system struck me as ingenious; but it is because of a significant sequel that I mention it. In the afternoon, I called on a negro professional man who had invited me to go for a drive in his buggy. As we left the house I noticed that he wore no tag. I touched my own tag, and said, smiling, “Dare you venture into the streets without one of these?” “Why,” he replied, “they wouldn’t for anything ‘tag’ a coloured man!”

This was “discrimination” with a vengeance! Even charity fenced round by the colour-line! I felt that here at last I had touched the limit.

We drove past the small but attractive-looking Public Library, situated on a bluff, with a glorious view over the lake-like Mississippi.

“Is there discrimination here?” I asked.

“Why, certainly,” was the reply. “My son is in an office where several of the white young men have cards enabling them to draw books from the library. My son applied for a card; and as he is very light in colour, it at first seemed that there was going to be no difficulty. But when they heard his name, they identified him as my son and refused him a card. The librarian wrote to me privately, and said that the boy could have as many books as he liked without any card. But I would not have that; I threatened to take the case into court by refusing to pay any tax for the support of the library. But then they offered to 41establish a branch library for coloured people, and that compromise I accepted.”

Some time later, in another city, I was reminded of this conversation on seeing a very handsome Carnegie Free Library occupying a prominent site.

“Is it free to coloured people?” I asked.

“Oh dear no,” was the reply. “Carnegie offered to give an extra $10,000 for a black branch library, if the town would contribute $1000 a year to its support. This the town agreed to do, on condition that the negro community provided the site. We, on our part, consented to this, merely stipulating that we should have a voice in the management. The town replied emphatically ‘No,’ and the whole thing fell through. It would simply have meant, you see, that they would have dumped upon us any rubbish for which they hadn’t room in the main library. Can you wonder that we declined?” I could not.

To return to Memphis. I had gone there, not exactly to attend the annual “Conference for Education in the South,” but to see several people who were attending it. |Educators in Council.| However, I did go to one or two meetings, and notably to one which was to be addressed by the British Ambassador, Mr. James Bryce. It was in the Lyceum Theatre, and I sat on the platform (the stage) and looked out over the crowded house, where a dozen electric fans were 42keeping the sultry air in motion. It seemed to me odd that, while the floor of the house and the first and second circle were overcrowded, there were only one or two people in the gallery. Presently I looked up again; there were now about twenty people in the upper regions, and I had a curious difficulty in distinguishing their features. A light burst upon me—they were negroes. In a “Conference for Education in the South” the whites did all the conferring and the blacks, if they were so minded, might listen from the gallery.

Next day my black, or rather olive-coloured, friend said: “I could have whipped myself this morning when I opened the paper and saw that I’d missed hearing Bryce. I was bent upon hearing him, but somehow I forgot that yesterday was the evening.” I wondered whether he realized that he would have had to sit in the gallery. But I did not ask him. Every now and then, in this country, one turns tail and flees from the haunting colour question. It is the skeleton at the feast of Southern life.

In New York I had met President Booker T. Washington, of Tuskegee, one of the most notable men in America, an accomplished speaker, and an authority, if ever there was one, on the education of the negro. “No doubt I shall see you at Memphis,” I said, in an off-hand way. He answered, rather drily, “No;” and some time afterwards he said, “You asked me if I would be 43at Memphis—I am not at all sure that I should be welcome there. I received a printed circular notifying me of the meeting, but no invitation to attend it. You will find friends of the negro there, and of negro education—oh yes, plenty. But they will not be of my colour.”

I did, as a matter of fact, hear one friend of negro education hold forth—Bishop Bratton, of Mississippi. |A Bishop on Race Equality.| The Bishop laid down a good many principles—among them that “the negro is capable of development to a point whose limit he (the speaker) had not discovered,” but that “the vast majority are still children intellectually, and little short of savages morally.” The purport of his address was the assertion that negro education should not be left entirely or mainly to negro teachers. The ideal school would be one under the supervision of a white clergyman, where carefully selected portions of Scripture should be necessary parts of the curriculum, and “where the race should be taught that race integrity is obedience to God’s own creation and appointment, and that race intercourse, kindly and cordial, is not race equality.” “Indeed,” the Bishop proceeded, “the very expression ‘race equality’ is an anachronism belonging to the mediæval period of reconstruction history [that is, roughly, the period between 1866 and 1876], which has long gone to its account.” These remarks were warmly received by the audience, and greatly applauded by the leading 44Southern papers. But one understands why Mr. Booker T. Washington—and, still more, why Professor W. E. B. Du Bois, of Atlanta University—were not bidden to the conference. Of these two negro leaders I shall try to give a sketch in my next paper.

“People are always laying stress on the white blood in me,” said Mr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, “and attributing to that anything I do that is worth doing. But they never speak of the white blood in Mr. Booker Washington, who, as a matter of fact, has a larger share than I have.”

“How do you make that out?” I asked; and Mr. Du Bois gave me the story of his ancestry. The story went back two hundred years, for he comes of a New England stock, and has had no slave ancestors (I take it) for many generations. I could not follow his proof that more of Africa flows in his veins than in Mr. Booker Washington’s; nor does it greatly matter; for if it be so in fact, Nature has taken great pains to conceal the fact, and the popular error of which he complains is practically inevitable.

Principal Booker T. Washington is a negro in every lineament, and not, one would say, of the most refined type. His skin is neither black nor copper-coloured, but rather of a sort of cloudy yellow, 46to which the other shades are, perhaps, æsthetically preferable. His hair, his ears, his nose, his jaw, all place his race beyond dispute; only his grave, candid, forceful eyes announce a leader of men. He is above middle height, and heavily built; seated, he is apt to sprawl. He has a curious trick of drawing back the corners of his mouth, so as to reveal almost the whole of his range of teeth. At first I took this for a slow smile, heralding some humorous remark; but humour is not Mr. Washington’s strong point. His grin is a nervous habit, and scarcely a pretty one.^[17] Altogether, in talking with him, you have no difficulty in remembering the race of your interlocutor, and if you make an untactful remark—if you let the irrepressible instinct of race-superiority slip out—you have all the more reason to be ashamed.

With Mr. Du Bois the case is totally different. His own demonstration notwithstanding, I cannot believe that there is more of the negro in him than in (say) Alexandre Dumas fils. Meeting this quiet, cultivated, French-looking gentleman, with his pointed beard, olive complexion, and dark melancholy eyes, it is hard to believe that he is born, as he himself phrases it, “within the Veil.” In appearance he reminded me a good deal of Gabriele d’Annunzio, only that D’Annunzio 47happens to be fair, while Mr. Du Bois has something more like the average Italian complexion. In speaking to this man of fine academic culture—this typical college don, one would have said—the difficulty was to feel any difference of race and traditions, and not to assume, tactlessly, an identical standpoint.

These two men are unquestionably the leaders of their race to-day; but their ideals and their policy are as different as their physique. Mr. Washington leads from within; Mr. Du Bois from without. Should he read this phrase he will probably resent it; but it may be none the less true. Mr. Washington could never have been anything else than a negro; he represents all that is best in the race, but nothing that is not in the race. Mr. Du Bois is a negro only from outside pressure. I do not mean, of course, that there are no negro traits in his character, but that it is outside pressure—the tyranny of the white man—that has made him fiercely, passionately, insistently African. Had there been no colour question—had the negro had no oppression, no injustice to complain of—Mr. Du Bois would have been a cosmopolitan, and led the life of a scholar at some English, German, or perhaps even American University. As it was, he felt that to desert his race would be the basest of apostasies; but it was because he could have been disloyal that he became so vehemently—one might almost say fanatically—loyal.

48I have heard a well-known New York publicist, the editor of an influential paper, express the opinion that Mr. Booker Washington is one of the greatest men at present alive in America. |“Up from Slavery.”| One of the others was President Eliot, of Harvard; the third I will not name—thus leaving the gate of hope ajar for many eminent persons. There was, perhaps, a spice of paradox in this appraisement of Mr. Washington; but a remarkable man he certainly is. Not, I think, a great intellect, but assuredly a strong and admirable character. His life, as related by himself in “Up from Slavery,” is a story of quiet heroism to rank with any in literature. Born a slave in a one-room cabin, with no glazed window and an earthen floor, he remained there until, when he was eight or nine, emancipation came. After that he worked in a salt-furnace and in a coal-mine, devoured all the time by a passion for knowledge which overcame what seemed almost incredible difficulties. At last he set forth for Hampton Institute, where General Armstrong was then just beginning his beneficent work. He had five hundred miles to travel and scarcely any money. He worked and even begged his way; for Mr. Washington has never been ashamed to beg when there was a good object to be served. Arriving at Richmond, Virginia, without a cent, he worked for several days unloading a ship, and slept at night in a hollow under a wooden side-walk.

49At Hampton he found the system in operation which he has since adopted at Tuskegee—namely, that tuition is covered by endowment, while the student is enabled to pay (in part, at any rate) by work, for his board and clothing. He soon distinguished himself, not by great attainments, but by the thoroughness of his work and the sincerity and elevation of his character. Then, in 1881, it occurred to the State of Alabama to start a normal school for coloured people at a little village named Tuskegee, some forty miles from the capital, Montgomery. It did not, however, occur to the State of Alabama to provide any buildings or apparatus; it simply allotted £400 a year to be applied to the salaries of the teachers. On General Armstrong’s recommendation, Mr. Washington, then a youth of some five-and-twenty, was entrusted with the organization and management of the school; and the account of how, with practically no resources at all, he built up the great and beneficent institution which has now made the name of Tuskegee world-famous, is indeed a remarkable story of indomitable courage and perseverance. Mr. Washington felt that his personal failure would be reckoned a failure for his race. Out of the nettle, danger, he plucked the flower, safety; and Tuskegee now represents perhaps the greatest individual triumph his race has ever achieved.

Of course it has been achieved largely through 50philanthropic help from the North—Mr. Washington, as I have said, is an unashamed, though very tactful, beggar. |Statesman or Time-Server?| It is precisely that tactfulness, in its largest sense, with which the fierier spirits of his race reproach him. In their milder moods they call him an opportunist and time-server; in moments of irritation they call him a betrayer of his people, and a pitiful truckler to the white man. He is, in fact, nothing of the sort; on the wrongs of his race he has spoken with no uncertain voice, when he felt it to be in season; but he has not harped upon them in and out of season. While he has plenty of race-pride, he has no race-vanity, and realizes that the negro has yet to conquer his place among the fully-developed and civilized races of the world. To help in this conquest is the mission and glory of his life; and he feels, rightly or wrongly, that material progress must precede and serve as a basis for intellectual progress. Therefore what is called the academic course—the course of language, literature, and abstract science—plays only a secondary part at Tuskegee. The curriculum is mainly industrial and agricultural, though the chemical and mechanical theory which lies behind agriculture and the handicrafts is by no means neglected. The fostering of aptitudes and the upbuilding of character—these are the two great aims of Tuskegee. The negro, says Mr. Washington, must render himself necessary to 51the American Commonwealth before he can expect to take a highly esteemed place in it, and the best way to claim a vote is to show that you are capable of using it wisely. Such are the maxims which he inculcates on his students—thereby earning the contumely of the fierier spirits aforesaid. They broke up one of his meetings in Boston, not long ago, with red pepper, and with the racial weapon—the razor.

But if any one imagines that Mr. Washington is a saint-like spirit in whom the wrongs of his race awaken no bitterness, he is very much mistaken. He has, when he cares to show it, a quiet contempt for the pettinesses of Southern policy which is rendered all the more scathing by his acceptance of them as matters of course.

It was at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895 that Mr. Booker Washington made his first great success—the success which brought him national renown as a speaker and a leader of his race. |The Atlanta Compromise.| In an address delivered at the opening ceremony, he formulated what has since become famous as the Atlanta Compromise, in this oft-quoted sentence: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

Mr. Washington has himself described with dignified simplicity the enthusiasm which this speech aroused among an audience which, if not 52hostile at the outset, was at least sceptical of the policy of allowing a negro to speak on such an occasion. The chairman—the Governor of Georgia—rushed across the platform and shook him by the hand, and the country was soon ringing with the fame of his tactful eloquence. But though it is the phrase above quoted that has become classic, there was another, which, if I am not greatly mistaken, did more to conciliate his audience. Speaking of the progress of his race, as manifested in their department of the Exposition, he reminded his hearers that the negro had “started thirty years ago with ownership here and there in a few quilts and pumpkins and chickens (gathered from miscellaneous sources).” I would wager a good deal that it was this parenthesis, this genial allusion to the tender topic of chicken-stealing, that finally won the hearts of his white hearers. It is impossible to imagine Mr. Du Bois thus playing, not to the gallery, but rather to the stalls. And Mr. Washington no doubt deliberately calculated his effect, for he is certainly not by nature an irrepressibly facetious personage.

This famous speech, with its famous metaphor, was delivered, as I have said, at Atlanta, in 1895. At Atlanta in 1906 an outbreak of popular frenzy, excited by one or two real and several imaginary outrages, led to the slaughter in the streets of an unknown number of negroes (probably thirty or forty), not one of whom was even suspected 53of any crime. It does not seem as though the Atlanta Compromise had as yet borne much fruit, at any rate on its native soil.

Even more significant than Mr. Washington’s “Up from Slavery” is a book called “Tuskegee and its People,” to which he contributes a general introduction. |Tuskegee Ideals.| Two-thirds of the book consist of “Autobiographies by Graduates of the School,” with such titles as “A College President’s Story,” “A Lawyer’s Story,” “The Story of a Blacksmith,” “The Story of a Farmer,” “A Druggist’s Story,“ “A Negro Community Builder.” These stories are all interesting, many of them heroic and touching, and all permeated with the Booker-Washington spirit of indomitable self-help, unresentful acceptance of outward conditions, and unquestioning measurement of success by material standards. And yet not wholly material. The formation and maintenance of the “home” are the aspiration and ideal everywhere proclaimed—the home connoting, to the negro mind, not only pecuniary well-being, but decency, morality, education, a certain standard of refinement. Here is a characteristic passage from “The Story of a Farmer”:

To this subject of the “home” I shall return later. I have seen few things more touching than the negro’s pride in the whiteness of his bedspreads.

Not less characteristic, however, is this further passage from the same “Story of a Farmer,” which follows, indeed, on the same page:—

It does not appear that “the Tuskegee influence” involves any economic idealism, or any doubt as to the legitimacy of capitalistic exploitation.

Principal Washington’s message, by his own admission, or, rather, insistence, might not unfairly be called “The Gospel of the Toothbrush.” |Washingtonian Optimism.| Again and again he uses this unpretending appliance as a symbol of the clean-living self-respect which he has made an ideal for his race. His policy, as he puts it in a remarkable passage, is to teach the negro to “want more wants.” It is the man with scarcely 55any wants who can satisfy them by working one day a week and loafing the other six. The man who wants many things “to make a happy fireside clime for weans and wife,” is the man who can be trusted to work steadily for six days out of the seven. This undeniable and (from the employer’s point of view) most salutary truth ought to put to silence the dwindling minority of Southerners who still object to the very idea and principle of negro education.

But suppose the majority of the race converted either into men of independent substance or satisfactory labourers for hire, will the problem be thereby solved? Principal Washington has no doubt on the subject. In the introduction to “Tuskegee and its People,” he proclaims his optimism in no uncertain voice:

Such is the teaching of Washingtonian optimism.

And what is the reply of Du Boisian idealism?

56The reply is implicit in the very title of Mr. Du Bois’ book, “The Souls of Black Folk.” |Du Boisian Idealism.| “Your method of securing peace, decency, and comfort for our bodies,” say the idealists to Mr. Washington, “implies, even if successful, the degradation and atrophy of our souls.” Mr. Du Bois celebrates with fervour the saints, the rebels, and the martyrs of his race, of whom Mr. Washington seems never to have heard. Mr. Du Bois admits, of course, the misfortunes of his people, but apparently regards them as a pure contrariety of Fate, with nothing in the racial constitution or character to account for them. Nothing less than the most perfect equality, not only economic and political, but social and intellectual, will satisfy him. If the negro is to hold a place apart, it must be by his own free choice, because he does not desire or condescend to mingle with the white. “Those who dislike amalgamation,” he says, “can best prevent it by helping to raise the negro to such a plane of intelligence and economic independence that he will never stoop to mingle his blood with those who despise him.” Mr. Washington admits to the full the mistakes of the Reconstruction Period—when the negro was made the dominant race in the South—and promises that they shall never be repeated. For Mr. Du Bois the mistake lay in not resolutely carrying through (of course, with greater wisdom and purity of purpose) the Reconstruction policy. 57He sees no reason why “the vision of ‘forty acres and a mule’—the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landowner, which the nation had all but categorically promised to the freedmen”—should not have been literally realized. In short, while Mr. Washington is an opportunist and a man of action, Mr. Du Bois is a cloistered intransigeant.

But especially does he resent the over-emphasis laid, as he thinks, on manual as opposed to intellectual training. Manual training is good; but without intellectual training it must leave the race on a low and servile level; and Mr. Washington’s “deprecation of institutions of higher learning,” is leading to a “steady withdrawal of aid” from negro universities. The spectacle of a “lone black boy poring over a French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home,” which raised in Mr. Washington only a pitying smile, seems to Mr. Du Bois heroic and admirable. The “gospel of work and money,” he thinks, “threatens almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life.” “To seek to make the blacksmith a scholar is almost as silly as the more modern scheme of making the scholar a blacksmith; almost, but not quite.”

I have paused in the story of my pilgrimage in order to give a little sketch of two conflicting tendencies, embodied in two remarkable men. Mr. Washington I have called an optimist; but it must not be understood that Mr. Du Bois is wholly 58a pessimist. He even says in one place: “That the present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influence of culture, as the South grows civilized, is clear.” But is it? I wish I could share the confidence of either the optimist or the idealist.

In Memphis I had no difficulty in discovering what I had in vain looked for in Louisville—a book-store. There are two or three on Main Street; and into one of them I went to ask for Mr. Du Bois’s book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” which I had not yet read.

Immediately the proprietor swooped down upon me. As to the possession of that particular book he returned an evasive answer; but if I wanted information about the negro, I had, in every sense, come to the right shop. He exuded information at every pore. He had no prejudice against the negro—no, not he! Why, he employed three or four of them on his own place. (This protestation of impartiality I found to be the constant exordium of such a tirade.) But he was simply stating a matter of incontrovertible fact when he said that there was no nigger that would not assault a white woman whenever he saw a chance of doing so with impunity.

“But,” I objected, “outrages are not, after all, such daily occurrences. Do you mean to suggest 60that there are many outrages and lynchings that are never heard of—that don’t get into the newspapers?”

“Oh no; they get into the papers right enough. The reason there aren’t more outrages is simply that we whites have learnt to protect ourselves against the negro, just as we do against the yellow fever and the malaria—the work of noxious insects. You’re at the Hotel Gayoso, are you? Well, you see the wire-gauze screens over all the doors and windows? That’s to keep out the muskeeters; and just in the same way we must keep the nigger out of our lives.”

Then came a phrase which I was to hear repeated many times, not by irresponsible fanatics, but by Southerners of a much higher type: “I tell you, sir, no pen can describe the horrors of the Reconstruction Period, when all that was best in the white South was outlawed, and the nigger rode roughshod over us. The true story of that time will never be written in history. It is known only to those who went through it.”^[18]

61He then poured forth in terms of romantic extravagance the tale of the Ku-Klux-Klan, and how it had saved American civilization. He referred me, by way of proof, to the statue of General Forrest, right here in Memphis, who had been Grand Titan, or Grand Dragon, or I know not what, of the said organization, and whom British soldiers, General French and General Wolseley, had declared to have been the greatest military genius that ever lived.

To all this I was no unwilling listener; yet my time was limited, and now and then I sought to return to the prime object of my visit. In vain! He literally button-holed me, held me by the lapel of my coat, while he informed me that there was not an honest woman, in any sense of the word, among the whole negro race, and that the coloured population was ravaged by every sort of vice and disease. Had it been possible to take his assurances literally, one must have concluded that the race problem must quickly solve itself by the extinction of the negro. And he frankly 62looked forward to that consummation. “Our vagrancy laws are going to be a bitter pill for them. You see”—here he sketched a diagram to assist my understanding—“a nigger can’t come here to the front-door of my house and ring the bell; but he can go round to the back door”—a line represented his tortuous course—“and I tell you he does. Every household supports at least four or five niggers. Now the vagrancy laws are going to drive that class of niggers to the North, and the Yankee ain’t goin’ to stand his ways. We’re a long-sufferin’ people here in the South.”

As for Mr. Du Bois’s book, it was evident that, even if he had it, he was not going to sell it to me. I left the shop with two books: one was “The Clansman,” by Thomas Dixon, jun., a melodramatic romance of the Ku-Klux-Klan; the other a pseudo-scientific onslaught on the negro race—a brutal and disgusting volume.

An hour or two later I was sitting in the consulting-room or “office” of a coloured physician—Dr. Oberman, let me call him. |A Doctor’s Story.|His real name was that of a we ll-known Southern family, and I remarked upon the fact, expecting to hear that he had been born a slave in that family. In a sense this was the case; but his story was a strange one, and he told it with frank simplicity.

“My father,” he said, “was in fact a member of that family”—and he told of sundry political offices which his white kindred had filled. 63“But my father attached himself openly and honourably to my mother, who was a slave in the family, and for that reason had to leave his home in North Carolina. For some reason or other they chose to go to the State of Mississippi. In 1850 that was a long and toilsome journey; and I was born on the way, not far from this place. For some years they lived in Mississippi, but they were again driven from there and passed into Ohio. My father was one of the noblest of men, and as soon as he was in a State where he could legally do so, he married my mother. I was present at the wedding.”

“Your mother, Dr. Oberman,” I said, “must surely have been a quadroon, or even an octoroon?”

“My dear mother,” he said, “was very nearly of the same colour as myself. You see, sir, we don’t breed straight,”—and he proceeded to give several instances in which the children either of two people of mixed blood, or of a white father and a mother of mixed blood, had varied very widely in complexion and facial type, some seeming almost pure white, others emphatically negroid. I did not say it, but I could not help thinking: This is scarcely a point in favour of that mixing of bloods which is here called miscegenation. Or is it merely another form of race-prejudice to hold that marriage undesirable in which the colour of the offspring cannot be foretold, and is apt to be variegated?

64In a country where such terrible disabilities and humiliations await those in whom there is the slightest strain of black blood, it is surely manifest that the people who impose these humiliations, and scout the idea of legal marriage between the races, ought to visit with the severest penalties any relation (necessarily illicit) between a white man and a coloured woman—any augmentation by the white man of that half-bred caste on which colour-disabilities press with such peculiar cruelty. I asked Dr. Oberman whether there was any adequate feeling of this sort in the white community—whether the white man who was known to have relations with coloured women was denounced and ostracised?

“My dear sir,” he replied, “I can assure you that many of those who preach most loudly against miscegenation are far from practising what they preach.”

I am glad to say, however, that white men everywhere assured me that there was a strong and increasingly efficient public sentiment against this most anti-social form of transgression.^[19] I 65cannot but think that the lynching of a few white men notoriously guilty of it would beneficially equalize matters.

As I had come to Dr. Oberman with an introduction from Mr. Booker Washington, it was natural that the talk should fall upon the comparative merits of academic and of industrial education for the negro. Said the doctor: “We acquire property, and we want bankers; we fall ill, and we want physicians; we have business difficulties, and we want lawyers; we have souls, and we want preachers who can give us something better than the old ranting theology. But for every one of our race who can profit by a literary education, there are ninety-nine for whom manual training is the first essential.”

Then, looking up at a portrait of Mr. Washington on the wall of his office, he said, “Ah! he is our Moses!”

But a stronger proof of the reverence with which this leader is regarded awaited me as I left Dr. Oberman’s house. I had gone some twenty yards down the street, when I fancied I heard my name called. It must be an illusion, I thought, but nevertheless I looked round. There was the 66doctor, with his head thrust out of his office-window on the first floor, calling to me and beckoning me back.

“Did you take away that letter of Mr. Washington’s?” he asked.

I searched my pockets, but had it not. Meanwhile the doctor apparently rummaged on his bureau, and found it.

“Here it is! All right!” he cried; and I passed on.

A formal type-written note of introduction, signed by the great man’s hand, was a thing to be treasured like a pearl of great price. The first thought in the doctor’s mind on parting from me had been to assure himself of its safety!

For a whole long hot summer’s day I journeyed down the Mississippi Valley from Memphis to Vicksburg, stopping at every wayside station. Here I first felt—what was afterwards to grow upon me every day—an impression of the extraordinary potential wealth of the South. These fat champains, many of them scarcely reclaimed from the wilderness, and few of them subjected to more than a rough surface culture, seemed to me to reek of fertility and to cry aloud for development. As scenery they were monotonous enough, but as the seed-plot of an illimitable future they were vastly impressive.

There was no dining-car on the train, and at Clarksville, at 12.30, we were allowed twenty minutes for “dinner.” We rushed for the dingy refreshment-room, and found at each place a plate of soup, surrounded by little saucers containing a cube of butter, a sort of dough-nut in syrup, and some lettuce with a slice of hard-boiled egg. There was also at each place a coffee-cup, a small milk-pot, and some sugar. The soup-plates 68were removed by being piled in the middle of the table; a negro waiter came round with fresh plates, and then served the following menu, all dumped successively upon a single plate: (1) chunks of boiled bacon with sauerkraut; (2) stewed veal; (3) mashed potatoes; (4) baked beans; (5) roast chicken; (6) boiled beef. The meal ended with pumpkin pie and ice-cream; and for beverage you had your choice of either coffee or iced-tea. For this refection the charge was seventy-five cents, or three shillings—the regular tariff, it would seem, at roadside stations. Moral: Never, if you can help it, take a train without a dining-car.

Approaching Vicksburg, we ran for miles and leagues through a lovely region of luxuriantly green, vine-tangled forest, mirrored in perfectly clear water. Here, indeed, might the poet have sung of

How the water got there I cannot say. If it was simply the result of a flood, how came it so exquisitely clear? It seemed as though the forest grew naturally out of this pellucid mirror; the rather as we passed many open glades of blue water, where a race of lake-dwellers had built their cabins on piles. These glades I conceive to be “bayous,” but found no native who could inform me. In any case, I shall never forget that run up to Vicksburg. Until then, I scarcely knew 69the meaning of the word “green.” The South was afterwards to teach me many other shades of its significance.

This whole day’s journey lay through the “black belt” of the State of Mississippi. |Africa in the Ascendant.| It was manifest to the naked eye that the black population enormously outnumbered the white. Few and far between were the cottages occupied by white folks, numberless the cabins of the blacks. At the stations the blacks—who love hanging around railway stations—were to the whites as ten to one. They were a lively, good-humoured, talkative crowd, and on the whole, one would have said, a fine race physically. Neither the men nor the women showed any obvious sign of that dwindling vitality wherein my friend the Memphis bookseller rejoiced—which is not to say that he was entirely mistaken as regards the urban negro. These were rural negroes—a wholly different matter.

The newsman on the train was selling the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and I noticed that he found quite as many customers among the blacks as among the whites—two or three at each station. This would have gratified Mr. Booker Washington, for it was not only a proof of education but of easy circumstances—the paper costing just about as much as the Times. Mr. Washington, too, would have rejoiced to see the rather exquisitely-dressed negro cavalier, mounted 70on a pretty little well-bred mare, with spick-and-span new saddle and appurtenances, who, at Mound Bayou, rode up to the Jim Crow car, and chatted with a friend. Here was the Gospel of the Toothbrush supplemented by that of the curry-comb.

At this point I must face an avowal which I have long seen looming ahead. |The Jim Crow Car.| Without sincerity these impressions would be worse than useless. What I think about the colour question must be superficial, and may be foolish; but there is a certain evidential value in what I feel. The whole question, ultimately, is one of feeling; and the instinctive sensations of an observer, with the prejudices of his race, no doubt, but with no local Southern prejudices, are, so far as they go, worth taking into account.

Well, that day in the “black belt” of Mississippi brought home to me the necessity of the Jim Crow car. The name—the contemptuous, insulting name—is an outrage. The thing, on the other hand, I regard as inevitable. There are some negroes (so called) with whom I should esteem it a privilege to travel, and many others whose companionship would be in no way unwelcome to me; but, frankly, I do not want to spend a whole summer day in the Mississippi Valley cheek by jowl with a miscellaneous multitude of the negro race.

The Jim Crow car is defended by many Southerners as a means of keeping the peace, 71and on the ground of the special aversion which, owing to deplorable and (in time) corrigible circumstances, the negro male excites in the white woman. But I think the matter goes deeper than this. The tension between the races might be indefinitely relaxed, outrages might become a well-nigh incredible legend, the Gospel of the Toothbrush might be disseminated among the negroes ten times more widely than it is; and still it would not be desirable that the two races should be intermingled at close quarters in the enforced intimacy of a long railway journey. The permanent difficulty, underlying all impermanent ones, that time, education, Christian charity, and soap and water may remove, is that of sheer unlikeness.

Oh! they are terribly unlike, these two races! I am postulating no superiority or inferiority. I say, with Bishop Bratton, that “the negro is capable of development up to a point which neither he nor any one else can as yet fix;” and I will even assume that, from an astral point of view, the negro norm of physical beauty may be quite as well justified as that of the white. But they are essentially, irreconcilably different; and instincts rooted through untold centuries lead the white man to associate ugliness and a certain tinge of animalism with the negro physiognomy and physique. Call it illusion, prejudice, what you will, this is an unalterable fact of white psychology; or, if alterable, not in one 72generation, nor yet in one century. No doubt there is something good-humoured and not unsympathetic in the very ugliness (from the white point of view) of the negro. For that reason, among others, the two races can get on well enough, if you give them elbow-room. But elbow-room is just what the conditions of railway travelling preclude; wherefore I hold the system of separate cars a legitimate measure of defence against constant discomfort. Had it not been adopted, the South would have been a nation of saints, not of men. It is in the methods of its enforcement that they sometimes show themselves not only human but inhuman.

Remember that the question is complicated by the American’s resolute adherence to the constitutional fiction of equality. |The Fiction of Equality.| As there are no “classes” in the great American people, so there must be no first, second, or third class on the American railways.^[20] Of course, the theory remains a fiction on the railroad no less than in life. Everyone travels first class; but those who can pay for it may travel in classes higher than first, called parlour-cars, drawing-room cars, and so forth. The only real validity of the fiction, it seems to me, lies in the unfortunate situation it creates with regard to the negro. If our three classes (or even two) were provided 73on every train, the mass of the negro population would, from sheer economic necessity, travel third. It might or might not be necessary to provide separate cars on that level; but if it were, the discrimination would not be greatly felt by the grade of black folks it would affect. In the higher-class cars there would be no reasonable need for discrimination, for the number of negroes using them would be few in comparison, and personally unobjectionable. The essential elbow-room would seldom be lacking; conditions in the first and second class would be very much the same as they are at present in the North. It is the crowding, the swamping, the submerging of the white race by the black, that the South cannot reasonably be expected to endure; and what I realized on that day in Mississippi was that such swamping would be an inevitable and everyday incident unless measures were taken to obviate it.

Of all historic ironies this is surely the bitterest—that the Republic founded to demonstrate eighteenth-century ideals of human equality should have been fated to provide their most glaring reductio ad absurdum. This is far from an original observation: but there is another paradox in the case which is not so generally recognized. It is that the most religious of modern peoples should all the time be flying in the face of the plainest dictates of Christianity. The South is by a long 74way the most simply and sincerely religious country that I ever was in.^[21] It is not, like Ireland, a priest-ridden country; it is not, like England, a country in which the strength of religion lies in its social prestige; it is not, like Scotland, a country steeped in theology. But it is a country in which religion is a very large factor in life, and God is very real and personal. In other countries men are apt to make a private matter of their religion, in so far as it is not merely formal; but the Southerner wears his upon his sleeve. There is a simple sincerity in his appeal to religious principle which I have often found really touching. I have often, too, been reminded of that saying of my Pennsylvanian friend: “The South may be living in the twentieth century, but it has skipped the nineteenth.” The Southerner goes to the Gospels for his rule of life, and has never heard of Nietzsche; yet I am wholly unable to discover how the system of race-discriminations is reconcilable with the fundamental precepts of Christianity. It is far easier to find in the Old Testament the justification of slavery than in the New Testament the justification of the Jim Crow car, the white and black school, and the white and black church.^[22] 75This is not necessarily a condemnation of the Southerner’s attitude; I do not think that the colour problem was foreseen in the New Testament. Christianity is one thing, sociology another, and the Southerner’s logical error, perhaps, lies in not keeping the distinction clear.^[23] But I am sure there are many sincere and earnest Christians in the South who will scarce be at ease in heaven unless they enter it, like a Southern railway station, through a gateway marked “For Whites.”

Enormous undeveloped or half-developed fertility is the impression one receives on every hand in the South; but the lack of development belongs to a state of things soon to pass away. There can be little doubt that the South stands on the threshold of an agricultural Golden Age.^[24] It is being brought about mainly by three agencies: (1) The United States Department of Agriculture; (2) The General Education Board of New York; 77(3) the boll-weevil, which, entering Texas from Mexico in 1899, has extended its ravages over the States of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and part of Mississippi, and at one time threatened the ruin of the whole cotton industry. It may seem odd that this unwelcome invader should be reckoned among the factors that are promoting agricultural development; but, in a very real sense, he has served as a pioneer to the movement.

Dr. Wallace Buttrick, of the General Education Board, was so kind as to give me an outline of the course of events.

“Our Board,” he said, “was established and endowed, and has been at various intervals re-endowed, by Mr. Rockefeller.”

“To promote education in the South?”

“Not in the South alone, nor even primarily; but we had, of course, to study the special conditions prevailing in the South. We soon convinced ourselves that the deficiencies of Southern education—and they were enormous—were due to the sheer poverty of the country.^[25] In the Southern towns there are good schools, and the accommodation is fairly adequate. But 78only 15 per cent. of the population of the South is a city population. The remaining 85 per cent. is rural and agricultural—not even, for the most part, gathered in villages of any size—so that the problem of bringing education to the doors of the people is an immensely difficult one.”

“I suppose compulsory education is not to be thought of?”

“It is thought of; it is mooted; it is coming; but not yet awhile. That is just what, as I say, we realized—that the South is too poor to pay for an adequate system of education, and that the problem is too huge a one for even the most lavish outside philanthropy to tackle. What was to be done, then? Manifestly to enrich the Southern agriculturalist, so as to enable him to pay for the schooling of his children. As it is, his average income is something like a third of the average income of a man of his class in (say) the State of Iowa, where the public-school system is adequate and satisfactory. Multiply his income by three, or even by two, and he also will be able to afford an adequate public-school system.”

“So your problem was nothing less than to double or treble the wealth of the fifteen or sixteen Southern States?”

“Something like that; and it was right here that the boll-weevil came in. With ruin staring them in the face, the farmers of the affected districts took up eagerly 79the system of what are called Demonstration Farms, organized by Dr. S. A. Knapp, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That department, at its experimental stations and with the aid of its entomologists, had devised a method of combating the pest. Roughly speaking, it consisted of getting in ahead of the weevil—carefully preparing the ground and selecting the right varieties of seed, so that the main part of the crop could be harvested before the insect was ready to attack it. But it is one thing to devise a scientific method and another thing to persuade and teach farmers to carry it out. This difficulty Dr. Knapp got over by the following means: he organized a body of skilled agents, who went to the leading citizens—merchants, bankers, or what not—of a given district, and said, ‘Introduce us to the most intelligent and progressive farmer of your neighbourhood.’ Then to this farmer the agent would say, ‘If you will set apart a certain amount of land to be treated, under my supervision, exactly as I shall prescribe, I (that is to say, the Government) will provide you with the right seed for the purpose, and you will see what the result will be.’ Then meetings would be called of the neighbouring farmers, principles explained, and their attention directed to the experiment. Their life-and-death interest in the matter would make them watch the result closely; and as, in each case, the result would be a far larger crop per acre than they had been used to 80before the appearance of the weevil, you may imagine whether the methods of culture were eagerly adopted and the right sorts of seed eagerly applied for.

“Well, we of the General Education Board saw in the method of Dr. Knapp’s campaign against the boll-weevil the very thing we were wanting. The Government was operating only in the boll-weevil districts—there were constitutional objections to its extending its activity to regions unaffected by the pest. There we stepped in, and offered to finance the extension of the Demonstration Farms to other districts, in accordance with their needs and capabilities. So long as only a nominal money appropriation was required of it, the Government had no objection to our acting under its authority, our agents thus having the prestige of Government emissaries. For the current year, we have appropriated £15,000 to the work, while Congress has voted a somewhat larger sum for work in the boll-weevil States. Altogether, about 12,000 Demonstration Farms have already been established, and about 20,000 farmers have agreed to ‘co-operate’—that is, to work the whole or part of their land according to our instructions. The system is quite new. It has nowhere been at work more than two years, and there are many regions which are not yet even touched by it; but already the results are surprising.”

81“It does not, I presume, apply solely to cotton-growing?”

“Certainly not; on the contrary, one of our great objects is to break down the exclusive reliance on cotton so common in many districts, and to show how the exhaustion of land may be avoided by the judicious rotation of crops. In short, we aim at providing object-lessons in scientific agriculture all over the Southern States, and of course always with strict reference to the particular advantages and disadvantages of a district. I assure you the South is at the opening of a new agricultural era; and it will not be many years before our work will produce a marked effect on education. Come back ten years hence, and you will no longer find it true that the Southern school is open, on an average, only about three months in the year; that the Southerner gets, on an average, something less than three years’ schooling in his whole life; and that about 10 per cent. of the native-born white population of the Southern States is wholly illiterate, and about 40 per cent. of the negro population. We are going to change all that.”

Shortly afterwards I met, not Dr. Knapp himself, but his son, Mr. Arthur Knapp, who gave me some further information as to the new era in Southern agriculture.

“Not only,” he said, “is much Southern land unimproved, but much of it is exhausted by careless 82and ignorant cultivation. It has been the method of many Southern farmers to work their land until it would no longer raise a paying crop of cotton; then to sell their farms for what they could get and move on to fresher soil. The system of Demonstration Farms will put an end to this, along with many other abuses and stupidities. It is the only sound method of educating the farmer. You may deluge him with Government bulletins of printed advice without producing the slightest effect. Even if he reads and understands the advice, he can’t or won’t apply it in practice. You must show him the process and show him the results. Much more is done by talking than by reading in the South; things circulate from mouth to mouth much more effectually than even through the newspapers. Each of the 12,000 Demonstration Farms is visited by from thirty to one hundred neighbouring farmers. That means that the object-lessons reach something like 400,000 every year. And then the spirit of emulation is awakened. Intelligent and energetic men are fired with the idea that they will beat the Government; and they go off and have a very good try.”

“I think I roughly understand the method of fighting the boll-weevil; but can you tell me something of what is being done for the benefit of other products than cotton?”

“Well, we insist on the necessity of better drainage, of deeper and more thorough ploughing, 83of carefully selecting and storing the best varieties of seed. We demonstrate the judicious rotation of crops, and show the advantages of devoting portions of the farm to legumes, which have a high food value for stock, and at the same time enrich the soil. Above all, perhaps, we insist on the necessity of economizing labour by the use of more horse-power and better implements, and urge the increasing of stock to such an extent that all the waste products and idle lands of the farm may be utilized.”

“But most, if not all, of these prescriptions surely demand fresh capital. Where is that to come from?”

“Why, no one pretends that the average farmer can introduce all these improvements at once. The fundamental ones do not require more capital, but only more thought and labour; and, these once applied, the more expensive improvements will gradually become possible. The more intelligent preparation of the soil and selection of the seed produce wonderful results at once in the case of corn—what you call maize—no less than in the case of cotton. If a farmer, under our guidance, plants half his land with corn and cowpeas, and only the other half with cotton, he gets as much cotton as he used to before, and has his corn and cowpeas in addition, while the land will be gradually restored to its original fertility. It is one of our great objects to teach farmers, while keeping cotton their ‘cash crop,’ as they call it, 84to divert from cotton as much land as is necessary to raise their own essential food-stuffs and the fodder for their stock—things which, under the present wasteful system, they mostly buy from outside.”

“Then the result of all this will not be an immense and immediate increase in the whole output of cotton?”

“Not immediate, no; but who can tell what the ultimate result may be? It is quite possible, for instance, that a cheaper and more effective method of combating the boll-weevil may one day be discovered. As it is, with all our care in breaking up the hibernating places of the pest, and planting so that the greater part of the crop can be secured before he is ready to attack it, we merely keep him effectively in check, we do not exterminate him. He still puts us to much additional labour and expense, and he still gets the end of the crop.”

“He seems to have been a valuable stimulus to effort, however; you ought not to speak ungratefully of him.”

“His work in that respect is done—we have no further use for him. By-the-by, have you seen his portrait?”

And I left Mr. Knapp with my note-book enriched with a counterfeit presentment, many times enlarged, of the insect which has co-operated with Mr. John D. Rockefeller in the agricultural regeneration of the South.

Vicksburg is situated on a solitary, abrupt bluff, at a bend of the Mississippi; whence, I suppose, its strategic importance and its place in history. I climbed to its highest point, and looked out, at sunset, over the burnished river and the Louisiana shore beyond. It seemed one unbroken stretch of dark forest, which might never have been threaded by human foot, or only by that of the Red Man. When the first explorer of the great river climbed the bluff (as he doubtless did), he must have surveyed no very different scene.

The town, too, had a touch of the primitive South about it which I had not hitherto encountered. Memphis was as civilized and modern as any Northern city; but Vicksburg, with its steep-climbing streets, its cavernous, dimly-lighted shops, and its lounging outdoor life, had something of the air of an Italian hill-town. The principal hotel was a gaunt, dingy caravanserai, with no pretence to modernity about it. Here, and here only, I may say, I found the Northern 86allegation justified, that the South had lagged behind the age in things material.

An odd little incident brought home to me vividly the width of the empire of English literature. |Madrigals by the Mississippi.| At a street corner a sharp-featured Yankee youth, mounted on a large cart, was carrying on a book-auction, with a great deal of lively patter. As I passed, a familiar phrase fell upon my ear:

I stopped and heard him read, not without understanding, the whole of Marlowe’s canzonet. It carried me back from the Mississippi to the Cherwell and the Chess; but what did it mean, I wonder, to the little crowd of loafers, half white, half black, that surrounded his stall? Then, with a little more patter, he modulated into

and I left him stumbling over the accentuation of

Passing the same way half an hour later, I heard him thus deliver himself: “Here y’are—Dr. Johnson’s great work ‘Rasselas’! Seventy-five cents for ‘Rasselas’! He was Prince of Abyssinia—that’s a country in West Africa where they’s a powerful lot o’ coloured folks.” But there was, 87in the phrase of the country, nothing doing in “Rasselas.” I saw only one actual transaction concluded—a negro could not resist the allurement of “Doré’s Bible Gallery,” on which he lavished three shillings.

Next morning I awoke to look out upon a moist mist rising over the vast green chequer-board of rice-fields, as we approached New Orleans. |Disillusionment.| Again a country of wonderful richness, to which clumps of splendid trees gave a park-like aspect. The population seemed sparse. Little wooden churches were dotted every here and there, each with its pigmy spire—a feature not elsewhere common. The whole region, of course, was as flat as a windless sea.

But, oh! the disappointment of New Orleans! To come from the dainty pages of Cable to this roaring, clanging, ragged-edged, commonplace American city! It seemed particularly frayed and grimy, because the streets had everywhere been torn up for much-needed sewerage operations; but under the best of circumstances it must be, I should say, a city devoid of charm. In respect of mere width, Canal Street is doubtless a splendid thoroughfare; but even it, with its two or three scattered sky-scrapers and its otherwise paltry buildings, produces a raw, unfinished effect; while it is so often cluttered up with electric cars, on its six or eight tracks, as to have the air of a crowded railway-yard.

88The usually truthful Baedeker tells us that “New Orleans is in many ways one of the most picturesque and interesting cities in America, owing to the survival of the buildings, manners, and customs of its original French and Spanish inhabitants.” He further states that “Canal Street divides the French quarter, or ‘Vieux Carré’ from the new city, or American quarter.” I therefore plucked up fresh hope, dodged the swarming street-cars of Canal Street, and made for a street of the “Vieux Carré,” which had at least a French name—Bourbon Street. But here my disappointment became abysmal. It is difficult to believe that the French city, with its narrow, rectangular streets and its commonplace houses, can ever have been picturesque; now, at all events, it has sunk into a rookery of grimy and dismal slums. There is still a certain pleasantness about the old Place d’ Armes (now Jackson Square), with its cathedral and its old-world red-brick Pontalba Mansions; but, for the rest, the glory of the old city has absolutely departed. Baedeker duly informs us where “Sieur George” lived, and “Tite Poulette,” and “Madame Délicieuse,” but I did not take the trouble to identify the houses. If I am ever again to read Mr. Cable with pleasure, I must forget all I saw of old New Orleans. Of only one spot in it have I a grateful recollection—namely, Fabacher’s Restaurant, in Royal Street (Rue Royale). There I partook of a “Creole Gumbo”—a soup compounded of ham, crab, 89shrimps, chicken, and oysters—the bouillabaisse, I take it, of Louisiana.

In the new residential quarters of the city, in St. Charles Avenue and about Audubon Park, there are, no doubt, many beautiful houses, pleasantly embowered in semi-tropical vegetation. One or two of the newest and showiest mansions, in the Spanish style of architecture, I suspected of being built after a fashion I had observed on the outskirts of Memphis—with only a “veneer” of stone. The essential structure is of wood; but an outside casing is added, consisting of rusticated blocks of stone some three or four inches thick, an air-chamber being left between the stone and the wood. Whether this method of building is found successful I cannot say. The effect is often pleasing enough, even though the Lamp of Truth may not shine conspicuous in the architecture.

A run in a river-steamer for several miles up and down the Mississippi enabled me to realize in a measure the commercial magnitude and importance of New Orleans. But what impressed me most of all in the city was its cemeteries, of which it is justly proud. They are certainly magnificent and “pretentious” cities of the dead. (The word “pretentious” is currently used in America as a term of laudation.) Yes; if you want to get buried with everything handsome about you, by all means go to New Orleans. But as a place to live in, I cannot, on short acquaintance, commend it.

90My pleasantest memory of New Orleans is of a house on Prytania Street—cool and airy, on an evening of extreme sultriness—where a lady of Scottish name and descent was good enough to talk to me of her manifold public activities. She is an ardent Suffragist—a rarity in these climes—but, above all things, she devotes herself to the work of holding in check, so far as may be, the terrible evils of child-labour, which its rapidly growing industrialism has brought upon the South.

“It is quite true,” said Miss Graham, in answer to a question of mine, “that you may often see the black child going to school while the white child goes into the factory. The negro child is not wanted in the factories; it could not be relied on; it would fall asleep over its work. You know, I dare say, that we are now overrun in New Orleans with Southern and Eastern Europeans—Italians, Roumanians, Lithuanians, Greeks. It is their children that are the chief sufferers.”

“In what forms of employment?”

“Why, in cotton mills, stocking mills, candy factories, department stores. We got an Act some time ago forbidding the employment in factories of boys under twelve and girls under fourteen. But the proof of age required was simply a certificate from the parents! And the result was to make it appear that most 91boys had been born at the age of twelve, and most girls at fourteen. We are now agitating for an Act greatly increasing the penalties for employing children under age and for issuing false certificates.”

“Just before coming here,” I said, “I went into a boot-blacking ‘parlour.’ It was a long, close gallery; and there I had seen a dozen little boys working all this sweltering Sunday under a ‘boss.’ Unless he had relays of boys (which seems unlikely) they must have been at it, to my certain knowledge, for eight hours, and I don’t suppose they will shut down for another two hours at least.”

“If you had inquired,” said Miss Graham, “you would probably have found that they were all Greeks. The negro boot-blacks of New Orleans used to be quite a class by themselves—Eugene Field has written a poem about them. But now they have been quite ousted by the Greeks; while the negroes, in turn, have ousted the Italian organ-grinders. Yes, the boot-black boys are a bad case; but still worse is the case of the telegraph-messengers. Just think of their working young boys from six in the evening to six in the morning—sending them at all hours of the night into the lowest streets of the lowest quarters of this wicked city—and paying them two cents a message.”

“At what age do they take them?”

“Why, at any age when they can trot and 92have intelligence enough to find an address that is given them. And, mark you, it isn’t always—perhaps not generally—extreme poverty that makes the parents thus sacrifice their children. Often the children’s earnings will go to pay the two or two-and-a-half dollars a month demanded for a piano on the instalment system. That instalment system is a great curse to the ignorant poor. I have known a little child sent out to labour that its mother might acquire—of course at four or five times its value—what do you think?—a huge green plush album!

“Just in these days,” Miss Graham continued, “we have had some terrible revelations of child-labour, at a certain place on the Gulf Coast, where more than 200 children, from nine years old upwards, are kept ‘shucking’ oysters for twelve hours a day, under the most horrible conditions, physical and moral. And the Law Committee of our S.P.C.C. reports that there is no remedy, because the factory law at present in force in Louisiana applies only to ‘cities or towns having a population of 10,000 or more;’ whereas this place is a little private inferno, owned by a single company and occupied solely by its serfs. But we are fighting a good fight for better laws and better conditions.”

My greatly condensed report of her conversation may lead the reader to mistake Miss Graham for a one-idea’d humanitarian. There could not 93be a greater error. She is an eminently practical, energetic, broad-minded young lady, with a keen sense of humour and an interest in many things outside the work to which she has devoted herself. I am sure the little children of New Orleans have in her not only a sincere but a very shrewd and efficient friend.

Miss Graham reported the relations between the white and coloured populations in New Orleans rather exceptionally good. The reason, I think, is not far to seek—namely, that the whites outnumber the blacks by about three to one. The acuteness of the problem in any given locality is apt to depend largely on the numerical proportions of the races.^[26]

On the New Orleans street-cars the two races are kept apart, but the discrimination is certainly made with the utmost urbanity. The rear-seats of each car are marked “For Coloured Patrons Only.”

Montgomery, the legislative capital of Alabama, has the air of a pleasant and prosperous country town, with spacious streets, for the most part well shaded with trees. Its dignified, unpretending State House—where the Confederate Government was organized in 1861, and where Jefferson Davis took the oath as President—is admirably situated at the top of a gradually sloping hill, and commands a fine view over the rich, pleasant country. The soil in this district (and, indeed, in many parts of Alabama and Georgia) is as red as that of South Devon, and has naturally imparted its tint to the swirling Alabama river, which, when I saw 95it, reminded me of the rivers through which Thomas the Rhymer rode in the old ballad:

I was much disappointed not to find at his Alabama home Mr. Edgar G. Murphy, whose book on “The Present South” proves him not only a humane and judicious thinker, but one of the most accomplished living writers of America. I take this opportunity of expressing my great indebtedness to his admirable work.

My most interesting experience in Montgomery was a long talk with an intelligent and prosperous negro tradesman, whom I shall call Mr. Albert Millard. |A Contented Negro.| Mr. Millard did not, on the whole, express serious dissatisfaction with the condition of his race in the neighbourhood, and was inclined to take a hopeful view of the situation in general. “It’s the low classes of both races,” said he, “that keep us down and keep friction up.”

“In labour matters,” he went on, “no galling colour-line is drawn. In the building trade, for example, there is a white union and a coloured union, with a superior council representing both races. On Labour Day they parade together until they come to a certain point. Then one body turns to the right and the other to the left, and they finish the celebration each in its own park.”

“I wonder,” I said, “whether that may not 96be a type and model in miniature for the general solution of the question.”

But Mr. Millard’s note changed when I got him on the administration of justice.

“No,” he said, “we do not get justice in the courts. A negro’s case gets no fair hearing; and he is far more severely punished than a white man for the same offence. I’ll give you a little instance of the sort of thing that happens. A coloured man whom I know—a decent, quiet fellow—used to work in a livery stable. The boss one day fell a-cursing him so furiously that the man couldn’t stand it, and said he’d just as soon quit. He went into a room to take off his overalls; the boss followed him, and, without more ado, hit him over the head with an iron crowbar and knocked him senseless. When the man recovered he got out a warrant against the boss; but, instead of listening to his case, the Recorder said he might be thankful his master hadn’t killed him, and the next time he appeared in that court he would be sent to the farm.”

“Sent to the farm?”

“That means fined a sum he couldn’t pay, and sent to work it out either on the State farm or under some private employer. Oh, the State makes a big profit in this way! Suppose a man is fined 20 dollars and costs—say 25 dollars altogether—his labour being credited to him at 50 cents a day, it takes him fifty days to work out his fine. 97But his labour is worth far more than 50 cents a day. Private employers pay the State 60 or 70 cents a day for each convict labourer, and provide his food as well; but he is credited only with 50 cents all the same.”

“And what are they employed in for the most part?”

“Oh, farming in general—cotton, corn, potatoes, some sugar-cane. The State has lots of stock. And then there are the truck gardens (market-gardens) and the coal-mines.”

“And do you mean to say that all magistrates behave like the Recorder you spoke of?”

“When the regular Recorder is away, they select the hardest of the aldermen to take his place. There is only one court in which we think we get justice, and that is the Federal Court.”

This is one of the few points on which there is little conflict of evidence—the negro, in the main, does not get justice in the courts of the South.^[28] |An Elective Magistracy.| The tone of the courts is exemplified in the pious peroration of the lawyer who exclaimed: “God forbid that a jury should ever convict a white man for killing a nigger who knocked his teeth down his throat!” Exceptions there are, no doubt; there are districts 98in which the negroes themselves report that they are equitably treated. But the rule is that in criminal cases a negro’s guilt is lightly assumed, and he is much more heavily punished than a white man would be for the same offence;^[29] while in civil cases justice may be done between black and black, but seldom between white and black.

It would seem, too, that as a rule the negro lawyer receives scant attention in the courts. Flagrant instances of this have been related to me—too flagrant, I hope, to be typical. It is pointed out, indeed, that while negro doctors are numbered by the thousand, negro lawyers (despite the argumentative and rhetorical nature of the race) are comparatively few. The reason alleged is that, though colour is no disqualification in the courts of nature, it practically disbars in the courts of men.

In the last analysis, this condition of affairs is no doubt a sort of automatic index of the state of public sentiment in the South. The average man does not greatly desire, or does not desire 99at all, that scrupulous justice should be done to the negro; and an elective magistracy—elected, as a rule, for short terms—simply mirrors this attitude of mind. A Recorder who held the scales even, as between the races, would quickly become unpopular with his electorate. He must record their judgments, or he will record no longer.

But there are special causes which tend to deflect the scale against the negro, and the chief of these is the system touched upon by Mr. Millard, which makes convict labour a source of profit to the State. |Profitable Crime.| No doubt white men as well as blacks are sentenced to the “chain-gang”; but it is much more natural and simple to send a negro than a white man into judicial slavery.^[30] Why let any pedantic rule of evidence or sentimental scruple of humanity deprive the commonwealth of a profitable serf? I find it alleged that in the year 1904 the State of Georgia made a clear profit of £45,000 out of “chain-gang” labour leased to private contractors. There is perhaps some mistake about this, since the average profit of the previous three years had 100been only £16,000 per annum. But even that sum is surely £16,000 too much.^[31]

One can understand the attractions of such a system, however unreal may be the gains that accrue to the Commonwealth. It is much less easy to understand another system, expounded to me by a leading white citizen of the State of Alabama, which makes it to the interest of magistrates and other officers of the law to promote litigation, and to keep the prisons full, because of the fees it brings them—so much for issuing a warrant, so much for filing it, so much for making an arrest, so much for maintenance in prison, etc. I do not understand this system well enough to attempt to explain it; but my informant declared that on one occasion, in his own town, a temporary magistrate, who was appointed during the serious illness of the regular occupant of the bench, found the prison “stacked up” with 500 negroes. Half of them were “held” on frivolous charges, which he simply dismissed; on the other half he imposed light fines which they could pay. “These iniquities,” my friend continued, “react upon us; they cost us money, and our gaols are breeders of crime and filth and disease. But our best people see it, and they’re going to correct it.”

While such systems prevail, it is manifest that statistics of negro crime must be carefully 101scrutinized and largely discounted before any value can be attached to them.^[32] |An Outlawed Race.| At the same time there is no doubt a considerable class of criminal negroes. It is natural, and indeed inevitable, that there should be. They are largely illiterate; they are for the most part poor; their white environment does all it can to lower rather than to stimulate their self-respect; the temptations of drink and drugs (mainly cocaine) beset them in many places; and when once a negro comes in conflict with the law, everything is done, not to reclaim him, but to harden him in crime. When we consider in how many respects the race is outlawed, it seems wonderful that more of them should not fall into habits of outlawry. No one can reasonably 102pretend, I think, that there is in the negro any innate and peculiar bent towards crime. Give him an equal chance, and he will show himself quite as ready as the white man to respect the criminal law at all events, if not, perhaps, the precepts of current morality. I cannot believe that any deep-rooted “original sin” in the African race is a serious element in the colour problem.

Meanwhile, by treating him with consistent and systematic injustice, the South is weakening and confusing her own case against the negro. In spite of many better impulses among the more enlightened of her people, her dominant instinct is to substitute for slavery a condition of serfdom. The black race is to have no indefeasible rights, but rather revocable licences to pretend to be freemen, so long as the pretence does not seriously interfere with the convenience or profit of the white race. And specially must the strictest limits be placed to the freeman’s right to work when and where he will, and even, if it suits him, to refrain from working. The South needs the negro’s labour, and is determined to have it, not on his terms, but on hers. Far more important and wide-reaching than the crime-slavery of the “chain-gang” is the system of debt-slavery or peonage, whereby a negro, becoming hopelessly indebted to a white landlord (and store-keeper), is compelled to spend the remainder of his life in working off a claim which can never be wiped out, because, for his very subsistence, he is forced to 103be ever renewing it. There is all the less chance of escape as accounts are kept by the landlord or his agent, and the negro is seldom in a position to check them. Until the law comes to the relief of the “peon,” and ceases to traffic in the sweat of the convict, the South, it seems to me, cannot look the negro squarely in the face.

Many Southerners, even the not unthoughtful or inhuman, make it the first and last word of their philosophy that “the nigger must be taught to know his place.” This means, on analysis, simply that he must accept his position as a serf. But no more than slavery, I take it, is serfdom permanently possible in a modern democratic State; and in so far as she fails to recognize this, the South is once more trying to put back the hands of Time.

It is very difficult to get at the true truth as to public education for the negro in the South. The probability is, in fact, that there are as many truths as there are points of view. One high authority (a negro) told me that for every single dollar expended on a black child about five dollars are expended on a white child. That is very likely true; but it is probably no less true that the sums expended on negro education are large out of all proportion to the sums paid by negroes in taxes. “Let us reduce their education to the scale of their taxation,” I have heard it said, “and where would they be?”^[33] The true question is: Where would the South be? Probably half-way back to barbarism.

But if we ask: Has the South neglected its plain duty towards the children of the freedmen? or has it heroically, in its poverty, devoted to the education of the black child money that could be 105ill spared from the beggarly education fund of the white child?^[34] we cannot rest content with the answer, “It depends on the point of view.” On the whole, I am inclined to believe that the favourable judgment is the true one; but I should hold it with greater confidence if there had not existed in the past, and did not survive to some degree in the present, a violent feeling against the very idea of negro education. In many places white teachers of black children are to this day ostracised.^[35] One may even say, I 106think, that, as a general rule, it takes some strength of mind for a white man or woman to follow the vocation of teaching negroes.

The hostility to negro education has, however, lost much of its former strength. |A Teacher of Negroes.| This is apparent from the case of Professor Patterson, head of an excellent State school for negroes in Montgomery. The Professor (a title as lightly accorded in the South as Major or Colonel) is a sturdy Scot. When he first came to the South in Reconstruction days chance led him to a county in the State of Alabama where there was, indeed, already a school, but it was kept by a negro who could neither read nor write. An educator by instinct, if not by training, Mr. Patterson determined to set up a school of his own. For this misdemeanour he was twice shot at, and was finally arrested, and put under a bond of 15,000 dollars to desist from teaching in that county. He went into another county, and started a school in the frame building that served as a negro church; but here the negroes themselves had to turn him out, as they were warned that if they did not the church would be burnt. These experiences only stiffened the professor’s backbone. He said: “I will teach—teach in Alabama—and teach negroes!” And here he is to-day, head of a fine large school in 107the State capital, and partially maintained by the State—a school well planned, well built, and with an excellent system of industrial training going on in various annexes in its spacious grounds.

As I passed through one of the senior school-rooms, a boy had just written on the blackboard, in a fine round hand, a quotation from a recent speech by Senator Foraker on the Brownsville affair—the affair of the negro regiment which President Roosevelt is alleged to have treated with high-handed injustice. The sentence ran: “We ask no favour for them because they are negroes, but justice for them because they are men.” Evidently there is no affectation of excluding from the schoolroom the all-absorbing problem.

Tuskegee (pronounced like Righi, but with the first “e” sound lengthened) is about forty miles from Montgomery, situated on an open rolling upland, with many small knolls and sudden gullies. In the course of a short drive from the station to the Institute, one passes a dignified old ante-bellum plantation-house, not without wondering what its owners of fifty years ago would have thought of the Tuskegee of to-day.

I am not going to attempt a minute description of “Booker Washington’s City,” as it has been called. It is, beyond all doubt, a wonderful place. Everywhere one sees the evidence of a great organizing capacity, a great inspiring force, a 108tireless, indomitable singleness of purpose—in short, a true magnanimity. I did not see Mr. Washington in his principality—I had met him some weeks earlier in the North—but the dominance of his spirit could perhaps be more clearly felt in his absence than in his presence.

Mrs. Washington I did see—a lady with the mien and manner of a somewhat dusky duchess. The observation may (or, rather, it does) seem an impertinence; but such impertinences are forced upon one by the very nature of the inquiry. Not only Mrs. Washington, but other members of the General Staff with whom I was brought in contact—for instance, Mr. Emmett J. Scott (Mr. Washington’s secretary) and Mr. Warren Logan (the treasurer of the Institute)—were far more Caucasian than African in feature, and very light in colour. Indeed, I saw no one in high position at Tuskegee who would not, with a very small lightening of hue, have been taken without question for a white man. I make the remark, however, without suggesting any deduction from it. I believe there is little evidence of any intellectual superiority of the mulatto (in all his various degrees) over the pure negro. It is often assumed as a matter of course; but those who have had the best opportunities for close comparison are quite unconvinced of it. One well-known white educator of the negro told me that for character, if not for intellect, he gave the pure black the preference over the mulatto.

109Mr. J. Stevenson, who conducted me over the Institute, showed precisely the bright intelligence, the frank, unembarrassed courtesy, the quiet enthusiasm for his alma mater, which I should have expected in a senior “college boy” showing me the lions of Princeton or Cornell.

Tuskegee Institute is just twenty-seven years old. |Tuskegee.| It was opened in 1881 with one teacher (Mr. Washington) and thirty pupils. It had a grant of £400 a year from the Alabama Legislature; but it had no land and no buildings. Operations began in a dilapidated shanty and an old church, lent by the coloured people of the village.

It has now, or had two years ago, 2000 acres of land and 83 buildings, large and small. Its property, exclusive of endowment fund, is valued at about £170,000, and it has an endowment fund of a quarter of a million. It now accommodates about 1500 students, two-thirds of them male. More than 6000 students have passed through it, counting only those who have remained long enough to benefit appreciably by their course. Of these 6000 Mr. Washington declares that, after diligent inquiry (and every effort is made to keep in touch with former students), he cannot find a dozen who are not usefully employed; nor has one Tuskegee graduate been convicted of crime.

Instruction is given in thirty-seven industries, from agriculture and stock-breeding to printing 110and electrical engineering. Mr. Stevenson took me through the machine-room, the blacksmithing and carpentering, carriage-building, harness-making, tailoring, and shoemaking departments, the departments of agricultural chemistry, and of mechanical and architectural drawing. Mrs. Washington herself was good enough to be my guide through the women’s building (known as Dorothy Hall), with its departments of plain sewing, dressmaking and millinery, mattress-making, broom-making, basket-weaving, laundry-work, and cookery, and its model dining-rooms and parlours, furnished, arranged, and decorated by the students themselves. Everywhere I saw earnest work in progress, everywhere order, discipline, and thorough scientific method. All this had been made possible, no doubt, by white money; but the whole organization and conduct of the Institute is the work of black brains alone.

Externally, Tuskegee has none of the orderly design which one finds in the “campus” of a Northern University. It is evidently a place that has “growed.” Buildings are dotted here and there over the somewhat rugged site, with small eye to picturesqueness or dignity of general effect. Except the Carnegie Library, with its well-proportioned portico, there is no building of much architectural ambition; but the chapel or general assembly hall of the Institute struck me as showing real originality of design. I was 111extremely sorry not to hear one of Mr. Washington’s Sunday evening “talks” to the students in this fine hall. I had not time even to see an assembly of the whole school, in its neat blue uniform, nor to hear its singing of old negro melodies, which is said to be remarkable.

In speaking of Tuskegee architecture, one must not omit to mention that nearly all the buildings of the Institute are built by the students themselves, of bricks burnt in their own brickyard. All furniture and fittings, too, are made and repaired within the Institute. I went through one or two of the students’ dormitories; the little cubicles were simple, neat, clean, fairly comfortable, but entirely devoid of luxury or upholstery. As I have before explained, tuition is provided by endowment, while the students are supposed to pay for their board and lodging at the rate of about thirty-five shillings a month, which they are enabled to earn, wholly or in part, for themselves.

After a far too brief visit, I left Tuskegee with the liveliest admiration for its methods and results. |A Reflection and a Query.| It is beyond all question a radiating centre of materially helpful and morally elevating influences. Mr. Washington is assuredly doing a great and an indispensable work for his race; nor is he doing it in any such spirit of contempt for academic and literary culture as his critics attribute to him.

112But two reflections occurred to me as I returned through the red twilight to Montgomery. The first was obvious enough—namely, that the men and women turned out by such an institution as Tuskegee cannot possibly be taken as representing the average of negro capacity. They are a select company before they go there—or, rather, in the very fact of their going there. They are impelled by individual and exceptional intelligence, thirst for knowledge, desire for betterment. Some, it is true, are sent by their parents, very much as white boys are sent to school or college; but whereas the white boy’s parents are merely following a social tradition, the black boy’s parents are taking a clear step in advance, and showing not only ambition but (in all probability) a good deal of self-denial. Almost every one, in short, who enrols himself at Tuskegee is animated from the outset by some measure of Mr. Washington’s own spirit; and not a few show, in the pursuit of knowledge, something of the heroism which marked his early career.

My second reflection took the form of a query. I did not doubt for a moment that Mr. Washington’s work was wise and salutary; but I wondered whether the material and moral uplifting of the negro was going to bring peace—or a sword. In other words, do the essential and fundamental difficulties of the situation really lie in the defects of the negro race? May not the development of its qualities merely create a 113new form of friction? And far beneath the qualities and defects of either race, may there not lie deep-rooted instincts which no “Atlanta Compromise” will bring into harmony?

Tuskegee marks an inevitable stage of the conflict; but is it the beginning of the end? I wonder.

After the daughter, the mother. Being again in America this year (1909), I stole a few days for a run into Virginia and a visit to Hampton, the fount and origin of the whole movement for the industrial training of the coloured race. It is perhaps well to take Tuskegee before Hampton, just as, in visiting English Universities, it would be well to take Liverpool or Birmingham before Oxford or Cambridge.

Hampton is on historic ground, and looks over still more historic waters. It stands at the tip of the peninsula formed (roughly speaking) by Chesapeake Bay to the east and north and the James River to the west and south. Yet not quite at the tip; for the spit of land which Captain John Smith in 1608 named Point Comfort runs some two miles further to the southward, and forms a sort of breakwater for Hampton Roads. The spit of land, now known as Old Point Comfort, is entirely given over to two great establishments—Fortress Monroe, where Jefferson Davis was imprisoned after the war, and the 115Hotel Chamberlin, one of those huge American caravanserais which are devoted to the cultivation partly of health, partly of sport, and wholly of fashion. The Chamberlin, despite its Pompeian swimming-bath and its circular dancing-pavilion built out over the waters of the sound, is not quite so extensive or so sumptuous as the Virginia Hot Springs Hotel, to say nothing of the Ponce de Leon and other palaces of Florida; but its life has a colour of its own, due to the large infusion of artillery officers from the Fort, which is but a stone’s throw away. The coming and going of the great white river-steamers, too, lends animation to the scene. Old Point is a meeting-place for these floating hotels, hailing from New York, Baltimore, Washington, and Richmond. Moreover, there is plenty of shipping in the Roads, consisting for the most part of the great four- and five-masted schooners which still abound in these waters. Some six miles up the estuary to the westward rise the immense coal elevators of Newport News, with its navy-yard; while to the southward, on the further shore, towards Norfolk, one can dimly descry a city of towers and domes, the buildings of the Jamestown Exhibition of 1907. Altogether, despite the flatness of the coasts, this confluence of great estuaries with the Atlantic has a nobility and beauty of its own. The sky-effects are marvellous.

Twenty minutes in the electric car carry you 116from the Chamberlin to Hampton Institute, from valetudinarianism and luxury, time-killing and life-killing,^[36] to industry, frugality, character-building and—in far more than a theologic sense—soul-saving. The Institute is divided from the little town of Hampton (with its church built in 1660, of English bricks) by a wide creek, known as the Hampton River, which was populous, when we passed it, with negro oyster-dredgers. On a spacious campus, bordering on this creek, stand the buildings of the Institute—looking out upon the very reach of the Roads where the fight between the Merrimac and the Monitor opened a new chapter in naval history. Both banks of the creek are well-wooded, and the white houses, with their wide verandahs deep-set in the tender green of early spring, gave the scene a semi-tropical air. It needed only a few palm-trees to transport one to Florida. The campus, too, is rich in flowering shrubs. A marvellous rose-tree in full bloom almost covered the office-building; hard by, a great bush of wisteria (standard, not climbing) made the air heavy with scent; and tulip-trees and climbing wisteria were to be seen at every turn. In the exquisite amenity of its site lies one great contrast between Hampton and Tuskegee. The red and gully-gashed Alabama 117upland, where Booker Washington has established his city, is unkempt, almost untimbered, and as nearly bleak as any place can be in that southern climate; whereas the Hampton student may sing with literal truth:—

But as I watched the negroes plunging their dredgers into the mud of Hampton Creek, I could not but wonder whether the downs of Tuskegee might not be the healthier habitation.

The fundamental contrast, however, between the two institutions lies in the fact that at Tuskegee the organizing and teaching staff is all black (or brown), at Hampton all white.^[37] The founder of Hampton, General S. C. Armstrong, was born in the Sandwich Islands in 1839, the son of a missionary. He was a man of extraordinary strength and vitality, a muscular Christian in the fullest sense of the term. In the war, he commanded a negro regiment,^[38] and after the war he put aside all opportunities of personal gain and advancement to devote himself to the 118work of the Freedmen’s Bureau. This brought him to Hampton; and here, in April, 1868, he opened his school, with one assistant teacher and fifteen pupils. Next year the attendance increased to sixty-six, and in 1870 the Institute received a charter (but no endowment) from the Virginia Legislature. In 1878 it was decided to admit Indians as well as negroes, and now about ten per cent. of the students belong to the aboriginal tribes. Armstrong had immense difficulties to contend with. The whole of the money for his enterprise had to be raised by his personal exertions; and the value of his idea—the value of negro education in general and industrial training in particular—was not then a tested fact, but remained to be proven in the face of much scepticism. A minor difficulty lay in the prejudice of the negroes themselves against manual training. This was still, in their eyes, the badge of servitude; and they were apt to rebel when, asking for Greek, they were given a hoe. With indomitable energy and geniality, however, Armstrong stuck to his task; and when, early in the nineties, he was stricken with paralysis, Hampton was already a great institution, and Tuskegee was firmly founded.

At Hampton there are now 113 buildings (65 of them of considerable size) and a home farm of 120 acres; while at Shellbank, six miles away, the school owns a farm of over 600 acres, with 150 head of cattle, 30 horses and mules, 100 hogs, and 119fowls by the thousand. The students enrolled in the Institute number 863, while the Whittier Preparatory School has nearly 500 pupils. In addition to all branches of agriculture and horticulture, fifteen trades are taught to boys, while girls are thoroughly trained in every form of domestic industry, laundry-work, dressmaking, etc. The teaching and organizing staff numbers about 200, or one to every six pupils. It is the deliberate policy of the Institute to seek for increase of efficiency rather than of numbers, and the entrance tests are correspondingly severe.

The Principal, Dr. H. B. Frissell, was unfortunately absent when I visited Hampton. |A Tour of the Institute.| I had met him a year before at Memphis, and learnt to appreciate his quietly commanding personality. Mrs. Frissell received us most courteously in the very beautiful old plantation-house which is now the Principal’s residence. A patriarchal hospitality is the tradition at Hampton, and we were cordially invited to remain, if not a week, at least a night. But a few hours were all we could spare; and the chaplain, Dr. Herbert Turner, very kindly constituted himself our guide.

He took us first to “the soul of the institution,” the Memorial Church, externally a fine building, internally, to my mind, memorably beautiful. It is a cruciform structure of romanesque style; but the arms of the cross are so short that they may be called apses rather than nave and transepts, 120and the great body of the space is covered by the dome. The four great arches are magnificent in their airy dignity, and the material, red and cream brick, is at once simple and beautiful. The doctrine here preached is entirely undenominational. The students are encouraged to adhere to their own denominations, “as they will thus be best able to serve the communities to which they return.” The official designation of the building is simple—“The Church of Christ in Hampton Institute”—and after several hours’ talk with Dr. Turner, I feel sure that his flock will imbibe from him no harsh or illiberal theology.

“We lay the greatest stress first and last,” he said, “on character-building. It is not the clever self-seeker that we look for and encourage—not the youth whose aim is personal success and money-making. It is the service he is to do to his people that we keep constantly before the student’s mind; and with the great majority that is actually and effectively the dominant idea. Many of them, of course, are training to be teachers; but all of them feel that they can teach indirectly in their different communities, by uprightness in life and efficiency in work. We follow carefully the careers of our students, and I am able to say that 83 per cent. of those who are now out in the world are Christian men and women, not merely in the sense of church-membership, but of the practical Christianity which is known by its fruits. We are especially 121careful to cultivate mutual kindliness and good feeling among teachers and pupils alike. It was a saying of General Armstrong’s that ‘cantankerousness is worse than heterodoxy,’ and we still take that view.”

“Have you many students,” I asked, “who are supported by comparatively well-to-do parents?”

“Very few,” Dr. Turner replied; “and we do not particularly care for that class of young man or woman. All new students have to bring with them a registration-fee of ten dollars, and eleven dollars for one month’s board; but the great majority of them need little more than that, for they are immediately put to various sorts of unskilled work by which they are enabled to earn from fifteen to twenty dollars a month, and so can not only pay their current board bills, but lay up a sum to meet the expenses of the next year, when they go into the day-school or into trades in which, during their apprenticeship, they are unable to earn anything. You remember how Booker Washington, when he first presented himself, was so ignorant that he was almost rejected; but when he was told, by way of trial, to clean a room, the superintendent noticed that the dark corners were as thoroughly cleaned as the most visible parts, and accepted him on the strength of that observation.”

We were now in the boot- and harness-making division of the Trade School building. Pursuing 122the theme of thoroughness suggested by the anecdote of Booker Washington, Dr. Turner continued—

“We insist that every student shall become highly skilled in whatever trade or pursuit he takes up; but we allow him to acquire a partial and rough-and-ready knowledge of other crafts subsidiary to his own. For instance, it is found that the individual harness-maker cannot compete with factory work, so that few students now take a complete course in that craft; but a boy who becomes a thoroughly skilled shoemaker also learns so much of harness-making as to render him an efficient repairer. In the same way our thoroughly trained carpenters also acquire a certain amount of skill in bricklaying, plastering, painting, and tinsmithing; and the girls, in addition to complete instruction in house-work, laundry-work, dressmaking and cooking, also learn something of simple carpentry, paper-hanging, painting, and the repairing of tinware, shoes, etc. In small villages and country districts it is very important to know something of everything as well as everything of something.”

“And where, amid all this, does academic study come in?”

“Students in their first year who are working for wages attend the night-school only. After that, if they are training for teachers, they enter the day-school, and devote only a minor portion 123of their time to manual work. But we take care that those who are mainly engaged in handicrafts and agriculture do not neglect their mental development on the academic side; and we find, with scarcely an exception, that the boy who does the best work in the classroom does the best work at the bench. The annual cost of academic training (apart from board, etc.), is seventy dollars, or £14, of industrial training, thirty dollars, or £6. To many of our students, in accordance with their abilities and their necessities, we are able to allot scholarships which cover these fees; but we are greatly in need of more such scholarships. For the general needs of the institution an endowment fund of three million dollars is required; but as yet we have been able to raise only about half that sum. The United States Government pays a small sum for each of the Indians whom it sends to the Institute; but it does not cover their expenses.”

“And how do the negroes and the Indians get on together?”

“Without the slightest friction. They live in separate houses—there is the Wigwam, the home of the Indian boys, and nearer the river is Winona Lodge, the Indian girls’ dormitory. But you have seen them working side by side in the workshops, and you will see them presently dining side by side in Virginia Hall.”

Dr. Turner took us through the very interesting Indian Museum, used also as a lecture-hall, and 124through the beautiful and admirably equipped Huntington Memorial Library, containing, among other things, one of the largest existing collections of books on the negro race and its problems.

“Do you find,” I asked, “that many of your students come to you with the idea that book-learning is a more dignified and desirable thing than manual training?”

“No,” was the reply; “that particular form of ignorance is rapidly passing away. But now and then students come to us with ambitions which we can scarcely encourage. A good many years ago now, a boy presented himself with the announcement that he wanted to be trained for the career of a prize-fighter. We did not reject him, but we found means of modifying his aspirations. He proved to be an unusually intelligent youth, and at the end of his course was chosen the valedictorian of his class. The subject of his address was ‘A Changed Ideal.’ He is now the head of an agricultural college.”

Our perambulation of the Institute was interrupted by the bugle call summoning us to midday dinner in Virginia Hall, a building partly “sung up” by a travelling band of Hampton singers. The beautiful quality of the students’ voices was manifest in the short grace which they sang. We went through not only the dining-hall, but the kitchen, and were much struck by the brilliant 125cleanliness and neatness of all the arrangements, the rapidity of the service, and the appetizing appearance of the meal. The young men and girls sit together at the same tables, a lively, talkative, but well-mannered company—with enviable appetites, if one may judge by the rapidity with which dishes were sent back to the kitchen to be replenished. I noticed that for the most part, though not strictly, the Indians and the negroes kept to separate tables. None of the white instructors took part in the meal.

Hampton was the only negro college or school I ever visited in which I saw no student who could have passed as white. There was, indeed, one singularly beautiful girl with auburn hair, who might have been taken for a European of peculiarly rich colouring; but she was of Indian, not of negro, blood. There must, I think, have been some reason for the absence of “white negroes” at Hampton; but I had not time to inquire into it. We bade an unwilling farewell to our kind hosts, and departed deeply impressed by the spirit and achievement of this noble institution.

126XIV

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

Birmingham, Alabama, is a city not yet forty years old; yet it numbers, with its suburbs, 150,000 inhabitants. It is the Pittsburg of the South, the centre of a great and rapidly growing iron and steel industry. But as yet it has not created anything of a “black country” around it. From the roof of its splendidly equipped and organized High School I saw nothing in its environment but pleasant wooded hills and flourishing “residential” suburbs. The city itself has spacious streets, handsome shops, at least two first-class hotels, a fine Court House, and an excellent streetcar service. There is far less rawness in Birmingham than in many American cities three times its age.

A very remarkable feature of the town is the splendid Union Station now in course of completion. Among the most conspicuous proofs of the prosperity of the South are the spacious and handsome railway stations, which are everywhere replacing the grimy old shanties of the past. In almost all, as though by special word of command, 127the Spanish Mission style of architecture is adopted, with its two towers crowning either end of the structure. This Union Station at Birmingham was perhaps the finest I saw; but the new station at Atlanta runs it hard; and Charleston, Jacksonville, even little Vicksburg, have all handsome and commodious stations. Each has its separate entrance, waiting-rooms, ticket-office, etc., “for White Passengers” and “for Coloured Passengers.” In some the colour-line is very palpably drawn in the shape of a thick brass rod running across the main hall, or “concourse,” and dividing it into two (unequal) portions. One end of this rod runs into the news-stand, the other into the ticket-office; so that in each of these departments both races can be served by one staff of clerks. Wherever I observed this rod, it was no provisional or movable device, but fixed as the foundations of the building.

Two little traits which I noted in the streets of Birmingham are perhaps worth reproducing. The first was a parcel-van with the legend—

Tho second was a placard inspired by a more catholic spirit. It ran: “Largest glass of beer in the city, for White or Coloured, 5 cents.”

Dr. Phillips, Superintendent of the Birmingham Public Schools, was kind enough to take me 128over the really magnificent High School building above mentioned, in which, by the way, manual and industrial training is as largely provided for as literary training. |The Young Idea.| In Dr. Phillips’s opinion, compulsory education is now well within sight in Alabama. They have already, he said, in the Birmingham district, approximately the school accommodation required under a system of compulsion. From a statistical report it appears that the number of “seats” provided in the nine white schools of the city is 4903, while in the four negro schools only 1607 are provided; whereas it would seem that the negro population is little, if at all, less numerous than the white. Indeed, the same report points to the inadequate accommodation for coloured pupils as an evil calling for prompt remedy. I note with interest that in the school year ending June, 1907, the “Cases of Corporal Punishment” are set down as “White: 57. Negro: 432.” As the average daily attendance of negroes was less than half that of the whites, these figures mean a ratio of something like sixteen to one. On the other hand, when we come to “Cases of Suspension” we find, “White: 105. Negro: 9.” It is clear that totally different systems of discipline are applied to the two races.

On the question of the relative mental capacity of white and coloured children Dr. Phillips holds decided views.

“Whatever the anthropologists may report,” 129he says, “the black race is to all intents and purposes a young race; therefore it is imitative. The black child has a good word-memory and a good eye-memory. He will often learn by rote quicker than a white child—but it is a different thing when it comes to understanding what he learns. Such an imitative function as writing comes at least as easy to the negro as to the white; but in anything that requires reasoning—in mathematics, for instance—the negro soon falls behind.”

There is a general agreement, I may say, as to the remarkable brightness of the young negro child, and a scarcely less general agreement as to the fact that this brightness does not usually last far into the teens. Some theorists tell you that the sutures of the skull close earlier in the black than in the white, and thus do not leave room for brain expansion. In the West Indies it is said that precocious sexual development checks the mental growth of the negro. On the other hand, negro investigators seek to show that the difference, in so far as it is not purely imaginary, arises from such accidental causes as the inferior nutrition of the average black child.

Dr. Phillips differs from some other authorities in holding the mulatto distinctly superior in mental capacity to the pure black.^[39] As to 130industrial training, he admits its value for the negro, but adds that an undue proportion of the race, even when brought up to a trade, manifests an invincible preference for “some sort of teaching or preaching”—in a word, for an easier life.

It seemed as though all my introductions in Birmingham, save that to Dr. Phillips, were to be of no avail. |A Character.| One gentleman had gone to Kansas, another had gone to a picnic, a third had gone where not even an inquisitive journalist could follow him—at least for the present. I had packed my “gripsack” in preparation for an early start on the morrow, when my telephone bell rang, and a visitor was announced. It was the gentleman who had gone to Kansas; and to his timely return, and kind promptitude in calling on me, I owe one of the most interesting hours of all my pilgrimage. He stated few facts, and some of these I have already mentioned in other contexts; he was very chary of pronouncing judgments; but he gave me a charming glimpse of Southern (though certainly not typical Southern) character.

A man of middle height, with a clear-cut, aquiline, rather careworn face, and iron-grey hair. His features would certainly not strike you at first sight as beautiful, or even as distinguished; you might class him, in a crowd, as a well-to-do farmer; but ten minutes’ talk brought out a curious distinction and charm in his face. It 131reminded me, vaguely, of portraits of Cardinal Newman. He looked far older than his years—at least, I found myself treating him with the deference due to marked seniority, and was amazed when it appeared that he was three years my junior. He had taken life earnestly, strenuously; he had been very successful in his business career, and he felt his success, not as an end achieved, but as an obligation imposed; so much I very soon made out from his slow, reflective, simple, and open-hearted talk.

“I’m ve’y much attached, sir,” he said, “to the negro race. My father was a large slaveholder, and he had a passion for them. He selected and bought ve’y fine types of negroes. Fo’ myself, I have now an entirely negro household, and they are all of them devoted to my wife and to my children. Fo’ instance, we have in our house a coloured woman of fo’ty-five or fifty—an old maid and a ve’y clever woman indeed—who is passionately attached to my youngest daughter.”

It was curious to find such an old-time, antebellum household subsisting in the go-ahead, intensely modern city of Birmingham. I felt, however, that this casual survival had very small bearing upon the problems of the present or future; so I tried to get at my visitor’s feeling on some of the burning topics of the actual situation.

Almost in vain. He would not express himself either for or against the “Jim Crow car,” though 132he was emphatic on the iniquity, which President Roosevelt also has recently denounced, of giving negroes inferior accommodation for the same rates as those charged to the whites. Not even on the question of “miscegenation” would he give a decided personal view.

“I feel,” he said, “that these people have been left on our hands through no fault of their own, and that it is our duty to do the best we can for them, each in his own way. It is the business of some people to think out theoretical questions; but that is not my business. I try to do what practical good I can from day to day—and that keeps my hands pretty full. As for such questions as that of social equality or inequality, they will settle themselves in time, through the thinkers and professional men of both races. Solutions will be found for many problems that now seem terribly difficult, if both races will only have patience. You know,

—these lines often come back to me.

“Many whites in the South,” he went on, “have hitherto held aloof from the negro cause, because they felt that the negro regarded them with suspicion and preferred to look for help to the North. That feeling is now passing away on both sides.”

133He had, naturally, no sympathy with the idea of supplanting negro labour with imported European labour. “Even if there were nothing else against it,” he said, “it is bad business policy. The Italians have carried four hundred million dollars out of the country in [I forget what space of time], whereas the earnings of the negro remain in the country. Sixty-five per cent. of the raw material produced in this district is mined by negroes.”

I tried in vain even to get at what he regarded as the chief mistakes made by white people in dealing with negroes—at the reasons, for instance, why such households as his own were now such rare exceptions. He could not be got to pass any judgments, even on his own race. The nearest he came to it was in this speech, which I reproduce almost word for word:

“My wife is a ve’y beautiful woman. Other ladies say to her, ‘Oh yes, Mrs. ——, you get on with yo’ negroes because yo’ beautiful an’ yo’ rich—but it’s ve’y diffe’ent with us.’ But seems to me ’tisn’t he’ beauty no’ he’ wealth that makes the diffe’ence—’tis he’ ha’at.

“As to those questions you ask me,” he said, as we were parting, “I read a’ticles upon them with great interest—oh yes, su’, with great interest and profit. But what is happening now is to me of mo’ impo’tance than what may possibly happen fifty years hence.

134“You are going to Atlanta? Then you will see Judge Mansfield. He can tell you far more than I can on all these matters.”

I did see Judge Mansfield, and he did tell me more.

The quaintly named “Seaboard Air Line” carries you from Birmingham to Atlanta, Georgia, for the most part through a region of fresh and woody highlands, with blue mountains on the southern horizon. The woods consist of pine and leaf trees about evenly mixed. Large tracts of them, unfortunately, have been ruthlessly hewn or burnt away—that crime against the future so prevalent in America.

Atlanta is finely situated at an elevation of about 1000 feet above the sea, on a billowy upland which has earned for it the name of “the city of a hundred hills.” The guide-book states that it is “laid out in the form of a circle”; but to the casual observer it seems to lack the usual regularity of plan. It has many spacious streets and handsome buildings, with the usual sprinkling of sky-scrapers. Its Park Lane or Fifth Avenue is named Peachtree Street, and is a really beautiful winding road, with handsome houses on either hand, shadowed by fine trees. It was hard to believe that this well-built, bright, busy, windy 136city had, only eighteen months before, been the scene of a sanguinary riot, almost a massacre, in which many innocent coloured people lost their lives.

The population of Atlanta is a little over 100,000, about 40 per cent. being coloured. |Gunpowder and Fire.| Most of the white people, I was told, come of a mountain stock, who never held slaves or came in contact with the negro before the war. Hence there is even less of mutual comprehension between the races here than elsewhere.

The riot was the outcome of a political campaign, in which negrophobia had been carefully worked up with a view to securing votes—yellow journalism aiding with inflammatory headlines. Then came a series of five or six outrages on women within twenty-four hours. Two of them, perhaps, were genuine; the rest were figments of hysterical imagination. The papers came out with edition after edition, piling horror on horror’s head; the saloons seethed with virtuous and highly alcoholized indignation; and some trifling incident sufficed to let loose the bloodthirsty frenzy of the mob. The police judiciously made themselves scarce, and for four days there was no law in Atlanta.

It is admitted on all hands that not one of those who were killed was even suspected of any crime. The mob went from unprotected house to house, ostensibly searching for firearms. But 137it kept carefully to parts of the city where it knew it would meet with no real resistance. It did not go down into the negro quarter; it avoided the criminal negro, whose criminality might have gone the length of “putting up a fight.” It preferred to harry the respectable and law-abiding coloured person, and “teach him his place.”

Atlanta is now very sorry for its sport. Its better people, of course, reprobated and deplored the riot from the first; but even the average man soon realized what it had cost the city. Its credit was shaken; there was an immediate fall in real estate and rise in wages. In no community does the sane element favour such outbreaks; but I had only to think of my Memphis bookseller to realize that nowhere in the South is the point very far distant at which the insane element may get out of hand.

There were fears of an outbreak last Christmas, and if it had come it would have been a very different matter, for the negroes were armed to the teeth.

Nor did my talk with Judge Mansfield (as I shall call him) altogether reassure me. |A Friend of the Negro.| The Judge is one of the leading citizens of the State, and took a prominent part in a sort of conciliation movement which immediately followed the riot. He is a man well advanced in years, was himself a slaveholder before the war, and is full of the warm Southern sentiment for the “old-time 138negro.” He is well known among white people as a friend of the coloured race and a defender of its rights. I do not know whether the negroes themselves rank him high among their champions.

He seemed to me more concerned with injustices done by the North to the South than with injustices done by the South to the negro. “Sherman said, ‘War is hell,’” so he led off; “but there is a worse state than hell, and we passed through that state. It was called Reconstruction.”^[40]

As to that, however, he was content to let bygones be bygones. His real complaint was of the immediate past and present—of the ignorant intermeddling of Northern folk in Southern affairs, the ignorant and contemptuous criticisms of the Northern Press.

“The other day,” he said, “Mr. Smith, a Congregationalist minister—I’m a Baptist myself, but I have a great respect for the Congregationalists—Mr. Smith came to me and said, ‘I hear that the coloured people in your town are sending their children to school in flies and waggons rather than 139let them ride in the street-cars. What am I to say to my people in the North about that?’ ‘I suggest, sir,’ was my reply, ‘that you should tell them it is none of their business.’”

He was absolutely opposed in theory to lynching, but seemed hopeless of its being put down so long as outrages on women continued. Here, again, his last word was a tu quoque to the North: “I addressed a meeting in Ohio last year, and I said to them, ‘Here in Ohio you have 2 per cent. of negroes; in Georgia we have 47 per cent.; yet you have lynchings here, not so many fewer than ours. Until we have twenty-three times as many as you have, I don’t see that you have anything to say to us.’”

His account of negro morality was very low, and he maintained that the negro Churches could do little to check it, because at least 25 per cent. of the preachers—in some places a much larger percentage—lived as loosely as their flocks. I found other Southern white men of opinion that the influence of the negro Church was, on the whole, a bad influence.

But it was on the necessity for absolute social separation between the races that Judge Mansfield was most emphatic. |“I would Brain him.”| “Jim Crow” regulations, he declared, are essential to prevent constant breaches of the peace. “If a big black man got into the street-car and pressed up against my wife, I would brain him!”

140And again: “I was staying with a friend in Ohio last year—a man of wealth and position—in a place where there are several well-to-do coloured people, and where coloured children go to the same school with the whites. I said to my host, ‘Does your wife take her coloured lady friends driving with her?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, because she doesn’t want to.’ ‘Your boy has a rig?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Does he ask the coloured girl friends he made at school to drive out with him?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, he doesn’t want to.’ ‘I’ll tell you why he doesn’t want to, and you don’t want him to. It’s because, if he did, the girl’s brother would come to you, and say, “I want to marry your daughter”—and you would brain him!”

A third time this phrase occurred in the Judge’s conversation—I forget the precise context, but it referred to another instance of negro presumption.

I felt that, after all, the key to the Atlanta riot was not so far to seek; nor could I feel in the spirit of Judge Mansfield any absolute guarantee against the recurrence of such unpleasantnesses. None the less do I remember him with kindness and respect. He was as fine a type of the Southern gentleman of the old school as any I met in my travels.

That evening I spent at Atlanta University with Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois. Twilight fell as we stood on the eminence which is crowned by the 141University buildings, and looked out over a wide expanse of red Georgian landscape. |Atlanta University.| The sunset had left behind it a delicate rosy flush, and, just where it paled off into greenish blue, the slender crescent of a new moon hung in the sky, with a glorious planet above it. Behind us lay the city, with its 60,000 white men ready to “brain” its 40,000 black and brown men on the slightest provocation. Before us lay the silent country and the ineffable peace of heaven. A mood of deep melancholy fell upon me as I reflected that under the silence of the country the same passions were vibrating, and that the peace of heaven was nearer, at any rate to this generation, than any peace on earth.

The influence of the immediate surroundings, too, had something to do with my mood. About Atlanta University there is nothing of the cheerful energy and optimism of Tuskegee. This is a home of intellectual culture; and intellectual culture, however necessary, can scarcely be exhilarating to the negro race at this stage of its history. The more you strive to break through the veil (to use Mr. Du Bois’ favourite metaphor), the more keenly are you conscious of its galling and darkening encumbrance. For assuredly it galls and darkens, whether it be a real barrier or a figment conjured up by the pride and folly of man.

At all events, his culture, which is great, and his genius, which is not small, have not made of Mr. Du Bois a happy man. With perfect 142simplicity, without an atom of pose, he is and remains a singularly tragic figure. |Professor Du Bois.| He is, perhaps, more impressive than his book, able as that is. In some of its pages we are conscious of a little rhetorical shrillness; but there is nothing of this in the man. He is perfectly urbane and dignified; there is nothing of the apostle, and still less of the martyr about him. He regards and discusses phenomena with the calm of the trained sociologist. But beneath his calm one is conscious of a profound bitterness of spirit. If he is hopeful at all, it is for a day that he will never see; and, in a man still in the prime of life, such hope is not very different from despair.

I met no man in the South with whom I felt more at ease, or seemed to have more in common. And yet, as we talked, there lurked in my mind a sense of hypocrisy, almost of treachery. I could not frankly expose to him my doubts as to whether the stars in their courses did not fight against his racial ideal.

Of his very interesting conversation I shall here record only a few fragments.

“The problem in the South,” he said (almost echoing Mr. Shipton, of Louisville), “is not that of the vagabond or the criminal, but of the negro who is coming forward. That is why even the good people of the South are taking their hands off, saying, ‘We can’t do anything.’

“The older generation of negroes had friends 143among the white people of their own age; but the boys and girls now growing up have no white friends. The younger white people have no feeling towards the negro but dislike, founded on utter lack of comprehension.

“The race antipathy is fomented in the schools. The progressive negro is held up as a bugbear to the white child, who is told to ‘Look out, or he will get ahead of you!’ Fear, jealousy, and hatred are actively taught to the rising generation of whites. But, after all, they are being taught something, and that’s more than their fathers were. Where intelligence increases there is always hope.”

At one point I did come near to hinting to Mr. Du Bois the doubt lurking in my mind. I quoted to him this passage from “The Souls of Black Folk:”

“Now, tell me, Mr. Du Bois,” I said, “whatever these people may say, is it not really just the other way about? The ignorance, shiftlessness, etc., are manifestly temporary and corrigible; is it 144not precisely the ‘blackness and other physical peculiarities’ that are the true crux of the problem?”

Mr. Du Bois smiled. “No,” he said; “that is the point of view of the outsider, the foreigner. The Southerner, brought up among negroes, has no such feeling.^[41] In using the argument I there attribute to him he is perfectly sincere.”

I refrained from pressing the point, but Mr. 145Du Bois’ answer did not quite meet my difficulty. I had no doubt of the Southerner’s sincerity; what I questioned was rather his self-knowledge, or (perhaps I should say) his reading of race psychology. And that doubt, I own, remains.

If the Ethiopian could but change his skin, how trifling would be the problem raised by his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime!

Every one agrees that the most remarkable phenomenon in the recent history of the South is the “wave of prohibition” which has passed, and is passing, over the country. “There are 20,000,000 people in the fourteen Southern States, 17,000,000 of whom are under prohibitory law in some form.” “Yes, sir,” says Mr. Dooley, “in the sunny Southland ’tis as hard to get a dhrink now as it wanst was not to get wan.... Why, Hinnissy, I read th’ other day iv a most unfortunate occurrence down in Texas. A perfectly respectable an’ innocent man, of good connexions, while attemptin’ to dhraw a revolver to plug an inimy, was hastily shot down be th’ rangers, who thought he was pullin’ a pocket-flask. Is no man’s life safe against th’ acts iv irresponsible officers iv the law?”

Georgia led the way in “State-wide” prohibition, by a law which came into force on January 1, 1908. This law nominally affected only fifteen counties, since 135 out of the 150 counties in the State had already “gone dry” under local option. 147But its importance is not to be measured by the mere number of the counties affected; it lies in the stoppage of the “jug trade” between “wet” counties and “dry.”

Alabama and Mississippi both passed Statewide prohibition laws which came into force in January, 1909. A strong fight is being made for State-wide prohibition in Tennessee, though “all but five of the ninety-six counties in the State are now ‘dry’, and only three cities—Memphis, Nashville, and Chattanooga—remain ‘wet.’” Though Kentucky has over £30,000,000 invested in distilleries, the saloon has been expelled from 94 out of 119 counties, and from the great majority of its towns and cities. All over the South, in fact, the same tale is being told—even where Statewide prohibition cannot as yet be carried, local option is riddling the defences of the whisky trade.

Of course I made it my business to inquire into the effects of this great movement, and, of course, I received many conflicting answers to my inquiries.

Many people told me, just as they would in England, that “You can’t make a man sober by Act of Parliament.” They enlarged on the evils of the “blind tiger,” or illicit saloon. They sang to me the refrain:

They told me of the “clubs” where each member can keep his private locker full of alcohol, and 148get drunk at his leisure. As for drink and the negro (they said), what is the use of keeping whisky out of his way, when in ten cents’ worth of a “patent medicine” he can find enough cocaine to make him more dangerous than could a gallon of whisky?

On the other hand, I was told of a State in which the gaol-keepers, who (strange to say) made their living out of catering for the prisoners under their charge, applied for a special “grant-in-aid” on the ground that prohibition had so depopulated their preserves that they could no longer keep body and soul together.

This, though I believe it to be true, sounded a little like a fairy-tale; so I thought I would go to headquarters for exact information. Atlanta was the only city I visited where prohibition was actually in force; so I betook me to Decatur Street Police-court, in the middle of its lowest quarters. I arrived at a fortunate moment: it happened to be the first of May, and Mr. Preston, the Clerk of the Court, was just making up his statistics for April. He took the trouble of looking up the records of the previous year for me, and gave me the following figures:

Number of cases tried in the first four months of 1907 (before prohibition), 6056.

Number of cases tried in the first four months of 1908 (after prohibition), 3139.

Convictions for drunkenness before prohibition, 1955.

149Convictions for drunkenness after prohibition, 471.

“Take it all round,” said Mr. Preston, “our work has been reduced by just about one-half.”^[42]

I afterwards attended a sitting of this Court (Judge Broyle’s), when, in a very light calendar, there was not a single case of drunkenness.

Oddly enough, no distinction of colour seemed to appear on the records, but I gathered that about 75 per cent. of the prisoners who come before Judge Broyle were negroes.

Of the negroes to whom I spoke of prohibition, all but one were strongly in its favour. That one, Dr. Oberman of Memphis, thought that more real good would be done by a “high licence.” Mr. Millard, of Montgomery, was emphatic in his approval. “I believe we’re the ones that are going to get the biggest part of the bargain,“ he said. “My people are going to have better homes and look after their families better—to pay for their schooling and pay their bills.” It is only fair to point out, however, that this was pure prophecy, since in Montgomery prohibition had not then come into force.

Being myself but a small consumer of alcohol, I was not irresistibly impelled to study the various 150methods of evading the liquor laws. One mild evasion of them I did come across at one of the “Country Clubs” which are such a delightful adjunct to American city life. |Club Law.| Here each member could by law have his locker; but it was found an intolerable nuisance to carry the system literally into effect. So, as a matter of fact, drinks did not come from any individual locker; they were supplied from the club cellar in the ordinary way; only the club must not be paid for them, since that would be a confession that the member ordering them had not stored them for his own use. What, then, was the method adopted? Members bought of the club books of ten-cent coupons, and with these coupons they paid the waiters who brought the drinks—not for the drinks, but for their services in bringing them! It appeared to me a complex and rather childish fiction, but probably it was no one’s business to look into its seams.

It was at this club that a Senator from an adjoining State, who had been very active in the prohibition campaign, was found one day seated before a “high-ball” of imposing dimensions. On being reproached for inconsistency, he replied: “Prohibition is for the masses, not for the classes.” A most un-American sentiment, some will say; but to my thinking characteristically American.

In Savannah, Georgia, 147 “locker clubs” were organized the day after prohibition came into force, one of them, a negro club, numbering 1511700 members. But it will not be long before this evasion is dealt with. It is held by able jurists that, even under the present law, such clubs are illegal. In the mean time, I suppose they exist in Atlanta no less than in Savannah; yet, as we have seen, the work of the police court has been reduced by one-half.

As for “blind tigers,” there is no doubt that they follow in the track of prohibition laws, and that it is fairly easy, for those who know how, to procure bad liquor at high prices. |The “Blind Tiger.”| But in the first place you have got to “know how;” in the second place, even for those who know how, it costs more time, trouble, and money than it did of old, to attain the requisite exhilaration; in the third place, “blind tigers” can, and do, have their claws pared now and then. Most of the people I spoke to, at all events, admitted that the evils of the “blind tiger” are not to be compared with the constant temptations offered by the open saloon.

That these evils are serious enough, however, appears from the following brief paragraph which I cut from the Atlanta Constitution:

152During the days I was in Atlanta, five blind-tiger keepers were prosecuted and “bound over under bonds to the city court,” one in the sum of £200, the rest in sums of £100. What this “binding over” precisely means I cannot say, but it seems to be a painful process to the animals in question, for I read that “their howls filled the court.”

One of the persons “bound over” was a doctor. It was noticed that his practice had of late increased enormously. A stream of patients resorted to his office at all hours of the day, till at last a plain-clothes officer joined the stream. The doctor told him that he was out of whisky, but could fix up a good substitute, which proved to be some form of alcohol, tinctured with syrup, to take away the crude taste. Of this beverage the officer purchased two half-pints at two different times, and then ungratefully arrested his benefactor.

On another occasion a plain-clothes officer was told off to watch a house where it was suspected that an illicit trade was carried on. Near it he came upon a negro lounging against a fence.

“Nager,” said the constable, “do you know where a fellow can get a quart of good whisky?”

“Naw, sir, I don’t; but mebbe I kin find some,” was the reply.

The constable handed him a dollar and a half, and told him to see what he could do.

“Yessir,” said the negro. “Just you hold this 153shoe-box for me while I step down the street a piece.”

The policeman held the carefully wrapped shoe-box, while his emissary disappeared round the corner. For half an hour he waited in vain, then searched the neighbourhood up and down, and returned to the station enraged at having let himself be victimized. But when he investigated the shoe-box, expecting to find it full of rubbish, behold! it contained a quart bottle of whisky.

Such are the dodges to which the liquor-trade is reduced. But however manifold and ingenious its sleights, I cannot be persuaded that it is so easy to get drunk in Atlanta as it is in New Orleans, with its 2000 open saloons—to say nothing of cities nearer home.

South Carolina was for some time, and is still partially, under the “dispensary” system, the State undertaking the function of providing its citizens with alcohol. The dispensary is open only during limited hours, and no liquor may be drunk on the premises. This system has proved the reverse of satisfactory from the point of view of the temperance reformer, while corruption has fleeced the State of hundreds of thousands of dollars in the purchase of its liquors.

There have been “waves” of prohibition in America before, which have more or less receded as time went on. Will that be the history 154of this wave? The best authorities do not think so.

In the first place, as I have said before, the South is deeply and earnestly religious. The Churches are all opposed to the liquor traffic, and it has been said that “a proposition to restore it would encounter from them almost the same reception as a proposition to restore a State Church establishment.”

In the second place, the presence of the negro in the South is a tower of strength to the prohibitionist.

In the third place, the rapid industrial revival of the South is making men alive to the economic waste involved in the liquor traffic.

In the fourth place, prohibition has touched the patriotic imagination of the South, which is a very lively faculty indeed.

On this subject I spoke to Dr. E. A. Alderman, President of the University of Virginia. In that State local option has banished the saloon from almost all the country districts and from most of the towns. Charlottesville, the seat of the University, is, according to Dr. Alderman, distinctly a better town since it “went dry.” Manners are better, the standard of comfort is higher, there is more money to spend.

“It seems to me,” said Dr. Alderman, “that society has an absolute right to protect itself against the evils of alcohol, just as it has the 155right to take compulsory measures of sanitation. Whether the best method of protection has as yet been reached, I won’t undertake to say. But I think you may safely assume that in the Southern States the age of the open grog-shop is past.”

Wherever I went in the South, one invariable experience awaited me, of which I scarcely know how to write. A buggy was ordered out, and I was trotted round to visit six or eight negro “homes.” I came to regard it as an established ritual, and learned to use the responses expected of me.

It would be base and stupid were I to laugh at these simple people who, in all good faith, and with a touching pride, which one felt to be more racial than personal, displayed to me their household gods. As a rule, indeed, I felt much more inclined to weep than to laugh. And yet, in one aspect, the parade was irresistibly ludicrous. It was as though one were led from window to window in Tottenham Court Road and asked to read, in the dining-room, drawing-room, and bedroom “suites,” the capacity of the British people for culture and civilization.

The point, of course, was to show what progress the coloured race had made, in wealth, education, 157and refinement, during the forty years which had elapsed since their emancipation. Statistics on this point, as we have seen, are apt to be a little deceptive. It is generally assumed that, after the Civil War, the race as a whole started in absolute pauperism. But this is not the fact. There were at that time many free negroes, and not a few who possessed a good deal of property.^[43] Thus the well-to-do, “home”-owning class of negroes is not entirely a creation of the past forty years. In Charleston, for instance, there were a good many negro slave-holders before the war; and I was told (though for this I should not like to vouch) that negro property-owners are now fewer in that city than they had once been, many of the younger generation having dissipated the savings of their elders. I may add that by far the most homelike of the homes I visited belonged to a professional man who could not truly be said to have risen from slavery.

Nevertheless, the evidence of thrift and material prosperity among a considerable class of negroes is undeniable and very striking. As I was driven from home to home, other homes and institutions were pointed out to me, with details as to the number of dollars they represented, until my head swam, and I began to 158wonder whether I were not back among the Vanderbilts and Goulds in Fifth Avenue. For when you get well up among the tens of thousands, my power of grasping and comparing numbers very soon fails me.

“The greater part of this street here to the left belongs to the richest man in our community. He pays taxes on half a million dollars.” “There are three or four homes in this street belonging to coloured people worth from 25,000 to 75,000 dollars.” “That is an infirmary for negroes donated by a carpenter who couldn’t read or write. It cost 50,000 dollars. It is supported by various coloured clubs, with contributions from the county and the city.” Such was the unvaried strain as the buggy rattled along.

But one thing I noticed with interest—my coloured cicerones were just as ready to point with pride to the fine residences and institutions of white men as to the homes of their own people. Whatever their grounds of complaint against the other race, they were, so far as they were suffered to be, loyal citizens of their State.

To one negro Crœsus I was personally introduced, and an interesting type he was. |A Coloured Carnegie.| An old man—well on in the sixties, I should say. He had no negro traits that I could discover, and his complexion was the very lightest yellow. His shrewd, many-wrinkled, crab-apple face would have been remarked in Europe as distinctly American, but he 159would scarcely have been suspected of black blood. In one respect he was ostentatiously millionairish, for every tooth in his head was of gold. Moreover, he wore in his shirt front a splendid diamond pin, which contrasted oddly with his otherwise plain and even rustic attire.

He is a banker, a general trader, an owner of real estate—and a liberal benefactor to his own people. He has established in the negro quarter of the city where he lives a sort of garden and recreation-ground for his race, which is all the more appreciated, as negroes, even when not formally excluded from the public parks, are made very unwelcome in them. In the recreation ground is a plain but well-designed and commodious wooden theatre, where companies of negro actors frequently appear. I am told there is a remarkable development of negro theatrical art in several quarters, but was not fortunate enough to come across any specimens of it.

The keen little walnut-skinned Carnegie-Chrysostom accompanied my guide and me over the garden and theatre. He said very little, but he gleamed appreciation of my guide’s remarks, all tending to impress on me his manifold activities, his astuteness, his success, and his beneficence. Yet one did not feel, as one would have felt had a white millionaire been concerned, that the poorer man was guilty of adulation, the richer of ostentation. There was something impersonal about it all. It was not the men but the race 160who boasted. The hero of the song of praise was not “I,” nor “he,” but “we.”

And what, now, of the “homes” themselves? |Villa Residences.| Those that I saw were without exception what are called by English house-agents suburban villa residences, which would command, in the neighbourhood of London, rents of from £40 to £70 a year. They were very nice little houses, scrupulously neat and well kept. They had (to my mind) the advantage over English houses of the same class, in the sense of spaciousness which comes with steam-heat and the consequent absence of doors. In some the doorways were filled with bead curtains—hanging strings of glass beads—which seem to be very popular just now in coloured society.

The furniture was always modern and in excellent condition, with a great deal of plush about it. Much of it conveyed the impression (not uncommon in English villa residences) of being intended rather for show than use. The wall-papers ran to large patterns, and were apt to be sombre in tint. Every home, without exception, had its piano, sometimes with open music on it. In the matter of pictures, nicknacks, etc., there was no affectation of “culture.” Æstheticism—that “unanimity of æsthetic appreciations” which so troubled Mr. Wells in Boston—has not yet penetrated the negro home. I did not see a single Wingless Victory. The works of art are simple to the point of primitiveness, 161and pleasing in so far as they genuinely represent the taste of their owners. One handsomely furnished parlour stands out in my memory, in which a showy overmantel was flanked by two amazing glass transparencies in heavy gilt frames, one representing a moonlit landscape and the other the Houses of Parliament and Clock Tower at Westminster.

As a rule, I would be received by the lady of the house (her husband was apt to be away at business) with the stock phrases of American politeness. In the great majority of cases the lady would be a quadroon, or lighter; and in one or two instances I fancy nature had been assisted by a whiff of the powder-puff. My inspection generally stopped short at the living-rooms on the ground floor; but sometimes I was admitted to regions of more intimate domesticity. It was embarrassing; it was ludicrous; it was, above all, pathetic.

With people of a corresponding class in England the first impulse would have been to offer a visitor “refreshment” of some sort. Never once was there a hint of anything of the kind on the part of my negro hosts. I wondered, and am still wondering, whether it simply was not the custom of the country, or whether they imagined that I would scruple to eat or drink with them.^[44]

162Though I did not partake of their bread and salt, I have a sense of perfidy in thus criticizing the interiors in which they took such a simple pride. |Resolute Refinement.| But, after all, I was there for no other purpose than to report what I saw and felt. What I felt, then, was certainly admiration for the thrift and progressiveness which were apparent on every hand; nor was it the unsophisticated order of taste displayed in furniture and adornment that qualified my admiration. Far be it from me to attribute any absolute superiority to the standards of Brixton, or even of Boston. What troubled me throughout my domiciliary visits was the sense that (with one or two exceptions) these homes were not homes at all. I do not doubt that each roof sheltered a home; but I do not believe that the prim parlours I saw had any essential connection with it. They were no more homelike than the shopwindow rooms of the up-to-date upholsterer. If they were lived in at all, it was from a sense of duty, a self-conscious effort after a life of “refinement.” They were, in short, entirely imitative and mechanical tributes to the American 163ideal of the prosperous, cultivated home. I could find in them no real expression of the individuality of their inhabitants.

Let it be remembered, however, that this is the first generation of negro prosperity. Will the second or third generation really assimilate the American ideal, or develop a “refined” domesticity of its own?

A remark of my guide on one of these expeditions summed up the phase of culture as I saw it. “We have a little whist club in our set,” he saidsaid. “We meet and play once a month. But the best part of it is the good dinner at the end of the season.”

The whist club, so frankly characterized, guided me to the word I had been searching for in the back of my mind through all these experiences. It was the word “veneer.”

A very different class of negro was represented in the congregation of the only church which I had an opportunity of attending.

It was an African Methodist church—a spacious, airy building, capable, I should think, of seating some 2000 people. It was not full, but fairly well attended; and black, as distinct from brown or yellow, was the prevailing complexion. Every one was quite decently dressed, some of the women in gaudy colours, but many of them, too, in black. The gaudiest colours were in the awful stained-glass windows, which seemed to be made of salvage 164from the wreck of a cheap kaleidoscope. Two pastors sat on a platform at the end of the hall. There were flowers on a table before them; and, as it was a sweltering morning, each of them held a fan.

The whole service was conducted by one of them, a man of rather Caucasian features, but of dark-brown tint. In the hymn-singing there was nothing peculiar—it was fairly spirited and good. But after the first few sentences of the prayer, ejaculations began to break forth. Their precise meaning, if they had any, I did not catch. They seemed to me like “Yes, oh yes!” They ought, according to the best authorities, to have been “Hallelujah!” “Praise de Lord!” and such phrases; but I certainly did not distinguish them. And presently they grew quite inarticulate, passing over into wails, moans, and now and then a sort of wild, maniac laughing and yodelling.

And the whole sermon, after the first five minutes, was accompanied by similar manifestations. The text was, “Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” I have heard many worse sermons than this competent, fluent, popular discourse, which consisted mainly of an exposition of the overpowering strength of the metaphor of “hunger and thirst.” “We may credit our backs,” said the preacher, “but we must pay our stomachs; we can put the back off, but we can’t put off the stomach.” (“Yes, oh yes!” shouts, moans, and 165wails.) “No doubt most of you, before you came here, have had a good drink of coffee or tea; but how many of you have had a real good drink from the fountain of everlasting life?” (Confused sounds not unlike the yelpings of a large kennel.) “If some of you didn’t eat and drink more physically than you do spiritually, you’d be skeletons. That’s plain talk.” (Shrieks, wails, and yodelling.) “Some of you good sisters are so anxious to get your people’s breakfasses that you have no time to ask a blessing on the work of the day.” (“Hu! hu!” “Bless de Lord!”—for once articulate—moans, and shrieks.)

These are but fragments of the discourse, which lasted half an hour. What particularly interested me, both in the prayer and the sermon, was the action and reaction between speaker and audience. Never once did he take any notice of the wild sounds, as a political speaker would almost necessarily have done. I do not remember that he even paused for them; his rhetoric seemed to flow smoothly on. In other words, he did not openly “play to the gallery.” Yet there is no doubt that the hysterical cries and ululations were of value to him. He worked them up, and they worked him up. It must not be understood, however, that anything like the whole congregation joined in the noises. They seemed all to proceed from two or three definite points in the hall. One could almost have supposed them the prearranged paroxysms of an epileptic claque.

166I stole out, under cover of a hymn, at the end of the sermon, not sorry to find myself once more in America. In the church (where I was the only white or even approximately white person present) I could not but feel that I was in Africa—slightly veneered.

For any disappointment I had felt in New Orleans, Charleston more than compensated me. Mr. Owen Wister, in “Lady Baltimore,” has in no way exaggerated its charm.

In situation it is not at all unlike New York, being built on a tongue of land between the broad estuaries of the Ashley and the Cooper Rivers. At the tip of the tongue (as in New York) is the Battery; but here the Battery is a beautiful, semi-tropical garden, full of live-oaks, palmettos, and flowering shrubs, with an esplanade overlooking the blue expanse of the harbour, the historic Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie, and the low shores beyond. This garden is a fascinating spot. I returned to it again and again during my stay in the city. Passing up Meeting Street (the Broadway of Charleston), one finds, instead of the skyscrapers which shoulder one another in the lower end of New York, the simple, dignified old houses of a vanishing generation of Southern aristocrats, each standing end-on to the street, in its little plot of lawn and flowering shrubs. The typical 168Charlestonian house is a plain two or three storey structure, entirely surrounded at each level with broad verandahs and balconies. In several cases the floor area of verandah and balcony outside the walls must at least equal the floor area of the rooms inside the walls. Now, spacious verandahs always suggest to the mind the lazy luxury of a genial summer-land, deep lounging-chairs, cool drinks, and the glow of cigar-tips in the twilight. I am bound to say that I saw very little of this sort of life proceeding in the verandahs of Charleston; but that only enabled one all the more easily to people them with the ghosts of fifty years ago, before the guns of Fort Moultrie startled their calm. In Charleston I felt, almost for the first time, that the romance of the Old South had once been a reality. All of the South that I had hitherto seen had been remorselessly new.

Further up-town (as they would say in New York) the streets of Charleston become more commonplace, but always retain a character of their own. There is not a vestige of a sky-scraper in the whole peninsula. On the other hand, the city is dotted with old churches of the Wren style, each with its quiet burial-ground around it. Close to St. Michael’s Church and in front of the City Hall, is a sadly mutilated statue of the elder Pitt. It was erected in 1770, and its mutilation was begun by a British cannon-ball in 1780.

Let me add that Charleston, like New Orleans, 169is proud of its cemeteries, and with much better reason. Magnolia Cemetery, with its live-oaks and its little lake, is a really lovely garden. One historic live-oak of enormous size, draped in Spanish moss and with exquisite little ferns growing along each of its huge boughs, is not only a wonderful but an extraordinarily beautiful tree.

As to the population of Charleston my informants differed. |“No Trouble.”| A white man placed it at 60,000 in all, with 40,000 negroes; a negro at 65,000, with 33,000 negroes. As there has been no census since 1900, probably no one knows exactly; but it seems to be admitted that the blacks more or less considerably outnumber the whites. The white people, by their own account, pay nine-tenths of the taxes; the negroes aver that their real estate is assessed at a million and a half dollars—assessment representing only about 60 per cent. of actual value. Both statements are very likely true.

White Charleston plumes itself on a peculiar and hereditary understanding of the negro, and knowledge of the way to deal with him; whence it happens that there has been “no trouble”—no outrages or lynchings—in or around the city. Moreover, I was assured that negroes were employed in the police force, and that not long ago there was a black lieutenant of police, with white men under him.

But mark how the aspect of things alters according to the point of view from which they are 170regarded! When I mentioned to a little group of leading negroes this proof of the equal treatment accorded to the two races, I observed on their countenances an expressive smile. On inquiring its reason, I learned that there were indeed three coloured policemen out of a total force of 106; that they and a few others had been appointed at some long-past period of political compromise; and that, when they die off, there is not the smallest chance of their being replaced by men of colour. “Here, as elsewhere, the Irish control the police force; and the Irish hate us worse than the native Americans.”

It was an odd group, this coloured conclave in which I found myself. |The Negro and his Vote.| Only one member (a doctor) was dark-brown in complexion; two were very light-brown; while two others, again, were indistinguishable from white men. One reminded me strongly of a choleric old Scotch General whom I once knew; the other was very English in type, with smooth, silvery hair (prematurely white), and a large, round, placid, bovine face. Meeting him in England, you would have said he was a trifle sunburnt.

Their talk was mainly of their political grievances, and the various methods by which their race, all over the Southern States, were jockeyed out of their votes. Much of what they said I failed to follow; with a good deal of it, on the other hand, I was already pretty familiar.

171The different States of the South have adopted methods differing in many details for excluding incompetent and undesirable voters from the polls; but the general principle has always been much the same. It has been to impose some slight test of education and intelligence (generally to read and explain some paragraph of the Constitution) on all who desire to have their names placed on the register.^[45]

If these tests were applied equally to the two races, the negro would have no ground of complaint. But exceptions are made in favour of the whites in the very laws establishing the tests. Most of them contain clauses analogous to what is known in Alabama as the “grandfather clause,” which provides that illiteracy shall not bar any one whose father or grandfather was 172entitled to vote at the outbreak of the Civil War. This exception is defended on the ground that even an illiterate person of the original Anglo-Saxon stock (the South is nothing if not Anglo-Saxon) is generally a very shrewd fellow, and eminently capable of exercising the franchise. Under the “grandfather clause,” then, only illiterate aliens and illiterate negroes are excluded from the register; and this discrimination is naturally resented by the negro.

But if the matter stopped there, the black race would not feel themselves so very much aggrieved. The real burden of their complaint is not the inequality of the laws, but the inequality of their administration. The tests of intelligence are applied (they declare) by unscrupulous registrars, who will ask a white man some simple question, such as whether imprisonment for debt is permitted, while they will pose a negro with some impossible technicality concerning a bill of attainder or an estate in tail. The upshot is that admission to the register depends entirely on the arbitrary will and pleasure of the registrars. Their decisions can be appealed against, but the appeal is said to be practically useless.

Nor is this all. When a negro happens to be a man of such property, education, and position that it is absolutely impossible to reject his vote, there is always the last resource of omitting to count it. One of the Charleston group spoke of a particular election in which he himself, and 173others of his people to his certain knowledge, cast Republican ballots; but the result, as announced, showed not a single Republican vote.

On this matter, as on so many others, it is very hard to get at the truth. White men aver, and will prove by statistics, that in proportion to his taxation the negro has very fair voting power, and is freely permitted to exercise it. But I met no single negro who would admit this; and most of them, like my Charleston friends, were very bitter on the question, as well as on the exclusion of even the most respectable of their race from the councils, the “machine,” of their party.

A remark made by one of this very intelligent Charleston group struck me as a curious comment on the belief of white Charleston that it has a special genius for dealing with the black race. “We negroes,” said this member of the race, “have no respect for the Southern white man’s opinions or his prophecies. He has always prophesied wrong. This thing is going to work out in the usual mysterious way, that the South will be very much surprised over.”

I quote word for word. “The usual mysterious way” may seem an odd phrase, but its meaning is not very far to seek.

In Charleston, under the guidance of a genial Southern gentleman placed in high educational authority, I saw a good deal both of white and of coloured schools. My guide was an enthusiast 174for negro education. “What’s the good,” he said, “of talking about being a superior race if you’re afraid to educate the negro? |White Negroes.| There’s not much superiority in that.” He admitted with regret that accommodation for negro children was very deficient, and said that those who were fighting for better accommodation had been crippled by the recent appointment of a negro to a Federal office in the town.

In a school containing twelve hundred black children, the fire alarm was given, and in exactly three minutes every child was in the playground, the whole school being ranged in “column of companies,” or, rather, of classes. Assuredly, such discipline cannot but be salutary. It was in this school too, that I heard five hundred negro children (most of them quite small, for three-fourths of them drop out after passing through the primary classes) singing in their clear, shrill voices—

Poor quaint little mortals! They were unconscious of any irony in the sentiment.

In every negro school or college that I visited—at Tuskegee among the rest—I saw several young people in whom my eye could not discern the slightest trace of black blood.^[46] But it was 175in Charleston, at an endowed school for negroes, that the most remarkable instance of this kind came under my notice. I was present at the morning muster of the whole school; and while the hymn was being sung I could not take my eyes off two boys of thirteen or fourteen, evidently brothers, who stood side by side in one of the upper classes. They were not only white, but (one would have said) peculiarly and resplendently white. Their features were delicate and distinguished, their eyes blue or grey, their hair a light brown. They were slightly built, and, although their dress was quite plain, they had somehow an air of grace and breeding. They could have gone to Eton or Winchester and excited no remark.

Shall I confess that the contrast between these boys and the ebony and chocolate manikins among whom their lot was cast stirred in me the race instinct in all its unreasoning crudity? I wanted to swoop down upon them and rescue them from what I felt for the moment to be their horrible and unnatural surroundings. They seemed to me like children in a fairy-tale, carried off by some tribe of brownies or gnomes. And who shall say, indeed, that the impulse to rescue them was wholly quixotic? If they remain in America, there can be no doubt that the life that lies before them will be one of painful misunderstandings, heart burnings, and humiliations.

Before leaving Charleston, let me record a 176curious little street-car incident. |A Street-car Incident.| Coloured people, in this city, are not confined to a special part of the car; but, each seat being designed to accommodate two passengers, a coloured person and white person must not sit side by side on the same seat. One afternoon I was in a car which was full save for one place. The foremost seat on the left hand was occupied by one negro girl, and there was, of course, a vacant place at her side. Presently a white woman got in and sat down in this place. “Hallo!” I thought, “here is a violation of the rule,”—and I wondered what would happen. The conductor was equal to the occasion. The foremost right-hand seat was occupied by a cadet of the Charleston Military Academy in his neat grey uniform, and by a lady. The conductor touched the cadet on the shoulder and whispered to him. The young man at once stood up, the white woman who had last entered the car transferred herself to his place, and for the rest of the journey the cadet hung on to the strap, while the seat beside the negro girl remained vacant!

At Charleston I was in some sense at a parting of the ways. In order to attend the Educational Conference at Memphis I had been compelled to leave out Virginia and North Carolina from the itinerary I had originally planned. Should I now return to New York, repairing this omission—taking Raleigh, Richmond, the Hampton Institute, and other interesting places, on my way? Or should I set my face once more southward, and return to England by way of the West Indies?

Several considerations determined me in favour of the latter course. Chief among them, perhaps, was the desire to visit the southernmost portion of the United States—a portion unknown to the past, but destined to figure largely in the history of the future—the Canal Zone of Panama.

Still, then, my motto was “Southward Ho!”

A slight misadventure frustrated my design of paying a short visit to Savannah. |St. Augustine.| At Jacksonville, the capital of Florida, I stayed just long enough to find it intolerably hot and excessively uninteresting; 178though here, as almost everywhere else on the east coast of Florida, a magnificent sheet of water (the St. John’s River) compensates for the monotony of the surrounding country.

I hurried on to St. Augustine, with its huge and really picturesque hotels (the Alcazar and the Ponce de Leon), its narrow, semi-Spanish streets, its fine old fort of the Vauban period, its beautiful lagoon, and (on Anastasia Island) its glorious stretch of silver-white ocean beach. But there was no temptation to linger anywhere in Florida, for the hotels were all shut up and the season was entirely over. I can imagine that, in the season, the Plaza de la Constitucion at St. Augustine is a busy and amusing spot. But no one could explain to me why the great hotels, instead of being placed in view of the bay or (still better) of the open sea, were huddled together, on no “situation” at all, in the centre of the little town. There is no doubt some reason for this; but it passed my divining.

Onward, then, by the Florida East Coast Railway, which is, if I am rightly informed, practically the undivided property of Mr. Flagler, a Standard Oil magnate. |The American Riviera.| (I heard the Governor of the State, Mr. Broward, deliver an attack on its monopolist pretensions in the Plaza at St. Augustine.) With a few hours’ pause at Daytona, I went right on to Miami, which was, till lately, the terminus of the railway—366 miles from Jacksonville.

179Undoubtedly this margin of the great peninsula—this Riviera of the United States—has a charm of its own. Physically, however, nothing could be less like the Riviera. Here there are no Alps, no Esterels. There is not even a molehill that can be magnified into a mountain. It is a region of broad skies and broad waters, green scrub, and leagues on leagues of smooth, white beach, with the blue ocean curling idly over it. Apart from gardens and a very few neglected orange groves, I saw absolutely not one patch of cultivation between St. Augustine and Miami. The railroad would pass through miles of tangled scrub and acres of dwarf palmetto; the most dreary and monotonous country imaginable. Then suddenly a blue lagoon would open out, with delightful, low, board-veranda’d houses skirting it, and rich tropical gardens running down to the water’s edge. Then into the wilderness again, with only here and there a clearance and a cabin, and here and there, I grieve to say, acres of beautiful pine-trees bleeding to death for the enrichment of some turpentine company.

Miami—known to the natives as My-ammy—has the air of a busy and prosperous frontier town. It has the usual huge hotel, unusually well situated, at the junction between a beautiful river and a beautiful lagoon. Here we are quite clearly on the very verge of the tropics—coco-nut palms abound on every hand; coco-nut husks cumber the white shell roads; the gardens are 180full of hybiscus and other splendid flowering shrubs; and everywhere the gorgeous poinsiana regia flames in unabashed vermilion against the deep blue of the sky.

A wonderful piece of engineering is the railway over the Florida Keys—the low margin of islands, like those of the upper Adriatic, in which the peninsula tails off. By this time it may be completed all the way from Miami to Key West; but when I was there it had a half-way terminus at Knight’s Key.

For an hour after leaving Miami the railway runs through an almost unbroken pine forest. Here and there a rude cabin is visible, occupied, no doubt by platelayers; but there is not a single clearing or attempt at cultivation. Then, all of a sudden, the forest ceases, and we emerge upon open swamp prairies, dotted with clumps of low green scrub. To the north we can see the edge of the pine forest running off, like a black wall, into the dim distance. For another hour or thereabouts we trail through the coarse grass of the swamp prairies or salt marshes, broken only by occasional channels of water. Of habitation or cultivation there is no sign. Then we run out upon vast lagoons dotted with occasional scrub-covered islands. The railroad is built on a piled-up causeway of a sort of white shell-limestone—or is it, perhaps, coral?

On the whole, the outlook is rather monotonous; 181but there are patches of beauty. I remember vividly a huge green lagoon, with a low green shore beyond; in the foreground some sort of heron lazily flapping its way over the surface; and in the distance the white sails of a fore-and-aft schooner shining in the sun.

Then we pass through many miles of amazing and fantastic jungle. No tree, perhaps, is over thirty feet high; but all are strangelystrangely contorted and interwoven with vines and creepers—like the forest round the Sleeping Beauty’s castle. A few clearings are burnt away in this jungle, and things like banana trees are growing in them. But for an hour and a half after leaving Homestead (the station at the edge of the pine forest) I saw not a single human habitation.

Soon, however, we begin to catch occasional glimpses of the open sea—iridescent and exquisite—through gaps in the outer barrier of reefs. And now there are one or two houses to be seen. We stop at what seems to be a station. Some one in the car calls to a negro navvy on the line: “Say, what’s the name of this town?” Negro: “Illago, sa’.” Passenger: “How many people live here?” Negro: “None at all, sa’.”

Now we are practically out at sea, crossing miles of blue water between the islands, sometimes on limestone (or coral?) causeways, sometimes on long bridges of wooden trestles. At one point there lies, about half a mile from the line, a little island, 182perhaps a mile long, entirely covered with palm-trees, and with a single wooden house upon it—suggesting an atoll of the Southern Seas.

At a place called Long Key we stopped for lunch. Long Key is a settlement of some twenty one-storey wooden houses, all raised on piles about four feet from the ground, and with every doorway and window screened with wire gauze. The whole place is embowered in palms; and under the palms, twenty yards from the green sea, a wooden counter had been set up, with the word “lunch,” rudely painted on a shingle, displayed above it. Two white women served behind the counter and dispensed coffee (the milk poured through a gimlet hole in a tin), sandwiches, coco-nut milk, and little packages of coco-nut candy. I had never before tasted coco-nut milk and am not eager to quaff it again. It suggests nothing so much as weak eau sucrée. The frugal meal, in its romantic surroundings, was pleasant enough; but I could wish that the wire-gauze screens had been run round the lunch-counter. It was a “quick lunch”—only fifteen minutes allowed—yet when I returned to the train I found my neck quite rough with mosquito-bites.

From Long Key we presently ran out on an immense viaduct, some two miles long, I should say, of concrete arches. |Asia and Africa.| Then again across jungle-covered islands and some smaller lagoons. Here signs of life grew more frequent, for we were approaching the point 183where the extension of the line is actively proceeding. The labourers seem to be for the most part accommodated in huge house-boats, which we saw here and there moored in convenient creeks and channels. The majority, I think, are negroes, with a considerable intermixture of “Dagos” and some East Indian coolies.

At one point we passed a large truck crowded with half-naked negro navvies, who swarmed over it and clung on to it in every possible attitude, grinning, joking, indulging in horse-play, so far as their close quarters would allow—the very picture, in short, of good-humoured, muscular animalism. And in the middle of the swarm, penned in on every side, and yet utterly aloof, stood two turbaned Easterns; austere, unbending, sombre, a trifle sinister. The negroes’ vivacity and humour made them, in a way, more sympathetic, but, at the same time, threw into relief the distinction of the Orientals. They looked like kings in exile among a rabble of savages. “Mere Aryan prejudice,” you will say. Yes; but that means that it is prehistoric and inveterate.

Knight’s Key is but a temporary settlement with a wharf, a railway yard, and one or two warehouses. Thence the comfortable little steamship Miami conveyed us in about five hours to Key West, and in another seven or eight hours to Havana—from the New World to the Old.

PART II THE PROBLEM FACED — II THE PROBLEM FACED — Numbers and Vitality of the Negro — Four Possibilities: II. The Atlanta Compromise. — The Crux of the Problem. — Four Possibilities: III. Amalgamation. — The Races not Equal. — The Case for the Mulatto. — A Biological Argument. — Four Possibilities: IV. Segregation. — Back to Africa? — A Negro State. — I THE AMERICAN IN CUBA — II A GAME FOR GODS — III A FRAGMENT OF FAIRYLAND — IV THE PANAMA CANAL

The Southern States of North America at present offer to the world a spectacle unexampled in history. It is the spectacle of two races, at the opposite extremes of the colour scale, forced to live together in numbers not very far from equal, and on a theoretic basis of political equality. In other regions where white men and black have come into close contact, the circumstances have been, and are, essentially different. In the greater part of Africa the white man is a conquering invader, living among blacks who are either entirely savage, or obviously and confessedly but little removed from savagery. No question of “social equality” arises, and the question of political rights, where it presents itself at all, is uncomplicated by any predetermined constitutional principle. In a large part of Spanish America there has been so free an intermixture of many races that it is practically impossible to draw any colour line. Families of pure European descent may hold themselves apart, but few of these regions can by any strain of language be 188called “white men’s countries.”^[47] In the British West Indies the whites are so small a percentage of the population as to constitute a natural aristocracy; and in most of the islands the two races live peaceably under the slightly tempered despotism of Crown Colony government. Moreover, the white West Indian, even though he may rarely cross the Atlantic, has always England behind him. He is a member of a great white community, which happens to control certain tropical islands, mainly inhabited by blacks. Here he may prefer to pitch his tent; but his essential citizenship is still British. His social and political relations with his black surroundings are not to him a matter of life and death. Whatever their local interest and importance, they do not touch the fountain-head of his polity, the homeland of his race.

But it is his only homeland that the Southern American finds himself compelled to share, on nominally equal terms, with a race which, whatever its merits or demerits, its possibilities or its impossibilities, stands at the extreme of physical dissimilarity from his own. This is a condition of life not easily understood by the European, and not always very vividly realized even by the 189Northern American. I have devoted some effort to realizing it, both by personal observation and through the medium of books. The details of my observations form the First Part of the present volume. In this Second Part I propose to set forth some of the large and essential facts of the situation, as nearly as I can ascertain them, and to state the general trend of the reflections these facts have suggested to me.

In the first place, what are the facts as to the negro’s numbers, distribution, and rate of increase, if any? They are not easy to ascertain: partly because it is nine years since the last census was taken (1900); partly because American vital statistics are very scanty, and, where they can be obtained at all, are apt to be untrustworthy.

It would appear that, roughly speaking, one-third of the population of the seventeen Southern States is black or coloured. As against some 3 per cent. of negroes in the Northern and Western States, there are about 33 per cent. in the South. The total coloured population of the United States is generally set down at about ten million, nine million dwelling in the South and something over one million in the North and West.^[48]

190Now, are the negroes increasing? It used to be thought that they were multiplying very rapidly. Judge Tourgée, in 1884, prophesied that by 1900 they would outnumber the whites in every State from Maryland to Texas. This prediction is far from having fulfilled itself, and appears to have been based on defective enumeration in the census of 1870, which made the rate of negro increase between 1870 and 1880 seem quite inordinate. Now speculation has gone to the other extreme, and prophesies the not very distant extinction of the negro. This view is set forth with uncompromising 191emphasis by Mr. P. A. Bruce in his “Rise of the New South” (Philadelphia, 1905):

When I find this forecast cited with approval by Dr. E. A. Alderman of the University of Virginia, it acquires some authority in my eyes; but still it seems far from convincing. It leaves out of account one probability and one certainty. The probability is that what may be called the Hampton-Tuskegee movement—industrial education and moral discipline—will in time so leaven the mass of the negro race as to make it fitter to compete with white labour, and abler to resist the destructive influences on which Mr. Bruce dwells with such gusto. I call this a probability, not a certainty, for it is hard to tell as yet whether the Hampton-Tuskegee spirit is really leavening the mass, or only playing upon the surface. The industrial college at Hampton is barely forty years old; Mr. Booker Washington’s great institute at Tuskegee came into being less than thirty years ago; and the minor offshoots of the movement are, of course, still younger. They have not had time to give any just measure of their influence in promoting the self-respect and the efficiency of the negro race. But there is no doubt whatever that they are doing a remarkable and (from the negro point of view) a beneficent work; the only doubt being as to whether the work is or is not proceeding fast enough to 193overtake and counteract the forces that make for degradation.^[49]

This, I say, is doubtful; but what is scarcely doubtful is that the South, for its own sake, cannot suffer Mr. Bruce’s prophecy to fulfil itself. The gist of the forecast is, briefly, this: the rural negro, who is admittedly prolific, and whose children survive in fair proportions, will gradually be driven into the towns, where all possible influences are leagued against his moral and physical well-being, and where the rate of negro mortality, both infant and adult, is always very high and often appalling. Thus, according to Mr. Bruce, the “Afro-American” is being inexorably hounded into the jaws of death, and must in due time perish from off the face of the earth. But what is to be the state of the South while this amiable prophecy is working itself out? If the towns are the jaws of death to the negro, what are they to the white man and his children? Putting all question of humanity aside, can any sane civic policy permit negroes to crowd in their thousands into city slums, and there to die like flies in conditions “even more unwholesome and squalid” 194than those which at present obtain? Why is the rate of negro mortality so high? Simply because the black folk are less able than the whites to resist the poisonous influences of bad sanitation, moral as well as physical. But bad sanitation, though it may be more fatal to one race than to the other, inevitably takes its toll of both. Hear what a Southern health officer has to say on this point:

What can be more certain than this? And is it to be conceived that the South will deliberately refrain from looking to its physical and moral sewerage until the negro shall have been killed off?^[50]

195It is not to be conceived, and it is not what is happening. Better sanitary conditions are everywhere being secured, though the movement is slow in the cities of the South. In the North a great improvement has already been effected. In a report on “The Health and Physique of the Negro American” (Atlanta University Publications, No. XI., 1906) we read—

If there is any permanence and any efficacy in the “wave of prohibition” that is passing over the South, it must certainly cause a great reduction in negro mortality; and it surely cannot be long before means are found to check the vending of noxious drugs. Unless, in short, the civilization of the South is to stand still while the negro dies off, there seems to be little likelihood of his 196fulfilling Mr. Bruce’s prognostic. This great and beautiful region cannot possibly find its salvation in making itself a hell for the negro.

When I quoted to Mr. Booker Washington Mr. Bruce’s death-sentence on his people, he was moved to one of his rare laughs. In Mr. Washington’s opinion, which may very well prove to be correct, the natural increase of the negro in the South about keeps pace with that of the white man. The white race, however, is being largely recruited by immigration, so that its numerical preponderance is doubtless increasing. It would appear, then, that, unless conditions very greatly alter, there is little chance of the black race out-breeding and submerging the white, but equally little chance of the black race being obliging enough to die out. “Conservative” statisticians estimate that at the close of this century there will be anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-five million negroes in America.^[51]

Taking the Southern States at large, then, we find that one person out of every three is wholly or partly of African blood. It is sometimes maintained that really pure-bred negroes are very rare; but this seems to be a mistake. Professor W. E. B. Du Bois, himself a man of mixed origin and not 197likely to underestimate the number of his own class, thinks that in two-thirds of the negroes of the United States there are no “recognizable traces” of white blood. He adds that white blood doubtless exists in many who show no trace of it; but for practical purposes this speculation may be disregarded. I think we may take it as pretty certain that if, in the South, one person out of every three is of African descent, one person out of every four is either actually or virtually a full-blooded negro. But it must not be supposed that the distribution of the races is by any means even. Some districts, such as the mountainous regions of Tennessee and West Virginia, contain hardly any negroes; while in other districts, not a few, the blacks largely outnumber the whites. These are, no doubt, the districts in which the pure-bred black most abounds.

Is there a “Negro Problem”?

Having ascertained, approximately, the numerical relations of the two races, we are now in a position to consider the problem or problems involved. And first we are confronted with the question, “Is there any real problem at all?”

Some people deny it, or at all events maintain that the problem is created solely by the almost insane arrogance and inhumanity of the Southern white man. This view lingers in the North, among the inheritors of the old abolitionist sentiment. 198In England, it has been roundly expressed by Mr. H. G. Wells, and somewhat more considerately by even so high an authority as Sir Sydney Olivier. I need scarcely say that it is a very popular view among the negroes in the South itself.

For a typical (though moderate) American utterance of this opinion the following may suffice. It is a passage from “Race Questions and Prejudices,” by a distinguished psychologist, Professor Royce of Harvard (International Journal of Ethics, April, 1906):

The attitude of the South, then, in the conception of Professor Royce, is no more rational than that of a woman who shrieks, jumps on a chair, and gathers her skirts about her ankles, because a mouse happens to run across the floor. I should have thought that the wiser tendency of modern science was to divine something more 199than a “caprice” in so deep-rooted an instinct as the dread even of mice. As for the dread of snakes, it was surely by a slip of the pen that Professor Royce adduced it.

Not at all dissimilar is the judgment of Mr. H. G. Wells. Hearing a great deal of loose, illogical, inconclusive talk on the colour question, and having himself taken a “mighty liking” to these “gentle, human, dark-skinned people” as he saw them in a Chicago music-hall and elsewhere, Mr. Wells formed the opinion that there was no reason at all in the Southern frame of mind. His conclusion is that “these emotions are a cult;” and by a cult he evidently means a contagious, fanatical folly.

Now, Mr. Wells is a man for whose essential wisdom I have a very high respect. If I were bound to acknowledge myself the disciple of any living thinker, I should have small hesitation in selecting him as my guide and philosopher. But his chapter on “The Tragedy of Colour” in “The Future in America” is tinged with what I cannot but take to be a dogmatic impatience of all distinctions and difficulties of race. Before writing it, he might, I think, have asked himself whether the theory of sheer race-monomania was not, perhaps, a rather too simple way of accounting for “emotions” felt with absolute unanimity (in a greater or less degree) by some twenty million Southern white people. The arguments he heard might be weak, ill-informed, inconclusive; the 200conduct in which the emotions expressed themselves might often be indefensible and abhorrent; and yet there might lie at the root of the emotions something very different from sheer unreason. I think Mr. Wells should have been chary of “indicting a nation” without more careful reflection and a closer scrutiny of evidence.

Sir Sydney Olivier, on the other hand, speaks with the authority of one who has spent many years in close contact with negroes, having been a successful administrator of large communities in which they greatly preponderate. It is impossible to suspect him of hastiness or of à priori doctrinairism. What, then, is his view? In his “White Capital and Coloured Labour” (1907), he tells us that both in visiting the United States and in discussing race questions with American visitors to Jamaica, “he found himself, as a British West Indian, unable to entirely account for an attitude of mind which impressed him as superstitious, if not hysterical, and as indicating misapprehensions of premises very ominous for the United States of the future.” He proceeds:

And again, in another part of his book:

I have very real diffidence in contesting the deliberate judgment of a man like Sir Sydney Olivier on a question which he has deeply studied; but I cannot believe with him that the problem is simply one of Southern unwisdom. On the contrary, I believe that, however unwise in much of her talk and her action, the South is in the main animated by a just and far-feeling, if not far-seeing, instinct. That there has been an infinitude of tragic unwisdom in the matter, not in the South alone, no one nowadays denies. But I believe that the problem, far from being unreal, is so real and so dishearteningly difficult that nothing but an almost superhuman wisdom, energy, and courage will ever effectually deal with it.

Let me try to give my reasons for this belief.

White Man’s Land or Brown Man’s Land?

No one, I suppose—not even Mr. Wells—would deny that the importation of the African into America was an egregious blunder as well 202as a monstrous crime. Without him the South would perhaps have developed more slowly during the eighteenth century; but she would have escaped the arrest of development which sums up her history during the nineteenth century. She would have escaped the war by which she strove, with misguided heroism, to perpetuate that arrest of development. She would have escaped the “horrors” of that Reconstruction period which still haunts her memory like a nightmare. She would have escaped the prostration and impoverishment from which she is only now beginning—though very rapidly—to recover. The negro has assuredly been her calamity in the past. To say, as negro writers often do, that he has created her wealth, is to ignore the appalling price she has paid for him. Much more truly may he be said to have created her poverty.^[52]

This, however, is certainly not the negro’s fault. He did not thrust himself upon the South: he was no willing immigrant. Historic recriminations, therefore, are perfectly idle—as idle as the attempts of Southern writers to shift responsibility for the slave trade to the shoulders of the New England States. I cast a glance back at history merely to remind the reader that the presence of the negro in America is not the result of a 203natural movement, an inevitable expansion, a migration springing from economic necessity or from deep impulses of folk-psychology. It is, on the contrary, the outcome of what may almost be called a disastrous accident—of inhuman cupidity in the slave-dealers and economic short-sightedness in the slave-owners.

The upshot, as we find it to-day, is that in a magnificent country, well outside the torrid zone, and eminently suited to be the home of a white race, one person in every three is coloured, and one person in every four is physically indistinguishable from an African savage. It would be the extravagance of paradox to maintain that this is a positively desirable condition, preferable to that of a country which presents a normal uniformity of complexion. England, for instance, would certainly not be a more desirable place of residence if one-fourth of her population were transmuted into the semblance of Dahomeyans, even supposing that the metamorphosis involved no moral or intellectual change for the worse. A monochrome civilization is on the face of it preferable to such a piebald civilization as at present exists in the Southern States.

Here at once, then, we have a difference between the South and the West Indies, which Sir Sydney Olivier seems strangely to overlook. The West Indies are not climatically fitted to be a “white man’s land”; or, if it was ever possible that they should become one, the chance was 204lost at the very outset of their history. They are once for all black men’s lands, with a sprinkling of whites governing and exploiting them. It would be much more reasonable for the black to chafe under the dominance of the white, than for the white to resent the presence of the black. But the case in the Southern States is absolutely different. They were explored, settled, organized by white men; by white men their liberties were vindicated. They are fitted by their climate and resources to be not only a white man’s land, but one of the greatest white men’s lands in the world. The black man came there only as a (terribly ill-chosen) tool for their development. When the tool ceases to be a tool and claims a third part of the heritage, the “peripeteia” is no doubt dramatic and exceedingly moral, but none the less exasperating to a generation which, after all, was personally innocent of the original crime-blunder. No one enjoys playing the scapegoat in a moral apologue; and the Southern white man would be more than human if he accepted the part with perfect equanimity. At any rate, the West Indian white man has no right to assume an air of superior virtue until the conditions of his case are even remotely analogous. The negro in the West Indies is the essence and foundation of life: in the United States he is a regrettable accident.

205Four Possibilities: I. Extinction.

It is time now that we should look more closely into the conditions of this piebald community which a violent interference with the normal course of race-distribution has established in the Southern States.

The future seems to contain four possibilities, or, rather, conceivabilities, which may be examined in turn.

(1) Things may “worry along” in the present profoundly unsatisfactory condition, until the negro gradually dies out.

(2) The education of both races, and the moral and economic elevation of the black race, may gradually enable them to live side by side in mutual tolerance and forbearance, without mingling, but without clashing.

(3) Marriage between persons of the two races may—I mean might conceivably—be legalized, and the colour-line obliterated by “miscegenation.”

(4) The negro race might be geographically segregated, by deportation or otherwise, and established in a community or communities of its own.

The first eventuality—the evanescence of the negro race—we have already examined and seen to be highly improbable. Let me only add here that there is one way in which it might conceivably be brought about—a way too horrible to be contemplated, yet not wholly beyond the bounds 206of possibility. The recurrence of such an outbreak as the Atlanta riot of 1906 might lead to very terrible consequences. On that occasion the white mob found the negroes unarmed, and wreaked its frenzy practically unopposed. But the lesson was not lost on the negroes, and a similar onslaught would, in many places, find them armed and capable of a certain amount of resistance. In that case one dares not think what might happen. Their resistance could scarcely be effectual, in the sense of intimidating and checking white violence. It would, on the contrary, infuriate the mob, and lend some show of justification to their proceedings; while the frenzy would spread from city to city, and the result might quite well be one of the darkest pages in American or any other history. Once let a dozen white men be killed by armed negroes in any city of the South, and a flame would burst out all over the land which would work untold devastation before either authority or humanity could check it. The incident would be taken as a declaration of racial war; everywhere the white mob would insist on searching for arms in the negro quarters; the negroes would inevitably attempt some panic-stricken defensive organization; and the more effective it proved, the more terrible would be the calamity to their race. Not even in the wildest frenzy, of course, could the race, or a tenth part of the race, be violently wiped out; but they might be so dismayed and terrorized as to lose that natural 207buoyancy of spirit which has hitherto sustained them, and enabled them to increase and multiply. The prophets of extinction already read hopelessness and a prescience of doom in the negro tone of mind; but, so far, I think the wish is father to the thought. The race, as a whole, is confident, in its happy-go-lucky way. But would their spirit survive a great massacre, followed by an open and chronic Negerhetze? I doubt it; and I believe it possible that in this way Mr. P. A. Bruce’s prophecy might be realized more rapidly than he anticipated.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the South lives on the brink of such a horror; but there is no denying that the elements are present which might one day bring it to pass.^[53] Sir Sydney Olivier is quite right in calling the feeling of a large class of Southerners towards the negro “hysterical” and ungoverned; and this is just the class that is handiest with its “guns.” Long and laborious treatises have been written to prove, on Biblical evidence, that the negro is a “beast,” and, on scientific evidence, that he is more nearly an ape than a man. These works, no doubt, are scarcely sane; but their insanity is by no means peculiar to their individual authors. The word “extermination” is gravely spoken by men who 208are not therefore held to be maniacs or even monomaniacs. The South, says Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois, is “simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk”; and where such a condition prevails, the possibility of sudden disaster is never far off. To recognize the possibility is not to bring it nearer, but rather to indicate the urgent need of measures that shall place it infinitely remote.

We pass now to the second eventuality—the gradual smoothing away of friction, so that the two races may live side by side, never blending and yet never jarring. This is the conception set forth in Mr. Booker Washington’s celebrated “Atlanta Compromise” speech of 1895, wherein he said, “In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Is this a possible—I will not say ideal, for that it manifestly is not—but a possible working arrangement?

One thing is evident at the outset—namely, that the fourteen years that have elapsed since Mr. Washington uttered this aspiration have brought its fulfilment no nearer. Both negro education and white education have advanced in the interim; the “respectable” and well-to-do class of negroes has considerably increased; but the feeling between the races is worse rather than 209better. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page used to say, “Northerners espouse the cause of the negro as a race, but dislike negroes individually; while Southerners do not dislike negroes individually, but oppose them as a race.”^[54] Ten years ago there was a large element of truth in this saying; but it becomes less and less true with every year that passes. The old-time kindliness of feeling between the ex-owner and the ex-slave is rapidly becoming a mere tradition. No common memories or sentiments hold together the new generations of the two races; they are growing up in unmitigated mutual antipathy. At best, indeed, the Southern kindliness of feeling towards the individual negro subsisted only so long as he “knew his place” and kept it; and the very process of education and elevation on which Mr. Washington relies renders the negro ever less willing to keep the place the Southern white man assigns him. In the North, too, while the dislike of the individual has greatly increased, the theoretic fondness for the race has very perceptibly cooled. Altogether, the tendency of events since 1895 has not been at all in the direction of the Atlanta Compromise. The Atlanta riot of eleven years later 210was a grimly ironic comment on Mr. Washington’s speech.

This merely means, it may be said, that education has as yet produced no sensible effect upon the inveterate and inhuman prejudice of the South. Nevertheless, time and patience may justify Mr. Washington’s optimism. There is no saying, indeed, what a great deal of time and a great deal of patience may not effect. Meanwhile, let us see what is really involved in the idea of the Atlanta Compromise.

We are to conceive, in the first place, an immense advance in the negro race—an advance in education, industry, thrift, and general efficiency. Well, this is possible enough—the negro is certainly civilizable, if not indefinitely, at any rate far beyond the average level he has yet attained. Negro crime might easily be reduced within normal limits; for the race is not inherently criminal, but is rendered so by ignorance, poverty, vice, injustice, and a thoroughly bad penal system. The next fifty years, if present influences continue to work unimpeded, may see a very large increase in the class of law-abiding, property-holding negroes, and possibly a considerable improvement even in the condition of the black proletariat. But supposing that, by the exercise of infinite patience for fifty or a hundred years, a condition something like that indicated in the Atlanta formula were ultimately attained, would it be desirable? and could it be permanent?

211The assumed improvement of conditions would, of course, imply a steady increase in the numbers of the black race; so that, even with the aid of immigration, the white race would probably not greatly add to its numerical superiority. Let us suppose that at the end of fifty years the coloured people were not as one in three, but as one in four, and that this ratio remained pretty constant. Here, then, we should have a nation within a nation, unassimilated and (by hypothesis) unassimilable, occupying one-fourth of the whole field of existence, and performing no function that could not, in their absence, be at least as well performed by assimilable people, whose presence would be a strength to the community.^[55] The black nation would be a hampering, extraneous element in the body politic, like a bullet encysted in the human frame. It may lie there for years without setting up inflammation or gangrene, and causing no more than occasional twinges of pain; but it certainly cannot contribute to the health, efficiency, or comfort of the organism. Is it wonderful that the Atlanta Compromise, supposing 212it realized in all conceivable perfection, should excite little enthusiasm in the white South?

But to imagine it realized in perfection is to imagine an impossibility—almost a contradiction in terms. We are, on the one hand, to suppose the negro ambitious, progressive, prosperous, and, on the other hand, to imagine him humbly acquiescent in his status as a social pariah. The thing is out of the question; such saintlike humility has long ceased to form any part of the moral equipment of the American negro. The bullet could never be thoroughly encysted; it would always irritate, rankle, fester. Mr. Washington’s formula in renouncing social equality is judiciously vague as to political rights. But one thing is certain—neither Mr. Washington nor any other negro leader really contemplates their surrender. It is quite inconceivable that the nation within a nation should acquiesce in disfranchisement; and the question of the negro vote will always be a disturbing factor in Southern political life. Either he must be jockeyed out of it by devices abhorrent to democratic principle and more or less subversive of political morality; or, if he be honestly suffered to cast his ballot, he will block the healthy divergence of political opinion in the South, since, in any party conflict, he would hold the balance between the two sides, and thus become the dominant power in the State. This will always be a danger so long as the unassimilated negro is forced, by his separateness, to think and act first 213as a negro and only in the second place as an American. Even if the Atlanta Compromise were otherwise realizable, the friction at this point would always continue acute.

The worst, however, remains behind. If the Atlanta Compromise were possible in every other way, it would be impossible on the side of sex. For two races to dwell side by side in large numbers, and to be prohibited from coming together in legal marriage, is unwholesome and demoralizing to both. I am not thinking mainly of what Mr. Ray Stannard Baker calls “the tragedy of the mulatto.” It seems hard, no doubt, that marriage should be impossible between a white man and a girl in whose complexion, perhaps, an eighth or sixteenth part of negro blood is entirely imperceptible; but such cases are romantic exceptions, and do not constitute a serious factor in the problem. Negroes, at any rate, will tell you proudly that the young men and women of their race, however light-skinned, hold it no hardship that their choice of mates should be restricted to their own people. Whatever be the truth as to these marginal relations, they are not the essence of the matter. The essence is simply this: the youth and manhood of the white South is subjected to an altogether unfair and unwholesome ordeal by the constant presence of a multitude of physically 214well-developed women, among whom, in the lower levels, there is no strong tradition of chastity, and to whom the penalties of incontinence are very slight. To say, as many Southerners will, that there is no such thing as virtue among negro women is stupidly libellous; but it is impossible to doubt that the average standard of sexual conduct among the lower orders of the black and brown population is anything but high. And this is not a state of things that can be radically amended in one generation or in two. The completest realization of the Atlanta Compromise that is conceivable within, say, a century, would still leave the white male exposed, from boyhood upward, to a stimulation of his animal instincts which, in the peculiar circumstances of the case, cannot be otherwise than unwholesome.

We are here at the very heart of the problem. All other relations are adjustable, at a certain sacrifice; but not this one. If the two races are to live together without open and lawful intermingling, it must be at the cost of incessant demoralization to both. “Miscegenation,” in the sense of permanent concubinage and the rearing of hybrid families, may be held in check by the strong social sentiment against it,^[56] but nothing can hold in check the still more degrading casual commerce between the white man (and youth) and the coloured woman. It is probably this fact, quite as much as the hideous proclivities of the 215criminal negro male, that hardens the heart of the white woman against the black race. Nor is the unwholesomeness of the condition measured by the actual amount of laxity to which it leads. Temptation may in myriads of cases be resisted; but this order of temptation ought not to be in the air.^[57] It cannot be good for any race of men to be surrounded by strongly-accentuated Sex, which, for ulterior reasons, whereof the mere animal nature takes little account, is placed under a tabu.

I venture to say that no one—not even Mr. Washington himself—really believes in the Atlanta Compromise as a stable solution of the problem. The negroes who accept it as an interim ideal (so to speak), never doubt that it is but a stepping-stone to freedom of racial intermixture. They see that so long as constant physical propinquity endures, the colour barrier between the sexes is factitious, and in great measure unreal, and they believe that at last the race-pride of the white man will be worn down, and he will accept the inevitable amalgamation.^[58] The ultimate forces 216at war in the South are the instinctive, half-conscious desire of the black race to engraft itself on the white stock,^[59] and the no less instinctive horror of the white stock at such a surrender of its racial integrity. This horror is all the more acute—all the more morbid, if you will—because the white race is conscious of its own frailty, and knows that it is, in some sense, fighting a battle against perfidious nature. It is a hard thing to say, but I have little doubt it is true, that much of the injustice and cruelty to which the negro is subjected in the South is a revenge, not so much for sexual crime on the negro’s part, as for an uneasy conscience or consciousness on the part of the whites.^[60] It is because the black race 217inevitably appeals to one order of low instincts in the white, that it suffers from the sympathetic stimulation of another order of low instincts.

This brings us, of course, to the third of the conceivabilities above enumerated—the legalization of marriage between the two races. To the white South, nothing is more inconceivable: to the critics of the white South, nothing is more simple. Which of them is in the right?

It is significant that none of these outside critics puts the slightest faith in the Atlanta Compromise. They see quite clearly that the two races cannot live together and yet apart. Their solution is the obvious one of free intermixture, and they cannot understand why the South should be so inveterately opposed to it. Why make such a fuss, they say, over such a simple matter?

And then comes a long array of arguments to minimize, in general, the significance of race, and, in particular, the gap between the white race and the black. Racial purity is a vain imagination; there is no such thing, at any rate among European peoples; and if it existed it would 218only be a limitation and a misfortune to the people afflicted with it. Most of all is the Anglo-Saxon race ridiculed as a historic fallacy. The South, which boasts itself almost the last stronghold of pure Anglo-Saxondom,^[61] is told that the pure Anglo-Saxon is a myth and a superstition. As to the negro, we are assured that we were all negroes once, or something very much to that effect. At any rate, it is asserted that the Mediterranean races, with whom Western civilization originated, were in great part of negro origin. Skull-measurement and brain-weight are called in to prove—whatever the particular disputant wants to prove. Special qualities are claimed for the negro—such as a rich imagination, an innate courtesy, and a strong musical faculty; and it is argued that these are the very things of which the (so-called) Anglo-Saxon race stands most in need. Great play is made with the quasi-scientific modern Rousseauism which avers that our barbarian ancestors were better men than we, and thence argues that there is little or no real gap between the savage of to-day 219and the civilized man. Weismannism is pressed into the service to show that, as the aptitudes and tendencies that we sum up in the word civilization are acquired and therefore (it is argued) untransmissible, the white child can have profited nothing by its ancestors’ centuries of upward struggle from barbarism, while the black child cannot be in any way handicapped by his descent through untold ages of savagery. We are even assured that civilization has sprung from and must be maintained by “the commingling of all with all, the general ‘panmixture,’ the universal ‘half-breed.’”^[62]

Fortunately it is quite unnecessary that I should plunge into the mazes of ethnological controversy. It is sufficient for my present purpose to note that controversy, and very lively controversy, exists. The practical equality of the two races is so far from being a point on which all authorities are agreed, that it may rather be called a paradox which charms a certain order of mind by reason of its very audacity. So, too, with the opinion that, whether the African race be or be not inferior, it possesses qualities that the European stock needs, and ought to accept with gratitude. Whether true or false, this is, at present at any rate, a quite undemonstrated speculation. Even Sir Sydney Olivier, who maintains in general that a man of mixed race is “potentially a more competent vehicle of 220humanity,” advances no proof of the benefits of the particular mixture in question which can for a moment be expected to carry conviction to the Southern white man. The South, then, is urged by the amalgamation theorists to embark upon, or submit to, what is at best a great experiment. It is to quell its higher instincts (for so it regards them, rightly or wrongly) and commit what it feels in the marrow of its bones to be a degrading race-abnegation, in deference to a half-scientific, half-humanitarian opinion, held by certain theorists outside its own boundaries, to the effect that, after all, there is no great difference between black and white, and that the complexion of the future will certainly be a uniform yellow. Can any one blame the South for answering: “No, thank you! If you in England or in New England are tired of being white men, and sigh for the blessings of an African blend, we can send you several million negroes, of both sexes, who will no doubt be happy, on suitable terms, to intermarry with your sons and daughters. For our part, we are content with our complexion as it is. We see no reason to believe that the African slave trade was the means adopted by a beneficent Providence for the ultimate improvement of our Anglo-Saxon stock; nor, on the other hand, can we accept it as a just punishment for the sins of our fathers that our race, as a race, should be merged and obliterated in indiscriminate hybridism.”

I do not pretend, of course, that the fixed 221antipathy of the South to the very idea of amalgamation is a purely rational one. Who is so foolish as to look for pure reason in aught that concerns the obscure fundamentals of life? What I am trying to show is that, whatever irrational elements may mingle with it, the Southern sentiment has a solid and sufficient nucleus of reason. The advantages of fusion, as between such antipodal races as the white European and the black African, are, to say the least of it, unproved; and a race may be forgiven, surely, which declines to try on its own body, so to speak, so problematic and so irremediable an experiment. For, once made, this experiment cannot be unmade. The South must choose between definitely renouncing its position as a “white man’s land” or struggling to maintain it. What wonder if it feels that it has no choice in the matter?

I have stated the case at the very lowest in saying that the advantages of fusion are unproved. Though it is not essential to my position, I must confess that my personal belief goes much further, and that the disadvantages of fusion are, to my thinking, proved beyond all reasonable doubt. I have not hitherto emphasized the essential and innate inferiority of the negro race, because my argument did not demand it. But the fact of this inferiority seems to me as evident as it is inevitable. However fallacious may be the boundaries 222between this and that European race, the boundary between the European and the African is real, and not to be argued away. The European is the fruit of untold generations of upward struggle, the African of untold generations of immobility. At the very dawn of history, the ancestors of the white American had advanced to a point beyond that which the ancestors of the Afro-American had attained when they were shipped across the Atlantic from fifty to two hundred years ago. That the negro race has some very amiable qualities is not denied. It is not denied that civilization has brought with it certain disadvantages and corruptions, and that the white savage is in some ways a more deplorable phenomenon than the black savage. Nor is it denied that the negro, in virtue of his strong imitative instinct, has, in many cases, shown a remarkable power of taking on a certain measure of civilization. But all this does not practically lessen the huge historic gap between the two races. Even if we admit the innate power of the negro to overtake the white man in intellectual grasp and moral stability, we must in reason allow him a few centuries to make up his millenniums of arrearage. Whatever it may become in the course of ten or fifteen generations, the negro race here and now is inferior to the white race, not only because of its “previous condition of servitude,” but, ultimately and fundamentally, because of its recent condition of savagery. Therefore, the white race, 223in accepting amalgamation, would be derogating from its birthright and climbing down the scale of humanity.

Our theorists are, on the whole, too much inclined to confound instinct with prejudice. It is absurd to class as pure prejudice the white man’s preference for the colour and facial contour of his race. This is no place for an analysis of our sense of beauty; but to maintain offhand that it is an unmeaning product of sheer habit, with no biological justification, is simply to shirk the problem and postpone analysis to dogma. Does any one really believe that the genius of Cæsar and Napoleon, of Milton and Goethe, had nothing to do with their facial angle, and could have found an equally convenient habitation behind thick lips and under woolly skulls? The negro himself (as distinct from the mulatto rhetorician) takes his stand on no such paradox. Whoever may doubt the superiority of the white race, it is not he; and it is a racial, not merely a social or economic superiority to which he does instinctive homage. It does not enter his head to champion his own racial ideal, to set up an African Venus in rivalry to the Hellenic, and claim a new Judgment of Paris between them. If wishing could change the Ethiopian’s skin there would be never a negro in America.^[63] The black 224race, out of its poverty, spends thousands of dollars annually on “anti-kink” lotions, vainly supposed to straighten the African wool.^[64] The brown belle tones her complexion with pearl powder; and many a black mother takes pride in the brown skin of her offspring, though it proclaims their illegitimacy. There can be no reasonable doubt that amalgamation, in the negro’s eyes, means an enormous gain to his race. It means ennoblement, transfiguration. It is quite natural that he should not too curiously inquire whether the gain to him would involve a corresponding loss to the white man. That is the white man’s business, not his. The one thing his 225instinct tells him is that, if he can break down the white man’s resistance and make the Southern States a brown or yellow man’s land, he will have achieved a splendid racial triumph.

It is urged, as we have already seen, that the black man’s gain would not be the white man’s loss, but that the black race would bring to the white certain qualities of which it stands sorely in need, the result of the mixture being a more competent “vehicle of all the qualities and powers that we imply by humanity.” Has experience justified this speculation? We have ample experience to go upon—in South America, in the West Indies, in the Southern States themselves. The mulatto exists and has existed for generations, not in hundreds or thousands, but in millions; in what respect has he proved himself superior to the pure Spaniard, or Portuguese, or Anglo-Saxon? Does South American history bear testimony to his political competence? Have his achievements in science, in art, in literature, in music, been superior to those of the un-Africanized peoples? Or, waiving the question of superiority, has he even, in these domains, produced meritorious work in any fair proportion to his numbers? I do not say that it is impossible to make a sort of case for him, by the ransacking of records and the employment of a very indefinite standard of values. But 226I do most emphatically say that no conspicuous and undeniable advantage has resulted from the blending of bloods, such as can or ought to counteract the instinctive repugnance of the South.

In a work entitled “Twentieth Century Negro Literature,”^[65] published in 1901, Mr. Edward E. Cooper, a mulatto journalist, quotes Byron’s lines:—

and then comments as follows:—

227This writer can scarcely mean what he says—namely, that Alexandre Dumas and the rest were all black African slaves captured in war. We must interpret him liberally, and take him to be simply asserting the literary genius of the African race, whether pure or blended. A better case than this might doubtless be made for it; but a ten times better case would still be very far from a good case. And Mr. Edward E. Cooper is a fair average specimen of the negro champion of negro genius. Another spokesman of the race, by the way, in the same collection of essays, argues that if the Southern clergy had done their duty in denouncing lynching, there would have been no assassination of President McKinley, “nor would there be anywhere such an illiberal public sentiment as would openly criticize our Chief Executive for dining a representative member of the race whose feasts even Jupiter did not disdain to grace.”^[66]

To wind up this attempt to place on a basis of reason the Southern horror of amalgamation, I return for a moment to Sir Sydney Olivier’s argument on the point.^[67] He says:—

To this I have nothing to object, save that it manifestly and in its very terms does not apply to the Southern States of America. Sir Sydney does not intend it so to apply; but when he proceeds to speak of the Southern States, he somehow neglects to draw the necessary distinctions. The conditions he has in mind in the 229above paragraph are those of a black man’s land, not of a white man’s land. It may readily be granted that a fundamentally black community gains by the infusion of white blood, though the circumstances of the “first cross” are scarcely agreeable to civilized sentiment. There can be little beyond sheer animalism in the relations between a white man and a black woman; and such parentage cannot be reckoned the most desirable. This feeling, however, is perhaps a mere superstition; the science of eugenics is not yet far enough advanced, I take it, to afford us any authoritative guidance. Sir Sydney Olivier, at all events, rejects without hesitation the view that the mulatto is inferior, not only to the white, but to the pure black. The mulatto element in a black community, he maintains, is a distinct gain; and the larger it is the better. So far, I am quite willing to follow him; but surely the same process of reasoning, applied to a white community, must lead to exactly the opposite conclusion. It is this fundamental distinction between a black and white community that Sir Sidney either ignores, or declines to take into account. The South is obviously not a country where, “if white men are to breed at all, it must be with women of coloured races.” It is a country where a pure white race increases rapidly in spite of the disturbance (economic and sexual) undoubtedly set up by the constant propinquity of a black race. In bygone days, when the black race 230was a herd of human chattels, with no political or social rights, a great deal of intermixture took place. It was, as Sir Sydney would doubtless admit, morally bestial and degrading; but on the principles he lays down, and on the assumption that slavery was part of the eternal scheme of things, it was probably good policy, inasmuch as it improved the breed of the black community—the community of slaves.^[68] But when the black community ceased to be, in its very nature, a thing apart—when its members became freemen and citizens, indistinguishable, in constitutional theory, from members of the white community—then the conditions entirely altered. It was one thing to produce a superior breed of slaves; it is quite another to go on producing an inferior breed of citizens, and to legalize the production of such a breed. “But I deny the inferiority!” Sir Sydney may say. “I contend that the good qualities of the white race are preserved, and are reinforced by the addition of certain very valuable qualities which are the special endowment of the black race.” It is not very easy to see why, if this argument hold good, Sir Sydney should discountenance the mating of the black man with the white woman. Either 231the African strain is valuable or it is not; if it is, why should there be any “bad natural economy” in such unions? Waiving this point, however, I think we have already seen pretty clearly why Sir Sydney’s argument meets with scant acceptance in the South. The plain reason is that it opposes to a deep-rooted instinct a wholly unproved speculation. The South has not discovered, in its own pretty considerable experience, the advantages of hybridism as compared with purity of white blood; nor does Sir Sydney himself advance anything that can possibly be called proof of his opinion. A white nation can scarcely be expected to renounce its racial integrity on the chance of breeding an occasional Alexandre Dumas.

Sir Sydney Olivier’s biological principle, strictly and consistently applied, would issue in a law making marriage legal between any male and a female lower in the colour scale than himself, but illegal between any female and a male with a larger proportion of African blood. Such a law would, of course, be absolutely impossible of enforcement; and equally inconceivable in practice would be any other partial and restricted legalization of inter-racial unions. There is no middle course between a resolute maintenance of the legal barrier between the races and a complete acceptance of the principle of amalgamation. If the legal barrier were ever removed, it would mean such a relaxation of public sentiment 232as would insure the very rapid increase of the hybrid race.^[69] Three or four generations would see the South a brown man’s land, with, no doubt, a rapidly narrowing white aristocracy. In another three or four generations the prevailing complexion of the North would be sensibly affected; and, finally, the whole American nation would be typically negroid, the pure white man being the more or less rare exception. For my part, I cannot but sympathize with the sentiment that violently repudiates such a contingency. I do not understand how any white man who has ever visited the South can fail to be dismayed at the thought of absorbing into the veins of his race the blood of the African myriads who swarm on every hand.

For the South itself, at any rate, the discussion is purely academic. Amalgamation is a thousand leagues remote from the sphere of practical politics. I have been endeavouring to state for outsiders the case of the South as I understand it. I may have stated it wrongly, or understated it; but no one can possibly overstate the resolve of the South that the colour line shall not be obliterated by “miscegenation.”

Lastly, we have to consider the fourth conceivable eventuality—the geographical segregation of the negro race, whether within or without the limits of the United States.

This is usually ridiculed as an absolutely Utopian scheme, and at the outset of my investigation I myself regarded it in that light. But the more I saw and read and thought, the oftener and the more urgently did segregation recur to me as the one possible way of escape from an otherwise intolerable situation. Not, of course, the instant, and wholesale, and violent deportation of ten million people—that is a rank impossibility. Between that and inert acquiescence in the ubiquity of the negro throughout the Southern States, there are many middle courses; and I cannot but believe that the first really great statesman who arises in America will prove his greatness by grappling with this vast but not insoluble problem. And, assuredly, the sooner he comes the better.

We have seen that the negro race is not dying out, or that, if it does die out, it can only be, so to speak, at the cost of Southern civilization—through the indefinite continuance of insanitary and barbarous conditions. We have seen that the Atlanta Compromise is illusory and impracticable, that there is no reasonable hope that the two races will ever live together, yet apart—in 234economic solidarity, yet without social or sexual contact. We have seen that the essence of the whole situation lies in the negro’s inevitable ambition (even though it be unformulated and largely unconscious) to be drawn upward, through physical coalescence, into the white race, and the white man’s intense resolve that, on a large and determining scale, no such coalescence shall take place. Now this state of war—for such it undoubtedly is—will not correct itself by lapse of time. It will continue to degrade and demoralize both races until active measures are taken to put an end to it. Though I sympathize with the white man’s horror of amalgamation, I neither approve nor extenuate the systematic injustice and frequent barbarity in which that horror expresses itself. The present state of society in the South is as inhuman as it is inconsistent with the democratic and Christian principles which the Southern white man so loudly, and in the main sincerely, professes. The Jim Crow car, and all such discriminations in the system of public conveyance, are, I believe, necessities, but deplorable necessities none the less. The constant struggle to exclude the negro from political power is at best a negative and unproductive expenditure of energy, at worst a source of political dishonesty and corruption. The wresting of the law, whether criminal or civil, into an instrument for keeping the negro in a state of abject serfdom, is a scandal and a disgrace to any civilized community. The 235constant resort to lawless violence and cruelty in revenge for negro crime (real or imaginary) is a hideous blot upon the fair fame of the South, if not rather an impeachment of her sanity. The truth is, in fact, that constant inter-racial irritation leaves neither race entirely sane, and that abominable crime and no less abominable punishment are merely the acutest symptom of an ill-omened conjuncture of things, which puts an unfair and unnatural strain upon both black and white human nature. The criminal stupidity that brought the negro to America cannot be annulled by passively “making the best of it.” If its evil effects are to be counteracted, corrected, and wiped out, it must be through an active and constructive effort of large-minded statesmanship.

The deportation of the negro has been urged by many American writers, generally in a somewhat illogical fashion. They start by asserting his total incapacity for self-government, as demonstrated in Haiti, Liberia, and elsewhere, and then recommend the foundation of a new negro republic in some undefined portion of Africa. A curious scheme was put forward in 1889, in an anonymous book entitled, “An Appeal to Pharaoh,” written, I believe, by Mr. Carl McKinley, of Charleston, South Carolina. Mr. McKinley’s proposal was to promote “the voluntary and steady emigration of 236the active maternal element of the negro race.” He calculated that if 12,500 child-bearing females, between the ages of twenty and thirty, could every year be induced to emigrate (taking their husbands with them), the whole “maternal element” of the coloured population would be removed within fifty years. The plan was, apparently, that as soon as a child was born to a young negro couple, they were to be persuaded to emigrate, and that thus the prolific negro would gradually be transferred to the new negro commonwealth, only the sterile element of the race being left to die off at their leisure. It is unnecessary to criticize this scheme, which is now twenty years old, and does not seem to have found any serious champions. I mention it as perhaps the most carefully considered of the suggestions for an exodus to Africa.

In no form does the African project seem to me at all a hopeful one. The habitable portions of Africa are, I take it, pretty well staked out among the European Powers, so that an elaborate and costly international arrangement would be necessary before the requisite territory would be available. But supposing this difficulty overcome, would the United States be justified in simply dumping its coloured population in Africa, and then washing its hands of them? It might just as well drive them into the sea and have done with it. The negro character has shown no fitness for the very difficult task of combined 237pioneering and nation-building that it would have to encounter. To the lower elements in the race, the return to Africa might mean repatriation in the sense of a not unwelcome home-coming to savagery; but the better elements would suffer greatly in such a relapse, while of their own strength they probably could not resist it. Toward these better elements, and indeed toward the whole race, the United States has a responsibility that it could not, and certainly would not, shirk; so that it would in effect have to undertake the policing of a distant, troublesome, and unsatisfactory dependency, which might, in addition, not improbably involve it in international difficulties. This would be preferable to the present state of things, but still far from a desirable solution of the problem.

The same objections apply to a settlement in South America, the Philippines, or anywhere else outside the United States. Deportation, in a word, is beset with disadvantages. It would be ruinously costly and indefensibly cruel. If there ever was a time for it, that time is past.

What, then, is the alternative? Manifestly, concentration within the United States—the formation of a new State which should be, not a white man’s land, but a black man’s land.

Is this physically possible? Is there enough 238unoccupied territory to permit of such a concentration? Of absolutely unoccupied territory there probably is not enough; but those who have studied the matter tell us that there is plenty of territory so thinly occupied that the white settlers could be removed and compensated at no extravagant cost. According to the Honourable John Temple Graves:—

We may liberally discount this estimate, and yet leave it unquestionable that the resources of the United States are amply sufficient to admit of the establishment of a new State without any exorbitant disturbance of the existing distribution of territory.

It would be absurd for me to forecast in any detail the methods by which the concentration should be brought about. They must be devised and elaborated by the great American statesman who is to come. If he can successfully grapple with this colossal task, he will deserve to rank with Washington and Lincoln in the affections of his countrymen. It may be pretty safely predicted that he will attempt no sudden and forcible 239displacement of the mass of the negro race. Rather he will establish local conditions that shall tempt the younger and more enterprising negroes to migrate of their own free will; while he will probably fix by legislation a pretty distant date—say five-and-twenty years ahead—after which it shall be competent for the various State governments^[70] forcibly to evict (with compensation) and transplant to the new State any negroes under, say, forty-five years of age still lingering within their boundaries. There will be no need at any time to disturb old or middle-aged negroes who are disinclined to start life afresh under new conditions.

The probability is, however, that if once the new State were judiciously set on foot, the difficulty would be so to moderate the westward rush as to prevent an unnecessary dislocation of the labour-market in the South. Negro labour could and would be gradually replaced by white labour; but a sudden negro exodus on a large scale would embarrass agriculture and other industries in most of the Southern States. It would be one of the main problems of the case so to regulate the flow of migration as to make it continuous, yet not excessive.

There seems to be little doubt that the negro 240race, as a whole, would welcome any reasonable means of escape from the galling conditions of their life in the South. On the other hand, there is no doubt whatever that all the more intelligent members of the race are staunchly and even pathetically loyal to American ideals, and would be very unwilling to live under any other than the American form of government. In the new State, they would be members of a negro community without ceasing to be American citizens. It might be necessary at first to establish some provisional government like that of an American territory or English crown colony; but as soon as the country was sufficiently settled, and the mechanism of life in full swing, there could be no difficulty or danger in admitting the new community into the Union, with full State rights. Negro education has enormously progressed since the bad old days of Reconstruction; and there is no reason to doubt that the population could furnish a competent legislature, executive and judiciary. Legislative aberrations would be checked by the Supreme Court of the United States; and if things went thoroughly wrong, and a new Haiti threatened to develop in the heart of the Republic, why, United States troops would always be at hand to hold a black mob or a black adventurer in awe. But it would doubtless be a fundamental principle that no white man could vote or hold office in the negro State, while, reciprocally, no coloured man could vote or hold 241office in the white States.^[71] The abrogation of the Fifteenth Amendment would remove from the Constitution of the United States a constant source of trouble.

I am far from denying that this racial readjustment would demand a huge effort and a very large expense. In many individual cases it might cause a good deal of hardship to people of both colours. But that both colours would enormously and permanently benefit by the effort seems to me indubitable. It would be, before everything, an act of justice to the negro. It would enable him to build up a polity of his own, on lines to which his mind is already habituated. It would offer him full opportunity for the development of his talents and ambitions, unhampered by any social discriminations or disabilities. The Hampton-Tuskegee movement has been fitting great numbers of the race to carry out the necessary tasks of construction and organization involved in the material and moral upbuilding of the new community. Every aid should, of course, be afforded for the transference to the new domain of all negro universities, colleges, and similar institutions. I see little reason to doubt that the sense of new and unhampered opportunity would stimulate the mental and moral energies of the race, and beget a higher competency, a new self-respect. They would feel that they were on trial before the 242eyes of the world, that their future was in their own hands, and that they must vindicate their claim to the rights and liberties of civilized humanity. They would have a very fair chance of success; and in case of failure they would at worst relapse upon some sort of crown colony government. A regularly established and benevolent despotism would, at any rate, be better than the capricious and malevolent despotism to which they are now subjected in the South.

“But,” it may be said, “the rights and liberties of civilized humanity include the right to move freely hither and thither over the face of the earth. This right, at any rate, would be denied to the Afro-American, inclosed within the ring-fence of his own State.” There is, I think, a sufficient answer to this objection. The right to travel would not be denied to the negro. Nor would he be debarred from emigrating and settling abroad among any community that was willing to receive him. It is, I think, becoming more and more clear that the right of every man, white, black, or yellow, to effect a permanent settlement outside his own country, is subject to this qualification. The idea that all the world ought to belong equally to all men, and that rational development tends toward an unrestricted intermingling of races, seems to be signally contradicted by the trend of events. Is it not the great essential for the ultimate world-peace that races should learn to keep themselves to themselves?

243If the negro State is established with any success, I do not believe that its inhabitants will feel it an undue restriction on their liberties that they are forbidden to settle in other parts of the Union. The population question will gradually regulate itself. A fairly civilized people, with limited opportunities of expansion, will soon realize the penalties of breeding beyond its means of subsistence.

And what of the South, when this act of justice to the negro shall have been performed? It will awaken, as from a nightmare, to the realization of its splendid destiny. No longer will one of the richest and most beautiful regions of the world be hampered in its material and spiritual development by a legacy of ancestral crime. All that is best in the South—and the Southern nature is rich in elements of magnanimity and humanity—abhors the inhuman necessities imposed upon it by the presence of the negro. The Southern white man writhes under the criticisms of the North and of Europe, which he feels to be ignorant and in great measure unjust, yet which he can only answer by an impotent, “You do not know! You cannot understand!”^[72] He has to confess, too, that 244there is much in Southern policy and practice that even the necessities of the situation cannot excuse—much that can only be palliated as the result of a constant overstrain to which human nature ought never to be subjected. Remove the causes of this overstrain, and a region perhaps the most favoured by Nature of all in the Western Hemisphere will stand where it ought to stand—in the van, not only of civilization, but of humanity.

245PART III

HAVANA TO PANAMA

I have known few more curious sensations than that of crossing in a single night from Florida to Cuba: leaving the New World at ten p.m. and arriving at six a.m. in the Old World. For Havana is distinctly an Old World city—more so, I am told, than some of the cities of modern Spain. From the moment the steamer passes between Morro Castle and La Punta, and skirts beneath the grey and pink cliffs of the huge idle fortress of La Cabana, one feels that one has left behind the region of the Immature, and entered upon that of the Over-ripe.

I am not going to attempt a description of Havana, with its many-coloured, swarming Southern life; its arcaded side-walks; its huge windows, all barred with ornamental ironwork, at which a great part of the social life of the city is carried on; its narrow business streets, the Calle Obispo and Calle O’Reilly, in which the frequent awnings stretched from house to house create a rich golden shade; its grey old cathedral; its cool green patios framed in the 247gloom of high-arched gateways; its handsome, rather commonplace, modern squares; its Prado and its esplanade, where the restless purple waters of the Gulf of Mexico fling up, every now and then, white pillars of spray. Except for its splendid harbour, the city has no great advantage of situation, being placed on low hills, and surrounded by others not much higher. The chief impression it leaves on the mind is that of opulent colour—often garish where the hand of man has held the brush, but, where Nature has her own way, in tree, shrub, soil, ocean, and sky, indescribably and inexhaustibly gorgeous. A painter of the temperate zone would here throw away his palette, except, it may be, for the wonderful blue distances, of which, on the outskirts, one has now and then a glimpse.

From all that I could see and hear in Cuba, I felt thoroughly convinced that American intervention had amply justified itself, and that this noble island, after all its miseries and distractions, was now in a fair way to become as prosperous and happy as, by its natural advantages, it is entitled to be. The splendid work of cleansing and sanitation which the Americans have done in Havana I more fully appreciated after a brief inspection of a couple of unsanitated Spanish-American towns—Cartagena and Barranquilla. But cleaning-up and road-making, and the organization of public services, are not all that 248the Americans are doing. In the Cuban guide-book it was significant to note the number of places which owed their fame to having been the scene of this or that massacre or military execution. It would be premature, perhaps, to say that all that sort of thing is past and done with; but there will certainly not be much more of it; the United States will see to that. I am bound to confess that here, in my opinion, the Republic has “taken up the white man’s burden” very efficiently and in a very true sense.

The sense of prosperity was very strongly borne in upon me in Vedado, a suburb of Havana, whither I went to call upon an American gentleman, resident for many years in Cuba, to whom I had an introduction. Vedado is a great sun-baked stretch of ground between the low hills and the sea to the west of Havana, where handsome bungalow-villas are rising in great numbers. As yet it is in a somewhat raw and ragged condition; but there is evidence of wealth and activity on every hand.

My primary object in visiting Mr. Ogden (as I shall call him) was to inquire into the relations of the white and coloured races in Cuba.

“It is very obvious,” I said, “in the streets of Havana, that, if there is any colour-line here, it is not drawn anything like as strictly as in the Southern States. I see a good many black policemen; and there are black 249motor-men and conductors on the street-cars. Among the passengers in the cars there is no distinction of colour. In the Colon Cemetery, as I came down here, I noticed that, among the thirty heroes commemorated on the Firemen’s Monument, four seemed to be pure negroes; and there were negro traits in six or seven more. Is there really no colour discrimination at all?”

“In the sense of legal disability,” said Mr. Ogden, “there is none. Socially, of course, there is a good deal, though no hard-and-fast barrier is raised between the races. Each family, each individual, draws the colour-line according to taste. But, naturally, there is a tendency for the pure white to exclude the unmistakably coloured.”

“Would a white man lose caste on marrying a coloured woman?”

“Oh, very distinctly. I could tell you of several instances.”

“But there is no serious friction—no feud—between the races?”

“At present, no; but I’m not at all sure that a race problem may not declare itself when the new Constitution comes into force in February next. We shall then have the negro in politics; and that is how trouble always arises.”

“You fear a Cuban repetition of the Reconstruction time?”

“Yes, indeed I do. The negro is susceptible to every sort of political machination. Every 250carpet-bag demagogue can make a tool of him, and that the Cuban white men won’t stand for.”

“Meanwhile, however, there is no trouble? You have not any such Reign of Terror here as there is some parts of the Southern States?”

“No. Outrages on women are practically unknown here.”

“And how do you account for the difference between Cuba and the Southern States in respect to this class of crime?”

“Well, sir, I’m a Southern man myself, and all I can say is that the nigger here don’t seem to me the same as he is at home. I believe it is partly a real difference of race. |The Pick of the Basket.| You see, most of the slave-ships used to touch at Havana before they went on to Charleston or New Orleans; and the Cuban planters used to make a study of the different races and tribes, and select the best types. The daughter of a very wealthy planter—she’s an old lady now—has told me all about it. They knew precisely the qualities of the different breeds. Some were best fitted for body-servants, some for field-work, some for handling stock, others for educating and making clerks and book-keepers of. So, you see, the Cubans got the pick of the basket, and only the lower class—the mere brawny animals—got to the United States.”

This theory did not strike me as wholly adequate to the case, nor did Mr. Ogden pretend that it was. But there may be something in it, and 251I commend it to the notice of students of negro ethnology.

“By-the-by,” Mr. Ogden continued, “there is a curious African survival among the negroes here—a sort of semi-religious society called the Ñanigo, which indulges in strange rites of its own, and occasionally in assassination.”

“When you say ‘semi-religious,’ do you mean Christian or pagan?”

“Oh, pagan entirely. The members are generally tattooed or decorated with scars and cicatrices. They come greatly to the front in Carnival time, when they parade the streets, carrying a sort of illuminated pagoda and making strange noises by grating gourds.”

The talk then strayed to politics, and Mr. Ogden gave me a no doubt one-sided, but evidently sincere, view of the situation.

“I take it,” said I, “that Cuba is now peaceful and contented?”

“Oh yes, fairly so,” said Mr. Ogden; “but capital is still shy of coming in, until the political condition is more stable.”

“What was the reason of President Palma’s downfall?”

“The sole reason was that he was too good for them—too honest, too scrupulous. Ninety-five per cent. of those who took active part in the revolution of 1906 were negroes, and the rest were, with very few exceptions, men of no standing whatever, either political or social.

252“The revolution was largely worked by the editor of a popular paper, a very able man whose sole moral quality is a total lack of hypocrisy. He said quite frankly, ‘In the old days I was always in touch with the Spanish Governor, and all sorts of good things came my way. Now, on the other hand, there’s nothing doing, and it don’t suit me.’ For a short time I ran the English page of his paper for him; and once, when he wanted me to put in something that I knew to be a blazing lie, I said to him, ‘I wonder how you can reconcile it with either your principles or your policy to print such an utter falsehood.’ He slapped his right pocket, and said, ‘My principles are here;’ his left pocket, ‘and my policy here.’

“The chief of the secret service had warned Palma for some time that a revolution was brewing—that there was open talk in the cafés of his assassination or deportation. He only said, ‘Why, what is there to make a revolution about? Our credit is good, our public works are going forward, prosperity is spreading. Where should the revolution come from?’

“A party of men were suborned to enter the barracks of a company of rural guards, shoot all the men in their sleep, and seize their arms. This was to be the signal for a general rising; but the bandits were left in the lurch by their friends. Orders were given to take them alive 253or dead—preferably dead. Unfortunately they were taken alive, and have all been released by Mr. Taft, on the plea that their offence was political.

“Then a man got up a revolution in a remote province; which meant that he set a lot of niggers looting stores and carrying off canned salmon, and calico, and boots and shoes. A friend of his in Havana went down to find out the reason of this revolution. The leader explained that he had 7000 dollars of gambling debts which he couldn’t pay; and for that sum he would order off the revolution. The friend said: ‘You can’t have 7000, but I know of 3000 dollars allotted for a purpose that can stand over; I think I can get you that, and you can make a composition with your creditors.’ The leader agreed to this proposal, but Palma refused to sanction the deal, and the rising went on, and spread, and became serious.

“Palma confessed to me that the only troops he could rely on had only a few rounds of ammunition. |A Foreign Legion.| ‘Why, then,’ said I, ‘there’s only one thing to be done—we’ll telegraph to the Colt Manufacturing Company for twenty machine guns and a million rounds of ammunition; and I’ll organize the men to work them.’ Palma held up his hands in protest. ‘A million rounds! Why, that’s enough for a war!’

“The Colt Company could only deliver ten 254machine guns, but those we got; and I organized a foreign legion. It contained Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians—450 men in all. We were just ready for business when Mr. Taft arrived with the Peace Commission; and what followed I have never understood, and don’t understand to this day.

“We went on board the Des Moines to wait on Mr. Taft. He said to me, ‘Mr. Ogden, I understand you are an American citizen—then what are you doing in that uniform, and under arms? And that man there? And that man there?’ I replied, ‘Mr. Taft, I have lived in Cuba twelve years. This gentleman is an Englishman—he has been fifteen years here. This gentleman is French—he has been twenty years here. We have wives and children here; and we have formed ourselves into a foreign legion, because we think we have a right to protect our families and to preserve the peace.’

“‘What do you want me to do?’ said Mr. Taft. |Muzzling the Machine-Guns.| ‘The very thing you won’t do,’ said I. ‘How do you know?’ he said. ‘I’m a reasonable man, and I’m here to do something. How do you know it mayn’t be what you want?’

“‘Well, sir,’ said I, ‘we want you to sit still, and smoke your cigar, and do nothing.’

“‘For how long?’

“‘For twenty-four hours—at most for forty-eight.’

255“‘And meantime,’ said he, ‘you propose to keep the peace by committing an act of war?’

“‘It won’t be war, sir,’ I said. ‘These people can’t stand up for a minute before machine guns. It isn’t in them. In the first place, they haven’t more than six or eight rounds of ammunition apiece, and you know you can’t make war with six rounds of ammunition. But I don’t care though they had a million rounds—they simply cannot stand up. There’s no reason why they should. There’s no patriotism, no principle among them. They’re merely out for a little loot. If you tie our hands, and give the country over to this gang, Cuba will stink to heaven before many months are over.’

“But it was no use. Palma had to go, and now we don’t know what lies before us.

“It isn’t that the Cubans aren’t fit for political life. Many of them are, perfectly. But with the ignorant negro and low white vote, there is no saying what may happen.

“I wish to heaven President Roosevelt had just added a few words of postscript to his message to the Cubans. If he had only said, ‘Though we intend that Cuba shall have honest self-government, we don’t propose to put up with revolutions,’ all would have been well.”

A cloudlessly hot Sunday afternoon in Havana—I am lounging in the Parque Central, when I observe a poster announcing that a game of “Jai Alai” is at that moment in progress. The very intelligent “Standard Guide to Havana,” sold by Mr. Foster (the Cook of Cuba), notes this “famous gambling game” as one of the sights of the city; so I charter a cab, and jog through the baking streets to the “Frontón” in which it is played. You first enter a long and evil-smelling hall, with various refreshment bars, like the lower regions of a hippodrome; and then you pass into the “Frontón” itself. Imagine an amphitheatre sliced in two at its longitudinal axis; one half retained, with its shape unaltered, to serve as the auditorium; the other half converted into a titanic racquet court, 175 ft. long, 36 ft. deep, and (I imagine) something like 40 ft. high. The long wall, of course, fronts the audience, the two short walls close in the ends. The floor of the immense court is made of smooth and almost shining concrete; the walls are of stone, painted chocolate 257colour, and the long wall is marked off by perpendicular lines into seventeen compartments. The purpose of this I did not understand, for play takes place, not against this back wall, but up and down the whole length of the great court. Imagine, now, the great auditorium, tier on tier, filled with a vast crowd of excited, shouting, cheering men (there were only about a dozen women present), while bookmakers in red Basque caps move up and down in front of the first tier of seats, and permeate the higher tiers as well, yelling the odds in their raucous voices. As a vehicle for betting “Jai Alai” is generally recognized as “a curse to the community,” and the American Governor has been much blamed for tolerating it. But in itself,—as an exercise of skill, endurance, strength, agility, and grace—I do not hesitate to call it out and away the finest game I ever saw.

Readers who have been to Spain may recognize this as the Basque game of pelota. |“Partido” and “Quiniela.”| I had heard its name; but certainly its extraordinary merits had never reached my cars. Probably it is too difficult for the ordinary amateur; the professionals whom I saw are engaged at large salaries, and showed marvellous skill. But as a mere spectacle I should think it would prove attractive anywhere.^[73] The 258game is perfectly simple to understand, and there is never a dull moment in it, except the few moments of rest which the players allow themselves. Here is my guide-book’s account of it:—

The quiniela seemed to me more graceful and beautiful than the partido, or foursome, if not quite so exciting. The players wear the simplest costume—white drill trousers and either white or blue shirts. For a long time I was puzzled to think what familiar object the “cesta” recalled to me; but at last I hit on it—the thing is for all the world like those wicker guards which linkmen put over hansom-wheels, to save the gowns of ladies in alighting. The basket is, I take it, about two feet long. When a player lets his arm drop from the shoulder, the tip of the “cesta” is about level with his ankle.

Now, how shall I describe the actual play? It is racquets enormously magnified, and carried 259to an almost superhuman pitch of skill. Only once does the player touch the ball with his hand, and that is in leading off. |Playing the Game.| Standing about the middle of the court, he drops the ball on the floor, catches it with his “cesta” in the rebound, and sends it whizzing against the end wall. It flies back like a streak of lightning, and instantly one of the other side has it in his “cesta,” makes two or three leaps to give himself impetus, and hurls it again at the end wall. This time it is not improbable that he has put such force into his cast that the ball rebounds the whole 175 feet, strikes the opposite wall, and flashes down to the floor. Then one of his opponents must be ready to take it on the hop, and, reinforcing its movement, to send it flying once more against the end wall, of course doing his best to “place” it awkwardly for the other side. I have seen the ball returned thirty times in a single rally; but the average number would probably be some twelve or fifteen. And almost every catch and return seemed an incredible feat of skill. Just consider: here is a space of 6300 square feet, and only two players on each side—in the quiniela only one. What astounding rapidity of eye and agility of limb it must take to be always at the right spot to catch a little demon of a ball, that tears flashing about the court like a thing possessed! And the men are almost always at the right spot. They may misplace the ball or send it “out;” but it is 260the rarest thing for the ball to escape them entirely. They run, they leap, they make the most amazing whirling strokes; if the ball comes very low, they fall down, and often hurl it with the greatest accuracy from the most unconventional positions on the ground. Not once but hundreds of times that afternoon did I see things done that looked absolutely impossible. Perhaps their variety of resource is their most astonishing quality. But, wonderful as it all is, it is still more beautiful. With all their rapidity, their grace is perfect, like that of lithe, resilient, feline animals. If anything more marvellous or more graceful was done at the Olympic games, then the Greeks were athletes indeed.

Certainly, if one wanted to gamble, “Jai Alai” provides an intensely exciting method of doing so. |The Fluctuating Odds.| In one partido that I saw it seemed at first that the “blancos” entirely outclassed the “azules.” They gained about 8 points to their rivals’ 3—the game being 30 up. But gradually the blues crept forward, until at 14 they tied. Then the whites spurted, and presently the score was 24-19. But again the blues pulled themselves together, and at 26 they again tied. The whites, however, were the better team, and in the end won by 2 points. Of course, at every fluctuation of the score, the odds varied: when the twenties were reached the betting became fast and furious, and both bookmakers and their “clients” shouted 261themselves distracted. But there is no reason in the nature of things why this exquisitely beautiful game should be “soiled with all ignoble use.” How amazing is the brutality of taste that can prefer the bull-fight to pelota!

Allowing time for a few hours’ stay at Matanzas, the journey from Havana to Santiago di Cuba occupies two days and a night. At Matanzas, a town in itself of no great interest, it is well worth while to climb to the hermitage of Montserrate, which overlooks to the westward the Yumuri valley, a great semicircular basin in the hills, and to the eastward a magnificent sweep of sea and shore. The endless colonnades of palm-trees give to the distant slopes an exquisite tone of silver-blue such as I have never seen anywhere else. On the whole, however, the Cuban landscape, as it presents itself between Havana and Santiago, is rich and spacious rather than specially beautiful. Its characteristic aspect is that of wide and fertile plains, with ranges of high hills, or low mountains, in the distance, dappled with the shadows of the clouds; but in the central province of Camaguëy the hills disappear, and the plains become rather uninteresting, and to a considerable extent unimproved. The general impression of fertility is very striking. The soil is often of such a rich red 263or chocolate colour that it seems as though an artist need only mix a little oil with it and transfer it to his canvas. The species of palm which prevails in Cuba has an unfortunate tendency to bulge in the wrong place, and assume a bottle-like contour, which is fatal to the beauty of the individual trees. Patches of inextricable jungle are not infrequent in the central districts, and suggest a use for the huge, broad cutlasses—the machetes—with which the negro peasantry are generally armed. As the line bends southward to Santiago, I fancy that the scenery becomes more mountainous and picturesque; but we ran through it in the dark. I retain only an impression of dense forests jewelled with myriads of fire-flies, while some sort of cricket or cicala made a pleasant tinkling sound, as though of running water.

Santiago I take to be one of the hottest places in the universe. |Santiago to Kingston.| It is set in a vast basin of splendid hills, the bottom of the basin being formed by the lake-like expanse of the historic harbour. The gulf or fiord so narrows towards its mouth that no sign of the open sea is visible, and no breath of sea breeze seems ever to stir the mirror-like surface of the lake. The red roofs of the town climb up the hill from the water’s edge, and seem to glow and flame in the fierce sunlight. One envied the little brown and yellow urchins running about stark naked in the shady side-streets. If 264they wore anything at all, it was a necklace—an amulet or charm, as I conceive.^[74]

From Santiago I took ship for Jamaica on the S.S. Oteri, the most uncomfortable vessel on which I ever set foot. It belongs, I am told, to the Cuba Eastern Railroad, which is largely an English company. Surely it would pay them to assign a habitable ship to the service, and thus encourage travellers to adopt this otherwise delightful route.

Over the passage I draw a veil. We wound our way down the narrow neck of the fiord (sacred to the memory of the heroic Hobson), passed under the bluff crowned by the bastions of Morro Castle, and plunged into the rollers of a marvellous sapphire sea. From that time, I remember nothing for about eighteen hours, except the truly infernal heat of a grimy little oven, facetiously described as a stateroom. Next morning, when I came on deck, the blue mountains of Jamaica were towering over us, and we were heading for the low spit of Port Royal, which forms, as it were, the breakwater of Kingston Harbour.

Of Jamaica I shall say very little, for the simple reason that my feelings concerning it are beyond expression. |The City Desolate.| The burden of my message is, “Go and see it.” Until you have crossed the Blue Mountain range of this incomparable island you 265do not know what Nature can achieve in the creation of pure beauty. In Italy Nature is helped out by art, by architecture, by the magic of antiquity, by all sorts of historic associations; and it would, of course, be ridiculous to under-value these advantages. Here beauty has no such adjuncts; if it is enhanced at all by the intervention of man, it is by mere accident. Comparison, then, is futile; but with the liveliest memory of many of the loveliest scenes in Italy, I say deliberately that I did not know what pure beauty meant until I visited Jamaica.

But I did not learn it in Kingston. Rebuilding had scarcely begun in that luckless city, which can at no time, I fancy, be very attractive. It was, to put it briefly, the abomination of desolation. The heat in the long, straight streets was torrid; and all the mortar that ought to have been in the house-walls was blowing about in the form of scorching and stinging dust-clouds. So I presently shook the dust of Kingston, not so much off my feet as out of my eyes and lungs, and (under the advice of kind friends at King’s House), set forth on a short tour, of which the first stage was a railway journey to Port Antonio.

Never shall I forget that afternoon. |A Midsummer Day’s Dream.| Perhaps it impressed me the more because I had not been led to expect anything unusually beautiful. Between Kingston and the old capital, Spanish Town, the route was of no great interest; but no sooner had 266the train passed Spanish Town, and begun to creep up into the hills which form the backbone of the island, than I found myself in a valley of enchantment. A gorge rather than a valley—a winding, Highland glen, with a clear blue river flowing musically down its rocky bed, and a white road following the curves of the stream. Everywhere were glorious forest trees and slender palms—very different from the paunchy Cuban species—with an underwood of the richest tropical growths. The banana groves, sometimes mixed with orange trees, were numberless, and at almost every turn huge clumps of feathery bamboos were mirrored in the stream. The giant limbs of the forest trees were often clad for their whole length with the tender green of thick-clustering ferns. As for the temperature, it was perfection. I can only describe it by a contradiction in terms—very warm and yet beautifully cool—whereby I mean that, though the thermometer was doubtless high, the delicate freshness of the air, the clearness of the water, and the depth of the green shadows through which we were running, produced a perfect illusion of coolness. Slowly as the train meandered along, it went far too fast for me. I was tortured by a desire to linger, to get out and walk, to fix in my mind some of the ever-shifting aspects of beauty. Presently—all too soon—we reached the top of the pass and began to wind down the wider valley on the other side. Beneath jag-toothed mountain walls in the grey distance, 267spread a labyrinth of crinkly hills, all tending to a pyramidal form, and many of them crowned with red-roofed cabins or wattle huts. Down their corrugations flowed exquisitely limpid brooks, and up their sides climbed forests of broad-leaved bananas. On every hand were palms, oranges, and brilliant flowering shrubs. It gave one an odd little shock to see at a wayside station, amid all this wealth of tropical colour, a patch of homely British vermilion in the shape of a mail-cart inscribed with the familiar “E.R.” At times the train would plunge into tunnels, just long enough to afford a pleasant pause in the overpowering feast of beauty; then out again to serpentine along amid fairy dells and dingles each lovelier than the last. As we drew downwards, the noble mountain background began to flush in the evening light; and at last we ran out into the wide bed of a torrent debouching in a sweep of purple sea. This was Annotto Bay; whence the line skirts round headland after headland of the romantic coast to the bright little town of Port Antonio.

Here I spent a perfect tropical day. |At Port Antonio.| The great American caravanserai on the promontory between the two bays was closed; so I went to the pleasant little Waverley Hotel on the neck of land at the base of the promontory. Through the still hot hours of blazing sunlight, I sat in the airiest of attire on a shady verandah, writing 268some of the foregoing pages, while the vulture-like “John Crows” wheeled solemnly around, in sedulous devotion to their craft of scavenging. The waters of the smaller bay were lapping at my feet; and I looked out over their blue expanse to a little red-and-white light-house on the opposite head-land, and the white walls of an American millionaire’s villa gleaming through a forest of palms. In the cool of the afternoon, I climbed to a small plantation on the top of a hill some seven or eight hundred feet high, almost perpendicularly overhanging the town. Nothing more glorious can be conceived than the falling of the purple twilight over the innumerable folds of the foothills filling the bottom of the great basin of mountains to the south; while northward lay the measureless expanse of the sleeping Spanish Main. It was a scene of sheer enchantment. I lingered until the great stars began to blaze in the crystal deeps of heaven; then took my way downward, unutterably moved, as by some august and gorgeous ritual. In the town, the lamplight was glowing through the walls of the houses—for here, as often as not, the walls are of pivoted slats which open and close like Venetian blinds. The streets were swarming with a dusky throng, and a band of black Salvationists was making an unholy clatter under the star-sown silences.

But I must cut short my Jamaican raptures, and not attempt to express the inexpressible. Starting from Buff Bay the next morning, at 269seven o’clock, under the guidance of a negro whoso regal name was Clovis, I rode all day long up a valley of paradise, into the heart of the mountains. |A Valley of Paradise.| Sometimes, when the road skirted a ravine, we would look down a hundred feet or so, and see shining brown bodies plashing about in the silver pools, flecked with sunlight through the overarching palms. More than once, in some sequestered nook, we came upon a negro family party performing an elaborate go-to-meeting toilet—for it happened to be Sunday, and the road was populous with worshippers, all of whom gave us a grinning good-day. While we took our midday rest at a hospitable plantation, half ruined by the earthquake, a deluge of rain came down and lasted over an hour; but when we rode forward—now on a mere bridle-path winding along the sides of often precipitous gorges—it was wonderful to see the clouds rolling up like giant curtains from the glittering mountain-sides. On we clambered over the watershed, and a little way down the southern valley, to the plantation of Chester Vale, 3000 feet high. There I spent several delightful days of work and mountain wandering, on which I must not allow myself to enlarge. Almost every afternoon—for it was the rainy season—there came a tropical downpour. But rain itself, in this climate, is a thing of beauty and of joy; and as for the lifting of the clouds and breaking through of the evening sun, who shall describe 270the splendours of the spectacle? Perhaps the most beautiful of all my experiences was an early morning ride from Chester Vale along the ridge to Newcastle, on my way back to Kingston. Such ferns, such exquisite wild flowers, as lined the path, I have seen nowhere else; and the view from our shady fringe of the forest, over the sunbathed valley fading away to the northern sea, was sumptuous in the extreme.

I cannot better sum up my impressions of Jamaica than by saying that there was scarcely an hour of my brief stay in the island which I would not willingly have prolonged indefinitely. Again and again—many times in the day—I would feel, “Why cannot the sun stand still? Why must this marvellous moment pass away before I have absorbed a hundredth part of its beauty? Why is there no means of ‘fixing’ on the memory, as on a photographic plate, the details of this heavenly scene?” We have all, I suppose, experienced these moments of exasperation at the tyrannous march of time; but I have never known them come crowding upon me as they did in Jamaica. In a very real sense, the island is too lovely; one is sated, surfeited with beauty. I should hesitate to live there, lest perchance I should sicken of Nature’s prodigality. But for a month or two, or for a winter, nothing could be more fascinating. And Jamaica, in my experience, has few or none of the usual draw-backs of the tropics—poisonous insects, snakes, 271and so forth. It is the nearest conceivable approach to an earthly Paradise. It is a fragment of Fairyland.

To confess the truth, I was too much occupied in sheer enjoyment of life during my stay in Jamaica to pursue with any ardour my researches into the race-problem. |Black, White, and Coloured.| But I saw enough to realize the heaven-wide difference between this black community, administered by a benevolent but scarcely qualified despotism, and the piebald democracies of the Southern States. There were in Jamaica, in 1905, 15,000 whites, ten times as many “coloured” people (that is to say mulattoes), and nearly 630,000 blacks. In other words, the white population of the island is smaller than that of Rugby, the non-white population is larger than that of Manchester and Salford. There are fifty-five non-whites to every one white. Moreover, the terms of the enumeration point to a characteristic difference between the United States and Jamaica. In America, every one with the smallest strain of African blood is black, though he may, in fact, be as white as George Washington. “Coloured man” and “negro” are synonymous, there being no legal, social, or statistical distinction between the pure black and the mulatto. We have seen how impossible it is to arrive at anything but a merely conjectural estimate of the relative numbers of the pure and mixed breeds. But in the West Indies “coloured”“coloured” means “not 272black” as clearly as it means “not white.” The “coloured” population is a middle class between the white aristocracy and the black proletariat; and whereas in America there is almost complete solidarity of feeling and interest between the mulatto and the negro, I am told that in the West Indies the “coloured” man despises the “nigger,” and feels himself immeasurably his social superior.^[75]

This means that no real race-problem exists in Jamaica. There may be a certain amount of marginal friction and unpleasantness where the coloured population, the intermediate stratum, touches the black basis of society on the one hand, and the white upper-crust on the other; but these difficulties are not essentially different from those which necessarily arise in any community which includes a large class of indeterminate social standing. There is, in fact, none of thatthat race rivalry which declares itself where two races are practically equal in numbers and theoretically equal in political status. The integrity and the social position of the white race are absolutely unthreatened. They are, like the English in India, a small body of “sahibs” in a non-white country. The situation in Jamaica, in fact, has 273scarcely an element in common with that of the Southern States.

There are, I believe, some slight stirrings of democratic ambition, and of resentment at their lack of political rights, among the Jamaican populace—especially in the small class of urban negroes. |Let Well Alone?| It would be absurd for me to offer an opinion as to whether they have any substantial and practical grievance. But I confess I could not work up any enthusiasm for the “elevation” of the Jamaican masses. Beyond a little better sanitation, I do not know what they want. They seemed as happy as South Sea Islanders, and much more tenacious of life. Both the coloured population and the black population have nearly doubled within the past half-century. From the point of view of the white employer, no doubt, it is highly desirable that, as Mr. Booker Washington puts it, they should “want more wants:” more civilization would mean more stability and industry, with less inclination to “prædial larcenylarceny.” But from the point of view of the black man himself, the benefits of progress seem far more questionable. I read without the appropriate sense of horror that “not more than half of the native population is effectively reached by religious and educational influences,” and that 60 per cent. of the births are illegitimate. It seems to me that the Jamaican negro enjoys all the advantages of the primitive life without 274its disadvantages, whereas the American negro (broadly speaking) is subjected to all the evils of civilization, while he receives but a disproportionate share of its benefits.

When, in New York, I was handed a sailing-list of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company’s boats, I observed that their first port of call, after Jamaica, was Colon. In vain I hurriedly searched the map of the Caribbean Sea, hoping to disguise my ignorance. I had to pocket my pride, and inquire, “Where is Colon?” Afterwards I discovered that Colon was a place of which I had often heard under its earlier name of Aspinwall; for my father, one of the Californian Argonauts, had twice crossed the Isthmus of Darien in the old days.

Under no conceivable name would Colon be an attractive place. It is situated on flat ground (formerly an island) at the bottom of a little bag of a bay; it consists of the ordinary jerry-built two-storey houses of a more or less improvised tropical sea-port; its fringe of palms is meagre and mangy; and it is backed by low and featureless wooded hills.

But, as we steam slowly up to the jetty, what is this cluster of some twenty or thirty 276neat new houses, under a grove of palm-trees away to the right? There is something odd about them, something dark and blind-looking; they seem to have neither windows nor doors. After a little searching of spirit, I realize what they suggest to me—they are like a row of giant meat-safes.

And there, at the point of the spit of land, is a statue—a group of two figures. Now I know where I am, for I have been reading things up a little. This must be the statue of Columbus embracing an Indian maiden, presented by the Empress Eugénie in the palmy days of French ambition regarding the Isthmus; and the houses behind it must be those of the American officials in the settlement of Cristobal, a suburb of Colon.

One soon learns to appreciate the “screened” houses of the Canal Zone, with their verandahs enclosed in an impervious veil of wire gauze. But outwardly, and especially at a distance, they are not things of beauty.

Three minutes in the broiling streets of Colon were quite enough for me. I have seen frontier settlements before now; and Colon, though it has a sort of a history, is at present, to all intents and purposes, a frontier settlement. “Do you know Port Said?” a resident said to me; “Well, this place is just about 50 per cent. wickeder.” I think the resident (with pardonable partiality) exaggerated a little; but the aspect of Colon, even by day, was quite sufficiently sinister.

277Besides, I had an important introduction to present at Panama; so I took the first train thither. This railway, or at any rate a railway more or less on the line of this one, was built in the ’fifties, and is said to have cost a life for every tie (Anglice, sleeper). Literal-minded persons question this statement; to me it seems entirely probable. For if ever there was a pestiferous-looking region, it is this land of swamp and jungle and blood-red river. Though I knew that science had practically annulled the evil spell that had so long rested on it, there were still places which I could scarcely look at without a shudder.

Of course the Canal works, and the settlements of the workers, give an air of great animation to many points on the line. But apart from these I saw not a single sign of life on the whole route; not a square inch of cultivation, not a man or woman who looked like a peasant of the region; only a few undaunted cattle browsing here and there in the swamps. And every here and there, to add to the desolation, lay great pieces of machinery—travelling cranes, trucks, even engines—overturned by the wayside and half submerged in jungle. They were relics of the French fiasco, the abandoned impedimenta of De Lesseps’ Moscow. I have seen few more tragic spectacles.

Here let me say, however, that intelligent Americans speak with great respect of their French predecessors. “Consider the difficulties 278they had to deal with,” a high official said to me—“difficulties that we have had practically swept away for us! They knew nothing of tropical hygiene, and malaria and yellow fever had it all their own way with them. They knew nothing of cold storage, and the problem of supply was practically insoluble. Considering all these circumstances, it is wonderful what they did, and did well. If it bears a small proportion to the £50,000,000, more or less, that were sunk in the enterprise, you must remember that probably not half that sum of money ever got to the Isthmus. Their material was all excellent. We use a considerable amount of it to this day. We have dug many of their locomotives out of the jungle, and found them practically as good as new. When we took over the business, there was a great outcry over the £8,000,000 we paid to the French Company. People said it was grossly extravagant; but we have found that the bargain was a good one.” Despite all alteration of plans, I gather that about half the excavation actually made by the French has proved, or will prove, useful.

As one leaves the station at Panama, one fears that it is to prove a second Colon. |A Sanitary Campaign.| Here are the same two-storey shanties, half of them, it would seem, drinking-bars, and the other half miscellaneous stores, kept by the ubiquitous Ah Sin and Wong Lee. But after half a mile or so of this Hispano-Americano-Chinatown, the Avenida Central leads 279one into the moderately old and not quite uninteresting Spanish city, with its Plaza, its twin-towered Cathedral, and its fort. And when you get to the fort, you find yourself on the central promontory of one of the most beautiful bays in the world; but of this more anon, from another point of view.

The towns of Panama and Colon are specially excluded from the Canal Zone—the strip of territory extending five miles on each side of the Canal, which the United States has bought from the Republic of Panama for £2,000,000. But even in these two towns the Americans have undertaken the work of paving and sanitation; the outlay to be repaid by instalments extending over fifty years. So they have repeated here the drastic cleaning-up which they have effected in Havana, even outraging the feelings of the natives by abolishing the domestic rain-water butt, the breeding-place of the “Anopheles” and “Stegomyia” mosquitos—disseminators, respectively of malaria and yellow fever. It is mainly, though of course not entirely, by waging war upon these insects that the now almost perfect sanitation of the Canal Zone has been secured. And it is in order to exclude them from the happy home that all the I.C.C.—Isthmian Canal Commission—houses are “screened” with wire gauze.

To one of these houses, in the suburb of Ancon, I drove in the early afternoon, and 280presented my introduction, which was honoured with true American cordiality. Once within the gauze fortification (and the door shuts behind you with a spring, lest you should inadvertently admit a casual Anopheles) you find yourself in a delightfully arranged tropical house, with dining-room and drawing-room opening off a central hall, and with the spacious verandah affording what is equivalent to another suite of rooms. It is built entirely of hardwood, painted in white and shades of green, and is as cool and airy as heart can desire. From within, the “screen” is scarcely noticeable; in the normal Panama weather, indeed, it merely softens agreeably the glare of the sun outside.

“Is this,” I asked, “the famous house that was built in some incredibly short space of time?”

“Yes,” said my host, laughing. “That story has got around a good deal, but it has the merit of being true. When the house was begun, I saw that the workmen were simply dilly-dallying over it and making no way. I spoke to our chief, Colonel Goethals, about it, and he came over and looked at the preparations, so far as they had gone. He said to the overseer: ‘This house must be finished and ready for occupation on the 15th of November’—just six weeks ahead. The overseer pulled a very long face, and said, ‘I’ll do my best, sir.’ ‘That was not my order,’ said Colonel Goethals. ‘I did not tell you to do 281your best—I told you to have the house finished.’ And finished it was, in just thirty-six working days.”

After taking me for a most interesting drive in the environs of Ancon, my host was compelled, by a previous engagement, to leave me to myself for the rest of the evening. |“A Peak in Darien.”| I did the obvious thing, which was to climb Ancon Hill at sunset. To do so you have first to wind your way through the beautifully situated hospital buildings, all, of course, carefully screened in gauze. Straying a little from the proper road, I came across a lumber-yard, outside of which I was a little startled to find a pile of some fifty coffins of assorted sizes. These, too, might, I thought, have been “screened” without disadvantage to the spirits of the community.

A stiff climb of about half an hour brought me to the top of Ancon Hill, and disclosed one of the loveliest views I have ever seen. Immediately below lay the town of Panama on its promontory. To the left a huge bay curved outward, with a magnificent sweep, and beyond it range on range of mountains grew ever dimmer and more distant as they faded away into South America. To the right of Panama lay the smaller bay of La Boca, in which the canal will actually debouch, studded with beautiful mountainous islands, not at all unlike those of the bay of Naples, on a smaller scale. It was a glorious scene; and a white American cruiser 282lying out in the anchorage gave a pleasant touch of life to it.

Observe that I have said “to the left” and “to the right” of Panama, not to the south and to the north; for the orientation here is extremely puzzling. I naturally expected to see the sun set over the Pacific; but, to my great surprise, there seemed to be no sun in the heavens in that direction. Yet the light proved that a sunset was going on somewhere; and, turning inland, I found the luminary engaged in sinking behind the mountains of the Isthmus—to the eastward it seemed to me. A study of a large-scale map may show the reason for this paradox—I shall not attempt to expound it.

The Isthmian Canal Commission has built and runs a delightful tropical hotel at Ancon, called—heaven knows why—the Tivoli. |The Tivoli Hotel.| Even the negro waiters wear at their belt the brazen badges or checks showing their numbers on the I.C.C. pay-list. Salaries are paid to numbers, not to names. Many of the labourers have no ascertainable, or no spellable, name; many change their names as the fancy strikes them; but their badge identifies them at once.

The telephone in my bedroom rang at 5.30 the next morning, for I had to catch a train at 6.35 to meet my Ancon friend at Culebra, several stations down the line. On the way, I saw a gang of black convicts working at an embankment. The black 283and white stripes of their trousers were conspicuous: less conspicuous the chain attaching one leg of each man to a large bullet. A negro in khaki uniform stood sentry over them with fixed bayonet.

There is, it appears, surprisingly little serious crime in the Zone. There are three district judges, who, sitting in banc, form a supreme court. Trial by jury has recently been introduced, on the theory that the Constitution follows the flag. Two cases have been tried by jury: in the first a white man was acquitted who ought (said my informant) to have been found guilty; in the second, a negro was (justly) convicted with promptitude and despatch.

After breakfast at the delightful house of one of the officials at Culebra, my kind cicerone and I sallied forth to visit the famous Culebra Cut. But, while waiting for our motor to appear, he showed me two of the characteristic institutions of the Zone.

The first was an I.C.C. Club House—a spacious and admirably arranged recreation-home, containing a library, reading and writing rooms, billiard-room, gymnasium, skittle alley, and theatre for amateur performances and minstrel shows.

“The great enemy we have to fight,” said my friend, “is not the climate, and still less disease, but the monotony of the life. You cannot get good work out of discontented and homesick 284people—you cannot even retain their services. So it has been one of our most essential tasks to organize amusements, and make the leisure time of our people agreeable. This Culebra club-house is one of four already built, at the cost of about £7000 apiece. The others are at Empire, Gorgona, and Cristobal; and we have four or five more in contemplation.”

“And to whom are the club-houses open?”

“To all Gold Employees; and the dues are only one dollar a month.”

The Gold Employee means, on the face of it, the man or woman whose salary is calculated in United States currency, while the Silver Employee is the labourer, white or black, who works at so much an hour, calculated in the currency of Panama, in which a dollar is equal to just half the American or gold dollar. But to all intents and purposes, so far as I could make out, the Gold Employee is the white American, the Silver Employee is everybody else. There are 6000 American employees of the Commission; and, counting officials of the Panama Railway and women and children, there are altogether about 12,000 Americans on the Zone. The total number of employees varies considerably, but is somewhere about 40,000.

The second institution to which my friend introduced me was a Commissary Store, of which there are half a dozen in the Zone. In this large and roomy building commodities of every 285description are dispensed to employees of the Commission. I say dispensed, for nothing is bought for money. |A Socialistic Store.| Everything is paid for by coupons various values, issued to employees alone—the object being to ensure that none but they shall benefit by the institution. As the region is almost wholly unproductive, everything has to be imported from New York, New Orleans, and other points of the United States, from one to two thousand miles distant—the “perishables” being handled by a magnificent system of cold storage. As everything is supplied virtually at cost price, the Canal employee on the average pays for what he consumes rather less than he would in New York.

“But, my dear sir,” I said, as we left the Commissary Store, “this is sheer unmitigated State Socialism.”

“I know it,” he replied, “but I have always thought that Socialism under Carlyle’s ‘benevolent despot’ would be no bad thing. And we flatter ourselves that, in the I.C.C., the benevolent despot has, for once, been discovered.”

Our motor had by this time appeared—a motor running on the railroad—and we set off. |The Culebra Cut.| First we ran down the ordinary passenger track to Las Cascadas; and there, by means of an ingenious portable turntable, we faced about and got ourselves switched on to rails leading to the Cut. Times out of number 286had our motor-man to jump off and turn the points so as to run us into a siding while some huge “dirt train” rumbled past. The rule is that everything must give place to a “business” train. Only for the President of the United States was the line cleared.

Up in the North, an old soldier of the Union, now one of the most delightful of scholars and critics—why should I not name Professor Lounsbury?—had said to me, “I thought that the charge of Pickett’s Brigade, on the third day at Gettysburg, was the greatest sight that I ever had seen or would see; but the Culebra Cut really rivalled it.” I was curious to see where any analogy could lie between two such disparate spectacles; and, frankly, I could find it only in the cannonade of dynamite through which we had occasionally to run. But unquestionably the Cut is a wonderful spectacle, a tremendous demonstration of human and mechanical energy.

It is simply the transformation of a mountain into a valley. Imagine all the biggest railway cuttings you have ever seen ranged into a sort of giant stairway, along the two sides of a great prism-shaped valley; and imagine all these cuttings, at a dozen different levels, being daily and hourly deepened by an army of machines and men. The activity is enormous. Here we have whole companies of drills of various kinds boring the rock to be charged with dynamite; a little farther on we pause at a given signal, and presently come 287five or six detonations, one after the other, like a sharp discharge of artillery. The usual charge is about three hundred pounds; but on one occasion twenty-three tons were used in a single explosion, to blow away a whole hillside. When the ground has been loosened, or “fired,” as they call it, along comes that mammoth earth-eater, the steam-shovel, with its attendant train of dirt-cars, digs its shining steel teeth into the hillside, and munches it up at the rate of five cubic yards to a mouthful. These giant mouthfuls it spits out again one by one into the flat “Lidgertwood” cars on the adjoining track, five or six mouthfuls (I forget the exact number), constituting a carload. The train of some fifteen cars is, in fact, a long platform on wheels; for iron aprons join car to car and make the platform continuous. The cars, moreover, have but one side, so that, when the train arrives at the dumping-ground, a sort of steam plough is dragged by a cable along its whole length, and its huge burden of rock and soil is discharged in a very few minutes. For another consistency of soil, a tilting form of dirt-car is used. In short, no possible time- or labour-saving device is neglected. Even the shifting of temporary railway tracks, which is constantly required, is effected by a machine, which lifts whole sections of rails and “ties,” and deposits them in their new location.

Along the whole length of the Cut we made our way, zig-zagging from level to level. |Engineering Difficulties.| When 288we were in the very bottom of the “prism,” and the two sides of the eviscerated mountain were towering above us, I inquired what was to be the ultimate surface level of the water, and found that the surface level had not yet been reached by many feet.

For about half its length, the Canal will not have the aspect of a canal at all, but of a great lake. The low lands of the northern side of the Isthmus are to be entirely flooded by the damming at Gatun of the Chagres river. This lake-reservoir will have a surface area of about one hundred and ten square miles, and will serve as a regulator of the water supply. For instance, such a sudden rainfall as would cause the Chagres river to rise thirty-five feet in twenty-four hours, will raise the water in the dam only about three inches.

It is whispered in Colon that there is still one great engineering difficulty in the way of the enterprise, and that is to find an adequate foundation for the huge Gatun Dam. Whether such a difficulty exists I cannot say, but, if it does, I am very sure it will be overcome. Croakers also declare that it is well known that the proposed width of the locks at Gatun and La Boca (100 feet) will be quite inadequate for the greater Dreadnoughts and Lusitanias of the future, but that the engineers dare not tackle a larger “proposition.” These are very likely the idlest of rumours. The quidnuncs of Colon do not observe 289the admirable resolution adopted by the Cristobal Women’s Club, namely, “That every club-woman in the Canal Zone constitute herself a committee of one to foster favourable instead of adverse criticism of the conditions of the Zone and of the Isthmus of Panama.”

We had just dodged our way through the Cut, when the eleven o’clock whistle sounded, and work ceased for the “noon hour” of eleven to one, essential in this climate. We were thus enabled to make a pretty clear run into Panama. A recent rainfall had left some standing water along the line, and wherever we saw a pool we saw, too, a negro treating it with a can of crude petroleum. The mosquito has indeed a poor time of it in the domain of the I.C.C.

Regretfully I bade my hosts farewell and took the 5.30 train for Colon. As the twilight fell, about midway across the Isthmus, I saw, on the same patch of green, one set of negroes playing baseball, and another set playing cricket. The latter were, of course, Jamaicans, asserting their privileges as citizens of the British Empire. This, I am told, they are very apt to do, in and out of season. The moment they consider their dignity outraged, their retort is, “Let me tell you, sah, I am a British subject.” And, truly, for men of their hue, it is better to be British subjects than American citizens.

It was at Colon, the same evening, that I 290heard those questionings as to the engineering success of the Canal which I have recorded above. Neither of its scientific nor of its political aspects do I profess to judge; but I am much mistaken if the organization of the enterprise be not an achievement of which America has good reason to be proud.

INDEX

• Amalgamation of races, 56, 215, 217. (See also “Miscegenation.”)
• Alderman, E. A., 74, 76, 77, 154, 192, 218
• Ancon Hill, Panama, 282
• Armstrong, General S. C., 48, 117
• Atlanta, Georgia, 135
  •    ”   Compromise, 51, 113, 208
  •    ”   Police Court, 148
  •    ”   Riot, 52, 136, 206
  •    ”   University, 140

• Baker, Ray Stannard, 5, 18, 64, 105, 224
• Baltimore, Maryland, 16
• Biological argument, 227
• Birmingham, Alabama, 126
• “Black Belt,” The, 67
• “Blind Tigers,” 147, 151
• Boll-Weevil, The, 77
• Bratton, Bishop, 43, 71
• Bruce, P. A., 191
• Buttrick, Wallace, 77

• Cable, G. W., 87
• Calhoun, William P., 211
• Canal Zone, The, 280
  •    ”    ”   Club Houses in, 284
  •    ”    ”   Commissary Stores in, 285
• Chain-gangs, 33, 99
• Charleston, South Carolina, 176
• Chicago, 3, 7
• Child labour, 18, 90
• 293“Clubs” and alcohol, 147, 150
• Colon (Aspinwall), 276
• Colour-Problem, Reality of, 9, 197
• “Coloured Man,” in Jamaica, distinct from negro, 272
• Convict labour, 96
• Cooper, Edward E., 226
• Cuba, 23, 247, 263
  •    ”   Colour-line in, 250
  •    ”   Revolution in, 253
• Culebra Cut, Panama, 287

• Demonstration farms, 79
• Deportation of negroes, Proposed, 235
• Discrimination, 5, 40, 70, 74, 97, 127, 139, 162, 176, 234
• Dispensary system, 153
• “Dooley, Mr.,” 146
• Du Bois, W. E. B., 30, 33, 45, 52, 56, 61, 75, 99, 140, 162, 208
• Dumas, Alexandre, 226, 231
  •    ”      ”   Fils, 46

• Education, 17, 22, 25, 43, 76, 104, 128
  •    ”   Academic, 17, 50, 122, 141
  •    ”   Agricultural, 76
  •    ”   Compulsory, 78, 128
  •    ”   Industrial, 17, 50, 57, 109, 119, 192
  •    ”   Board, General, 76
• Equality, Political, 9, 72
  • 294   ”   Race, 43, 231
• Ethnological argument, 217

• Finot, Jean, 219
• Florida, 177
• Florida East Coast Railway, 178, 180
• Frissell, H. B., 119
• Foraker, Senator, 107

• Gatun Dam, Panama, 289
• Goethals, Colonel, 281
• “Grandfather clause,” 171
• Graves, John Temple, 238

• Hampton Institute, 48, 114
• Havana, 23, 247, 257
• Hookworm, 3, 194, 202

• Immigration, European, 133, 196
• Indians, American, 123
  •    ”   Asiatic, 183
• Instinct, 8, 9, 16, 71, 201, 217
• Isthmian Canal Commission, 280, 283

• Jacksonville, Florida, 177
• “Jai Alai,” 257
• Jamaica, 265
• “Jim Crow Car,” 70, 131, 139, 234
• Justice, Administration of, 96

• Kingston, Jamaica, 265
• Knapp, S. A., 79
  •  ”   Arthur, 81

• “Lilywhite Policy,” 34, 171
• Louisville, Kentucky, 29, 36
• Lynching, 24, 26, 33, 139, 169, 216, 235
  •  ”     Statistics of, 27

• McKinley, Carl, 235
• Marriage of white with black, where legal, 5
• Massacre, Possibility of, 206
• Matanzas, Cuba, 263
• 295Memphis, Tennessee, 38, 59
• Miami, Florida, 179
• Miller, Kelly, 101, 161, 215, 223
• Miscegenation, 64, 132, 214, 231
• Montgomery, Alabama, 64, 94
• Mosquitos, “Anopheles” and “Stegomyia,” 280
• Mulattos, 108, 129, 213, 225, 230
  •  ”     do not “breed straight,” 63
  •  ”     separate class in Jamaica, 272
• Murphy, Edgar Gardner, 26, 30, 35, 60, 77, 95, 101, 105, 190, 216, 273

• Negro and Jew, 215
  • ”   and Prohibition, 149, 195
  • ”   as domestic servant, 18
  • ”   barbers, 30
  • ”   “Body odour” of, 144
  • ”   churches, 139, 163
  • ”   crime, 26, 28, 100, 142, 200
  • ”   Cuban, 251
  • ”   disfranchisement, 34, 171, 212, 234
  • ”   education, 17, 22, 25, 43, 104, 174
  • ”   homes, 32, 35, 53, 156
  • ”   Inferiority of, 221
  • ”   Instinctive feeling towards, 8, 144, 183
  • ”   in the North, 7, 209
  • ”   Jamaican, 272, 290
  • ”   labour unnecessary to South, 211
  • ”   lawyers, 31, 36, 98
  • ”   loyalty during Civil War, 25
  • ”   morality, 64, 139, 214
  • ”   mortality, 193, 205
  • ”   Northern feeling towards, 3, 14, 21, 209
  • ”   Numbers of, 16, 93, 189
  • ”   peonage, 102, 234
  • ”   policemen, 169
  • ”   precocity, 129
  • ”   professional men, 33
  • ”   Progressive, 142

296 ”   religion, 34, 74, 139 ”   State, A, 237 ”   Rural, 69, 193 ”   taxation, 104, 169 ”   thrift, 54, 175 ”   Urban, 69, 193 ”   vitality, 189 ”   wealth, 32, 33, 35, 157 Negrophobia “not matter of colour,” 144 New Orleans, 87, 153 New York, 7, 15, 195

• .sp 1
• .ix
• Old Point Comfort, 114
• Olivier, Sir Sydney, 200, 203, 227

• Page, Thomas Nelson, 25, 27, 33, 138, 193, 207, 209
• Palma, President, 252
• Panama Canal, 276
  •  ”   City, 279
  •  ”   Isthmus of, 278
• “Pan-mixture,” 219
• Patterson, Professor, 106
• “Pelota,” 257
• Peonage, 102, 234
• Philadelphia, 21, 195
• Phillips, Dr., 127
• “Poor Whites,” 3, 18, 195
• Population, Proportion of black to white, 16, 93, 189, 196
  •      ”   Increase of negro, 36, 189, 196
• Port Antonio, Jamaica, 268
• Prohibition, 146

• Race Antipathy, 143, 198, 207
• Railway Stations, 126
• Rape, 22, 24, 59
• Reconstruction Period, 33, 43, 56, 60, 138
• Rockefeller, John D., 77, 84, 194
• 297Roosevelt, President, 13, 107, 227, 256
• Royce, Professor, 198

• St. Augustine, Florida, 178
• Santiago di Cuba, 264
• Segregation of Negroes, Proposed, 233
• Slavery, 3, 25, 32, 230
• Slave-trade, 201, 220
• Smith, W. B., 27, 129
• Southern States an Anglo-Saxon community, 218
• Southern States a “white man’s land,” 204, 229
• Southern States, Poverty of, 77, 105, 202
• Southern States, Religion of white population, 73, 143, 154
• Southern States, Wealth of, 76
• Stone, A. H., 23, 93, 97, 157, 188, 190, 211, 243
• Street-car episodes, 11, 30, 93, 176

• Taft, President, 254, 255
• Timber, Waste of, 20, 135, 179
• Thomas, William Hannibal, 33, 144, 193
• “Toothbrush, Gospel of,” 54, 70
• Turner, Herbert, 119
• Tuskegee, 49, 107, 116, 141

• Vicksburg, Mississippi, 68, 85
• Virginia Hot Springs, 19

• Washington, Booker T., 35, 42, 45, 48, 65, 69, 97, 121, 192, 196, 208, 215, 274
• Washington, Mrs. Booker, 108
• Washington, D. C., 4, 6, 11, 16
• Wells, H. G., 199, 201
• West Indies, British, 188, 200, 203
• “White Negroes,” #125, 170, 174, 223