PART I SOUTHWARD HO! (continued 2)

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.

85

X NEW ORLEANS

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:

“And shallow rivers, by whose falls

Melodious birds sing madrigals.”

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

“As it fell upon a day

In the merry month of May,”

and I left him stumbling over the accentuation of

“King Pandion he is dead,

All thy friends are lapt in lead.”

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.

A Champion of the Children.

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!

An Island Inferno.

“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.”

94

XI CRIME-SLAVERY AND DEBT-SERFDOM^[27]

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:

“For a’ the blude that’s shed on earth

Rins through the springs o’ that countrie.”

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.

Inter-Racial 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.

104

XII AN INDUSTRIAL UNIVERSITY

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.

Mr. Washington’s Staff.

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.

114

XIII HAMPTON: AN AFTERMATH

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.

In Pastures Green.

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:—

“The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want;

He makes me down to lie

In pastures green; He leadeth me

The quiet waters by.”

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 Pious Founder.

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—

Principles and Methods.

“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.”

“A Changed Ideal.”

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.”

A Happy Family.

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—

IMPERIAL LAUNDRY

WE WASH FOR WHITE PEOPLE ONLY.

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.

The Mills of God.

“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,

‘God worketh in mysterious ways,

His wonders to perform.’

—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.”

Judge Not, that Ye be not Judged.

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.

135

XV THE CITY OF A HUNDRED HILLS

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:”

“Deeply religious and intensely democratic as are the mass of the whites (in the South), they feel acutely the false position in which the negro problems place them.... But ... the present social position of the negro stands as a menace and a portent before even the most open-minded; if there were nothing to charge against the negro but his blackness or other physical peculiarities, they argue, the problem would be comparatively simple; but what can we say to his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime?”

“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!

146

XVI PROHIBITION

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.

First-hand Evidence.

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:

“Hush, little grog-shop, don’t you cry:

You’ll be a drug-store by-and-by!“

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:

KILLED AT A BLIND TIGER.

Nashville (Tenn.), April 29.—“At a blind tiger on Knott Creek, Kentucky, Henry Pratt, a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, shot and killed Howard Maunds, also aged thirteen. The boys were intoxicated, and the killing followed a game of cards.”

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.

Has Prohibition Come to Stay?

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.”

156

XVII THE NEGRO HOME AND THE NEGRO CHURCH

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.