W

HATEVER antagonism exists between the Southern whites and the negroes is pretty well known in all its phases to the country at large; but the more hopeful aspects of their mutual relations seem little understood beyond our own borders. It is known, for instance, that many Southern people hope for no solution of the negro problem which will allow the negro to remain in the South on friendly terms with his white neighbor. Colonization, voluntary or enforced, is their expedient. There are also those who prophesy the extinction of the negro as a natural result of a higher civilization acting upon a lower race. But side by side with these impatient or despondent people is a large and growing class of Southern whites whose point of view is less well known abroad. They agree with the other class with regard to the facts of the negro's needs and deficiencies-these are too near at hand and too clamorous to be overlooked or mistaken. But, while assenting to the general conditions, they note the increasingly numerous exceptions to the rule, and draw from the acknowledged facts more hopeful conclusions than do their neighbors. It is for this class that I wish to speak.

There is among us so strong a disapproval of some aspects of negro education that we are sometimes thought of as opposed to their education altogether. One fact should end this misapprehen

sion. The Southern whites, though still paying ninety-two per cent. of all money for school purposes, spent, in the twentyfive years following the war, $120,000,000 on schools for the negroes. In relation to the need it was a small sum, but it was great in relation to the poverty from which it came.

The feeling against college training for negrocs is certainly strong, but the cause for it is not hard to understand. It is always both an easy and a dangerous thing to develop the minds of ignorant people faster than their moral natures; and many of the negroes have been thrust into a new world to which they are imperfectly related mentally, and not at all related morally. Such negroes despise the old life of manual labor, though incapable of making an honest living in any other way, while their wants and ambitions have been multiplied. Whatever their color, people like that are a menace to any community; and the Southern people have suffered enough from the mistaken beginnings of negro education to be pardoned if they are oversensitive at this point. But they do not deny the negro's right to a college education. The Southern Methodist Church-as a mem ber of that Church I can speak more definitely of it than of any other has long been committed to the higher education of the negro in Paine Institute at Augusta, Ga. This institution is the joint property of the Colored Methodist Episcopal

Church-a negro organization-and of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and has the official indorsement of the General Conference as well as of the several Annual Conferences. Its President is a member of an old South Carolina family, and its faculty is made up of Southern white and negro teachers. For years this school has been sending out men and women of good scholarship and fine character to become leaders of their race as teachers, preachers, and citizens.

In regard to social equality, the better class of negroes do not want it. Certainly they will never get it, South or North, for at least as far in the future as the mind of the white man can project itself; but this fact does not prevent mutual kindliness nor respect. In the best stores of our Southern cities white women can be seen to wait while the clerk attends to the colored customer who preceded them, and not one of them apparently gives it a thought. In the banks negro men take their place in line, and white men wait their turn behind them. Down on our public square, where the street is being repaved, white men and negroes work side by side, as they did to build the house in which I live. If antipathy exists, a friendly spirit is still more evident. No honorable negro lacks the respect of his white neighbors. This respect does not take the form of social intercourse, which such negroes desire as little as we; but it is none the less expressed and understood.

It is difficult for the people of the North to understand either the pressure of the whole great race problem upon us as a people, or its endless ramifications into the smallest details of our individual daily lives. The sharpest criticism of the negro we ever hear comes from the Northerners who come to live among us, and who find the dirt, shiftlessness, and dishonesty of the colored laborers, men and women, quite beyond endurance. They cannot understand why we "put up " with it all, and look askance at us, as lazy and shiftless ourselves-an opinion, be it observed, from which we radically dissent! After years of painful discipline--if they do not give up the struggle first, and return to the land of cleanliness and trained workers-they come to one of two conclusions. Either they do their

work themselves, and are looked down upon by the darkies as " po' white trash;" or they adopt the attitude of their Southern neighbors, endure the pilfering and the slipshod work, and do what they can to awaken in these childish and undeveloped creatures some idea of trustworthiness and honor. It is not an attractive task. The long procession of incompetents tramp through our homes and business houses, never content long enough anywhere for the kindest or wisest of us to make much of an impres sion on them.

It is the more difficult to make any lasting impression upon them for the reason that, as a race, they are grateful only superficially, and in the immediate presence of expected benefits. But those of us who are discouraged by this patent and ubiquitous fact forget that gratitude is not a primal instinct; it is a late development in the progress of any race from barbarism, as in the growth of the normal civilized child. An illustration such as any housekeeper can furnish is found in a girl whom I tried hard to help during the year in which she cooked for me, and who left me at a moment's notice one morning when told that, on account of unusual rain and mud, the porch needed an extra scrubbing. I was ill and without other help, but that troubled her not a whit. Two weeks later the "collector," finding that she had left me and thinking her unprotected, tried to take away the furniture she had nearly paid for on the installment plan. She came to me with the untroubled confidence of a child, and of course received help as freely as she asked it. Embarrassment was of another world. Such matters are refreshing from their comical side, and should burden nobody with a sense of the negro's depravity. They spring from an undeveloped mental and moral consciousness. A few generations of reasonable patience and the negro will have passed this trying point.

But there is a darker side. It would be difficult to exaggerate the lack of morals among the mass of the negroes. Yet the whole human race has come up from the depths in this respect; and, remembering how recently their forefathers were sav ages, the situation is not without encouragement. Whatever the height of our

own moral superiority, it must, in God's eyes, just measure the depth of our debt to the weaker race. The difference pledges us, not to condemnation, but to service.

But there are chaste negroes and honest ones. I know many personally, and I cannot think my own experience very exceptional. A woman who was in my house thirteen years-a girl grown up since the war-is a fair specimen of this class. I believe in her virtue entirely, and would trust her with anything I possess, while her long and faithful service compels my genuine affection; and I am but one of thousands who could bear a like testimony.

It is in these exceptional negroes, and in their constantly, if slowly, increasing numbers, that we find a visible warrant for our faith in the future of their race, as well as for our faith in the providence which has bound up their future with that of our whole country.

Southern white women are sometimes said to be indifferent to the needs of the colored people. The charge is not without foundation; yet very many of the negro's best friends and most sympathetic helpers are to be found among the women who have inherited this attitude toward them from their mothers and grandmothers. In their painful progress from barbarism the negroes owe much to the Christian Southern women of the past, and more than is known to those of the present.

The new industrial school at Paine Institute is a sign, small but significant, of a growing desire among Southern women to help their darker neighbors through organized effort. It is also an indication of the growing belief that a final solution of the whole difficult problem will be reached for the mass of the race along the lines laid down at Hamp ton and Tuskegee. This school has been enterprised by the Woman's Board of Home Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, which is composed of women from every Southern State. A young colored woman, a graduate of Hampton, was placed at Paine this fall as instructress, and Dr. Walker writes that she is doing fine work notwithstanding the temporary lack of suitable accommodations. We have just let the contract for two industrial cottages, to be erected at once.

We offered the work to a negro contractor living in Atlanta, an ex-slave; but, to his regret and ours, his time and resources for months ahead were already pledged in contracts with white people living in that city, and he could not undertake it.

It is chiefly industrial education, with its already notable good results, that is changing the attitude of many of the thinking men of the South to one of unmistakable hopefulness. Dr. J. J. Tigert, the editor of the Southern Methodist Review," and one of the acknowledged leaders of his denomination, says in a recent editorial:

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We confess, for our own part, that we no longer share the pessimism with respect to the insolubility of the problem which has seemed

to dominate much of Southern thought and sentiment. There are too many indications of the steady improvement of the negro in his Southern habitat. Commercially, educationally, religiously, the colored man is on the up grade. Many of his race are earning the cordial respect of the white people of the South by good conduct alike on the farm and in the shop, in the school and in the church. Social and moral distinctions, which are recognized by the negroes themselves, are rapidly developing among them. He who looks upon the race as a common mass of uniform quality is vastly mistaken. The worthless elements are no doubt still present in large proportions; but the worthy elements are visible and growing to him who has eyes to see. Time and patience will be needed for a permanent solution of all the difficulties of the situation; but the practical demands of business life, and various influences, both emancipating and conservative, which grow out of daily association and common interests, will make their scarcely perceptible contributions until, in ways whose operation is not measurable, but whose results are determinative, the vast and complex problem of the two races living side by side in concord and amity will be solved.

To some at the North these words may seem over-sanguine in view of the recent wholesale disfranchisement of the negroes in several of the Southern States. The charge which is brought against these States is not that negroes unfit to vote are excluded from the ballot, but that white men equally ignorant are not excluded also. But whenever the great majority of intelligent citizens in any State do a thing which to those at a distance appears unjust, it is safe to conclude that the action cannot be

explained by the assumption that the intelligent majority has either laid aside its intelligence or has acted from unworthy motives. Explanations like that do not

explain, North or South. Mistakes may be made, the correcting of which will be costly enough; but in every State in the Union there is enough of the spirit of patriotism and of fair play to prevent the securing of any great majority for an act of selfish tyranny. As a matter of fact, the ignorant white vote at the South has never been, as at the North, a menace to good government. Such voters have not been gathered into towns, but scattered through the country, and coming into frequent and friendly touch with the educated classes both in the country and in the towns where they go to do their trading. They have stood entirely apart from questions of municipal government, and have been overwhelmingly on the side of law and order in the country communities. The dangers of our political life have come from the manipulation of the ignorant colored vote by a few unscrupulous whites. It is impossible for the North to realize or the South to forget the horror of the days when that vote ruled the South. In the interest of both races, for the sake of justice and decency, it must never rule again. The States which have barred the ignorant black vote but not the ignorant white vote have drawn, not a color line, but what they believe to be a danger line. All this is said, not in defense of an abstract principle, but in explanation of a concrete fact.

There are many men in the South who do not favor the retention of the ignorant white vote. The majority of them, as might be expected, are found in those States where the ignorant black vote is less overwhelming or the ignorant white vote more significant than elsewhere--that is, where the conditions tend to approximate those of the North.

It should be remembered that those States which have disfranchised these ignorant voters are taxing every resource equally with the other States to educate the negroes and to fit them for citizenship. There is neither the intention nor the wish to keep them disqualified, nor to bar them out when qualified. They are admitted as voters, and will be for years to come, on a lower level than would admit them to suffrage in one of the wisest Northern States. A mistake may have been made, but it was in the sincere belief that it was best for all classes, and with no

desire to oppress the helpless or to shirk the duty laid upon the South of solving the negro problem in justice and honor.

To those of us who believe most thoroughly in a restricted suffrage the country over, there is a danger in the future which is as yet unknown among us. The rapid growth of our manufactures is drawing the scattered country population into our cities and laying the foundations of the Southern slum. The conditions which have hitherto safeguarded the ignorant white vote are rapidly changing, and the seeds of a new peril to clean municipal government are being sown. Unless the school term can be lengthened and compulsory education laws passed throughout the South, our children will find that the color line and the danger line no longer coincide. The ignorant white voter of to-day will give no trouble; but what of to-day's mill children, controlled a few years hence by the political boss? The spectacle so long familiar at the North may yet be seen at the South—the intelligent white vote arrayed against the ignorant white vote, and fighting it in the interest of good government.

But it is with the present situation that we are now concerned. We cannot, if we would, deny the crimes against the negroes which have been committed among us; but we believe that the great majority of whites will yet find a way to put an end to that which they condemn, and that the negroes themselves will eventually be raised above the moral level on which the terrible provocation is given.

It is a tremendous task which is laid upon the Southern whites, both in behalf of the negroes and to hold fast by patience and hopefulness within their own hearts. It is for the North, free from the daily burdens and conflicts which that task involves, to give us more of generous and brotherly understanding. With all her heroic effort, the white children of the South in many places are still inadequately provided for; to meet even in a small measure the needs of the colored population often seems to involve the sacrifice of needed provision for the whites. There is nothing comparable to it in all the North or West. But, whatever the South may lack, she has never yet turned her back upon difficulties nor failed in the

power of sacrifice for her ideal of duty. As much as in us is, we are debtors to the whites and to the negroes also. Southern statesmanship and Southern

Christianity have long since owned the debt, and by the grace of God they will yet pay it in full.

Nashville, Tenn.

"The woods are hushed, their music is no more; The leaf is dead, the yearning passed away: New leaf, new life-the days of frost are o'er : New life, new love, to suit the newer day."

THE WOODS ARE HUSHED

T was near the middle of the afternoon of an autumnal day, on the wide, grassy plateau of Central Kentucky. The Eternal Power seemed to have quitted the universe and left all nature folded in the calm of the Eternal Peace. Around the pale-blue dome of the heavens a few pearl-colored clouds hung motionless, as though the wind had been withdrawn to other skies. Not a crimson leaf floated downward through the soft, silvery light that filled the atmosphere and created the sense of lonely, unimaginable spaces. This light overhung the far-rolling landscape of field and meadow and wood, crowning with faint radiance the remoter low-swelling hill-tops, and deepening into dreamy half-shadows on their eastern slopes. Nearer, it fell in a white flake on an unstirred sheet of water which lay along the edge of a mass of somber-hued woodland, and nearer still it touched to springlike brilliancy a level, green meadow on the hither edge of the water, where a group of Durham cattle stood with reversed flanks near the gleaming trunks of some leafless

Copyrighted, 1891, 1899, by Harper & Brothers, New

York.

sycamores. Still nearer, it caught the top of the brown foliage of a little bent oaktree and burned it into a silvery flame. It lit on the back and the wings of a crow flying heavily in the path of its rays, and made his blackness as white as the breast of a swan. In the immediate foreground it sparkled in minute gleams along the stalks of the coarse, dead weeds that fell away from the legs and the flanks of a white horse, and slanted across the face of the rider and through the ends of his gray hair, which straggled from beneath his soft black hat.

The horse, old and patient and gentle, stood with low-stretched neck and closed eyes half asleep in the faint glow of the waning heat; and the rider, the sole human presence in all the field, sat looking across the silent autumnal landscape, sunk in reverie. Both horse and rider seemed but harmonious elements in the panorama of still life, and completed the picture of a closing scene.

To the man it was a closing scene. From the rank, fallow field through which he had been riding he was now surveying, for the last time, the many features of a landscape that had been familiar to him from the beginning of memory. In the afternoon and the autumn of his age he was about to rend the last ties that bound him to his former life, and, like one wh