only therefore, the South is safe. What we deprecate is the systematic warfare that is waged in some quarters against this instinct as a mere unenlightened "prejudice" whereof we should be ashamed—the attempt to battle it down or else to drug it to sleep in the name of morality or religion or higher humanity. When our Northern brothers, by precept and by example, throw the whole weight of their immense authority in favour of a practice that would be ruinous to the South, are they walking according to love?

We do not deny that there may be cases that move our sympathy; that appeal strongly to our sense of fair play, of right between man and man. In and of itself, it may sound strange and unjust and even foolish to deny to Booker Washington a seat at the table of a white man, even should he be distinctly Mr. Washington's inferior. But the matter must not be decided in and of itself—no man either lives for himself or dies for himself. It must be judged in its larger bearings, by its universal interests, where it lays hold upon the ages, under the aspect of eternity. We refuse to let the case rest in the low and narrow category of Duty to the Individual; we range it where it belongs, in the higher and broader category of Obligation to the Race.

And this conducts us to a final remark. Even at the risk of a sus Minervam we venture to correct a great journal, The Outlook, in one of its statements. It assures its readers that the recent criticism does not represent the real South of intelligence, generosity, and true breeding, but is a survival in a few persons, who have not had opportunities of large contact with the world—of an antiquated and incomprehensible prejudice. Such words are doubtless well-meant; but they are ill-meaning, and if we understand them at all, they invert the facts of the case. We have some acquaintance with some of the best elements of the Southern society, some of the best representatives in nearly all the walks of Southern life. We believe the virtue and intelligence of "the real South" are eminently conservative, earnestly deprecate intemperance in language, and are sworn enemies to sectional animosity. Perhaps, in their zeal to cultivate the friendliest relations with their Northern brethren, they may guard their expressions too carefully and repress their true feelings. But he who supposes that the South will ever waver a hair's breadth from her position of uncompromising hostility to any and every form of social equality between the races, deceives himself only less than that other who mistakes her race instinct, the palladium of her future, for an ignorant prejudice and who fails to perceive that her resolution to maintain White racial supremacy within her borders is deepest-rooted and most immutable precisely where her civic virtue, her intelligence, and her refinement are at their highest and best.

CHAPTER TWO

IS THE NEGRO INFERIOR?

In the foregoing discussion, it did not seem well to interrupt the current of thought by any proof of the assumed inferiority of the Negro, or of the degeneracy induced by the intermixture of types too widely diverse.

Yet these assumptions are, indeed, the two hinges of the whole controversy. Once conceded the racial inferiority of the Black and the half-way nature of the half-breed, and the general contention of the South is proved, her general attitude justified. It is not strange, then, that the doughtiest champions of equality, in their very latest deliverances, find no choice left them but to deny that the Negro is an inferior or a backward race.

Such, by way of high example, are two world-renowned metropolitan journals, whose general excellence and powerful influence for good in our civic life cannot be disputed, but whose intense straining for Justice and Equity in the present has utterly blinded them no less to obvious facts and principles of science than to the highest and holiest rights of humanity in the future. The one, in speaking of racial "inferiors," incloses the word in contemptuous guillemets and declares that when Mr. Darwin says: "Some of them—for instance, the negro and the European—are so distinct that, if specimens had been brought to a naturalist without any further information, they would undoubtedly have been considered by him as good and true species," he "raises no question of superior or inferior;" and it adds, "Nature knows no forward or backward races, fauna or flora"—an oracle whose real meaning can only be guessed at.

The other is more specific. It maintains: "Physically, the negro is equal to the Caucasian. He is as tall and as strong. He has all the physical basis and all the brain capacity necessary for the development of intellectual power.... No evidence has yet been adduced which proves that the Negro is physically, intellectually, essentially, necessarily an inferior race." ... "The assumption that the Caucasian is an essentially superior race ... is provincial, unintelligent and unchristian."

When we first meet with such denials, we are almost dumbfounded; we rub our eyes and exclaim with Truthful James: