is a book which is said to have been widely sold throughout the South, and which seems to be written for no other purpose but to arouse the hostility of the Whites against the Negroes. The title page reads: “The Negro a Beast or In the Image of God The Reasoner of the Age, the Revelator of the Century! The Bible as it is! The Negro and his Relation to the Human Family! The Negro a beast, but created with articulate speech, and hands, that he may be of service to his master—the White man. The Negro not the Son of Ham, Neither can it be proven by the Bible, and the argument of the theologian who would claim such, melts to mist before the thunderous and convincing arguments of this masterful book.” This savage work quotes with approval an alleged statement of a Northern man that inside the next thirty years the South will be obliged to “Re-enslave, kill or export the bulk of its Negro population.” It insists that the Negro is an ape, notwithstanding the fact that he has not four hands; he has no soul; the mulatto has no soul; the expression “The human race” is a false term invented by Plato “in the atheistic school of evolution.” The serpent in the garden of Eden was a Negro. Cain was also mixed up in the detestable business of miscegenation, for the Bible says, “Sin lieth at thy door, and unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.” The writer has taken pains to point out that “The mere fact that the inspired writer refers to it in the masculine gender is no evidence that it was not a female.” The mulatto being “doomed by Divine edict to instant death ... neither the mulatto nor his ultimate offspring can acquire the right to live. This being true, it follows that these monstrosities have no rights social, financial, political or religious that man need respect.” Wherever you find the word beast in the Bible it means the Negro!

If such passionate and rancorous books were all that sprang from the South, the problem would end in a race war; but as will be seen throughout this discussion, there are two camps of opinion and utterance among Southern white people. On one side the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it by force; on the other side there is a body of white writers who go deeper into the subject, who recognize the responsibility of the white race as the dominant element, and who preach and expect peace and uplift. Such a writer is A. H. Shannon in his “Racial Integrity and Other Features of the Negro Problem” (printed in Nashville and Dallas, 1907). In good temper and at much length he argues that the Negro owes to the white man a debt of gratitude for bringing his ancestors out of African barbarism, though the principal evils of the negro question are due to the inferior race.

A widely read book of the same type is Thomas Nelson Page’s “The Negro: the Southerner’s Problem” (1904). Mr. Page accepts as a fact the existence of various classes of Negroes self-respecting and worthy of the respect of others; and he believes, on the whole, that the colored race deserve commendation. “The Negro has not behaved unnaturally,” he says; “he has, indeed, in the main behaved well.” The main difficulty with Mr. Page’s book is that it fails to go to the bottom of the causes which underlie the trouble; and that while admitting the fact that a considerable fraction of the negro race is improving, he sees no ultimate solution. He suggests but three alternatives: removal, which he admits to be impossible; amalgamation, which is equally unthinkable; and an absolute separation of social and apparently of economic life, which could be accomplished only by turning over definite regions for negro occupation. Starting out with undoubted good will to the black race, the writer ends with little hope of a distinct bettering of conditions.

Quite a different point of view is William Benjamin Smith’s “The Color Line—A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn” (1905), which is based on the assertion that the Negro is no part of the human race and hence that amalgamation is a crime against nature. The general trend of Professor Smith’s book is an argument, somewhat technical and not convincing, that the black man is physically, mentally, and morally so different from the white man that he may be set outside the community. This was of course the argument for slavery, and if it be true, is still an argument for peonage or some other recognized position of dependency. From this deduction, however, Smith sheers off; he uses the inferiority of the Negro chiefly as an argument against the mixture of the races, which he believes to be a danger; and he makes an ingenious distinction between the present mixture in which the fathers were Whites and a possible future amalgamation in which the fathers might be Negroes.

The most suggestive recent study of the negro question is Edgar Gardner Murphy’s “Problems of the Present South” (1904). Mr. Murphy is an Alabamian, very familiar with Southern conditions. While not optimistic—nobody in the South is optimistic on the race question—he recognizes the possibility of a much better race feeling than the present one. It is interesting to see that this man who, as champion of the movement against child labor in the South, has been so successful in relieving children of a terrible burden, feels sure that the worst thing that can be done for the community is to keep the Negro ignorant. He is perfectly willing to face the issue that those who show the qualities of manhood should have the reward of manhood, namely, the right to participate in politics; and the acknowledgment of that right he says does not imply race fusion. He gives up nothing of his Southern birthright, and courageously asserts the ability of his section to work out its problem for itself.

Genial in tone, full of the ripe thought of an accomplished writer is William Garrott Brown, “The Lower South” (1902), which is not a discussion of the race question so much as of the character and point of view of the planter before the Civil War and the Southern gentleman since that time, a plea for a sympathetic understanding of the real difficulties of the South and its sense of responsibility.

These five books are proof not only that there is wide divergence of views, but also that genuine Southern men, strongly loyal to their own section, can set an example of moderation of speech, breadth of view, and willingness to accept and to promote a settlement of the Southern question through the elevation of the people, white and black, who have ultimate power over that question.

In slavery days almost all the discussion of race questions came from the Whites, Southern or Northern. Now, there is a school of negro controversialists and observers, several of whom have had the highest advantages of education and of a personal acquaintance with the problems which they discuss, and thus possess some advantages over many white writers. About twenty years ago George W. Williams published his “History of the Negro Race in America” (1883), which, though to a large degree a compilation, is a respectable and useful book. Another writer, William H. Thomas, in his “The American Negro” (1901), has made admissions with regard to the moral qualities of his fellow Negroes which have been widely taken up and quoted by anti-Negro writers. Charles W. Chesnutt, in several books of collected stories, of which “The Conjure Woman” (1899) is the liveliest, and in two novels, “The House Behind the Cedars” (1900) and the “Marrow of Tradition” (1901), has criticised the rigid separation of races. No man feels more keenly the race distinctions than one like Chesnutt, more Caucasian than African in his make-up. One of the best of their writers is Kelly Miller, who has contributed nearly fifty articles