ing. The American, once having made them
citizens, cannot unmake them. He says, in his newspapers, they ought to
be elevated by education. He is trying this, but it is likely to be
a long job, because black blood is much more adhesive than white, and
throws back with annoying persistence. When the negro gets religion he
returns directly as a hiving bee to the first instincts of his people.
Just now a wave of religion is sweeping over some of the Southern
States.

Up to the present two Messiahs and a Daniel have appeared, and several
human sacrifices have been offered up to these incarnations. The Daniel
managed to get three young men, who he insisted were Shadrach, Meshach,
and Abednego, to walk into a blast furnace, guaranteeing non-combustion.
They did not return. I have seen nothing of this kind, but I have
attended a negro church. They pray, or are caused to pray by themselves
in this country. The congregation were moved by the spirit to groans and
tears, and one of them danced up the aisle to the mourners' bench. The
motive may have been genuine. The movements of the shaken body were
those of a Zanzibar stick dance, such as you see at Aden on the
coal-boats, and even as I watched the people, the links that bound them
to the white man snapped one by one, and I saw before me the hubshi
(woolly hair) praying to a God he did not understand. Those neatly
dressed folk on the benches, and the gray-headed elder by the window,
were savages, neither more nor less.

What will the American do with the negro? The South will not consort
with him. In some States miscegenation is a penal offence. The North is
every year less and less in need of his services.

And he will not disappear. He will continue as a problem. His friends
will urge that he is as good as the white man. His enemies--well, you
can guess what his enemies will do from a little incident that followed
on a recent appointment by the President. He made a negro an assistant
in a post-office where--think of it!--he had to work at the next desk
to a white girl, the daughter of a colonel, one of the first families
of Georgia's modern chivalry, and all the weary, weary rest of it.
The Southern chivalry howled, and hanged or burned some one in effigy.
Perhaps it was the President, and perhaps it was the negro--but the
principle remains the same. They said it was an insult. It is not good
to be a negro in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

But this is noth