e have got to learn that we live in an industrial
age, and success demands of an employer that he utilise the most
available labour. After Green was discharged, George Brown was the
best mason left. He gets more work out of the men than Green did--even
in the old slave times Negroes made the best of overseers; they knew
their own people better than white men could and got more out of them.
When the mill is completed it will give employment to five hundred
white women and fifty white men. But every dog must have his day, so
give the Negro his."

The colonel attached no great importance to the incident; the places
of the workmen were filled, and the work went forward. He knew the
Southern sensitiveness, and viewed it with a good-natured tolerance,
which, however, stopped at injustice to himself or others. The very
root of his reform was involved in the proposition to discharge a
competent foreman because of an unreasonable prejudice. Matters of
feeling were all well enough in some respects--no one valued more
highly than the colonel the right to choose his own associates--but
the right to work and to do one's best work, was fundamental, as was
the right to have one's work done by those who could do it best. Even
a healthy social instinct might be perverted into an unhealthy and
unjust prejudice; most things evil were the perversion of good.

The feeling with which the colonel thus came for the first time
directly in contact, a smouldering fire capable always of being fanned
into flame, had been greatly excited by the political campaign which
began about the third month after his arrival in Clarendon. An
ambitious politician in a neighbouring State had led a successful
campaign on the issue of Negro disfranchisement. Plainly
unconstitutional, it was declared to be as plainly necessary for the
preservation of the white race and white civilisation. The example had
proved contagious, and Fetters and his crowd, who dominated their
State, had raised the issue there. At first the pronouncement met with
slight response. The sister State had possessed a Negro majority,
which, in view of reconstruction history was theoretically capable of
injuring the State. Such was not the case here. The State had survived
reconstruction with small injury. White supremacy existed, in the
main, by virtue of white efficiency as compared with efficiency of a
lower grade; there had been places, and instances, where other methods
had been occasional