use of color or
previous condition of servitude, tell the truth, and say this: 'We
tried for many years to live in Mississippi, and share sovereignty and
dominion with the Negro, and we saw our institutions crumbling.... We
rose in the majesty and highest type of Anglo-Saxon manhood, and took
the reins of government out of the hands of the carpet-bagger and
the Negro, and, so help us God, from now on we will never share any
sovereignty or dominion with him again.'"--Governor JAMES K. VARDAMAN,
Mississippi, 1904.

During the past decade, newspaper and magazine articles galore, and not
a few books, have been written on what is called the "Race Problem," the
problem caused by the presence in this country of some ten millions of
black and variously-shaded colored people known as Negroes. But, strange
as it may sound, the writer has no hesitation in saying that at this
date there appears to be no clear conception anywhere, on the part of
most people, as to just what the essential problem is which
confronts the white inhabitants of the country because they have for
fellow-citizens (nominally) ten million Negroes. Ask the average man,
ask even the average editor or professor anywhere, what the race problem
is, the heart of it; why, in this land with its millions of foreigners
of all nationalities, THE race problem of problems should be caused
by ten million Negroes, not foreigners but native to the soil through
several generations; and in all probability you will get some such
answer as this:--

"The Negroes, as a rule, are very ignorant, are very lazy, are very
brutal, are very criminal. But a little way removed from savagery, they
are incapable of adopting the white man's moral code, of assimilating
the white man's moral sentiments, of striving toward the white man's
moral ideals. They are creatures of brutal, untamed instincts,
and uncontrolled feral passions, which give frequent expression of
themselves in crimes of horrible ferocity. They are, in brief, an
uncivilized, semi-savage people, living in a civilization to which they
are unequal, partaking to a limited degree of its benefits, performing
in no degree its duties. Because they are spatially in a civilization to
which they are morally and intellectually repugnant, they cannot but be
as a foreign irritant to the body social. The problem is, How shall the
body social adjust itself, daily, hourly, to this irritant; how feel
at ease and safe in spite of it? How shal