han the Negroes by
the guardians of law and order; and there are none anywhere so easily
punished for disobedience to the statutes and mandates of their economic
superiors. Courts and juries may be sometimes subject to just criticism
for undue leniency toward white defendants; but that courts and juries
are ever subject to just criticism for undue leniency in dealing with
black defendants is the sheerest nonsense.

The frequent charge that the Negro's worst crimes partake of a brutality
that is peculiarly racial, is not supported by facts. I need not enlarge
upon this statement further than to say that the Negro's worst crimes,
with all their shocking accompaniments, are, not seldom, but often,
duplicated by white men. Let any one who doubts the statement observe
for one week the criminal statistics of any cosmopolitan newspaper, and
he will have his doubt removed.

Assuredly we do not hit upon the essence of the race problem in the
Negro's propensity to crime!

III

Do we hit upon it in his ignorance, in the fact that an immense number
of the black people are illiterate, not knowing the first from the last
letter of the alphabet? Hardly. For, almost to a man, the people who
most parade and most rail at the race problem in private conversation,
on the political platform, and in the pages of newspapers, books, and
periodicals, are disposed rather to lament, than to assist, the passing
of the Negro's ignorance. Ex-Governor Vardaman, of Mississippi, used
the following language in a message to the legislature of that state,
January, 1906:--

"The startling facts revealed by the census show that those [Negroes]
who can read and write are more criminal than the illiterate, which
is true of no other element of our population.. .. The state for many
years, at great expense to the tax-payers, has maintained a system
of Negro education which has produced disappointing results, and I am
opposed to the perpetuation of this system. My own idea is, that the
character of education for the Negro ought to be changed. If, after
forty years of earnest effort, and the expenditure of fabulous sums to
educate his head, we have only succeeded in making a criminal of him
and impairing his usefulness and efficiency as a laborer, wisdom would
suggest that we make another experiment and see if we cannot improve him
by educating his hand and his heart.... Slavery is the only process by
which he has ever been partially civilized. God Almigh