y--but most of its victims are of the despised race.

Against the worst outrages the best men of all sections are arrayed in
condemnation and resistance. But of its own essential and final social
superiority the white South brooks no question. It expects its social
code to be observed by the nation's representatives. It forgets that the
nation's representatives are cognizant of the general code of the
civilized world,--that breeding, manners, and intelligence, constitute
the gentleman. So when President Roosevelt entertains as his guest the
foremost man of the negro race,--easily one of the foremost half-dozen
men in the country,--the white South indulges in a mood which to the
rest of the world can only appear as prolonged hysteria.

Before this whole wide range of the unjust treatment of the black race
in America, the observer is sometimes moved to profound discouragement.
"Was it all for nothing?" he asks, "have all the struggle and sacrifice,
the army of heroes and martyrs, brought us to nothing better than this?"
But such discouragement overlooks the background of history, and the
vital undergrowth of to-day. We see the present evils, but we forget the
worse evils that preceded. Turn back sixty years,--read, not _Uncle
Tom's Cabin_ if you distrust fiction, but Fanny Kemble's _Life on a
Georgia Plantation_, or Frederick Law Olmsted's volumes of travels.
Glean from the shelves of history a few such grim facts, and let
imagination reconstruct the nether world of the cotton and sugar
plantations, the slave market, and the calaboose; the degradation of
women; the hopeless lot to which "'peared like there warn't no
to-morrow",--and see how far our world has moved into the light since
those days. A race is not developed in an hour or a decade or a
generation.

In the present are facts of solid reassurance, in that the best spirit
of the South is facing the besetting ills, is combating them, and being
thus aroused must eventually master and expel the evil spirit. The South
has a burden to carry which the North does not easily realize. There the
negro is not a remote problem of philanthropy; he is not represented by
a few stray individuals; it is a great mass, everywhere present, in its
surface manifestations often futile, childish, exasperating; shading off
into sodden degradation; as a whole, a century or several centuries
behind its white neighbors. To get on with it peaceably, to rightly
apportion with it the opportun