o a few white men who realized that such a social order could not
last forever.

Early in the nineties, however, the pendulum had swung fully backward,
and the years from 1890 to 1895 were in some ways the darkest that the
race has experienced since emancipation. When in 1892 Cleveland was
elected for a second term and the Democrats were once more in power, it
seemed to the Southern rural Negro that the conditions of slavery had
all but come again. More and more the South formulated its creed; it
glorified the old aristocracy that had flourished and departed, and
definitely it began to ask the North if it had not been right after all.
It followed of course that if the Old South had the real key to the
problem, the proper place of the Negro was that of a slave.

Within two or three years there were so many important articles on the
Negro in prominent magazines and these were by such representative men
that taken together they formed a symposium. In December, 1891, James
Bryce wrote in the _North American Review_, pointing out that the
situation in the South was a standing breach of the Constitution, that
it suspended the growth of political parties and accustomed the section
to fraudulent evasions, and he emphasized education as a possible
remedy; he had quite made up his mind that the Negro had little or no
place in politics. In January, 1892, a distinguished classical scholar,
Basil L. Gildersleeve, turned aside from linguistics to write in the
_Atlantic_ "The Creed of the Old South," which article he afterwards
published as a special brochure, saying that it had been more widely
read than anything else he had ever written. In April, Thomas Nelson
Page in the _North American_ contended that in spite of the $5,000,000
spent on the education of the Negro in Virginia between 1870 and 1890
the race had retrograded or not greatly improved, and in fact that the
Negro "did not possess the qualities to raise himself above slavery."
Later in the same year he published _The Old South_. In the same month
Frederick L. Hoffman, writing in the _Arena_, contended that in view of
its mortality statistics the Negro race would soon die out.[1] Also in
April, 1892, Henry Watterson wrote of the Negro in the _Chautauquan_,
recalling the facts that the era of political turmoil had been succeeded
by one of reaction and violence, and that by one of exhaustion and
peace; but with all his insight he ventured no constructive suggestion,
thinkin