g it best for everybody "simply to be quiet for a time." Early in
1893 John C. Wycliffe, a prominent lawyer of New Orleans, writing in
the _Forum_, voiced the desires of many in asking for a repeal of the
Fifteenth Amendment; and in October, Bishop Atticus G. Haygood, writing
in the same periodical of a recent and notorious lynching, said, "It
was horrible to torture the guilty wretch; the burning was an act of
insanity. But had the dismembered form of his victim been the dishonored
body of my baby, I might also have gone into an insanity that might have
ended never." Again and again was there the lament that the Negroes of
forty years after were both morally and intellectually inferior to
their antebellum ancestors; and if college professors and lawyers and
ministers of the Gospel wrote in this fashion one could not wonder that
the politician made capital of choice propaganda.

[Footnote 1: In 1896 this paper entered into an elaborate study, _Race
Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro_, a publication of the
American Economic Association. In this Hoffman contended at length that
the race was not only not holding its own in population, but that it was
also astonishingly criminal and was steadily losing economically. His
work was critically studied and its fallacies exposed in the _Nation_,
April 1, 1897.]

In this chorus of dispraise truth struggled for a hearing, but then as
now traveled more slowly than error. In the _North American_ for July,
1892, Frederick Douglass wrote vigorously of "Lynch Law in the South."
In the same month George W. Cable answered affirmatively and with
emphasis the question, "Does the Negro pay for his education?" He showed
that in Georgia in 1889-90 the colored schools did not really cost the
white citizens a cent, and that in the other Southern states the Negro
was also contributing his full share to the maintenance of the schools.
In June of the same year William T. Harris, Commissioner of Education,
wrote in truly statesmanlike fashion in the _Atlantic_ of "The Education
of the Negro." Said he: "With the colored people all educated in schools
and become a reading people interested in the daily newspaper; with all
forms of industrial training accessible to them, and the opportunity so
improved that every form of mechanical and manufacturing skill has its
quota of colored working men and women; with a colored ministry educated
in a Christian theology interpreted in a missionary spirit,