eply Mr. Washington says: "In nine cases out of ten the crimes
which serve to unite and give an excuse for mob violence are committed
by men who are without property, without homes, and without education
except what they have picked up in the city slums, in prisons, or on
the chain gang. The South is spending too much money in giving the
Negro this kind of education that makes criminals and not enough on
the kind of schools that turn out farmers, carpenters, and
blacksmiths. Other things being equal, it is true not only in America,
in the South, but throughout the world, that there is the least crime
where there is the most education. This is true of the South and of
the Negro, just the same as it is true of every other race.
Particularly is it true that the individuals who commit crimes of
violence and crimes that are due to lack of self-control are
individuals who are, for the most part, ignorant. The decrease in
lynching in the Southern States is an index of the steady growth of
the South in wealth, in industry, in education, and in individual
liberty."

Then comes a letter to an individual who desires to know what
proportion of the American Negroes can read and write now, and what
proportion could at the time of the Civil War. The reply again quotes
the 1910 census to the effect that 69.5 per cent. can now read and
write as compared with only 3 per cent. at the close of the war. The
letter also points out that the rate of illiteracy among American
Negroes is now lower than the rate for all the peoples of Russia,
Portugal, Brazil, and Venezuela, and almost as low as that of Spain.

There follows a sheaf of correspondence in which Mr. Washington agreed
to speak at the unveiling of a tablet in Auburn, New York, to the
memory of "Aunt Harriet" Tubman Davis, the black woman, squat of
stature and seamed of face, who piloted three or four hundred slaves
from the land of bondage to the land of freedom. While there he also
agreed to speak at Auburn prison in response to the special request of
some of the prisoners.

Then we find a courteous but firmly negative reply to a long-winded
bore who writes a six-page letter urging Mr. Washington to secure the
acceptance by the Negro race of a flag which he has designed as their
racial flag.

After this follows a group of letters which passed between him and the
late Edgar Gardiner Murphy, author of "The Present South," "The Basis
of Ascendency," and other important books. In on