ough him the
negro in service generally. He has been made a citizen with a vote;
consequently both political parties play with him. But that is neither
here nor there. He will commit in one meal every _betise_ that a
scullion fresh from the plough-tail is capable of, and he will continue
to repeat those faults. He is as complete a heavy-footed,
uncomprehending, bungle-fisted fool as any _memsahib_ in the East ever
took into her establishment. But he is according to law a free and
independent citizen--consequently above reproof or criticism. He, and he
alone, in this insane city will wait at table (the Chinaman doesn't
count). He is untrained, inept, but he will fill the place and draw the
pay. Now God and his father's Kismet made him intellectually inferior to
the Oriental. He insists on pretending that he serves tables by
accident--as a sort of amusement. He wishes you to understand this
little fact. You wish to eat your meals, and if possible to have them
properly served. He is a big, black, vain baby and a man rolled into
one. A coloured gentleman who insisted on getting me pie when I wanted
something else, demanded information about India. I gave him some facts
about wages. "Oh hell," said he, cheerfully, "that wouldn't keep me in
cigars for a month." Then he fawned on me for a ten-cent piece. Later he
took it upon himself to pity the natives of India--"heathen" he called
them, this Woolly One whose race has been the butt of every comedy on
the Asiatic stage since the beginning. And I turned and saw by the head
upon his shoulders that he was a Yoruba man, if there be any truth in
ethnological castes. He did his thinking in English, but he was a Yoruba
negro, and the race type had remained the same throughout his
generations. And the room was full of other races--some that looked
exactly like Gallas (but the trade was never recruited from that side of
Africa), some duplicates of Cameroon heads, and some Kroomen, if ever
Kroomen wore evening dress. The American does not consider little
matters of descent, though by this time he ought to know all about
"damnable heredity." As a general rule he keeps himself very far from
the negro and says unpretty things about him. There are six million
negroes more or less in the States, and they are increasing. The
Americans once having made them citizens cannot unmake them. He says, in
his newspapers, they ought to be elevated by education. He is trying
this: but it is like to be a