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It was my good fortune to have for my hosts in Washington two active sympathizers with the negro. The husband hails from a North-Western State; the wife is a New Englander. They knew personally some of the Abolitionist leaders, and are still full of their spirit.

They related to me cruel and deplorable incidents in the everyday life of the streets.

“One afternoon,” said my host, “I was sitting peaceably in a street-car, when I was suddenly conscious of an altercation between the conductor and a coloured man. The absolute rights of the matter I don’t know, but it had somehow arisen out of a recent modification of the ‘transfer’ system, which the coloured man probably did not understand. I had scarcely realized what was happening, before men were standing on the seats of the car, shouting, ‘Kill the d——d nigger! We’ll all stand by you! All Virginia is behind you!’ The motor-man detached the heavy brass handle by which he works the car, ran up to the negro, and had actually raised it to strike. I interposed, and told the man that, if anything happened, he would get into trouble for leaving his post. He replied: ‘The nigger’s abusive,’ but sullenly went back to his platform.”

“Was the nigger abusive?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t hear him say anything; but it is quite possible that he had been ‘sassy.’ All I know is that he stood his ground like a man, with that yelling crowd around him.”

“And what happened?”

“Oh, the thing blew over. The negro walked away, and the crowd dispersed. As I took my seat again in the car, the man next me said, ‘If that had happened in South Carolina, he would have been a dead nigger.’”

“Not long ago,” my hostess said, “I was in a crowded street-car. |Street-Car Episodes.| A black woman with a baby got in, and had to stand. You know how our Washington cars are constantly rounding corners; and at every curve the woman was nearly thrown from her feet. Presently one of two white shop-girls who were sitting near her rose and gave the mother her place. The two girls soon after got out; and as they passed me, the one who had kept her seat said to the other, ‘I wonder you would do such a thing!’ ‘Didn’t you see she had a baby?’ the other replied; so, after all, we are not quite without humanity.”

“But tell about the two boys,” my host put in.

“Oh, that was two or three years ago. I noticed in a street-car a very distinguished-looking old man with two boys of about fourteen and twelve, evidently his grandsons. I thought what very nicely-mannered boys they were. A white woman got in, and, the car being full, the elder boy rose and gave her his seat. Immediately after, a mulatto woman got in, very well and quietly dressed—entirely a lady in manner and appearance. The younger boy was rising to give her his seat, when the elder pushed him down angrily, saying quite aloud, ‘I thought you knew better than to get up for a nigger.’”

“Did the lady hear?”

“Oh, perfectly. It was most painful.”

“And what said the distinguished grandfather?”

“He smiled, and nodded to the elder boy.”

Mr. Roosevelt and the Washerwoman.

I took out my pocket-book and handed my hostess a cutting I had made a few days before. It was a letter signed “Edgar S. Walz,” and ran thus:

“To the Editor of the New York Times.

“I read in your Sunday’s issue an item headed ‘Subway Manners: Boys keep their Seats rather than Give to a Sick Old Woman,’ which reminds me of the first time I saw Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, about eight or nine years ago. He was sitting next to me in a Broadway car, and somewhere along about Thirtieth-street the car stopped to let some people on. All secured seats except a coloured woman with a large bundle of clothes. As soon as Mr. Roosevelt saw that she had to stand, he jumped up, took off his hat, and bowed as graciously as though she were the first woman in the land.”

“Yes,” said my hostess, as she handed back the cutting; “you will find these differences.”

“Of course,” I said, “Mr. Roosevelt is a Northerner.”

“I’m afraid that doesn’t always mean liberality of feeling nowadays,” was the reply. “I should rather say Mr. Roosevelt is Mr. Roosevelt.”

My host is a chief of department in a large Government office.

Sent to Coventry.

“Have you any coloured people working under you?” I asked him.

“Not long ago,” he replied, “a coloured girl was sent to me—I think because they knew that I would ‘kick’ less than any other chief of department. It was suggested to me that I should assign her some special work by herself. I refused. ‘No,’ I said, ‘if she comes to me at all, she follows the regular routine.’ I made a point of speaking to the three most responsible young women among my clerks—all girls of good family and standing—and telling them they must behave well to her.”

“And how did they behave?”

“Oh, well enough, on the surface; there was no trouble; but she was quietly sent to Coventry. Soon afterwards a Russian girl entered the department, who knew nothing and cared nothing about our prejudices. She made friends with the coloured girl; but when she sat at the same table with her in the lunch-room, the quadroon herself said to her, ‘You mustn’t do this; you’ll get into trouble with the others. They don’t behave badly to me; but when I seat myself even at the other end of a long table they make an excuse to move away.’”

“How are negroes placed in these positions?” I asked.

“Why, through various political ‘pulls.’”

“Do you think it a wise policy to try to break down the colour-line here and there—at this point and that—by the nomination of negroes to Government appointments?”

“Ah, that is just the question.”

“Meantime,” I asked, “are matters getting better or worse?”

“Oh, worse—decidedly worse,” said my hostess. “They are coming to something like open war. For instance, I constantly see stone-fights between white boys and black boys in the open space outside our house. That doesn’t mean much, perhaps; for boys will be boys everywhere. But sometimes lately the white boys have seemed to go frantic, and have begun stoning black men and women who were going peaceably about their business. Once I had to telephone to the police to interfere, or I believe there would have been a riot.”

“I am told that in New York the white and black street-boys play amicably together.”

“Yes,” said my host, “that is because the blacks are comparatively few. The tension increases in the direct ratio of the number of negroes.”

This I find to be essentially, if not quite universally, true. What is the inference? Is it not at bottom an instinct of self-preservation that spurs the South to inhumanity—an unreasoning, or half-reasoned, panic fear of racial submergence? There are many other factors in the situation; but I think, beyond all doubt, this is one.

“You can see any day on the street-cars,” said my host, “the embitterment of feeling. Formerly a black man would always rise and give his seat to a white woman; now he aggressively refrains from doing so.”

I repeated this to a friend in Baltimore, a gentleman of an old Southern family, who had fought for the Confederacy, even while he realized that the institution of slavery was doomed. |A Pessimistic View.| “You must remember,” he said, “that the problem is acute in Washington. The Washington negro is particularly bumptious and intolerable. Immediately after the war, Washington was the black man’s paradise. They flocked there in their thousands, thinking that the Government was going to do everything for them, and that there was nothing they had not a right to expect. That spirit still survives and makes trouble.”

“And how do you feel as to the way things are shaping? Do you see any actual or probable improvement in the relations of the races?”

“What shall I say?” he replied. “I do all I can to put the matter out of my thoughts. I do not personally feel the pinch of the problem. My children are in the North, and my life here pursues an even routine. I have old coloured servants, with whom I get on very well. But I am constitutionally a pessimist, and I confess I do not see how the thing is going to work out.”

“Education?” I suggested.

“Education is all very well; but if it removes some difficulties it raises others. It tends to make the negro unwilling to work where he is wanted, and desirous of working where he is not wanted—at any rate by the white artisan who is in the field before him. The industrial education of the black race, which is in some quarters regarded as a panacea, will no doubt do a great deal of good; but we cannot close our eyes to the fact that it will intensify race-friction in the labour market.”

“Still, you are not one of the Southerners who want to keep the black ignorant—who think that education, as a whole, merely teaches him ‘not to know his place’?”

“That is an outworn and impossible point of view. But you can understand that even the reasonable Southerner feels a certain bitterness on the subject of education when he sees the black child marching off to a school provided by Northern philanthropy, while the child of the ‘poor white’ goes into the cotton-factory.”^[3]

“You say you have black servants?”

“Oh yes, I have; and many people still have. But you know the race as a whole is turning against domestic service. I have friends in Mobile, Alabama, who tell me that their servants make the most fantastic conditions. For instance, they won’t do a stroke of work after three o’clock. If you want a meal after that hour, you must prepare and serve it yourself. As for the abstraction of household stuff from the kitchen, it is carried on openly and systematically—they call it ‘Cook’s excursion.’ In the case of domestic service, in fact, the difficult conditions which are being felt all over the world are intensified by—what shall I call it?—the race pride, or the race resentment, of the black. Domestic service was one of the badges of slavery; and now, if he or she will undertake it at all, it must be on such terms as shall remove from it all taint of servility.”

“A very natural feeling,” I remarked.

“No doubt; but not calculated to relieve the friction between the races.”

3. It is not only the child of the “poor white,” in the special Southern sense of the term, that goes to the factory. Mr. Stannard Baker, in “Following the Colour-Line,” says: “One day I visited the mill neighbourhood of Atlanta to see how the poorer classes of white people lived. I found one very comfortable home occupied by a family of mill employees. They hired a negro woman to cook for them, and while they sent their children to the mill to work, the cook sent her children to school!”