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My original plan had been to go from Washington to Hampton, Virginia, and see the great industrial school for negroes and Indians established by General Samuel Armstrong, the alma mater of Mr. Booker Washington, and consequently of Tuskegee. But I found that both the President of Hampton and the President of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville were to be at a Southern Education Conference at Memphis; so, instead of going due south into Virginia, I turned my face south-westward towards Kentucky and Tennessee. But I determined to “stop off” for a day at Virginia Hot Springs, where some friends had invited me to visit them.

Virginia Hot Springs is nothing but a huge rambling hotel, with a number of “cottage” dependencies. |A Happy Valley.| The hotel company has bought up the whole mountain-valley, and runs it like a little kingdom. It is a delightful place; the air fresh and sparkling, the hotel and cottages sufficiently picturesque, the basin of the valley entirely given up to the brilliant sward of the golf-course. Around the hotel runs a spacious “piazza,” with innumerable rocking-chairs. A score of buggies and saddle-horses, at the disposition of the guests, gather round the steps. Inside, every American luxury is at command. You move noiselessly on deep-piled carpets; the news-stand is heaped with the latest magazines and novels; there is a little row of shops where you can buy hats and frocks, jewellery and bric-à-brac, at fifty per cent. over Fifth-avenue prices; and—most indispensable luxury of all—there is a stock- and share-broker’s office, and there are long-distance telephones, whereby you can keep in touch with Wall Street and the various Exchanges. That curious oval excrescence at one corner of the building is the ballroom. It opens into the great hall of the hotel, called “Peacock Walk”; for here the ladies assemble after dinner to air their “rags” and their diamonds.

My friends chartered a buggy, and drove me after lunch to Warm Springs, an old Colonial health-resort, where it is on record that General Washington came to nurse his gout; and thence to a point called Flagstaff Hill, or something of the sort, where we had a glorious view over an endless stretch of hill-country, running far into West Virginia. But, oh! the reckless, suicidal waste of timber that is going on here, as almost everywhere in America. Here, however, it is sheer thoughtlessness that is at work—not the criminal cupidity which is converting the forests of Maine and New Hampshire into wood-pulp, and ruining for generations to come the climate, the fertility, the water-power of the country.

Our talk, of course, strays (not through my leading) to the question of the negro.

The Darkest Phase.

“I have two cousins,” says Mrs. X., “who are sisters. One of them devotes all her spare money to the amelioration of the black race, while personally she loathes them and shrinks from them. The other has no philanthropic feeling whatever; she regrets that slavery was ever abolished; but she likes the black people personally; she goes among them, and nurses them when they are ill—just as she would a favourite horse or dog. That is in Philadelphia, where, as you know, I was born.”

“And you yourself—how do you feel on the subject?”

“I had lived so much abroad that I had no very definite feeling towards the black race, one way or another, until a few summers ago, when I spent some time at Aiken, South Carolina, where the bulk of the population is black. I don’t think I am hysterical, but I assure you it was an almost intolerable sensation to walk down the main street of Aiken, even at midday, under the eyes of those hundreds of great hulking blacks, staring at you with half-suppressed insolence. It gives me a little shudder now to think of it.”

“Last year,” said her husband, “I was shooting in North Carolina, in a district where the population is pretty evenly divided between white and black. I boarded in a farmer’s family. The grandfather had fought in the war, of course on the Confederate side; the father and mother were solid, unpretending, intelligent people. There was a school-house only a mile and a half away, but they could not let their two daughters go to it. They could not let them stir away from home unprotected. They had to pay for their education at home, while at the same time they were being taxed for the education of the negro children of the district. That is not a pleasant state of affairs.”

A Significant Admission.

Some time afterwards, I stated this case to a loading educator of negroes, a man widely recognized as one of the best friends of the race.

“Do you think,” I asked him, “that these girls could not safely have gone to school? Or was their parents’ action the result of groundless, or, at any rate, exaggerated, panic—as of one who should forbid his children to pass through a wood lest a tree should fall upon them?”

“It would depend on the district,” was the reply. “In some districts the girls could have gone to school safely enough; in others, no!”

This, I think, was a terrible admission; for, after all, a “safe” district can only be one in which no outrage has occurred; and that is no guarantee against its occurring to-morrow.^[4] What father, what husband, is going to rest on such security?

Here, then, I was face to face with the most hideous factor in the problem—that which keeps popular sentiment in the South chronically inflamed and exasperated. Again and again, at every turn, I came upon it; not only in the shape of revolting stories, but in accounts of the constant and most burdensome precautions which the state of affairs imposes.

To give only one instance: I asked an American long resident in Havana whether there was any trouble of this nature in Cuba. “No,” he said, “practically none. It’s true that about a year ago a sort of half-witted black was accused of an outrage on a mulatto woman, and committed suicide in prison to escape the garotte; but I believe an American nigger has since confessed that he was the real culprit. It’s very different,” he went on, “in my native State, Louisiana. I have two sisters married there. The husband of one of them never dares to leave his home unless he takes his wife with him. The husband of the other is compelled to leave home for days at a time; but he keeps a loaded shot-gun in every room in the house, and he has made his wife practice till she is a very fair shot, both with gun and revolver. There isn’t a white man in the country districts that doesn’t take similar precautions.”

Think what it means to have this nightmare constantly present to the mind of every woman and girl of a community—at any rate in the country districts, and on the outskirts of the towns. |A Malign Enchantment.| No doubt the state of “nerves” it sets up is responsible for many errors and cruelties. Many attempted outrages may be purely imaginary. Negroes may have been lynched or shot down, not only for crimes they themselves did not commit, but for crimes that were never committed at all.^[5] But there are quite enough authentic cases of crime—denied by nobody—to justify the horror of the South.^[6] It is all very well to say that it is the precautions taken, and most of all the lynchings, that suggests the crime to vagrant, dissolute, drink-and-drug-ruined negroes. That is probably in great measure true—the evil moves in a vicious circle. But who or what is to break the circle of malign enchantment? Education? Yes, perhaps; but education is at best a slow process. I cannot to-day throw my revolver into the Mississippi because I hope that fifty years hence my grandson may have no use for it.

“During the war,” a very intelligent coloured man said to me, “the planters’ wives and children were left to the protection of the negroes. |Who is to Blame?| Not a single case of outrage occurred, and scarcely a case of theft or breach of trust. Had we been the lecherous brutes we are now supposed to be, we should have written the darkest page in history, and brought the Southern armies home to the defence of their own hearthstones.”

That is true. It is admitted on every hand that the conduct of the slaves during the war was, on the whole, excellent, and in many cases touchingly beautiful.^[7] And therein lies, by the way, not, certainly, an apology for slavery, but a proof that its most melodramatic horrors were exceptional. But what matters the admission that the malignant and bestial negro did not exist forty years ago, if it has to be admitted in the same breath that he exists to-day?

What has bred him? Who is responsible for his existence? History may one day apportion the burden between the doctrinaire self-righteousness of the respectable North, the rascality of the “carpet-bag” politician, the stiff-necked pride of the South, and the vanity, the resentfulness, and the savagery of the negro himself. But what avails recrimination or apportionment of blame, while the monstrous evil—none the less monstrous because it necessarily awakens a morbid imagination on both sides—exists and calls aloud to be dealt with? While the relations of the two races remain as they are, there can be no doubt that an act of brutal lust often justifies itself to a semi-savage imagination as an act of war—a racial reprisal. And who shall say that a state of war does not exist?

Few sensible men in the South have now a word to say for lynching.^[8] It has proved itself as ineffectual in practice as it is unjustifiable in theory. |Lynch Law.| It cannot even be palliated as an ungovernable reaction of horror at the particular atrocity here in question; seeing that, as a matter of fact, more negroes are lynched for mere murder than for outrages on women.^[9] There seems to be little hope, however, of a cessation of lynchings in the near future. The Southern Press abounds with evidences that the lynching impulse is strong, and is with difficulty held in check^[10] even when the provocation is comparatively trifling.

One thing seems to me certain—namely, that crimes against women, and all sorts of negro crime, will be far more effectually checked when respectable and well-disposed negroes can feel reasonably confident that people of their race will be treated with common fairness in white courts of law. At present it is certain that they can feel no such confidence. But, in making this statement, I am anticipating matters. The point is one to which I must return later.

4. In a paper read in 1901, Mr. A. H. Stone said of the Yazoo Mississippi Delta: “There is now no more feeling of fear on the white man’s part, whether for himself or his wife or his children, than in the days of slavery.” But he afterwards added: “Writing to-day, 1908, it would be necessary to modify this statement somewhat—certainly for some part of this territory.” “The American Race Problem,” p. 91. The footnotes to Mr. Stone’s paper point out one or two other instances of a deterioration of conditions.

5. Among the “Causes Assigned” for lynchings in the statistical statement prepared by the Chicago Tribune, “Race Prejudice” stands fourth on the list; and in the four years, 1900-1903, twenty-four cases are assigned to it. Among the other causes are “Unknown offences” (10), “Mistaken Identity” (5), and “No offence” (1).

6. “Making allowance for all exaggerations in attributing this crime to negroes, there still remain enough well-authenticated cases of brutal assault on women by black men in America to make every negro bow his head in shame.”—Atlanta University Publications, No. IX. (A negro monograph).

7. “No race ever behaved better than the negro behaved during the war. Not only were there no massacres and no outbreaks, but even the amount of defection was not large.... Many a master going off to the war entrusted his wife and children to the care of his servants with as much confidence as if they had been of his own blood. They acted rather like clansmen than like bondmen.... As Henry Grady once said, ‘A thousand torches would have disbanded the Southern army; but there was not one.’”—Thomas Nelson Page: “The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem,” p. 21.

8. One of the most sensible men in the South is certainly Mr. E. G. Murphy, who writes (“The Present South,” p. 177): “The mob, so far as it has a conscious philosophy, has attempted the justification of its course upon these grounds: It has insisted that its methods were necessary in order to prevent the crime; in order to avoid the procrastination of the courts; and in order to protect the victim of assault from the ordeal of presenting testimony at the trial of the offender. It has become increasingly obvious, however, that the practice of lynching ... is not a remedy. It does not prevent crime. Through the morbid interest which it arouses, and through the publicity which it creates, it inflames to the utmost the power of criminal suggestion and aggravates all the conditions of racial suspicion and antagonism. The so-called ‘remedy’ has always been followed by new outbreaks of the disease, the most atrocious crimes coming at short intervals after the previous exercise of the mob’s philosophy of ‘prevention.’” “Lynching as a remedy,” says Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, “is a ghastly failure.” The opposite opinion, however, has still its champions. “The lynch lightning,” says Mr. W. B. Smith (an anti-negro extremist), “seldom strikes twice in the same district or community.” “The Colour-Line,” p. 259.

9. The commonly accepted statistics of lynchings are those supplied by the Chicago Tribune. I have before me the figures for the years 1885-1904, somewhat vitiated by the fact that the enumeration for 1888 is incomplete. It would appear that in these years 2942 lynchings in all occurred, 2042 of the victims being negroes, and the remaining 900 belonging to other races. But the proportion of negro lynchings steadily increased. In 1886, 71 negroes were lynched, as against 62 men of other races; whereas in 1901 the respective figures were 107 and 28. Out of the whole number of lynchings 25 per cent. were for rape, 42 per cent. for murder, and 33 per cent. for other offences. More than 80 per cent. of the whole number of lynchings occurred in the Southern States.

10. Washington, November 15, 1909. “Ninety days’ imprisonment was imposed to-day upon ex-Sheriff Joseph F. Shipp, of Chattanooga, Tenn., by the supreme court of the United States for contempt of court in failing to prevent the lynching of a negro, Edward Johnson, whose execution had been stayed by the court.

“Luther Williams and Nick Nolan were sentenced to imprisonment for ninety days for connection with the lynching, and Jeremiah Gibson, the jailer, Henry Padgett and William Mayers, all of Chattanooga, for sixty days.”