the best models, yet profitably. Some of them have learned all these things after the best models. I have examined, with a grateful heart, specimens of the work done by negro boys and girls in some of the public schools of the city of Atlanta. They were every whit as good as the best done in the white schools of similar grade. And thousands more of them will learn. Some of them "hunger and thirst" after knowledge. One of the most en couraging indications of their progress and uplifting is this: it is fast becoming a "point of honor" with colored parents that their children learn to read and to write. This sentiment is entering into their "society." Of this there can be no doubt.

Alas, that there ever was any hinderance to their education! God be thanked! there is now, January, 1881, next to no opposition to their instruction. Where one benighted neighborhood can be found where their education is opposed, twenty may be found where it is encouraged.

In closing this chapter, that is designed to give only a general statement and rough outline-sketch of their present condition and characteristics, a few words should be added as to their dispositions and tempers. They are kind-hearted, generous to the distressed, obliging, unrevengeful. They love their friends and forgive their enemies more promptly and truly than do many who have had better cultTheir disposition to help one another is a

ure.

wonder. In this little village of Oxford I have seen, time and again, very poor negroes helping some of their neighbors still poorer than themselves. They have organized many "societies" for the relief of the sick and the afflicted. Many times I have known "burial expenses" met by these societies. And there can be little doubt that their "finances" are generally well and faithfully managed. One of their "treasurers" has been for some years a trusted member of my household. He has given me insight of their methods. If he were not an honest man, as he is, he has to give such rigid account that he would have little opportunity for "financiering" on the society's funds, even if he had the disposition. The picture must not be drawn in colors too bright, for, alas! a colored treasurer now and then imitates some white treasurer or cashier so closely that the society's funds are seen no more by the society forever. This, however, should be said for the negroes in such a case: they call their unfaithful treasurer "a thief," they do not say "defaulter."

CHAPTER III.

HERE ΤΟ STAY.

O far as man can see or devise, these negroes are in "the South" to stay. Common sense, in considering this problem, cannot assume a supernatural intervention to move them elsewhere. Left to the natural conditions that enter into such questions, there is no reason to expect that these Americanized Africans will remove or be removed from the regions where we now find the great mass of them. If such a not-to-be-expected migration should occur, still leaving them within the United States, the problems that grow out of their presence in this country must be worked out all the same. Change of place can no more eliminate this factor in our national equation than it can change the past history of these people in the United States.

There is much reason to believe that the problem can be better solved without a change of locality. The South is the best place for these emancipated negroes, and the people of the South will yet prove themselves to be, of all people in the world, the fittest to deal with this very difficult and delicate

race-problem. What we want is not a change of blackboards, but a thorough study and a clear understanding of the problem itself; also, the right spirit all round.

The conditions of this problem will not be greatly modified by the so-called "exodus "—a very large word, by the way, for the fact it represents. I hold myself bound to modify my opinions in the light of new facts, for facts must govern opinions as well as silence prejudices; but as the case now is, it is very clear to me that the negroes as a body will never move to Kansas, to Indiana, to New Mexico, or to any State or Territory, either so cold in its climate, or so different in its population, or so diverse in its conditions of living, from any thing they have ever known. A few thousands may go to these States, a few thousands may scatter themselves through various northern and western States. It is desirable that they should do so; it will extend the knowledge of the difficulties of our national problem, and nurture patience in regions where patience is as much needed as "toleration" is needed in the South.

This we may certainly depend on; if the negroes were moved en masse to some other section of our country, they would carry their race-problem with them. The problem would, indeed, be modified; perhaps it would lose none of its present difficulties; certainly it would take on some new ones.

Wherever the negroes are in large numbers, there, we may be sure, are their characteristics. If they live in the midst of another race, there, also, are the characteristics of that race; and these diverse racecharacteristics-for they are not the accidents of place or special conditions—must somehow adjust themselves both to their resemblances and their differences. And there are differences as well as resemblances--a simple but important fact not always considered. The differences as well as the resemblances go deeper than the skin. Whether the negroes are superior or inferior, whether better or worse than white people, it will nevertheless be admitted by candid persons that a company of negroes-if the reader please, a very small company, so small as to be socially and politically powerless-are not, in any State, or city, or town, or country hamlet in the United States, realized in the inmost consciousness of men to be just the same as white people. The negroes themselves certainly understand and recognize these differences. These differences are realized on the plantations, in the humblest relations of obscure country life, as distinctly as in Washington city, where the wisest and best people feel (January, 1881) that they will not know just how to conduct themselves if the incoming administration should appoint a worthy and capable colored Senator from Mississippi to a cabinet portfolio. How true and wise is