representations, have inflamed the passions and prejudices of the negroes, as a race, against the white people, and have thereby made it necessary for the white people to unite and act together in self-defence and for the preservation of white civilization."

The people of North Carolina recovered the right of self-government in 1870. Other States followed from time to time, the last two being Louisiana and South Carolina in 1877.

Edwin L. Godkin, who was for long at the head of the Nation and the Evening Post, of New York, is thought by some competent judges to have been the ablest editor this country has ever had. After the last of the negro governments set up in the South had passed away, looking back over the whole bad business, Mr. Godkin, in a letter to his friend Charles Eliot Norton, written from Sweet Springs, West Virginia, September 3, 1877, said: "I do not see in short how the negro is ever to be worked into a system of government for which you and I could have much respect.

991

1 Ogden's "Life and Letters of Edwin Lawrence Godkin," vol. II, p. 114.

Garrison is dead. At the centenary of his birth, December 12, 1904, an effort was made to arouse enthusiasm. There was only a feeble response; but we still have extremists. Professor Josiah Royce, of Harvard, in "Race Questions" (1906), speaking of race antipathies as "trained hatred," says, pp. 48-49: "We can remember that they are childish phenomena in our lives, phenomena on a level with the dread of snakes or of mice, phenomena that we share with the cats and with the dogs, not noble phenomena, but caprices of our complex nature."

CHAPTER XI

THE SOUTH UNDER SELF-GOVERNMENT

OR now more than thirty years, whites

FOR

and blacks, both free, have lived together in the reconstructed States. In some of them there have been local clashes, but in none of them has there been race war, predicted by Jefferson and feared by Lincoln; and there probably never will be such a war, unless it shall come through the intervention of such an outside force as produced in the South the conflict between the races at the polls in 1868–76.

Every State government set up under the plan of Congress had wrought ruin, and the ruin was always more complete where the negroes were most numerous, as in South Carolina and Louisiana.

The rule of the carpet-bagger and the negro was now superseded by governments based on Abraham Lincoln's idea, the idea he expressed in the debate with Douglas in 1858, when he said: "While they [the two

races] do remain together there must be the position of inferior and superior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white man."

Conducted on this basis, the present governments in the reconstructed States have endured now for periods varying from thirtysix to forty-two years, and in every State, without any exception, the prosperity of both whites and blacks has been wonderful, and this in spite of the still existent abnormal animosities engendered by congressional reconstruction.

In the present State governments the race problem seems to have reached, in its larger lines, its only practicable solution. There is still, however, much friction between whites and blacks. Higher culture among the masses, especially of the dominant race, and wise leadership in both races, will in time minimize this, but it is not to be expected, nor is it ever to be desired, that racial antipathies should entirely cease to exist. The result of such cessation would be amalgamation, a solution that American whites will never tolerate.

Deportation, as a solution of the negro problem, is impracticable. Mr. Lincoln, much as he desired the separation of the races, could not accomplish it, even when he had all the war power of the government in his hands. He was, as we have seen, unable to find a country that would take the 3,500,000 of blacks then in the seceded States. Now, there are in the South, including Delaware, according to the census of 1910, 8,749,390, and, quite naturally, the American negro is more unwilling than ever to leave America.

Another solution sometimes suggested in the South is the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment, which declares that the negro shall not be deprived of the ballot because of his race, but agitation for this would appear to be worse than useless.

The negro vote in the reconstructed States is, and has for years been, quite small, not large enough to be considered a factor in any of them. One cause of this is that the whites enforce against the blacks rigidly the tests required by law, but the chief reason is, that the negro, who is qualified, does not often apply for registration. He finds work