woman in order to shield a relative, who, she later confessed, was the real culprit who threatened to kill her. One was lynched for killing a man, and the other one was murdered by white fiends while peacefully slumbering by the roadside, for no other crime than that he was black. The night-rider outrages were but other features of the same lawless tendency, manifested by the same class of whites.

THE NEGRO AS A CRIMINAL."There is too much crime among us," says Booker T. Washington, in his book, "My Life and Works." "The figures for a given period show that in the United States thirty per cent of all the crime committed is by Negroes, while they constitute only twelve per cent of the entire population."

Everybody who has seriously studied the Negro question is aware of this; and no one could give a better reason for the existence of this undesirable condition than Mr. Washington. He says, "A large amount of crime among us grows out of the idleness of our young men and women." This is a true statement as far as an ordinary surface observation is concerned. We contend that the sporting proclivity in the pres

*Without doubt Okolona has a larger Negro population than than any other North Mississippi town, yet crime here is almost unknown."-Okolona Sun.

ent generation is too intensely cultivated, owing to favorable opportunities brought about by the changing conditions throughout the South.

When a young Negro sport can earn as much money in a city in one week as his father used to earn on a plantation in a month, he is generally a candidate for partial idleness and crime. He is a stumbling block to the honest colored man who deserves decent wages, and who works hard to maintain a respectable home and educate his children.

The idleness of the young men and women of the race is often traced to the criminal neglect of a certain class of shiftless parents, who fail to rear their children by precept and example in the ways of respectability and industry. Parents of this class who steal from their white neighbors as well as their black, cannot expect their sons and daughters to refrain from stealing, and committing graver crimes when opportunity permits.

We fully expound in chapter eighteen, that like begets like-a thief begets a thief, a rapist at heart begets a real rapist, a murderer at heart begets a real murderer, etc.

Booker T. Washington says: "I condemn with all the indignation of my soul the beast in human form guilty of assaulting a woman. Let us all be alike in this particular."

We wish to remind Mr. Washington of the fact that a "beast in human form" must be conceived, born and reared, before it can commit the unspeakable crime on a woman. Why not go back a little and attack the cause, the source of the beast nature, and condemn it first with "all the indignation of our soul?" Is not the parent of an ill-begotten child responsible for the result of that issue, be he white or black? As two consumptive parents will beget children with consumptive tendencies, so, too, will criminal parents beget criminally inclined children. It is nothing but the penned-up beast nature in the parents that breaks out in their children. This beast nature was first cultivated in the African slave in America by the unbridled beast passions of the slave-master who owned them, and has now become a second nature in both races. Only by refinement and a cultivation of the higher faculties in the races, as they commingle, can this beast nature be ultimately restored to its normal channel. We condemn, in the strongest English at our command, the hell-born custom of America, which forbids the commingling of the races for moral and religious culture, while it tolerates the mixing for evil purposes; thus utterly corrupting both people. As long as there is no respect for the colored womanhood of America, by the white man of the country, so long will it

be impossible to cultivate and infuse a higher moral tone in the race. We wish to impress, indelibly, upon the readers' minds that as soon as legal intermarriage displaces the old custom of illicit mixing, the beast in both races will disappear.

FEW OUTRAGES COMMITTED IN THE NORTH-WHY? How often do we hear of Negro outrages committed on white women in such great Negro centers as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and other places in the free states of the North? Very seldom. And those Negroes are not unlike the southern Negro, as they have largely migrated there from the South in recent years. It is in the old slave states that nearly all assaults on white women are reported to transpire; and just where the unnatural social relations between the races are strongest these outrages are most frequent. This goes to prove, without further argument here, that it is not so much the Negro, or the colored man, or the beast in both races after all that is to blame, as the unnatural relations maintained between them, which gives all the privileges to one, and none of the advantages to the other. A respectable colored man, who has married a white wife, cannot travel with her in these old slave states without being in imminent danger of arrest and mob lynching. We know of several