more favorable field can be found for the exercise of the civilizing influences of negroes of American training over the less advanced members of their race.

Conceive, if such a conception be possible, the results to the Congo Free State which would follow the advent of from five to ten million of Africans, after the decades of labor and experience in this country, bringing with them their schools and universities, their printing-presses, churches, language, and other institutions, not only establishing themselves in independence and prosperity, but exercising a beneficent influence, religiously and otherwise, upon the natives of their own race. Here there could be no friction between races. No color line could possibly be drawn. Under the protection of the United States, wherever established, the negro would be free in the coming years to develop his capacity for political organization and to assume his separate and equal station as one of the nationalities of the earth.

Reading in detail descriptions of this African continent, with its undeveloped resources and its peculiar adaptability to the needs of the negro race, and pondering over the difficulties and disadvantages of the emigration project, as well as the benefits accruing from its adoption, the writer has reached the profound conviction that in this direction alone lies the true field of opportunity for the American negro, and that only by establishment upon African soil can the race truly emancipate itself from the restraining conditions which in the past have so impeded its progress.

Can the negro achieve this result? Judged by his past record in Africa, the prospect would be discouraging, but his forty years of accomplishment in the United Possibilities States give us hope. In the present age of scientific attainment, and with the liberal assist

for the Negro.

ance of our country, prosperous colonies of negroes could be readily established on the African continent. To those

who may be disposed to entertain doubts as to this assertion, the writer begs to commend the reading of the account by President Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee Institute of the history of the negro town of Mound Bayou, Bolivar County, Mississippi, published in the World's Work, July, 1907.

Here we have an illustration of the black man at his best, and an inspiring example of what in various sections of the country he has been able to accomplish. In the heart of the Mississippi Black Belt, where the very densest negro population centres, and where illiteracy and poverty are the normal condition of the mass of the people, is to be found a locally self-governing community of some four thousand persons of negro blood. This community is the distinctive outcome of negro thrift and intelligent negro leadership. The town of Mound Bayou, about which this exceptional society is distributed, is an incorporated municipality, with a mayor, three aldermen, town marshal, and constables, all of negro blood. A bank with $40,000 assets, well housed in a brick building, six churches, three schools, a library, and a telephone exchange, give some idea of its business and social conditions. A weekly newspaper is published, and a well conducted loan and investment company testifies to the thrift of the people. The town has an electric lighting plant in operation, is about to install a water supply, and, in addition to other enterprises, maintains three well established cotton gins. No liquor saloons are permitted to exist, the population is orderly, and but little crime demands the attention of the authorities. The general reputation of the town for moral standing is good.

The photographs accompanying the article give the impression of a village of neat stores and houses, carrying an air of general prosperity. While the local government is administered entirely by black men, and meets successfully

the limited requirements of the inhabitants, it must be borne in mind that in the larger affairs of the state and nation the negroes of this model community have no voice. The town and its surrounding country afford an excellent illustration of what the negro can accomplish under favorable circumstances, as the land occupied was not acquired in an improved condition, but was purchased while part of a forbidding wilderness only twenty years ago, and redeemed and brought to its present condition of fertility by the hard, but not compulsory, toil of these aspiring black men.

Can we then say that the negro is incapable of doing in Liberia what he has done in this Mississippi town and in a lesser way in many other localities in the South? Given the same spirit of industry, thrift, and sobriety, with the added inducement of governmental assistance, and the assurance of industrial freedom with political independence, would not the assisted emigration which was the dream of Lincoln open to the negro a door of hope by which he would be enabled to gain entrance to fields of opportunity from which he is now excluded?

CHAPTER II

THE REHABILITATION OF THE SOUTH

To undeceive the people of the South, to bring them to a know

IN

ledge of the inferior and disreputable position which they occupy as a component part of the Union, and to give prominence and popularity to those plans, which, if adopted, will elevate us to an equality, socially, morally, intellectually, industrially, politically and financially, with the most flourishing and refined nation in the world, and, if possible, to place us in the van of even that, is the object of this work.— HELPER'S Impending Crisis, p. 60.

1857, one Hinton Rowan Helper, a native of North Carolina, writing from a Southern viewpoint, published a work on the slavery question under the title of The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It. Probably no one book, with the exception of Uncle Tom's Cabin, had so powerful an influence in moulding the anti-slavery thought of the nation, and in bringing to the knowledge of the people, North and South, the economic fallacies underlying the slavery system, as this production of Helper's. It exercised beyond question a most potent authority, and aroused an intense sectional animosity. Attempts were made on behalf of the slaveholding states to answer his arguments, but all efforts to that end were unavailing, and the slave power was compelled to content itself with the banishment of the author and the denunciation of his book.

The general scheme of Mr. Helper's work consisted in an elaborate comparison of the condition of the free states

Crisis."

with that of the slave states, based upon the census of 1850, followed by an exhaustive inquiry as to the causes of the glaring inequality shown in the progress Helper's "Impending of the two sections during the period which had elapsed since the formation of the Constitution. The author endeavored to demonstrate that at the inception of our national existence the Southern States possessed decided advantages in extent and location of territory, fertility of soil, salubrity of climate, harbor facilities, character of population, and, indeed, in all the elements which combine to constitute an enlightened and progressive commonwealth. He traced by tables of statistics the gradual retrogression of the South in the race for pre-eminence in wealth and population, and by his elaborate and indisputable mathematics demonstrated that the section once in possession of leadership was at the date of his work hopelessly distanced in the competition.

He instituted separate comparisons between Massachusetts and North Carolina; New York and Virginia; Pennsylvania and South Carolina; greatly to the disadvantage of the Southern States. He presented convincing tables to establish the growing primacy of the North and the nonprogressive character of the people of the South.

Space will not permit the reproduction of his convincing statistics in this work. The liberty, however, has been taken to present a few of the more important tables, and there have been added to his figures the most recent statistics on the subject, taken from the compilation of the Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, made in 1904. The purpose of these tables is to set forth the fact that the disparity between the progress of the sections, noted by Mr. Helper over fifty years ago, has continued and is even more marked at the present time than when he made his onslaught on the slaveholding element of the South.