ernment of the Confederate States to the domestic arrangement of the simplest household among the slave-holding class, had fallen to pieces.

In most instances-indeed, in all of which the writer has any knowledge-the old masters informed their servants that their homes were still open to them, and that if they were willing to remain and work, they would do all in their power to help them. But to remain, in the first radiant holiday of freedom, was, perhaps, more than could be expected of human nature, and most of the blacks went off for a time, though later a large number of them returned.* a little while the country was filled with an army of occupation, and the Negroes, moved partly by curiosity, partly by the strangeness of the situation, and, perhaps mainly, by the lure of the rations which the Government immediately began to distribute, not unnaturally flocked to the posts of the local garrisons, leaving the fields unworked and the crops to go to destruction.

In

From this time began the change in the Negroes and in the old relation between them

*The same thing happened in Russia on the emancipation of the serfs. See Kropotkin's Memoirs.

and the whites; a change not great at first, and which never became great until the Negroes had been worked on by the ignorant or designing class who, in one guise or another, became their teachers and leaders. In some places the action of military commanders had already laid the ground for serious misunderstanding by such orders as those which were issued in South Carolina for putting the Negroes in possession of what were, with some irony, termed "abandoned lands." The idea became widespread that the Government was going to divide the lands of the whites among the Negroes. Soon all over the South the belief became current that every Negro was to receive "forty acres and a mule "; a belief that undoubtedly was fostered by some of the U. S. officials. But, in the main, the military commanders acted with wisdom and commendable breadth of view, and the breach was made by civilians.

From the first, the conduct of the North toward the Negro was founded on the following principles: First, that all men are equal (whatever this may mean), and that the Negro is the equal of the white; secondly, that he needed to be sustained by the Government; and thirdly, that the interests of the Negro and the

white were necessarily opposed, and the Negro needed protection against the white.

The South has always maintained that these were fundamental errors.

It appears to the writer that the position of the South on these points is sound; that, however individuals of one race may appear the equals of individuals of the other race, the races themselves are essentially unequal.

The chief trouble that arose between the two races in the South after the war grew out of the ignorance at the North of the actual conditions at the South, and the ignorance at the South of the temper and the power of the North. The North believed that the Negro was, or might be made, the actual equal of the White, and that the South not only rejected this dogma, but, further, did not accept emancipation with sincerity, and would do all in its power to nullify the work which had already been accomplished, and hold the Negroes in quasi-servitude. The South held that the Negro was not the equal of the white, and further held that, suddenly released from slavery, he must, to prevent his becoming a burden and a menace, be controlled and compelled to work.

In fact, as ignorance of each other brought about the conditions which produced the war between the sections, so it has brought about most of the trouble since the war.

The basic difficulty in the way of reaching a correct solution of the Negro problem is, as has been stated, that the two sections of the American people have hitherto looked at it from such widely different standpoints.

The North, for the present far removed and well buttressed against any serious practical consequences, and even against temporary discomfort from the policies and conditions it has advocated, acting on a theory, filled with a spirit of traditionary guardianship of the Negro, and reasoning from limited examples of progression and virtue, has ever insisted on one principle and one policy, founded on a conception of the absolute equality of the two races. The South, in direct contact with the practical working of every phase of the question, affected in its daily. life by every form and change that the question takes, resolutely asserts that the conception on which that policy is predicated is fundamentally erroneous, and that this policy would destroy not only the white race of the South, but even the civilization which the race has helped to

establish, and for which it stands, and so, in time, would inevitably debase and destroy the nation itself.

Thus, the South holds that the question is vastly more far-reaching than the North deems it to be; that, indeed, it goes to the very foundation of race preservation. And this contention, so far from being a mere political tenet, is held by the entire white population of the South as the most passionate dogma of the white race.

This confusion of definitions has in the past resulted in untold evil, and it cannot be insisted on too often that it is of the utmost importance that the truth, whatever it is, should be established. When this shall be accomplished, and done so clearly that both sides shall accept it, the chief difficulty in the way of complete understanding between the sections will be removed. So long as the two sections are divided upon it, the question will never be settled. As soon as they unite in one view, it will settle itself on the only sound foundation-that of unimpeachable economic truth.

To this ignorance and opposition of views on the part of the two sections, unhappily, were added at the outset the misunderstandings and