too far away. Somewhere between these two widely different points of view must be found ultimately the solution of the Negro problem."

"I doubt if there is a first-class hotel in any large Northern city which could make a practice of receiving Negro guests and keep out of bankruptcy. Yet in these same Northern communities, where, very properly, the Negro is not granted the slightest semblance of social equality, the demand is constantly made that the South shall permit him to vote and hold important offices, which would of necessity involve him in constant association with the white people. The people of the North must divest themselves of the idea that the welfare of the Negro is for the present at least in any way connected with the exercise of the right of suffrage....

"I do not believe any intelligent, fair-minded, and liberal Northern man can spend even a few months in an exclusive investigation of the race question without becoming convinced, as I have become convinced, that the granting of suffrage to the Negroes, immediately after the war, was a horrible blunder. For while here and there one may find Negroes who are eminently fitted to exercise the right of suffrage, the time has not yet come when it is safe to give the ballot to the Negro millions. It is doubtless true that the methods adopted by the South to eliminate the Negro from politics were at first generally cruel, and are now frequently unconstitutional, but an honest survey of the situation must prove that they adopted the only way to repair the serious breach in the social and commercial fabric of the South, and that the end justified the means."

"It is a simple thing to stand in a Northern pulpit or to sit in a Northern office chair and from that safe vantage ground to speak or write about equal rights, the genius of the American Constitution, the beauty of a free ballot; but the political situation in the South is not a matter of theory, but of fact. If it happens to come in conflict with our American institutions, so much the worse for the institutions. Looked at from the standpoint of theory, the existing political situation in all the Southern States is a cruel outrage, a manifest violation of the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence; looked at in the light of social, commercial, and moral conditions, it is evident that to disturb present conditions rashly, in obedience to the voice of uninPatterson, The Negro and His Needs, p. 9.

3

formed Northern demagogues, would be disastrous, first to the white man, but ultimately and most completely to the black man.

"To travel through the South is to become constantly more and more impressed with the fact that the best interests of the negro are not in any way identified with politics. Whether he has or has not the ballot is a matter which may well be left for settlement until his material and intellectual condition has been vastly improved. For what the Negro most needs to-day is education of head and hand, an education whose sole object shall be to help him earn his daily bread, to teach him to dispose intelligently of the fruits of his labor. Give the ballot to-day to the tens of thousands of ignorant negroes in the cane fields of Louisiana, and they will be much worse off in a year's time than they now are."

"Just at the present time, the great masses of the Negroes are densely ignorant but they have their race prejudice, just as much as the white man, and when they have the ballot their votes will go to the Negro candidate, never to the white man. . . .

7

"The manifest future of the Negro race in America lies along the line of mental and industrial culture. Booker T. Washington is right, and Burghardt DuBois and T. Thomas Fortune are dangerously wrong. The Negro editors of the North, who write inflammatory editorials which are circulated among the ignorant plantation hands, are not the real friends of the black race. Booker T. Washington has had to win. his victories devoid of the sympathy and support of the leaders of his own race. Yet, in some strange way, this great Negro, a century ahead of his own people in intellectual grasp of a complex situation, sees clearly that the black man must be equipped to fight the real battles of the world, that he must learn economy and frugality, that he must acquire property, and that he must make for himself a place in the community from which he cannot be dislodged."

"In conclusion, the country must not forget the complications of the race question. There are issues at stake involving politics, education, labor, immigration, industrial and agricultural necessities, all of which must be settled long before we reach the great issue of possible social equality, which, after all, for the present century, is only the fabric of a dream.

6

"Finally, let me reiterate the declaration that the only permanent Patterson, op. cit., pp. 112-13.

'Ibid., p. 114.

settlement of the race question in America must come through the education of the Negro; that this must proceed from the ground up through the district school, and not through the university; and that the people of New York, and of Illinois, and of Oregon are quite as responsible for negro illiteracy as the people of Georgia and Arkansas. "The uplifting of the negro must be done by the nation." "

Robert E. Speer is the author of two books setting forth the Christian conception of the race problem. The titles are Of One Blood and Race and Race Relations.

Eugene O'Neill, playwright, has written two dramas dealing with Negro life-All God's Chillun Got Wings and The Emperor Jones.

George S. Merriam is the author of a book, The Negro and the Nation, which is a study of the Negro problem from the standpoint of history. It covers the period from the introduction of slavery in America to 1906, and discusses the chief political events, including the Civil War and Reconstruction, growing out of the slavery issue.

The author is a man of excellent scholarship, of historical insight, and of wide sympathy, which enable him to write without visible bias, or sectional coloring. In every phase of American history in which the Negro is involved he sees and frankly states the virtues and shortcomings of both the North and the South.

The distinguishing feature of Mr. Merriam's book is its high idealism. No one can fail to admire the staunch moral fiber which stands out on every page. The only criticism which a Southern man might make of Mr. Merriam is that his idealism implies a future relationship of the races which does not seem attainable in view of our knowledge of human nature as it is now constituted.

In his last chapter, "Looking Forward," Mr. Merriam says:

"We, the people of the United States, are to face and deal with this matter. We are all in it together. Secession has failed, colonization is impossible. Southerner and Northerner, white man and black man, we must work out our common salvation. It is up to us, it is up to us all!

"The saving principle is as simple as the multiplication table or the Golden Rule. Each man must do his best, each must be allowed to do his best, and each must be helped to do his best. Opportunity for every one, according to his capacity and his merit,-that is democracy. Help for the weaker, as the strong is able to give it,—that is Christianity. Start from this center, and the way opens out through each special • Ibid., p. 211.

difficulty. The situation is less a puzzle for the intellect than a challenge to the will and heart.

"First of all, it is up to the black man himself. His freedom, won at such cost, means only opportunity, and it is for him to improve the opportunity. As he shows himself laborious, honest, chaste, loyal to his family and to the community, so only can he win to his full manhood. The decisive settlement of the whole matter is being worked out in the cotton fields and cabins, for the most part with an unconsciousness of the ultimate issues that is at once pathetic and sublime,-by the upward pressure of human need and inspiration, by family affection, by hunger for higher things.10

"But for the right adjustment of the working relations of the two races, the heavier responsibility rests with the whites, because theirs is the greater power. They can prescribe what the blacks can hardly do other than accept.

"What we are now facing is not slavery, an institution that may be abolished by statute-but its offspring, Caste—a spirit pervasive, subtle, sophistical, tyrannic. It can be overcome only by a spirit more pervasive, persistent and powerful-the spirit of brotherhood.11

"Each of us dreams his own dream, and thinks his own thoughts. Differ as we may, let us unite wherever we can in purpose and action. The perfect social ideal will be slow in realization, but it is to-day's straightforward step along some plain path that is bringing us nearer to it. The black workman who every day does his best work; the white workman who welcomes him to his side; the trade-union that opens its doors alike to both colors; the teacher spending heart and brain for her pupils; the statesman planning justice and opportunity for all; the sheriff setting his life between his prisoner and the mob; the dark-skinned guest cheerfully accepting a lower place than his due. at life's feast; the white-skinned host saying, Friend, come up higher,it is these who are solving the race problem." 12

CHAPTER 37

MARK TWAIN'S DELINEATION

Pudd'nhead Wilson, Dealing with the Tragedy of the Mulatto-Tom Sawyer Abroad-General Attitude of Mark Twain toward the Negro

IN

N the writings of Mark Twain, the Negro plays a conspicuous part in Tom Sawyer Abroad, Huckleberry Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson. Mark Twain came from slave-holding stock. His father received several slaves by inheritance. Jennie, the house servant, and Uncle Ned, the general utility man, were the companions of Mark Twain's youth. From them he became acquainted with the ghost stories and other superstitious lore characteristic of the slaves. In addition to his father's slaves, Mark Twain had an opportunity to know the thirty slaves belonging to his uncle, John Quarles. One of the latter furnished the model for his "Nigger Jim" in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. On one occasion Mark Twain was saved from drowning by a slave man, Neal Champ. In his youth he had seen a gang of Negro men and women chained together awaiting shipment. When he grew to manhood and married, he employed Negro servants and one of them, Aunt Rachel, his cook, became the "Auntie Good" in A True Story.

When Mark Twain moved to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1871, he came to know very well Harriet Beecher Stowe, authoress of Uncle Tom's Cabin. He had every opportunity to know the Negroes intimately, and liked them, especially those of the ante-bellum type. In writing to his uncle, who had moved to Iowa, he said, "How do you like free soil? I would like amazingly to see a good old-fashioned Negro."

In Mark Twain's novel, Pudd'nhead Wilson, Negro characters play the leading parts. The story deals with just one aspect of the Negro problem and that is the tragedy of the mulatto. The central figures in the story are two mulattoes, Roxanna, a slave girl, and Valet de Chambre, her son. The former was only one-sixteenth Negro, having been born of a light-mulatto woman and a white F. F. V. Her son was thirty-one parts white, having been born of Roxanna and a white man of some distinction in Missouri. Both of these mulattoes