experiment which she has undertaken. Adequate results, a full determination of success or failure, cannot be attained in five years or in ten. All criticism of the actual political readjustment of the South should, moreover, be positive as well as negative, and adverse discussion should deal sympathetically and constructively with the question, "If not this, what?" What is the alternative? One must recur again and again to the thought that the fundamental embarrassments lie in the elementary conditions that precede all the evils and all the remedies. Partially anomalous remedies will always arise out of essentially anomalous conditions. The task is so complex, the difficulties are so inscrutably formidable, the issues — involving all the deepest and most fateful passions of races and parties are so far-reaching, that one may well pause before attempting prematurely to substitute for a pending policy of extrication a policy—even though logically complete

which may be based upon more consistent but perhaps more academic conceptions of public right. As one who vigorously opposed the imposition of unequal or uneven tests the author feels that he may fitly say that there would be nothing gained and much lost by any return to older conditions, and that the whole Southern readjustment, whatever its theoretic inconsistencies, should be accorded a reasonable trial.

The need of the present is not

The situation presents issues for which men upon either side have often been willing to die. But for strong men it is sometimes easier to die than to wait. martyrdom, with all its touching and tragic splendor, but just a little patience. Human nature is everywhere essentially the same. No movement of our human life can long support its own momentum, or conserve its own integrity, if it assume an irrational or unrighteous form. Political inequalities will not endure. With time, with reason, with patience, the moral forces of the South can accomplish something which all the enactments and threatening of the Nation can delay but cannot produce, an equitable public temper, with which imperfect laws are just, and without which Utopia itself would be but an institutional futility. God has left no corner of the world without certain of the resident forces of self-correction. The South feels, and feels justly, that

in the view of history she has dealt as scrupulously as the North with the literal obligations of the Constitution, and that in the travail of her extrication from an intolerable situation, her policy is now entitled to considerate and adequate trial. She has given her own welfare as hostage in pledge for her sincerity. With patience, and with the rapidly increasing educational and industrial quickening of the South, there is arising within her popular life, a clearer outlook, a saner Americanism, a freer and juster civic sense and these are, at last, the only ultimate security of our constitutional assumptions.

The practical situation presents, not a problem of theoretic politics, sociology, or ethics. It is a problem of flesh and blood, the elements of which are men and women and little children; the issues of which lie not in the cheap and passing advantage of factions and parties but in the happiness or the wretchedness of millions of our human kind. It is in many of its aspects the greatest, the most difficult, problem in American life a problem all the greater because, North as well as South, the forces of race prejudice and of commercial and political self-absorption are constantly and impatiently putting it out of sight. But it is here. It is the problem of taking those institutions and those principles) which are the flowering of the political consciousness of the most politically efficient of all the races of mankind — institutions and principles to which even the Anglo-Saxon is unequal save in theory and securing the just coördination under them of this stronger race which has hardly tried them with a race which had never dreamed them, a race which, with all its virtues, is socially and politically almost the least efficient of the families of men; -two races separated socially by antipathies of blood, separated politically by the supposed division of political interests; the weaker distrusting the stronger, the stronger distrusting the weaker; each knowing the other at its worst rather than at its best, and each passionately resolved to be judged by its best rather than by its worst; a situation of actual, grotesque, farreaching inequalities projected under the conditions of a democratic order and continued under the industrial and political assumption of the parity of classes. A great problem! A

problem demanding many things - the temper of justice, unselfishness, truth - but demanding most of all a patient wisdom, a wise, conserving, and healing patience the patience of thought and of work; not the patience of the opportunist but the deeper patience of the patriot. Indeed, if one may speak of it with anything of hopefulness, it is only because this problem has now come for its adjustment into a day when a deeper sense of nationality has merged within its broader sympathies and its juster perspective the divisive standpoints of the past, bringing into the Nation's single and inclusive fate a new North as well as a new South, a South with its boundaries at the Lakes and the St. Lawrence, a North with its boundaries through the fields and the pines of a reunited country at the waters of the Southern Gulf.

67. A SOUTHERN SENATOR'S VIEWS ON THE RACE SITUATION IN THE SOUTH1

The negro as a race, in all the ages of the world, has never shown sustained power of self-development. He is not endowed with the creative faculty. "God planted the Egyptian and the negro side by side in the fabled Valley of the Nile with equal opportunites. The earth was new; all things lay before all men ; no man could borrow from his neighbor, because his neighbor had naught to lend; no man could learn from his neighbor, because his neighbor had naught to teach. Here was the virgin earth, fresh and moist from the hand of the Creator; there was the mysterious sea, and far away in the shining spaces of the night lay the uncounted stars with their lessons spread. All of these were to be conquered. The door of hope stood broadly open and no color line was drawn."

But the door of hope might have remained closed so far as the progress the negro was to make for himself was concerned.

1 By James K. Vardaman, senator from Mississippi. Condensed from a speech in the United States Senate, Feb. 6, 1914. The Senate had under consideration the bill (H. R. 7951) to provide for coöperative agricultural extension work between the agricultural colleges in the several States receiving the benefits of an act of Congress approved July 2, 1862, and of acts supplementary thereto, and the United States Department of Agriculture.

He has never created for himself any civilization. He has never risen above the government of a club. He has never written a language. His achievements in architecture are limited to the thatched-roofed hut or a hole in the ground. No monuments have been builded by him to body forth and perpetuate in the memory of posterity the virtues of his ancestors.

For countless ages he has looked upon the rolling sea and never dreamed of a sail. In truth, he has never progressed, save and except when under the influence and absolute control of a superior race. His opportunities have been great. The negro helped to build the temples of Rameses, he polished the columns of Karnak, he toiled at the hundred-gated Thebes, he was touched by the tides of civilization that swept across the Eastern Hemisphere in the forenoon of the ages, and yet it made no more impression upon him as a race than a drop of water on the oily back of a duck. He is living in Africa to-day, in the land where he sprang, indigenous, in substantially the same condition, occupying the same rude hut, governed by the same club, worshiping the same fetish that he did when the Pharaohs ruled in Egypt. He has never had any civilization except that which has been inculcated by a superior race. And it is a lamentable fact that his civilization lasts only so long as he is in the hands of the white man who inculcates it. When left to himself he has universally gone back to the barbarism of the jungle.

Let us consider his condition in Haiti. It will throw a flood of light upon our own American problem. The negro acquired control of this island more than 100 years ago. Thomas Jefferson said: "This will test the negro's capacity for selfgovernment."

With his usual prescience and foresight, Jefferson predicted failure. But he said: "Let him try it. We will help him."

Haiti was at that time the gem of the Antilles. The most magnificent cane fields, coffee plantations, and fruit groves graced the landscape of that delightful little island. Now shift the scene. Look at Haiti to-day, after 100 years of negro rule. After 100 years of assistance by the white man assistance with money, with example, precept, and all of those superior virtues

which characterized the civilization of the white race, what do we find there to-day? Sir Spencer St. John, who represented the English Government at Port au Prince for 20 years, wrote a book entitled "Haiti, or Black Republic." When this English officer first visited Haiti he looked with compassion upon the black man. He thought he had been denied an equal chance in the race of life. He thought he had been the victim of slavery — that the elements of manhood had been stifled by such oppression as some of the distinguished Senators on this floor in this debate have called attention to as having been practiced in the Southern States of America. Yes; he thought "the negro was a sunburned Yankee, who had not been given a square deal."

Sir Spencer St. John remained as the representative of his Government at the court of this black Republic for 20 years. He made a close study of the question. He informed himself as to the racial peculiarities of the negro, and his testimony to the world is that the negro is incapable of self-government. He is incapable of sustaining a civilization all his own. Further, he says:

After an experience of 100 years Haiti has proved a failure. There is no semblance of civil government there, except in the seaports, which are dominated by whites and mulattoes.

And he tells us further the disgusting story of the worship of the voodoo and cannibalism, which he says is as common as their sexual crimes in the Southern States of this Republic. The United States Government is in San Domingo to-day as the guardian of that people, having sent agents there to administer their public affairs. Now, I know the negro has made a certain order of progress in the South. He has acquired property. He is acquiring book learning. I am advised that there is a decrease of illiteracy of something like 12 per cent in every decade. There is no doubt about that. But I am going to make a statement which, I dare say, will astonish some of the gentlemen who have shown such honest and sincere interest in the negro's advancement. While he has progressed mentally, he has deteriorated morally and physically. It is a lamentable fact that as a race the negro in America is more criminal to-day than he was