white population has reduced racial friction in many communities.
White women are evincing more interest in the morals of black women than
was usual fifteen or twenty years ago. Ostracism is more likely to visit
a white man who crosses the line. There is no means of knowing the
actual amount of illicit intercourse, but the most competent observers
believe it to be decreasing. Though the percentage of mulattoes has
increased since 1890, according to the census, the figures are
confessedly inaccurate, and the increase can be easily accounted for by
the marriage of mulattoes with negroes, and the consequent diffusion of
white blood. An aspiring negro is likely to seek a mulatto wife, and
their children will be classed as mulattoes by the enumerators.

Except for the demagogues, whose abuse of the negro is their stock in
trade, the most bitter denunciations come from those nearest to him in
economic status. The town loafers, the cotton mill operatives, the small
farmers, particularly the tenant farmers, are those who most frequently
clash with both the impertinent and the self-respecting negro. In their
eyes self-respect may not be differentiated from insolence. If a negro
is not servile, they are likely to class him as impertinent or worse.
The political success of Blease of South Carolina, Vardaman of
Mississippi, and the late Jeff. Davis of Arkansas is largely due to
their appeal to these types of whites. The negro on the other hand may
resent the assumption of superiority on the part of men perhaps less
efficient than himself. Obviously friction may arise under such conditions.

The mobs which have so often stained the reputation of the South by
defiance of the law and by horrible cruelty as well do not represent the
best elements of the South. The statement so often made that the most
substantial citizens of a community compose lynching parties may have
been partially true once, but it is not true today. These mobs are
chiefly made up from the lowest third of the white community. Perhaps the
persistence of the belief has prevented the wiser part of the population
from stamping out such lawlessness; perhaps some lingering feeling of
mistaken loyalty to the white race restrains them from strong action;
perhaps the individualism of the Southerner has interfered with general
acceptance of the idea of the inexorable majesty of the law which must be
vindicated at any cost. Yet, in spite of all these undercurrents of
feeling