not to the guidance of the best, but
rather to the exploitation and debauchment of the worst; that this is
no truer of the South than of the North,--of the North than of Europe:
in any land, in any country under modern free competition, to lay any
class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, at
the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful
fellows, is a temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and
seldom will withstand.

Moreover, the political status of the Negro in the South is closely
connected with the question of Negro crime. There can be no doubt that
crime among Negroes has sensibly increased in the last thirty years,
and that there has appeared in the slums of great cities a distinct
criminal class among the blacks. In explaining this unfortunate
development, we must note two things: (1) that the inevitable result of
Emancipation was to increase crime and criminals, and (2) that the
police system of the South was primarily designed to control slaves.
As to the first point, we must not forget that under a strict slave
system there can scarcely be such a thing as crime. But when these
variously constituted human particles are suddenly thrown broadcast on
the sea of life, some swim, some sink, and some hang suspended, to be
forced up or down by the chance currents of a busy hurrying world. So
great an economic and social revolution as swept the South in '63 meant
a weeding out among the Negroes of the incompetents and vicious, the
beginning of a differentiation of social grades. Now a rising group of
people are not lifted bodily from the ground like an inert solid mass,
but rather stretch upward like a living plant with its roots still
clinging in the mould. The appearance, therefore, of the Negro
criminal was a phenomenon to be awaited; and while it causes anxiety,
it should not occasion surprise.

Here again the hope for the future depended peculiarly on careful and
delicate dealing with these criminals. Their offences at first were
those of laziness, carelessness, and impulse, rather than of malignity
or ungoverned viciousness. Such misdemeanors needed discriminating
treatment, firm but reformatory, with no hint of injustice, and full
proof of guilt. For such dealing with criminals, white or black, the
South had no machinery, no adequate jails or reformatories; its police
system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that
every