en well-wishers of the coloured
people who are not so hopeful. By way of giving what may be regarded as
the more pessimistic view, take the following passage from an article in
the _Daily Mail_ of October 23, 1901:--

"Frederick Douglass was an honoured guest in hundreds of Northern homes;
his career as United States senator was marked with every token of
respect and admiration, and many others like him were expected to
appear. But in the forty years since the war the North has become more
conservative in this respect, although it has been untiring in its
efforts to foster the negro's education, to direct his energy wisely,
and to make him capable of enjoying the liberties of the American
Republic. In the South there may still be oppression to-day and the
restriction of the negro's constitutional rights, but such a charge has
never been made against the North, even by the black man's most
prejudiced apostles. If the North refuses to-day to grant social
equality to the negro, the reasons are that it is considered not only
impossible to accomplish, but dangerous even to attempt. It is
considered impossible because the feeling has deepened instead of being
dispelled since the war, that the negro is greatly inferior by nature
and will never be otherwise. In his forty years of freedom he has
advanced more in crime and lawlessness, according to statistics, than he
has in education or development. Taking the blacks and mulattos together
they form sixteen per cent. of the entire population, and furnish thirty
per cent. of the penitentiary convicts. Crimes against the person
especially constitute a menace from the negro almost unknown before the
war, and Frederick Douglass said, shortly before he died, 'It throws
over every coloured man a mantle of odium, and sets upon him a mark for
popular hatred more distressing than the mark set upon the first
murderer. It has cooled our friends and fired our enemies.' The race
has, as a matter of fact, shown almost no power to fight its own
battles, and its problems hang like a weight of lead around the neck of
the American people, a weight growing heavier and causing more
hopelessness as the years go on."

If the above is not actually too dark a picture, the evil is certainly
one which a great Republic need not regard as an evil incapable of
correction. Booker Washington himself is not so sanguine as to ignore
difficulties; he foresees clearly enough that the earlier half of this
present