fter the war who do not think or say so now. No;
after forty years the separation between the races is clearer, wider and
more distinct than ever before. The thoughtful black men do not desire
amalgamation; and the white men will not have it. Some say the negro
will be colonized. I think that there is less reason in this answer even
than in the former. The negroes do not wish to go; and we cannot force
them. Think of the difficulty of deporting forcibly nine million people!
No; as Dr. Booker T. Washington says, "This problem is not to be solved
by deportation or by amalgamation." The negroes are here to stay with
us, and the bulk of them will stay in the South.

For years there has been a steady movement of the negroes from the
country to the towns and cities of the South, and from the Southern
cities to the Northern. I think they are coming and will continue to
come North in sufficient numbers for our brethren of the North to learn
to know them, to sympathize with us in our problem and to have something
of a problem themselves, and to feel that we must all work together
towards its true and final solution. The negroes are dividing into two
distinct classes more decidedly, it seems to me, than any other
nationality in our country; and I hope they will continue to keep and
increase this distinction. A minority are improving, are taking
advantage of education, are advancing in morality and industry, are
acquiring property and becoming worthy citizens. These few are setting a
standard, and are giving us hope of what the negro can and may become.
The majority are not improving, but rather retrogressing. They are
looking on liberty as license; they are thinking that a little education
will give them the privilege of living without manual labor; they are
making higher wages the way to less work rather than the way to a higher
standard of life; they are shiftless, immoral, and criminal. Now, as I
study this race so dividing in the great laboratory of Nature, under the
law of God which works on so justly, ofttimes apparently so cruelly,
always for the general good of man, I look forward with the hope that
this smaller, higher class will increase, and that the larger, lower
class will decrease. The better class will increase as all good things
do and will increase in the providence of God and with the help and
sympathy of true good men. The larger, meaner class of negroes will
steadily diminish in two directions; the first by mov