nto a foolhardy and
disastrous struggle. Land was cheap but he hadn't the money to buy it,
and the aristocrat didn't have the "nigger" and the mule to give him. He
grew lukewarm politically, got his rod and went a fishing. But with the
Negro freed and enfranchised, and the Northern politician on the
premises, the vote of the poor white became indispensible to the former
Southern ruler who wished to hold his own politically. So a new battle
cry was made, viz:--"Negro Domination," "Social Equality." But so
lukewarm had the poor white become, that his song had to be sung with
pertinacious fervor to make him do more than pause to listen.

"_Do you want niggers to marry your daughters? Do you want niggers to
sit in school beside your children? Do you want niggers on the juries
trying white men? If you don't want such dreadful calamities to befall
the South, go to the polls and do your duty!_" "What'd he say? Niggers
er marryin our darters? Niggers in skule wid we uns? Thet aint er goin
ter du! Le' me see thet ticket!"

The Southern poor white has never had much of a hankering after "book
larning." He's better than the "nigger" and that's all he cares to know.
To be white means license to trample upon the rights of others. The
cat's paw--the tool of the aristocrat, he stands ready always, to do the
dirty work of lynching, burning and intimidation. Traveling South,
especially on the East Coast, the train conductor only has to say to the
colored passenger in a first class car but once that he must get out. If
the passenger refuses, the conductor need not waste words; a telegram to
Jessup or Way Cross, Ga., or Bartow Junction in Florida will call
together a crowd of crackers, large enough to put the engine off the
track if necessary. Like the dog in the manger, unable to pay for a
first class ride himself, the poor white squats about railroad stations
and waits for the opportunity to eject some prosperous Negro. I have
known as many as two hundred to swarm around a train to put off one
frail woman not over ninety pounds in weight.

This is the creature that is held up continually before the Negro as
his superior--an assertion that will ever be met with strong resistance.
For while the Negro was a slave he is not a descendant of criminals.

"Gentermen," said Teck Pervis, "whils we air waitin fur ther kernul and
other big uns ter errive, as cheerman uv the Dry Pond White Supreemacy
Leeg, I wish ter keep this here meet'n warm by