o
the Southern white man for the manner in which he defends not only his
virtues, but his vices. He knows that, judged by a high standard, he
is narrow and prejudiced, that he is guilty of unfairness, oppression,
and cruelty, but this he defends as stoutly as he would his better
qualities. This same spirit obtains in a great degree among the
blacks; they, too, defend their faults and failings. This they
generally do whenever white people are concerned. And yet among
themselves they are their own most merciless critics. I have never
heard the race so terribly arraigned as I have by colored speakers to
strictly colored audiences. It is the spirit of the South to defend
everything belonging to it. The North is too cosmopolitan and tolerant
for such a spirit. If you should say to an Easterner that Paris is a
gayer city than New York, he would be likely to agree with you, or
at least to let you have your own way; but to suggest to a South
Carolinian that Boston is a nicer city to live in than Charleston
would be to stir his greatest depths of argument and eloquence.

But to-day, as I think over that smoking-car argument, I can see it
in a different light. The Texan's position does not render things
so hopeless, for it indicates that the main difficulty of the race
question does not lie so much in the actual condition of the blacks as
it does in the mental attitude of the whites; and a mental attitude,
especially one not based on truth, can be changed more easily than
actual conditions. That is to say, the burden of the question is not
that the whites are struggling to save ten million despondent and
moribund people from sinking into a hopeless slough of ignorance,
poverty, and barbarity in their very midst, but that they are
unwilling to open certain doors of opportunity and to accord certain
treatment to ten million aspiring, education-and-property-acquiring
people. In a word, the difficulty of the problem is not so much due to
the facts presented as to the hypothesis assumed for its solution. In
this it is similar to the problem of the solar system. By a complex,
confusing, and almost contradictory mathematical process, by the use
of zigzags instead of straight lines, the earth can be proved to be
the center of things celestial; but by an operation so simple that it
can be comprehended by a schoolboy, its position can be verified
among the other worlds which revolve about the sun, and its movements
harmonized with the law