tes. He is rather inclined to think that the rapidity with which the
negro of the South would work out his economic salvation, if once the
political difficulty were removed, would depend chiefly on the ability
of the race to produce a continuity of men like Mr. Booker Washington,
with, perhaps, the concurrent ability of the north to produce men (shall
I say, like the late W. H. Baldwin?) to co-operate with the leaders and
teachers of the blacks and to interpret them and their work to the
country.

The Englishman in England is chiefly impressed by the stories of
Southern outrages upon the blacks and he gets therefrom an erroneous
idea of the character of the Southern white. An Englishman who studies
the situation on the spot is likely to acquire great sympathy with the
Southern white and to condemn only the political ineptitude which has
made the existing conditions possible.

Whether Mr. Roosevelt's course has been the one best adapted to
facilitate a solution of the difficulties it would be idle to enquire.
The laws being as they are, and he being the kind of man he is and, as
President, entrusted with the duty of seeing that the laws are
faithfully executed, he could not have taken a different line. Another
man (and an equally good man) might have refrained from making one or
two of his appointments and from entertaining Mr. Washington at the
White House. But if Mr. Roosevelt did not do precisely those things, he
would not do fifty other of the things which have most endeared him to
the people.

* * * * *

In this connection, it may be that there will be readers who will think
that in many things which I say, when generalising about the American
people as a whole, I fail to take into proper account the South and
characteristics of such of the people of the South as are distinctively
Southern. It is not from any lack of acquaintance with the South; still
less from any lack of admiration of or affection for it. But what has
been said of New York may in a way be said of the South, for whatever
therein is typically Southern to-day is not typically American; and all
that is typically Southern is moreover rapidly disappearing. In the
tremendous activity of the new national life which has been infused into
the country as a result of its solidification and knitting together of
the last thirty years, there is no longer room for sectional divergences
of character. They are overwhelmed, absorbe