The scene is Chicago; the occasion, a luncheon-party at the Cliff-Dwellers’ Club. All the intellect and talent of the Middle West (I am credibly assured) are gathered round one long table. I mention to an eminent man of letters that I am going into the South.

“Well,” he says, “you are going into a country that is more foreign to me than most parts of Europe. I do not understand the Southern people, or their way of looking at things. I never feel at home among them. The one thing I have in common with them is a strong antipathy to the black man.”

This, of course, is only an individual point of view; but many other men are listening, and, while some nod assent, no one protests.

But here is another point of view. A few days later I met an old friend, a Philadelphian, who said, “I like the South and the Southerners. They are men of our own stock and our own tongue—even the ‘poor whites’ whom slavery and the hookworm have driven to the wall. In the North we are being jostled and elbowed aside by the foreigner, who murders our speech, and knows nothing and cares nothing about our history or traditions. Yes; give me the South. It is true that, intellectually, it scarcely exists. The Southerner may be living in the twentieth century, but he has skipped the nineteenth. His knowledge of literature, for instance, if he have any at all, stops at the Waverley Novels and ‘The Corsair.’ But I’m not sure that that isn’t part of the charm.”

Thus early did I learn that no two men can talk to you about the South without flatly contradicting each other.

It was evident that my plan must be simply to gather views and impressions as I went along, and trust to sifting and co-ordinating them later.

An invitation, equivalent to a command, called me to Washington. |Nearing the Colour-line.| For a whole day my slow train dragged wearily through Northern Ohio; and in the course of that day two young couples in succession got into my car, who interested me not a little. In each case it seemed to me that the girl had a streak of black blood in her, while the young man was in each case unimpeachably white. As to one of the girls, I was practically certain; as to the other I may have been mistaken. Her features were aquiline and she was uncommonly handsome; but the tint of her skin, and more especially of her eyeballs, strongly suggested an African strain. Both girls were lively, intelligent, well-spoken, well-dressed, well-mannered—distinctly superior, one would have said, to the commonplace youths by whom they were accompanied. Yet I felt pretty certain that a few hours’ travel would have taken them into regions where they would be forbidden by law to sit in the same railroad-car, and where marriage between them would be illegal.^[1]

At any rate, even supposing that in these particular cases my conjecture was mistaken, it was not on the face of it improbable. On the other side of the Ohio River, these girls would have had, so to speak, to clear themselves of the suspicion of African blood, else any association on equal terms between them and their male companions would have been regarded as an outrage. This seemed a senseless and barbarous state of affairs. But I was there to observe, not (as yet) to form conclusions; and I kept my mind open, wondering whether, in the coming weeks, I should discover any reason or excuse for the apparent barbarism.

In Indiana, rain; in Ohio, torrents; at Pittsburg, a deluge. But when I awaken next morning, just on Mason and Dixon’s line, the sun is shining on the woods of Maryland, and I feel at once that the South and the spring are here. |“Summer is i-cumen in.”| These spring coppices are far richer in colour than any of our English woods. They run the whole gamut of green, from the blue-green of the pine to the silver-green of the poplar and the gold-green of the birch; and the greens are freely interspersed with red and yellow foliage, and with white and pink blossoms. The red is that of the maple, whose blush at birth is almost as vivid as its flush in death.

The new Union Station at Washington is a vast and grandiose palace of shining white. Its “concourse” (a new American word for the central hall of a station) seems a really impressive piece of architecture. But it is a Sabbath Day’s journey from the platforms to the cabs; and the porters seem to be making a Sabbath Day of it, for I cannot find a single one. Let me not embark, however, on the endless story of a traveller’s tribulations. Every country has its own inconveniences, and recriminations are not only idle but mischievous.

The city of Washington is one great sea of exquisite green, out of which the buildings rise like marble rocks and islands. Yes, I am in the South; the leafless elms of New England and the shrewd, bracing blasts of New York are left behind.

And this day of sunshine was the first of many days. Save for a few thunder-showers, the South was to be all sunshine for me.

And with the sunshine—the Negro. Here he is in his thousands, and in his deepest dye. |A Question of Elbow-room.| In the North one sees him now and then, but he is swamped and submerged in the crowds of the great cities. To be very clearly conscious of his presence you must go to special quarters of New York or Chicago. “Coloured persons” (seldom pure blacks) are waiters at hotels and clubs, but no longer at the best hotels and clubs. The Pullman porter is always coloured; so are most, if not all, of the ordinary railway porters—when there are any. But “at the North” (as they say here) you have to go out of your way to find any problem in the negro. The black strand in the web of life is not yet particularly prominent—whatever it may be destined to become.

But here in Washington the web of life is a chequer of black-and-white—a shepherd’s tartan, I think they call it. In 1900 there were over 85,000 negroes in the city—now there must be at least 100,000, in a total population of considerably under a quarter of a million, or something like the population of Nottingham.

Imagine nearly half the population of Nottingham suddenly converted into black and brown people—people different not only in colour but in many other physical characteristics from you and me. Imagine that all the most striking of these differences are in the direction of what our deepest instincts, inherited through a thousand generations, compel us to regard as ugliness—an ugliness often grotesque and simian.^[2] Imagine that this horrible metamorphosis--or, if you shy at the word “horrible,” let us say fantastic—imagine this fantastic metamorphosis to have taken place as a punishment for certain ancestral crimes and stupidities, of which the living men and women of to-day are personally innocent. Can you conceive that, after the first shock of surprise was over, Nottingham would take up life again as a mere matter of course, feeling that there was no misfortune in this mingling of incongruities, no problem in the adjustment of their relations?

Do not object that in Washington there has been no sudden metamorphosis, but that the condition of things has gradually come to pass through the slow operation of historic forces. That makes no real difference, save that the Washingtonian has no “first shock of surprise” to get over. The essence of the matter is that half of the elbow-room of life is taken up by an alien race. Even disregarding, as (perhaps) temporary and corrigible, the condition of hostility between the races, we cannot but see in the bare fact of their juxtaposition in almost equal numbers, and, theoretically, on a standing of equal citizenship, an anomalous condition of affairs, as to the probable outcome of which history affords us no guidance.

Walk the streets of Washington for a single day, and you will realize that the colour-problem is not, as some English and Northern American writers assume, a chimera sprung from nothing but the inhuman prejudice of the Southern white. It is not a simple matter which a little patience and good-temper will presently arrange. It is a real, a terrible difficulty, not to be overcome by happy-go-lucky humanitarianism.

It may be a great pity that Nature implanted race-instincts deep in our breasts—Nature has done so many thoughtless things in her day. But there they are, not to be ignored or sentimentalized away. They are part of the stuff of human character, out of which the future must be shaped. The wise statesman will no more disregard them than the wise carpenter will disregard the grain of a piece of timber—or the knots in it.

One principle I arrived at very early in this investigation—namely, that black is not always white, nor white invariably black.

It was my good fortune to have for my hosts in Washington two active sympathizers with the negro. The husband hails from a North-Western State; the wife is a New Englander. They knew personally some of the Abolitionist leaders, and are still full of their spirit.

They related to me cruel and deplorable incidents in the everyday life of the streets.

“One afternoon,” said my host, “I was sitting peaceably in a street-car, when I was suddenly conscious of an altercation between the conductor and a coloured man. The absolute rights of the matter I don’t know, but it had somehow arisen out of a recent modification of the ‘transfer’ system, which the coloured man probably did not understand. I had scarcely realized what was happening, before men were standing on the seats of the car, shouting, ‘Kill the d——d nigger! We’ll all stand by you! All Virginia is behind you!’ The motor-man detached the heavy brass handle by which he works the car, ran up to the negro, and had actually raised it to strike. I interposed, and told the man that, if anything happened, he would get into trouble for leaving his post. He replied: ‘The nigger’s abusive,’ but sullenly went back to his platform.”

“Was the nigger abusive?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t hear him say anything; but it is quite possible that he had been ‘sassy.’ All I know is that he stood his ground like a man, with that yelling crowd around him.”

“And what happened?”

“Oh, the thing blew over. The negro walked away, and the crowd dispersed. As I took my seat again in the car, the man next me said, ‘If that had happened in South Carolina, he would have been a dead nigger.’”

“Not long ago,” my hostess said, “I was in a crowded street-car. |Street-Car Episodes.| A black woman with a baby got in, and had to stand. You know how our Washington cars are constantly rounding corners; and at every curve the woman was nearly thrown from her feet. Presently one of two white shop-girls who were sitting near her rose and gave the mother her place. The two girls soon after got out; and as they passed me, the one who had kept her seat said to the other, ‘I wonder you would do such a thing!’ ‘Didn’t you see she had a baby?’ the other replied; so, after all, we are not quite without humanity.”

“But tell about the two boys,” my host put in.

“Oh, that was two or three years ago. I noticed in a street-car a very distinguished-looking old man with two boys of about fourteen and twelve, evidently his grandsons. I thought what very nicely-mannered boys they were. A white woman got in, and, the car being full, the elder boy rose and gave her his seat. Immediately after, a mulatto woman got in, very well and quietly dressed—entirely a lady in manner and appearance. The younger boy was rising to give her his seat, when the elder pushed him down angrily, saying quite aloud, ‘I thought you knew better than to get up for a nigger.’”

“Did the lady hear?”

“Oh, perfectly. It was most painful.”

“And what said the distinguished grandfather?”

“He smiled, and nodded to the elder boy.”

I took out my pocket-book and handed my hostess a cutting I had made a few days before. It was a letter signed “Edgar S. Walz,” and ran thus:

“Yes,” said my hostess, as she handed back the cutting; “you will find these differences.”

“Of course,” I said, “Mr. Roosevelt is a Northerner.”

“I’m afraid that doesn’t always mean liberality of feeling nowadays,” was the reply. “I should rather say Mr. Roosevelt is Mr. Roosevelt.”

My host is a chief of department in a large Government office.

“Have you any coloured people working under you?” I asked him.

“Not long ago,” he replied, “a coloured girl was sent to me—I think because they knew that I would ‘kick’ less than any other chief of department. It was suggested to me that I should assign her some special work by herself. I refused. ‘No,’ I said, ‘if she comes to me at all, she follows the regular routine.’ I made a point of speaking to the three most responsible young women among my clerks—all girls of good family and standing—and telling them they must behave well to her.”

“And how did they behave?”

“Oh, well enough, on the surface; there was no trouble; but she was quietly sent to Coventry. Soon afterwards a Russian girl entered the department, who knew nothing and cared nothing about our prejudices. She made friends with the coloured girl; but when she sat at the same table with her in the lunch-room, the quadroon herself said to her, ‘You mustn’t do this; you’ll get into trouble with the others. They don’t behave badly to me; but when I seat myself even at the other end of a long table they make an excuse to move away.’”

“How are negroes placed in these positions?” I asked.

“Why, through various political ‘pulls.’”

“Do you think it a wise policy to try to break down the colour-line here and there—at this point and that—by the nomination of negroes to Government appointments?”

“Ah, that is just the question.”

“Meantime,” I asked, “are matters getting better or worse?”

“Oh, worse—decidedly worse,” said my hostess. “They are coming to something like open war. For instance, I constantly see stone-fights between white boys and black boys in the open space outside our house. That doesn’t mean much, perhaps; for boys will be boys everywhere. But sometimes lately the white boys have seemed to go frantic, and have begun stoning black men and women who were going peaceably about their business. Once I had to telephone to the police to interfere, or I believe there would have been a riot.”

“I am told that in New York the white and black street-boys play amicably together.”

“Yes,” said my host, “that is because the blacks are comparatively few. The tension increases in the direct ratio of the number of negroes.”

This I find to be essentially, if not quite universally, true. What is the inference? Is it not at bottom an instinct of self-preservation that spurs the South to inhumanity—an unreasoning, or half-reasoned, panic fear of racial submergence? There are many other factors in the situation; but I think, beyond all doubt, this is one.

“You can see any day on the street-cars,” said my host, “the embitterment of feeling. Formerly a black man would always rise and give his seat to a white woman; now he aggressively refrains from doing so.”

I repeated this to a friend in Baltimore, a gentleman of an old Southern family, who had fought for the Confederacy, even while he realized that the institution of slavery was doomed. |A Pessimistic View.| “You must remember,” he said, “that the problem is acute in Washington. The Washington negro is particularly bumptious and intolerable. Immediately after the war, Washington was the black man’s paradise. They flocked there in their thousands, thinking that the Government was going to do everything for them, and that there was nothing they had not a right to expect. That spirit still survives and makes trouble.”

“And how do you feel as to the way things are shaping? Do you see any actual or probable improvement in the relations of the races?”

“What shall I say?” he replied. “I do all I can to put the matter out of my thoughts. I do not personally feel the pinch of the problem. My children are in the North, and my life here pursues an even routine. I have old coloured servants, with whom I get on very well. But I am constitutionally a pessimist, and I confess I do not see how the thing is going to work out.”

“Education?” I suggested.

“Education is all very well; but if it removes some difficulties it raises others. It tends to make the negro unwilling to work where he is wanted, and desirous of working where he is not wanted—at any rate by the white artisan who is in the field before him. The industrial education of the black race, which is in some quarters regarded as a panacea, will no doubt do a great deal of good; but we cannot close our eyes to the fact that it will intensify race-friction in the labour market.”

“Still, you are not one of the Southerners who want to keep the black ignorant—who think that education, as a whole, merely teaches him ‘not to know his place’?”

“That is an outworn and impossible point of view. But you can understand that even the reasonable Southerner feels a certain bitterness on the subject of education when he sees the black child marching off to a school provided by Northern philanthropy, while the child of the ‘poor white’ goes into the cotton-factory.”^[3]

“You say you have black servants?”

“Oh yes, I have; and many people still have. But you know the race as a whole is turning against domestic service. I have friends in Mobile, Alabama, who tell me that their servants make the most fantastic conditions. For instance, they won’t do a stroke of work after three o’clock. If you want a meal after that hour, you must prepare and serve it yourself. As for the abstraction of household stuff from the kitchen, it is carried on openly and systematically—they call it ‘Cook’s excursion.’ In the case of domestic service, in fact, the difficult conditions which are being felt all over the world are intensified by—what shall I call it?—the race pride, or the race resentment, of the black. Domestic service was one of the badges of slavery; and now, if he or she will undertake it at all, it must be on such terms as shall remove from it all taint of servility.”

“A very natural feeling,” I remarked.

“No doubt; but not calculated to relieve the friction between the races.”

My original plan had been to go from Washington to Hampton, Virginia, and see the great industrial school for negroes and Indians established by General Samuel Armstrong, the alma mater of Mr. Booker Washington, and consequently of Tuskegee. But I found that both the President of Hampton and the President of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville were to be at a Southern Education Conference at Memphis; so, instead of going due south into Virginia, I turned my face south-westward towards Kentucky and Tennessee. But I determined to “stop off” for a day at Virginia Hot Springs, where some friends had invited me to visit them.

Virginia Hot Springs is nothing but a huge rambling hotel, with a number of “cottage” dependencies. |A Happy Valley.| The hotel company has bought up the whole mountain-valley, and runs it like a little kingdom. It is a delightful place; the air fresh and sparkling, the hotel and cottages sufficiently picturesque, the basin of the valley entirely given up to the brilliant sward of the golf-course. Around the hotel runs a spacious “piazza,” with innumerable rocking-chairs. A score of buggies and saddle-horses, at the disposition of the guests, gather round the steps. Inside, every American luxury is at command. You move noiselessly on deep-piled carpets; the news-stand is heaped with the latest magazines and novels; there is a little row of shops where you can buy hats and frocks, jewellery and bric-à-brac, at fifty per cent. over Fifth-avenue prices; and—most indispensable luxury of all—there is a stock- and share-broker’s office, and there are long-distance telephones, whereby you can keep in touch with Wall Street and the various Exchanges. That curious oval excrescence at one corner of the building is the ballroom. It opens into the great hall of the hotel, called “Peacock Walk”; for here the ladies assemble after dinner to air their “rags” and their diamonds.

My friends chartered a buggy, and drove me after lunch to Warm Springs, an old Colonial health-resort, where it is on record that General Washington came to nurse his gout; and thence to a point called Flagstaff Hill, or something of the sort, where we had a glorious view over an endless stretch of hill-country, running far into West Virginia. But, oh! the reckless, suicidal waste of timber that is going on here, as almost everywhere in America. Here, however, it is sheer thoughtlessness that is at work—not the criminal cupidity which is converting the forests of Maine and New Hampshire into wood-pulp, and ruining for generations to come the climate, the fertility, the water-power of the country.

Our talk, of course, strays (not through my leading) to the question of the negro.

“I have two cousins,” says Mrs. X., “who are sisters. One of them devotes all her spare money to the amelioration of the black race, while personally she loathes them and shrinks from them. The other has no philanthropic feeling whatever; she regrets that slavery was ever abolished; but she likes the black people personally; she goes among them, and nurses them when they are ill—just as she would a favourite horse or dog. That is in Philadelphia, where, as you know, I was born.”

“And you yourself—how do you feel on the subject?”

“I had lived so much abroad that I had no very definite feeling towards the black race, one way or another, until a few summers ago, when I spent some time at Aiken, South Carolina, where the bulk of the population is black. I don’t think I am hysterical, but I assure you it was an almost intolerable sensation to walk down the main street of Aiken, even at midday, under the eyes of those hundreds of great hulking blacks, staring at you with half-suppressed insolence. It gives me a little shudder now to think of it.”

“Last year,” said her husband, “I was shooting in North Carolina, in a district where the population is pretty evenly divided between white and black. I boarded in a farmer’s family. The grandfather had fought in the war, of course on the Confederate side; the father and mother were solid, unpretending, intelligent people. There was a school-house only a mile and a half away, but they could not let their two daughters go to it. They could not let them stir away from home unprotected. They had to pay for their education at home, while at the same time they were being taxed for the education of the negro children of the district. That is not a pleasant state of affairs.”

Some time afterwards, I stated this case to a loading educator of negroes, a man widely recognized as one of the best friends of the race.

“Do you think,” I asked him, “that these girls could not safely have gone to school? Or was their parents’ action the result of groundless, or, at any rate, exaggerated, panic—as of one who should forbid his children to pass through a wood lest a tree should fall upon them?”

“It would depend on the district,” was the reply. “In some districts the girls could have gone to school safely enough; in others, no!”

This, I think, was a terrible admission; for, after all, a “safe” district can only be one in which no outrage has occurred; and that is no guarantee against its occurring to-morrow.^[4] What father, what husband, is going to rest on such security?

Here, then, I was face to face with the most hideous factor in the problem—that which keeps popular sentiment in the South chronically inflamed and exasperated. Again and again, at every turn, I came upon it; not only in the shape of revolting stories, but in accounts of the constant and most burdensome precautions which the state of affairs imposes.

To give only one instance: I asked an American long resident in Havana whether there was any trouble of this nature in Cuba. “No,” he said, “practically none. It’s true that about a year ago a sort of half-witted black was accused of an outrage on a mulatto woman, and committed suicide in prison to escape the garotte; but I believe an American nigger has since confessed that he was the real culprit. It’s very different,” he went on, “in my native State, Louisiana. I have two sisters married there. The husband of one of them never dares to leave his home unless he takes his wife with him. The husband of the other is compelled to leave home for days at a time; but he keeps a loaded shot-gun in every room in the house, and he has made his wife practice till she is a very fair shot, both with gun and revolver. There isn’t a white man in the country districts that doesn’t take similar precautions.”

Think what it means to have this nightmare constantly present to the mind of every woman and girl of a community—at any rate in the country districts, and on the outskirts of the towns. |A Malign Enchantment.| No doubt the state of “nerves” it sets up is responsible for many errors and cruelties. Many attempted outrages may be purely imaginary. Negroes may have been lynched or shot down, not only for crimes they themselves did not commit, but for crimes that were never committed at all.^[5] But there are quite enough authentic cases of crime—denied by nobody—to justify the horror of the South.^[6] It is all very well to say that it is the precautions taken, and most of all the lynchings, that suggests the crime to vagrant, dissolute, drink-and-drug-ruined negroes. That is probably in great measure true—the evil moves in a vicious circle. But who or what is to break the circle of malign enchantment? Education? Yes, perhaps; but education is at best a slow process. I cannot to-day throw my revolver into the Mississippi because I hope that fifty years hence my grandson may have no use for it.

“During the war,” a very intelligent coloured man said to me, “the planters’ wives and children were left to the protection of the negroes. |Who is to Blame?| Not a single case of outrage occurred, and scarcely a case of theft or breach of trust. Had we been the lecherous brutes we are now supposed to be, we should have written the darkest page in history, and brought the Southern armies home to the defence of their own hearthstones.”

That is true. It is admitted on every hand that the conduct of the slaves during the war was, on the whole, excellent, and in many cases touchingly beautiful.^[7] And therein lies, by the way, not, certainly, an apology for slavery, but a proof that its most melodramatic horrors were exceptional. But what matters the admission that the malignant and bestial negro did not exist forty years ago, if it has to be admitted in the same breath that he exists to-day?

What has bred him? Who is responsible for his existence? History may one day apportion the burden between the doctrinaire self-righteousness of the respectable North, the rascality of the “carpet-bag” politician, the stiff-necked pride of the South, and the vanity, the resentfulness, and the savagery of the negro himself. But what avails recrimination or apportionment of blame, while the monstrous evil—none the less monstrous because it necessarily awakens a morbid imagination on both sides—exists and calls aloud to be dealt with? While the relations of the two races remain as they are, there can be no doubt that an act of brutal lust often justifies itself to a semi-savage imagination as an act of war—a racial reprisal. And who shall say that a state of war does not exist?

Few sensible men in the South have now a word to say for lynching.^[8] It has proved itself as ineffectual in practice as it is unjustifiable in theory. |Lynch Law.| It cannot even be palliated as an ungovernable reaction of horror at the particular atrocity here in question; seeing that, as a matter of fact, more negroes are lynched for mere murder than for outrages on women.^[9] There seems to be little hope, however, of a cessation of lynchings in the near future. The Southern Press abounds with evidences that the lynching impulse is strong, and is with difficulty held in check^[10] even when the provocation is comparatively trifling.

One thing seems to me certain—namely, that crimes against women, and all sorts of negro crime, will be far more effectually checked when respectable and well-disposed negroes can feel reasonably confident that people of their race will be treated with common fairness in white courts of law. At present it is certain that they can feel no such confidence. But, in making this statement, I am anticipating matters. The point is one to which I must return later.

Louisville, Kentucky, is not an attractive city. It is as flat as my hand; its atmosphere is grimy; its buildings vary from the commonplace to the mean. It has one or two of the dumpy sky-scrapers—only some ten or twelve storeys high—which are indispensable to the self-respect of every American city of a certain size; but one feels that they are products of mere imitative ostentation, not of economic necessity. In Louisville the names, or numbers, of the streets are scarcely ever stuck up. It is characteristic of a half-grown American town that you can generally read the names of streets which have no houses in them; but when the houses are built, the name-boards seem to be thrown away.

I am apt to estimate the civilization of a city by inspecting its book-stores; but during a long day in Louisville I could not find a single one. No doubt I failed to look in the right place; but I certainly perambulated the leading business streets. I was reminded of a couplet from I know not what poet—

Let me hasten to add that in all the other cities I visited I found one or more fairly well-supplied book-stores.

For reasons I have elsewhere stated at length, an American barber’s shop is an abomination to me. |Tonsorial Sarcasm.| Among the least of its terrors is the interminable time occupied by the disgusting processes to which you are submitted. However, I had time on my hands in Louisville, and, being a vagrant with no fixed abode, had no conveniences for shaving myself. So I ventured into a “tonsorial parlour.”

I was “attended” by a white “artist”; for this is one of the trades from which the negro is being rapidly ousted all over the South.^[11]

“Have you special seats for coloured people in the street-cars here”? I asked my torturer.

“No,” he replied, “we haven’t. They can sit wherever they please. And, what’s more, they won’t sit beside each other, but insist on plumping themselves down alongside of white folks. If I had my way, they’d ride on the roof.” I need scarcely remark that, as American street-cars have no outside seats, this was an ironical recommendation.

It was with some hesitancy that I offered a tip to this champion of the dignity of the white man. But he showed no resentment.

I had been recommended to call on Mr. A. B. Shipton (I alter the name), a coloured lawyer of some prominence. |A Negro Lawyer.| Entering his office, I found a man of aquiline features and tawny rather than brown complexion, carrying on a conversation through the telephone. From its matter I gathered that he was talking to his wife; and this conjecture was confirmed when he, so to speak, rang off with two sounding kisses into the instrument. The trait was characteristic; for the domestic negro is very domestic indeed.

He now put on his gold-rimmed eye-glasses and read my letter of introduction, all the time smoking a long pipe, which he had kept alight even while at the telephone. I presently found that some of his habits in relation to the use of tobacco savoured of the period of “Martin Chuzzlewit”; but he was a man whom one instinctively, and with no effort, met on the equal terms on which one would meet a member of his profession in England.

As I was well accredited, he received me with cordiality and talked freely. Not only freely, indeed, but copiously; not only copiously, but with rhetorical finish and emphasis. I soon realized that I was listening to extracts from speeches which he was in the habit of delivering.

Looking back upon the whole tenor of our interview, I find it curiously like the talk which a sixteenth-century Englishman might have held with a Spanish or Venetian Jew. Mr. Shipton related, indeed, a series of wrongs, injustices, and humiliations; but the ever-recurring burden of his tale was a celebration of the material progress of his race, the wealth they were amassing, the homes they were founding, the heroism they were developing in the teeth of adverse circumstance.